But ClearSpring’s acquisition was a major one too — Xgraph, a data science firm concentrating on social graph modeling and monetization. It’s real-time data processing technology can reportedly handle 10 tetrabytes of data a day.

“Clearspring is at the epicenter of two major shifts online—the web becoming social and personal, and advertising becoming data-driven and accountable,” McGrory said. “The common thread in both changes is data. To compete in this new world, companies will not only need the ability to access and process big data, but also have the ability to activate that data to create value for consumers, publishers and advertisers.”

ADOTAS

Well, come third-quarter report time, CFO and interim CEO Tim Morse — on the job for a few weeks after the unceremonial firing of Carol Bartz — had a great deal of tap dancing to do. In general, revenue was down 5% year over year ex-TAC (24% GAAP-adjusted) and net earnings dropped 26% YOY, but now display revenue had actually slipped. See, in the second quarter, global display revenue was still up year over year (5% ex-TAC); in third quarter, display revenue ex-TAC was $449 million, down from $448 million during Q3 2010 — a 5% drop YOY. GAAP display revenue was $502 million, a decrease of 2% versus the $514 million reported in the third quarter of 2010.

Morse played the dip off as “flat,” but it takes a blind man not to see an inflection point. With the premium inventory sales team running at full steam, Yahoo! cited the culprit this time around as remnant inventory. Morse said straight up, premium (guaranteed) display revenue grew while non-premium (nonguaranteed) revenue display declined. It appeared that CPMs for non-premium inventory sold on RMX had been sinking like the Titanic, but Morse suggested that an in-house tech upgrade would turn the decline around. Kinda weird considering that the department has been running around headless for a few weeks.

Morse’s statement is only one reason why today’s announcement that Yahoo! is buying audience targeting platform Interclick for $270 million ($9 a share, a 22% premium to the price of the stock at Monday’s close) is a bit of a surprise. The others are a bit more obvious — Yahoo! doesn’t have a permanent CEO and is undergoing a “strategic review,” while cofounder and ex-CEO Jerry Yang is reportedly seeking funds to take the company private, or a merger with fellow beleaguered portal AOL is being considered. Seems like a weird time to lay down $270 million for a tech purchase.

But it’s definitely aimed at sealing the leak in Yahoo!’s remnant display revenue and getting more money out of the vast amount of remnant inventory on its content network, which is only growing through deals like the one recently signed with ABC News. In addition, Interclick features its own network of publishers, and a sales team that will be moving over.

It’s the audience segmentation and targeting technology that really has Yahoo! licking its chops. Interclick will be bringing over its Open Segment Manager audience targeting platform as well as inventory optimization technology for boosting remnant inventory CPMs via audience segmentation with smarter data insight. Earlier this year Interclick introduced a video ad platform designed to illuminate the correlations between display and video advertising campaigns. Also, the company recently released the self-service Genome platform for audience targeting and campaign planning.

A source told The Wall Street Journal that remnant ad inventory is a $600 million a year business — is that it? Really? In theory — with a solid integration, which is no guarantee considering Yahoo!’s track record — the acquisition could not only stem the display revenue decline but seriously turn it around, as Interclick sounds like the kind of advanced data-driven targeting platform Yahoo! was lacking to clean up on its remnant inventory.

And Interclick kinda needed a hand too — the stock hadn’t rebounded to it’s all time-high of $8.94 (just short of the $9 offer price) since slipping during the big stock market selloff this summer. The company was reported to pull in $53 million in revenue this year.

“Having worked closely with Yahoo! for the past few years, we have a deep appreciation of the quality of the inventory that Yahoo! brings to market,” said Michael Katz, founder and CEO of Interclick. ”The combination of Yahoo!’s premium data and inventory with our platforms will create tremendous value for clients.”

So the real question is, what does this mean for RMX? I imagine we’ll start seeing a lot less Yahoo! content network inventory on it, but the will the exchange finally become useless?

Nielsen gains 52 employees with the deal along with software and ongoing client projects, according to the release. Founder and CEO Ross Link will oversee the group within Nielsen as wells as manage the integration of Marketing Analytics’ tech.

Nielsen is attempting to bring the substance of TV analytics online with its Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings, which promise statistics for reach, frequency and gross rating points (GRP). Announced last fall and Currently in beta testing with 80 brands, the service is scheduled to launch on Aug. 15. Check out this blog post by Charles Buchwalter, SVP of Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings, for some interesting preliminary stats.

While Nielsen further excited current and potential clients last week by releasing a Facebook data set with demographic and connection data for 170 million U.S. users, Michael Learmonth at AdAge reported yesterday that marketers don’t appear sold yet on the online GRP concept.

The latest bit of consolidation takes place in the mobile arena as mobile marketing platform Augme bought mobile marketer Hipcricket for $44 million ($6 million in cash, $38.5 million in Augme common stock). The two companies’ client roster will exceed 300, including 10 of the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies, six of the largest media companies in the world and four of the world’s biggest advertising agencies.

This is the second acquisition in as many months (actually, weeks) for Augme as the company bought mobile barcode specialist and contextual MMS advertiser JAGTAG in late July, giving JAGTAG CEO Ed Jordan the CFO responsibilities at Augme. Prior to that move, Augme released version 4.0 of its mobile marketing software platform AD LIFE.

Founded in 2004, Hipcricket is a relative veteran in the field of mobile marketing, having recently powered its 100,000th brand campaign. Earlier this year the company released version 7.0 of its cloud-based mobile marketing and advertising platform HIP, with new features such as integration with Facebook Pages and the SmartXchange conversational SMS tool.

All of Hipcricket’s staff is expected to Hipcricket CEO Ivan Braiker will become president and a member of Augme’s board of directors while President and COO Eric Harber — who has written some deep thought pieces for Adotas — will take on COO duties at Augme.

“We expect the complementary resources of Augme, JAGTAG and Hipcricket, when combined, will allow Augme to provide the most powerful best-of-breed mobile marketing solutions to global brand name leaders, backed by strong intellectual property portfolios, including patented technology and software-as-a-service technology platforms,” commented Augme CEO Paul Arena.

For more on Hipcricket, check out CMO Jeff Hasen’s thoughts regarding social customer relationship management in the smartphone era.

By the way, my proposed theme song for the Summer of Consolidation is “Something in the Air” by Thunderclap Newman. “Come Together” by the Beatles would also be appropriate.

In the early days, everyone was excited about click-through rates (CTRs) and the first ads which could garner CTRs of 30% or more. Over time, there were debates about view-based conversions versus click, online GRPs, online reach, etc. These debates are still raging as new vehicles (e.g., video) have been added to the marketing mix; the complexity has only increased.

The latest trend has been how to bridge search and display with attribution modeling. At the end of the day, marketers are using these tactics to evaluate the impact of different vehicles at different stages in the marketing funnel and are trying to get to an overall Return on Ad Spending (ROAS) for their boss or their client.

Simultaneously, there has been a real shift from buying impressions or views to buying audiences across media. The new question facing a marketer is “how do I value my online audience?” – which can be simplified to “how do I value a cookie?”

To answer that question, a breakdown of the current model is needed. Traditionally, marketers have evaluated the performance of their display advertising campaigns based on action-oriented goals (e.g., CPA, CPC, CPX). If a campaign does not hit the minimum, many marketers deem it a failure and cancel the flight, which prevents them from capturing an immense amount of value—especially when it comes to retargeting.

While customer targeting, re-targeting and re-messaging have all been around for a while, it seems to really have caught fire over the past three to four years. Part of the current debate centers on whether a display campaign that fails in terms of its CPX goals actually has value in terms of building an advertiser’s cookie pool.

The challenge for most centers around time. How long do you have to run a campaign before you can expect payoff from your cookie pool? It is best to think of display campaigns in terms of two equally important stages: “audience acquisition” and “customer retargeting.”

In Stage 1, a marketer launches a display campaign and hopes to build awareness and generate actions (e.g., registrations or purchases). With the traditional model, a marketer would base their judgment of success or failure solely on this first stage and these initial actions. In other words, I spent $X and I generated this many leads or this many sales and so my ROI for the campaign is either positive or negative compared to other marketing vehicles.

The traditional model misses the fact that with each site visit (or e-mail “open”) the marketer has the opportunity to place a cookie — (i.e., identify an individual). Over the length of the campaign, you will have added to your cookie pool, also known as your online audience.

In Stage 2, a marketer is able to capitalize on these cookies through a retargeting campaign—which are often the most effective campaigns you can run since you are connecting with people who have already visited your site, opened your e-mail, or expressed interest in your product/service. A marketer is able to continue that conversation across the internet by creating personalized ads that—we all hope—are highly relevant to each prospect. Thus, by using retargeting, marketers will generate additional actions and at a better scale than just through audience acquisition.

However, it has been hard to capture this additional value in the classic CPA model. In fact, an inexpensive CPM campaign that delivers no actions and does nothing but increase an advertiser’s online audience (i.e., cookie pool) can be one of the best campaigns once the retargeting actions are factored in over time. And to make sense of it all, one has to be able to value a cookie.

Determining the Value of Your Online Audience

To determine the value of a specific cookie, marketers should consider the following six factors:

1.       Action Value – What value does each action warrant based on your business model?

2.       Conversion Rate – What percent of people who visit a landing page convert (i.e., take the action you are measuring)?

3.       Cost of a Click – If you bought media on a CPC basis, what is the resulting cost of a click?

4.       Cookie Value – Based on the “Action Value” and “Conversion Rate,” what is the gross value of each cookie that comes to the marketer’s landing page?

5.       Marginal Value of a Cookie – What is the net value of each cookie that comes to the marketer’s landing page once-acquired, including of the cost of obtaining the retargeting click?

6.       Marginal Value of each Acquisition Campaign Click – What is the net value of each cookie that comes to the marketer’s landing page, including of the cost of acquiring the cookie, and the subsequent retargeting click

While 1-3 are pretty standard, 4-6 are more esoteric. This approach has the power to change the way advertisers are running and valuing their display campaigns. But not all cookies are created equal. Here are a few “gotchas” to keep an eye out for:

First: Cookie Pool Decay. Just like Oreos, cookies have a shelf life and can expire or be deleted. To counteract these trends, marketers need to continually run both audience acquisition and customer engagement campaigns.

Second: Brand Fatigue. How many times can a brand hit a prospect before losing them or numbing them to the message?  Marketers need to determine, maintain and frequently review metrics that shed light on their audience behavior and drop off. They must then use these insights to continually optimize media with tools.

Third: Landing page limbo. Any good marketer will tell you that an online marketing campaign will fail if the value proposition is not strong and the conversion process is un-engaging. So marketers must continually evaluate and optimize their “digital storefront” to ensure the maximum number of conversions.

Today, most marketers evaluate display campaign effectiveness on initial actions. Unfortunately, by doing so, they may be missing a completely different source of value—building their cookie pool—that enables them to execute more effective retargeting campaigns over time. And this, in turn, can change the very way they think about display marketing.

Two million mobile users and 85 million monthly visitors take advantage of the Dealmap’s DealExchange distribution network, which offers access to 450,000 deals each day across the U.S. and the United Kingdom through 450 local daily deal sources. Users can take advantage filters for 12 business categories (e.g., restaurants, automotive) and eight types of deals (discount, free stuff), while advertisers/dealmakers can take advantage of 50 commercial distribution partners such as CityGrid, Local.com and MyPoints.

But possibly the coolest feature of the Dealmap is not that the platform enables advertisers to easily add deals, but that it allows consumers to share deals spotted on the street (such as a sign in a window) with their fellow deal-seekers.

Consider the potential of such technology hooked into the scale of Google+ and Google Offers — it would be a boon to both consumers (more deals!) and advertisers (word-of-mouth!).

In addition to smartphones with scanning apps, JAGTAG’s QR codes can be read by the cameras on feature phones and smartphones, allowing them to be read by 90% of mobile consumers. In addition to powering QR codes and proprietary 2D codes, in owns a patent on a system that serves contextually relevant ads when targeting is available for MMS advertising.

“Ed Jordan will represent a great addition to the executive management team that we’ve been building over the past year,” said Augme CEO Paul Arena. “He joins Augme at a time when we believe we are becoming recognized as a technology leader in the U.S. mobile marketing space. Ed’s expertise in managing fast-growing technology companies in the mobile and Internet services sectors, combined with his public company experience and his accounting background, should prove invaluable to Augme and its shareholders as we pursue an aggressive growth strategy in the coming years.”

The acquisition adds 150 clients to Augme’s roster, including major brands like Sports Illustrated, Bacardi,Unilever, GlaxoSmithKline.

The notion that a captain might go down with the ship or that storybook ideal that the band must play on until the very end, their very end, is certainly at odds with the current me-me-me culture. Of course, those aboard did not know their fate until the very end, and while not too protracted, it did not happen swiftly taking almost three hours before first impact to full submersion.

The Titanic, as the movie proved, makes for a timeless tale, one full of irony and allegory. It is in this tale of invincibility and unexpected demise that we find ourselves pondering digital re-enactments of the Titanic.

Last week when writing about the potential bubble and mega-billion-dollar digital media exits, a story came out that tells not all the unlike the Titanic, for now at least and luckily minus the actual loss of life. This is the story of the one that used to rule them all, MySpace.

As a business, it has languished, becoming a diminishing asset not unlike AOL’s dial-up business. It hasn’t gone away but despite the best efforts thus far, including numerous management and direction changes, the business has not pulled out of decline.

Unlike the Titanic, the event that signaled MySpace’s eventual rode to demise is not as concrete as hitting an iceberg. Many point to Facebook as that which led to the once-king of social’s doom, but hardly anyone, Mark Zuckerberg included, would have guessed his company would surpass MySpace. Like any great entrepreneur and overly driven, competitive individual, visions of grandeur absolutely ran through his head but the rational brain would not have agreed until much later.

Today, FBOK has 15 times the users that MySpace had at its peak, a number that shows little sign of slowing down; it also carries an estimated value $79.5 billion dollars higher than MySpace’s purchase price.

That MySpace didn’t have a specific event that signaled its end has certainly not made the ride down any smoother or any more palatable. In the digital world, its story is anything but unique. As others have noted before, it is as though the category killers and originators all end up surpassed at best and obscurity at the worst.

Who would have guessed that Yahoo! would not retain the number one spot in search? Who would have thought that Netscape would disappear? It’s one thing to lose your spot, but it is another to work there. What must it be like to work at MySpace? How does a company like Yahoo! turn itself around when they see so much bad press?

These are big ships on a trajectory  much like the Titanic. In today’s world, Apple alone stands as the rare example of a company that rose from the ashes to achieve an even bigger place of prominence. It’s the ultimate Catch-22 though — a strong business almost too closely associated with its strong leader.

Exactly what a strong business is not supposed to do. For example, can you name the CEO of Coke?

Whether MySpace’s story — thanks to new owners Specific Media in conjunction with Justin Timberlake — can ultimately resemble an Apple versus that fabled ship remains to be seen. What we don’t envy though is the challenge of both still working there as well as the one who takes over the helm.

Here is what so easily happens — employees remember the good times. They look to management to help create that and to fix the culture decline with substance. Management doesn’t really care about fixing the business. They don’t feel they have the support of the people into their new vision. They endanger that support further by making a few mid-course corrections and a stream of layoffs. They might care, but it’s hard to really care as even upon taking the job they started to plan their next venture. In their mind, they are simply optimizing for being able to say look how many lives we did save (using the Titanic metaphor) as opposed to actually trying to have the ship avoid the iceberg once the warning bell has sounded.

This battle is playing itself out in companies not nearly as large as Yahoo! or public as MySpace. The foreboding, dread and continuous drain on morale almost ensures that those still there do so because no better alternative exists. The ship may go down but why jump off the boat if it looks like some form of life raft will still exist?

It is really is too bad that businesses like these don’t necessarily have an iceberg to point to. At least Napster could fight until the very end happily even though the knockout blow would come at any moment. For the rest who find themselves already sinking but not knowing why, theirs is that depressing but all-too-common story — not admitting the issues until all they can do is tread water.

Cross-published at DMConfidential.com.

According to insiders, Go Daddy, a resource for affiliate marketers for setting up landing pages, has been sold to private investment firmsKKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures for $2.25 billion — not a bad price considering that Go Daddy brought in more than a billion in revenue last year, and revenue intake has been shooting up at 20% yearly growth rate.

Go Daddy’s release says the Internet services company “signed a definitive agreement to receive a strategic investment and enter into a partnership” with those investment firms. Bob Parsons, who founded the company in 1997, will keep his job as CEO.

“I’ve always said we would make a move like this when the right deal with the right partners could help us do the right thing for our customers and our employees,” Parsons said in a release. “This is it! We are partnering with KKR, Silver Lake and TCV because of their technology expertise, their understanding of Web based businesses and because their values align with ours.”

Go Daddy currently boasts 9.3 million customers worldwide and 48 million domain names – a key aspect to the acquisition is pushing international growth.

But what about Danica Patrick? Will she still wear skintight and skimpy outfits on my teevee?

I don’t know, I don’t care. Wait, this just in — ESPN reports that Go Daddy will continue to sponsor Patrick’s racing career, and she will likely appear in more nonsensical and tacky television commercials that advertise unrated Internet content.

“The new investors have specifically said they don’t want to mess with Go Daddy’s secret sauce — at least two of the magic ingredients, our customer service and marketing,” Elizabeth Driscoll, Go Daddy’s vice president of PR, told ESPN.

Yay — I’m sure some overgrown man-children are celebrating, somewhere.

Specific may have bought a real jalopy, but depending on how well the social network is fixed up, it could be a boon for the ad network.

It’s fitting that the acquisition news is all over the web on Social Media Day, but Thursday, June 30 also marks the end of News Corp.’s fiscal year — it’s understandable that Rupert Murdoch didn’t want that revenue black hole on his balance sheet anymore.

Originally acquired for $580 million, MySpace was pretty much given away for $35 million – when it first appeared on the auction block, News Corp. was seeking a laughable $100 million. Actually I’m a little surprised News Corp. didn’t pay Specific Media to get rid of it, though News Corp. is taking a minority equity stake in Specific.

The layoffs came quickly (I can’t believe people would be working for MySpace without an updated resume), with about half of the 400-500 employees getting the ax. How many rounds of layoffs (and CEO-oustings) have we seen during the long, slow, depressing decline of MySpace? I remember being surprised in the last two years any time I received a hiring announcement from MySpace.

The decline really stemmed from News Corp.’s takeover in 2005 and at its heart were display ads. The parent company was making hand over fist in revenue from chintzy display ads and a deal with Google to power search and contextual ads, but at the price of annoying users with poor site functionality (how many pages did you have to sift through to make a comment?). Believe it or not, Facebook has always held user experience above revenue (especially now after tripping over its privacy policy so many times) and that was why it stole MySpace’s users.

But now the oft-redesigned social network is Specific’s problem, and it’s blowing some commentators minds that an ad network owns a social network. Specific wasn’t high on the tech media’s radar; indeed, the biggest splash Specific has made outside of the ad tech world was a lawsuit that claimed Specific used (previously) hard-to-delete Flash cookies for targeting purposes — which was kicked out of federal court a few months ago with little fanfare coverage.

But Specific is a big-ass display ad network — a reach of 170.9 million U.S. uniques and 79% of the U.S. Internet population — known for its targeting and dating mining technology.

“Our Data Universe enables us to gather insights from more than 2.6 million sites worldwide, giving us visibility into the digital consumption of 550 million global users each month.” Specific’s website reads. “Because our data is proprietary, it’s unique. Differentiated data means differentiated audiences.”

I didn’t get an answer when I asked if Specific Media was planning to incorporate MySpace user data into its display and video targeting services — there may not be one at this point. In theory, Specific will be able to do what Facebook won’t – anonymize profile data to add to audience segments for targeted display campaigns, and enable advertisers to reach potential targets on MySpace.

We keep wondering why Facebook swears it’s not building an ad network even though it has such large tracts of data that would be a boon to targeted display campaigns — Specific won’t get the same kind of reach (the company claims it will reach 70 million users but 50 million is the media-sanctioned number), but it’s pretty sweet to have so many uniques traversing an owned property.

I’ve read more than a few articles suggesting you delete your MySpace profile now, and a few that say it won’t matter as MySpace has backed up of all that data (oh no, they have pictures of my emo period!). But can you imagine the vast loads of outdated, crap data sitting in MySpace’s back pocket? Most of it must be absolutely useless for mining or targeting.“Hey Jenny, we see you liked Fallout Boy five years ago — check out this new line of studded belts!

Honestly, I don’t think being MySpace being owned by an ad network is going to ward anyone off other than the most privacy sensitive.

MySpace offers a new outlet for these branded videos as well as the opportunity to monetize 67 million video streams monthly.

Finally, Specific has suggested it will offer advertisers “socially-activated advertising campaigns, enabling brands to turn their campaigns viral by allowing users to share their favorite ads with friends.” It could easily set up new ad products similar to Facebook that offer advertisers the ability to anonymously target based on demographics and related user-generated content.

“With [Specific's] emphasis on video and data, this is about access,” commented interclick CEO Michael Katz. ”They gain access to a lot of inventory for their video offering. They also gain access to some quality data including the search data and registration data.”