Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Vibrant Media IPO
It appears in-text advertising technology company Vibrant Media is headed to the public markets. TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters summarizes a recent interview by Vibrant CEO Doug Stevenson who said that “Vibrant Media has ‘all the elements in place’ for a public offering ‘if it were deemed appropriate’, and is currently in the midst of sizing up companies for acquisitions of their own.” Read more.
ValueClick Beats Street
With the assistance of a healthy tax benefit, ValueClick beat Wall Street’s earnings predictions for Q3 2010 according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek which writes, “For July through September, ValueClick said net income jumped to $36.2 million, or 44 cents per share, from $25 million, or 29 cents per share, in the same period last year.” Read more. See the ValueClick IR press release. For Q4, “the company sees revenue of $122 million to $126 million and non-GAAP profits of 27-28 cents a share; the Street has been expecting $120.2 million and 19 cents,” says Barron’s.
DSP Fever Down Under
The Sydney Morning Herald examines the arrival of audience-based, digital buying and selling in Australia and the DSP phenomenon as Julian Tol’s Brandscreen (AdExchanger.com Q&A) is featured. SMH’s Julian Lee writes, “Brandscreen is Australia’s first Demand Side Platform, the unwieldly name given to the technology companies that are setting up stock exchange-style ad trading platforms in developed ad markets.” Read more.
Digital firebrand David Koretz sticks it to the rich media man in an opinion piece on MediaPost. He writes, “Using invasive rich media ads to capture a consumer’s attention is like trying to save a man dying of thirst by drowning him in water.” And then Koretz goes for the proverbial throat! Read more.
Down For The Count
Nielsen fell on its data-driven sword yesterday and said that it has undercounted web traffic for certain clients. Ad Age’s Michael Learmonth reports, “Nielsen is still investigating both the cause and extent of the error, but is advising clients in a letter today that it believes their “time spent” metrics — or the amount of time visitors spend on a website or watching video — may be grossly underestimated by the current system.” Read more.
Specific Raises $$$, Adds The “i”
From SoCalTech.com comes news that Specific Media has raised another round of funding for $5.3 million. Also, SM announced that it would begin using the new “i” icon to provide internet users with information and controls on data being collected about them.
Yahoo! Loses Another
All Things D’s Kara Swisher reports that Yahoo! has suffered another executive departure as CIO Michael Kirwan (LinkedIn) has left the company. Read about it. No word yet on what’s next for Kirwan.
French Media Trading On Fy-Uh
Media trading firm Matiro makes available presentations and video from its Media Trading Forum held last Thursday in Paris, France. Matiro reports a sell-out crowd of 50 people representing advertisers and publishers from across the region. See more in English. Et, en francais. Matiro’s Yann Le Roux tells AdExchanger.com, “Prior to the event, a quick online poll with advertisers showed that Display advertisers are very unhappy with the level of transparency (of inventory, of optimisation, of cost), and that they would like to see better solutions for attribution. 100% of them thought that ‘there has to be a better way to target, buy, optimise, measure display advertising’!” Laissez les bon “media trading” temps rouler!
CTO Of America
The Princeton mafia has extended its tentacles into the U.S. government as “the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has named Edward Felten, a Princeton professor of computer science and public affairs, as the agency’s first chief technologist to help guide government policy in an era when technology has a growing influence on businesses and consumers.” Read more at Princeton.edu.
That’s Not Pre-Roll
Underscore Marketing’s Tom Hespos takes a critical eye to a recent TubeMogul survey which said that “an average of just 13.1% of unique visitors to a media company’s homepage actually finish watching a pre-roll ad.” He thinks that figure may be the results of in-banner video that the user has no control over. Hespos concludes, “I do think we should all acknowledge the real problem here: all video ad impressions are not created equal, and publishers are simply not offering enough of the best pre-roll impressions.” Read it.
The Blog State
Technorati has issued its annual state of the blogosphere replete with colorful infographics and about the typical blogger demographic from a survey of over 1,000 bloggers. Insights include: “Two-thirds of bloggers are male; 65% are age 18-44; Bloggers are more affluent and educated than the general population; 79% have college degrees; 43% have graduate degrees and 1/4 have a household income of $100K+.” And, 100% like to fill out surveys about themselves. Begin reading the first installment of the report.
CBS Showing No Pain
CBS reported “a 42 percent rise in third-quarter profit on Thursday and authorized a $1.5 billion share repurchase program,” according to BloombergBusinessWeek Read the earnings release. CEO Leslie Moonves said on the earnings call, “we have been slightly more conservative about putting our content online than some of our peers because as you know, we are not a member of Hulu. And as a result of that, we do have cbs.com, but once again, we’ve been rather cautious about where to put it, when to put it because the mother load is still our network advertising and ratings on network and in syndication still bring in far more dollars than they do on digital,” according to Seeking Alpha. Read it.
News Corp. Profiting
Mediaweek’s Anthony Crupi takes a look at News Corp’s earnings for Fiscal Q1 2011. It was a banner quarter, no pun intended, as the company saw profits rise 36%. News Corp. earned $775 million in net income on consolidated revenue that grew 3 percent to $7.43 billion. Read more. From the earnings call transcript available on Seeking Alpha, News Corp COO Chase Carey says, “I do think it’s important that the digital platforms continue to develop dual revenue stream options. I mean I do think in fragmenting world, it’s difficult to rely solely on the advertising supported platforms. And I do think dual revenue streams are critical and those options, the digital world, clearly are even earlier stage than others.” Read more on Seeking Alpha.
Targeting ‘Tudes
Attitudinal targeting firm Resonate Networks said in a release that 43 recent U.S. political candidates won their race for office with the help of Resonate’s attitudinal targeting services. From the press release, “Resonate’s client campaigns spanned the country and included candidates and ballot initiatives leveraging display and video ads.” Read more.
Day Parting For Dollars
New data from Bizo claims that there’s a best time of the week to target busy professionals with advertising. See the infographic that “shows the day an online ad is most likely to be effective across five specific industries.” Hint: not Sunday.
Magellan Would Have Approved
Freewheel rolled out a bunch of mobile support for MRM – Monetization Rights Management video ad platform which includes location-based targeting. The company blog explains, “So what, geo-targeting has been around for a decade, right? Not like this. MRM takes cues from your phone to target by latitude and longitude in the U.S., allowing for a whole new level of precision in geo-based targeting for video ads.” Read more.
Verifying Before Bidding
(Corrected from Thursday’s edition) Ad verification company AdSafe Media announced that its ad verification technology is integrated into publisher side yield optimizer AdMeld and providing what it says is “pre-bid brand safety.” Read more.
