Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
TubeMogul Banks $10 Million
Video analytics and advertising firm, TubeMogul (AdExchanger.com Q&A), has raised $10 million in Series B funding in a round led by Foundation Capital. Foundation’s Ashu Garg will join the board. existing investors Trinity Ventures and Knights Bridge Capital Partners also participated. Did you know Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter is on the TubeMogul board? He is. What’s it all mean? Good times. Read the release.
AdKeeper Launches
About.com founder Scott Kurnit has launched AdKeeper, which the site describes as giving “users a new way to control their online experience. A Keep Button on every ad allows them to continue doing what they’re doing and simply save ads for later.” Read the release. And, see the home page with a video explanation on the service. The Wall Street Journal’s Jessica Vascellaro reports, “Kraft Foods Inc., Unilever PLC and 19 other major marketers have signed up with a new effort to get users to store and revisit ads they see on the Web, rather than ignore them.” Read more.
The Digital Hot List
Mike Shields and Brian Morrissey deploy their 2010 “Digital Hot List” on AdWeek/Mediaweek. The top 10 list features digital companies and products such as Demand Media and DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which is intro’d thusly: “Advertisers are abandoning traditional buying models on the Web in favor of buying specific audiences all over the Internet using a wealth of data. Nearly every ad agency worth its salt has established a trading desk to purchase this highly targeted ad inventory at scale in real time.” Read more.
Zach Rodgers talks to Microsoft exec Aaron Easterly about the recent $50 million AppNexus investment as well as Microsoft exchange strategy on ClickZ. Rodgers notes that Microsoft exchange volume still pales in comparison to Right Media Exchange, “The Microsoft Advertising Exchange – a name that will eventually replace AdECN – now supports approximately 8 billion impressions, or transactions, per month. That’s in contrast to Yahoo, which says it manages 9 billion transactions per day through Right Media – or 30 times more than Microsoft.” Read more.
Bartz Bites On Premium Display
USA Today published an interview with Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz late last week. In it, Bartz responds to the reporter’s dissatisfaction with having to click a “close” box if they did not to watch a full-screen Purina ad: “Oh, excuse me, please. You are getting a lot of value. This is not like a free lunch here. We just opened a data center in Buffalo, and in its first phase it has 50,000 servers. That is not cheap. So the very fact that you get all this great information is part of the deal.” Read more.
The Next Data Category
Companies like First Round Capital’s Swipely should like this. On his personal blog, Bradford Cross identifies what he sees as the next, big, data category: “transaction streams.” Cross writes, “Transaction streams are high signal. Their signal to hype ratio seems better than anything else. Existing companies like Intuit are very well positioned to do amazing things if they can execute. I’m not convinced they can, and rather convinced they can’t.” Read more. Cross defines transaction streams in the comments: “A time series of a history of transactions – it could be your purchase history on amazon, or your purchase history at resteraunts, or the historical real estate purchases in your neighborhood.”
Mistakes That Happen
AppNexus CTO Mike Nolet returns to his MikeOnAds personal blog with “Top 5 Media Startup Mistakes.” Chief among mistakes he identifies is “credit/payment terms.” Nolet explains, “Here’s the problem. Agency margins have been on a nose dive downwards for years now. One of the ways agencies drive up their profitability by paying everybody late and making a little extra $ on the interest they earn by keeping the money in their bank account.” Read the other four.
New JumpTap CEO Speaks
MediaPost’s Mark Walsh goes toe-to-toe with former Excite exec, George Bell, who has joined mobile ad network, JumpTap as CEO and member of the board. Bell tells MediaPost, “Am I here to put JumpTap up for a quick sale? The answer is no. I believe that the two deals that occurred in the market were great; both the AdMob and Quattro sales were very good. The market has done nothing but grow since then.” Read more.
The Black Market For Data
On O’Reilly Radar, former Netscape engineer and entrepreneur, Jud Valeski, sees unique challenges arising from within the UGC publisher’s domain. He writes, “I can see Coke’s logo whenever I like, but I can’t use it however I want. Similarly, companies own user-generated content (UCG) — or at least the means to access it, and/or the conditions under which it can ultimately be displayed. Users, developers and others can see all that information, but it’s not free for the taking. Here-in lies the conflict and the impetus for black markets dealing in data.” Read more.
Publishers Respond About Privacy
Julia Angwin and Scott Thurm follow up the Wall Street Journal’s “What They Know” series with coverage on the response by website publishers in regards to cookie tracking. From the article: “‘It is technically impossible for Yahoo! to be aware of all software or files that may be installed on a user’s computer when they visit our site,’ Anne Toth, Yahoo’s vice president of global policy and head of privacy, wrote to U.S. Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas).” Read more publisher reactions.
Addressing Privacy In Mobile
Mobile ad network Ringleader Digital has launched a new effort to stem concerns over consumer privacy and the way they use tracking on mobile devices. Billed as the “RLD Media Stamp Cert Center” (see it). Ringleader Digital was recently sued along with a few other media technology companies and publishers for what plaintiffs argue was “intentional exploitation of software on a Plaintiff’s mobile device.” Read the release on the new Certification Center, which is emphatic about the new tool: “The Media Stamp technology does not track users. Rather, it builds profiles of each device by tracking mobile online usage patterns across nearly 100 discriminators that include device type, geography, and mobile carrier information.”
Creativity And Scale
On the Brand.net blog, COO Andy Atherton discusses his participation on an IAB MIXX event panel recently where one of the key conundrums in digital came to the fore. He writes, “Standardized web advertising is now capable of phenomenal scale. Getting better at combining that scale with creativity, rather than arguing for one or the other, should be the priority.” Read more.
Digital Gets Print Gossip Legend
The editor in charge of the New York Post’s popular gossip sheet, Page 6, Richard Johnson is leaving for unnamed digital pastures but staying within the News Corp fold according to news released on… what else.. Page 6. Read it. And, read even more in the NY Times.
Massive Closing
Massive, the in-game mobile ad network which sold for anywhere from $200 – $400 million to Microsoft in 2006, is being shuttered. Mediaweek’s Mike Shields writes on the challenges that Massive ran into, “Massive’s ad sales efforts were never fully integrated within the Xbox team. In fact, at the time of the acquisition, several Xbox executives were said to be against the deal (…)” Read more.
A New Site!
Online advertising technology company, OpenX, has a brand new website emphasizing its ad serving capabilities as well as real-time bidding through OpenX Market, its ad exchange solution. See it.
