Last Friday Microsoft announced that it is buying ad technology firm Rapt - here’s the official PR on the deal. This looks like a very strategic and smart buy that will bolster Microsoft’s APS offering in the optimization and sales tool area. Rapt looks like a great tool to help with online display for big publishers… Rapt has an impressive rooster of top teir customers including: MSN, Yahoo, Fox Interactive, NCB, CNET and Dow Jones. This post on Yankee Group helps explain why they are buying Rapt and here is the TC post.
WSJ and others have reported that on Monday, Senior Execs from Microsoft and Yahoo! met so that Microsoft could outline what the vision for what a post-merger entity would look like. The agenda for the meeting was similar to those that Yahoo! held with AOL and News Corp. What’s interesting is that this is the first time the companies have spent some face time together since the unsolicited bid was announced.
Is Yahoo! being tactical by playing nice before Ballmer gets hostile ahead of the Yahoo! board meeting or is Jerry Yang realising that in the face of a hardening economy, he should probably shake hands on this one before it’s too late.
In case you don’t know, OpenX, is a UK-based start-up that recently received a SeriesB $15 million injection. They are taking a successful open-source ad serving platform (History of the project/company is: PHPAds, PHPAdsNews, Max Media Manager) and applying a RedHat/MySQL approach to commercialising the opportunity.
Scott Switzer is founder and CTO and his post on why Google Ad Manager is a threat to Publishers is well-rounded and recommended reading. What’s exciting is that Google Ad Manager completely validates the need for an indy platform like OpenX, which is even more exciting as the software is open-source. That is it’s been built and is being built in the bazaar of the online Publishers rather than the cathedrals of software development. This then naturally leads one to suggest that if OpenX does get established and then builds out an Exchange/Network on top, the very fact that it’s been created in a marketplace can only be beneficial to all involved.
ReadWriteWeb have an excellent interview with Switzer that provides some further flesh to the OpenX approach to the ad serving space.
On the back of the SXSW Mark Zuckerberg interview and the interesting macro movements around the future of social media advertising, it seems that Time Warner provides further validation to these trends and have acquired, considered by many the #3 player, Bebo for AOL.
AdViking’s early take is that by adding the additional platform and traffic to what they have all ready, AOL has some very interesting pieces in play and with their Platform A advertising stable they have a unique opportunity to be at the forefront of what happens next. Especially, if we consider that Zuckerberg considers that the solution to social media advertising isn’t going to be found in the next couple of years but decades.
The coverage has ranged from:
What did they actually buy crunching of the financials at Boomtown?
Following on from the news that the acquisition of DoubleClick by Google has been given grace in Europe and therefore has been closed, Google announces what’s a potential game changer with the release of Ad Manager. Sister site, A Fuller View has more details including a bold prediction about what the future holds for ad serving in 2008.
The keynote interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW’08 by Sarah Lacy has all ready had plenty of coverage. Generally, the coverage has been about the supposed awfulness of the interview and the Geek revolution that took place but from listening to the interview, AdViking believes that many people missed some very interesting insights into Facebook and in particular the Facebook strategy around advertising.
One important point that Zuckerberg was at pains to get across is that Facebook is really just part of the macro-trend about bringing technology to bear to facilitate the ease of connectivity and communication between people.
Advertising
Within seconds of Lacy turning the conversation towards advertising, a punter in the crowd neatly summarised the majority of opinion by shouting out, “Beacon Sucks!”. To which Lacy responds by promising that we’ll get to that.
AdViking thought that the primary takeaway about the Facebook monetisation strategy is that it’s going to be an organic evolution that is inline with how people use the platform, both on the site and across the wider web. Zuckerberg also admitted that they announced the basic idea (Beacon) too early and believes that the solution isn’t going to be found in the next couple of years but actually over the next couple of decades.
AdViking would argue that Facebook needs to take the thinking a bit further and provide Users with empowerment tools to become nano-publishers. That is, if Facebook is making money off people’s use of the platform, then those that are keen to do so should be able to get involved in that marketplace.
Beacon, WTF*?
To this question, Zuckerberg shrugs his shoulders and agrees with the indictment. He then takes a step back and takes the opportunity to explain the vision behind Beacon, which can be summarised as:
Beacon was first attempt at trying to tap into a growing trend (very web2.0) that social media interaction is quickly moving away from monolithic sites (e.g.: Facebook) to a collection of social services (e.g.: TripIt, Dopplr, 30Boxes) across the wider web. That is, Beacon was hoped to be a collection point for the usage of social services with a tie into the Facebook ad system and then turn those actions into ads/endorsements.
Another point that AdViking found interesting was that the development of Beacon was done by the Platform team and not the Ad team.
In response to what went wrong, it all came down to communication and in particular about how users can tune the permissions.
Microsoft
With regards to the $15 billion valuation that was gained through the Microsoft deal, Zuckerberg said that others focus on the deals but at Facebook, they believe that to realise their vision they need to build revenue quickly and this was one way.
As to if Microsoft are happy, this was skirted around but jokes were flying about calling Ballmer to ask him.
Adviking’s takeaway is that Facebook views this deal as some easy cash and resources that allows them to focus on the big picture.
The above image was an interpretation of the keynote by graphic artist Sunni Brown.
* WTF - Was Lacy’s rather interesting way of putting a burning question from most people’s minds.
The story that Facebook UK lost 5% of users between Dec. 07 and Jan. 08 is a bit of old-rope now but AdViking has been on the road and wanted to come back around to this and also wanted to synch that with a recent report that shows the UK marketing decision makers are reticent to invest in advertising through social media.
Facebook is losing users!
The news that Facebook UK lost 5% of users is interesting for a couple of reasons (including that it’s buried in the coverage that MySpace lost the same amount of users for the same time period) but let’s see if the trend continues through the next couple of months, which is so nicely put by: Alex Burmaster, the Nielsen Online’s European Internet analyst
Just as one swallow doesn’t make a summer, so one month of falling audiences doesn’t spell the decline of Facebook or social networking,
Personally, AdViking would put some bets that the trend could be associated to some of the reasons Fuller mentions in his post about why he was quitting Facebook over on A Fuller View. This was mirrored with some reasons that the quality weekly UK magazine Grazia had to say about why they are bored of Facebook.
NB: I am an active FB user but have changed drastically my usage pattern the platform over the recent months and now use it for lifestyle enhancements (e.g.: Integration with 30 Boxes and Dopplr).
Marketers are saying no to Social Media advertising
More interesting and lost amongst this noise was that a poll published by TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony shows that senior corporate marketing executives believe that social media in some form will be lasting, but in the UK only 18% of companies believe that by not spending on social media they are likely to fall behind competitors.
The poll, which was taken across France, North America and the UK, used the broad definition for Social Media, including: blogs, forums, social networking and video sites. You can get access to the summary of the findings by going to http://www.socialmediainbusiness.com/.
Some other interesting highlights:
0% thought it would impact purchasing intent
9.9% said they didn’t have sufficient budget to make forays (i.e.: spend isn’t an issue)
38% saw social media sites as a new advertising channel
49.3% believe social media should be monitored at exec level
0% thought social media would have little significance in 5 years
AdViking’s take is that if you narrowed the spectrum to look at just the obvious social networking sites (i.e.: Bebo, Facebook and MySpace) then these numbers would look drastically worse. The thing is today’s senior marketing exec isn’t really going to be savvy to the idea that the potential for this kind of advertising and so will probably be as wrong about Social Media as they were about Search advertising. You can read AdViking’s nascent views on the importance of this new format in this comment on John Battelle’s Searchblog.
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M&A, Microsoft, adserving, advertising, deals, display | 
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Posted by dylanfuller
