Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Turner’s Jacobs On Audience Buying
Turner’s Walker Jacobs talks to Mediaweek about a new tool used by the Turner direct sales team called Nexus which can help predict future performance of a client’s ad campaign using audience data sources include ComScore and @plan. In the article, Jacobs expresses concerns about content adjacency with today’s audience buying trend: “For so many of our clients who have objectives other than an exact direct-response metric, are those sacrifices they have to make around environment worth getting the benefit of audience-based targeting?” Read more.
GumGum Announces AdNetworkAdNetwork
Bedrock Founders Ophir Tanz and Ari Mir (former LowerMyBills.com product dude), whose original company, GumGum, revolved around content licensing technology (video here), extend the GumGum tech with a new ad network. Bedrock allows publishers to create non-traditional placements which are biddable by advertisers through a keyword-based auction on a CPC basis. Board members include GRP Partners’ Mark Suster, First Round Capital’s Howard Morgan, Crosscut Ventures’ Brian Garrett and angel investor Michael Jones. See the Bedrock site.
Permuto On Shoppers
Busted
AOL (AOL.com AIM Today, to be exact) and Viacom’s NeoPets, which runs under the Nickelodeon umbrella, have both been cited – negatively – for showing ads inappropriate to minors. In a release, the Federal Trade Commission cited the two web publishers as well as other for running ads for R-rated movies. Read more from ClickZ. Or try downloading the 15MB report to Congress from the FTC.gov site (PDF). Good luck!
The Strategic Investors 101
From his “Both Sides Of The Table” blog, GRP Partners’ Mark Suster gives his advice on who to pick and why when it comes to early-round “strategic” investors. Suster acknowledges the allure of large corporate entities who may bring cachet as a strategic investor but warns, “Imagine your investor has to call the CEO of a $20 billion company for approval for your merger or sale. Fun.” Read the whole post.
Omnicom On Profit Sharing With Clients
Elie Khouri who heads Omnicom Media Group across the Middle East says in an op-ed in Emirates Business that the agency-client relationship is about to evolve. Khouri writes, “Agencies have long sought to be less seen as a supplier and more as a partner. It is likely the new economic reality will bring about a new remuneration model, not unlike profit sharing.” Read more.
IPO Rebound
Richard Waters and David Gelles of Financial Times get positively bubbly about the possibilities of a rebound in the IPO market for tech firms in Silicon Valley. Citing a VC firm in the Valley, there are at least 100 companies who have a revenue run rate well north of $100 million per year and could go public soon. Read more.
Armstrong Has Apple In His Eye
Tom Lowry writes on Bloomberg that Tim Armstrong is taking his cue from Apple’s recovery which began in the mid-to-late nineties and concentrated on building products that people need. Later in the article, AOL’s Jeff Levick describes how “scarcity” may become a new buzzword for AOL inventory. Levick says the AOL portal home page’s inventory received a haircut from 10 placements to one. Read about it.
Listening To The Comments
On Mediaweek, Lucia Moses writes about Glamour.com’s new “Glamour Wedding” site which was born from the comments of a post on wedding proposals on Glamour.com. This new site comes during a time in which site owner Conde Nast recently shutdown two of its three wedding magazines. Read more.
Publishers Vs. “Ad Brokers”
Forbes Laurie Burkitt says that publishers are getting rooked as “ad brokers” are cookie-ing users, tracking them, retargeting them without sharing revenue with the publisher whose original placement offered the cookie opportunity. Read more.
Holiday Spending Spree
ComScore is going hog wild with information on Cyber Monday, Black Friday, Taupe Tuesday. This time the measurement firm says that after reviewing data from the most recent week’s online spending, the revenue increases are “above average” for online retailers. From November 1 through December 3, “$15.3 billion has been spent online, marking a 4-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year.” Read the release.
The Quinstreet IPO
Jay Weintraub reviews in detail the upcoming Quinstreet IPO which is significant for many reasons including the fact its a lead generation pure play according to Weintraub. He adds, “You will find ‘lead generation’ on the [Quinstreet] homepage but not as a descriptor of the company itself. I have mixed feelings about this, but from a positioning standpoint I understand.” Read more.
Mass Cool Investment
Accel Partners and Austin Ventures still believe in the ad network model as they’ve taken part in a $12 million+ new round of investment in Complex Media “The Online Network For 20-Something Men” which boast of 10 million unique users and 130 million page views. Read more from Tameka Kee of PaidContent.org on the raise. Or, visit Complex Media’s site.
On Aol. Inventory
Former AOL product guru, Brent Halliburton, looks at recent news that Ad.com may no longer be able to sell AOL inventory. Halliburton notes that this would make sense for AOL as it looks to gain control of its inventory and drive higher eCPMs but notes the irony: “The original investment thesis behind AOLs acquisition of Ad.com those many years ago was that if they owned their own remnant monetization engine, it would be smart because they could keep their margin.” Read the post.
