Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Time Inc.’s McDonald On Data
Digiday Daily’s Melinda Gipson covers Time Inc.’s president of Digital Kurt McDonald at the recent AudienceScience Targeting Summit. Rather than shying away from the challenges that online data presents publishers today, McDonald is choosing a pro-active approach. According to Gipson, he said that it’s simple: “You just have to understand your mindset or frame of reference when you come to [audience] data.” Read more.
Sailor Talk, More From Yahoo!’s Bartz
Men’s magazine, Esquire, talks to Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz and comes up with a creative title to help frame Bartz’s frank nature in the article titled, “Hi, I’m Carol Bartz … Are You an A**hole?” In the article, writer Cal Fussman concludes with Bartz’s thoughts on a timeline for a Yahoo! turnaround: “It’s my job to work with this team and execute. Three years from now, Yahoo! is going to be the shiny new penny.” Read what happens until then.
News Corp Making Money
The earnings cavalcade continued on Tuesday as an earnings report for fiscal Q3 ended March 31 was released by media conglomerate News Corp. And thank to flying blue people (Avatar), the company showed decent profits of $839 million or 32 cents a share – significantly hire than the 23 cent consensus analyst estimates. Read more from Bloomberg. And, The WSJ. Also, read the IR release (PDF).
Ad holding company, MDC Partners, reported its Q1 2009 earnings which included a year-over-year revenue increase to about $10 million to $136.2 million in Q1 2010. “Digital revenue reached 40.5% of total revenues in Q1 2010” and the company raised 2010’s EBITDA guidance a whopping 20+%. See the IR release.
Life Without Google
From the Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog comes coverage of The Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco where publishers discussed on a show panel what it would be like to live without Google. Given the growth of Facebook, Twitter and the like, perhaps there’s another way. But Tristan Harris from a company called Apture tosses the cold water, “But are we going to be in a position again in a five years when Twitter and Facebook own our destiny too?” Spppplash.
Open Source Bonds
For the data-driven, financial market gurus, VC and IA Capital Partners’ Roger Ehrenberg “goes deep” on the topic of bonds in a post entitled: “Bond Analytics: Taking an Open Souce Approach.” Ehrenberg strikes a theme familiar to some buyers and seller of online advertising today in discussing ratings for the bond market: “If an open source approach has worked so well in software, why not apply it to the ratings problem? Whether or not ratings should be required for institutional investors to buy certain securities is not the issue; the essential point is getting better transparency into and analysis of instruments constituting the investable universe.” Read it.
Building A DSP Is Easy…
…and consequently, in comparison to the 400 ad networks he says exist, there will be an order of magnitude more demand-side platforms (4000 DSPs) soon according to Brent Halliburton on the Cogmap blog. Kindly, Halliburton offers 10 lines of PHP code from Right Media’s PHP library so that everyone can start their own DSP, presumably. Read more.
Controlling The Brand Event
PubMatic announced plans for a Q&A discussion called “How Brand Control Affects Revenue and Operations” led by Rob Beeler of AdMonsters and former Yahoo!-Aol’er Greg Coleman who is now President and CRO of the Huffington Post. Publishers can request an invite for the May 26 event here.
Belo Digital Revs Up
Almost everyone is showing some sort of year-over-year improvement in their digital revenues. Belo Corp., which owns affiliate TV stations with ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CW and MyNetwork TV, said that it’s digital revenues sprang upward 12%and a 17% overall year-over-year increase for ad revenues. Read more from the Radio/TV Business Report. And, read the IR release.
VisualDNA In iPad
Visual quiz and data targeting company, VisualDNA, gets a shout in a recent Time magazine story by Lauren Katims on online dating and the iPad. Katims writes that VisualDNA will ship an “an iPad version of its ProfileWiz product, which prompts users to define, for example, what they think is sexy by making them choose from several photos, including one of a couple snuggling in bed and another making out in a restroom.” The goal – true love, of course. Read more.
GRP For Digitals
ComScore mad scientist and Chief Research Officer, Josh Chasin, discusses, “GRPs For Digital Marketers.” His goal for the post is the very last lines: “So the next time a “Does digital really need the GRP?” debate breaks out, let’s nip it in the bud. GRPs are a necessary, but in no way sufficient, metric for describing digital advertising. Next question.” Read more on The ComScore blog.
Getting Bizo
Bizo has formed another new partnership – this time with GyroHSR, which has a “targeted ad management platform called GyroHSR Decision Maker Laser.” The platform is to be “powered by” Bizo and its Bizographics technology which provides b-to-b audience segmentation data across a publisher’s inventory. Read more.
DOOH Study
Digital-out-of-home advertising technology provider, Adcentricity, has released a new study which looks across the DOOH industry and provides “Q1 & Q2 Top Market Activity / Demands Category Sales Activity” among other DOOH data points. Get it (registration required).
The Digital Buyer Challenge
Shawn Riegsecker, the president of media services and technology company, Centro, issues a think piece on MediaPost arguing the need for efficiency in the media buyer’s day-to-day. Read more.
