A lively conversation about the future of data-driven display

With a life-sized portrait of George Washington looming in the background, Fixing Advertising panelists---many of them founders and revolutionaries themselves---discussed the future of digital display at their latest conference, held in Boston at the Harvard Club on November 30.

This Yahoo! and Dapper-sponsored confab, the ninth held this year, is now available on iTunes and via .mp3 download. Visit the Fixing Advertising website and to listen and learn from Jon Aizen (Yahoo!/Dapper), Jeff Steeves (CSN Stores), Nathen Woodman (Adnetik), Mike Baker (DataXu), Scott Portugal (e-Miles) and Tom Penque (Havas Digital).

--- The Team

eXelate finds positive results with Right Media Audience Sharing

The industry shift to audience targeting has given advertisers the ability to reach the right user with the right message at the right time in a more efficient and cost effective manner. Right Media announced new Audience Sharing capabilities last month and some of our customers are already seeing good things happening with it.

With Right Media’s Audience Sharing, data providers—referred to as segment owners—can monetize, manage and report segment usage across the Right Media Exchange.  One of the first segment owners using the technology on the Right Media Exchange was eXelate, the world’s first and one of the largest open marketplace for behavioral targeting data and one of the leaders in data management tools. eXelate became a segment owner through Audience Sharing one month ago. As a segment owner, eXelate’s business objective on the exchange is to make their data actionable for media buyers across the Right

Meet a creative director who prefers authentic experiences to advertising

Can the creative community walk the tightrope between marketing and authenticity? Sounds like the perfect question for Brian Hunt, Yahoo!’s Senior Creative Director. He’s moderating “Can Authenticity and Marketing Be Friends?,” a panel scheduled for this coming Wednesday during the ANA's Creativity Conference in New York.

Hunt will lead a discussion with ad luminaries Kevin Roddy (ex-Bartle Bogle Hegarty), Rosemarie Ryan (Co:, ex-JWT) and Steve Wax (Campfire), as they explore how digital, video, social, mobile and TV offer marketers opportunities to tell unified stories and engage customers---or not, as is often the case. Yahoo! Ad Blog’s Becky Ebenkamp hunted Hunt down to get an authentic preview of the panel, and experience his thoughts on the topic of creativity.

Yahoo! Advertising Blog: Creative directors generally work at ad agencies. What does a senior creative director at Yahoo! do? Are you our Don Draper?

An energetic shopper prepares herself for the big day

As with music, movies and other creative works, the quality of an advertisement is in the eye of the beholder. I’m sure there are those who find the “Flo” character in the Progressive Insurance commercials hilarious; personally, I think she’s insufferably annoying, and I’ve nearly pulled a muscle trying to quickly change the station upon hearing the opening seconds of one of her ads.

With its series of November Black Friday ads, giant retailer Target tried to “out-Flo” Flo, presenting a hyper, unnamed, middle-aged blonde shopper (played by comedian Maria Bamford), who relentlessly trains like a boxer to prepare for the rigors of scooping up bargains at 4:00 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving. The Wieden & Kennedy agency produced ten 15- and 30-second spots featuring the red-suited Bamford to promote Target’s two-day sale. While the ads fell flat for this devoted non-shopper, apparently they resonated with the many people who do like to

Free webinar showcases ad-targeting tools and consumer insights for marketers

Yahoo! Advertising and Forrester Research have a match game to show you. However, this one doesn’t involve wacky out-of-work sitcom actors and garish TV show sets. It’s a sophisticated targeting tool that allows marketers to merge their own customer intelligence with what we know from observing online behavior, so they can serve up digital campaigns that make the most sense for each person.

Princes of the Web gather to discuss the future of media

It’s not every day that an industry forum gets a welcome keynote by an actual prince. His Royal Highness, Prince Albert II of Monaco, gave the opening remarks at one of the year’s most exclusive confabs, The Monaco Media Forum, on November 10.

In addition to the traditional aristocracy of birth, the three-day Monaco Media Forum attracted an aristocracy of talent from across the media empire. Among the notables was Dapper’s founder and CTO, Eran Shir. Dapper, you may know, underwent something of a royal marriage with Yahoo! back in October, and the relationship is going swimmingly.

Eran talks turkey about ad networks, the future of Dapper, and Yahoo!, along with other Internet royalty from comScore, Nielsen, AOL and Simulmedia. View the video below and see Eran’s comments on the Dapper blog.

See all the videos from Monaco here.

--- Michael Mattis

Shopping, more shopping, socializing for business, face law and social do good-ing

1. Best Use of Location Services on Black Friday: Target

We all know mobile phones are changing the way we shop. And now, there’s a Yahoo! study to prove it. The proof was also in the Black Friday pudding. Savvy shoppers weren’t only checking out sales, they were using Foursquare to check in and nab even better in-store deals. Who was the Black Friday location services winner? Target. Not surprising, since the brand hit a double bullseye, buying the Black Friday hashtag on Twitter and reviving the crazy popular, crazy Target lady.

2. Best eCommerce Day Ever: Cyber Monday 2010

After the long holiday weekend, Americans thumbed their nose at---ugh---work and instead, kept on---yay---shopping. According to comScore, Cyber Monday 2010 marked the “heaviest online spending day in history” exceeding $1 billion, up 16 percent from last year. Interestingly, the Twittersphere was considerably less concerned with Cyber Monday than Black Friday. Hmmm, maybe Twitter users actually work at work. At least, when they aren’t tweeting.

On myth-busting, not getting it wrong, why facts matter, and more

Since the earliest days of the Internet, Douglas Rushkoff has distinguished himself as one of the most insightful critics of society and technology in the new millennium. His latest book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, looks at how both companies and individuals can thrive in these forever switched-on times.

We caught up with the always outspoken and engaging Rushkoff---who’s frequently hired to consult both agencies and brands---at the recent PivotCon conference, where he was the grand finale. In the following Q&A, he tells us why the Internet is biased toward facts, not myths; how brands can actually make social media work; and why:

Yahoo! Advertising Blog: You were the grand finale at the PivotCon conference, and yet you’re often critical of the advertising industry. What’s your take on marketing in the digital age?

Douglas Rushkoff: The majority of advertisers are just learning some vocabulary words they can say at a meeting and hope to retain a client who sees that they’re not getting the results they’re being promised. And what people are calling social media---and what I used to just call “the Internet”---is still little understood, and has mystery and activity and big numbers with millions of people, so it holds up the promise for creative and sexy deliverables.

Facebook and Twitter are restoring some of the basic functionality of the early ’90s Internet, so now people are going, “Wow, people can share things in a peer-to-peer way, and there must be a way for highly branded, centralized corporations to exploit that, right?” But the trick is that it’s really hard, because if this is a peer-to-peer technology revolution, then it necessarily reduces our dependence on highly centralized brands for meaning and supply.

YAB: What don’t marketers “get” about social media?

DR: Trying to get millennials to tweet about brand myths to drive customer loyalty is like trying to resurrect the techniques of 1950s television advertising onto the Internet. And the fact that they’re calling it social is even funnier to me.

YAB: Because the Internet has always been social…

DR: Right, it was originally about people having discussions. But a lot of people were introduced to the ’net via the World Wide Web interface and through sites like Amazon and eBay, concluding that the Internet is a place to buy stuff. Then when the dot-com bubble burst, all these things came up that were more “Internety,” like blogs and chats and Facebook.

YAB: What’s your take on Facebook?

DR: I understand there’s a great desire for people to connect online, I just don’t know if the way to do it is through a giant, centralized technology run by a company whose sole purpose is to figure out how to monetize relationships.