Aol's Dividend And Display; Mobile Is Big, Really Big

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Patents And Display

Aol has announced that its investors will receive proceeds of its patent sale in the form of a stock buyback and dividend. See the release. Ronald Josey of ThinkEquity was positive about the development in a note to investors but added, “To be more constructive on [Aol] shares long-term, we need to see domestic display growth that suggests AOL can at least begin to maintain its share of the domestic display market, which we believe is under 5% today, and falling. Devil ads at scale, video, and Patch should help here, but it remains relatively early.”

The Mobile Rocket

In the history of humankind, nobody and I mean NOBODY, has seen anything like it. According to mobile ad and analytics platform Flurry, “Compared to recent technologies, smart device adoption is being adopted 10X faster than that of the 80s PC revolution, 2X faster than that of 90s Internet Boom and 3X faster than that of recent social network adoption.” Read about the rocket.

Agencies + Tech = Harmony

Marketer Judy Shapiro says that engineers and ad/marketing people all need each other. In Ad Age she delivers the koom-bye-yah meh-lord: “The flood of platforms with their vague opt-in classifications has undermined the overall trust consumers place in opt-in behaviors. As consumers get a flood of unwelcome opt-in outreach, they increasingly opt out, poisoning the opt-in well for all marketers. It’s useful to remember there’s big data and then there’s bad big data. Platforms obscure one from the other.” Agencies and tech unite.

Adding FB Revenue

Robert Peck, a financial consultant writing in Business Insider, has some advice for Facebook and suggests several ways it could get a $7 Billion with a capital “B” revenue boost: “Based on the ~500m users that live on Facebook and the ~1.6b searches done each month… Facebook could generate ~$1b of incremental revenue immediately… with some tweaks, it could balloon towards $3b of revenues per year. The best part, it would be almost 100% pure margin (just like it is for AOL today).” Read more.

GRP Religion

Facebook is pushing for standardized reach/frequency metrics that will help it find a natural home in every brand’s marketing mix. Brent Smallwood tells AdAge’s Cotton Delo, “The ultimate vision is for a media buyer to purchase, for example, 100 GRPs on TV and the equivalent of 50 GRPs on Facebook, which together might generate the equivalent of another 20 GRPs through owned and earned media on Facebook. The buyer would then have the understanding that all together he got 170 GRPs.” Read it.

Monetizing Bollywood

Indian streaming music service Dhingana has launched its ad platform and nabbed Facebook ad product chief Gokul Rajaram as an advisor (catch him at AdExchanger’s Human Centered Automation conference next month). Anthony Ha reports for TechCrunch, “Eventually, Shinde says advertising should make up 70 to 80 percent of Dhingana’s revenue, with the rest coming from subscription services.” Read it. Dhingana isn’t just about Bollywood hits, but also new and traditional music.

Three Screen Heaven

AT&T Adworks is rolling out a new platform to help advertisers put mobile and TV data to work for their online ad buys. Mediapost’s Laurie Sullivan reports, “The AdWorks division worked with AT&T Labs to develop an algorithm that allows brands to target audiences based on aggregate demographic data from TV programs watched or downloaded on apps, games and videos on mobile.” Read it.

Mobile Ad Exchange

OpenX says that it has launched a mobile, private ad exchange in Japan for CyberWing Corporation, “one of Japan’s leading media representative companies and a subsidiary of NEC BIGLOBE,” according to the OpenX blog. Director of publisher solutions, Ari Oberman, says, “Although we are still in the early days for both mobile and Real-Time Bidding generally, Japan is leading the world in mobile monetization in many ways.” Read the release, too.

Too Many Ads

And you thought too many ads on a page was a digital-only problem? It’s been around since, well, TV. Read this WSJ article about Viacom adding tons of TV ads to its programming: “According to data from TV-research firm Nielsen, [Viacom]’s Nickelodeon and Comedy Central networks boosted the amount of ad time they aired in the first half of 2012 by 9% from a year earlier, to a combined 1,901 hours. That followed a 7% rise in all of 2011 and a 4% rise in 2010, Nielsen found.” Read it.

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