ADOTAS

The Wave Report will surely receive loads of attention in the coming days and weeks, as the leading platforms celebrate their victories and people throughout the industry take a closer look at the criteria Forrester used. The DSP report from last month was murmured about by some who wondered if the criteria were fair metrics for judging such a company’s success — like, for example, one point that evaluated companies for their number of employees. In a field where the merits of a business ride on the merits of its technology, some pointed out, a smaller staff should probably be seen as preferable to a larger staff.

• Speaking of reports, in its Global Search Advertising Spend Analysis for Q3 2011, independent search marketing agency Covario noticed an impressive rebound in paid search spend during the third quarter, up 26% quarter over quarter and 24% over the same period last year. Study author and Adotas contributor Craig Macdonald, Covario senior vice president and chief marketing officer, attributed the rebound to strong back-to-school spending and increased investment in the Asia-Pacific region.

• Underdog Media announced that Jeff Hirsch is its new chief executive officer. Most recently Hirsch served as president of AudienceScience, but before that co-founded Fastclick and had multiple executive roles at ValueClick.

• Exchange operator adBrite has added Rick Cotton as its chief revenue officer. A 20-year veteran of digital sales, Cotton was last seen holding down the senior vice president role at Monster.com while simultaneously serving as general manager of the FastWeb.com division. Before his Monster stint, Cotton served as general sales manager for CBS radio.

• Former Gracenote President and CEO Craig Palmer will take the CEO’s chair at collaborative content network Wikia. Palmer has named Jennifer Betka senior vice president of marketing. Betka boasts experience developing brand and audience at AOL, Time Warner, Veoh, SIRIUS XM and The Los Angeles Times.

• Guess who’s got two G in its name and still accounts for 65% to 66% of all searches (depending on who is counting)? comScore has search “rivals” (in the loosest meaning of the term) Yahoo! at 15.5% and Bing at 14.7% for September 2011, while Experian Hitwise puts them at 15.2% and 12.8%, respectively.

• The legacy online portal world is a total soap opera: while Yahoo! cofounder and former CEO Jerry Yang is trying to raise the cash to take that company private, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is apparently pushing AOL stockholders on selling the company to Yahoo!.

• Virtual goods inventivizer Ifeelgoods has teamed up with Universal Pictures to promote caper comedy “Tower Heist” with a scavenger hunt for 1 million Facebook Credits. Facebook users receive Credits for discovering “Heist” buttons around the network and are incentivized for sharing the game on Facebook or inviting friends to play.

• Social media dashboard HootSuite has acquired location-based marketing tool Geotoko. According to HootSuite’s blog, “The Geotoko technology reports on geo-based social media interactions like key influencers, customer sentiment, and demographic patterns to help businesses draw conclusions about audience behavior, as well as help brands reward customers for checking-in via Foursquare and Facebook Places.”

• Digital video advertiser Brightroll has expanded into Germany, naming former FOX Networks executive Patrick Edlefsen as head of the just-opened Hamburg office.

• Thanks to a new partnership, eBay will integrate Facebook’s Open Graph protocol into the X.commerce, Magento and GSI e-commerce platforms, allowing merchants to incorporate not just “Like” buttons, but also the new “Want” and “Own” buttons introduced with Open Graph tags.

• Business-oriented social network LinkedIn has introduced status updates for company pages, as well as a certified developer program to help marketers and agencies connect with developers (such as charter partner Buddy Media) who can develop social applications for the LinkedIn platform.

• Through its new Total Audience Guarantee (TAG) program, video ad network BrightRoll guarantees a certain number of impressions will reach the target audiences (segmented by age, gender and geographic data), which is verified through comScore’s AdEffx Campaign Essentials. Video advertisers are then only charged for impressions that actually reach target audiences.

• Following new deals with advertisers like Google, FedEx and Adobe, Online and offline experiential marketing agency MKTG INC (previously known as CoActive Marketing Group) has a new executive vice president of sales in Brian Duffy, who moved over from executive vice president and managing director at Ignited. In addition, Lindsay Rowe has been promoted from brand ambassador to director of sales and marketing.

• Mobile ad network Mojiva has three new members on its advisory board: Mike Perlis, president and CEO of Forbes Media; Mike LaSalle, a partner at Shamrock Capital Advisors who also serves on the boards of INgrooves, Media Storm and Harlem Globetrotters International; and Will Wynperle, another Shamrock partner on the boards of K2 Towers and Media Storm. Earlier this week, Mojiva ad-serving arm Mocean Mobile opened the Publisher Annex, a consortium of mobile solutions companies (including Golden Gekko and Zumobi) that will provide whitepapers and event demonstrations to educate mobile publishers and devlopers.

• Experimenting with an in-banner 300 X 250 video ad, blurbIQ, which overlays questions within videos to test audience reception of brand messages, found that its “interrupting” ads had a 38% interaction rate, compared to the “industry average” of  4% (determined through a “bake-off” with a host of vendors including DoubleClick). In addition, blurbIQ’s video completion rate was over 65% (compared to 43%) and the click-through rate was 2.5% (versus 0.18%).

• A survey of 700 senior marketers (both in-house and agency) by the Branding Forward Project, a joint initiative between branding agency Mechanica and Fast Company magazine, found that 51% believe consumer-generated marketing is inherently more relevant and effective, compared to 49% who prefer the traditional agency creative approach.

• Interpublic Group has acquired social marketing agency Spring Creek Group (cofounded by Clay Daniels in 2006) through its media holding company, IPG Mediabrands. Spring Creek will keep its name and operate as part of the Mediabrands Audience Platform (previously The Audience Platform).

• Cella Irvine has been named CEO of contextual advertising firm Vibrant Media. The 25-year veteran of digital media was last seen heading up the New York Times Company’s About Group, and the contextual advertising around About.com content. Prior to that, Irvine served as chief financial officer for Digitas, but even before she held executive positions at Hearst, Marsh and Prodigy. Known best for it’s in-text advertising solution, this year Vibrant has launched a contextual targeting product for display advertising as well as an on-site toolbar for delivering related social content.

• Tom Cox has been named vice president of corporate development at Gannett, taking over for the soon-retiring Dan Ehrman. Previously Cox was senior vice president/head of business development at MySpace, and prior to that was principal and co-founder of consulting firm Stratique Partners.

• Digital Agency R/GA has named Ivan Arbitam its new chief information officer. His 17 years in information technology include stints at Interbrand, BrandWizard, Draftfcb, Foote Cone & Belding New York and SixtyFoot Spider.

• Andrew Nicolaou will lead O2 Media’s client sales team and develop mobile marketing solutions as head of client strategy. Previously, Nicolaou spent three years at Microsoft Advertising as a creative media strategist. In addition, Alexandra Davies was brought over from Channel 4 to serve as O2 Media agency sales manager.

• Recently launched Metacafe Entertainment Network has brought on Jon Harrison as senior director of Midwest sales and Marisa Polin as regional sales manager for the NYC office. Harrison has previously held senior sales positions for Break Media, Fox Interactive Media and RollingStone.com, while Polin has served in media management positions at 360i Media and Media Com.

• Digital design agency Fjord announced that cofounder Mark Curtis is returning to the fold as chief client officer after a six-year tour of duty at Flirtomatic, a Fjord spinoff. Curtis previously co-founded CHBi with Fjord cofounder Mike Breeston in 1994, which was sold to Razorfish in 1998. Fjord Partner and Director Christian Lindholm recently contributed a byline to Adotas asking whether new Apple CEO Tim Cook had the “art of logic.”

Big Spaceship founder and CEO Michael Lebowitz has been named chair of the IAB Agency Advisory Board, succeeding McKinney Chairman and CEO Brad Brinegar, who has held the role since 2009.

But now the wire is exploding with news that Google is finalizing a $400 million acquisition of revenue optimizer Admeld. Just a couple of months ago it disseminated through the ranks that revenue optimizer AdMeld passed on an acquisition offer from Google because the $200 million price tag was too low. How nice of Google to double the asking price.

If this deal goes through, it will be hard to imagine anyone being able to compete with Google in the display space. Big G will have its fingerprints on an unbelievable amount of display transactions from both the supply and demand sides.

In addition to optimizing publisher revenue by enabling participation in real-time bidding on various exchanges such as Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Yahoo!’s Right Media Exchange, Admeld has been providing the technology behind and powering the private ad exchanges of The Weather Channel, IDG and quadrantONE (a partnership between journalism depots The New York Times Company, Hearst, Tribune and Gannett).

An acquisition would allow Google to take over this business and sell the technology to other major publishers. In addition AdSense partners and DoubleClick for Publishers clients would get hooked up with Admeld’s optimization tech.

Those wary of the deal (including regulators who will definitely give it a long hard look) will be skeptical of Google favoring its own exchange in display transactions, but honestly Big G won’t have to in order to bring home serious revenue. There’s plenty of money to be made by optimizing the supply side.

Admeld competitors PubMatic and Rubicon Project are hoping publishers will be suspect of Google’s intentions and choose to work with an independent revenue optimizer instead. True to form, Rubicon CEO Frank Addante sent out a statement offering existing AdMeld customers 90 days of free service.

All 15 of ReviNet’s employees are coming over to PubMatic, which has completed its 2011 hiring goal of doubling its staff to 100 employees. The company is also expanding its European operations: earlier this month, the company added former Truvo and Yahoo Europe executive Gianluca Carrera as vice president of international sales and business operations in its U.K. office.

With the ReviNet acquisition, now boasts the capability to read 218 million U.S. uniques, or 95% of the country’s Internet population, as well as 400 million globally.

“2010 was a breakaway year for us as our revenues grew 10x last year, outpacing the market,” PubMatic cofounder and CEO Rejeev Goel told PaidContent. “There’s a growing sense that publishers want to work with platforms that have scale. Because we provide that—and ReviNet has the customer relationships with the news publishers—the deal is meet both our overlapping goals.”

Hey, no need to be sad! PubMatic will hook you publishers up with the data you need through its new Audience Data on Demand Service. Through its Sell Side Platform for Premium Publishers, PubMatic is enabling pubs to reach out and grab some third-party audience data sets to assist in their direct sales initiatives.

Initial launch partners are date resources eXelate, Quantcast and Proximic; PubMatic plans to add more data providers in the coming months. In addition to boosting sales efforts, Audience Data on Demand offers publishers improved understanding of their audiences through a outside vantage.

“Advertiser demand for granular audience targeting is exploding,” said PubMatic cofounder and CEO Rajeev Goel.  “As part of our commitment to empower publishers to meet the ever-evolving demand from advertisers without having to work with dozens of different companies to do so, Audience Data on Demand serves as a natural extension of our robust Sell Side Platform for Premium Publishers.  We want to make the publishers of today be the smartest sellers of tomorrow, while making it as simple as possible for them to accomplish that.”

The crowd was a veritable who’s-who of the “Digital Display Advertising Landscape” (LUMA) map, so I suppose you could argue that these guys got where they are today by skipping lots of fun, and building advertising and media technology instead.

Among the highly informative (albeit sometimes sales-y) content at the conference, there were some gems to be had. So, here is DPS 2011, organized by quote:

“Value is shifting from those that produce the content, to those that deliver the experience of consuming it.” – Saul Berman, IBM

Saul Berman’s keynote address touched upon the disruption happening in our space, but even the overhyped keyword “disruption” doesn’t touch upon the true chaos happening as publishers learn how to navigate the through all the new social media, exchange-based sales, and various technology partnering opportunities out there.

Do you make Facebook Connect your friend (as Kristine Shine from PopSugar Media does) to drive new unique visits and build your audience? According to Shine, for her organization, the call was to “go all in” with Facebook. For others, like Todd Sawicki, CRO of Cheezburger, Facebook can kill publications by migrating all of their native traffic (like message board comments) to their environment, without returning the favor.

For publishers, the challenge is not just continuing to produce quality content, but to make it for a multi platform world, where consumers are just as likely to value the way they are consuming it. That means having a multi-platform approach—and a multi-revenue approach as well. Why does a full song from iTunes cost $0.99, but a 10-second sliver of that song, sold as a ringtone, cost $3.00? In that case, it is the application of content in a clever way that adds value, a nice use case for anyone monetizing content in an experiential way.

“Media will be sold like pork bellies” – Frank Addante, Rubicon Project

There was quite a bit of discussion around pricing at the conference, and the founder and CEO of the Rubicon Project was not wrong in insisting that, without significant changes, media would indeed be as commoditized as the humble pork belly.

Unfortunately, this trend has already happened. Addante was right to highlight the unfortunate fact that the same article in The New York Times commands a $20 CPM in print as opposed to $2 CPM online. That value gap, Addante argues, can be closed by “realizing the true value of digital experiences.”

Rubicon would like to see one big gigantic “open market” that enables the industry to expand the digital advertising pie from $40b to $400b with full participation, but the details were cloudy. If that market concept involves having publishers suddenly not to sell their entire remnant inventory into an exchange, then maybe we can avoid the pork bellies fate.

Addante may be on to something, however. What the industry needs is one trusted third party aggregate high quality inventory, and create value around it, but that battle is in its very nascent stages.

That being said, a good bit of the conversation was around pricing. Both Saul Berman and Tim Cadogan of OpenX deployed the airline pricing scenario, to argue for dynamic pricing models. For Cadogan, three levels of inventory equate to three levels of seating: Exclusive (first class), Premium Guaranteed (business class), and Non-Guaranteed (coach). Just as airlines frequently change the configuration of their seating to account for their routes, seasonality and passenger mix, so must the industry dynamically price inventory, based on its placement and value.

The OpenX Enterprise server hopes to achieve that by putting guaranteed and real time exchange inventory into the same platform, and use smart decisioning technology to maximize yields. A very smart idea.

For Berman, it was not only about “having five different passengers, paying five different prices,” but also about exploring entirely new revenue models, like Apple did in “switching the razor blade model” with the iPhone (expensive “razor,” cheap “blades”). Publishers must go beyond monetizing their content through advertising, and start looking at generating revenue from the larger ”marketing” bucket. Right now, that is called “selling apps.”

“Premium brands need to be associated with premium content” — Eric Klotz, Pubmatic

Truer words have never been spoken. Klotz explored some recent survey data which asked publishers and advertisers how the way they are buying media is shifting. The results were fairly predictable: more and more budget is finding it’s way into real-time bidding environments, as brand and direct marketers seek new ways to target their desired audiences.

That’s nothing new. What is changing rapidly, however, is that all marketers are demanding more placement control, increased transparency, and brand safety. Brands want the same direct connections with publishers they have enjoyed with guaranteed buying, with the ease and cost efficiency of exchange-based buying. The takeaway? If you are a publisher and not looking at building private exchange connections with your demand side partners, you are in trouble.

That sentiment was hinted at in a panel called “Selling in a Cluttered Market.” For Jonas Abney of Hachette Filipacchi, “general content gets beaten by specific content every time.” Marketers are looking for laser-focused, topical content that captures user intent, rather than more generalized content.

Moreoever, today’s advertising sale is more educational than ever. For panelists like AdMeld CEO Michael Barrett and PubMatic’s Andrew Rutledge, a sales force cannot simply have media experience–they have to know the ecosystem, and be prepared to add value by educating clients.

For Whitepages VP of Sales Craig Paris, it is simple math: Agencies get more than 100 unique sales calls a month, from an increasing amount of new technology and media companies. Unless you differentiate yourself, you are not going to win business. “Thirty percent of your day should be spent reading the industry trades so you can have credibility, and provide insights to your customers.”

“Nielsen says people visit 2.9 sites a day, and one of them is Facebook” — Greg Rogers, Pictela

Last minute speaker Greg Rogers of Pictela provided some insights on how premium advertising units (specifically the new IAB 300×1050 “Project Devil” unit from AOL) can drive user engagement. If the above quote is true, it means that brands have to find a way to engage the user more deeply on the the sites they visit every day, and that way is through interactive units.

Rogers has data that points to “dramatic” CPM increases from premium RM units, and makes a case for replacing three 300×250 units with the single 300×1050 “devil” slot. Patch and Huffpo have seen great results, and advertisers are getting good engagement and plenty of reporting.

Highly premium, brand-safe, engaging advertising… sounds like something from the past called “premium guaranteed.” I bet PopSugar’s Shine would agree. She has built a virtual in-house agency to build premium campaigns for her customers, and demands ”150% control over every ad unit on the page.”

“Cookie Targeting Doesn’t Scale” — Michael Hannon, Aperture

Sort of a dark horse moment for me was Michael Hannon’s first slide, which threw down the gauntlet on cookie targeting. All the energy in the space for the last several years has been about targeting using third-party data .

But what if it doesn’t work? This is the 900-pound elephant in the ecosystem. Not only have many marketers had difficulties achieving significant scale when overlaying data on top of exchange buys, but the legislative tsunami of “Do Not Track” threatens to reduce that scale even further. Hannon makes an elegant argument for real audience measurement, and doing so in a cookie-less way.

That leads me to a great conversation led by Alan Chappell, a lawyer specializing in just these types of issues. In a room full of ad publishing and ad technology executives that depend on using data to identify target audiences, there was a great deal of confusion regarding how our industry is getting on top of what may be a very severe problem.

More direction from the IAB in the form of specific self-regulatory principles and mandates is needed, and needed fast. For Chappell, inaction may cause the “privacy disaster, which enables Google, AT&T, and Facebook to own all the data,” leaving the rest of the industry on the side.

Add revenue optimizer and RTB platform Admeld to the list of companies saying “Hell no!” to Google. According to Business Insider, Admeld considered $150 million to $200 million too low a price.

Admeld has generated a lot of attention of late for its private ad exchanges built and operated for The Weather Channel and the IDG TechNetwork. On the launch of TWC’s private exchange, CEO Michael Barrett told us, “The private exchange enables a premium publisher to operate ‘above the fray’ by engaging with a select pool of programmatic buyers in exactly the way they want.”

And that seems to be exactly what major publishers want. AdExchanger’s John Ebbert reported from the AdMeld Partner Forum last week that branded publishers such as CBS “appear to be ready to put the pedal to the metal in the data-driven ad world in a new way, as long as they feel they have control.”

In conjunction with its Partner Forum, Admeld released a study with Forrester Research that estimated RTB spend would more than double in 2011 — from $353 million in 2010 to $853 million.

Apparently Google is now courting Admeld competitor Pubmatic. It’s quite interesting that Google wants a revenue optimizer/supply-side platform – the RTB component could be a boon to the Google Display Network, which is still well behind display leaders Facebook and Yahoo in terms of impressions served.

Participating in the development of OpenRTB were DSPs DataXu, MediaMath and Turn and SSPs AdMeld, PubMatic and the Rubicon Project. The project is the brainchild of DataXu CTO and founder Bill Simmons, who believes open, flexible, safe and consistent RTB standards will ignite growth in the display space that has been hobbled by each company in the arena having its own guidelines.

The initial OpenRTB protocol includes

• DSP to SSP advertiser batch synchronization (a method for automatically retrieving a list of publisher restrictions for each advertiser);
• SSP to DSP publisher batch synchronization (a method for automatically retrieving publisher properties and creative restrictions for each DSP); and
• RTB request standards for publisher creative restrictions.

Future goals for the initiative include further API standards, best practices for network management, privacy enforcement, standardized bid request forms and performance reporting.

“Agreeing on a set of standards will enable all of us to streamline the real-time media buying process and create a stronger foundation on which to build future industry innovations,” Simmons said. “It’s critical that we join to overcome these common technical challenges if as a group we wish to see the industry realize its full potential of delivering superior marketing results to agencies and brands.”