Mapping TV Performance To Online; Trading Desk Mandates Under Microscope; Google Adds Procter And Gamble Exec

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Mapping Offline To Online

There are a lot of players in the growing “attribution” field though I can’t say all players necessarily think of themselves as exclusively focused on helping marketers understand the success of their ad spend. The Wall Street Journal’s Emily Steel finds that TV programmers and TV ad buyers are beginning to track conversations online – including Facebook and Twitter specifically – in an effort to track sentiment and success. Steel writes, “Advertisers are seeking out these new tools partly because of this year’s buoyant ad market and the substantial price increases expected for commercial time in the coming season. Marketers say that’s forcing them to be choosier about where to invest their ad budgets.” Read more.

Trading Desks Tribulations

Digiday’s Mike Shields writes a feature piece titled “The Trouble With Trading Desks” which looks at the momentum, or lack thereof, of agency trading desks. Among the topics, Shields covers the idea of a mandate within the agency to use internal trading desks rather than outside ad network partners. He writes, “One prominent agency executive explained that over the past year her planning team was given quarterly goals to allocate more client budgets to exchanges, which she ignored. Other agencies compensate their teams for shifting more spending to trading desks; it’s actually in some planners’ cont(r)acts, she said.” Read more.

Getting TV Brand $$$

“Brand marketers, spend your TV brand dollars here.” At least, that’s likely what Google is hoping anyway with the hiring of P&G digital marketing director Lucas Watson as VP of sales and marketing for YouTube and video. Ad Age’s Jack Neff covers the news and writes, “The company gets an executive who has spearheaded a big increase in digital spending at the biggest ad spender in the U.S. and globally over the past three years, though P&G’s media budget remains primarily with TV.” The hiring comes on the heels of last week’s announcement regarding a CPV or cost per view model for promoted views as “engagement” metrics increase in importance in order to lure television’s brand dollars.

Hiring For Local Ads

IPG Geomentum’s Sean Finnegan announced the hiring of former Omnicom trading desk exec Todd Curry as Chief Digital Officer for the Geomentum unit. In addition, former Forrester analyst Lisa Bradner has been named Chief Client Services & Growth Officer and former Zappos brand manager Emily Olson-Torch is Geomentum’s new Director of Client Services. According to the release, the reason for the new hires is to “focus on client growth and deeper integration between traditional and digital local media through the agency’s EnCompass hyper-local planning process.” Read the release. Agencies and startups alike are taking aim at local ads and its plumbing.

Looking At The Numbers

ComScore offered up its latest pay-for-play numbers in the ad network world with its comScore Ad Focus Ranking by U.S. reach. Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, the usual players. Among the top 10, the only real difference between April and March numbers is the unique U.S. reach fell by nearly 20 million for Specific Media as it slipped 10th place. Hard to say that it really is a significant stat though. See March 2011. And, see April 2011.

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The Remuneration Conversation; Investigators Set Their Sights On Zeta

Unbundling Discovery

Union Square Ventures Albert Wenger is seeing the unbundling of discovery from commerce. In a post on his Continuations blog, he writes, “I would happily follow a sailing tumblr (a blog) that provided great sailing tips or images and might occasionally or even frequently include neat new products. Depending on the voice or quality of selection, I would do this even if the tumblr belonged to a vendor!” Niche content wins. Read more.

Startup Tools

GuideMe’s Pat McCarthy writes on his company’s blog, “One of the initial challenges in starting a technology company is doing the research and making decisions about all the various tools and software you need to operate your business.” And then, he shares his company’s startup-tools-to-live-by list. See it now.

Behavioral “i” Results

Media6Degrees announced that the Digital Advertising Alliance’s behavioral “i” icon is now on 90% of its campaigns on the company blog. Media6Degrees’ Kevin Reilly shares some data: “To date, we’ve served almost a billion impressions that included the icon; People who see the icon click through to expand the overlay at a rate of less than 0.005%; The overall opt-out rate is 0.0001%; Of the people who clicked on the icon to expand it, 3% eventually choose to opt-out.” Read more.

Prove You’re Smart

Invite Media co-founder tackles smartness and the lack thereof when dealing with people in a business context (hiring, VC, etc.) Turner writes on his blog, “All too often, people give other people (…) the benefit of the doubt for being intelligent. This post suggests that you should flip that thinking around and start assuming someone is not smart until proven otherwise. Why is this important?” Read it.

Display And Deals

On StreetFight, former Google display ad aficionados Nhon Ma and Tim Zhou discuss their new daily deals venture, Tenka. Ma identifies display’s influence in the deals space, “The industry is definitely going to be moved more towards what we’re seeing in the display advertising space which is leveraging data to make sense of ‘This deal works for this person because he or she is in this location,’ and they’ll present this person with spa treatments and stuff like that.” Read more.

Offering The Code

Metamarkets announced that its going to be open sourcing its Druid platform which it uses to analyze data from display advertising transactions. In a post on the company blog, Eric Tschetter writes, “Druid’s power resides in providing users fast, arbitrarily deep exploration of large-scale transaction data. Queries over billions of rows, that previously took minutes or hours to run, can now be investigated directly with sub-second response times. We believe that the performance, scalability, and unification of real-time and historical data that Druid provides could be of broader interest. As such, we plan to open source our code base in the coming year.” Read more.

New Sites

Both Digiday and AllThingsD have unveiled fresh site designs for their business/trade news sites in the past few days. See Digiday’s here. And, see AllThingsD’s here.

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