Voice-marketing company Vontoo has secured $2 million in a second-round financing led by EDF Ventures. The Indianapolis-based startup will use the funds to expand sales, marketing and business development staff with the goal of tripling revenue and doubling staff to 50 in 2009. Vontoo's technology allows companies to send and track marketing voicemail messages targeted to a particular audience. The system can also be used to send notifications and alerts, and integrate voice communications into a company's existing software applications. Among Vontoo's highest-profile clients to date have been sports franchises such as the Cleveland Browns and Memphis Grizzlies, which have used its voice-messaging services to drive ticket sales. The company recently said its voice-marketing tools comply with a new Federal Trade Commission rule requiring telemarketers to provide consumers with an opt-out mechanism such as a key press at the start of all automated messages. Vontoo said its system was designed to allow someone to opt out at any time during a call. But the FTC rule--effective since Dec. 1-- specifically requires the opt-out message to play at the start of sales and solicitation calls, and that messages left on voicemail systems or answering machines provide a toll-free phone number to prevent further calls. Roughly three-quarters of the company's latest investment round came from existing investors. New investors include Gregg Throgmartin, a shareholder in appliance retailer H.H. Gregg. His investment followed the company's use of Vontoo's services. Vontoo initially raised $1.8 million a year ago.
Giving rival Web TV portals a run for their money, TV.com posted a 263% increase in unique viewers in January, according to new data from Nielsen VideoCensus. To boot, during that month, the CBS-owned destination for full-length video recorded a 1,261% increase in streams, and a 4,435% increase in minutes viewed. According to Nielsen Online, meanwhile, TV.com achieved a 19% increase in monthly users in January, along with a 26% increase in visits, and a 43% increase in minutes spent on the site. "We are seeing more and more people turning to TV.com," said Anthony Soohoo, SVP of entertainment and lifestyle, CBS Interactive. Competing data, however, recently showed that TV.com was suffering from increased competition. According to comScore Video Metrix, TV.com's unique viewers dropped 55% last November to 160,000 vs. 355,000 last May. Videos per viewer, minutes per viewer, and minutes per video for the site also declined, according to the comScore service. TV.com presently competes against a number of Web TV upstarts, including Joost, Sling, Veoh, Fancast, and Hulu -- the joint video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. Hulu, for one, drew over 22 million unique viewers in November, who spent an average of two hours on the site over the course of the month. To better compete against Hulu, CBS -- which acquired TV.com along with CNet last year -- is in the process of bolstering the platform with social networking features. TV.com, which features Hulu content, more recently added CBS shows, along with content from MGM, Sony, PBS, Endemol, USA and Showtime.
Microsoft Live Search has begun several projects to understand the tasks that consumers want to accomplish on search engines before making decisions, and the steps they take to get there. But making search more efficient could put pressure on advertising networks and agencies to perfect targeting ads. People often use search engines as navigation tools. They repeatedly type in queries on Google, Live Search or Yahoo that take them from keywords such as "Amazon.com" to the URL. The more searches that are done, the more pay-per-click (PPC) and display ads are served up. Sometimes the ecommerce transaction or information queries can turn into multi-minute, multi-page, high-single-digit searches that begin as a keyword or phrase and turn into long, drawn-out processes, according to Stefan Weitz, Microsoft's director of Live Search. "Search can reduce the overall time to task," he said. "It should help people make decisions faster and smarter." Microsoft Live has added several search features such as "related queries." The results appear on the right rail. The tool returns results that Live Search thinks are related. Another tool, Opinion Index, crawls Web sites, collecting opinions and reviews. The comments are aggregated, placed into categories and divided by sentiment, so searchers can read opinions in comments made about products, services and companies that have been posted across the Web. The tool also notes the number of positive and negative remarks. For ecommerce sites, the Live Search team is developing ways to help consumers validate buying decisions. One site, recently acquired by Microsoft and supported by Microsoft Live Search, relies on analytics. Seattle-based Farecast aggregates cost and stats across airline sites to predict whether prices on specific fares will increase or decrease within a predetermined length of time. Weitz said these examples support Microsoft Live Search's view that "search is more than a keyword to a URL," and that Microsoft plans to remain in search to compete. Recognizing that search is a long-term commitment, he said "we're looking for ways for people to reduce the time it takes to search for something." But with streamlined searches comes less opportunity for advertisers to make an impression on searchers. Although Weitz declined to comment on potential affects to advertisers, David Berkowitz-- director of emerging media and client strategy at 360i, New York--said it has been a topic for discussions that has been floating through the industry for years. "Streamlining search means there will be fewer ad impressions for every search session, so there are fewer opportunities to reach consumers during the search process, but it also means the ads must be more meaningful each time they engage with consumers," Berkowitz said.
An organization that promotes rodeos has agreed to pay $25,000 to the group Showing Animals Respect & Kindness for wrongly demanding that YouTube remove the animal welfare group's clips. The dispute began in December 2007, when YouTube took down a channel created by Showing Animals Respect & Kindness, or SHARK, in response to allegations by the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association that the clips infringed its copyright. The channel showed footage of actual rodeos, with clips like "Horses Illegally Shocked at 2007 Cheyenne PRCA Rodeo," and "Rodeo Bulls--Killers, or Gentle Giants?" The events were recorded by SHARK members who attended the rodeos and who owned the copyright to the footage. SHARK had hoped to raise money that holiday season via its YouTube channel. The rodeo group alleged that the clips violated its copyright because it had not authorized SHARK to record the rodeos. But rodeos themselves are not copyrightable. SHARK protested and YouTube restored its channel--but at the end of the year, after the peak charitable donation period. The Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the rodeo group on behalf of SHARK for wrongly claiming copyright infringement. The lawsuit alleged that the rodeo organization "sent the notice in order to chill SHARK's efforts to raise public awareness of animal abuse ... and not in order to enforce any perceived copyright interest." EFF lawyer Corynne McSherry said this case was a clear-cut example of a group using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to squelch critics. "This is a particularly egregious example because the (rodeo group) simply didn't have the copyright to assert in the first place," she said. "It says to organizations: 'You will be held accountable if you use the DMCA process improperly, to silence speech.'"
In hopes of getting its first big break in an online video series sponsorship, AT&T is helping a small Seattle rock band get its next big break. The two-man band, Head Like A Kite, is the star of a new eight-part Web video series "On The Brink" being sponsored by AT&T and being distributed by Broadband Enterprises Inc. across some 2,000 affiliated sites, including www.onthebrinkshow.com. The reality show follows band members Dave Einmo and Trent Moorman on stage, back stage and on the road, and that's where the AT&T connection really comes in via a series of product integration deals that help Einmo and Moorman stay connected with friends, family and the rest of the world while playing college towns, local bars and larger venues in search of stardom. "One minute you're in front of thousands of people and they love you and you feel it. The next minute, you're offstage, on the road-and the road gets pretty lonely," confides Einmo. "We needed a way to connect with the people we love." AT&T was happy to provide that connectivity and reap some product integration bonus points in the process. Einmo and Moorman are seen relying on AT&T's Samsung Propel and Pantech Matrix over the course of the eight-part series. "What's cool about this, is they are not celebrities - yet," says Heather Buffington, a spokesperson for AT&T who worked on the project. "What you've got is a couple of guys who have a group, who are ascending, but you don't know if they're actually going to make it. You're peeking in and watching as they try." The sponsorship, which also includes conventional pre-roll ads for AT&T products, is the first ongoing Web series advertising buy of its kind by AT&T. Buffington declined to disclose the size of AT&T's advertising commitment to the series, but she indicated it is part of a broader online video outreach designed to reach young, mobile adults with relevant online content. "On The Brink" runs through the end of February.
Twitter may not have a business model yet, but that hasn't stopped the hot social media company from raising additional capital. The micro-blogging service on Friday announced new funding from Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners. While Twitter did not disclose the amount, TechCrunch is reporting the startup raised $35 million in the third-round financing that also included existing investors Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone indicated in a Friday blog post that the financing would help speed the company's efforts to start making money from its wildly popular service. "We are now positioned extremely well to support the accelerating growth of our service, further enable the robust ecosystem sprouting up around Twitter, and yes, to begin building revenue-generating products," wrote Stone. "Throughout this year and beyond, our small team will grow much bigger to meet the challenges and opportunities ahead." In an interview with U.K.-based Marketing magazine this week, Stone suggested that the company is exploring charging for commercial Twitter accounts and creating revenue-generating features that capitalize on how brands use the service as both a marketing and customer-service tool. To date, Twitter has raised a little over $20 million in venture funding. Rumors circulated at the time of Facebook's failed acquisition of Twitter last fall that put its valuation at $250 million. According to Stone, active Twitter users have increased 900% in the last year. A report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project released Thursday estimated that 11% of U.S. Web users are actively Twittering. The company's newfound status as a cultural phenomenon was confirmed this week by the "Shorty Awards," an awards ceremony held in New York on Wednesday night recognizing the best "tweets," the 140-character messages sent via Twitter.
Throughout January, many of the major technical publications in our space and most technical blogs have agreed that 2009 is shaping up to be the year of cloud computing. From lead articles in InfoWeek and CNet to events such as SoftwareAG's Cloud Computing Innovation Day, Under the Radar, AdMonsters and the DCIA's events, it seems that cloud computing will dominate discussions throughout our industry. So what does cloud computing mean for the world of Interactive Advertising? Ad-serving on the web began in the early-mid 1990s. Many display publishers still rely on systems that haven't changed a whole lot since then. This seems inconsistent because most people in the interactive ad business consider themselves technologists not marketers. Unfortunately, there haven't been many new options or technological breakthroughs in the last 15 years to change the ad serving landscape. Ad serving has always been about supply and demand, but with so many variables, it takes some pretty fancy software and diligent sales staff to track everything. Even then, revenue is lost. Publishers have multiple constraints today: overlapping target audiences, campaign conflicts, inventory geographically or seasonally constrained. Add multiple remnant ad networks and ad exchanges to the mix, getting the most out of every impression and not leaving money on the table has become a very complex, labor intensive task. Media buyers and ad ops folks will be the first to tell you that there is no standard or easy way to handle inventory management, forecasting and optimization for premium guaranteed cpm display inventory. Current ad serving models do not account for future inventory availability or demand which drives both pricing and of course, revenue. Most ad servers use historical data to determine what ads should be served. Historical modeling for risk and inventory allocation makes sense in some contexts, particular where there is a predictable pattern. But looking backward does not work well for interactive advertising for the very reason that demand, and factors like seasonal targeting, rely on future events. Inevitably then, display inventory allocation or pricing based on past events is not accurate. Optimally, trafficking and operations staff would prefer to allocate order delivery with greater insight into what is actually available and what is likely to happen based on fact and not sampling or conjecture. To maximize revenue, publishers must make the most of every impression and allocate orders as efficiently as possible. It makes more sense to know in real-time how an ad server will deliver an order when scheduling new orders or making changes to existing orders. That's where cloud computing can make a difference in today's ad serving world. For the uninitiated, cloud computing is a network of servers and connections collectively known as "the cloud." In cloud computing the network becomes a supercomputer. When a request is made to the cloud, tasks are assigned to a combination of connections, software and services within the network. So instead of being tied to a single limited server, cloud enabled platforms can access a very powerful network providing a clear path to manage scale, data complexity and speed. With cloud computing technology, massive amounts of complex data can be accessed, processed and computed at one time, producing real time results. The cloud combined with proprietary algorithms, analytics and a special purpose database provides highly reliable revenue and sell-through forecasts at the product level and allows for granular inventory forecasts for many different products at the same time. The immediacy of all this information enables advertising sales teams to make smart decisions about pricing and targeting, behavioral and contextual. Because a cloud computing analytics model can provide clear understanding of availability, under delivery and value, sales teams can take proactive steps to correct course and maximize yield. With this kind of proactive knowledge the sales teams can better communicate with clients and internal stakeholders to identify the best options. Cloud computing is truly what's hot this year. But what is really important to interactive is that this new technology will finally move the needle for delivering value to marketers and publishers alike. Analysts covering the ad serving space have said for years that the old model is fatally flawed because it uses historical modeling to solve uniquely dynamic, forward-looking, multi-variant supply-demand equations. Having proactive modeling and more accurate inventory knowledge and forecasting won't solve every revenue problem for publishers in this troubled economy, but it will certainly enable them to maximize the opportunities that do exist. For those of you in ad operations I suggest that you take a few steps to get educated and ensure your organization is taking full advantage of cloud computing: 1) Talk to your tech team and understand if you can leverage cloud computing to solve your internal data volume challenges 2) Take the time to understand how your data is gathered and processed; is it sampled or based on summary information that is missing granularity 3) Schedule meetings with your vendors and have them brief you on their use of cloud computing and how it could improve the reliability of their products