Year Of The IPO; Facebook Exchange In China

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Year Of The IPO

Buying platform Marin Software, who’s early claim to fame was in the search engine marketing space along with Kenshoo and Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe in 2011), says that after taking over $100 million in funding, the next step is an initial public offering. Read more in MediaPost. How many private ad tech companies will be saying “IPO” this year?

Holiday Acquisition

WPP Group’s Kantar Media announced on December 21 the acquisition of Chicago-based analytics firm AdGooroo. Kantar North America CEO Terry Kent said in a release that “the acquisition will enable a more holistic approach to measurement of the digital media landscape, broadening Kantar Media’s current methodic insight into display, video, ad networks and paid search advertising trends – including expenditure allocated, and keywords purchased – as well as detailed data on spend, impressions, creative, traffic and site usage.” AdGooroo claims 400 marketer clients and 35 employees. Read more. Attribution buzz builds.

Chinese FBX

Chinese buying platform iPinYou says it has real-time bidding to access to the Facebook Exchange. iPinYou CEO Huang Xiaonan tells China Daily, “There is demand from Chinese advertisers to reach out to US consumers and this is how Facebook can cash in on the Chinese market.” China demand-side platforms targeting chinese consumers – Facebook’s revenue footprint continues to expand. Read more.

One Product, Two Prices

The new era of marketing personalization has brought its share of bogeymen. Among the most frequently invoked has been price variability, where two users are quoted different prices based on data attributes. The Wall Street Journal tracks down specific examples from Staples. The newspaper “found that the Staples Inc. website displays different prices to people after estimating their locations. More than that, Staples appeared to consider the person’s distance from a rival brick-and-mortar store, either OfficeMax Inc. or Office Depot Inc. If rival stores were within 20 miles or so, Staples.com usually showed a discounted price.” Read more.

Foursquare PII

Foursquare will expose more data about users, including their full names, under a privacy policy change slated for January 28. As for venue owners, TheNextWeb notes, “Currently, they can see check-ins at their locations from the past three hours, as well as location ‘mayors’… when the new policy comes into effect, Foursquare says that it will allow them to see “more of those recent check-ins, instead of just three hours worth.” In other words, augmenting first party data. More.

The People Of Data

Former Lijit (acquired by Federated Media in 2011) CEO Todd Vernon took the wraps off of his new venture. It’s not ad tech this time – but it is about corralling big, bad data and includes $1.5 million in investment from venture firms such as Foundry Group. The VictorOps website calls out to data warriors: “Ops, DevOps, TechOps… different names in different companies but there’s one constant in the equation: it’s your team that keeps the machine running.” It’s about the people! Oh, the irony. Read more on The Next Web.

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