This kind of instant access is becoming an asset to consumers, publishers and advertisers, providing unprecedented ways to communicate and interact with one another in ways no other medium can offer. Monetizing this viewership is an unparalleled opportunity. However, users are quickly becoming complacent to the onslaught of online advertising. No one has perfected a way to accurately target users to create a more personal advertising experience, which has alienated users and is causing a rift in customer loyalty due to fears of what this new level of access means for personal privacy.

Enter AdTruth™ – a company looking to tackle the concerns that cookie-based, location-based, behavioral and audience targeting has created by:

• Putting control back in the hands of the consumer
• Increasing customer loyalty
• Maintaining the ability for media to deliver quality, tailored advertisements across all web-enabled devices.

The company was started by Ori Eisen, founder and chief innovation officer of online fraud protection company 41st Parameter and former director of worldwide fraud at American Express. Ori has spent years and millions of dollars in research to develop DeviceInsight ™, a patented technology used by the top financial institutions, travel and e-commerce sites to battle online fraud. This research uncovered unsettling trends where customer challenge rates were increasing while the viability of cookies was rapidly decreasing. Indeed, the writing was on the proverbial wall: Cookies were beginning to crumble.

This discovery gave birth to the idea of using the DeviceInsight technology to provide increased transparency, adherence to privacy and cookie-less tracking/targeting in the online ad space. This potent and highly effective device recognition technology has proven excellent for finding and stopping the fraudulent “bad guys,” and should be repurposed to help the online ad industry, which has been plagued with HTTP and Flash cookie degradation, growing privacy legislation in both the U.S. and E.U. and tracking efficacy with mobile. Cookies were not the only solution and could not be depended on long-term; it was obvious that media had to evolve.

Building a team of ad industry professionals, a new version of the technology and a subsidiary company was created, and AdTruth embarked on presenting their solution to 67 key players within the industry landscape, receiving over 50 immediate requests to pilot the technology. The technology was then presented to lawyers in Germany, where cookies are opt-in only, and to the FTC, and both greeted the solution with wide acceptance and enthusiasm.

AdTruth’s solution recognizes the DNT (Do Not Track) flag – a privacy solution presented by Mozilla (Firefox Browser) and recently adopted by all major browsers and Internet companies who are part of the W3i to allow for greater user choice in conjunction with other tools like the OBA (Online Behavioral Alliance) AdvertisingOption Icon offering. This allows the user’s privacy choices to truly be honored with this solution.

AdTruth is so unique because of its on-premise, server-side integration into a client’s existing data center infrastructure with no additional hardware requirements. This allows for increased speed while leaving no residue on the user’s device. With concentration on no latency or additional calls, those leveraging the growing valueof Real-Time Bidding (RTB) will find this extremely valuable. The solution augments the use of cookies for display advertising and provides substantially more visibility of mobile devices.

AdTruth announced their first client in November, Steelhouse Media, and has several ongoing pilots and new partnerships developing both in the US and EU. All in the mobile and display landscape are welcome to become a client of AdTruth, particularly mobile players and those in Europe struggling with opt-in only cookie use for 2012, as those sectors are just not making as much as they could if they used this technology. “Once the word gets around on the efficacy, it will spread like wildfire,” said Ori Eisen.” We’re doing the right thing. We do it differently than anyone else.” With over 50 requests to pilot the technology alone, AdTruth is sure to become an industry staple and a true game changer.

ADOTAS: Sponsormob is an industry leader in the truest sense of the term. Explain your foresight in creating the first affiliate/CPA network for mobile devices. What motivated you to go into mobile?

GLAESER: My business partner Jet [Patel, cofounder and COO] and I have been working for a number of years in online marketing on the advertiser’s side. We worked in many different industries throughout our careers and saw two major trends taking place in digital advertising.

The first was that more businesses were gravitating towards true performance marketing. The second was that mobile Internet usage was skyrocketing. You put these things together and that’s how we decided to start our own mobile Internet Affiliate/CPA network.

How did you pick your team to grow the company to where it is today? Was it organic or did you have an idea who you wanted to work with from the beginning?

It was fully organic. It’s hard because if you want a certain quality of people they are usually employed elsewhere. In Europe you must wait three to six months to leave a job. Because of this you must start looking very far in advance from when you actually need to fill a position.

How has your client base changed since the company has started?

We started out selling games and music for the major mobile entertainment companies in Europe and North America. This took up the bulk of our business efforts until mobile apps came out. Now they’re competing for the same traffic. So our business is shifting towards app publishers.

We run the gamut of advertisers now, both people well established with mobile advertising and many new to mobile, which we’ll get to in a moment. With apps having become so wildly popular there are definitely both pros and cons to using them for your campaign.

The pro for us is that the marketing lifetime on any app is about three months, which inevitably increases our demand. The potential problem with that however, is that in order for a client to be successful they must continue to produce new apps to stay current.

How do you address concerns over privacy with mobile advertising? Everyone expects targeted adds to a certain degree but how do you toe the line between innovation and invasiveness?

The rules are the same as online. Certain content gets paid for. If the content is free to the user than there is revenue to be gained for advertisers. Germany has the strictest laws when it comes to protecting identifiable data.

We don’t use unencrypted device IDs. We can’t keep any raw data for more than 90 days. We don’t record GPS data. IP addresses can only be kept for seven days. We only look at general information on your phone such as country registration, language setting, and day of the week, etc. in order to tailor the advertising experience.

What can you tell me about Host & Post and Click To Call? How will this innovate mobile ads for advertisers?

We’ve learned two things in the past three to six months. A lot of advertisers don’t have a lot of experience in building good mobile landing pages. And there are industries for whom it doesn’t make sense to have lengthy sign ups on the phone – finance, cable, etc.

Those that have lack of experience will highly benefit from Host & Post. This is a platform in which we build the creative material for the advertiser and submit the user information in real-time through a standardized gateway. All we need is a gateway. The benefits are that campaigns start faster with better, more accurate results and inevitably produce higher volume.

With Click To Call, we build a small mobile landing page with a call button where the user can directly call the advertiser. All we need is a phone number. There’s no further integration necessary. This lets us start very quickly.

The validity of the call is defined by its duration. A valid lead is longer time, generally a minute or more. It lends mobile advertising to the entire offline world. We are starting the first campaigns this week.

Where do you see the company a year from now? The industry as a whole?

I believe that Host & Post and Click To Call will be our main focus for the time being. It will help us expand into other countries. Anything that does well will be picked up by other players. I anticipate you will see other versions of these platforms get integrated in other companies’ suites. This will be a key trend in mobile advertising.

The demand for mobile traffic is growing faster than the supply. What that means is the quality advertisers with large budgets will have a big advantage for some time over their competitors. It is time for all advertisers to explore their mobile options.

ADOTAS: Tell us a little about your business, what Vulcan Spring does and how you measure success with your marketing efforts? Targets? Specific goal outcomes?

Bob Gustafson: We are a custom flat steel spring manufacturer. Our products include Constant Force Springs, Variable Force Springs, Power Springs and Pullboxes. We make the springs that push products forward on a shelf, trigger the use of a medical device and open solar panels on satellites in space, among many other applications. We have been in business since 1967.

Our goal is to be available online for engineers and designers who are searching for this type of niche product. Since our customer base is spread among many different industries we need to have marketing tools that casts a wide net on one hand, and can selectively target markets on the other.

Why is GlobalSpec a fit for those marketing objectives and targets?

GlobalSpec allows us to be found online when an engineer of designer is looking for a solution to a problem and knows that a spring would help. GlobalSpec is searched by many different industries and we see this in the results. They also have targeted newsletters that we have utilized for different industries, customizing our message.

One other part that we like is the ability to add products to our on-line profile to show the engineer the type of products that we offer. We can add updated information and new products at any time.

What objectives and goals did you specifically hope to apply to GlobalSpec?

Our goal is to reach as many engineers and designers as possible, hopefully in the early stages of design. This way, we can work with them to make the best possible product. We work to integrate the spring into the other components of the product and usually can add to the overall design.

How did you and GlobalSpec go about planning for the specifics of your marketing objectives and campaign?

We mainly set up our profile so that we can cover most industries and key words for search results. We then strategize to pinpoint various newsletters that will gain us attention.

Tell us about the experience and outcome of that initiative?

We receive leads on a weekly basis, sent directly to us. We can also go on and download custom reports at any time. Our results are magnified when we run the newsletters. We can increases of 400% when we run a newsletter.

Are you currently doing or plan to do more?

We are always looking at the newsletters to increase our visibility. We are also trying to work our way into the on-line tradeshows that are now available. That would be something we could do to gain exposure.

The report also detailed, for the first time, the economic impact they had on all 50 states. California, not surprisingly, took the lions share at $14.1 billion.

The report stated, “We make most of our revenue from the ads shown next to our search results, on our other websites and the websites of our partners.” Google’s report also went on to say “Through these ad programs, we help many others make a living, too.”

But competition for revenue is stiff as the Internet’s share of overall advertising spending is forecast to rise to 17% in 2012 from 13% this year. ZenithOptimedia, a London-based ad buyer owned by Publicis Groupe SA has forecast this 4% increase in spending for internet advertising over the next 18 months.

Google’s report continued: “We conservatively estimate that for every $1 a business spends on AdWords, they receive an average of $8 in profit through Google Search and AdWords,”

Despite this rosy outlook, Google’s share value has declined 23% this year.

According to comScore the site had 90,000 unique visitors in June 2009. Traffic has now increased to 335,00 per month. True/Slant is different from most traditional publishers because they allow advertisers to have their own separate pages in addition to regular display ads. And, more importantly, its contributing writers can earn bonuses depending on the amount of traffic they draw.

The concept of the entire site is to allow the journalist to be entrepreneurial. And Forbes, being well know for their pro-capitalist stance, seems to be validating this integration of news and business.

It isn’t that news and business have ever been entirely separate but True/Slant has combined the roles traditionally assigned to separate divisions of a news organization into one entrepreneurial blogger. Conflict of interest between the editorial room and advertising is beginning to appear as a quaint old-fashioned ideal of an era gone-by.

Forbes, founded in 1917, will now use True/Slant.com for a 2010 makeover.

CEO of Match.com Greg Blatt made a statement saying, “Online dating is a pretty interesting thing because your users are in many ways part of your product. The more and better users you have, the better experience you’re delivering to your users.”

IAC’s Match unit totaled 1.6 million paid users in Q1. This unit includes Match.com and other dating sites.

ADOTAS – The Rubicon Project, the digital advertising technology company, has announced that it has acquired SiteScout, a malware security technology provider, to build upon the technology that drives the brand protection and security layer of its REVV for publishers platform. Malware attacks on popular sites and apps have reduced traffic as much as 10% in a single month. This represents a net monthly risk of almost $600 MM. There is almost nothing, technology or otherwise, within legacy ad server that protects publishers, their visitors or their advertisers from malware attacks.

COO and Founder of the Rubicon Project, Craig Roah said, “We began to look for the right security partner to help address this growing issue for publishers in 2009, evaluating several solutions in this space to complement our industry-leading brand protection technology. In side-by-side tests, in a live production environment with real ad tags on premium websites, SIteScout was hands-down the most effective technology. In addition, the technology is easily integrated with our platform, and the SiteScout team is a perfect fit with our strong company culture. This acquisition will enable us to protect premium publishers with the most effective and highly scalable technology solution to address the very real, very dangerous and fast-growing problem of malvertising.

ADOTAS – Google’s advertising breakdown has been divulged. Partners get 68% of revenues from ads that are placed alongside various web page content and articles. Websites take 51% of revenue from ads shown in their own search results.

Commission for ads next to general content has been in place since 2003, while the rate for search ads has been the same since 2005. Ad shown next to Google’s own services took in $15.7 billion in revenue last year while marketing messages distributed to other site brought in $7.2 billion.

ADOTAS – The OFT announced today that after investigating online targeted advertising, more could be done to protect user information, both how its collected and used. Some of the suggestions the report includes are: CPS practices would include a decision on whether or not to visit a website; and should industry action prove ineffective, OFT and ICO will strengthen the effectiveness of regulation by seeking to agree a memorandum of understanding to establish in which circumstances the ICO or OFT would take enforcement action.