Another big move for Buddy Media as it continues to build out the services it offers as part of its social media marketing business: the company has hired sales supremo Susan St. Ledger as its new president.
She is joining Buddy Media from Salesforce.com, where she had been for the past seven years in a number of key roles. They included (most recently) SVP of industry verticals, where she was in charge of relationships with Salesforce.com’s biggest clients in technology, financial services, insurance, media and telecoms.
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With somewhat coincidental (?) timing, given this week’s Facebook Marketing Conference, a new article published today by Bloomberg Businessweek takes a deep dive into Twitter’s advertising’s business. Twitter is the other major social network after big brands’ ad dollars, and although its 100 million active members pale compared with Facebook’s 800 million+, there is the potential for a different kind of ad targeting arising on Twitter. The company is going after the “interest graph,” a concept we’ve covered in some detail before.
An interest graph is different than the social graph provided by Facebook, which looks at connections, likes, and detailed demographic data like hometown, age, education and more, in order to narrowly target specific groups with ads. Instead, the interest graph is about what you like, what you read, and, generally, what kind of person you are. But the question is, can Twitter get a better read on users’ interests and personalities than Facebook can?
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As we approach the date for Facebook’s meet-up with brands and marketers in New York, here’s another development in the world of Facebook that points to growing sophistication around social advertising.
Techlightenment, a division of Experian and Facebook’s first partner when it launched APIs for ads in 2010, has now upgraded its Alchemy platform to work more closely with Facebook’s Timeline and Sponsored Stories features, a move that also puts the platform in position for any future advertising developments that Facebook has in store. → Read More
Twitter says that 70 percent of its users come from outside the U.S. at the moment, and so it makes sense that this is where it is also investing more to grow the rest of its business. Today the company announced that it has appointed another sales executive to beef up its efforts outside its home market.
Stephen McIntyre, most recently of Google, will be overseeing Twitter’s international self-serve business, based out of Twitter’s European HQ in Dublin, which Twitter opened in September 2011.
McIntyre’s appointment comes about a week after reports emerged that Shailesh Rao, currently based in New Delhi, India, would be leaving Google to join Twitter. Rao is now Twitter’s new VP of international revenue. → Read More
Research firm eMarketer has put together a few interesting data points that show Google doing better in display ads than you might have realized. That is, by growing this business across properties that it at some point acquired – YouTube, DoubleClick, and mobile (AdMob) – it’s set to pass Facebook’s own display business.
The social network had the highest online ad sales of any company in the US last year, at $1.73 billion. But that was a mere $200 million or so above Google. This year, eMarketer expects a similar story, with Facebook bringing in $2.58 billion versus Google’s $2.54 billion. Things change in 2013 and 2014, further off from what the data can tell us accurately. → Read More
Twitter is now accepting sign-ups from small businesses that want to participant in its self-serve ad program.
The self-serve rollout was reported this afternoon by Ad Age and others, and the sign-up page is now live. In a promotion with American Express, Twitter offering a $100 credit for free advertising to the first 10,000 businesses that register — you just have to accept American Express cards, or be a cardholder yourself. Oh, and the sign-up process also requires you to follow American Express on Twitter. → Read More
Marin Software, a company that helps advertisers manage large online ad campaigns, has raised $30 million in a new round of funding.
Founded in 2006, Marin initially offered tools to manage search advertising campaigns, but it has expanded into display, mobile, and social media campaigns, and the company now bills itself as “the world’s leading online advertising management platform.” Marin says it doubled its customer base in the last year and now works with more than 1,500 advertisers and advertising agencies, who use the company’s services to manage $3.5 billion in annualized ad spending. → Read More
As part of its 2012 US Digital Future in Focus whitepaper, comScore looked at the online ad landscape and found a mix of old and new names. The report includes a list of the top 10 display advertisers in the United States (all of this data is US-only), as measured by impressions. As in previous years, AT&T topped the list, but there’s a newcomer — Google, which delivered 40.4 billion ads for products like Chrome, Google Offers, and Google+.
Large brand advertising on the Internet is growing in general, comScore says. To quantify that, it measured the number of advertisers delivering at least 1 billion impressions per quarter. There were 145 advertisers in that league during the final quarter of 2011, up 38 percent from the same period in 2010. → Read More
Startup SoftKinetic just announced a new kind of advertising, one that combines its gesture-control technology with Intel’s video analytics.
The goal is for people to walk up to a digital display equipped with SoftKinetic’s 3D camera and move their arms (or the rest of their body) to interact with the display, similar to Microsoft Kinect. Then, as you’re moving, Intel’s AIM technology can identify your age and gender, which is crucial information for advertisers — and also useful for personalizing the content to each viewer. → Read More
A month after its expansion to Android, Chartboost, the newly launched (already profitable) direct deals mobile ad marketplace for game developers is expanding to Asia. Starting today, the company is rolling out localized versions in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
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Independent mobile ad network InMobi has released its Mobile Market 2011 Review report today, finding significant growth in mobile advertising over the past year, with global smartphone impressions up by 488%. The company also saw 251% growth in mobile impressions on its network, which includes tablet devices and smartphones combined.
Tablet impressions alone grew by an incredible 771% year-over-year, up to 1.2 billion. And the market is growing still, led by, of course, Apple’s iPad. → Read More
San Francisco-based 4Mads is a new, angel-funded startup in the adtech space which allows SMB’s and local brands the ability to create both online and mobile rich media ads. The service, which has been in private testing for the past year, just went live this week with the launch of its one-stop shop and easy to use, drag-and-drop tools.
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Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Samsung launched its advertising platform, Samsung AdHub, for Samsung Smart TVs. With the new service, publishers and brands will be able to deliver video, 3D, and interactive advertisements to the living room through the Samsung Smart TV interface.
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Adzerk, the ad-serving technology startup which raised $650K in seed funding this July, is launching its next phase, called adOS. The new platform is intended as an evolution of its current product, and is offering improved ad-serving code plus a marketplace where publishers can find third-party apps to install. Yep – it’s an app store for ad tech. → Read More
Twitter unveiled a major redesign today which will be rolling out slowly. We’ve covered some of the main aspects already such as the new timeline and discover features, as well as how Twitter is trying to become more mainstream and accessible.
One major change for brands, however, is new brand pages. Not everyone can see what these look like yet, so I’ve pasted some screenshots here from @AmericanExpress, @generalelectric, @JetBlue, and @@McDonalds. The two big changes are a new banner just below the profile information that stretches across the page and the ability to pin a tweet at the top of each brand’s stream. This will give brands a more distinctive presence on Twitter, and should roll out more widely in the first quarter of 2012. → Read More
Chartboost, the newly launched (already profitable) direct deals marketplace for mobile game developers is today announcing its expansion to Android. The company provides free ad-serving technology for direct deals and cross-promotions via its Chartboost SDK, allowing publishers to retain 100% of the revenue share on their direct deals. Meanwhile, the company’s opt-in ad network offers revenue sharing with publishers to help fill unsold inventory.
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The Justice Dept. finally gave the greenlight today to Google’s proposed $400 million acquisition of AdMeld. The deal was announced in June, and the review took almost six months. The government will not impose any major restrictions on the deal, which is now free to close in the next few days.
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Washington, D.C.-based video indexing and discovery startup Veenome has raised $500, 000 in seed funding from Ecosystem Ventures (investors in Tube Mogul and Facebook), plus private angel investors from Google, Dingman Center Angels, as well as Chegg founder Aayush Phumhra and the founder of WebMetrics Tim Drees.
The company uses proprietary automated video recognition technology to scan video clips for products, brands and objects which can be tagged and indexed. → Read More
As Erick wrote in September, over the course of the last year, Fotopedia has been hard at work at trying to reinvent the photo book for the iPad. To date, the so-called “Wikipedia for photos” has launched seven apps, two of which have been in partnership with National Geographic, and has racked up 5.2 million downloads since August of last year.
In September, as part of turning its attention to creating more magazine-like experiences, it launched the Fotopedia Magazine on Flipboard, which highlights five photo essays each day of the week from the company’s impressive bullpen of high-end photographers. And, today, Fotopedia is launching its eighth app and, in turn, is embarking on a new initiative that aims to leverage its photographic talent to begin creating branded experiences in magazine form, combining advertising with “premium content”. → Read More
Here’s some good news for web video publishers and producers. Online video advertising budgets are expected to jump sharply in 2012. Brand advertisers who purchased online video ads this year are projected to spend 47 percent more next year. These numbers were released this morning in the second annual “Video State of the Industry Survey” by Adap.tv and Digiday.
For advertisers that didn’t purchase any video ads so far this year, 84% say they will include digital video in their campaigns in Q4 2011 or 2012.
Advertisers say they are most likely to shift spending away from display and print ads to fund the increased online video spending. While some have feared online video might start replacing TV ad spending, the report claims television ad budgets, especially for cable, are safe for now. A majority of advertisers say online video ads are a direct compliment to TV, not a replacement for TV ads. → Read More
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