Mojiva's Tablet Ad Network; Googler De Castro To Yahoo

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

Tablet Ad Network

The shortcomings of mobile targeting continues to provide opportunities for the growth of ad networks. Mojiva announced yesterday that it has effectively re-branded the tablet audience of its ad network as another new ad network called Mojiva Tab. (Marketing, baby!) The company claims it’s the first of its kind to target a growing, valuable audience. Drawing from 8,000 mobile publishers, the press release gives a sense of scale: “The number of tablet ad requests per month on the Mojiva ad network was 119 million in January 2011, increased to 655 million as of January 2012, and reached an impressive 2.13 billion tablet ad requests per month as of August 2012 – a nearly 20-fold increase in 20 months.” Read more.

Millennial’s Q3

Millennial Media is forecasting a Q3 loss of between $1.9 and $2.4 million, but it says revenue grew faster at 85 percent year over year, versus just 76 percent last quarter. “We are delivering greater value to our advertising customers and developer partners through the use of technology and data which, in turn, is driving increased demand for our services and enhanced gross margin performance,” says CEO Paul Palmieri. Prelim earnings release. Separately the mobile ad net is raising some money through a follow-on offering of a million new shares plus an extra nine million from existing stockholders. The cash is earmarked for “working capital and general corporate purposes.”

Attribution Platforms Hold Hands

VisualIQ and Korrelate announced that they would combine their attribution capabilities to provide a new online-offline attribution product through VisualIQ. According to the release, the new product calculates “the value of each marketing touchpoint experienced by each prospect across the entire marketing ecosystem with offline vehicle purchase data that quantifies the propensity for someone exposed to any of those touchpoints to buy a certain make and model of vehicle.” Simple. Read more.

Data Mining’s Rep

The DMA hopes a new consumer ad campaign will burnish the data industry’s tarnished image. As reported by the New York Times Natasha Singer, the trade initiative goes by the highfalutin name “Data-Driven Marketing Institute” and aims to educate people on the benefits and the economic impact of the data mining industry. Read more.

Yielding To The Meter

Gannett Chief Digital Officer, David Payne, discusses his company’s digital strategy on NetNewsCheck. In talking about his company’s metered content yield, he says, “Revenue is up and actually well above what we expected for those properties. Any time you put a barrier to content, you’re always going to be worried about that. Traffic is understandably down, but the users we have and the revenue we’re able to generate from those users is higher. It’s one of these balancing acts as you migrate away from everything being free all of the time.” Read more. And, read the WSJ (subscription).

Buy-Side Private Marketplace

Buy-side platform [x+1] said yesterday that it has aggregated more than 40 publishers – including Forbes, trulia and The New York Times – into what it’s calling a private marketplace. Mark Kopera explains on the [x+1] blog, “The [x+1] Private Marketplace gives advertisers at-scale access to new and premium inventory that is not available through open auction on exchanges or supply-side platforms (SSPs).” Also, it’s another way for a programmatic buyer to get first look on inventory and audience that may end up making it to the exchanges eventually. Read more. The publisher ad network evolves -or is it the exchange that is evolving?

High Speed Trading

As the “trading desk” model propagates in digital advertising, Wall Street is re-thinking its high-speed trading. Scale has been an issue as The New York Times reports, “The challenges facing speed-focused firms are many, the biggest being the drop in trading volume on stock markets around the world in each of the last four years. This has made it harder to make profits for traders who quickly buy and sell shares offered by slower investors.” Read more. The big difference here – in ads every impression is different; in stocks, many shares of stock are the same.

Ad Tech Publisher

B2B data and ad targeting platform Bizo announced that it was adding to its product line with a site devoted to digital marketing news called “Digital Marketing Remix”. Led by former B2B editor Sean Callahan, the news site will target marketers and be “a combination of original and aggregated content, focuses on digital marketing in all its forms, including online display advertising, data, email, mobile, search, social, data and analytic,” according to the release. Read more. It could be a good source of B2B targeting data, too. See the site.

Google’s De Castro To Yahoo?

That’s what AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher was hearing. And then word came down – Yahoo! has a new COO – Henrique De Castro, Google’s former global head of media, mobile and platforms business. The New York Times reports, “Yahoo lured Mr. De Castro with a hefty pay package that according to a regulatory filing will include a $600,000 base salary plus a bonus that — depending how he performs — could be worth twice that much. Mr. De Castro will also receive $36 million in stock, half of that as a one-time retention equity award and the other half as performance-based stock options.” Not bad. Read more.

Native Ads Are Restless

Most publishers want to emphasize “premium sales” these days, and one big idea associated with that push is the creation of native ad units. The problem is that most agencies and marketers prefer standard ad units — if only because they want to avoid the costly and time-consuming procrustean need to retrofit their banners to fit a unique placement. Jay Lauf, group publisher of The Atlantic Media Company, tells Digiday’s Josh Sternberg that native ads can scale if the offering “centers around recognition of the assets you have to tell your stories [with], as well as flexibility in how they are used on the marketing side and trust on the publishing side.” Read more.

But Wait. There’s More!