advertising Archive

CBS’ outdoor division has announced a new option for their billboard advertisers today. The program is called txt2go and allows advertisers to place a sms code on their advertisements that viewers can enter into their mobile device to gain access to something from the advertiser.

Jodi Senese, Executive Vice President, Marketing, CBS Outdoor said, “…if someone is interested in a product or service advertised they can receive a coupon, free merchandise or another offer simply by texting in a short code, giving the company ongoing communication with an interested consumer.”

Mobile technology provider Rip Road will serve the text messaging portion of the advertisement. Campaigns start at $225 for 500 SMS interactions. I’ve always pushed for every offline ad to have some way to get users and/or viewers online. It’s a mistake to run a campaign in a magazine, newspaper or on a billboard without some online call to action.

It will be interesting to see if the CBS billboards in Times Square and around NYC start to feature SMS codes as part of this program.

Ad management application server OpenX has announced a new Series C round of funding in the amount of $10 million. The total amount that OpenX has raised is $30.8 million to-date. OpenX notes that the funding will be used, “to further expand its market-leading advertising technology products and services and to rapidly accelerate the growth of the recently launched OpenX Market, the company’s unique new monetization platform.”

DAG Ventures led the new Series C round and existing investors Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital, First Round Capital and Jonathan Miller, the company’s board chairman, all participated.

For the OpenX hosted program, the company reports growth of 500% to 7.5 billion monthly impressions. They also note that 10,000 web publishers are using the hosted program.

Interestingly, OpenX shares some bits about their revenue model which is broken up into four parts:

• professional services for publishers
• premium support packages
• premium Hosted packages
• OpenX Market

Most of us seem to agree that while the traditional online banner ad is still very popular, the ability for it to truly convert is lessening each day. Today everyone is trying to figure out what comes next after the text unit and banner ad. With the current economic downturn, ad dollars are shrinking and what each dollar must produce is growing.

We’ve seen more news and talk shows starting to introduce products and services directly into the shows. My guess is that the ads inside the shows convert better and are higher priced compared with a 30-second TV spot. It’s also way cheaper to produce the “live ads” than a produced ad spot.

The Mike and Juliet show runs Yahoo Buzz spots each week as regular show segments. Oprah is pimping Skype for cash.

Today I noticed Ellen is now running “live ads” for one of her sponsors – Advil. I’ve embedded the clip below. Is this type of ad more effective than a regular commercial? The audience seems to be eating it up even if they are forced to clap and applaud. Do they realize that it’s a commercial? The best part about these live ads is that they beat the DVR or Tivo.

We are currently seeing a variety of new advertising concepts tested on blogs, social networks and websites. Some are on the level, some ride the line and some are way over the “ethical” line. Whether its paid reviews, “sponsored conversations” or the “give product to a blogger”, we will see more new ideas in the market over the next 12-18 months. I do believe we will see WAY more campaigns which “rent” people who have high follower counts on the various networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.).

Will we see ads like the one below on blogs? We are already seeing the spots in video, will it enter the text world as well?

Video advertising company YuMe has announced a new ad unit launch today. The new ad unit is called “Insynch” and the company calls it a takeover unit. Basically how it works is that it combines video ads and traditional online ads together on a page. If a video ad is on the left and a traditional ad on the right, YuMe can sync the two together and pass bits back and forth. In their demo, YuMe combines a video ad, a layer ad and a traditional banner ad together.

From the launch announcement, “How does the InSynch Video Takeover work?  While the in–stream video ad is playing, the entire page where the player resides turns into an advertising canvas where anything is possible.  For example, marketers can have objects jump out of the video ad and into a companion banner placement or have these elements fly across the web page, temporarily taking over the page and captivating the viewer’s attention. ”

It looks like a pretty interesting advertising unit as long as the actual synch always works perfectly. Check out the demo of the InSynch ad unit on YuMe’s site.

The topic of paid social media is something I’ve been thinking about a lot of the past few months. When I met with Scott Monty of Ford, I mentioned the idea of assuming that all social media is paid. Perhaps you already do assume that what you read is already paid or sponsored although I’ve tried to think that what I read is genuine unless otherwise noted. For the purposes of this discussion, I am leaving the “is paid social media good or evil” on the side for another day.

Scott noted that the 100 paid reviewers of the Ford Fiesta will disclose that they are part of the “movement”. That’s great that there will be disclosure – it’s something that many of the paid reviews systems have moved to. And while I am using Ford as an example, they are by no means alone with regards to my question. Whether it’s Izea, Magpie, in-house ad sales, etc, the question continues to grow in importance. And I haven’t even mentioned pimping by investors, friends, family members, etc.

Disclosure is easy on a blog, but what about as the blog entry is pushed around. Does the disclosure travel with the blog entry? And more importantly, what about all of the social media services like Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Plurk, etc.? How do we define disclosure on these networks?

Read the rest of this entry »

Brooklyn-based Pontiflex has announced a new $6.25 million Series B round of funding led by RRE Ventures today. The company previously raised $2.5 million.  Existing investors New Atlantic Ventures and Greenhill SAVP also participated in the round. Pontiflex notes that the new funding, "will be used to strengthen the company’s flagship Pontiflex AdLeads product that makes online lead generation simple, effective and transparent."

Pontiflex describes their service as, "offering advertisers the opportunity to purchase high-quality customer leads via brand-specific banner and direct response ad units. These ‘marketing leads’ generated via the Pontiflex platform represent potential customers who have voluntarily opted in to receive advertisers’ messages."

David Kaplan at PaidContent has more on the transaction. David discusses the difference between marketing leads and sales leads and spoke with Pontiflex CEO Zephrin Lasker regarding transparency and the company’s opt-in methods.

Online advertising optimization service YieldBuild has announced that they now support Microsoft pubCenter in their premium text ad program. Microsoft pubCenter is in beta and publishers need to be approved for entry. YieldBuild notes they can get qualified publishers directly into the text ad program. Microsoft pubCenter is similar to Google AdSense.

Apparently some publishers in the pubCenter beta report better performance than with AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network. I can’t comment on the results as I don’t use pubCenter but as with any ad network, pricing can fluctuate on each individual ad click.

Check out my video interview with YieldBuild CEO Paul Edmondson.