Bermel Interactive

Google announced today they are acquiring Teracent, a dynamic ad optimization company I referenced in an earlier post. Disclosure: I was fortunate to do some contract work for Teracent beginning in March of this year. Unfortunately, as a contractor, rather than a FT employee who is now buying rounds at the local bar.

“This technology can help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns,” Google said. “In turn, this enables publishers to make more money from their ad space and delivers Web users better ads and more ad-funded Web content.”

The announcement comes on the heels of Google’s deal to acquire mobile ad network AdMob in a $750M stock exchange just a few weeks ago and of course, the larger acquisition of online ad service, Doubleclick over a year ago.

So, to those who say they are so over display advertising, consider the moves Google is making.

The shopping spree is evidence they are serious about staking a claim in display, a fairly fragmented market compared to search. No single player has more than a 10% share today.

Display may not be the media darling that SMM is today, but is here to stay:

Read more…

Salesforce.com is a cloud computing company with a customer base of 70,000 across myriad of industries and geographies. They held an annual conference this past week in San Francisco – optimistically named Dreamforce – that boasted a staggering 19,000 attendees.

During the keynote, the company announced Chatter, a social platform that includes profiles, status updates with real time activity feeds from it’s customer relationship management software and integration with Facebook and Twitter.

I typically don’t spend much time thinking about enterprise apps, but this is interesting because, though it’s not the first to talk about bringing social networking for business use into a secure enterprise environment, the size and clout of salesforce.com is enough to warrant significant attention. At a time when it seems every company is asking how do I integrate social media marketing, here is Salesforce saying, we’ll change the way business works.

That said, the company was exceptionally careful to refer to Chatter as a collaboration tool rather than a social media capability, as Ian Lamont’s blog for CIO pointed out. CEO Mark Benioff says the choice of words is all about accessing pursestrings, rather than avoiding social media terminology.

“We really want to talk about collaboration, because that really is a budget item for our customers,” Benioff said.

Until the product rolls out, we won’t know if it’s primarily a collaboration tool for sharing business documents with some light social features, or truly a social networking tool with some enterprise features. Whether Salesforce refers to it as enterprise social, realtime enterprise, social collaboration, or any other combination, it doesn’t matter.

Certainly, as Enterprise Irregulars so rightly pointed out in their post, the product announcement won’t address the cultural issues that hamper adoption of social networking. Even so, I believe the announcement pushes the conversation about the need to integrate and adopt social networking forward. CMOs and marketing departments wrestling with how to roll out and integrate social media marketing have another example to point to, and depending on the success of the rollout, potentially many more internal advocates to champion the cause.

That’s my take. What’s yours?

Display has to change, otherwise it’s headed for failure. If advertisers don’t recognize online is more challenged with the old approaches and needs to be incredibly hyper-targeted, they’re going to fail.
- Chip Hall, SVP, Sales & Marketing, Teracent, as told to AdAge.

Even Internet executives admit that traditional banner ads fail to meet marketer’s expectations. That view is changing however, as marketers employ the latest techniques to more precisely target the intended audience and measure all of the activity associated with a person’s interaction with an ad.

Today, a spate of companies offer dynamic ad optimization capabilities, among them Teracent, Tumri, PointRoll, ChoiceStream, Dapper. (Disclosure: I’ve done some contract work for Teracent)

What is dynamic ad optimization?
Think of all of the parts, the elements or components of an ad: the headline, animation, logo, background color, main image, call to action text and the button itself, the product featured and price. Each one of these can be tweaked – optimized – to deliver the combination of elements that best achieve the defined success metrics on the fly. Multi-variate testing on steroids, if you will. Depending on the provider, the marketer can set the rules (only send the snow blower creative to the northeast) or the “engine” can learn automatically over time or a combination of rules and self-learning can apply.

The results can be impressive. Consider: