Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Marin Gets $16 Million
Marin Software (AdExchanger.com Q&A), whose roots in the search engine marketing platform world, announced that it has raised $16 million in Series E financing from Crosslink Capital among others. That brings the company to a total raise of about $50 million since it was founded in 2006. According to the San Francisco Times, the company will add 100 employees in the coming year to the 175 they have to day. Read more. In separate release, Marin said that it now has $2 billion of ad spend under management and names a few of its advertisers. Read it.
Twitter Beats Facebook
PaidContent’s David Kaplan covers the Ad Age Digital Conference taking place in NYC yesterday and today. Twitter head of sales Adam Bain presented and though there was no big announcement, he did bring plenty of stats and graphics. Kaplan reports on one Facebook tweak/stat from Bain, “About 67 percent of Twitter users said they would be more apt to make a purchase from a follower, while 51 percent of Facebook users said the same. Part of the strength of that comes from the fact that 40 percent of Twitter users follow at least one brand.” Read the coverage.
Display CPMs
Chris Jacob says on the Efficient Frontier blog that CPMs were trending down in March in comparison to February while impressions were doubling. Jacob offers a silver lining, “So while CPM trends are down over the corresponding period and relatively flat MoM (month over month) and QoQ (quarter over quarter), the amount advertisers are spending on Display is increasing significantly.” Read more. Lots of variables here but a couple of possible conclusions among many… the more impressions you can see (or QPS, queries per second), the more cheap impressions you can buy? Or the smarter your tech gets, the cheaper it gets?
Data-driven, social advertising company XA.net announced that it is now “an approved Facebook API Tools Vendor.” The company is looking to tame the Facebook ad beast with its multivariate ad platform – Optim.al – “allows users to efficiently test Facebook ad variations, find the right audience and leverage unique data via one interface,” according to the release. Read more. Meanwhile, Facebook is starting to promote social e-commerce says Miguel Helft of The New York Times. Read it.
Display Up Escalator
Gavin O’Malley writes in MediaPost about new display ad data from Macquarie Capital’s Ben Schachter and it’s good news! O’Malley writes about one example, “Showing the most improvement during the first quarter of the year, AOL’s home page had one of the highest proportions of oversized/custom ad units at 26%. It also had the highest percentage of purely brand-focused advertisers, which Macquarie views as a positive indicator of ad quality.” Read more good news.
Play Video Ball!
Video ad technology company Auditude announced a multi-year agreement to “deliver video advertising across its live game streaming and video-on-demand (VOD) content [to] all individual Major League Baseball team Web sites, and on mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets.” Someday this sort of deal will be cross-channel meaning TV, too. Will it be Auditude? Time will tell. Ohmmmm.
Brands Want Facebook Insights
Hoping brand marketers will take notice, social research platform Techlightenment (Experian owns a piece) and AdKnowledge announced a new agreement that will result in a data-driven Facebook research platform according to a release. “The Social Research Platform (SRP) which is available now can layer opt-in social data of a consumer’s interests and demographics on top of survey responses.” Read the release. And, read more on All Facebook. Surveys will be distributed via Adknowledge’s Super Rewards virtual currency platform.
More Facebook Insights
Speaking of Facebook insights, social media agency Buddy Media is hoping data drives ad spend through its products and services as it a new study about Wall posts made on client Facebook pages for the first two weeks of February. Sample brand insight: “Brands that posted outside of business hours had 20% higher engagement rates.” Read the blog post and see nice graphics. And, download “Strategies For Effective Facebook Wall Posts: A Statistical Review (sign-up required).”
Acronym Porn
Epic Media Group’s Don Mathis and Qayed Shareef offer their opinions on the ad network/DSP/SSP world and say it’s time to adopt another acronym. And the winner is… “A Demand Side Network (DSN) is effectively an all-in-one offering, and has the ability to do virtually everything a DSP and an SSP can do, and much of what an Exchange can do (vis-à-vis proprietary inventory) … while also being able to bid on exchange inventory as necessary, and with scalable efficiency.” This quote does not do the post justice. Read the entire argument here.
Ecosystem Fun
TRAFFIQ’s sales and marketing svp Chris O’Hara delivers a recap of the recent Digital Publisher Summit on Adotas. O’Hara writes, “The crowd was a veritable who’s-who of the “Digital Display Advertising Landscape” (LUMA) map, so I suppose you could argue that these guys got where they are today by skipping lots of fun, and building advertising and media technology instead.” Hey the event was in Park City, Utah, wasn’t it? Read more.
But Wait. There’s More!
- Three ways to increase your ad’s visibility – iMedia Connection
- Search Ads Affect Offline Sales Too – Inside AdWords
