Amazon Ad Net Rumblings; Do Not Track Negotiator Plea

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Amazon Ad Net Rumblings

Reuters describes some campaigns that have run on the Amazon’s secretive ad network since late 2012. They included clients like Kimberly-Clark (Huggies), Ubisoft and an unnamed movie marketer. For the latter, “data on purchases of related DVDs, books and music on Amazon.com helped identify potential customers who were likely to see the movie at the theater and ads were targeted at this audience.” Performance? “Above average,” said the source. More.

‘Do Not Track’ Negotiator Plea

Last year the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) brought in Peter Swire to mediate between pro-tracking and pro-privacy interests caught in a tooth-and-nail battle over Do Not Track. In a Wired piece, Swire describes an escalating “arms race” that threatens to topple the process and end in legislation. He says of post-cookie “fingerprinting” tech, “Browsers are gearing up to disable or reduce the effectiveness of such fingerprinting…leading to yet another round of aggressive tracking tools by advertisers followed by blocking tools on the user side.” His plea: Let’s negotiate. Read it.

Predictive Analytics And A New Integration

Adobe is injecting predictive capabilities into its Adobe Social tool to help users boost engagement levels. The new feature, which will be rolled out this summer, uses sentiment analysis and predictive text mining algorithms to make timing recommendations and engagement predictions for brands’ social media content. Adobe has also said that it is expanding its partnership with marketing agency SapientNitro by integrating the Sapient EngagedNow platform with Adobe’s Marketing Cloud. More.

Mobile Ad Nets RIP?

Well, it may be an exaggeration to say that mobile ad networks are dead, but they certainly appear to be losing ground to social networks, according to an IDC report titled “2012 U.S. Mobile Advertising Market Sizing and Vendor Market Shares.” (See the summary here.) Specifically, the space’s former hegemons – Google, Millennial Media and Apple – are seeing pushback from publishers, apps and social networks, particularly Facebook, Pandora, Twitter and The Weather Channel, who are now taking the lion’s share of mobile ad spend. “Networks, especially independent ones, are entering a difficult phase, in which, with an ever smaller share of revenue, they’ll have to compete with publishers, which will only grow in strength,” IDC’s Karsten Weide tells Internet Retailer’s Bill Siwicki. Read the rest.

Draining The Agency Brain

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But Are They Really Integral?; Don’t Pontificate, Verificate

One recruiter speaking to the Financial Times believes digital talent can make 20-30% more salary in advertising than in tech but that startup options tip the balance. Aegis CEO Nigel Morris says this leaves agencies with “relatively few people who have a strong enough understanding of all the different emerging opportunities in digital, with a broad enough brand and business understanding in order to provide the strategic context under that.” The end result is a perpetual knowledge drought in agency land. More.

Vibrant’s Mobile Moves

Contextual player Vibrant Media is expanding into mobile, including images and text-based ads. Techcrunch’s Anthony Ha suggests in-line ads on a touchscreen might not be the fat-fingered man’s nightmare that they at first seem: “One of Vibrant’s ad units only launches after users highlight a keyword through a three-second countdown, and Irvine said 4 percent of consumers actually do highlight the keyword long enough to activate the ad.” Read more

Third-Party Data First?

Publishers like to talk up the value of their first-party data, but an eXelate/Digiday joint study says ad buyers prefer third-party data for audience targeting, followed by first-party CRM data. Read the release and check out the slides.

Funding And The Like