Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Alt UDID Under Review
The Wall Street Journal sees the new UDID alternatives as mobile ad networks’ efforts to “circumvent” Apple Safari browser security efforts. The WSJ says, “…Ad networks that serve advertisements within mobile apps have started using new identifiers that collect information like location and preferences as the user moves across apps. One of the tracking systems is based on a unique identifier located in the iPhone’s wireless networking hardware—a system known as Open Device Identification Number, or ODIN.” Privacy advocates claim the new data being captured could lead to PII without the user’s consent. Read more (subscription).
Marketing’s IT Project
Forbes Lisa Arthur eyes a prediction from Gartner analyst Laura McLellan that says “by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than their counterpart CIOs.” Whoa, now. That’s whole lotta IT. No wonder, though, as McLellan also predicts, “2012 IT budgets are expected to grow 4.7 percent, while all marketing budgets, in general, are predicted to grow 9 percent, and high tech marketing budgets, more specifically, are expected to increase 11 percent.” Read more.
Segmenting Loyalty
The decision of New Orleans’ daily paper The Times-Picayune to reduce its print production to only three days a week earlier this month has provoked a new round of hand-wringing about the life and death of the newspaper business. The hope is that as readers lower their reliance on expensive to deliver and distribute print, they’ll naturally migrate to the paper’s website to get their news fix. But the NYT’s Christine Haughney quotes industry analysts who suggest readers’ “sense of loyalty” would be lost along with the physical product. But the ultimate gamble is whether or not digital revenues will be able to pick up the slack more quickly.
NYC’s Media Mayor
As New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg looks toward the end of his third term and a return to running his company, New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman offers an interesting comparison of the media side of the business. “Bloomberg LP is like Google,” he writes. “It has one wildly successful business model (selling data to banks in the case of Bloomberg; search in the case of Google). Efforts to expand beyond the core business of leasing terminals to financial firms have failed to produce similar results.”
Boring Brand Dollars
Digital gangsta Ted Leonsis responds to a few questions from Tim Peterson on Adweek. About the shift of brand dollars online, Leonsis is sanguine, “We’ve certainly seen the search industry go from zero to $25-30 billion in a decade. That spending came from somewhere. We’ve certainly seen the online display business get to be $15-20 billion. That business came from someplace. But this video/television/long-form, that’s waiting to be unlocked, and I think we’ll see that with this commingling of video and social happening over the next four or five years.” Read the whole interview.
Analog Dollars to Facebook Dimes?
Facebook may have to wait, like, forever for ad spending to match the gobs of time its users spend with the site. Says this analysis by AdAge’s Michael Learmonth,”The shift of dollars to attention will prove less linear and predictable for Facebook than for online display, which basically transplanted an approximation of the print ad model to the web — or video, which is a transplant of TV’s model.” Read more.
Parsing Real-Time Interests
On the Twitter Engineering blog, data visualization is the subject of a post titled, “Studying rapidly evolving user interests”. How about tying your RTBing to real-time events and sentiment pulsing through Twitter? Twitter researcher Jimmy Lin doesn’t go that far, but he does explain how his company approaches meausurement of the massive Twitter (or any ‘big data’) data sets, “One way to measure the dynamics of a content system is to test how quickly the distribution of terms and phrases appearing in it changes. A recent study we’ve done does exactly this: looking at terms and phrases in Tweets and in real-time search queries, we see that the most frequent terms in one hour or day tend to be very different from those in the next — significantly more so than in other content on the web. Informally, we call this phenomenon churn.” Read more. And, download the paper on “churn” (PDF).
Bad Venture, Bad
On Mediapost, Namely’s Matt Straz ponders a recent comment by the IAB’s Randall Rothenberg, “Venture capital has supported and financed a bunch of chaos.” As you might imagine, those in the venture capital world including Neu Ventures’ Jerry Neumann think differently. Read about his retort. Straz thinks aloud, “It is time for venture capitalists to commit to working more closely with the industry it aims to profit from and mitigate the chaos they are creating.” Don’t forget to read the comments on this one.
Microsoft’s TV Ad Net Pullback
Interactive TV advertising may be the wave of the future but right now, it’s far from a big business. At least that’s what Microsoft appears to have concluded, as the Redmond software giant is closing down its Microsoft Advertising TV Network, the unit charged with selling targeted TV ads based on set-top box data for cable networks run by Viacom and NBC Universal, reports Adweek’s Mike Shields. As many as 15 staffers in the unit will also be laid off as Microsoft considers selling its Navic software business, which powers set-top box ads. The move comes a few months after the cable industry JV Canoe Ventures’ abandoned efforts to forge a national targeted TV ad sales platform.
You’re Hired!
- OpenX announces the appointment of Jason C. White as General Manager, Publisher Business – West – press release
- LiveRail Adds Former Google/Admeld Chief Operating Officer to Executive Team – press release
- The Weather Channel Names Jennifer Anderson Gragg, VP of Brand Strategy and Marketing – press release
But Wait. There’s More!
- Marketing information offers insurers another way to analyse risk – The Economist
- B2B Brand Says Facebook Ads Drove Sales – ClickZ
- Live and Online, a Game Show Developed for the Internet Age – The New York Times
- Google gobbles retail reputation ranker, KikScore – The Register
- A health insurer plans to buy web retailer 1-800 Contacts – Internet Retailer
- Gaming LUMAspace – LUMA Partners