Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Verification Integration
DoubleVerify is letting bidders on AppNexus real-time ad platform use its brand safety data to making decisions for display ad auctions. The release claims that benefits of the integration include: “Provide campaign specific brand-safety targeting parameters, general brand-safety tiers and specific sets of advertiser and industry profiles to identify the right impression for advertisers’ pre-bid.” Read the release.
CAPTCHA FOR VIDEO
Solve Media announced it has brought its CAPTCH technology to video advertising as now video advertisers will be able to measure video ad engagement in yet another way. (There’s never enough data!) All Things D’s Peter Kafka explains, “So, rather than watch an ad for Toyota’s RAV4 before you watch a video on AOL’s Huffington Post, you can now type in ‘no time to waste’ and go right to the video.” Read it.
Engaging Ads In-Game
Can a successful ad business grow out of the virtual goods world of Zynga? Adweek’s Mike Shields explores the subject with Zynga CEO Mark Pincus who says, “We built our entire business model around engagement. Now advertising is the fastest growing part of our business. At the end of the day, we’re in the middle of really an amazing, magical secular shift to free gaming. We think it very quickly surpasses TV as the next major worldwide free consumer medium.” SocialVibe and others have had success here. Read it.
Product marketing manager Pablo Cohan at MediaMind delivers his “5 display advertising metrics you should know” message to iMedia Connection readers. “Our search-display overlap research revealed that one of every five users that arrived at an advertiser’s site was exposed to a display ad. Measuring search activity can be a good way to assess if a display campaign is performing. For example, if users are searching for the tagline from your campaign, product name, or other branded keyword, you can be confident those terms are resonating with users. If there is no increase in branded keyword searches during the campaign, it may be time to revisit your ads.” Read it.
TV Reach Dwindling
Simulmedia’s Dave Morgan follows up his previous week’s post on Ad Age about TV having a growing reach problem with a still more emphatic response on why ad apostles should care. He writes, “TV has plenty of available audience, more than it ever has. However, while audience fragmentation was dropping the effective reach of the average spot, the tools and audience data have only gotten slightly better and the industry’s post bundling and buying practices have changed virtually not at all.” Read more.
The Trackers
The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal continues his review of the online ad ecosystem and his concern for the use of cookies and consumer privacy. He singles out The Drudge Report for “trackers” and writes, “While I’m illustrating the problems of ad tracking with the Drudge Report here, let me be clear that what they are doing is only different in degree, not in kind, from what nearly all the national news sites you visit are doing. I tested other prominent websites using the same methodology we used to look at Drudge. I found The New York Times deployed 10 tracking tools from 7 different companies and The Huffington Post used 19 trackers from 10 companies. The lesson from Drudge is that you can’t judge a site’s business-side sophistication by the way that it looks on the web.” Read more.
Display For News
A new study by Pew Research looks at different ways Newspapers are trying to bring digital revenue to their traditional business models. One key finding from Pew: “The majority of [news]papers studied focus most of their digital sales efforts on the two categories of digital advertising that are the largest but are not growing -conventional display (such as banner ads) and digital classified. Those categories account on average for 76% of digital revenue at the papers studied. These are the same two categories that have provided most of their revenue in print. And 92% of the papers studied said display was a major focus of their digital sales effort.” Can RTB targeting local reach save the day? Read it.
Publishers And Tech
Digiday’s Josh Sternberg interviews Federated Media CEO Deanna Brown if digital publishers – including Federated Media – should construct themselves as a media or tech company. She responds, “We’re both. If they’re not both, they’re not going to win. You can’t be in the media business without having a true technology platform and a differentiated tech point of view. You can’t succeed if you don’t have really talented tech execs or teams.” Read more.
The Virtual Agency
On The Agency Post, J. Michael Roach argues that the agency model is being transformed and everybody needs to get with the program. He writes, “The best talent, in today’s connected world, simply doesn’t need a ‘job’ anymore. Loyalty to an agency is a thing of the past. Most talented designers, copywriters, developers and marketing strategists are perfectly content to freelance. What used to be an agency’s constant struggle of finding, recruiting, training and losing talent will also become a thing of the past.” Read more.
Agency
- MDC Partners Buys Social-Commerce Firm Dotbox – Ad Age
- Aegis to buy Chinese digital agency eLink – Campaign
Privacy
- Apple and Google to Meet with Senator Over Privacy – The NY Times’ Bits blog
- FTC Asked to Investigate Apple and Google Over Data Collection – ClickZ
- Letter from the Article 29 Working Party addressed to the Online Behavioural Advertising (OBA) Industry regarding the current approach of the Code of Conduct – European Commission
But Wait. There’s More!
- Burstly Quietly Acquires TestFlight and Secretly Builds TestFlight Live – PandoDaily
- Oxford Style Debate About Facebook – Albert Wenger
- LiveRail Launches Brand Safety Alliance For Video Advertisers – press release
- Scion Aims Online Videos at Young Buyers – The New York Times
