Publications Apple Plans Digital Radio Service 09/10. Welcome, Andre! | LinkedIn. The riskiest tech business decisions. Forrester Study Says Real-Time Bidding Set to Increase in Future. Digital video has helped one of advertising's fastest-growing sub-industries find a new foothold: a Forrester Research study commissioned by TubeMogul, an RTB buying platform, shows both the potential and the pitfalls of the RTB market, which Forrester suggests will reach some $687 million in gross sales as early as next year. RTB allows advertisers to purchase inventory a la carte—directly from the company running the ads. These days, it's almost entirely a digital proposition, with purchasers going to eBay-style websites and buying up display, pre-roll and other video ads simply by entering in the desired metrics (audience type, price range, penetration) and clicking a button.
It's a very simple system and one that RTB marketplaces and proponents believe will change the face of digital advertising by moving the entire industry away from a model mediated by ad agencies. But that's not happening quite yet. There are going to be problems, of course. A Plugged-In Ad Tech Source Drew This Diagram To Explain Facebook's Next $10 Billion Business. Mobile Is Where The Growth Is. If you look at any of the top web properties on comScore, Quantcast, Alexa or any other third party reporting service you will see that they all have been fairly flat over the first half of the year.
You might think that all these big web services are flatlining. We have seen this in our portfolio too. From board meeting to board meeting, we are seeing a similar pattern. Web is flattish. But mobile is growing like a weed. I alluded to this in a post last week where I wished for an aggregated audience measurement service across mobile and web. There is a significant shift going on this year, much more significant than we saw last year, from web to mobile. Mobile native services like Foursquare & Instagram have the most to gain from this transition. Mobile does not reward feature richness. That is why Facebook should (and it looks like will) break its big monolithic web app into a bunch of small mobile apps.
In technology the more things change, the more the stay the same. Yahoo Talking to Google, AppNexus, PubMatic as Right Media Replacement. Private marketplaces have become all the rage among premium publishers, with Condé Nast and Hearst each erecting walled gardens for their inventory within the past year, and soon Yahoo could join the ranks. Yahoo has been talking with Google, Microsoft-backed AppNexus and PubMatic about replacing Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange with a private marketplace that would exclusively contain Yahoo’s owned-and-operated inventory, according to several sources with knowledge of the discussions. Adweek has also learned that Rubicon Project has signed a nondisclosure agreement regarding Yahoo’s assets but was not able to ascertain whether the company is among those bidding to replace RMX. All Things D first reported on the Right Media talks late Friday afternoon.
Yahoo and Google each declined to comment. AppNexus and PubMatic did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The only commentary Rubicon offered was regarding its size. AppNexus is considered a front-runner in the bidding war. Publications Kellogg's, Ford Embrace Programmatic Buys: Assert They Are 'Premium,' Not Remnant 07/02. KOHLER, WISC. – Programmatic-buying of online display ad inventory has developed a reputation for being a way for performance or direct response oriented advertisers to buy cheap, “remnant” inventory that might otherwise go unsold, but the practice increasingly is being embraced by big brand marketers who believe it is a fast and efficient way to procure so-called “premium” ad impressions. The latter sentiment was championed Friday by Bob Arnold, associate director of global digital strategy for Kellogg’s during a keynote at MediaPost’s Brand Marketers Summit here.
“It’s a pretty safe prediction to say that programmatic buying is going to take over the media-buying space,” Arnold asserted, implying that as more marketers and agencies discover the premium branding benefits of the practice it will ultimately expand to include more forms of online advertising, and other media as well. Kellogg’s Arnold is not alone. “For one brand, the ROI went up over five times. The Case for E-commerce Acceleration (aka, Bye Bye BBY?) // Jeff Jordan.
Joseph Schumpeter said in his theory of “creative destruction” that the “process of industrial mutation…incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.” I believe we’re approaching a sea change in retail where physical retail is displaced by e-commerce in a multitude of categories.
The argument at a high level: Online retail is relentlessly taking share in many specialty retail categories, resulting in total dollars available to physical retailers stagnating or even declining. This is starting to put intense pressure on their top lines.Physical retailers are very highly leveraged and often have narrow profit margins. Material declines in their top lines make them unprofitable and quickly bankrupt.Online retail will benefit greatly from the elimination of their physical competition and their growth should accelerate. Source: U.S. Sundar Pichai: Chrome 'exceptionally profitable' for Google (q&a) | Internet & Media. SAN FRANCISCO--It began with a mere toolbar, an add-on that gave browsers a handy Google search box.
That modest project is what eventually led to Google Chrome, now used by 310 million people by Google's tally. It's what got the project's leader, Sundar Pichai, promoted to senior vice president of Chrome and Apps. And it's what led to a very lucrative new source of profit for the company. Chrome has spread steadily over its three-and-a-half years of public existence. It launched on Windows, extended to OS X and to Linux personal computers in the months afterward, exited beta testing on Android yesterday, and arrived on iOS today .
It makes the company money by driving search ads to Google and, less directly, by helping enable online services such as Google Docs. One particularly nice Chrome attribute for Google's bottom line: unlike with searches that come in from Safari or Firefox, Chrome searches are more profitable. Q: Let's start with the big picture: Why build Chrome? Uniformity? Your personal data is not worth anywhere near what you think it's worth. I see a lot of Root Markets-like businesses. Companies creating a way for people to own their own data and profit from it rather than letting someone else profit from it. The idea is appealing: other people are selling your data, it's your data, why shouldn't you sell it yourself? But most of the people I talk to don't have a good answer to the basic business question: can you sell your product or service for more than it costs you to buy or make it?
In this case, can you sell personal data for more than it costs to garner it? Well, can you? The IAB says that in 2011 there was $31.74 billion in US interactive ad spend [pdf]. Here is a breakdown of this per capita number, by channel, and a guess as to how much is potentially available for third party data sellers: The $130 needs to pay for several different functions.
If this is right, and given the fuzziness of the IAB numbers, it means that there is maybe $1.00 to $1.50 per person's data per month available to data sellers. Take context. How will DoubleClick stack up? It almost had to happen. Ad stacks are proliferating across the digital media landscape, and corporate behemoths such as IBM and Adobe are refining and growing their suites of digital marketing and advertising software offerings. All the while, Google has been very quiet on the display advertising front. No longer. Yesterday at DoubleClick Insights, Google announced its commitment to going full-bore into the stack wars with what Neal Mohan, vice president, display advertising, described to me in an advanced briefing as "the biggest upgrade in DoubleClick history. " Everything advertising at Google -- search, the Google Display Network, AdSense, text ads, rich media, YouTube, and mobile advertising (AdMob) -- will be combined into a new brand: a digital advertising suite dubbed DoubleClick Digital Marketing.
DoubleClick Digital Marketing Manager -- an upgraded version of the DoubleClick ad server, the control panel for ad scheduling, delivery, reporting, and more across premium media. Congress Should Pass The Startup Act 2.0. Editor’s note: Steve Case is chairman and CEO of Revolution, as well as co-founder of AOL. Follow him on Twitter @stevecase. For investors, Washington policymakers, casual observers of the stock market, and members of the media, the big story for entrepreneurs over the last few weeks has been the highly anticipated initial public offering of Facebook. While the largest tech IPO in history won the news cycle, there was an equally important, if not overlooked story for entrepreneurs brewing over on Capitol Hill.
A bipartisan group of senators joined together to unveil a bill called the Startup Act 2.0. Democrats Mark Warner and Chris Coons, and Republicans Marco Rubio and Jerry Moran, failed to read the memo stating that Washington can’t come together and pass meaningful legislation in an election year. More than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. were founded by immigrants or their children, and these firms alone employ over 10 million individuals. Publications Google Integrates Content Experiments With Analytics To Optimize Sites 06/04. Google turned content testing into dynamic marketing Friday with the integration of Content Experiments into Google Analytics. The tool rolls out in the next few weeks, allowing marketers to measure, test and optimize the best Web site design, layout and content for any visitor. It replaces Google Website Optimizer, which ends August 1. The goal of optimizing a site and increasing product sales means finding the best version of a page for a specific site.
Marketers can create up to six versions of a page and show diverse versions to different visitors. Google Analytics measures the efficacy of the versions of each page. Content Experiments tracks how each visitor converts, given the version of the page they see. It allows marketers to examine results in progress, including the number of conversions and the conversion rate for the original page and each variation, as well as the likelihood of each variation to outperform the original.
Dynamic ad targeting works similarly. MBA Mondays: Optimal Headcount At Various Stages. This is the third post in the MBA Mondays series on People. The number of people you have in your company at any time is a very important part of getting the company building process right. Too many and you will slow things down, burn through too much cash, and increase management overhead for no real benefit.
Too few and you will be resource constrained and unable to grow as fast as you'd like. I will say upfront that different types of businesses will require different employee bases and that my experience is really limited to software based businesses and within that sector, mostly consumer internet projects. So if you are working outside of the software business, I am not sure how useful this post will be.
I have a strong bias on this topic and that is that less is more. I have tackled this topic of headcount before in the post on Burn Rate. Building Product Stage – I would strongly recommend keeping the monthly burn below $50k per month at this stage. Données publiques / Open Data. What’s the Biggest Myth About Online Advertising? Earlier this week, Digiday highlighted a post from ComScore’s Kirby Winfield listing his top myths of online advertising. It inspired us to ask other industry leaders for their top myths.
Judging from the replies, it’s time to stop calling banners and clicks worthless, start questioning how new “native advertising” is, and acting like digital is going to take over from traditional media. Please add your own myths in the comments. Ian Schafer, CEO, Deep Focus @ischafer Online advertising is filled with more myths than Thor’s Kindle. But the one that’s captured my fancy recently is the myth of the Newfront. The TV upfronts are meant to create a competitive marketplace for brands to synchronously reach large audiences with scarce, premium inventory. Online video is delivered asynchronously, with no track record of being able to produce “hits.” Randy Kilgore, chief revenue officer, Tremor Video There are those who feel that all digital companies share an agenda to “change the world.” Confessions of a DSP Salesperson. For this week’s confession, we interviewed a demand-side platform sales person about what this person sees as the hype versus reality of programmatic buying.
What’s it like working for a DSP? Anyone that has not worked at a DSP or a trading desk, consider yourself lucky. It is the cesspool of our industry, with the DSPs racing towards an acquisition or IPO and the trading desks trying to validate themselves as valuable within the holding companies. It is a sweatshop environment on both sides, with workers who are bludgeoned from the top down.
It is terribly unfortunate, as there are a lot of very bright and talented people that work there and went there for the right reasons. As my father says, you sit by a cesspool long enough, you are bound to get shit on you. What are the biggest flaws of programmatic buying? Are agency trading desks white-labeling DSP technology and claiming they are doing something special?
Are DSPs arbitraging? How different are DSPs than ad networks? At ANA Conference, Holding Co Desk CEOs Pledge Alignment With Agencies. Holding company trading desks are moving to embed their capabilities locally within operating agencies, rather than operating entirely from a remote corporate hub. Speaking at the Association of National Advertisers' financial management conference today in Boca Raton, Florida, the heads of WPP's Xaxis and Interpublic Group's Mediabrands Audience Platform acknowledged client fears about mandates and double dipping and said they're ready to disperse programmatic media execution throughout their sister agencies. In the case of IPG's trading desk at least, the transition is well underway. Talking with AdExchanger after the panel, Media Audience Platform CEO Brendan Moorcroft said 20-plus staff now work directly with agency teams at Initiative and Universal McCann, and most of those are embedded at agency offices.
Additionally it has staff at Deutsch offering media execution. WPP's Xaxis is a somewhat harder case, being known for a more fixed and centralized structure to begin with. Is it a Tech Bubble?…NO…Just too many Wantrepreneurs. JOBS Act: Senate Adds Crowdfunding Provision, But It's Not Law Yet. Publications How Much Energy Does The Internet Use? 04/23. Google produces more than a quarter of a million kilograms of CO2 annually to power searches -- enough to run a freezer for 5,400 years. That's according to WordStream, which put together an infograph to tell us how much technology pollutes the planet. How much does the energy it takes to run the Internet affect the world we live in? Did you know that one spam message produces the equivalent of 0.3 grams of CO2? And what about the 62 trillion emails sent each year?
Those emails produce as much CO2 as 1.6 million cars driving around the earth. WordStream also gives us the benefits of the Internet. Telecommuting allows many people to work from home. Google recites a slightly different story. Google claims that to provide its products for one month, the company's data servers use less energy per user than leaving a light on for 3 hours. Similar to search, Google calculated the carbon dioxide emissions for everyday activities and compared them to YouTube and Gmail.
The Best 25 Places To Live If You're Starting A Startup. Publications Emerging Techs Could Influence Google's Earnings Report 04/12. Ex-Facebook insiders building next wave of Silicon Valley firms. Royal Canadian Mint’s “MintChip” Looks To Officially Digitize Cash. Subscription business models are getting their day in the sun. How Does Y Combinator Scale Y Combinator? Data Streaming May Transform a Host of Industries. The Market Curve: The Life Cycle Of New Technology Markets. A Call for Transparency: Are Dynamic Price Floors Good for the Industry? Yahoo, AOL Can Thrive Again By Rethinking How They Sell Ads.
MyThings picks up $15M to improve display ads. Publications 1 in 5 Tech Firms Rejected a Job Applicant Because of Social Media 03/19. Publications Publicis, FTO Invest $400M In Digital Startups 03/13. Virtual Currency Is The Next Big Platform. These Incredible Photos Show Parisian Life In The Early 20th Century. Billionaires Index News. Isis Reveals New POS Partnerships With Verifone, Ingenico And ViVOtech. Key Takeaways From The Facebook Marketing Conference. Chris Anderson: Pourquoi le prix TED 2012 a-t-il été attribué à la "ville 2.0"? Privacy, Data Decisions and More: Q&A With Turn CEO & President Bill Demas and Pierre Naggar, Managing Director EU. Amazon Has Big Ad Plans, But Trading Desks Obstruct | Digital. Facebook Page Insights Goes Real-Time. Publications Virtual Good Sales Hit $2.3 Billion In 2011 03/01.
Publications The 'Futures' Of Ad Exchanges? 02/29. Publications Digital Ad Execs: Trading Desks Emerge As Big Factor In 2012 Buys 02/29. Nat Turner (There are two ways to increase ROI) Submissions | NYC BigApps 3.0. Publications IAB Debuts 5 Mobile Ad Units 02/28. Opera Takes Over Payments In Its App Store; Inks Deal With Yandex In Russia. On stage at IAB: Daring to get the most out of online advertising for publishers, advertisers. Isis Revealed: Carrier-Led Mobile Payments Venture Shows Off Its New App, Announces Banking Partners.
16 Chinese Startups Came Out With A Bang At The ChinaBang Conference. Ahead Of Funding News, Boku Debuts NFC-Enabled Mobile Payments Platform For Carriers, Merchants And Consumers. Un salarié français coûte en moyenne 50 850 euros par an à son employeur. Agencies Must Embrace Performance Pricing. Entrepreneurship is an Art not a Job. Publications Time Spent In Mobile Far Outpaces Ad Spending 02/21. Beyond Facebook: The Rise Of Interest-Based Social Networks. Mobile Advertising Is The Baby Huey Of The Media World (And Apple Is Taking The Low Road) The DeanBeat: Crowd-funding gives hope to mid-size game developers. 5 Blogs Every Startup Founder Needs To Follow.