Industry News

Major publishers need to catch up with agency media buyers and rapidly adopt new technologies to boost their creative capabilities, arm their sales and operations teams with new technologies and focus on the development of high quality audiences. That is the conclusion of Forrester Research in a comprehensive study investigating The State Of The Digital Media Buyer.

Agency online display media buyers on the other hand are buying through a variety of direct and indirect sales channels and are rapidly adopting ad buying systems with new ad buying technologies such as dynamic ad creation and audience targeting and are embracing new buying methods like real-time bidding, according to Forrester Research. More than half of agency digital media buyers reported that they buy through a mix of direct sales, ad networks and DSPs/trading desks.

Forrester also found that while content-based buys continue to make up the bulk of publisher display revenues, sizable budgets are now allocated to audience-targeted buys. In fact, 35% of agency display media buyers surveyed spend a majority of their display budgets on audience-targeted buys.

Reach to a specific audience segments and audience targeting capabilities are the top two criteria buyers look for in a digital publisher partner. That is no surprise because with the exception of perhaps Yahoo, no individual digital publisher can deliver the scale across all audience targets of network TV.

One-third of online display media buyers plan to focus the bulk of their buys on “high-impact” placements, like custom sponsorships and in-stream video, while 43% plan to push audience targeting to the forefront of their display plans. Source

While more and more daily deal services are launching each week and their popularity among consumers is rising, there is conflicting information about the longevity of the daily deal space in general and whether daily deals are actually paying off for merchants.

Are Daily Deals Generating Repeat Business?
Many small businesses are skeptical about the long-term payoff of daily deals and whether they are generating repeat business. In a recent survey among small businesses, MerchantCircle revealed that the leading reason for liking daily deals was customer acquisition (58%) while at the same time ineffective customer acquisition was also listed as the top reason for not offering a daily deal again (42.4%). Source

Hearst Magazines Launching Daily Deals With Group Commerce
Hearst magazines has partnered with the Group Commerce, a New York-based group-buying discounts platform, to enter the daily deal group-buying space. Offers will start to roll out for readers of Road & Track and Car & Driver sites and will later be expanded to other well-known magazine properties as Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and Esquire.

Group Commerce, which launched in March, has builds turn-key white label group buying solutions that include best-practice merchandising strategy and sourcing, an extensive set of publisher administration tools. It has recently launched with other major media outlets, such as DailyCandy, Thrillist and the New York Times. The company has grown to 75 employees.

The Road & Track and Car & Driver deals will be promoted through the online magazines sites and through social media channels, such as blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and mobile apps.

Magazines, and newspapers in particular, have always had content and advertising – from classifieds to display ads – that people have been interested in. Leveraging the readers that those publications already have makes sense considering the massive marketing machines already assembled by Groupon and LivingSocial and the upcoming wider distribution of Google Offers. Source

Ex-LivingSocial Sales Rep: Dealy Deal Space Ready For Major Shakeout
The people that make Groupon, LivingSocial and many other daily deal group-buying companies run are the thousands of Yellow Pages-type sales people that are constantly hitting up local merchants, asking them to spend their small marketing budgets with them, and not on local search ads with Google, the Yellow Pages or the local newspaper.

Business Insider arranged an interesting interview with a former LivingSocial sales rep, who revealed that the daily deal industry is getting saturated and is setting itself up for an “implosion and a major shakeout.” According to the rep there are way too many daily deals companies competing for the same merchants. In New York alone there are 155 companies in this space and they have all sales people knocking on doors.

Local merchants, on the other hand, are getting smarter about what kind of deals they should and should not be offering consumers. They are also making deals less attractive because they want too many restrictions such as days of the week that it’s valid, blackout dates, times of day that it’s valid, is it good for any meal or is it just for brunch? 50% off deals are a thing of the past. Source

NBCUniversal has recently rolled out, as part of its Universal Audience Platform (UAP), a private digital ad exchange based on technology from yield optimization firm AdMeld. The reason behind this move is NBCUniversal’s desire to reduce the reliance on third-party ad exchanges and to stop the downward spiral of CPM prices for uncommitted digital ad inventory. Private ad exchanges can accomplish this better for the premium digital web sites of large publishers, where they can set specific price limits, then 3^rd party ad exchange networks.

By launching this private exchange, NBCUniversal can work directly with its agency and media partners, allowing them to deal directly with trusted and premium content sources, offering them more informed and targeted advertising buys and better pricing.

Using the supply-side real-time bidding technology from Admeld and audience data from BlueKai, Nielsen and Quantcast, NBCUniversal can target its most valuable audience segments, as well as restrict access to a select group of buyers. They can also set granular rules around pricing.

The Universal Audience Platform network features inventory from a wide range of the NBCUniversal Entertainment sites, including bravotv.com, nbc.com, oxygen.com, syfy.com, usanetwork.com, cnbc.com, accesshollywood.com, mun2.com, nbcsports.com, the 10 NBC Owned Television station websites, telemundo.com and mun2.tv.

NBC Universal’s Audience Platform inventory is sold solely by targeting audiences, not web sites. Source

Google’s latest gambit to build traffic to its Google+ sharing network is the creation of Google News Badges. The search giant will now award badges to regular readers of Google News, something that they will be able to tout on Google Plus.

To earn badges, you must be signed into your Google Account and have Web history enabled. Then each time you read a story on Google News your reading choice will be recorded and its off to the races.

The important good news is that badges are turned off by default, so if you want to enter the browsing Olympics, you will have to turn them on. And if you’d prefer to keep some of your reading private, Google allows you to do that as well.

The unanswered question in all of this is whether acquiring News Badges will earn you authority points in some future social media algorythm. That could be a game changer.

Here’s a hint about whether Google thinks they can create a reading competition, In a posting explaining News Badges, Google helpfully points out that it’s better to read a few stories every day than try to cram them all into a single session.

So if you miss those bygone days of campfires and merit badges, take a whirl on Google News. At least you won’t have to sleep on hard ground. Source:

For which platform should you develop first, iPhone or Android? It doesn’t matter, according to Foundry Group VC Brad Feld. The reason it doesn’t matter, Feld said, is that both platforms now have enough reach now. For paid apps monetization the iPhone is still better, Feld granted. So if you want to sell native iPhone apps via the Apple App Store, at least in the short term, it is better to focus on iOS, but that’s it.

A lot of people have been saying for a very long time that the iPhone is a much better platform than Android, and it’s pretty striking that things have come so far so fast. Android’s share of the smartphone market is growing fast and it is still blowing away all competitors in the US, including Apple. According to recent data from comScore, Android increased its market share by 5.1% over the last 3 months ending May 2011, while Apple’s iOS share grew only 1.4%, so the iOS may be technically a better platform than Android in terms of easiness to program and to transact, but Android is growing so fast that it basically doesn’t matter anymore.

Google’s earnings call last week has highlighted Android massive growth even more. Google revealed that there are around 130 million Android devices currently in the hands of mobile users and they are seeing 550,000 new activations daily, up from 400,000 in May 2011. Compare this to Apple iOS activations, which number 325,000 iPhones and iPads a day. iOS is still in the lead, but Android is completely poised to catch up if Google can maintain its growth. Source

According to Forbes, Facebook is in talks with about a dozen major news organizations to create special News Editions of their publications in the form of a Facebook app versions within its platform. With Google+ becoming a 10 million member social network community overnight, Facebook may be thinking more about how to keep current users on the Facebook platform than growing beyond 700 million members. A partnership with large news organizations, including CNN, the Washington Post and The Daily, would help Facebook keeping users on its platform for news consumption, instead of having them click away to these publishers’ Web sites whenever users shared an interesting link or news story. The partnerships will also give publishers an opportunity to get on board with multiple platforms to make insure there’s plenty of competition which could change the dynamic for publishers, who may find that playing one against the other may gives them the leverage they lacked until now.

Facebook will likely be asking for a cut of revenues generated by subscriptions and advertising sales generated by the app editions.

The first Facebook editions are expected to launch later this year, perhaps in September. Source

Now that more than 300 Groupon clones are actively pursuing consumers with daily deals, it would only take time before someone would come up with PriceLine-like consumer driven deals. SoBiz10 is one of the newer entrants pursuing this “reverse deal” model. Here is how it works. You get 10 friends together and tell merchants what kind of deal you want and even, in some cases, how much of a discount you expect and SoBiz10 helps you pitch the deal to selected merchants or merchants within specific categories. The entire process is automated, prices must be over $5, merchants have 48 hours to say yes, and offers expire after 30 days. For its effort, SoBiz10 takes a 25 percent cut as a commission – at least 5 percent less than low-end commission for most deal sites.

SoBiz10 is not the only player in this space, other are Wantsa, Ringleadr and Loopt “U-Deals”. In the services arena, Sears’ ServiceLive has adopted the same approach. Source

Earlier this week Electronic Arts agreed to buy social game developer PopCap Games for $650 in cash, $100 mln in Electronic Arts stock and as much as $500 mln more of 2013 when sales targets are hit. Apparently Zynga was also in the running to buy PopCap Games for $1 billion in cash. Another contender that was bidding for PopCap Games turned out to be Terlent, a Chinese gaming company, but that offer was not seriously considered.

PopCap employes 475 people world-wide and claims its games have been downloaded 1.5 million times.

Electronic Arts has secured $550 million in bridge financing from Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and UBS and was advised by Morgan Stanley and UBS.

The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2011. Source

Ecommerce web sites that have their products indexed in Google Product Search via the product data feed need to be prepared to make major changes to their product data feed preparation methods. As of September 22, 2011 Google will be making sweeping changes to the feed specifications and update the policy for new feeds and those feeds that are already in place. This new set of specifications are targeted to improve the shopping experience of Google Shopping Search users. The key changes fall in the areas of availability, product category, images (image link), apparel (size and color attribute) and data freshness.

This is the second major Google Shopping Search feed specification update this year. Last May Google added unique product identifiers, shipping information and tax information attributes to the feed specification. Source

Spotify’s entry into the US could still be months away, at least until they nail more deals with major US music labels. So far only has Sony signed on, but Sporify needs additional deals with at least Universal Music Group, the world’s largest label, and ideally also with EMI.

Another indicator that a launch in the US is at least a month away, according to All Things Digital, is a note to a select group of US users that has free access to the service is going to end and that they are going to have to start paying sooner or later. And it says Spotify is looking forward to a US launch in “the coming months.”

From a deck of Spotify marketing materials, obtained by AllThingsD, we can learn more about the planned integration with Facebook in the US. It notes that Facebook users will see music in their news feed and will be able to click through to subscribe to the service. The deck also notes that a Spotify tab application will allow Pages to offer their fans a music experience.

It is currently unclear whether Spotify will get any preferential treatment within the Facebook platform. It could appear as a part of the Music Dashboard that Facebook is planning to launch or appear as a separate app with premium placement, or as a standard platform app in the form of a Page tab application.

If Spotify manages to launch in the US ahead of Facebook’s own Music Dashboard, it could get a head start on establishing itself on Facebook, before the other streaming services Facebook may aggregate in the Music Dashboard, have a chance. Source