AdExchanger.com: It seems like First Round is everywhere – ok, maybe not everywhere, but you all are invested in quite a few companies at an early stage. What’s the method to the madness?

CF: Yes we are busy, and we do think we have a method to our model. We typically work with companies at the seed stage where it takes relatively small amounts of capital to get started, and we provide the bulk of our value and time in the first 18-25 months of a company’s formation. We were one of the most active investors in 2009 according to this Wall Street Journal article (http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/01/22/one-of-these-venture-capital-firms-is-not-like-the-other/tab/article/) and now have 8 partners and investment professionals and we’re opening our NYC office in addition to our San Francisco and Philadelphia offices. We also focus on providing tools/platforms and “structural value” that go beyond just the capital we provide and the point person they have from First Round. But we do keep very busy and like to think we work as hard as our entrepreneurs.

What are a few key characteristics of a compelling product for an investment?

I’d say product is important but that the market size/opportunity and the entrepreneur/team are more important – we like to back great entrepreneurs going after big market opportunities. But on the product side, I’d say it’s really important to understand your customer and their problem and how your product solves it – too often that’s not understood or articulated clearly enough.

And how about entrepreneurs who are often the CEOs of the young startups – any key traits here? Or is it all about the product and its opportunity?

I’d say there are a number of key traits – we want people who are smart and passionate about their idea, and it goes without saying that we look for people with integrity and character who do what they say they’re going to do. We prefer entrepreneurs who have started a company before or worked in a startup environment so they’re not making first time mistakes, however we’ve made exceptions to that rule and have had a number of good outcomes with first-time CEO’s. Another key trait is also how quickly they can learn and adapt.

You’ve noted in the past about how companies “pivot” with their business models. Can you explain what you mean? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

It’s a good thing – when we see a startup business plan we know one thing for sure about it – that it’s wrong – it’s just that no-one’s sure exactly how it’s wrong yet. We think the primary goal of seed stage investing is to help the entrepreneur validate or disprove their hypothesis, or to sufficiently “de-risk” it in order for them to attract additional external investment. So the key to a successful “pivot” is understanding how you might need to change your approach before you run out of money – or before you spend too much time or money.

Looking forward, what’s your view on M&A momentum in the digital media technology space? For example, is this the year? Or is it more of a 2011 or 2012 phenomenon?

It’s hard to look out too far, but things certainly seem to be lining up for a much better 2010 and hopefully beyond.

Do you think opportunities in the mobile advertising space are finally hitting their stride? What’s a key reason or three that mobile will continue to be hot?

The space has certainly heated up with the Admob/Google and Quattro/Apple acquisitions – but I still think it’s early and there’s room for more successful companies in the space. Smartphones and mobile devices are a huge part of the future if computing if not the computer of the future, and they know more about you than your laptop or desktop. Done right, mobile advertising can be huge, and it’s also pretty interesting to think about what Apple might do with advertising – they’ve never focused on it before.

If you’re an entrepreneur, what are your suggestions on the best way to pitch venture capital firm such as First Round Capital?

I put together a few thoughts on the subject a couple years ago and I think they’re mostly still true. At First Round we don’t provide direct email addresses on our site, but we do list our LinkedIn Profiles (http://firstround.com/contact.html) and we’re also actively blogging, tweeting, etc. so there are a number of ways to get connected. And we’ve also started something we call “Office Hours” which is a way that entrepreneurs can meet us and get to know us in an informal setting. We’ve already invested in a company we first met at one in NYC – so I’d recommend entrepreneurs keep an eye out at http://officehours.firstround.com/ for an upcoming Office Hours event.

Follow Chris Fralic (@ChrisFRC), First Round Capital (@firstround) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

AdExchanger.com: What’s the startup culture like in Europe – even Amsterdam, specifically?  Are there hotspots? (i.e. like Silicon Valley in California) Is creating interest with venture capital firms a challenge?

There is a thriving start up culture in Europe including tech, software, internet and mobile companies.  These include: Layar, Distimo and eBuddy in Amsterdam; Amiando in Munich; TweetDeck and Flirtomatic in London; Vente-privee.com and Jolicloud in Paris; Spotify in Stockholm, and many other examples of European start-up success stories. There is not truly one European hotspot for Internet start-ups, although some might say that Scandinavia was at the forefront of Internet connectivity. They were able to get people online quickly and ad spend there was among the first countries to surpass traditional media such as TV.

London is a media center and hub but it’s also rather expensive to live and work there, so setting up a business somewhere else like Amsterdam, Berlin or Copenhagen can be an equally good or better option for a number of companies. London is typically the starting point for a number of US based companies who want to make the step across the Atlantic into Europe, and certainly a part of this can be attributed to the fact that English is their shared common language.

The economy also continues to grow more and more global. We’ve found that it is equally important for European startups to build strong ties and good business connections with companies and business people in Silicon Valley and the APAC region.

What online advertising trends are you seeing today in eBuddy’s business?

eBuddy is exceptionally strong in brand campaigns that target tech-savvy 15 – 25 year olds who want to be online all the time on their PC and mobile devices. Entertainment (like DVD, movies, games), FMCG and mobile brands are all doing very well at reaching our audience. In those sectors, we’ve seen strong growth and demand for rich media, video banners and integrated solutions like homepage and messenger takeovers. There is clearly a movement towards greater consumer engagement.

Overall, CPM pricing has become pretty stable over the course of the past quarter. We see a trend in moving towards adding value to the inventory, through ad exchanges, network optimizers and data/audience networks or exchanges. Impressions that previously were thought to carry little value can be injected with added value when combined with audience targeting data. Data exchanges pull demographic and behavioral data on those same consumers from many more sites to fill in the blanks and create a more complete user profile. Advertisers are becoming more and more interested in buying pockets of unique users instead of just buying buckets of ad impressions, and this equates to better CTR optimization.

A deal size for eBuddy depends a lot on the country. We see higher deal sizes overall because we are able to combine both web and mobile advertising campaigns and add in multiple countries or regions. Plus, we can make global deals because we have users in more than 200 countries.

Is there a difference between the trends eBuddy may see as a web browser-based instant messaging service versus a more traditional web publisher such as a news website?

The biggest difference is content or in eBuddy’s case, the lack of it. Where content is expensive and can be crippling for a business, eBuddy has the ability to explore other avenues that are equally lucrative. eBuddy’s core business revolves around its tens of millions of users, and eBuddy continuously increases its user numbers across the globe month-over-month and year-over-year. This is done by constantly improving the central part of the service you provide, and in our case, it is web and mobile instant messaging. Our users want to communicate more and more often, so the engagement and online time spent on eBuddy messenger is very high. We can even reach the same user multiple times on both our web and mobile platforms. It’s critical for us to target based on research and our end user demographics instead of based on content. By doing so and working together with good strategic partners, we are able to ensure that we are displaying only the best performing campaigns to our users.

Another difference is that most web publishers or news sites are regional and not globally focused. Technology continues to make the world increasingly smaller and our ability to reach a global audience is absolutely a big competitive advantage.

What do you see at the next big thing in online advertising technology?

On mobile: In-application advertising, location based advertising and augmented reality advertising.

On the Web: Larger display ad formats designed to promote creativity among advertisers and encourage Internet users to actively share ads.

On social network aggregators: A place for all your various social networks, i.e. one inbox/place to keep in contact with all your various social media networks or friends. (Much like what eBuddy does with aggregating of your instant messaging networks, but then for all your social networks.)

What’s your view on display advertising? Does it work?

I believe branding works especially when we talk about sponsorship packages. Display advertising can create new insights into a user if this is expending his interests. The way to achieve this is via proper targeting and truly “knowing” the end user. There was previously a lack on information about the end users. Display is not dead though, and it will develop further this year once we are able to match the consumer’s interests with banner advertising. It is something that has been tried in the last year or two, however 2010 is the year it will finally work.

Any thoughts regarding the differences in digital advertising between Europe and the U.S.?

The EU is a bit behind with the newest developments on the web front. Mobile advertising however, seems to be taken more seriously in Europe than it is in the US.

The EU was behind when it came to rich media, video, and now data and statistics. Some of the best creative still comes out of Europe though.

Europe typically sees less advertising information compared to the U.S. The most important reports and surveys are typically focused on and have detailed information about the U.S market, although this is starting to change.

Follow Rogier van den Heuvel (@rheuvel), eBuddy (@ebuddy) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

Twitter Ad Platform Lurks

All Things D’s Peter Kafka has unearthed what Twitter’s new ad platform will look like – it will look like Google’s according to Kafka’s sources. In addition to using 140 character or less ads, Kafka writes, “Twitter will work with ad agencies and buyers to seed the program, but plans on moving to a self-serve model like Google’s, down the road.” Read more.
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Agency DSPs And Publishers

Mediaweek’s Mike Shields covers last week’s Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Annual Leadership Meeting and says that “DSPs, such as VivaKi (Publicis) and Cadreon (IPG), were a hot topic” as publishers such as the one represented by Brian Quinn (vp/gm, ad sales for the Wall Street Journal Digital Network) are more interested in receiving phone calls then agency trading desk ad calls. Read more.

MyYearbook Displays Revenue

MyYearbook is making $20 million in revenue annually and continuing to grow according to Mashable’s Adam Ostrow, who covers yet another company that is making its revenues public. Ostrow writes, “Most of that comes from virtual currency within games that the company has built, with titles like Blind Date, Owned and Quiz.” Read more.

The EIR Life

The Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR) life is kickin’ it in an article in The New York Times. Reporters Ashlee Vance and Claire Cain Miller identify monthly stipends of up to $15k while EIR’s ruminate on the next big idea and “in return, the venture capital firm usually gets the first shot at financing the idea that emerges from this meditation.” Do you have the EIR mojo? Read more.

I Love Raising Money

Matt Mirales, founder and CEO of SpeakerText, does not mince word in a post on his personal blog (also reprinted on The Business Insider) saying, “In startups and war, SPEED KILLS. And let’s get real: Raising money is a gigantic waste of [rhymes with "rucking"] time. Each minute you spend hobnobbing with and strategizing RE: investors is a minute you don’t spend on product or customer development.” Read more unminced words including views on the NYC vs. Silicon Valley startup world.

Time Warp: Microsoft’s Monopoly Worries

From their “Microsoft On The Issues” blog, Dave Heiner, VP and Deputy General Counsel at Microsoft, says it’s time to look at the monopolistic practices of Google and jumps on the EU’s bandwagon which announced last week that it was investigating the Google’s competitive practices. Read more. The statement was so ironic that The Wall Street Journal considered it newsworthy. Read the story from Thomas Catan.

Visualizing Offline Vs. Online Purchases

Permuto has taken recent U.S. Census Bureau data and put it into its data visualization machine. Among the findings within the poster-worthy graphic, if you think people buy most of their “Food, Beer, Wine” in-store, you’d be wrong according to the Census Bureau’s data says Permuto. See it.

Yahoo! Aiming For Efficiency

“Yahoo’s strategy seems more like ‘ready, aim, aim, aim, aim…,’” says TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington who references a report late last week by Thomas Weisel analyst, Jordan Rohan, which paints a picture that the executive team at Yahoo! is still fixing the beast before feeding it through more acquisitions. Arrington quotes from Rohan’s report, ““Our recent discussion with Yahoo! management focused more on costs and efficiency than growth.” Read more.

4As Looks To Transform

The 4As conference is rolling in San Francisco and The New York Times’ Stuart Elliott covers the recent changes in the conference format which brings together the management and media conferences of years past. Conference organizers sense a need to address the ad agency model as the 4As put out an open call for presentations for the event which it’s calling “Transformation 2010.” Read about it.

The Art Of Closing

GRP Partners’ Mark Suster continues his startup advice with “a reminder for all entrepreneurs to remember to be careful about ‘deal drift’”on his personal blog. From Suster’s perspective, the art of the deal from the entrepreneur’s perspective comes down to closing the deal in a timely fashion. Or else. Read more.

One-To-One Pricing

Greg Linden points to a recent whitepaper by Google chief economist, Hal Varian, called “Computer Mediated Transactions.” (PDF) Linden thinks that something called “differential pricing” may make a return if Varian has his way where, quoting from Varian’s paper, “Not only content, but prices may also be personalized, leading to various forms of differential pricing.” Read Linden’s post.

Comfortable With Uncertainty

Former VC and current CEO coach, Jerry Colonna, says that if you’re going to lead, expect to never know exactly how things will turn out – and be good with that. Colonna pours on the anecdotes and closes with, “Maybe the hardest part of leadership—be it leading a company, a family, a relationship or simply your own life—is that often times you don’t know and you still have to act.” Read more.

DoubleClick Videos

Janine Gianfredi, a Google Agency Marketing Manager, announces on the AdWords Agency blog the availability of a range of videos for understanding Google ad products including how to measure the success of a display campaign. Gianfredi writes about DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) and says, “The DoubleClick video illustrates the relationship between click-through-rate (CTR) and creative size.” Is bigger better? Read the blog. See the videos.

Ad Network Revenues

IDG TechNetwork provided a glimpse into its revenue momentum in a release last week saying, the ad network “has grown revenue more than 300 percent from Q1 2009 to Q1 2010 (Oct.-Dec.).” Read more about the IDG progeny and recent momentum.

AdExchanger.com: Please define what you mean by “impression inflation.” How pervasive is this issue and how do fraudsters pull it off typically?

PP: Impression inflation is not necessarily fraudulent activity, although that can certainly be part of the problem. We define impression inflation as anything that happens in the ad-serving chain that would mislead the advertiser into believing its campaign delivered more impressions to the target audience than it actually did. A simple example would be a botnet impression that’s counted as a human. Another example might be an ad delivered below the fold that’s never seen by an actual human being, but the impression is counted and billed. Impressions delivered in the wrong geo or daypart also shouldn’t count. Then there are the malicious schemes, such as ad stuffing (displaying multiple ads in the same ad unit for a very brief period), and invisible pages (malware opening pop-unders or 0×0 browsers to pull ads). These methods can inappropriately pad impression counts and invoices, reducing overall advertiser campaign effectiveness. The best ad networks and publishers want to assure advertisers that their campaigns are free from these inflated impression counts and their budgets aren’t being wasted.

Do you offer ad serving capabilities, too? Potentially, it would seem Click Forensics could start a media business. Thoughts?

No, we have no plans to offer ad serving capabilities or to start another ad network. We prefer to provide technology and data to our ad network and publisher customers and let them use it to differentiate their offerings.

Looking at the competitive set, it would appear that others such as AdSafe Media, Mpire’s AdXpose and DoubleVerify offer a similar toolkit. How do you differentiate?

We view our offerings as complementary to brand safety companies like DoubleVerify and AdSafe because they’re helping to solve an important part of the ad verification problem — making sure the page on which an impression is served is appropriate for the brand. While we take some of these aspects into consideration, we’re also auditing and measuring each individual impression or ad visitor, much like we do for search advertisers. This helps advertisers to see that the impressions they paid for were in fact delivered and viewed by the intended target audience. Examples of the attributes we measure in addition to publisher URL include the visitor data (is it human? is it a known fraudster? is it in the target audience?). Mpire’s AdExpose is more similar to what we’re doing. However, our offering is different in that it takes advantage our industry-leading click quality engine, massive community data set, and more than four years of experience in search traffic quality management.

By John Ebbert

AdExchanger.com discussed the news and its implications with Jason Glickman, CEO of Tremor Media.

AdExchanger.com: How is Tremor Media making it easier for brand marketers – who are accustomed to TV, reach and GRPs – to buy online video advertising?

JG: In order to have a GRP equivalent for online video, you have to be able to buy and deliver based on audience. For the most part, digital is bought and delivered based on impressions, without any accountability for audience delivery. Our targeting solution allows advertisers to plan, buy, and deliver based on audience delivery (just like they do with TV). Also, because of our first-look targeting capability, we are able to do it at scale – which is another requirement for making online video more like TV.

How does the Quantcast partnership work? Do you share revenue with Quantcast for the audience targeting they provide to your clients?

Can’t share contractual info regarding Quantcast. One important thing to note is that Acudeo can integrate with several data sources, so Quantcast is one of several data partners we work with. We’ll be announcing others in the future.

Can you drill down on how the “real-time” offering and “real-time updates” mentioned in the release is different than previous targeting methods?

Prior to launching real-time demographic targeting, we utilized comScore data to identify sites within our network that index high for a particular audience segment, and we would create customized site lists around that audience. With this approach, audience targeting was done at the CAMPAIGN and SITE level. With real-time targeting we are able to identify a user’s audience segment (no personally identifiable info) wherever and whenever they appear on our network because we are able to retrieve segmentation data at the time the ad server request, which allows us to choose the appropriately targeted ad based on the data that comes back. With this approach, audience targeting is done at the USER and IMPRESSION level. This is made possible by the fact that our Acudeo publisher technology is integrated into the player environment. Acudeo calls information from our 3rd party data sources so that in real time our ad server knows which ad to serve to the user.

There are two important benefits of how we’ve enabled real-time targeting thru Acudeo – Precision & Scale:

1) Simultaneous real-time data look-up provides targeting precision.

Acudeo enables us to look up multiple data sources in real time to find the users’ most updated demographic segment info. Simultaneous look up across multiple data sources enhances our user coverage on the network, while real-time audience data ensures that we base our targeting on the most up-to-date audience data.

2) Targeting users on the first impression provides scale.

Tremor Media’s Acudeo flash component is integrated into the publishers’ players, which gives us ability to segment audiences and serve relevant ads on the first impression on the network. Other XML based networks typically identify the user, insert a targeting cookie on the first visit, and re-target the users from the second visit which compromises scale.

By John Ebbert

John Childs-Eddy is VP of Business Development at Australian direct response ad network, Funbox.

When AdExchanger.com first asked me to discuss the Australian market, my verbatim response was:

“The thing about this market is that it’s consolidated, and dominated by traditional media – it’s the only English speaking market in which the five biggest digital media companies are owned by the biggest traditional media companies – which is an interesting anomaly on the face of things… however it seriously slows the adoption of ad exchanges in Australia… and reduces the discussion about these kinds of things. It’s not exactly an innovative marketplace like the States is in this area.”

To reflect just how deeply the Australian Media market is regarded as an oligopoly, you can check out this Wikipedia article on the definition of oligopolies.

And to paraphrase what is possibly the most important note in the Wikipedia article: “… competitors will generally ignore price increases, with the hope of gaining a larger market share as a result of now having comparatively lower prices. However, even a large price decrease will gain only a few customers because such an action will begin a price war with other firms. The curve is therefore more price-elastic for price increases and less so for price decreases.”

In other words, there is very little incentive to suddenly allow the majority of the media company’s remnant inventory to become liquid in an exchange market place. Indeed the companies have far more to lose than to gain by allowing the devaluation of their inventory through an ad exchange. The companies will correctly point out that they are better off *not* selling their remnant inventory at all, and keeping their eCPM average more than 1000% higher than the avg. in an exchange environment.

After all, if none of the “big five” discount, then buyers will have no choice but to pay whatever they ask for.

However, all is not lost. It is quite possible to run successful campaigns at scale in Australia… you just need to strategize. So here’s a few tips:

1. Ensure you are using segment pixels on your landing pages.
2. Work directly with the large publishers on a “remnant” buy. The publishers will still do “performance deals”, and run your campaign on their unsold inventory internally. They most likely won’t place your ad tags though.
3. I suggest you set up different landing pages for each major RON remnant buy for each of the big five publishers.
4. Retarget your segment pixels through your own exchange seat if you have one, or arrange a retargeting campaign with one (or more) of the major tier 1 players in the exchange space.
5. Optimize your premium buys from the data you gather from the segmented campaign performance and fine tune.
6. Rinse and repeat for each campaign.

In this way, you will be targeting premium users as efficiently as possible across Australia’s major publishers, while retargeting those same users at scale via retargeting in the exchange space.

Viola! You are now buying premium audience very efficiently (and at scale) in an “Oligopolized” market.

Follow AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

Publisher As Agency

The Wall Street Journal’s Emily Steel covers publishing company, Meredith, and its recent transformation as, in part, a marketing agency. According to Steele, recent acquisitions by the venerable publishing company in the digital agency space has attracted business from Kraft Foods, Chrysler and Wells Fargo to name a few. And, Meredith isn’t done acquiring yet. Read more about publisher as agency.

IAB Meeting Redux

Mediaweek’s Mike Shield’s provides an overview of the recent IAB Annual Meeting. Technology appears to be a threat when, in fact, it should be their friend as increasing transparency will bring efficiency. On the other hand, introducing scarcity by selling direct makes sense, too. It’s part of the equation and shouldn’t be seen as a defensive measure against tech. Publishers need to understand technology, networks and exchanges and its benefits rather than run and hide from it. Read Shields’ summary.

Aggregate Knowledge Approved For Credit

In a release, Silicon Valley bank, Bridge Bank, announced that “it has provided term financing and a working capital line of credit to Aggregate Knowledge to support the company’s continued growth.” Aggregate Knowledge said the funds will be used to “expand its Discovery Platform and deliver more value to its clients with new and exciting audience management and dynamic creative capabilities.” Often the purpose of a credit facility is to provide an infusion of cash while precluding the need to give away equity in the company as a venture capital deal will. Read more.

MDC Partners Reports Q4, 2009

Agency holding company MDC Partners, owners of Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, kbsp and Varick Media announced its fourth quarter and full-year 2009 results on Wednesday as “Revenue increased to $149.7 million vs. $144.7 million in Q4 2008, an increase of 3.4%” and “MDC EBITDA increased to $18.3 million vs. $17.1 million in Q4 2008, an increase of 7.0%.” CEO Miles Nadal said in the release, “Our focus on acquiring thought leading talent and expanding our capabilities in digital and data analytics are core to our ability to drive increasing return on marketing investment for our clients and market share gains for MDC. We expect another strong year in 2010.” Read it.

The Agency Gold Medal

Al DiGuido, CEO of Zeta Interactive, delivers “the goods” when he predicts what agencies will look like in 5 years. A favorite observation: “Analytics Will Decorate the Trophy Mantles” rather than “awards and accolades.” Read more.

Agency As Incubator

On Imedia Connection, Global Director of Interactive Strategies Renny Gleason of Wieden + Kennedy talks about the “PIE [Portland Incubator Experiment], our technology and cultural disruption accelerator.” Whoa.. new acronym. Gleason goes on to explain that the intention is to bring local tech entrepreneurs together with agency types in the local area in hopes of W + K incubating a few companies. Read more.

Valuing The Data

MediaPost’s Joe Mandese covers a panel at this week’s OMMA Metrics & Measurement conference where Adam Gerber of Quantcast and kbs+p’s Darren Herman considered how digital advertising will be valued in the future. Data value is a frustration as Herman said, “We can all buy data. But what is the price and value? There is a big market gap right now about the value of that data.” He added that he has an agenda and predicted the appearance of a “valuation company” in the next 1 to 3 years. Read about the agenda.

AdMob’s New Whitepaper

It’s a new whitepaper! Mobile ad network, AdMob, has released its “AdMob Mobile Metrics Report” and includes data and insights that it says it gleaned from 15,000 websites in its network in January 2010. Lots of operator and handset charts for gadget enthusiasts. An interesting demo finding from the report: “* 73% of Android users are male, compared to 58% of webOS users, 57% of iPhone users and 54% iPod touch users.” Read and then download it.

Microsoft and ComScore on CPG

From Microsoft Advertising blog, Dana Swygard announces that Microsoft and ComScore will team on “CPG Online Effect, [which] allows advertisers to create custom targets that are based on purchase and online behaviors. These targets run across the Microsoft network and we’re able to track offline sales as a result.” Read more.

Associated Content Looking For Buyer

Fresh from its new partnership with Rubicon Project, investment Allen & Co. is getting busy with Associated Content according to All Things D’s Peter Kafka. Kafka prognosticates on potential acquirers of the content-generating company including its competition, Demand Media. Read more.

2009 Ad Spend

Nielsen has released its final figures for 2009 ad spending across all channels. The “Internet” channel showed flat growth whereas cable was up 14%. Sadly, your favorite Sunday Supplement (a.k.a. kindling) finished dead last as its ad spend cratered 44%. Get the release (PDF).

Malware Attacks

ksl.com in Salt Lake City, Utah, announced on Thursday that its site had been invaded by malware and offered a complete report – including screenshots of the perpetrating ads. Blame was placed on “one of our 3rd party ad networks.” Read more.

Transparency And Attribution

Scott Burke, VP of engineering at Yahoo, gives Ad Age readers a walkthrough on the pleasures of the new data-driven display advertising environment. Burke advocates for more transparency from publishers so that marketers can perform better attribution modeling and move beyond the click as a success metric. Read more.

We Shall Call It DoubleClick Ad Planner

The Google Ad Planner received a makeover and became DoubleClick Ad Planner which synch with recent naming nomenclature used on DoubleClick Publisher products. The DoubleClick blog says in addition to re-naming the product, a wider array of metrics are now available. Read more.

Today’s column is written by Suman Basetty, Director of Product Management at Efficient Frontier, an online performance marketing company.

Sophisticated online marketers want to know how their display and search ad spend are influencing each other, their conversion rates and, most importantly, understand how to distribute their ad spend across these channels to maximize returns.  In order to answer these questions, marketers need two things:

1. A centralized tracking system across both search and display.
2. The ability to apply the right attribution model and optimize across both channels.

Tracking systems like Atlas and DART to some extent tried to solve the first problem.  However, in order to solve the second issue, marketers need the ability to bid their display ads up or down (in conjunction with their search ads) based on how the ads are directly and indirectly affecting the conversions.

With the recent surge of display inventory becoming available in biddable form (at impression level in many cases) optimization across search and display can now happen.

The graph below shows an example of distribution of registrations to an advertiser’s website from multiple channels and illustrating the number of registrations with prior search and display ad interactions.

A significant challenge arises in organizational and reporting structures at companies. Many marketing teams continue to have display and search teams working separately and often use different tracking and optimization systems.  As a result, conversions with overlapping events (for example, a search click preceded by a display click) are typically double counted. That is, each channel (search and display) will independently take credit for such conversions. Lacking the visibility into how each advertising channel is influencing the other, advertiers over-estimate advertising efficacy and may over-pay for placements and terms. Let’s examine a site retargeting scenario to illustrate the challenge.

When you are retargeting visitors to an advertiser’s site, you are inevitably reaching visitors that came to the site through paid search clicks. This means users who have come through paid search clicks and then viewed a retargeted display ad and then converted will be double counted if the advertiser is not using the same tracking systems across these channels or not using the right attribution model.

We typically see that 30-40% of all conversions arriving from a display impression, or click, are preceded with a paid search click. This overlap is significant enough that marketers need to pay close attention to attribution.  However, double counting conversions is just one problem. The other issue is that advertisers are not getting the proper visibility into how one advertising channel is influencing the other.

In our campaigns, we have seen that up to 10-15% of conversions that had a prior display impression had the last event as a paid search click.  When we looked further into the path to conversion data, it is interesting to see that many of these users see multiple banner ads and, within minutes of seeing the last banner ad, visited their favorite search engine, searched and then clicked on a paid listing prior to conversion. Clearly display influenced the search, although that ad will rarely be given credit.  Looking at the issue in reverse, we see that 20-30% of conversions that had a prior display impression or click had a paid search click prior to the display event. In essence, this 20-30% overlap consists of users that came to the advertiser’s site through a paid search click and then saw a re-targeted banner ad prior to converting.

What this data shows is that there can be significant cross channel influence between search and display. The key for advertisers is to have both a centralized tracking system to ensure they can obtain cross channel insights and an optimization platform that can activate this data in display and search buying. Only with centralized tracking can different conversion attribution models be tested, making cross channel optimization possible.

As more and more biddable display becomes available new DSPs seem to be launching on a weekly basis with their own unique offering (or spin).   However, almost all of these DSPs are focusing on managing and optimizing display campaigns independently of search.    We believe biddable display provides a bigger opportunity when managed and optimized across both search and display, making the overall online marketing spend much more efficient.

Follow Efficient Frontier (@efrontier) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

Bizo CEO Russell Glass discussed the new Martini Media partnership and its implications with AdExchanger.com.

Martini Media would appear to be a B2C opportunity for Bizo. Are you expanding beyond B2B?

RG: We’ve received a lot of interest from marketers coming to us asking if our executive and c-suite categories could be used as proxies for high net worth. After a few of these tests went well, we saw an opportunity to leverage our data in a new way. I would call it “prosumer” targeting – or reaching a business executive when they’re pursuing interests outside of work. Martini is one of the leaders in this category, so there was a natural fit to be working together.

As you re-sell the same cookies to different clients, are you getting any feedback regarding the rising cost of media as, potentially, different advertisers target the same user? Or is there so much inventory out there, advertisers don’t have to worry about rising costs?

We’re not seeing an increase in media costs based on the inventory – it’s more based on the audience and the limited number of impressions where you can find the audience. As more advertisers look to get in front of the same audience, the value of the impressions those audience members can be found on are going up.

How is business breaking out between ad network sales and direct advertisers? Any trends you can report?

Our business is 60% direct sales and 40% indirect where partners like Martini and others use our data to better target B2B audiences. We expect the indirect component of our business will outpace direct sales as we grow.

By John Ebbert

Netezza’s Brad Terrell, VP and general manager of digital media, and
Michele Chambers, director of advanced analytics product management,
looked how Netezza products apply in digital advertising with AdExchanger.com.

AdExchanger.com: What is the application here for digital advertising? For example, would a demand side platform find this system useful – and why?

Netezza: A wide range of analytic applications for digital advertising apply, including but not limited to ad targeting, Web site optimization, ad inventory and pricing, ad sales forecasting, attribution analysis, network usage, click fraud detection and keyword portfolio optimization.

Can you define what is meant by “big data” and “big math”?

Big data is petabytes of data. Big math refers to the complex computational processing that’s required for advanced analytics.

How does pricing work for Netezza’s TwinFin(i) Appliance?

List pricing starts at $125K for a system that analyzes up to 10TB of data and goes up from there.

By John Ebbert

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.

McGrory tells AdExchanger.com that his point “was that the lost bid data that comes when an auction is broadcast to bidders and a bidder doesn’t respond or responds and loses is very valuable data that a seller should fully consider before allowing bidders to have. If a bidder gets all the pings of the unsold for a publisher, over time they can calculate the sell through of a publisher and use that aggregate knowledge against the publisher in negotiations. The counter argument is that it helps the bidders bid more effectively if they know how often they’ll see a user (call it a scarcity factor). Generally, we believe the publishers that are working with third parties providing RTB should be aware of what is happening with lost bid data and then decide whether they want to support. RTB has to protect the primary interest of the publisher. The marketplace without fruits and vegetables is just an empty parking lot.”

AdExchanger.com’s (a.k.a. My) assertion that Yahoo! may have a reason to criticize the benefits of RTB for failing to have an RTB solution was further rebutted by McGrory who said Yahoo! has been piloting RTB (via Right Media) for the last several months with more details to come.

By John Ebbert

AdExchanger.com:   Let’s start with a bit of background. Has adap.tv always been a video ad exchange or marketplace? You’ve been around for a while, correct?

AA: Yes. We developed Adap.tv OneSource, ad serving and management platform, that is being used currently by hundreds of publishers. We literally were wiring the ecosystem in a world that lacks standards and innovating very frequently on formats. We realized that the monetization of video is just extremely difficult without the right technology platform, so we decided to develop exactly that. In the process, we also learned that technology, or the wiring, is only half of the problem. The second half is actually in the process of buying and selling.

When you get two or three calls a week from buyers looking for more inventory, and we have almost daily conversations with publishers looking for more revenue, you understand that something does not work.

So we decided to take another step in solving the video monetization problem and develop the ideal marketplace for video buyers and sellers.

Are you concerned about others, such as Google, jumping in the space? Yahoo and Google have significant display ad exchange models, couldn’t they just swoop in and grab your advertisers and publishers?

That’s a great question. We built the Adap.tv marketplace from the ground up for video, and for quality publishers. And those are two differentiators, I would say, versus the exchanges out there. This is, by the way, exactly why we chose to call it a marketplace and not an exchange. And when you look deep into the product, the control of give buyers and sellers, the information we provide to them, the large pool of video inventory and the wide support of video‑specific formats, you realize that there is a significant gap in the capabilities between what we provide and what display exchanges provide today.

Can demand‑side platforms effectively manage cookie databases such that their display inventory can be mapped to the video inventory that they’re buying? And if not, when, and how do we get there?

Absolutely. Demand‑side platforms are important in the evolution of media buying. And we are working with many of them, with plans to integrate all of them, to provide them with access to video inventory.

We provide APIs that allow them to access the publisher inventory and give them all the capabilities they need when it comes to targeting. So we found interest and great partnerships with many of them.

How do you expect the IAB’s VAST standard to impact your business? If it didn’t exist, would an ad exchange be possible for video, or a marketplace be possible for video?

Standards are very important, and we support all the VAST and VPAID standards. But, the thing is that those are the early days of video advertising, and we see rapid innovation coming from ad networks and ad agencies that cannot be captured immediately in those standards. This is why we think that having the platform across hundreds of publishers is giving us an advantage and making us uniquely positioned to provide trading platforms for buyers and sellers in video.

Are you thinking right now, for the marketplace, that initially it’s going to be about buying and selling pre‑roll, but down the road it’s in‑stream and other formats as well?

Yes. Our platform is extremely flexible, and very quickly we adapt to any format buyers want to buy and sellers agree to sell. So we are probably not going to be the innovators when it comes to formats, but we will quickly adapt our marketplace to those leading formats.

What do you tell video publishers who are concerned their CPMs are going to drop through the floor as your marketplace gets traction?

We actually believe CPMs will go up. This is a supply‑constrained environment, and what’s keeping prices and overall monetization down is the friction in the process. So the fact that we open for sellers a world of opportunities, while keeping them in control ‑ control over pricing, control over the buyers they work with, even control over the campaigns they allow in, control over the way their inventory is presented in the market ‑ you take it all, together with the fact that buyers can now easily access a large pool of inventory, applying their own targeting data, and I think what you’ll see is buyers finding online in‑stream video to be more extensible, more easily bought and, therefore, I believe they’ll spend more. And as an industry, that’s our goal.

What are video ad networks looking for these days when they work with adap.tv?

Ad networks like the immediate access to a large pool of inventory. They like the transparency and control that they get when buying through the platform. And they like the ability to bring their own targeting ‑ targeting data and algorithms.

Do you see audience buying in the marketplace today? Also, do you see a need for an understanding the content being viewed?

Yes. We definitely see an increase in using audience targeting, but within publisher or content‑quality constraints. So it’s not the wild west of “Let’s find this viewer, wherever he is.” It’s “Let’s find the viewers within the context we feel comfortable with.”

What sort of bidding parameters do you offer?

Buyers and sellers get up‑to‑the‑second information about market conditions. It is aggregated, it does not expose individual buyers and sellers, but it gives them the information and the tools that they need to make smart decisions.

From the publisher’s perspective, the market opens for publishers a stream of offers that is not on their radar screen. Even large publishers cannot be in front of every buyer and have every buying opportunity presented to them.

By opening it up, you basically gain visibility to the value of your site and the value of the content.

As noted in the Ad Age article the buying that is done is not in real time today. And if that is true, it is not real time, then how can a buyer truly see who the audience is, as in look at the cookie and in real time decide what to bid? How does that work?

Let me explain. We do facilitate now real time buying; not yet real time bidding, but real time buying. Meaning the buyer can make a buy or no‑buy decision in real time, given the cookie data and additional information about the view.

At some point, will real time bidding be a part of the marketplace, or is it even necessary?

I think the real innovation is not so much the real-time versus delayed. It is more about allowing buyers, whether those are ad networks, or demand side platforms, to leverage their targeting capabilities across a large number of publishers.

Softball for you -what do you think about online video as an opportunity for brand dollars?

Online video advertising is the Holy Grail. It combines the power of TV advertising with the interactivity, measurability and sophisticated targeting of online advertising. We are excited about our part in pushing this industry forward.

When you look back a year from now and see what has happened with Adap.tv’s marketplace, what might a few key milestones look like?

I think in Adap.tv, and many of the other companies that work in this space are actually focused on growing the pie. It is not so much about the competition with other companies right now. It is about making online video scalable, effective marketing vehicle for the leading brands.

Follow adap.tv (@Adaptv) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

Mpire President and CRO Kirby Winfield shared his thoughts with AdExchanger.com about the evolution of the AdXpose product and the API.

AdExchanger.com: What’s the pricing like for the API? And, are you moving away from offering a services layer for the AdXpose product at Mpire?

KW: Pricing will be an incremental CPM fee on top of the base service fee. We will basically offer API access at or near “cost” – it is meant to be a value-add to our ad server, network, and DSP clients. We are in no way moving away from the services layer, however. On the contrary, we are currently hiring technical account managers  to help service our clients and prospects: because we provide so much more than just simple verification reports, it’s crucial that we make it easy for our clients to understand the implications of the data and make human decisions in addition to any algorithmic decisions made leveraging the API.

What about API integration? Is this difficult for groups that may be less technically skilled such as some agencies, for example?

We are finding that most agencies now have the ability and desire to integrate data from multiple sources into their dashboards, reports, and decisioning engines. As Google VP of Product Management Susan Wojcicki said today at the IAB Leadership Meeting, “if you’re using spreadsheets to manage campaigns, you’re leaving dollars on the table.” The holding company agency DSP’s are especially well positioned to integrate the API, and we work with the majority of these entities today.

How is Mpire’s AdXpose media business progressing? And how does this API release affect it or say about the company’s media business?

The media business is largely a sandbox for continued development of our AdXpose Analytics technology. Sitting on a consistent volume of directly purchased impressions (we do not buy from or compete in any way with ad networks – in fact, some buy from us) allows us to test new features in real time without using clients as guinea pigs. That stated, it’s the technology and our technology clients that drive the enterprise value for our business, and that’s the side of the business that gets the lion’s share of our investment. To that end, the API release is simply further confirmation of our commitment to creating the leading brand safety and display ad analytics company online.

By John Ebbert

IAB ALM Notes: Data Access Through RTB

In the final panel discussion of the three-day, Interactive Advertising Bureau Annual Leadership Summit, Yahoo!’s Ramsey McGrory identified what he said was one of the key challenges currently emerging around data ownership: the advent of real-time bidding (RTB). McGrory suggested that any participating buyer can either bid or “watch” in a real-time bidding auction of a single impression, for example, and can potentially get access to valuable publisher data and all of its attributes. He questioned whether that’s fair to publishers. UPDATED: Yahoo! says I got it wrong. See Yahoo! clarification here. It should be noted that Yahoo! currently does not have an RTB solution. Google does and Microsoft’s appears to be on the way.

IAB ALM Notes: Tolman Geffs Presentation

Jordan, Edmiston’s Tolman Geffs arguably offered the most compelling presentation (best takeaway, too) of the IAB Summit. The prez included an ecosystem map of the world with which AdExchanger.com’s audience is already familiar -but was likely an eyeopener for some in attendance. Download it here (PDF).

IAB ALM Notes: Exchanges & Networks Rules of the Road

The IAB rules committee associated with ad exchanges and networks delivered for comment “Networks & Exchanges Quality Assurance Guidelines.” Read the release. Among the guidelines is the move towards transparency as the guidelines look to improved brand safety. The release notes ask that networks and exchanges “allow for transparency of inventory sources, publisher relationships, content levels and ad placement details.” The full 39-page guideline doc is available for download and includes a nice glossary on the space. Get it (PDF).

IAB ALM Notes: Adify’s Russ Fradin Says Its All Networks Or Not

Russ Fradin, CEO of Adify, told attendees that it’s time to choose. Either go with networks and understand the cost implications (lower CPMs, reduced or non-existent sales staff). Or, take all the pixeling opportunities off of your site and never contract with networks, and sell direct with a sales team.

Mike On Ads: Volume III (RTB Cookie Edition)

AppNexus’ CTO Mike Nolet reappears on his Mike On Ads blog with a post about “how cookie matching works in the RTB world.” Nolet says that PubMatic and AdMeld all work the way he ends up describing except for Google which “requires the bidder to store the mapping on his end” rather than having the RTB providers do the cookie mapping work. Taste the cookie.

Google Under EU Microscope

The Wall Street Journal reports that EU regulators are officially investigating complaints by three European Internet companies about Google’s alleged anti-competitive tactics. Google is innocent until proven otherwise according to the article. Read more.

Search & Display Research

Oh boy.. every display ad marketer’s new favorite piece of research is here. Eyeblaster has put together a study looking at the confluence of search and display ad marketing showing the symbiotic relationship for the tactics. Get it here (Sign-up required.). Among the findings, “72% of the conversions of cross channel search and display campaigns are a direct result of the display channel, only 28% are the result of the search channel.” Is search no longer display’s Daddy?

Millennial Media Acquires Mobile Analytics Firm

Mobile ad network Millennial Media has announced that it has acquired TapMetrics, “a San Francisco-based mobile analytics firm, focused on application usage and behavior.” It’s an interesting parallel to Flurry’s purchase of Pinch Media, another company focused on mobile analytics. More data AND insights are better. Read the release.

Auditude Cozies Up To Comcast

Video ad platform Auditude announced in a release “that it has partnered with Comcast Interactive Media (CIM) to manage and serve CIM’s video advertising across its websites including Fancast, Fancast XFINITY TV and Comcast.net.” Read more. Cable company and an online video ad platform? Makes sense on several levels.

InterCLICK Revs Are Better

Likely referring to the Jordan, Edmiston deck presented at the IAB, interCLICK President Michael Katz indicated in a tweet that revenue estimates for his company are being under-estimated tweeting, “they even under-estimated our revenue at $42M. More like $55M+, announcing earnings on 2/24…stay tuned.” And Katz wasn’t done there as he also tweeted a proposal recently of a merger between yield optimizers: “PubMatic & Rubicon Project should merge and be known as ‘Pub & Rub’.”

eBureau Announces Lead Scoring Partnership

Online leads scoring company, eBureau, announced a partnership with Sparkroom, a “provider of enrollment marketing automation solutions.” eBureau’s lead scoring capabilities will be integrated into Sparkroom’s platform for online marketers active in the lead generation space. Read the release.

Bizo Upgrades

Bizo announced from its blog that it has upgraded its B2B targeting data with exporting features and is offering 150 new, more targeted datasets saying, “Before we were able to target simply Medical/Health professionals, but with the new segments, Bizo marketers can now target and report on detailed segments within the Medical/Health segment such as Cardiologists or Psychiatrists.” Read more.

ClearSaleing Enhancing Attribution

In a release, attribution analytics company ClearSaleing said that it had “heard the call, and is now providing expiration dating for clicks and impressions” which will allow marketers to better customize their own attribution model for “each lead source.” Read the release.

Blinding Me With Science

Media6Degrees has hired Claudia Perlich as Chief Scientist. No, she will not be experimenting with test tubes and yellowcake but rather she’ll be leveraging her “data analysis and machine-learning” skills to help propel forward the company’s social graph targeting tools. Read the release. Interesting to note the R&D trend here, if you will, as Lotame started its own R&D unit recently. DataXu is filled with rocket scientists. MediaMath has more PHDs than Sloan Kettering. AppNexus has the Princeton mafia and Googlers. There are others. Feeling left out? Does the University of Phoenix offers a PHD?

Relevance That Doesn’t Suck

Inspired by a recent NextNY panel, Greg Hills blogs about the importance of relevance in online advertising and provides a list of ways ads can “suck” and “not suck.” Included among his “non-sucking” bullets are the importance of not being intrusive and establishing an emotional connection. Read more.

Top 5 Brand Trends

On Retailer Daily, the results of Brand Keys’ 2010 Customer Loyalty Engagement Index are dissected as the “Top 5 Consumer Brand Trends for 2010″ are revealed. “Show me the meaning’ and “Careful chic” are two of the five trends as consumers look deeper and deeply at what they’re buying. Read more.

Optimizing Your Reg Button

How to design the “Register” button… an age-old (relatively speaking, of course) challenge for the landing page of many-a drive-to-sign-up campaign. The Six Revisions design blog for developers and designers lists a bunch of reg button tips including “The registration button should be positioned near the main features/header area (usually at the top part of web layouts).” Is yours? Read more. (source: @Performable)

Prita Uppal, CEO of Hooked Media Group, discussed the announcement with AdExchanger.com.

AdExchanger.com: What is broken with the publishing model which Hooked Media is fixing?

Uppal: Today’s media consumption on publisher sites is extremely fragmented and not entirely social. This trend has led to diminished traffic, engagement rates and sellable ad inventory. Hooked’s Yoo-Mee gaming application helps to reverse this trend by providing publishers access to the benefits associated with social communities. By partnering with Yoo-Mee, publishers are connected to a vast community of players. Publishers visitors, who mostly do not engage with others on the site, can now engage with each other on the site and, more importantly, can invite, compete, challenge and broadcast to and with the rest of the internet community so that people who may not visit the publishers site, now have a reason to come and join in the fun. Through Yoo-Mee, Publisher’s receive incremental revenue streams from both advertising, cash tournaments, and virtual currency, but also growth in traffic and user engagement.

Skill gaming – where users play for real money – has been tried in the past with limited success. What makes you think Hooked Media’s version will work? And, on a percentage basis, how much do you see the skill gaming component contributing for your revenue model?

All signs point to skill gaming growing and not decreasing. A rapidly increasing number of people are playing games with others and the “gamer” demographic is expanding to include everyone. Hooked Media is positioned to take advantage of these trends by taking existing high quality games people already play and love and adding a social experience wherein users play for virtual money or real money. Instead of playing alone, they can play those same games with others and win money thru skill competitions. In the past a partial limitation has also been accessibility and scale to enable players to win real money. Through Hooked Media, not only is the current experience vastly enhanced but players can now play those games wherever they want to play, whether on a mobile device, website or social network.

There’s potential to collect a tremendous amount of data from the audience which visits these games. Can you see data being collected which may allow advertisers to buy advertising against audience segments across the web?

Over the last 3 years we’ve seen a dramatic shift in online targeting thanks to audience data tracking. Hooked plans to analyze a tremendous amount of data to not only benefit the player experience, but to support and provide benefit to advertisers. We’re going to use player behavioral attributes to help validate marketing initiatives and develop a deep understanding of the audience as it applies to their gaming profiles.

What will prevent others from hopping into your space such as a Zynga? Is $4.5 million in funding enough?

Lets start with Zynga and their competitors. The key to hopping into the space is distribution. Hooked Media Group has an existing and growing network of vertically focused partner websites. Hooked Media works with each partner to engage their visitors in two ways : provide visitors with game content related to their sites from casual and social developers and leverage their existing user base by providing a way for them to interact with each other. In fact, Zynga is a potential partner – as a content provider, Zynga would partner with Hooked Media Group to be a distribution mechanism to push their games to more players or to retain their existing players by giving placing their games in more locations.

By being both a monetization platform, Hooked Media is generating significant revenue already and has established support from advertisers. As such, our business model is supported from an existing revenue model and funding is not required. We both have very strong support from both US Venture Partners and Altos Ventures.

By John Ebbert

AdExchanger.com: Let’s start with the name – how does “Sprout” mesh with what you’re doing today? And, what problem is Sprout solving and how does this play out with your announcement about Disney?

CW: The display advertising business is still incredibly young. There is so much room for innovation to sprout. We want to make display ads relevant and engaging. We want to enable brands to plant relationships with customers and nurture those relationships with continuous conversations over time.

Today, we announced Sprout Engage Ads. Sprout Engage Ads allow brands to make stronger connections with their audiences by providing a fun, interactive experience, wherever their audiences travel online.

Our first customer to roll out these ads is Disney, who created Engage Ads for Alice in Wonderland. These ads are designed to take display advertising to the next level by bringing personally relevant data right into a standard Flash ad unit. The ads are ’smart’ in that they know when you have engaged with them so you will never see the same content twice. In addition, the ad and the Facebook application is linked so the ads know if you have engaged with the app and vice versa. For example, if you add yourself to the Mad Hatter’s Army in the ad, when you come to the Facebook app you will be recognized as being in the army.

Please discuss your datasets around the social graph. How is it collected? And, how much flexibility does a brand marketer have to customize her/his campaign?

Sprout creates both Engage Apps and Engage Ads. Sprout connects to social graph APIs to read profile data and write activities back. In the case of Engage Ads running outside of social networks, we use cookie data to personally identify users and give them content that is applicable to them, whether it’s based on location, for example, or actions a user has taken in another ad.

One great thing about our platform is that brands have complete control over customizing campaigns. Our platform is incredibly deep. Sky’s the limit for what you can do within an ad or social application. And, brand marketers can modify campaigns based on real-time analytics and these changes go live immediately.

Given your use of Flash, do you see Flash continuing to dominate rich media ads? Is HTML 5 a potential option for use in development in the future – or even Silverlight? Curious your thoughts on the Web’s “format future,” (HTML 5, Flash, Silverlight, etc.) in general.

Right now, given its ubiquity, we are continuing to bet on Flash. I like the idea of an open rich media format but it looks like we’re 18 months away from any real decision-making events. But we will continue to watch the numbers closely. The Sprout Engage platform is built on XML so if we need to shift we can easily adjust the platform to output something other than a .SWF file, such as DHTML or HTML 5.

What’s the case for advertising in social media beyond the sheer numbers of eyeballs? And, does Sprout help with brand safety in delivery of campaigns?

I think that social media is about more than eyeballs. It’s about allowing people to have continuous conversations with the brands they care about. You see the conversations happening on the fan page wall, within applications and between brand advocates and their friends. Our new Engage Ads allow brands to extend those conversations beyond the walls of the social networks to any web site.

In terms of brand safety, Sprout offers a campaign console that allows content to be moderated (either before it goes live or when it’s live) and removed, if needed.

What challenges is the creative (as in the human) dealing with today in digital advertising?

One thing we repeatedly hear from our customers is how important time-to-market is when launching apps or ads. Creatives need to build quickly while focusing on UI, not coding. One of the things that Sprout has said from the beginning is that we want the creative to maintain control of the rich media. Our platform has a visual interface and all our Engage Apps and Ads are created by a designer, using WYSIWYG tools. This is important because it puts the focus on the user experience versus the underlying technology, which can get very complex.

You’ve likely heard about the media trading platform strategies at VivaKi (nerve center), IPG (Cadreon), MDC (Varick Media) and Havas (Adnetik) to name a few. How does Sprout work into these strategies?

One of the bottlenecks for real-time ad exchanges is quickly and easily creating content for display advertising. We think we can solve this problem with the Sprout Engage platform and look forward to working with these DSPs moving forward. As I mentioned before, the Sprout Engage Platform has a completely visual interface. We have already done the backend integration with the social networks and 3^rd party services, such as Twitter and Google, for example. So, if a designer wants to add a Twitter feed to an ad, all he/she has to do is drag a Twitter component onto a canvas and set the user name. It literally takes 2 seconds.

Any thoughts on recent news that Facebook is taking back its display advertising from Microsoft and using its own, non-standard (as in IAB) units? Does this say anything about the social media advertising opportunity? And, for brand marketers, in particular?

Consumers expect ads running within social networks to be more targeted and social. When they’re not, performance suffers. Facebook knows that a regular display ad won’t perform well on the social network so they have done the right thing pulling them back.

Today, Sprout Engage Ads running on certain social networks can display social graph data so they’re display ads – - but they’re personally relevant to the user. What we’re excited about is being able to provide social, application-like experiences outside of the networks, wherever people see advertising.

If you were a publisher, perhaps a social media publisher, what would you be doing to insure a future?

Publishers are starting to see advertisers spend dollars traditionally spent with them on social networks. Publishers need to socialize content on their site. In particular they need to offer their advertisers social features. The standard IAB ad unit offers a compelling opportunity for them to think of ad units as pieces of content for managing customers.

Follow Carnet Williams (@carnet), Sprout (@sprout) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

AdExchanger.com discussed the announcement with CPM Advisors CEO Rob Leathern and MediaGeeks GM Jacob LeWinter.

AdExchanger.com: It’s interesting that a demand-side tech company is partnering with a publisher-side technology company – and beyond just buying media through aggregators (yield optimizers). What’s the takeaway here?

Rob Leathern: The smart players in this space are the ones that can build valuable core technologies but also work with other providers who can help support those efforts with relevant technologies. It’s all about driving ROI for the advertiser, using cost-effective best-of-breed technologies that can help support that and not reinventing the wheel. Ad- and data-serving for us is about having the quickest, cost-effective, most efficient delivery infrastructure that can support our key assets in advertiser interface, decisioning, campaign data and budget management, and optimization.

Jacob LeWinter: As Mediageeks built out our global infrastructure we realized our services and technology were beneficial to more than just enterprise websites, and mediageeks evolved to be a leading ad infrastructure company. We now work with publishers, media companies, data platforms, DSPs, and even other supply side platforms who want robust scalable ad technology and solutions. We plan to work with the major players in each of these areas.

Mediageeks has been working with publishers but has not been as well-known as some of the other aggregators – why not?

Jacob LeWinter: Most clients white-label mediageeks’ technology and traditionally we have only worked with very large media companies. Mediageeks now serves billions of impressions and pixels, and this continues to grow each day. We’re like a utility company of the ad industry. We provide the framework, but its up to media companies to think of innovative ways to utilize us beyond just ad serving. CPM Advisors has pushed the boundaries of what can be done with smart ad serving.

“Blazing fast ad tags” – what’s that? Can you quantify and why is this important?

Rob Leathern: This is important for us since real-time bidding creates new cost parameters for serving and for bidding on inventory and our agencies and advertiser clients deserve non-legacy purpose-built systems to realize the efficiencies possible here. We have been building a brand new kind of data/creative serving system on top of the Mediageeks’ infrastructure that will make impression-level advertising an ROI-positive reality.

Jacob LeWinter: Mediageeks infrastructure allows for ad tags faster than most major ad servers including Dart or Atlas. Latency is a growing issue in the industry with websites placing far too many untested pixels and tags across their sites, which leads to frustrated end-users, not to mention lost revenue. 100% uptime and speedy tags are critical to an enterprise business. Because we built our infrastructure from the ground up, our system is blazing fast. And a fast, efficient infrastructure allows a company like CPM Advisors to do real-time targeting across multiple data criteria in an economical way for end clients.

Are there any special technical complexities to growing a self-service platform, such as CPM Advisors, as opposed to a platform with a full-service front end?

Rob Leathern: Our technology makes large-scale display advertising accessible and efficient for advertisers of all sizes by simplifying the process and improving the results. We’re not looking to give advertisers a Star Trek-type of media buying console: besides, it then entails teaching people yet another system. We spend a lot of time thinking of how we can compress the time it takes to handle mundane tasks like create and receive conversion tags, upload hundreds of flash or HTML ads, and build campaigns. We have had advertisers using our system and telling us what they like and don’t like and we continually change to react to their feedback. Understanding what information is necessary and what is not. And being able to do that at scale means having a smart inbetween layer that configures campaigns optimally based on target parameters, category, audience and so on. We think that automating the advertising process is achievable for both small and large advertisers alike.

By John Ebbert