AOL, Yahoo Face Off to Impress Madison Avenue

The rivalry between AOL and Yahoo is on prominent display this week, as the two struggling Internet companies compete for advertising dollars on Madison Avenue.

They are pouring on the glitz as they vie for the attention of
thousands of ad-industry professionals at the Advertising Week
conference in New York.

Marketers typically don't negotiate specific deals to buy ad space
or time during the annual event. But media companies use it to tout
themselves to the many ad agencies and advertisers in attendance,
including Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Verizon Communications, Bank of America and MasterCard Worldwide. The aim is to establish relationships and secure business down the road.

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Facebook Sets Deal to Provide Ad Data to Nielsen

acebook Inc. plans to announce a deal with online measurement
company Nielsen Co., in a step to address advertisers' frustration with
measuring how ads perform on the social network.

Under
the partnership, Facebook will begin polling its users about some of
the display ads it runs on its site, such as a banner promoting a movie
release.

Facebook will provide that data, including responses from those who
didn't see an ad, to Nielsen, which will package it for advertisers,
say the companies.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is planning to
introduce the product, called Nielsen Brand Lift, in a keynote address
at an advertising conference Tuesday and to pitch it to marketers this
week in New York.

Facebook had a 9.1% share of display-ad views in the U.S. in July,
up from 6.8% in January, according to comScore Inc. That put it in
second place behind Yahoo and ahead of Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, comScore said.

The number of advertisers using Facebook's online system has also
tripled to tens of thousands in the past year, according to the
company. Advertisers say they are often spending more than $1 million
on campaigns on the Web site

In recent months, the site has launched new ad formats that prompt
people to take an action -- such as a forthcoming ad that allows people
to sign up to receive a free sample of what's being advertised.

It has also overhauled a tool that allows brands to build pages to
communicate with their fans and has rolled out a targeted-ad feature
that gives advertisers more control and guarantees over who sees their
ads.

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Case Study of Contexa at ReadWriteWeb: Context Improves CTR

The preliminary aggregated statistics of the six participating
sponsors (excluding Hakia), covering a 40-day period, demonstrate that
the Contexa system has met ReadWriteWeb's objectives:

• The Contexa system increased ad clicks by 14% (i.e. advertiser received, on average, 14% more ad clicks).
• The click-through rate (CTR) for Contexa was more than twice that of ReadWriteWeb's 125 x 125 banner ads.

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Pricing Tensions Shake Up Web Display-Ad Market

The market for online display ads -- those with text and pictures that
border a Web page -- has dwindled amid the ad recession to an estimated
$20.8 billion in 2009 from $23 billion in 2008

Some big Internet companies, such as Google, Microsoft and Time Warner's
AOL and Yahoo, are looking to profit from the discord. They are trying
to cut out the ad networks altogether by developing ad exchanges, which
allow advertisers to bid directly on the ad space available on a large
group of Web sites. Google unveiled its ad exchange Friday.

"Advertising networks are big aggregators. We have to emphasize that
we are premium," says Nada Stirratt, executive vice president of
digital ad sales for Viacom's MTV Networks. "We produce original content and attract fans, not just fly-by-night users."

In a bid to appeal more to advertisers and visitors, Web sites have
added pages of news or entertainment during the current downturn,
expanding their ad space and thus their reliance on ad networks.

At the same time, many big advertisers, eager to save money, have
shifted more online business to the networks. Ford now buys about 40%
of its display ads through ad networks, up from about 5% three years
ago, in part because it is "more efficient," says Scott Kelly, Ford's
digital marketing manager.

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The Dirty Little Secret About the "Wisdom of the Crowds" - There is No Crowd

Recent research by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Vassilis
Kostakos pokes a big hole in the prevailing wisdom that the "wisdom of
crowds" is a trustworthy force on today's web. His research focused on
studying the voting patterns across several sites featuring
user-generated reviews including Amazon, IMDb, and BookCrossing.
The findings showed that a small group of users accounted for a large
number of ratings. In other words, as many have already begun to
suspect, small but powerful groups can easily distort what the "crowd"
really thinks, leading online reviews to often end up appearing
extremely positive or extremely negative.

Article Link

The Dirty Little Secret About the "Wisdom of the Crowds" - There is No Crowd

Recent research by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Vassilis
Kostakos pokes a big hole in the prevailing wisdom that the "wisdom of
crowds" is a trustworthy force on today's web. His research focused on
studying the voting patterns across several sites featuring
user-generated reviews including Amazon, IMDb, and BookCrossing.
The findings showed that a small group of users accounted for a large
number of ratings. In other words, as many have already begun to
suspect, small but powerful groups can easily distort what the "crowd"
really thinks, leading online reviews to often end up appearing
extremely positive or extremely negative.

5to1 Lets Publishers Regain Control Over Unsold Ad Inventory

5to1, a startup with a high-profile founding team that includes former Fox Interactive execs Jim Heckman and Ross Levinsohn, has raised $4.5 million
in seed funding to work on a solution that can turn remnant advertising
into premium advertising. The company’s breaking out of stealth mode
today at TechCrunch50 with a service that could rid both publishers and advertisers of the extremely ineffective ad campaigns that are basically only beneficial to the networks selling them.

The 5to1 system allows publishers to get in between the remnant
networks and the ad inventory to give them more control over what will
appear on the site, where and when. The company’s founder and CEO Jim
Heckman dubs it a “Match.com meets iTunes for advertising” because it
allows publishers to dynamically create ‘playlists’ of ad units of
sorts and easily run both proper ads and potentially placeable remnant
ads on variable places on their website(s).

Ultimately, the goal is to make it easier for content publishers to
increase the quality of – and with it, the revenue that comes from –
the ads that appear on unsold inventory without too much hassle. And if
it takes off we’ll see a lot less of these horrible screaming ads that
you’d never click on even if they held you at gunpoint.

Q – Paul Graham: Humans can only do worse than the best optimization, right?

A: Pages are dynamic. What we found is that a vast majority of ads are not contextual, and we can fix that.