Shopper Marketing Remains Hot; comScore Measuring Mobile App-Web Audience

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Shopper Marketing

Shopper Marketing has attracted yet another investment. Rich Relevance said that it has raised $20 million in funds as startups try to build out and ride the eCommerce wave. Read the release. Ecommerce companies, which are sometimes the digital offshoots of brick-and-mortar retailers, are starting to look more like your everyday web publisher as content drives yield. The “shopper” is the reader when it comes to eCommerce, of course. Hence, the shopper marketing opportunity. Rich Relevance says in the release that its advertising offerings are used by “Colgate, 3M, P&G, AT&T, Verizon, Toyota and Cisco to engage shoppers on the world’s largest retail sites with custom content while they are researching and purchasing products.” As you may recall, RichRelevance bought retailer search monetization company Searchandise last December for an undisclosed sum. (AdExchanger Q&A)

Mobile Tea Leaves

comScore said yesterday that it as added new consumer engagement measurement capabilties for mobile. Dubbed Mobile Metrix 2.0, the company claims in a release that the product “enables reporting of unduplicated audience sizes across [mobile] app and browser usage, providing a comprehensive view of the complete media brand reach on mobile devices.” comScore say it’s “combining passive on-device measurement with census-level data” to bubble up data points like demographic reach and audience size. Read more. Coincidentally (or not), Nielsen published some new demo data for smartphones on its blog yesterday. Get the stats.

Retargeting For Travel

Vacation.com owner Travel Leaders Group announced a new retargeting initiative for its travel agent members. Travel Leaders Group CMO Stephen McGillivray tells Travel Agent Central how it works: “‘Retargeting with ads is not a new phenomenon. What is new is that we are the first agent organization to come out with retargeting and following customers’ online behavior after an initial e-mail offer is sent.’ Vacation.com generates and designs a supplier e-mail, sending it to members’ customers in the database. If the consumer clicks on that e-mail, it goes to a personalized landing page of that agent that has more offers and details.”
Read more.

Inside The VC

Though not ad tech specific, Geekwire points to a new report released by Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation which suggests that the venture capital world may be broken -or at least have significant “challenges.” Geekwire’s John Cook says the Foundation report calls into question the “2 and 20” compensation method for VC partners: “This arrangement means that VCs often get paid well, even when performance is poor and they don’t return investor capital. In essence, the report suggest that VCs get paid “to build funds, not build companies.” Read more.

Video Ads Blow-up

Sounds destructive, but PointRoll BD guy Adam Caroll has created a new post on his company’s blog that will be of assistance to any video ad seller looking to make the case for “why online video advertising is blowing up.” He sees recent mobile measurement initiatives as a firestarter: “In the past six months we have seen multiple vendors such as Nielsen and comScore introduce an ‘online’ GRP (Gross Rating Point) metric. While debate will continue as to whether this is the best way to measure online video performance, one thing it does do is provide a meaningful way to compare online video versus TV performance and ensure video is in the mix when it comes to budget allocation.” Read more.

adscale Gets RTB

Matthias Pantke from adscale said in a release that his company’s online marketplace will begin offering real-time biddable impressions for its Germany-centric audience. Pantke says in a release, “We assume that at least 15 per cent of all Ad Impressions on adscale will already be traded via real-time bidding in 2012.” adscale says 20 buying partners will participate on launch including Turn, MediaMath, DataXu, Struq, abilicom, adnetik, adnologies, ClickDistrict and plista. Pantke adds that he hopes to have all the “relevant national and international market partners” up and running by summer. Invite Media would seem to be one of them. Read an interview with Pantke on ExchangeWire. And, see the adscale view on how RTB works (in German) – including an infographic.

Private Exchange Deal

Casale Media’s Andrew Casale says on The Makegood that using something he calls the “Deal ID” is the best way to get value out of private exchanges. He explains, “Just like each IO has a unique number, a Deal ID (deal identifier, in ad tech geeky speak) is a universal identifier that specific attributes for a campaign can be tied to. Deal ID is the parameter carried into every bid request a private exchange transmits to DSPs, indicating where a private deal is available to be activated.” Consequently, Casale sees the buy and sell sides coming closer together. Read more.

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