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In today’s Signal, Google laps Apple in the race for brand value; Affectiva is one step closer to saying, “Smile, you’re being emo-tracked!”; Will RTB will become the new defacto display online buying method?; FreeMonee claims its new ‘gift’ incentive lifts sales by 400-700 percent; Facebook once again looks to social gamers for revenue; “Bimbots,” the cheapest form of image-building no brand manager would admit to using; and more.
Google Takes ‘Top Global Brand’ Title from Apple (SEW) In General Sentiment’s Q2 report, Google scored $756.6M in brand value, compared to former leader Apple’s $594.3M. And Microsoft? It took the bronze with $356.4M. GS, for those unfamiliar with the company, analyzes more than 30M sources of content (and opinions on content) regarding brands and products to assign a dollar value to the amount of buzz over a company, regardless of sentiment.
The New Face Of AdTech Goes Consumer: Emotion Tracker Affectiva Gets $12M From KPCB, Horizon (TechCrunch) Affectiva, a startup with a way of measuring emotional responses from online users by tracking their faces, has announced a huge round of funding that it will use to take its technology, first implemented to measure the effectiveness of ads, into the consumer market.
Analyst: RTB Will Be 34% of Display Revenues in Five Years (AdExchanger) Noting that the report doesn’t include video, social, or mobile RTB, since those platforms are still young and hard to predict, Zach Rodgers sums up the analysis, adding that it’s reasonable to assume sizable budgets will migrate from display to all three categories and, therefore, “the overall RTB spend will be much larger than the $6.8 billion estimated.”
With $34M, Gift Incentive Network FreeMonee Aims to Upend Advertising (GIGAom) FreeMonee, the company that works with merchants and financial institutions to give consumers free, no-strings-attached gifts in the form of credits to their credit and debit cards, has received a large gift of its own. It will use the $34M in new funding to continue pursuing its mission to “change the economics of advertising” by expanding to include more merchants and banks and building out the platform’s underlying technology.
Facebook Taps New Mobile Revenue Stream: App Ads (AdAge) Facbook is trying a new ad unit priced on a cost-per-click basis that will allow advertisers to promote their mobile apps. The unit joins Facebook’s “sponsored stories,” the network’s core product for brand advertisers, and will be targeted at advertisers looking for installs of mobile apps.
Who’s That Woman in the Twitter Bot Profile? (FastCompany) Jason Feifer has written a smart and entertaining piece about the army of bots on Twitter that we’ve all seen and that, get this, make up 48% of brands’ followers.
41 Female Founders Every Entrepreneur Should Know (Mashable) The success of prominent female business leaders, such as Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer, are bringing more (and well-deserved) attention to women in the tech space. But beyond the Sandbergs and the Mayers, there’s a crop of women who are not only leading, but also launching tech startups, and here at FM we’re making a major push of our Signal and CM Summit conferences to feature some of them.
How Buzzfeed Won Over Madison Avenue (Digiday) Buzzfeed, a site that favors social ads over banner ads, has just the right message at just the right time to attract Madison Ave. agencies that are more interested than ever in figuring out social ads and going “beyond the banner.”
VivaKi Pairs with comScore to Push Viewability Metric (ClickZ) The partnership will enable the mass use of viewability in media buying decisions, according to Anne Hunter, SVP of ad effectiveness for comScore. “It goes beyond measuring viewable impressions for a single campaign post facto to looking at viewability of large amounts of inventory in real time,” she said.
Short Film Imagines Life with Data and Constant Digital (FlowingData) In the what-happens-when-technology-takes-over-our-lives genre, art imitates life and “life becomes a game, and everything is gamified, including an incredibly awkward date.”
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