Short and sweet, the links are today. We’re busy prepping for the CM Summit next week. Here’s the good stuff:

Huffington’s Role Shrinks at AOL (WSJ) AN interesting story developing here.

The Storytelling Animal: The Science of How We Came to Live and Breathe Stories (BP) A book we will be reading for sure.

Million Short: A Search Engine for the Very Long Tail (Wired) Worth checking out – almost like going back in time, when the web wasn’t dominated by the head end.

The Path from a Social Brand to a Social Business (Brian Solis) He’s speaking our language here, again.

Digital Content NewFronts marks an online milestone  (LAT) A focus on the largest players, but the new tradition is here to stay.

Article: For Brands, Social Media Shows Returns but Measurement Hurdles Remain (EM) Continuing coverage of our current fascination.

Tumblr At A Glance (DBT) A quick primer on the growing platform.

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If it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

And don’t forget to secure your spot at the upcoming CM Summit, held May 14-15th in New York City. REGISTER today for one of the most exciting and connected digital marketing events of the year. Held in partnership with the IAB at Skylight Soho.

In today’s Signal, native advertising takes center stage; Bing takes a spin on the retro train to Minimalist Town; and, thanks to AdInsight, the online/offline divide might get a bit smaller. To the links …

Defining Ads Down (Digiday) What constitutes an ad is changing, and there’s a lot of wordplay around the ad unit as content. “Featured stories,” “recommended articles,” and “trends” are now Silicon Valley euphemisms for ads. Is this just semantics, or something else? Whatever it is, we need to make sure we don’t lose transparency. Oh, and the right of the content creator to make money from his/her work.

Bing Goes Search-Retro With Cleaner Look For Results (SearchEngineLand) A big change is a ‘comin for Bing. In an effort to create a “fresh, de-cluttered experience designed to help you find the results you want faster” and to make the page “easier to scan,” Microsoft has started to roll out a simpler Bing. More on this soon, I’d wager.

AdInsight Raises $2.6M From Eden Ventures For AdTech That Bridges Online And Offline Analytics (TechCrunch)  AdInsight’s flagship product, AdInsight Clarity, is a proprietary solution that tracks how every single website visitor has found a company’s website, what pages they looked at when there, and at what point they picked up the phone to call the company. They’re tracking the missing link across the online/offline divide, and we’ll be watching closely.

The Big Doubt Over Facebook’s IPO (WSJ) With new features, such as its much-talked about Sponsored Stories, Facebook is pushing ad methods that haven’t been fully tested, notes one FB advertiser with deep pockets. He and others are wondering if they’re getting their money’s worth. This (almost) obligatory ‘maybe this isn’t the second coming’ piece about Facebook suggests that WSJ is raising the flag now just so they can point to it later, if the FB IPO doesn’t work … But it most likely will, given the hype.

Tumblr’s Big Brand Bet (Digiday) Tumblr has set a $25,000 minimum for buying placement in “Radar,” the space it reserves on user dashboards to highlight interesting Tumblr accounts. The goal is to empower creative advertising by tapping into the originality that thrives on the platform. But rolling out an ad platform to a community virulently opposed to ads is a gamble. As is assuming you can roll your own, when advertisers want ROI compared to other approaches to reaching the same audience. Related:
The Ever-Affable David Karp Talks Tumblr’s Two-Pronged Advertising Strategy at Decoded Fashion Conference (BetaBeat) Tumblr’s David Karp detailed the company’s growth and his new plan for advertisers at Decoded Fashion on Monday. In doing so, BB’s Rebecca Seel notes, “he did not hide his (friendly!) contempt for advertising, emphasizing that Tumblr is a creative community which values expression, which advertising, in his opinion, is not.” Actually, advertising is, in fact, expression. And I’m not certain that folks on Tumblr are going to be happy about being left out of the deal. Cue the next link…

Ad Industry Takes Major Step To Fight Online Piracy (AdWeek) To cut off the financial support that keeps unscrupulous sites alive, the nation’s two major ad industry associations have recommended that agencies and marketers take steps to keep brands’ ads off those sites. Bob Liodice, president and CEO of the Association of National Advertisers, sums up the reasoning behind the decision: “The ads can lend inadvertent legitimacy to the illicit business models and can mislead consumers into believing that these ‘rogue’ websites are offering authentic products and complying with the law.”

Why Native Ad Formats Are the Future (Digiday) Native advertising lets brands experiment with creating entertaining content – longer-form videos, Web films, photo streams, interactive games – instead of being limited to the confines of banners or 15-second pre-roll ads. To be sure, native ads will be part of the future, but not the entire future. More on this from jbat soon.

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If it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

And don’t forget to secure your spot at the upcoming CM Summit, held May 14-15th in New York City. REGISTER today for one of the most exciting and connected digital marketing events of the year. Held in partnership with the IAB at Skylight Soho.

Photo By Michael Gil

The tech press, it ain’t what is should be, says Anil Dash. And what about the bubble so many are expecting? Is it already here? Well, Facebook is starting its roadshow soon, and the answer depends on the people you choose to ask. To the links…

Why You Can’t Trust Tech Press to Teach You About the Tech Industry (Dashes.com) An obvious graduate from the no-nonsense school of life, Anil Dash tells it like it is: “If there were one lesson I’d want to impress upon people who are interested in succeeding in the technology industry, it would be, as I’ve said before, know your shit.” Sparking quite a conversation with this piece, Dash comes down on tech bloggers and journalists who don’t know what they should about the disciplines they cover.

Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go? (Inc.) Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein, the partners behind troubled Turntable.fm, go to South by Southwest in an attempt to again woo the tech world and figure out how to make their partnership work. It’s a long but great piece about the ups and downs of running a business in this crazy industry.

Nope!  Still No Bubble Here, Says Marc Andreessen (AllThingsD) Marc Andreessen, who just might be Silicon Valley’s most prominent investor, does not think we’re in a bubble. His opinion is based partly on the fact that highly celebrated tech companies that have gone public in the last year have mostly seen their stock prices take a beating. And, while we’re on the subject…

Ron Conway: Tech Is Nowhere Near a Bubble (CNN Money) Ron Conway, one of the earliest investors in Google, Facebook and Twitter, as well as a recent investor in Instagram, says any talk of a tech bubble is, well, inflated.

Simulmedia Raises $6 Million More For Web-Like TV Ads (AllThingsD) There are lots of people chasing targeted TV ads, and to date none of them have gotten very far… except Dave Morgan. Morgan is a Web ad pathfinder, who promises to merge Web-style targeting with traditional TV ads through his New York City-based ad company, Simulmedia.

Signpost, the AdSense for Local Business, Raises $3.75M (GigaOM) Here’s another example of the big money being put behind advertising-related startups. Signpost, a New York start-up aimed at providing local businesses with a customized online marketing campaign, has been growing quickly, commanding the space once dominated by Yellow Pages, and investors have taken notice.

With 16.4% Growth, Digital Is Adland’s Star Performer (AdAge) Ad Age DataCenter reports that in 2011, U.S. agencies generated 30.3% of revenue — that’s $10.1B — from digital, compared with 28.0% in 2010. Agencies of all types are dialing up digital, but the shift is most evident in CRM and direct marketing, where agencies pulled in an estimated $2.8B in U.S. digital revenue. The DataCenter’s digital tally came from a bottoms-up analysis based on Agency Report data compiled for nearly 1,000 agencies, agency networks and agency companies.

Mobile Video Ads Start to Catch On (digiday) Brands are starting to see results from video campaigns that reach people on the go. Reebok’s mobile video ads for the RealFlex sneaker ran on tablets, desktop and mobile, and resulted in a 131 percent lift in brand response conversions, 27 percent higher than average video ad interaction rates. Volvo also turned to mobile video when the carmaker wanted to invoke passion and buzz around the launch of its new S60 sedan.

Confessions of an Ad Network Salesperson (Digiday) One the heels of the lsat Signal, in which we posted a link to this piece on Growth Hackers, today we find evidence of the need for those folks. Digiday tracked down a young media salesperson to get a view from supply side of the fence, and the anonymous source opined on tangible meetings, using summer houses to build relations, lying to clients and, more to the point, he answered a question that piqued our interest, Do salespeople always understand what it is they’re selling? The short answer: Not always.

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If it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box). And don’t forget to secure your spot at the upcoming CM Summit, held May 14-15th in New York City. REGISTER today for one of the most exciting and connected digital marketing events of the year. Held in partnership with the IAB at Skylight Soho.

The first banner, at Hotwired. Yeah, I was there.

Themes over the past few days include the death and revival of digital display, confusion over another piece of digital legislation (CISPA), and video, video, video (oh, and big data). To the links:

Small Screens, Big Dollars (NYTimes) Wanting a slice of the $70B a year that is spent on television commercials, digital media companies are now a big part of the annual spring Upfronts. Last week’s Digital Content NewFronts brought major players, including FM, to Manhattan for a series of presentations directed at encouraging Madison Ave. marketers and agencies to spend more money on digital ads. If you weren’t in attendance, you can grab a front row seat to the event, via Signal’s Live Stream of 2012 DIGITAS Digital Content NewFront.

Growth Hacker is the New VP Marketing  (Andrew Chen) The classic, non-technical role of the VP of Marketing is rapidly fading due to a new breed of marketer/coder hybrids called Growth Hackers. Growth Hackers are faced with all of the usual marketing problems and questions, of course, but they solve and answer not only using direct marketing disciplines, but also by relying on technical and engineering disciplines. This new role is helping to change the look and feel of entire marketing teams as we know them.

Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti: Display Dollars Aren’t Coming Back (PaidContent) Jonah Peretti, a founder of both the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed, sees display ads as artifacts, relics from yesteryear’s Internet. He notes that instead of going to portals to find content, today’s readers are turning to social media for stories, and it would be in the best interest of publishers to pay close attention. But can the current infrastructure support Peretti’s belief?

How CISPA would affect you (faq) (Cnet) A primer for those wondering what’s really going on here.

For Display Ads, Being Seen Matters More Than Being Clicked (comScore)  comScore, Inc. and Pretarget released results of an online advertising study which found that ad viewability and hover time are more strongly correlated with conversions than clicks or total impressions. Kirby Winfield, SVP of Corporate Development at comScore, believes the study helps  illuminate several findings. “First, it once again demonstrates the perils of relying on click-throughs for measuring the performance of display ad campaigns … Secondly, it highlights why the viewable impression … is significantly more meaningful than the unvalidated impression. Finally, this study shows why other non-click metrics of engagement, such as interaction or hovering, may be much more important in evaluating campaign performance than the click ever was. It’s time to start measuring the impact of campaigns using metrics that really matter, not just the ones that are most easily measured.”  For more on this story, read this piece from Ad Age.

Fixing Ads for Digital Media’s Golden Age (Digiday) A new approach to storytelling will allow readers to explore content in more fluid ways, says Matt Sanchez: “Today’s digital publishers are forced to contend with the legacy systems put in place by both the Web and print. From uninspired, table-like layouts on Web pages to the linear, one-dimensional experience of reading print on paper, these relics of digital publishing’s predecessors have created a media experience that’s a mess. It’s time to start over. It’s time to rethink the relationship between content, editorial design and user experience.” Amen, and where’d you get that idea, bud?

Bombs Away! Web Ads Miss Their Target, All the Time (All Things D) An example that an ad on the Web may do a better job of reaching its audience than, for example, a magazine ad, but that doesn’t mean it’s doing a good job.

YouTube Launches Advertiser Playbook, Gives Away $50 Million In Free Advertising (SocialTimes) To kick off the launch of Google AdWords for Video, YouTube is offering $50M in free advertising to help businesses enter the video ad world. Businesses that open a new AdWords account can receive a $75 credit, which can be used to reach new customers on YouTube for one month. The company has also released an Advertiser Playbook to teach advertisers the best practices and strategies when it comes to creating great content and building a YouTube audience. And, to recognize businesses that have fostered a culture of entrepreneurship on YouTube, the company has introduced YouTube Marketing Ambassadors, a group of outstanding organizations that have used YouTube to drive sales and grow operations.

Two Top Microsoft Advertising Execs Departing (AdWeek) A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed the departure of Richard Dunmall, VP of Global Agencies and Accounts (advertising). Meanwhile, Marc Bresseel, Microsoft’s VP of Global Marketing, is said to also be leaving the company. No confirmation that he plans to jump ship, however. Anyone paying attention knows that the company has had to endure a few high-profile sales departures over the past year or so, starting with Carolyn Everson jumping to Facebook in February 2011, followed by the exit of Jay Sampson four months later. Sampson ran emerging media sales for Microsoft.

Why Digital Ad Forecasts Are Irrelevant: The Future Is Not Display Ads (AdAge)  Because there is no such thing as display advertising on most of the platforms where consumer attention is flowing (Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, for example), James Gross believes that digital advertising will go through a radical transformation in 1-3 years, making digital ad forecasts irrelevant.

Digiday Launches Content Marketing Unit (Digiday) Digiday joins the mix of companies providing quality content services for advertisers with the launch of its new content-marketing arm, Digiday Content Studio. The Studio will operate separately from Digiday’s editorial operations, using different staff to produce content for marketers.

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If it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box). And don’t forget to secure your spot at the upcoming CM Summit, held May 14-15th in New York City. REGISTER today for one of the most exciting and connected digital marketing events of the year. Held in partnership with the IAB at Skylight Soho.