Posted on May 21, 2007
Digital Ad Serving Acquisitions are Hot - What's Next?
BY JAMES CLARK
This has been a month of major M&A activity in the digital advertising sector.
Laurie Petersen of MediaPost has a nice recap on her blog post - looking at WPP Group, Google and Microsoft all making huge multi-million/billion dollar acquisitions.
Microsoft's purchase of aQuantive is most interesting to us, as Avenue A comes with that package. This is in our mind is a great strategy, as Avenue A|Razorfish provides the expertise to clients seeking to use the actual medium.
What's next? Google's recent universal search announcement, I believe the next logical step is to take a look at how companies are going to implement search visibility strategies leveraging their own sites and taking control of and managing thier ow digital assets. The push is to become their own content publishers and feed the searc engines with new and relevant content. Right now, one sees companies leveraging social media (YouTub, MySpace, Flickr) to increase online search visibility.
The true breakthrough is to implement a RSS media casting strategy on their own site for their own content. So right now you have very large companies with websites that have no RSS feeds coming off them at all. With Google indexing RSS feeds, this is a tremendous waste of an opportunity. When compaines are looking at social media, word of mouth strategies it's all about leveraging other services. The focus now needs to turn internal where they can have a single system to manage and syndicate their own audio, video and text content.
So, this might answer a lot of questions we get about why Room 214 a search marketing, social media agency, also has its own CastLock (now Post Zinger) product. What we are doing is providing not only the marketing strategy, but the distribution and RSS management strategy for a client's content.
