Unfunded Tribal Fusion Growing Like A Weed

We tend to cover companies when they have a funding or liquidity event. So Tribal Fusion doesn't hit our pages much as its never taken a dime of funding. The Emeryville-based ad network says it has been profitable for something like 5 years, having been boot-strapped by its founder Dilip DaSliva.

Tribal Fusion consistently ranks as one of the top online ad networks, with its top rivals at this point being Advertising.com and Valueclick. TribalFusion's strategy differs in that it represents a smaller set of publishers. Tribal makes advertisers happy by deploying its behavioral ad server across this network.

What's next for Tribal is that it is expanding beyond brand campaigns to include the gamut of online marketing from lead generation, to performance marketing to contextual advertising. If Tribal can succeed in one or two of these as it has with brand advertising, that will really be something.

TribalFusion's management page now links to its new corporate page under the brand - Exponential. So now we need to think of Tribal as just an operating unit under Exponential which will also operate the brand units: FullTango (performance marketing); Lead Genuity (Lead generation) and EchoTopic (In-text advertising).

Online Marketers Spill Beans on Best, Worst Tactics

Online marketers rated what tactics worked best - and worst - in 2006 and those that they plan to focus on, and spend money on, this year, writes eMarketer, citing a yearend 2006 study by MarketingSherpa and ad:tech.

The ad:tech early-adopter (and therefore skewed) sample of marketers, who have on the whole already adopted online advertising techniques, said they anticipate their online spending to increase from 47 percent of the budget to 49 percent.

Those polled said the best-performing online advertising technique was paid search (49 percent said so), followed by house-list email (47 percent), search engine optimization (45 percent), behavioral targeting (34 percent) and contextual targeting (29 percent).

As for emerging tactics that they plan to budget for, the marketers cited blogs/blog networks (42 percent said so), social networking (40 percent), adding RSS feeds (37 percent) and video ads (37 percent). They also plan to increase spending on paid search (34 percent), house-list email (27 percent) and both rich media/video and SEO (25 percent).

The worst-performing technique cited was rented-list email (56 percent said so), followed by pop-up and pop-unders (45 percent), email newsletter ads (42 percent), banner ads (28 percent) and affiliate marketing (26 percent).

The Mobile Marketing Maelstrom: Why the Confusion and Hype isn’t Dampening the Optimism

from Adotas by Susie Kang

Are you confused about Mobile? Who can blame you? The lingo alone is enough to make your head spin: on-deck, off-deck, short codes—but what does it all mean?

I’ve got a secret to share and it might surprise you: Mobile marketing is not as difficult as it sounds. Seriously, it isn’t that complicated and if you bear with me for a few minutes I will explain why.

I don’t have to tell you that mobile is a hot topic in the interactive advertising world these days. It seems like everywhere you turn, there’s talk about mobile marketing. But for all the hype, I was genuinely surprised that the mobile marketing sessions at ad:tech NY left me even more confused than I when I first went in. The single most important thing I learned during that conference was that there is a lot more dialogue that needs to be had before everyone is on the same page and fully understands all of the options of mobile marketing.

Maybe it is what grabs headlines, but most of what I hear about mobile marketing seems really daunting and scary. “You need to work with carriers, handset makers, watch the permissions and get a short code!” are all the things I heard in Mobile 101. Even to me as a mobile search provider, that seemed like a tall order to fulfill. I can’t imagine what a media buyer must think. Especially when most of them don’t have the time or resources to figure it all out.

To be fair, media planners and buyers need to be risk averse at times, and new advertising platforms are tough to pitch to clients who look to online for somewhat predictable and measurable results. When WhitePages.com conducted its own informal survey of media planners and buyers at ad:tech NY, we learned that mobile marketing is nearly at the bottom of our respondent’s list of marketing tactics to test in 2007, and that mobile marketing’s special place in the mix is yet to be defined: is it good for driving online sales? Offline store visits? Branding? Nobody really knows—yet.

However, what irked me more about the mobile marketing sessions at ad:tech was the failure to mention that there is a huge, relatively easy to execute opportunity to buy banner and text advertising on popular mobile sites. By this I mean WAP-enabled Websites that are operated by publishers like WhitePages.com, USA Today, and the New York Times. Because these sites are independent of carriers, or “off-deck” there is no worrying about permissions, carriers and handset makers, as we already have permission from the users. Executing a marketing campaign on a mobile site can be as simple and uncomplicated as executing a marketing campaign on a regular Website. At WhitePages.com we’ll even design and build WAP-enabled campaign landing pages and re-size our client’s creative to ensure they appear correctly on all devices and browsers. We want to make buying mobile as simple as possible, especially given the current landscape.

Here is something I bet you didn’t know: Research from Enpocket showed that a majority of mobile users between the ages of 16 and 44 find advertising on mobile Internet sites acceptable. A recent Forrester report stated that when mobile advertising is done right, which means among other things that it is relevant to the consumer, response rates are high, and consumer engagement is increased.

According to WhitePages.com’s internal study to learn about consumer’s mobile habits and perceptions, study participants told us that they use their mobile devices for three main purposes: Web searches, email and making phone calls. The typical lookup for someone using their mobile device to search the web are local business listings, like restaurant phone numbers and hours, maps and directions and news and sports headlines. Most people use their mobile devices for lookups several times a week some even do it several times a day. Given what I heard at ad:tech, you would think that the major carrier decks were the most popular sites for these activities, but you would be wrong. What you see users doing on the Web, is mirrored in mobile, with popular sites including Google, Yahoo! Mapquest and White and Yellow Pages sites.

So what does this mean? It means that there is a huge untapped mobile advertising market out there, just waiting for marketers to leverage. As mobile advertising gains more of a foothold and myths and misconceptions are put to rest, I hope marketers will reconsider and think of mobile as another solution for driving sales whether it is online or offline. I know that I can’t wait for the day that mobile becomes a standard part of any marketing campaign. Like the hundreds of other publishers out there, we are chomping at the bit and ready to execute. Just say the word.

Skype Founder Tries Hand at Online Advertising

from Adotas by Editor

The folks behind eBay-owned Skype announced that they will invest in Wunderloop, an online advertising firm based in Luxembourg. Niklas Zennstrom, founder of Skype, along with two of his technology investors, Klaus Hommels and Howard Hartenbaum, will invest in the European company that claims to have developed a groundbreaking type of targeted advertising.

Wunderloop has already begun working with AOL, T-Online, Tiscali, Lycos, and Deutsche, and lays claim that its technology can improve revenue gain for advertisers by 10 to 15 times over its current rate. The company claims that advertising efficiency would also reach almost 80 percent with this new technology, which Wunderloop claims continuously analyzes users’ current behavior - what they click on or their queries in search engines, for example – and compares available market research data in real-time from AGOF, Nielsen NetRatings and comScore among others. Additional information is culled with the user’s consent from in-house data such as CRM profiles.

Other investors like the Samwer brothers are joining in on backing Wunderloop, which will receive an estimate of €8m (£5m). While Hommels and Hartenbaum are using their own funds to invest, Zennstrom is investing through his Atomico Investments.

In a statement to the New York Times, Hartenbaum said, “When I am surfing the web, I get a lot of ads that are a waste of my time and a waste of the advertisers’ time - weight-loss products for women, for example. Wunderloop means that I get a better experience, and it works for the advertise.

comScore Classifying Ad Networks

from Adotas by Editor

Internet measurement company comScore Networks has started breaking up audience data for online ad networks into consumer categories. The firm hopes this new addition to the Media Metrix service will give networks a better understanding of how their services behave in specific content areas.

“This enhancement provides advertisers and agencies with the ability to make side-by-side comparisons between individual Web sites and advertising networks, in order to select the optimal mix of media vehicles with which to achieve their goals,” said Jeff Hackett, comScore’s agency relations director in a statement.

The new classification system was able to determine that Advertising.com had the biggest reach in the Sports and Entertainment categories, beating out properties like ESPN and other networks like the Gorilla Nation Media Network.

According to Hackett, comScore has announced the new system just in time to measure the Internet impact of upcoming events. Media Metrix “can be an effective tool for media planners intending to capitalize on the Internet as a secondary advertising channel for high-profile media events in a specific content area, such as the Super Bowl and the Oscars,” he added.

MIVA Launches Vertical PPC Network

from Adotas by Editor

Online advertising company MIVA has launched its vertical PPC network, the MIVA Precision Network, into the US and UK markets in the hopes of generating better lea for MIVA advertisers.

The Precision Network is currently in beta and exists alongside MIVA’s existing Core Network. While the Core Network will provide broad ad distribution, the Precision Network will only focus on a few specific vertical categories.

Advertisers will be able to use a combination of both Core and Precision. “As the Pay-Per-Click market continues to mature, we believe there will be increasing demand amongst advertisers for both horizontal and vertical networks,” said MIVA CEO Peter Corrao in a statement. “The new Network is designed to provide lower volume, higher value leads to advertisers; while our Core Network will continue to provide a higher volume of leads at a lower cost.” US verticals covered by Precision includes 18 vertical markets, while UK coverage will start smaller with 5.

To promote the launch, MIVA is providing advertisers with a team of experts to help them determine the most effective ways to make use of the different categories. Both the new and old networks can be managed through MIVA’s AdCenter dashboard utility.

Google Posts Huge Profit

from Adotas by Editor

Google’s Q4 2006 numbers are in, and with revenue jumping 67% over the previous year, the billion-dollar business shows it has all the right moves.

By the end of December, Google reported $3.21 billion in revenue, a major increase over the $1.92 billion generated by the company in 2005. Google’s revenue has been on a steady rise, with the numbers growing 19% over the third quarter.

“Our impressive performance in the fourth quarter demonstrates the continuing strength of our business model across Google properties and those of our partners,” said CEO Eric Schmidt in a statement.

Revenue generated from Google-owned websites, which represent 62% of Google’s total revenue, grew 80% over 2005. Revenue generated through sites on Google’s AdSense publisher network grew 50%. And just under half of Google’s revenue came from international sources.

“Search is getting better and better as we continue to innovate around the globe,” added Schmidt in a conference call with investors.

Google’s increase comes as it gobbles up search market share from competitors Yahoo and Microsoft. According to comScore, Yahoo lost about 1% of the US search market, and Microsoft about 3%.