Arbitron announced it was allowing itself to be acquired by Nielsen, ending competition in major media metrics markets and putting an end to its pattern of occasionally challenging Nielsen's right to dominate TV ratings. Nielsen will pick up measurement abilities...
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The CEO of Shiny Ads, a firm that automates the sale of online media for direct sales publishers, indicates that there has been a "warming up" of publishers to the idea of throwing their direct sales into the automated...
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Blame the robots, blame retargeting, or blame the great comet ISON; whatever the cause, traditionally high-priced targeted media sectors newspapers and business to business publications are finding they are increasingly losing out in the race for online ad dollars. The...
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Donovan Data Systems (DDS), the dominant trafficking and invoicing system in television, appears to be just about ready to launch its re-written system, in hopes of extending its dominance in the digital space. Since its merger in March with MediaBank,...
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BuzzFeed, a site geared to deliberately keying into web content that has high search volume and viral capacity, got another $20 million from its previous funders. These funds are reportedly earmarked for additional content creation, which includes such stories as...
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It's not just you… young agency hires really are culturally different, and in some fairly annoying ways if you're one of the people asked to manage them.
As late as 25 years ago, an unwritten social contract existed between agencies...
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To help teams gain control of all the new features that have spewed out over time, Doubleclick is offering to offer a "personal trainer" program for ad management teams.
The program is geared to power users (which they define as people...
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In the fight for share in the social media space, and in the fight to produce something of actual value from the big data stores being collected by these large internet firms, the push to string linked user data together...
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Having failed to gain access to mainstream cable operator's menu of channels - which is a bit embarrassing, seeing as you can get four channels for "extreme logging," - Al Jazeera is purchasing Current TV, what was originally supposed to...
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It's about time. Wired is arguably the very first publication to sell a banner ad on the internet. Back in 1994, almost 20 years ago, they'd hired sales guy out of a San Francisco media shop and packed him around...
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Display:
A review of the major online property display advertising battles shows Yahoo and AOL having difficulty fending off Google, Amazon and other newer pools of inventory, forcing them to rely on special homepage promotions for larger clients.
Email:
Canadians are upset (which...
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Even as China cracks down on anonymous internet usage and puts up technical roadblocks to methods an estimated 60+ million Chinese use to access an uncensored web, iPinYou claims to be the first Chinese firm to gain access to Facebook's...
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Marketing management platforms are increasingly seen as must-haves, in part due to the ever-increasing diversity of marketing tactics available to advertisers in the digital age. But a $54 million investment Goldman Sachs just made in Infusionsoft implies a level of...
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A Digiday interview with Frank Holland, Microsoft's VP of online ads suggests the Redmond Behemoth has a few additional ad product tricks up its sleeve, presenting a few hints.
Among them
Holland said to expect something coming out in six months...
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Agencies:
Ad and design agencies can now point to a study commemorating their collective sense of martyrdom relative to their clients' inherently abusive nature. This study would complement well one polling the agency clients, perhaps entitled "Conceit and misaligned interests of...
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Marketing Automation:
One of the many growing marketing automation firms, Eloqua, put together an analysis of its clients' data to show how many different campaign elements existed in their average campaigns, and how complex were each of those. It showed lots...
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Some pretty simplistic blog posts making the rounds have suggested that a small poll done on teens regarding their favorite social sites may suggest Facebook could start to pull a MySpace, plummeting from absolute attention dominance among the young set...
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Analytics:
Google is doing it again: ratcheting up the functionality of its Analytics services, putting pressure on the big third party outfits selling these services. The third parties, like Omniture and Webtrends, do tend to have interfaces designed by humans, however,...
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In a move that moves Quantcast close to the ad performance measurement came, the firm
purchased the ad trafficking, verification and effectiveness system of MakeGood Software.
The terms of the purchase have not been disclosed.
MakeGood was started by Jeff Coon...
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2012 was a terrible year for magazines. Again. Publishers Information Bureau reported that 72 percent of tracked publications saw ad page decreases, the average being 8.2 percent.
Hardest hit were women's books. More targeted publications, such as Ebony and People...
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Sapient bought (m)Phasize, the Westport-based analytics firm, and appears to be pushing the new acquisition as a major component of its offerings. The analytics firm's technology and consulting will be applied primarily to the SapientNitro client base.
(m)Phasize's shtick has been...
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The Economist - the print publication that ate the newsweekly market single-handedly via the strange strategy of maintaining extremely highly sophisticated news coverage without dumbing down its tone - now has ten percent of its subscribers as online-only paying members....
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Maybe they watched too many dystopian movies like I Robot, or perhaps as an AdMonsters and Pubmatic study concluded, there are intrinsic qualities to the European ad markets that make it more difficult to invade the media buying space with...
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While mainstream web publishers fret over the shiny new viewable impression measure, people involved in ad exchanges appear to be shrugging their shoulders. Because the exchanges price media based on demand, which is based on perceived effectiveness, many in the...
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Advertising:
Now that Facebook has matched up its massive and always-on audience to its ad exchange, one agency wag wonders if its some too-good-to-be-true sales results from Facebook campaigns may be due to an "attribution play," whereby the fact that its...
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Online viewers watched 11.3 bajiliion zillion video ads last month, according to comScore. Seeing as that's the case, it suggests some interesting pricing and market size implications.
More than half of Americans saw video ads in December, with the average...
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Robot Invasion:
Digiday react to Facebook's closely examines Conde Nast's experiments with offering its online media through the robots. Conde only allows its existing customers to use the systems, setting up a private exchange. The upshot: "It's getting people on the...
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Confirming reports continue to trickle in that a major part of Google's advertising ecosystem is failing, at least for some advertisers. The broken bit: the data linkage for those advertisers that create a feedback loop from their analytics data back...
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It wasn't too many years ago that sophisticated targeting technologies came and went like summer pop hits, not necessarily because the underlying technology didn't add value, and often because the marketers spending money in online advertising simply weren't being pushed...
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Here is a set of step-by-step directions from SearchEngineWatch on what to do when Google tells you they don't think the links to your site are legitimate. To fend off death by Google snubbing, a site needs to act diligently...
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There are those who have been denigrating marketing campaigns setting off with the goal of gaining "likes" on Facebook. And, to be sure, a million likes, by themselves, is going to do more good for your karma than your wallet....
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Infusionsoft is one of a dozen or so companies looking to be a one-stop marketing shop for smaller and medium-sized businesses, integrating various media channels, now including the services of GroSocial.
In addition to adding the GroSocial semi-automated social media...
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The drumbeat of up-and-coming tech firms entreating traditional publishers to entrust their media with them continues. The argument, as forwarded by an iSocket executive: the buying process is inefficient, and a pain point for advertisers, publishers need to fall in...
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Yahoo Deathwatch:
In a move that harkens back to Yahoo's initial value proposition, an effort called "Project Zed" is gearing to position the search, portal, applications, personalized content giant in position to be a personalized information hub, akin to tablet and...
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Ad Exchanger got the skinny on Facebook's plans for the conversion attribution space. This is the service that allows advertisers to tell which messages and media were responsible for which transactions. Facebook has been beta testing such a service with...
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About one out of 60 English language searches are affected by the new algorithm changes that Google just rolled out in what is being termed the 24th Panda update. The new release, the 14th since the beginning of 2012 shows...
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A Google spokesperson reported to MarketingVOX that the breakage in the integration of conversion data between Google Analytics and Google Adwords has been fixed, but that the lost past data will be restored "in the coming days." This will not...
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Search:
Link building is still important in SEO, but dangerous, as more and more links appear to be interpreted as deliberate manipulations by Google's robot empire. Bas van den Beld put together a link-bait infographic (which is obviously working) to show...
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Search:
Google employs tens of thousands of humans, but most people and firms working with the search giant wouldn't know it. Endemic are problems like this, when advertisers find that Google fails to respond to important business matters. Where Google's silence...
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Often unable to beat the media competition armed with retargeting and other vast, cheaper-than-premium methods for reaching targeted audiences, a growing number of publishers is now joining the trend, purchasing cheap media where their known audience is known to be,...
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Google's Doubleclick division is starting to offer free video ad serving, taking yet more oxygen out of the online ad services industry. The new offering started yesterday afternoon.
In addition to offering the trafficking functions associated with Dart for Publishers...
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It was only a week ago that AdBrite's CEO was talking to trade press about its long evolution and bright future. As it happens, it was apparently up for sale and for sale in a relatively desperate timeframe. It also...
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Publishing:
Yahoo's figures showed revenue growth, profit growth and the key search metrics (paid clicks, etc.) also growing. Such shifts in perceived financial direction are often a bit bumpy between CEO change-outs, outs, as Yahoo recently experienced, although usually the incoming...
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Social:
Facebook, showed 40 percent revenue growth, which would be fine for most companies, but perhaps not so much for a trailing stock price over earnings ratio of 161 (about 10 times the valuation of Apple per dollar of earnings). The...
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"Premium" publishers concerned that direct response media marketshare is being eaten up by the relatively low-priced media bought on ad exchanges have a new - if predicted - worry: that the brand advertising media market might move in that direction...
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Agencies:
E. W. Scripps Company, largely due to shrinking publishing revenues, is playing agency for some clients, pulling together their own media with that of other publishers.
IPG is again rearranging the media deck chairs by taking the traditional media assignments out...
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Ads were run. A pigskin was thrown up and down the field. The equivalent TV audience of a few days worth of normal viewing happened. Big brands rolled out :30s that they created with goosed-up production budgets. We will see...
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Publishing:
Gannett's vice president of ad solutions has a blunt answer to programmatic pressures, and other ad network-oriented commoditizations, which might as well serve as the motto of truculent publishes everywhere: "If it's shit, we're not doing it.". That said, his...
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Now that Facebook is throttling traffic from Facebook fans to publishers to the extent that only about one in six or one in five publisher posts even gets shown to opted-in followers, publishers are losing their enthusiasm for the platform.
Facebook...
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Social:
Twitter ate Bluefin Labs, a firm selling TV-related analyses of social media statistics. Business Insider appears to have broken the story, and also scored a Twitter Powerpoint document justifying the purchase.
Publishing:
Big brand Kimberly-Clark stuck a toe in the programmatic display...
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