New investors Grotech Ventures and Greenhill SAVP join existing investor Court Square Ventures in the new round. Grotech general partner Steve Fredrick and Greenhill managing director Brian Hirsch have joined TRAFFIQ’s board of directors. Proceeds from the financing will be used to further enhance the platform and accelerate the company’s sales and marketing efforts.

Fredrick said advertisers, agencies and publishers are demanding more control of the advertising process, and some of that leverage is swinging away from the traditional ad networks that deal with the remnant inventory. They want to know what they are paying, the target demographics of where these ads are showing up and the ability to pick and efficiently manage where on both large publishers and long tail publishers.

“One of the challenges for the advertisers and agencies is how to identify, negotiate, buy, manage and then remit payment to dozens or hundreds of publishers,” he said. “It gets to be very burdensome and time consuming. TRAFFIQ provides an efficient means of doing that.”

Unlike networks or exchanges, TRAFFIQ’s marketplace provides buyers and sellers with a single platform that consolidates planning, RFP distribution, order execution, optimization and billing. By enabling ad buyers to post RFPs and publishers to respond directly, it returns control of the media buying process to the agency/advertiser. This level of visibility and access to real-time KPIs makes it easier for them to adjust campaigns on the fly to better meet clients’ goals. And, as an end-to-end solution, TRAFFIQ increases an agency/advertiser’s buying power and a publisher’s selling strength.

According to the company, there are millions of dollars of campaign demand and billions of impressions currently available on the TRAFFIQ platform. These are provided by thousands of quality publishers and aggregators, such as WhitePages.com, Scripps Network, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber and ContextWeb. It previously raised $7 million

Before shutting down its ad network, the company had to decide whether it was a media business trying to reach advertisers and expand its network or focus on its semantic technology, said CEO Amiad Solomon at the Digiday conference.  The company obviously decided on the technology, which appears to have been a good choice. It recently closed on $10.5 million funding. The company, founded in Israel in 2006, has raised $22 million so far.

But with all different tech services out there, especially behavioral, it seems that the competition could prove an obstacle. An idea that Solomon disagrees with, saying that it is more about adding layers of value rather than competition. (The video, hosted by Youtube, keeps disappearing. If it’s not viewable, here’s the url. )

According to Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, Google and its partners intercede in transactions advertisers would otherwise have received for free, so the true effectiveness of the ads Google delivers is overstated. Edelman shows how advertisers, when they measure conversion rates, mismeasure, and end up overpaying for traffic that is far less valuable than reporting systems suggest.

He breaks the four examples down into – Traffic source – How users are found – What would have happened had Google and its partners not interceded

WhenU – adware – User requests advertiser’s site. Adware covers advertiser’s site with pay-per-click listings. – Advertiser’s site displays as usual, with no covering popup. User stays at advertiser’s site, and advertiser pays no PPC fee.

Example – WhenU covers advertisers’ sites with advertisers’ own google ads

SmileyCentral – toolbar – Reconfigured browser tricks user into running a “search” for a site’s domain name. – User’s browser retains its ordinary configuration. User runs a direct navigation, and advertiser pays no PPC fee.

Example – IAC’s SmileyCentral grab advertisers’ organic traffic to show google ads

Typosquatting – User misspells advertiser’s domain name. User’s browser shows a list of alternatives, and user selects one — reaching advertiser’s site at no charge. Or, user sees an error page, notices the misspelling, and corrects the spelling to reach the advertiser’s site without a PPC fee.

Example – Cmcast.com, MediaLogik and others intercept users’ misspellings to show google ads.

Chrome – browser suggestions – User typing a web address is encouraged to run a search instead. – User finishes typing the site’s web address and reaches the advertiser’s site without a PPC fee.

Example – suggestions divert users from direct navigation to search.

At least one man, Joseph Turow, a marketing professor at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania, wants complete transparency.

He wants to put an icon on each ad that when clicked allows users to see what has been collected. Clicking the icon, you will get a privacy dashboard that will let you understand exactly what information was used to choose that ad. And you can edit the information or opt out of having any targeting done at all.

According to Turow, you will see what part of it was customized — the product, the price, the image and so on. You will also see the data used — your surfing habits, outside data vendors, inferences from your I.P. address, etc. You can click to learn more specifics about exactly where the data came from and to delete or modify the information used about you.

“When people begin to smell a rat with regard to their reputation or they feel they are being discriminated against, they will use it,” he said to the Times. “When companies realize you have the ability to see what they are doing, they treat you better.”

I believe in complete transparency, but I also wonder what’s the worst that can happen to me if a website (and I’m not talking about the bad actors out there) uses the information they are now able to collect related to my surfing habits.

– Express your opinion, comment below.

Marketing Mine is an online resource, connecting traditional and emerging marketing services companies with marketers. Marketers submit to an online database their profiles, RFPs, and other information in order to find partners with PR, social media, interactive, and other specialties. Founded by Todd Knutson, president of The List, the new company will offer core services such as RFP generation, agency search, creative and agency reviewing.

“Launching companies in these economic times you think, ‘Oh, boy,’” said Brandon Doty, president. “But what we are finding is, as we talk with agencies and marketers, it is really a good time for us to be doing this. Because it is providing a way for agencies to be found, it’s relatively inexpensive. For marketers, who are trying to find ways to find a new service provider, this is a quick and inexpensive to shorten the (search time).”

The company has launched to agencies to build the databases. Marketers won’t be able to use the site until next week. Service providers include companies that deal with widgets, in-game advertising, in-cloud applications, user-generated promotions, search engine optimization, mobile social networking and other areas.

The new company, according to Doty, is for marketers who want to do something cool, and new, and don’t know who to turn to. In feedback from marketing testers, Marketing Mine found that the marketers used the site to discover new creatives and see who is doing interesting stuff out there. Agencies and service providers have the ability to upload portfolio work, so marketers can go to the site and actually look at examples of work, whether it is a case study, white paper or actually looking at the work itself.

– Express your opinion, comment below.

We asked Grant Ries, BlueKai’s Chief revenue officer for more details:

We know that ad exchanges are places where publishers make available inventory to the highest bidder and advertisers buy audience of target customers or prospects, exactly what IS a data exchange?

A data exchange is similar to an ad exchange in that it aggregates something to sell at scale via an auction model to marketers. The difference is what the “something” is. Ad exchanges aggregate ad inventory, data exchanges aggregate data from commerce sites and offer them at scale to marketers. This is a departure from the online targeting that we know where inventory is always packaged with the promise of targeting a particular audience. By separating data from the equation, this means several things:

Fundamental problem in targeting today is that people are afraid to go granular because they lack the data scale. That forces them to add less granular or poor quality data to build scale. We’ve fixed that by aggregating data at scale from large quality sources so it’s now safe to target away and not have to compromise on scale.

Bridging the gap between commerce sites with valuable data and marketers and ad networks who are hungry for data to drive in-market prospecting. The key is doing this in a fair exchange.

Incremental site revenue – with a data exchange, publishers don’t need additional inventory – this is complementary to their ad exchange revenue stream

A clear understanding and control over what drives targeting for a particular campaign or segment, down to segmentation such as auto make and model, travel departure city, destination, retail product by category or brand.

This sounds somewhat like a form of behavioral targeting; with the FTC pressing for higher industry privacy standards, where do you stand on protecting the consumer?

BlueKai’s mission is to build the world’s most comprehensive registry of online preferences that is dedicated to ensuring consumers’ anonymity and privacy. We conform to and exceed the NAI principal for consumer privacy:

Transparency: we show consumers what anonymous data has been collected

Choice: Ability for consumers to edit their preferences

No PII collected (only anonymous data)

No sensitive data collected (health, gambling, etc…)

Disclosure: Partner privacy policy clearly discloses practice

Taking consumer transparency a step further, BlueKai has also created the BlueKai Registry, where consumers can view anonymous data that has been collected about them through our partners. They can choose to opt-out, or remove preference that are not relevant, and then select a charity to have a donation sent to, based on a % of advertising dollars gained by their anonymous data.

What proof do you have that buy and selling intent data works for publishers and advertisers?

In the auto vertical, an auto manufacturer who ran a BlueKai and InterCLICK data-powered campaign across the InterCLICK ad network saw results that were 2-3x better than contextual or demographic targeting. Their campaign even outperformed advertiser re-targeting, while delivering much higher reach. Their auto campaign was targeted to reach people who were in-market to purchase a specific type of car, including specific brands and an audience of 3.1 million unique users was assembled in less than one month.

We’ve also received phenomenal anecdotal feedback from data buyers across the travel and retail verticals and are working to get them out to the industry in the upcoming months. In the meantime, we urge marketers to test, test and test.

Give me a short history of the company.

BlueKai’s vision for a consumer-conscious data exchange was formed by our team of seasoned executives who bring decades of experience from the online advertising, behavioral targeting, and data mining industries. After years of chasing advertising dollars and creating products and technology to optimize targeting and performance, they all recognized that the key and value was in the data. They also collectively believed that the focus and ability to target in-market audiences was the answer to a myriad of marketers seeking consumers who are about to buy. That’s the genesis of the BlueKai Exchange, an online data marketplace where online marketers, ad networks and publishers can buy quality and reliable data to influence in-market targeting across the Internet. To raise the bar on data integrity and purity, BlueKai only works with trusted top tier data sellers including several of the top online travel agencies, retail and auto destinations on the Internet.

What have you got in the works coming up in the next six months?

The BlueKai Data Exchange is quickly gaining traction in the industry. Our goal in the coming months will be to increase advertisers’ understanding and adoption of data targeting and also do our part to make it easy for them to run data-smart campaigns through advanced optimization.

On the privacy front, we will continue to work with our key partners to increase awareness of the BlueKai Registry and the quest to bring more transparency, control and participation to the consumer.

– Express your opinion, comment below.

In the afternoon earnings call, CFO Patrick Pitchette suggested more cuts could come, “We really have a cost structure that is labor intensive and we have a lot of flexibility in our model. We’re going to manage our company responsibility in that sense.”

Googles repoted that its net revenue were $4.2 billion, its sites revenue was up 22% and it saw a paid click growth of 18%. The company said it hired only 99 employees, as compared to its hundreds in the last quarter of 2007. The company wrote down $726 million from its AOL holdings. It also announced an employee shares swap to try to keep them.

Henry Blodget is still not impressed. He points to three major issues: Google is still a one-product company, and the product is coming to the end of its adoption cycle; revenue growth is still decelerating rapidly, 2009 estimates are still too high.

Google is trying to squeeze pennies from everywhere, and considering the economic downturn, it seems to be doing right by its workers, though maybe shareholders would like a bit more belt tightening.

In a blog post today, the company said it decided to drop it’s Print ad program:

“While we hoped that Print Ads would create a new revenue stream for newspapers and produce more relevant advertising for consumers, the product has not created the impact that we — or our partners — wanted. As a result, we will stop offering Print Ads on February 28. For advertisers who have campaigns already booked, we will place their ads through March 31.”

The program started with 50 newspaper partners in November 2006 and expanded the network to include more than 800 U.S. newspapers. While many newspapers used the program primarily for selling small amounts of ad space they could not sell themselves, at below-market rates, small publishers could be hurt more.

“We got some good business out of it,” Steve Rossi, president and chief executive of the California Newspapers Partnership, which includes more than 30 daily newspapers owned by the MediaNews Group, Gannett and others, told the Times.

But don’t worry, Google feels their pain: “We believe fair and accurate journalism and timely news are critical ingredients to a healthy democracy. We remain dedicated to working with publishers to develop new ways for them to earn money, distribute and aggregate content and attract new readers online. We have teams of people working with hundreds of publishers to find new and creative ways to earn money from engaging online content.”

– Express your opinion, comment below.

It’s likely to be one of the most talked-about ad deals of the year. The company they are jockeying to sign up with is attracting 200,000 new users a day. Last week it was valued at $15 billion (£7.3 billion), though it has yet to make a profit.

Facebook is a three-and-a-half year old “social network” site that offers people a way of communicating with their friends online. So far, some 50m people have signed up to it. The company says it expects to break even this year.

Last week, Microsoft beat Google to buy a small stake in the firm, valuing it at $15 billion — more than twice as much as British Airways, a company that made a profit of $602m last year.

For some, the deal indicates a return of the “irrational exuberance” that former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan identified in the mid-1990s — an exuberance that ended when the dotcom bubble burst in 2000.

Facebook is the latest in a series of ever-bigger deals for a new generation of so-called web 2.0 companies.

Once again, internet start-ups with lots of buzz — but next-to-no profits — are being snapped up for huge sums by the world’s big media and technology firms.

For others, including Microsoft, the prices are not irrational but a concrete sign of the value of online advertising.

In recent years, internet advertising has soared as advertisers have shifted more and more of their spending from television, newspapers and other traditional media to a host of websites.

Online advertising is now a $16.5 billion business in America, according to Jupiter Research. Shoppers spend 10% of their money online. Compared with mature advertising markets such as TV (worth $74 billion in America), online advertising spending remains small, but it is growing by about 14% a year, and by 2011 it will be worth $32.1 billion.

Only a small slice of this goes to “social network” sites like Facebook and its larger rival MySpace (owned by Sunday Times parent News Corporation).

This year, according to eMarketer, $900m will be spent advertising on social-networking sites in America and $335m elsewhere. The growth of these sites is phenomenal. Facebook believes with Microsoft’s help it can reach 300m users worldwide in the next few years.

“It’s anybody’s guess how big Facebook will get,” said John Delaney, an analyst with the Ovum consultancy. “But 300m doesn’t sound completely ridiculous.”

Other sites with similar features to Facebook and MySpace have failed to take off — the British site Friendsreunited and America’s Friendster have both been left behind. But the success of Facebook and MySpace shows “there is a market for people to interact on the net in a similar way to the way they interact in real life”, said Delaney.

Advertisers, too, are increasingly enamored of the sites.

Carlton Cribb, the digital buying director at Zed Media, a London ad agency, said clients now see online sites as an intrinsic part of their advertising strategy.

“In the past couple of years there has been a major change from the clients’ perspective,” he said. “Online was kept very separate from the rest of the budget. Now online is another viable medium for reaching their audience — it’s part of the media mix.” A part of the mix that is growing swiftly.

Social networks collect a lot of personal data about their users. People share their taste in music, books, films, their political views as well as their location. All this information can potentially be turned into well-targeted ads. The danger is that users may turn against the “commercialization” of the sites.

When Google bought YouTube, the video-sharing website, Delaney said there was a lot of complaining from users, many of whom warned the company to stay away from Facebook.

“We heard the same sort of stuff when News Corp bought MySpace. People moan but they still use MySpace. It’s not the first site to put ads on its website. People understand that they get a lot of cool stuff for free on the internet because it carries ads,” he said.

But the internet is a two-way street, and advertisers now have to figure out how to reach an audience that has the power to talk back in a way that was denied them with more traditional forms of ads.

“That’s the promise and also the danger of social networks,” said Delaney. He points to the success of Arctic Monkeys, the indie rockers who built a following on MySpace.

“They were selling their brand. People will engage with you on a very deep level. The problem is that you are not in control of what is out there.”

Some advertisers have stopped using social-network sites, concerned that their ads will come up alongside unsuitable material put up by the sites’ users.

Cribb said these were problems to which the sites and advertisers were now finding solutions in what are still early days for a rapidly changing medium.

When Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg started the site it offered simple web pages for college students to list information about themselves and send messages to friends. Increasingly the site and its rivals offer an array of services, from e-mail to online photo galleries that have historically existed independently.

The aim is to make Facebook the first port of call for internet users in the way that many people now have Google as their home page.

It’s not a new strategy — AOL tried something similar and failed and Yahoo, which also courted Facebook, has a similar approach. But Facebook has the buzz and the momentum to more than rattle its rivals. As it adds new services, advertisers will be watching developments as closely as Facebook’s users, Google, MySpace and Yahoo.

Unlike the first internet boom, “big media” has in the main fought shy of paying huge prices for online firms. News Corp bought MySpace in 2005 for $649m and more than recouped its investment with an ad deal with Google worth $900m over three years.

For Microsoft the $240m investment is chump change. But it marks a significant evolution for the software giant as it increasingly moves its muscle online. Whether or not Facebook lives up to its $15 billion promise remains to be seen.

Dominic Rushe is a writer for the Times Online

Compliments of the Times Online

The company touts over 400 publishers, selling millions of ad impressions daily have seen increases of anywhere between 20% and 90% with PubMatic. The service runs on continuous auction on many larger ad networks worldwide.

“When we look at the pace of change and increasing complexity in the world of online advertising, we don’t feel that small and medium publishers have a fair shot – whether it is their ad serving technology, optimization, reporting, or management tools. PubMatic maximizes the revenue that publishers receive from their ad inventory by automating and optimizing the decisions that go into selling it. PubMatic looks across the largest ad networks, including Google AdSense, ValueClick, BlueLithium, Yahoo! Publisher Network, and soon many more, and dynamically shifts the publisher’s inventory to the ad network that is best monetizing it,” said Amar Goel, Founder & CEO of PubMatic, speaking at TechCrunch40. “Publishers can now focus on the content side of their business, knowing that they’re getting top dollar for their ad inventory.”

The company helps ad networks by sourcing qualified publishers, reducing the effort of having publishers implement new ad tags, and strengthening publisher relationships. Ad networks will not lose publishers due to publisher unhappiness with eCPMs in this model.
PubMatic gives the publisher one set of ad tags that generates ad network ad tags in real time, consolidates reporting across ad networks, and allows publishers to update ad tag settings through a browser-based interface.