Saturday, September 4th, 2010

The advertising industry is launching its own PR campaign by way of setting up an Institute for Advertising Ethics. The sector has always had a negative image and the likes of the “Mad Men” series are certainly surfing that tide to… sell. With the market staging a robust recovery the industry is planning ahead and wants to tweak its reputation. Here’s how.

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Teaming Up With Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute
The push comes from Wally Snyder, President Emeritus of the American Advertising Federation and former Federal Trade Commission lawyer, the Huffington Post quoted the Associated Press as saying. The AAF has teamed up with Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute to launch the initiative.

Google’s DoubleClick said it has acquired start-up Invite Media, a unified platform for “real-time bidding” and display of online media for an undisclosed sum.

DoubleClick.JPGThe acquisition is part of the company’s move to invest in the “advertising ecosystem”, which, DoubleClick believes, has great potential.

“Real time bidding technology… enables advertisers and agencies to tailor their bids on an impression-by-impression basis, based on their own data, when bidding on websites that choose to make their ad space available through an advertising exchange,” DoubleClick said in a blog post.

They knew it would be big. Advertisers have invested massive sums to get hot spots during ABC’s finale of Lost on May 23rd and they were right to do so, according to various reports and studies following the airing of the six-year long series’ closing episode. According to research firm Nielsen, the finale gathered an average 13.5 million viewers.

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Ad Engagement
A TV series finale usually brings advertisers 10-30% greater brand recall compared to what we could call ’standard’ programming.

The 2006 FIFA World Cup final between Italy and France was watched by a global cumulative audience of 715.1 million viewers. So, it’s now wonder that the 2010 FIFA World Cup is already generating some amazing commercials and YouTube video ads.

Image representing Visible Measures as depicte...

Image via CrunchBase

Topping Unruly Media’s Viral Video Chart and the Visible Measures Top Viral Video Ads Chart is NIKE FOOTBALL WRITE THE FUTURE – FULL LENGTH VERSION. Uploaded on May 17, 2010, it already has 11,770,721 views!

Magnetic announced integration of its search data marketplace with leading ad networks on Monday. This partnership will enable display ad buyers on the Collective, interCLICK and Undertone ad networks to retarget users of second-tier search engines who have performed a search in the last 30 days.

The thinking goes that since search is one of the highest converting ad formats in the world, then why not mash that data into ad networks to improve the conversion rate of display ads?

Market research firm comScore has unveiled its new generation ad ROI metrics weapon, calling it Smart Control. Here’s why.

How it works
Smart Control is based on marketing mix modelling techniques and enables to avoid using the test-and-control methodology to measure advertising impact. In comScore’s own words, “The methodology looks at the change in consumer response (either attitudinal or behavioral) by varying frequency of advertising exposure using a Bayesian regression model, from which the “control” response (i.e. frequency = 0) is derived”.

The network of official Google blogs has to be commended for the transparency in recent posts. Their admission and apology for data collecting via StreetView and their candidness over the closure of the Nexus One webstore are truly great examples of business blogging. Today, the Inside Adwords blog finally discloses the how AdSense revenue share split is calculated.

Large publishers are already privy to this information in their negotiations with the advertising giant, but up until now, Google has never revealed this information to its ’self service’ customers.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today announced the release of “Data Usage & Control Primer: Best Practices & Definitions,” a guide pioneered by the IAB’s Data Usage and Control Taskforce.

Developed in conjunction with leaders from branded publisher sites, ad networks and data companies the Primer is “a collective effort to answer a need in our industry,” said Patrick Dolan, EVP, CAO, and IAB leader on the IAB Data Usage & Control Task Force. “It addresses and helps resolve the contractual and competitive challenges that surround data usage and collection within the interactive advertising industry.”

YouTube experienced 160% growth in traffic to their mobile site in 2009.

So, they’ve decided to capitalize on all that traffic and serve ads on the site, which can be reached at m.youtube.com.

The ads will be served on the American and Japanese homepages, search pages, and browse pages.

To learn more about advertising on mobile YouTube, visit youtube.com/advertise.

Here’s a sample of what an ad looks like on mobile YouTube:

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Image via Official Google Blog

YouTube claims that the launch of this new ad offering automatically makes it one of the largest opportunities for mobile advertising. And they’re right.

A top mobile service harnesses its strengths to compete in the mobile ad space.

WHERE is a mobile application (both downloadable and mobile web) that focuses on local search and recommendations. This week, WHERE is launching a local/mobile ad network.

WHERE’s goal is to generate relevant ads based on location and context.

“We built WHERE Ads because we wanted to deliver a better advertising experience to our audience.” said Walt Doyle, CEO of WHERE. “Leveraging our unique access to the carrier infrastructure, we are able to deliver hyper-local, contextually relevant content. The result is that we are driving benefit by connecting the consumer and the local merchant. We’re now excited to begin offering this solution to third party publishers.”