If Yahoo’s purchase of Right Media and Google’s purchase of DoubleClick weren’t enough, today, The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft is buying aQuantive.
Among aQuantive’s business units are the agency, Avenue A /Razorfish, third-party ad serving platform Atlas Media Console and behavioral performance media company, Drive PM.
-- Tiffany Sumner
Now, they’ve announced a new Ad Exchange which has been under development for over a year. Code-named Wolf, the exchange would seek to leverage DoubleClick’s extensive publisher relationships to develop what many consider to be a viable alternative to the traditional media buying/selling process.
-- John Ruvolo
Last night, ContextWeb put on its first annual “ContextWeb Cup” at Chelsea Piers.
(Kabir Kochhar from Carat Fusion pictured on the right).
Invitations went out to many of our good friends at local, New York City advertising agencies and a great crowd showed up as people ‘teed it up,’ drove golf balls and enjoyed each other’s company - and the balmy temperatures.
-- Tiffany Sumner
The Wall Street Journal carries a warning shot to all advertising agencies from brand power house Nike to “Just Do It” and beef up their interactive capabilities or risk being left out in the cold. The venerable sneaker brand is looking beyond its longtime agency Widen + Kennedy for a new agency to do interactive.
Are brand dollars online? Yes.
According to MarketingVox, Sara Mirelez, brand director for the Coors family of brands at Coors Brewing, and Levi Patterson, account director at Avenue A/Razorfish have orchestrated the arrival of the Silver Bullet Train at 4:53 p.m. to sites frequented by males 21-34 starting in mid-April .
-- Tiffany Sumner
According to the MediaPost article by Tobi Elkin, Jefferies: Online Ad Spending Could Exceed $60B By 2010, investment bank Jefferies & Co. “raised its estimates for the worldwide online advertising industry to more than $60 billion by 2010–up from the $54 billion it projected in 2006” at it’s 3rd Annual Internet Conference.
Though phenomenal growth in search advertising fuels these revised forecasts, growth in brand or display advertising is another significant contributor. “Brand or display advertising represented $16 billion in revenues and accounted for 54% of all online ad dollars in 2006; Jefferies projects it will grow at a 20% clip through 2010.”
So what are the options available to marketers to spend this increase in available brand or display advertising dollars?
To date, a large portion of brand dollars have been spent on site specific buys on large sites and portals. Some of the primary reasons for this are:
(more…)
Last week, I attended Rick Parkhill’s iMedia Brand Summit on behalf of ContextWeb in Bonita Springs, Florida.
Attendees included a solid group of agency leaders from shops such as Carat Fusion, Avenue A Razorfish, Organic, OMD Digital and many others. On the brand side, a broad range of key decisionmakers attended from companies such as Verizon, Proctor & Gamble, Masterfoods and The Coca Cola Company.
-- John RuvoloI caught the last half an hour of an interesting workshop at the Always On conference titled “Harnessing Web Analytics to Your Advantage”. The discussion focused on the various web analytics - such as Omniture, WebSideStory, CoreMetrics and ClickTracks - that are available to advertisers and agencies to track the performance of their online campaigns. Because of the inherent ability to track and measure online advertising spend to very granular levels, direct marketers with hard performance metrics have been the early adopters of this form of advertising.
-- Shanthi Sarkar
On February 28th, the AAAAs (4As or American Association of Advertising Agencies), will convene at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino in Las Vegas for is annual conference . The trade association, chaired by Anthony J. Hopp of Campbell-Ewald and O. Burtch Drake, the president-CEO of AAAA oversees the health and wellness of America’s advertising agencies including their uneasy marriage with all things Internet, Google and Yahoo!.
