YuMe's New Ad Unit; Aegis Group's iProspect Planning For China

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YuMe Flips

Video ad network YuMe has been working the “users don’t differentiate between screens, why should advertisers” concept of cross-platform ad sales for a while. To try to make that idea a bit more graspable, YuMe has unveiled a mobile video ad unit called YuMe Mobile Flip. Users can instantly capture and retain key ad messages on one “slate” — or view — of a tablet device or smart phone, and then quickly “flip” to a second slate to interact further with the brand. Read the release.

Ad Tech Revs

Retargeting specialist Criteo is engaging in a little “humble-bragging” on Adweek — actually, it’s not so humble about expectations of making $300 million in revenue this year and that it’s been profitable since the dark ages of 2008. The secret of Criteo’s success, Richard Lowden, VP of sales and advertising at Weather Underground tells Tim Peterson, is due to the complete fill rate and clickthrough rates. When other retargeters are asked about the fill; rate they can provide, “They’ll say, ‘Oh, you know, probably 20-30 percent,'” Lowden says. “So we know that’s probably 5-10 percent. Well, that’s horrible.”

China Prospecting

Aegis Group’s iProspect is making big plans for China. In a move apparently in the works before it agreed to sell to Dentsu, the holding co takes a majority stake in Beijing Adsit Technology Co. Mediapost’s Joe Mandese covers the story: “The JV, which will integrate ‘performance marketing’ services of Adsit with Aegis’ existing iProspect network, will form an organization with 60 people and offices in both Shanghai and Beijing.” Read more.

Moving & Shaking

Frank Weishaupt has taken the mobile advertising plunge as he joins Jumptap and becomes the mobile ad network’s Chief Operating Officer. Previously, Weishaupt’s positions have included executive sales roles at Yahoo! and Criteo, where we worked for Greg Coleman. Unlike your run-of-the-mill “hiring” press release, surprisingly, former boss Coleman is quoted in Jumptap’s release, “Frank was a true asset during his time at Criteo and helped us deliver against the goal of establishing a new US-focused sales channel in Boston (…).” Read more. Jumptap has former Yahoo! (current Adobe exec) David Karnstedt on its board of directors as well as CTO Bob Hammond, who is a former Yahoo! VP of Engineering. An aside: Jumptap has 15 board observers. Those quarterly board meetings must have industrial strength catering.

“What If” Optimization

What ad buyer wouldn’t want to know how a buy will perform before she shifts the media mix? Aggregate Knowledge pledges to “make it so” with a new feature that models the performance impact of media plan shuffling. “This new functionality allows advertisers to optimize their media mix by selecting from a number of media metrics, including viewers, average frequency, clickers, clicks, CTR (click-through-rate), converters, actions, and APM (action-per-thousand). All changes occur immediately and can be seen both visually and within a table that highlights best and worst performers.” Read the releas e.

Video Prognostications

On Digiday, Josh Sternberg polls a selection of publishers about predictions for online video in the coming year. Jason Pontin, MIT Technology Review editor, takes a different tack and asks himself, “So why aren’t there more great Internet videos? Alas, there are economic constraints. Good-enough video is still surprisingly expensive to produce, shoot and edit, even when a publisher puts pro-am cameras into the hands of his editorial staff. And most advertisers will only allow publishers to place pre-roll before every two or four videos served. The result is that, for now, there is much less video inventory than advertisers want, because the economics don’t really justify a major investment by publishers.” Read more.

DSP Brain

Valueclick’s MediaPlex ops maven Khara Hutchinson, who is also “an advisor to the MOJO Demand Side Platform (DSP) product team” provides her take on the demand-side platform business in a lengthy interview on her company’s blog. In answer to a question about when a planner should not utilize audience targeting when buying programmatically, Hutchinson says, “Adding targeting to your exchange buys limits reach, interfering with the need to gather enough data to start making sound, confident predictions in bidding. Also, every user should be bid on and the value determined by the DSP based on the factors its bidding engine takes into consideration. This is a good way to test a DSP’s capabilities – how smart is ‘the Brain”‘ behind the platform.” Read more.

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