[x+1] has upgraded their Data Management Platform (DMP) to allow marketers full access to paid and owned media channels. Marketers will now be able to use their own CRM data when using [x+1] Origin, a key platform in the real-time media marketplace. “No one questions the incredible value of data to digital marketing,” stated John Nardone, [x+1] CEO. “There’s no reason that value should be limited to paid advertising.” In addition to using their own CRM data on both paid and owned media channels, [x+1] says that marketers will now have more control in how they reach customers and will be able to follow the performance of their campaigns with more ease. “What we have done with Origin is open the floodgates so the full potential of data -- plus the skills and insights of marketers -- can be applied easily and equally to all online channels and touchpoints,” stated Nardone.
AppNexus this morning announced a $75 million round led by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), joining a roster of TCV early rounders Facebook, Netflix, and ExactTarget. Venrock and Tribeca Venture Partners also participated in the round. AppNexus CEO Brian O'Kelley said the funds would be used to "create the next generation of innovations that will transform online advertising."
WPP's Media Innovation Group has asked a federal judge to dismiss a privacy lawsuit stemming from the alleged Safari hack. The agency says in court papers made public this week that the consumers who filed a potential class-action -- New York resident Michael Frohberg and California resident Andy Wu -- "do not, and cannot, allege that they suffered an injury." For that reason, Frohberg and Wu lack "standing" to proceed in court, WPP argues. The litigation stems from a report published last year by Stanford grad student Jonathan Mayer, who said WPP's Media Innovation Group -- along with Google, PointRoll and Vibrant Media -- were circumventing Safari's no-tracking settings. As a result, the companies were able to serve ads to Web users based on their Internet activity. None of the companies were accused of linking cookie-based data to users' names or other personally identifiable information.Google, Vibrant Media and PointRoll confirmed Mayer's report when it came out in February, adding that they had stopped tracking Safari users or would soon do so. WPP has never confirmed the report.The consumers say in court papers that they were harmed in several ways: the tracking caused them emotional distress, deprived them of the chance to sell data, and degraded their devices' performance.But the Media Innovation Group argues that none of those claims can support the lawsuit. WPP argues that the consumers' devices couldn't have been affected by the cookies due to their small size; the agency says that a cookie on a MacBook Pro wouldn't take up more than one billionth of the computer's available space.The agency also says that the emotional distress claims can't support the lawsuit, given that it wasn't accused of sensitive or personally identifiable information, such as names, addresses or financial account information. The Media Innovation Group adds that the consumers didn't flesh out any allegations that they were deprived of the chance to sell data themselves.Frohberg and Wu are asking U.S. District Court Judge William F. Kuntz, II in Brooklyn to keep their lawsuit alive. They say that a ruling dismissing the case would leave them without any way to control how their computers are accessed by outside companies. "A ruling in defendants’ favor is a holding that third-party cookies, which are not necessary for the Internet to function, are inescapable -- that there is simply no antivirus-type, software-based protection that Internet users can put in place on their devices to stop outsiders they have never interacted with, or even heard of, from placing third-party computer code on their devices," they argue in court papers made public this week. WPP isn't the only one facing litigation. Google, PointRoll and Vibrant Media also have been sued for allegedly circumventing Safari's settings. Google recently paid $22.5 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges stemming from the workaround, but didn't admit wrongdoing in the case. Google allegedly violated a 2011 consent decree banning the company from misrepresenting its privacy practices. The company allegedly did so by specifically instructing users that the Safari browser would block tracking cookies, and then dropped the cookies.
Data that is dependent on large-scale rapid computing that can crunch and deliver numbers on the fly requires capital investments. Marketing departments have begun to spend more money compared with their counterparts on technology, in search of insights into customer needs, according to industry insiders. Marketers are good at describing in simple language the impact of investments on business. Real-time bidding platforms from companies like WPP Group's Xaxis, which launched an RTB tool for digital radio Wednesday in partnership with Triton Digital, a digital service provider, have begun to demonstrate the possibilities of connecting audiences and brands in real-time. The connection remains important. Jonathan Margulies, managing director at the Winterberry Group, told MediaPost OMMA DDM attendees that the leap from data collection and processing to revenue and profit requires careful and thoughtful integration. He warns that marketers must align corporate objectives with data collection and processing or risk bursting the data bubble. He said there is some basis for the thinking that the ad industry will experience a repeat of the dot-com era. Millions of dollars and man-hours are being invested in technology and information that drives extremely small incremental improvements in sales, profitability, lift and response. As multichannel attribution becomes more essential in effectively allocating ad dollars, the data needed to run a progressive online marketing program continues to increase. In the search landscape, advertisers need to have equally smart data solutions in place and the flexibility to adapt to new challenges before their data bubble bursts, said Mark Ballard, senior research analyst at the Rimm-Kaufman Group. Advertisers must learn how to turn data into actionable insights, added George Michie, Rimm-Kaufman Group cofounder and chief marketing scientist, because platforms alone will not provide guidance in how to leverage data to make the greatest impact. Marketers participating in the Decision-Makers Survey said 16% of their budget goes to technology when asked by Forrester Research what percentage of their group or department's budget goes to spending directly on technology-related products,consulting services, telecommunications, and IT staff. Marketing departments are spending more on technology, but getting exact budgets from company executives -- especially when comparing marketing to IT -- can get a little tricky, according to Ion Interactive CTO Scott Brinker. He told Online Media Daily that even without exact stats several related indicators seem to confirm it. Almost every marketing technology company that Brinker knows continues to grow at -- or more than -- double-digit rates, and it's clear from their marketing strategies that they sell solutions to marketers, not IT staff. "It's not unreasonable to conclude marketing technology purchases, driven by, if not fully owned by, the marketing team are roughly growing at a double-digit rate as well," he said. Brinker points to Gartner research, which reveals that across all kinds of marketing technologies, more than half of the companies involved planned to up their investments in social media by 72%; mobile applications, 73%; CRM, 61%; customer analytics, 57%; content management, 54%; predictive analytics, 54%; campaign management, 50%; search engine optimization, 51%; and email, 49%.
Today is the day digital display becomes the centerpiece for all your marketing efforts, including offline ventures like TV, radio and print buying. Ask yourself a question: How much money do you spend on audience research to better understand who your audience is, whether it’s focus groups or in-market research? Now ask yourself: What if that money could be spent for real-time research while also reaching your target with actual messaging? In other words, what if your budget could be allocated to media and research was a free byproduct? It can be that way right now with any number of tools that are available to marketers though digital display. In full disclosure, I work in data -- but that can’t hold me up from proclaiming what I knew for years as a media buyer. Digital display, when done properly, is effectively a real-time research tool that enables brand marketers to gain actual information about their audience while testing messaging and either proving or disproving a hypothesis about audience -- rather than allocating hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars to a low-return vehicle such as standard offline research tools. Here’s how to do it. All marketers do an initial analysis of who their audience is; continue to do that. Once you have an idea, or ideas, you establish test campaigns using display media with multiple audience-based buys and a control established as a baseline. Evaluate interaction and response rates for each of those tests, and implement a third-party audience verification or similar platform to provide you with more details about your audience than you might have originally hypothesized. Once you have run that initial campaign, reintegrate your learning and run a secondary campaign based on a refined version of your target, plus any additional learning you gathered while in-market. This should enable you to end up with a strong understanding of your core target audience based on real-time results from display. Once you have that information and can evaluate it against your original hypothesis, you should be in a position to put that customer profile into action. If you want to make use of that information in digital, you need a cross-channel DMP to port the profile to your other execution layers. Use the information offline for your TV, print and radio buys to determine which media will represent the highest percentage of the audience you are looking to reach. Eventually there’ll be a more direct opportunity to leverage those digital profiles in offline media, but right now the execution layer in offline is still a manual process – unlike digital, where the execution layer can indeed be automated. Have you tried this method as of yet? Has it worked? Let us know on the Spin Board!
Conventional wisdom has it that consumers say they're concerned about online privacy, but rarely do much about it. But Microsoft challenged that idea today by releasing new survey results that indicate consumers are trying to control the way data about them is used by marketers. Among other findings, the report includes the following jaw-dropping statistic: Almost half of U.S. adults, 44%, say they have opted out of targeted advertising. At first glance, that figure appears quite high, especially compared to other reports. Consider, the self-regulatory group Network Advertising Initiative said last year that around 10% of the 8 million people who visited its site opted out of online behavioral advertising, or ad-targeting based on users' Web-surfing history. But the 44% figure might not be as much of an outlier as it seems if Microsoft's respondents interpreted the term "targeted advertising" broadly. For instance, respondents might have been referring to tweaking their Amazon settings regarding recommendations. It's also possible that the people surveyed by Microsoft opted out of online behavioral advertising on a company-by-company basis on publishers' sites, as opposed to a site like the one operated by the NAI. The proportion of respondents who say they try to block targeted ads isn't the only surprising tidbit. Microsoft also reports that 65% of respondents said they delete cookies in order to control privacy, while 39% say they have changed their browser settings to request that sites don't track them. Despite taking steps to control their data, 45% of respondents said they feel they have little or no control over the information that's gathered about them online. Microsoft chief privacy officer Brendon Lynch says in a blog post that the findings reaffirm that "customers want and expect strong privacy protections to be built into our products, devices and services, and for companies to be responsible stewards of consumers’ data." The results were based on an Ipsos survey of around 1,000 U.S. adults.