Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Yahoo! On Q1 2010
Barron’s Eric Savitz provides a bulleted list from the remarks made by Hilary Schneider, EVP of Yahoo! North America, at the Goldman Sachs Technology Conference in San Francisco. According to Savitz, Schneider said that the “rebound in brand advertising the company saw in the fourth quarter has continued into the first quarter” and, curiously, “dollars shifting from offline to online ads are targeting women, not men.” Read more.
Lookery Resurrected: Audience Networks For Pubs
Calling it “Lookery Prequel, Inc.,” Scott Rafer has rolled away the stones of the Lookery sepulchre to introduce a new company from the dust of the former Lookery. Rafer writes on the Lookery blog, “If you are a publisher network, category-leading publisher, brand, or agency, we’ll run through walls to help you become an self-reliant Audience Network.” Is this another step toward the SSP (supply-side platform)? It’s certainly a part of it. Read more.
Location-Based Services Added To Legislative Initiative
On The Hill’s “Hillicon Valley” blog, journalist Tony Romm says that privacy legislation will now include location-based services. What’s more, a hearing appears imminent as Rep. Bobby Rush, who is working along side Rep. Rich Boucher, said, “It is my intent that our next hearing on privacy will be a legislative hearing, where we will discuss the ‘devil in the details’ by commenting on a discussion draft of a comprehensive privacy bill.” Read the article.
VCs Are Fat
In the MIT Technology Review, New Yorker financial page columnist James Surowiecki looks at why venture capitalists have been enjoying the same gravy days they did just 10 years ago. Maybe the problem is VC have too much money? Surowiecki writes, “Since VCs get a percentage of assets under management, having tens of billions come into the industry every year makes it possible for a venture capitalist to make a good living even from investments that go nowhere. That’s not a recipe for creating focused VCs.” Read the article.
The Demo Is Dead
AdWeek’s Steve McClellan finds that demographics may not matter anymore if one is to believe a new study by the University of Southern California, the Hallmark Channel and E-Poll Market Research (quite a crew!). McClellan notes, “Individuals in different life stages can have very similar demographic profiles but different attitudes and media usage.” Read more. And, visit the E-Poll research site for more details.
TARGUSinfo Scores: Event and Expansion
On May 5-6 in New Orleans, Louisiana, TARGUSinfo is producing its Scoring Summit, which will “discuss how real-time scoring is transforming business” and will include the participation of number-cruncher expert Ian Ayres as well as additional “number crunchers” from BlueKai, LendingTree, ADP, Forrester Research and Sylvan Learning. Register here. In addition, the company said that it has expanded its footprint by establishing offices in New York and San Francisco as the company’s AdAdvisor, targeting data platform gains traction in the data-driven world of display. Read the release.
Killing Stuff In The Company
Rapleaf CEO Auren Hoffman puts it succinctly in the title to his post on his personal blog: “To Grow a Company, You Need to be Good at Killing Things.” No humans need to be killed here as he suggests, for example, “Your products may have features once thought to be important, but are no longer necessary or demanded by customers. Slay them.” Read the post.
Attribution For E-Commerce
Performance advertising company, Channel Intelligence, has released a whitepaper which looks at the company’s own methodology for properly attributing digital tactics to an e-Commerce client’s sale. For individual conversions, a timeline can be reviewed for example which shows where and when the consumer was reached. If the consumer nearly finishes completing a transaction after viewing display ads but goes to a coupon site, Channel Intelligence says that its services take this into account and gives proper attribution to the “assist” (display) as opposed to the “last click” (the coupon site). See the release and download the report.
Xerox Patent Claims On Google AdSense
eWeek’s Clint Boulton reports that Xerox thinks it has been copied! (Couldn’t resist.) The company has filed suit against Yahoo! and Google for what it believes are infringement of different patents. In one such case with Google, “Xerox accused Google of using its AdWords and AdSense ad platforms to automatically generate queries based on the content of Web pages to retrieve digital ads. ” See the actual court document (PDF). And, read more on eWeek. Yahoo and Google will “vigorously defend.”
Game Ad Network Acquisition
Game Advertising Online, a network with reach of over 50 million uniques according to Quantcast, has been acquired by a division of United Business Media, UBM TechWeb which owns properties like Gamasutra and the Game Developers Conferences. Read the release.
TV Driving Online
Mercury Media has released a white paper that speaks to the use of television by brand marketers to drive online. As the paper states, TV is still #1 by a mile, but driving online can be an effective extension of any brand marketers program given the time spent by Internet users -who are TV viewers, too! Read more (PDF).
VivaKi Names Innovation Chief
Rishad Tobaccowala has been named VivaKi’s new Innovation Chief according to a tweet from the VivaKi Twitter account. In his past, Tobaccowala was Chief Innovation Officer of Publicis Groupe Media.
Don’t Forget The Trademark
It’s never too early to for startups to start thinking about trademark law requirements according to the “IP Law For Startups” blog. Though the writer’s position is no surprise given the title of the U.S.-centric blog, several arguments worth considering are highlighted in the piece – including: “If you don’t understand the value of federal trademark protection and fail to file a registration, someone else may get a federal registration on the name that you’ve been using and then try to stop you from using it.” Read more. Of course, it would seem there are exceptions to the importance of a trademark. For example, do you think you’re ever going to hear the name Teracent again? It’s Google now – where did the trademark work go? Likely down a rat hole.
The Daily Bill Wise Tweet
From his Twitter account perch, Bill Wise, Yahoo!’s VP/GM, Ad Platforms, tweeted frustration about the noise around the data exchange model, “If there are so many data exchanges out there, why are BlueKai and eXelate the only ones ever mentioned? Tweet back @billwise interested…” Tweet him now. He’s waiting.
