“This integration is a great example of how DoubleClick is working with key industry players to bring value to publishers by enhancing the liquidity of mobile display inventory,” said Ari Paparo, group product manager for DoubleClick products. “We believe that the ability to sell mobile inventory directly and indirectly will provide mobile advertisers with more options, ultimately leading to better monetization for publishers.”

Now, publishers using DoubleClick Mobile can sell mobile display inventory indirectly, through automated access to one or more networks of mobile advertisers. Publishers, of course, can continue to sell directly as they have always done. DoubleClick Mobile provides an accurate view of what inventory is available to sell, what has been sold directly and what has been filled by ad networks. By managing inventory across direct and indirect channels, DoubleClick Mobile helps publishers better monetize their mobile web content.

DoubleClick Mobile is part of the DoubleClick Revenue Center, which enables media sellers to manage their display campaigns in tandem with emerging platforms, such as mobile advertising, in a single location.

“Both brand and performance advertisers are using our MBrand and Decktrade networks to reach their mobile advertising goals,” said Paul Palmieri, president and CEO of Millennial Media. “Our integration with DoubleClick Mobile makes it possible for publishers to accept ads from Millennial Media’s deep roster of leading advertisers while preserving their ability to sell directly.”

“AdMob is always eager to extend our engineering investments in mobile advertising relevance and optimization to new platforms,” said Omar Hamoui, AdMob’s founder and CEO. “We are excited that DoubleClick’s clients will now be able to join over 4000 existing AdMob publishers in leveraging AdMob’s ad liquidity and mobile specific ad serving technologies.”

The new service allows publishers to generate revenue by including contextual, text-based ads next to Adobe PDF content, with Yahoo! providing access to its extensive network of advertisers to match a broad range of subject matter. For advertisers, Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! extends reach by delivering advertising across a new channel of content, while also providing the ability to track advertising performance, just as they can today with ads placed on Web sites.

“By partnering with Yahoo! on this innovative advertising service we are creating opportunities for publishers to build new businesses around unique content that previously was just given away or not available to a mass online audience,” said Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president, Corporate Development at Adobe. “As advertisers look to touch new audiences, readers can look forward to some exciting Adobe PDF content coming their way.”

“This partnership with Adobe creates a previously untapped opportunity for advertisers to connect with qualified audiences, while opening new revenue streams for publishers, and helping deliver additional relevant content to consumers,” said Todd Teresi, senior vice president, Yahoo! Publisher Network. “Creating new value with Ads in Adobe PDFs is a natural step forward in Yahoo!’s ongoing strategy to enable an array of digital connections between advertisers, publishers, and consumers.”

How it Works

To join the program, publishers must register online, and then simply upload their Adobe PDF content so that it can be ad-enabled before distributing PDFs as they do today. Ads can only be displayed within Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat, in a panel adjacent to the content so that they do not disrupt the viewing experience. Every time the PDF content is viewed, contextual ads are dynamically matched to the content of the document. The publisher can then monitor performance through detailed reports. Publishers already committed to participating in the Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! beta program include: IDG InfoWorld, Wired, Pearson’s Education, Meredith Corporation, Reed Elsevier and many more.

“Since moving to a Web-only format earlier this year, we at InfoWorld have been able to apply a laser focus to cutting-edge solutions for the electronic distribution of our content,” said Allen Fear, director of Online Content at InfoWorld. “The unique combination of Adobe PDF and Yahoo! ads presents a new way of generating revenue from many of our existing products. We are excited about the opportunity to work with Adobe and Yahoo! on what we believe is a solution that significantly enhances the value of PDF distribution.”

Pricing, Availability and System Requirements

Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! is a free service and does not require the purchase or installation of software. The program, currently in beta, is open to US-based publishers who produce English content. Publishers can apply to participate in the program at advision.webevents.yahoo.com/adobe/ . Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! supports PDF content created in Adobe Acrobat 8 and earlier versions. For more information including system requirements please visit Adobe Labs .

“Both Microsoft and AdECN have a deep commitment to creating the technologies and platforms that enable advertisers and publishers to maximize their ROI in the digital marketplace,” said Kevin Johnson, president, Platforms and Services Division at Microsoft. “We believe the addition of AdECN to the Microsoft portfolio is a perfect fit and will create more efficiency for the industry by forming a more robust marketplace between advertisers and publishers, aggregating more supply and demand. This is good for the whole advertising industry.”

Founded in 2003, AdECN brings both key technologies and significant domain expertise to the Microsoft team. Advertisers and publishers will benefit from this deal in the following ways:

• Advertisers will get access to more inventory, enabling more efficient matching of their requirements which can help increase ROI.
• Publishers will be able to increase yield — earn more money per page view — due to the higher volume of available inventory.
• Both groups will benefit from the exchange’s neutrality and transparency, enabling them to make more informed decisions about their bid and ask decisions.

“Joining forces with Microsoft will provide the capital and resources to enable AdECN to scale the exchange at a much faster pace, making it more attractive to the advertising networks and other traffic aggregators looking to better serve their advertisers and publishers,” said William Urschel, founder and chief executive officer, AdECN. “All of us here are thrilled to join a team that shares our commitment to neutrality for the exchange and also believes that creating liquidity and intelligently matching supply and demand will be two of the most important roles for a technology provider to play in this rapidly growing and evolving market.”

The exchange concept is similar to the NASDAQ which serves as the hub for financial brokerages, enabling all parties to come together and have access through a neutral party to a larger pool of supply and demand for their clients. Exchanges are a means by which liquidity is created for advertising networks by bringing together a maximum number of both buyers and sellers. Rather than an ad network, a true ad exchange is the neutral, transparent, automated connection between multiple ad networks. AdECN market advertising networks trade on behalf of their advertisers and publishers. This means that AdECN supports, rather than competes with, the various players in the online advertising industry.

The acquisition is expected to be completed in the first half of Microsoft’s fiscal year 2008. The acquisition is not expected to have a significant impact on the financial guidance previously issued by the Company. AdECN, which has approximately 30 employees, will continue to operate from its headquarters near Santa Barbara, Calif. as part of Microsoft’s Online Services Business.

As part of the relationship, Microsoft will be the exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising on Digg. The two companies also agreed to work together on future technology and advertising initiatives. 

“Our collaboration with Digg is about bringing our advertising technology and sales force to one of the fastest-growing sites on the Web and a true innovator in user-generated content,” said Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of the Online Services Group at Microsoft. “We believe advertisers will welcome Microsoft and Digg’s combined strengths to forge more meaningful connections online.”

Microsoft and Federated Media Publishing, Digg’s current advertising partner, plan to collaborate to bring integrated programs to Digg’s users and advertisers. “Federated Media has unique advertising sales assets that dovetail with our efforts, and we look forward to working with them,” Berkowitz said. 

“We’re now positioned to provide a world-class advertising solution that builds upon Digg’s philosophy of providing a great experience for users and advertisers,” said Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg. “As the Digg audience continues to grow and diversify, we believe that this initiative with Microsoft, and the resources that it provides, will enable us to focus less on developing an advertising infrastructure and more on developing new and innovative features for the site.”

The companies expect to begin execution of the agreement in the coming weeks.

Ask Sponsored Listings (ASL) is an automated, open-auction system that allows search marketers to purchase, manage and optimize pay-per-click and contextual advertising campaigns on the ASL publisher network, including Ask.com.

As more consumers are making purchase decisions online, search marketing has emerged as a $15.8 billion global industry, and experts expect it to grow to $44.5 billion over the next five years. Search is also the second most commonly used application on the Web, with 550 million searches daily in the United States, according to Piper Jaffray & Co.* Local search is also catching on as more businesses want to be able to target their ads to a specific region; in 2006, local search accounted for approximately 15 percent of total online ad spending.** adManager is heeding these trends by offering small businesses a solution to develop a national or locally targeted search-engine advertising campaign in no time that can be managed across multiple search engines.

“We are very excited about the integration of Ask Sponsored Listings, as this provides more options for our small businesses to market their companies and attract new customers,” said Baris Cetinok, director of product management and marketing for Microsoft Office Live. “Adding Ask Sponsored Listings to our adManager service gets us one step closer to our goal of providing small businesses with an all-inclusive search engine marketing service.”

Cetinok continued, “Many small businesses feel that search engine marketing is a complicated and expensive process, and we want to demonstrate to our customers, especially those without a lot of time or budget, that pay-per-click advertising on adManager can be simple and affordable. adManager will help our small businesses promote their companies to the millions out there using the Internet to search for products and services.”

James Speer, general manager of search marketing at IAC Advertising Solutions, said, “The Ask Sponsored Listings search advertising network reaches over 59 million monthly unique users. The integration of Ask Sponsored Listings with Microsoft Office Live makes it easy for marketers to extend their pay-per-click ad campaigns to our publisher network.”

Search ads are text-based ads displayed on a search results page. They look very similar to search results displayed in the main body of the page; however, they are labeled as advertisements. To start the search engine marketing process, businesses can bid on keywords related to their services and products; their ad then has the potential of appearing when customers submit keyword searches on the Internet. Advertisers are charged only when their ad is clicked, which makes search advertising highly efficient.

adManager facilitates the pay-per-click advertising process for small businesses. Once a small business sets up an account with adManager, it can immediately select keywords to create its ads and set its bid amounts. adManager will work within the company’s budget, as well as target the campaign at the local or national level. In addition, the service will show results through detailed reports that describe which keywords are driving customers to the advertiser’s Web site.

Low-quality clicks are clicks that adCenter classifies as non-billable, including those that adCenter has identified as:

• Invalid clicks
• Clicks that have characteristics of low or unclear commercial intent
• Clicks that exhibit patterns of unusual activity
• Clicks that originate from spiders, robots, questionable sources, or test servers
• Clicks that should be filtered out for other reasons

Some traffic that adCenter has flagged as low quality might ultimately result in conversions for you, which is why the label “low quality,” rather than “invalid,” provides a more accurate description of this class of traffic.

• Improved Search – Use the new Toolbar to search items on eBay and Half.com, or do a quick Yahoo! search to find matches across the entire web. An advanced web search will help you find local businesses from Yahoo! Local, as well as content from Yahoo! Video, Yahoo! Answers and more.
• One-click access to your favorite destinations – Jump directly to features such as Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo.com and My Yahoo! As before, Toolbar also provides buttons that make eBay.com and My eBay just a click away. Customize your toolbar to add and remove the buttons of your choice.
• Account Guard, eBay alerts, and more – The new eBay Toolbar featuring Yahoo! offers many of the great features of the old Toolbar. Account Guard helps protect you from spoof websites. Desktop alerts let you know when there’s been activity on items you’re watching, bidding on, or selling. Plus, the new toolbar has a number of bug fixes and updates that address issues from previous releases.

“Yahoo!’s SmartAds gives marketers what they want from online advertising: the ability to deliver customized marketing messages to consumers, and still engage very large audiences with their brand,” said Todd Teresi, Yahoo!’s senior vice president of display marketplaces. “By enabling marketers to reach consumers on a more tailored basis and helping creative agencies support those customized campaigns, we can provide an even more engaging, relevant online experience to the more than 500 million users of Yahoo! branded products and services.”

Yahoo! SmartAds is powered by Yahoo!’s leading behavioral, demographic and geographic targeting capabilities and aim to connect users with what they are looking for based on their distinctive, expressed interests. For example, if a user is browsing for hybrid cars in Yahoo! Autos and has selected San Francisco as their default location in Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo!’s SmartAds platform can assemble and deliver a display ad in real time that showcases a hybrid vehicle from a major auto brand, as well as local dealer information and current lease rates. This provides a relevant experience to the user and allows the marketer to reach a user who is likely to become a customer.

In addition, Yahoo!’s patent-pending SmartAds platform allows advertisers and agencies to design a single set of individual creative components, provide Yahoo! with that artwork and a feed to their entire database of offers, then allow Yahoo!’s SmartAds technology to automatically generate the hundreds – if not thousands – of unique ad combinations based on those components. This helps advertisers and agencies scale to take full advantage of all of Yahoo!’s audience targeting capabilities while maintaining control over how their brand is presented.

“Yahoo!’s SmartAds is the breakthrough marriage of brand and direct marketing that advertisers have been waiting for,” said David Kenny, Chairman, Digitas and Publicis Groupe Digital. “By combining its huge audience, dynamic ad creation capabilities and deep knowledge of user interests, Yahoo! has developed a true innovation that will benefit agencies and its clients, especially companies with a large number of offers to present to many audience segments.”

Yahoo! is taking a phased approach to the SmartAds platform, making it available first on its owned and operated properties to travel industry advertisers in the U.S. The company has plans to expand it to additional vertical industries over the coming months and, in the future, deliver Smart Ads on its broader network of sites. In testing conducted on Yahoo! FareChase, SmartAds generally resulted in click through rates of two to three times higher than static, non-customized display ads using the same targeting and placement.

Yahoo! SmartAds furthers the company’s long-term advertising and publishing vision: To build the industry’s leading advertising and publishing ecosystem – both on and off Yahoo!’s network – and transform how advertisers connect to and engage with their customers. For more information about SmartAds or to view an online demonstration, visit: http://advertising.yahoo.com/smartads.

“We made the switch to DoubleClick because they offer a fully-integrated ad management platform to seamlessly manage all digital marketing channels,” said Kristopher B. Jones, president and CEO of Pepperjam. “It became a burden to manage multiple products for each marketing channel. DoubleClick instead provides cutting-edge technology and in-depth analysis enabling us to focus on serving our clients.”

“Pepperjam is growing tremendously, adding new clients each week and we are thrilled that they have decided to streamline their ad management with DoubleClick,” said Jason Bigler, vice president of product management at DoubleClick. “The combination of DFA, Search and Rich Media gives Pepperjam a single platform to create world-class advertising campaigns that produce great results and allow Pepperjam to achieve operational excellence.”

DFA provides Pepperjam with a hosted, enterprise-class advertising management and serving solution to help their clients reach their online goals efficiently and effectively. DFA offers sophisticated targeting capabilities, ad serving technology, robust reporting and rich media capabilities. As a highly advanced ad management platform on the market today, DFA allows marketers to centrally manage creative assets, traffic more compelling ads, track results beyond impressions and clicks to understand conversion, improve ROI and branding and automatically optimize creative to improve results.

Pepperjam’s powerful search-engine marketing management solution will rely on the Web-based DART Search, a solution for all aspects of creating and managing search advertising. It is integrated with DFA, so Pepperjam clients get a clear view of results across both display and search advertising, enabling them to boost efficiency, effectiveness and ROI. The Web-based DART Search system is integrated with leading engines so Pepperjam clients have insight into what’s happening from first bid to final report, across multiple search engines. Additionally, DART Search is synchronized with DFA, so Pepperjam clients can gain a clear view of their results.

With DoubleClick Rich Media, Pepperjam can easily collaborate with their agency partners, publishers and advertisers to produce campaigns that garner great results. DoubleClick Rich Media integrates the best of interactive design, ad serving and reporting into a sophisticated integrated rich media offering.

DoubleClick’s world-class service model provides unparalleled support for Pepperjam by giving them direct access to technical account managers and specialists to help ensure campaigns are up and running seamlessly.

Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords provides an integrated and effective solution that gives companies of all sizes all the tools they need to acquire new customers and grow their business. By encapsulating every element of the customer lifecycle – advertising, creating leads, closing business and retaining customers – in one solution, Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords enables any company to jump start their business by creating an online marketing and sales presence.

Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords enables users to:

• Advertise Online – With Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords, companies can immediately connect to Google AdWords, and create an ad that is displayed with the relevant search results on Google.com or across the Google AdSenseâ„¢ content network of partner websites. Users can create an ad in as quickly as five minutes and with as little as $5.
• Attract Prospects – When people search the Web for the products and services that your company sells, your ad appears with the relevant search results. When they click on your ad, visitors are taken to your website.
• Capture Leads – Once you have potential customers on your website, you can entice visitors to fill out a name capture form on your site with an offer for a Webinar or white paper. The information collected on the form flows directly into Salesforce as a new lead.
• Acquire Customers – As soon as a lead is added into Salesforce, it is distributed to the sales team. Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords enables businesses to effectively manage and share leads, track opportunities through the sales cycle and close deals faster. Sales teams can manage all customer interactions in Salesforce and turn qualified leads into new customers.
• Analyze Growth – Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords features dashboards that gives companies a bird’s eye view into lead generation, sales metrics, and company growth. Dashboards and reports are quick and easy to access with real-time information and allow companies to make decisions quickly and alter advertising strategies appropriately.
• Mash-up Other Business Applications – Through the power of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange directory, customers have the opportunity to mash-up any of 600 business applications including technologies for mapping and productivity.

In addition to these features, Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords also includes a custom designed user experience starting with an exclusive login page. Joint customers can go to the Google site at http://www.google.com/adwords/salesforce to login to their AdWords account and can access Salesforce directly at http://www.salesforce.com/google.

Another common thread that brought salesforce.com and Google together in their global alliance is their commitment to corporate philanthropy. In July of 2000, salesforce.com launched the Salesforce.com Foundation, which operates under the company’s innovative 1/1/1 Model — a commitment to deliver 1% Time, 1% Equity and 1% Product to nonprofit organizations and, most recently, to be “one” with the earth.

Since its launch, the Salesforce.com Foundation has donated their product to more than 2,000 nonprofits. Similarly, Google has also given free online advertising to selected nonprofits through its Google Grants program, supporting more than 2,500 nonprofit organizations in 16 countries to date. The Salesforce.com Foundation and Google are now teaming up to donate the new Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords to each other’s nonprofit grantees. These selected nonprofits will be able to gain access to the same integrated sales and marketing success that is available to the private sector at no cost. Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords will also be made available to additional nonprofits within the next quarter.