In a move that seems lateral at best, NBCUniversal digital sales chief Peter Naylor has been named executive vice president-sales for NBC News Digital, with responsibility for sales of nbcnews.com, msnbc.com, today.com and cnbc.com, as well as ivillage.com. Naylor, who previously was executive vice president-digital media sales for all of NBCUniversal for the past six years, is well known as a digital media industry leader, and is current chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, as well as treasurer of the Online Publishers Association. Naylor’s new role is part of a restructuring of NBCU’s sales organization announced Thursday by Linda Yaccarino, who was recently named president of ad sales for the entire company. In his previous role, Naylor also oversaw ad sales for NBCU’s digital sports and entertainment properties including NBC.com, NBCSports.com and NBCOlympics.com, SyFy.com, Oxygen.com, Bravotv.com, USANetwork.com, AccessHollywood.com and the Universal Audience Platform. The company did not say what would happen to the sales management of NBCU’s sports and entertainment digital properties, but pointed out that ivillage is now part of the NBC News Digital division. Naylor joined NBCU in May 2006, when it acquired iVillage Properties, where he was head of ad sales. Before that, he held various sales roles at companies including Terra Lycos and Vanity Fair and Spin magazines.
Video ad-serving and tracking firm Vindico on Friday is expected to announce an expanded partnership with Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi. VivaKi first teamed up with Vindico in 2010 to help power The Pool -- the Publicis unit’s online advertising research initiative. Together, VivaKi and Vindico built what they call a “choice-based” online video ad model, dubbed ASq. Since its creation three years ago, ASq has powered 220 campaigns for 43 clients, according to Matt Timothy, president of Vindico. The overarching goal of the partnership, as Timothy explains it, has been “to help advertisers tell their best story to the right audience anywhere online.” With the deal, the partnership has been expanded to include additional interactive units, targeting and verification. VivaKi agencies will also now have access to Vindico’s demo-verification partnerships with Nielsen and comScore. According to Timothy, Vindico currently provides video ad management services to over 200 brands through partnerships with Publicis, as well as GroupM, Havas, IPG and Omnicom. The deal also comes amid a major transition for VivaKi. Publicis recently announced that Jack Klues would step down as CEO of VivaKi at the end of the year. Klues is expected to stay on with Publicis through the first half of 2013 so he can help reposition VivaKi, which has mostly serviced its founding Publicis agencies, including Digitas, Razorfish, Starcom MediaVest and Zenith Optimedia. Ultimately, Publicis expects VivaKi to be more accessible to other Publicis agencies, as well as the broader market.
Verizon's claim that open Internet rules violate its free speech rights is "exactly backwards," a coalition of law professors and digital rights group Center for Democracy & Technology argue in court papers filed on Thursday. The neutrality rules ban all broadband providers -- wireline as well as wireless -- from blocking sites or competing applications. The regulations, which took effect last year, also prohibit wireline providers from engaging in unreasonable discrimination. Verizon is arguing to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that the rules should be vacated for several reasons, including that they violate the First Amendment by requiring it to transmit other companies' speech. The First Amendment generally prohibits the government from either censoring speech or forcing people to say something. But the advocates say in a friend-of-the-court brief that Verizon's argument misses the point. They say that neutrality rules don't infringe speech because the rules only apply when the company is acting as an intermediary for other parties' communications — not when the company speaks on its own behalf. The advocates add that the neutrality rules are similar to the common carrier rules that have long applied to telephone companies. "The rules do not restrict or compel anyone’s speech but instead protect everyone’s speech by requiring that it be transmitted without interference," the brief says. Earlier this year, a coalition of libertarian groups backed Verizon's argument that the rules wrongly restrict the company's First Amendment rights. Those groups -- TechFreedom, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Free State Foundation and the Cato Institute -- contend that the regulations wrongly compel broadband providers to "post, send, and allow access to nearly all types of content, even if a broadband provider prefers not to transmit such content."
Investing millions in Web sites or social content doesn't mean they will rise above all in search engine query results or become the top sharable piece among social and publisher sites. Marketers must optimize them. InboundWriter has begun working with enterprise companies to automate the optimization process, as an onslaught of new content makes search more difficult. The company also plans to tap predictive analytics in an effort to help brands get found among the billions of Web pages indexed daily. The indexed Web contains at least 9.5 billion pages as of Nov. 15, 2012, according to Maurice de Kunder, who manages and authors the site WorldWideWebSize. The tools and optimization model released Thursday aims to help enterprises improve the performance of online content, with management, measurement and objective analytics features. The move by the company follows others, like Resolution Media's Content Continuum and Covario's Rio SEO launching services and tools to support the space. "We want to make content optimization as simple as spell check," said Skip Besthoff, InboundWriter CEO. "We can leverage analytics to know that a piece of content will or won't perform," he said. "We also can tell you the variance of a specific term that will perform." The company has also announced it has raised $2.5 million in additional funding from existing and new investors to accelerate its expansion into the enterprise market. Existing investors Castile Ventures, Rho Canada Ventures, Formative Ventures and The Entrepreneurs' Fund III have contributed to the additional investment along with new investor, Crosslink Capital. Brands realize useful content accelerates the progress of finding potential customers. In the recent Forrester Research report, The Forrester Wave: SEO Platforms, Q4 2012, analyst Shar VanBoskirk explains how SEO programs have become too large to manage manually. Google, Bing and Facebook, along with publishers, now drive marketers to engage consumers with content. As SEO budgets grow, so do programs, VanBoskirk explains, but more pages to optimize means content to create, and more tasks to manage and measure. For example, real estate listings site Rent.com tracks about 1,000 -- up from 150 -- in less time with an SEO platform versus manually.
Online marketers may joke that Best Buy and other big-box retailers have become the local showroom for Amazon, Zappos and other online-only etailers, but studies released Thursday suggest that online and offline content could have a greater influence to bring consumers into stores. It turns out that 89% of consumers will search on sites like Amazon and eBay to find their holiday gift for less, and 52% of shoppers will not make an in-store purchase this holiday season if retailers do not match competitors' prices, according to SteelHouse's holiday consumer survey. Some 64% of shoppers will read product reviews and recommendations before making a purchase, but 51% of shoppers will not use their mobile device or tablet to browse or purchase gifts this holiday season. The study finds that 44% of shoppers have purchased a product or service they have seen recommended or shared on a social media site. Of these consumers, 85% said they saw the item they purchased on Facebook, followed by Twitter at 23% and Pinterest at 16%. About 89% of shoppers will search online to find the best prices. When looking for gifts this holiday season, consumers also will turn to research, with 64% reading product reviews and recommendations, 59% searching for discounts send via mail and email, 27% social media sites; and 23% will look through holiday gift-giving guides. About 37% of consumers said free shipping is the top offer from retailers they're looking for this year, followed by some sort of percentage off the retail price, and buy one, get one free. What will shoppers look for on Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Seventy percent will look for electronics; 30% for home goods; and 14% for jewelry, according to the Steelhouse survey. Consumers will search for products online at sites like Google Shopping, comparing and sharing recommendations before going into stores to make purchases. BIA/Kelsey estimates local search will grow faster than the overall search market, growing at a 12.1% compounded annual growth rate, from $5.7 billion in 2011 to $10.2 billion in 2016. BIA/Kelsey forecasts ad revenue for the online/interactive/digital segment of the U.S. local media market to grow from $21.2 billion in 2011 to $38.1 billion in 2016. For consumers willing to make purchases online, content supports the discovery of unknown brands and products. A study from nRelate, an Ask.com company, conducted by Harris Interactive found that Americans want to explore contextual information. Some 92% of U.S. adults read content online, spending more than seven hours per week looking for content. Americans read three to four articles per session and watch two to three videos per session, on average. Nearly half of online consumers say that after reading an article, they are more likely to click on related content. The nRelate study suggests that several factors influence an online consumer's decision to click. About 62% first look for traditional news stories versus images, videos, blog posts, or any other type of related content. For example, 34% said they would likely click on a link to another article, compared with 34% on another type of related content.
Tablet video continues to climb in length of viewing -- with the live viewing component a strong factor.In the third quarter, average live tablet viewing per play was 19 minutes, with video on demand averaging around 3 minutes, according to video streaming/analytics company Ooyala.Tablet owners spent 71% of their total tablet video viewing time watching videos 10 minutes or longer. By way of comparison, desktop long-form viewing was at 60%, with mobile at 48%, and connected TVs and gaming consoles at 94%.Some 30% of total tablet viewing time was spent watching content over an hour long, with overall share of tablet video viewing growing 90% during the past six months. Since the start of 2012, tablet owners have been watching 54% more long-form content. But it's not just new device tablets that are seeing big video results. Other devices -- some old, some new -- are witnessing increased video usage, especially live video usage.Connected TVs and gaming consoles have seen the amount of time users spent watching live video more than double in the third quarter, and desktop viewers watching live video tune in for an average of 40 minutes.Ooyala says viewer engagement with live content like sports and special events was much stronger than video-on-demand viewing times on the same devices. Ooyala’s Global Video Index report measures the anonymized viewing habits of nearly 200 million viewers in more than 130 countries every month.
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