Could HP Get Into The Ad Biz?; Big Data Needs Big Software; Millennial Acquiring For Mobile Ad Network

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HP Eyeing Mobile Ads?

GigaOm’s Jake Lynch offers an excerpt of his report on mergers and acquisition opportunities in 2011. He think Hewlett-Packard could be making a stronger entrance into the media space. Lynch writes, “In mobile, HP could differentiate its platform with compelling services, but first it needs to turn webOS into a competitive mobile OS. An important plank in that strategy is a mobile ad network, which would make startups like WHERE, Jumptap and Millennial Media targets for HP as well as others, such as Microsoft.” Read more.

Automating The Future

On Customer Think, former IBM/Unica VP of channel development, Dan Smith, discusses what he calls “Marketing 2.0: The New Reality.” Smith puts the vision he sees for marketers in plain terms: “Welcome to Marketing 2.0: the stage where a new class of Software-as-a-Service (also known as Cloud-based) marketing automation vendors is now emerging. These vendors offer the mid-tier buyer toolsets that meet and often exceed the capabilities of the enterprise players.” This is a great overview of the “Big Software” automation coming to the marketer’s “Big Data.”Read more.

Adding Video To Newspapers

Gannett’s Director of Video Operations, Kate Walters, talks to Beet.TV and reports that since the Gannett Digital Network’s websites were redesigned recently, “the company has seen increases of video views of 700 percent when the big player on the home page is deployed.” Walter says for monetization “overlays” work the best and rotate every two or three minutes. Taboola video recommendation widgets are also featured. Read more. And, read AdExchanger.com April interview with Gannett Digital VP/GM Josh Resnik here. A network of local news sites like Gannett’s wants to unlock the local ad business which can be an opportunity for not only local market marketers, but – when local news is aggregated – the big brands looking for scale.

Millennial Acqui-hiring

Speaking of the mobile ad network business, Millennial Media was active acquiring last week as it bought Condaptive whose technology TechCrunch says “focuses on audience formation and development through the innovative analysis of location and data.” Seems like an acqui-hire. The model also echoes other companies such as Place IQ (AdExchanger.com Q&A) which looks to triangulate targeting by leveraging local data. Read more on TechCrunch. Millennial continues to be rumored as both an acquisition target and an IPO candidate.

Leads Biz Adding B2C Web

Online lead platform Reply.com is targeting local ad business and bought MerchantCircle late last week. VatorTV says that “the deal allows Reply, which sells consumer leads to local and national advertisers, to tap into MerchantCircle’s 1.6 million merchant members who become natural buyers of Reply’s pool of consumers seeking their services.” If you don’t want to service publishers, you can always buy them. Read more. And, read the release. Doug Kilponen, Senior Vice President of MerchantCircle (now a division of Reply.com), writes on the Reply.com blog, “What you will see from our team in the coming months is an all out offensive to make the local conversation platform we’ve developed the dominant experience for local merchants and the consumers who are looking for them.” Read the blog post.

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Bigger Display Is Better Display

On the Triggit blog, the company claims that according to its buy-side, e-commerce client data, all signs point to a huge performance increase with bigger display ad units versus their smaller cousins. From the blog: “Our ‘bigger’ ad size, the 300×600, wasn’t just ‘better’, it absolutely dominated its smaller counterparts across any performance metric by hundreds of percentage points. The 300×600 ads averaged almost 5 times as many orders per thousand impressions than the 160×600 ads, and about 3 times more than the second best performing size.” Read more and see the graphs.

Disrupting Display

Veronika Sonsev summarizes the recent TechCrunch Disrupt panel with Medialets’ Eric Litman, Moat/Yext/etc.’s Michael Walrath, Gurbaksh Chahal of RadiumOne and Carolyn Everson of Facebook. Sonsev writes, “Rather than constantly blasting display ads in the public’s face, they suggested word of mouth recommendations and mobile applications would be the next trend in disruptive advertising.” Read a bit more.

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