Julie Ruvolo
Recent Posts
Digital video is maturing despite the recession
OnMedia NYC, a conference that brings technology and advertising executives together, concluded yesterday in downtown Manhattan. The event was, dare I say, encouraging, given the recession climate in New York. Tim Draper of VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, speaking at the event, went so far as to say there’s no better time to be an entrepreneur in digital media.
The kinds of online commercials we’re seeing today have certainly evolved well beyond what we saw just… Continue Reading
Adweek: Media buyers still hesitant about highly targeted ad campaigns
Addressability — the ability to deliver TV ads to target individual households rather than more general groups — is the new buzzword in advertising. And a panel session at the Adweek conference in New York yesterday that included speakers from Bloomberg and NBC Universal, as well as several traditional and digital ad agencies, highlighted exactly why addressable advertising has Madison Avenue’s media buyers feeling more than a little conflicted.
In the traditional media-buying paradigm, advertisers buy… Continue Reading
EBay’s Max Mancini on its experiments in mobile and social networking services
I sat down with eBay’s Max Mancini today at Web 2.0 Expo in New York. Max is the company’s Senior Director, Platform and Disruptive Innovation. That title sounds fluffy and new but Max isn’t a new hire, he’s been with eBay for close to five years and in the middle of the company’s mobile and social networking experiments. Here’s what he told me:
On mobile
EBay is looking at mobile extensions with buyers in mind, but not… Continue Reading
Madison Avenue shift: Look who’s leaving big firms, moving to digital startups
Executives at major media companies and advertising agencies are defecting to web start-ups in increasing numbers, attracted by some combination of equity and autonomy. Here’s a closer look at who’s left, and gone where.
Executives now at startups:
Mark Kingdon
Was: Chief Executive, Organic
Is: Chief Executive, Second Life
Moved: April 2008
In a somewhat puzzling move, Kingdon announced his departure from Omnicom-owned Organic in New York on April 22. Puzzling, because industry opinion is split: On one hand, many view… Continue Reading
Video ad startup SpotXchange funded by Madison Ave guru, not conglomerate
It’s becoming more common for ad-focused technology companies to seek out investment from Madison Avenue, in order to gain investors’ connections to advertising clients. But usually the investor is one of the major ad holding companies. Example: WPP’s aggressive investments in VideoEgg, SpotRunner, Media Rights Capital and WildTangent, and acquisition of 24/7 Real Media.
Instead, video ad marketplace startup SpotXchange has taken funding from Alex Bogusky, a thought leader in the ad industry, and chief creative… Continue Reading
Fresh from New York: Trends in online advertising
Silicon Alley technologists and Madison Avenue advertising executives have been meeting yesterday and today at the AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC conference. Here are some of the trends people were talking about:
– Ad networks were the darling acquisition targets of 2007, but what are they worth?
- Content versus community ad-targeting is emerging as a major debate
- The gap is widening between the proportion of people online, and the proportion of ad dollars spent online
Ad networks were the… Continue Reading
Clearspring launches widgets for Madison Avenue
In the latest evolution of this fast-paced but not yet lucrative world of widgets, Clearspring, a leading widget company, has launched an ad network for widgets (sample widget left).
It comes at a time when advertising agencies on Madison Avenue are finally getting comfortable with the idea of buying ads in widgets to get their client companies in front of social network users. A market for widget ads is forming, although its still unclear which forms… Continue Reading
The AdTech conference: Three problems and three ways to improve
The online advertising technology sector is bubbling over. New startups are launching and getting lots of funding as giants like Google, Microsoft and AOL gobble some of the larger companies up for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ad:Tech, a semi-annual conference that features a broad swath of companies in the online ad industry, is in the middle of the action. Its New York event earlier this week attracted over 14,000 registrants and included the launches of… Continue Reading
Notes from that other coast: NY New Tech Meetup Round-Up
They may be less socially awkward and more abrasive than their Silicon Valley counterparts, but New York’s tech community, often lost in the shuffle with hipsters, bankers and Midwestern tourists, is alive and well.
At the monthly NY Tech Meetup last week, entrepreneurs ran through a show-and-tell. Here are three that drew our attention:
MushyGushy – Remember OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself last year? Along those lines, MushyGushy lets you cut out your head from a photo and put… Continue Reading
Yoink’d, an easier way to find interesting videos
Imeem, one of the fastest growing sites on the Web in recent months, has proven the popularity of music playlists. It is also signing deals with major labels to let users access and play copyrighted songs.
So it’s no surprise that a bunch of other companies are jumping in the game for both music and video playlists. Project Playlist, for example, lets you manually create playlists of songs and embed them in MySpace. FIQL developed a… Continue Reading