On Tuesday, Facebook announced that all User Profiles are converting to the new Timeline format in the coming weeks.  Facebook now accounts for 1 out of every 7 minutes spent online globally (according to a recent comScore study).  Views of User Profiles account for 21% of that unprecedented share and Timeline will very quickly become a ubiquitous cultural metaphor and a frame of reference for our generation.

Timeline looks like nothing else on Facebook – a gigantic mural pushes everything halfway down your page; stories and widgets crisscross what used to be your Wall – even the ads look different.  Like it or Unlike it, Timeline isn’t going anywhere, and there’s a good reason: it will be remembered as the first in a series of master strokes, which allows Facebook to turn rival advertising platforms into MySpace.

For those users who can trace their roots on Facebook back to the beginning, Timeline recalls the tectonic shift achieved with the introduction of the News Feed, back in September of 2006.  A full 20% of all time spent on social networking sites is framed by Facebook’s News Feed…and no product feature deserves more credit for the company’s unanswered growth over the course of the last 5 years.  It smartly offered an alternative to the tedious profile-to-profile commute, required to keep up with your circle of friends on other social networking platforms.

MySpace leapt ahead of Friendster with customizable CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).  Facebook lapped both of them with personalized RSS (Really Simple Syndication).

Timeline allows the sharing of an entire life story…all on 1 page.  The delightful irony is that its true value — and brilliance — is bound up in stuff that’s not new at all. By providing easy access to a lifetime’s worth of content, Facebook has found a way to monetize its entire “back catalog”.

The News Feed, as well as its scrappy nephew, Ticker, profit from delivering the most up-to-date content.  Whereas, Timeline thrives on nostalgia and selling you back your crusty Spring Break photos which you were certain you had deleted.

Facebook is not-so-secretly engineering their own Google killer…in plain sight!  Check back soon to see what happens in Part II.

By Jonathan Wood, Director of Operations at XA.net

Forbes’ Rob Hof wrote an article about Facebook Actions, which are now live and targetable by Advertisers on the Facebook platform. Here’s a quote from the piece:

What’s more, this stuff is complicated, especially for delicate creative minds at agencies and marketers. “I don’t think brands have their heads around how to use it and it needs scale to succeed,” says Toland. “Going from one verb (like) to an infinite number is complicated for a marketing person to understand. And a lack of simplicity leads to a lack of scale, which leads to a lack of advertising opportunity.”

As a result, it will be up to the app developers to provide what marketers need, says Rob Leathern, founder and CEO of XA.net, an ad technology platform. “The developer ecosystem will be essential to helping brands understand what it’s useful for and how best to use it,” he says. “I suspect it will be buggy to use as a partner initially, and you won’t see serious ad action against it for a couple of months, apart from some early adopters.”

On the heels of the Golden Globe Awards this past weekend, we dug into our proprietary SocialPredict™ tool to get a better sense of the victors’ fans – who are they and how they are connected? We analyzed the clusters of fans and keywords surrounding Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen.

A quick note on how to easily digest the visual interest graph:

• the node sizes represent relative audience sizes
• the node colors are scaled by gender interest (blue nodes are typically masculine-associated words; red nodes are more feminine; grey nodes are right in the middle)
• the thickness of the edges and their relative placement together, approximate the strength of the connection between each of the nodes
• in the case where no edges are drawn; no connection exists
• for example, Audrey Hepburn is more closely connected to Meryl Streep, than to George Clooney; and she’s not connected at all to Allen or Scorsese

Fans of Meryl Streep are interested in board games and old television shows. They’re earnest, left-leaning do-gooders, with keywords such as ‘world wildlife fund’, ‘peace corps’ and ‘human rights campaign’. One wonders how the Iron Lady (Margaret Thatcher) herself would have thought about many of these causes!

The passage from Streep to George Clooney looks a lot like the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with nodes for Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt and Drew Barrymore, among other A-List Celebrities. Clooney’s quadrant contains far more teenage fans than any of the others; tending to like ‘the hills’ and ‘summer school’. However, there is a retro-cool element in this quadrant as well, with keywords such as ‘oregon trail’, ‘betty white’ and ‘cindy lauper’. And ‘saturday night live’, the largest node near Clooney, may encapsulate the intersection of these two relatively distinct subcultures.

Not surprisingly, the film buffs reside around Scorsese. His neighborhood of the interest graph oozes with film classics (old and new) such as ‘vertigo’, ‘the twilight zone’, ‘taxi driver’ and ‘there will be blood’. This is the arena where film facts and opinions are geekily harvested, compared and contrasted. It is also the most masculine region of the graph and we’ll leave it to the reader to determine if these two phenomena are related.

The path from Scorsese to Allen contains a densely connected web of jazz musicians and comedians. These types of figures prepare us for the more broadly artistic nodes around Allen (less film-centric) chock-full of references to television, literature and music. Fans of Woody Allen are likely to express an opinion about anything – not just movies.

And there’s a very illuminating nugget in this data…only one, single node connected to all four of the Golden Globe winners we studied…Frank Sinatra. So, despite all the differences between these clusters of fans who occupy each quadrant of our interest graph; they share a common interest for an outsized personality on which the modern entertainment industry was built.

And as Frank said, “the best revenge is massive success”…here’s to yours!

-Your friends @ optimal

I grew up both with and without Hostess Brands. You see, as a kid growing up in South Africa, reading US comic books I would forever see ads for Hostess Fruit Pies; then watching movies like Ghostbusters I saw the Twinkie as an appealing snack food: and yet, these products were unattainable to me until I arrived on US shores in 1993. The first day I was in the USA en route to college, I purchased a Hostess Fruit Pie. It wasn’t that great unfortunately, but that’s my own opinion. There are those that clearly love them.

The Fruit Pie and Twinkie are certainly not gone, but the financial health of the company is in serious question having filed for Chapter 11 today according to the Wall Street Journal.

So one might guess that perhaps not enough people love them. Social media provides some clues. Only 176,000 or so people in the United States “like” Twinkies or Hostess Brands according to Facebook. Here’s things that people who like Hostess Brands and/or Twinkies also tend to like (the Penguins no doubt a home-town shout out for many of the Twinkies lovers):

I thought that, like the kid that I was reading the comic book, many of the people professing their fandom for Twinkies would similarly be kids. But in fact that isn’t the case as the age data shows. Here’s what the average age index (compared to Facebook from an overall perspective) for these snack lovers look like. 20-40 year old women seem to predominate. So perhaps, there is a tinge of nostalgia among these folks about a once-loved snack food?

“Just-in-time manufacturing has earned companies billions of incremental dollars of profit. Driven by now-CEO Tim Cook shutting down its own manufacturing and outsourcing to more agile suppliers, Apple reduced its inventory on hand from90 days to five days over several years by switching to “just-in-time” manufacturing via partners.”

Check out the rest of Rob’s post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-leathern/just-in-time-advertising_b_1177429.html?

As part of its “State of…” series of articles with industry executives, AdExchanger.com sat down with Leathern to discuss his company, his views on the space, and the state of XA.net today.

What is different about the targeting data that’s available through Facebook versus anywhere else?

There are two things that are important. One is that it’s the most robust and largest source of self‑reported demographic data available anywhere in the world. No one else is even half the size of Facebook in terms of the amount of data. You can do demographic targeting on a variety of other large portals, or use data from third‑party vendors, but the quality of the data is low and you’re never going to get more than about 40 percent of the online audience. Whereas with Facebook, they reach 165 million people in the US monthly, and they have age and gender information on 95 percent of them.

The second thing is for brands. Facebook has this ability to target people by affinity: brand affinity, affinity of products, affinity to causes and more. The more that companies are spending time creating and driving customers to “like” them, the more targeting data is becoming available on this platform.

Hopefully, in the future, this data will be, targeted by marketers outside of the walls of Facebook in a privacy‑sensitive way since the walls between Facebook and websites have continued getting lower.

Why is it that advertising works on Facebook without first‑party cookies?

The signal that exists in Facebook is strong if you’re smart enough to know how to target users. The reality is that you’re not going to always target every single user you want. Nobody has built a targeting system that is very powerful, and/or generates a lot of money with the one exception of Google.

Google is the only company that has taken user‑supplied data, and has turned it into a meaningfully-sized business. Facebook hasn’t yet either, but everyone believes that they have the potential to do so.

For marketers, Facebook’s quality of data and the value of their data for targeting purposes are continuously increasing. Every dollar that is spent by a brand to drive fans towards their brand is also continuing to grow the power of this platform from a targeting perspective. It’s what you might call the ultimate network business.

Can you talk a little about the evolution of your business? I used to think of XA.net as a self‑service DSP. It feels like you’ve pivoted into the social space.

I don’t think we’ve pivoted at all. Our goal starting the company was always to be in a place where we could have the biggest impact helping marketers run advertising campaigns – systematically, profitably and with less pain. Any platform where many users are likely to pay attention to an advertising message is somewhere we want to be integrated. Facebook has fit that criteria, LinkedIn is one that we’re participating in right. At some point, perhaps Twitter will be in that category. But we’re interested in scale and the ability to tap into a platform systematically.

What I think has changed for us is that we have recognized the social data component. The understanding of that data is going to be an important part of creating value for marketers going forward. We have devoted additional resources in order to get much deeper on the social side than anyone who superficially puts out a press release announcing, “Oh, we’re a DSP and now you can buy social through us.”

We’ve focused our technology development efforts on the social side, not just as a workflow product to help you buy ads more efficiently, but also to understand the audiences that you have and the audiences that you could have. I wouldn’t say it was a pivot. It’s more of a continued concentration of focus in an area that we think is going to be key to unlocking value for marketers.

Speaking about those marketers, who is the ideal client for XA.net today?

We’re working with marketers directly and through their agencies. In some cases, agencies and the marketers themselves are both involved. In other cases, it’s just through the agencies as a service provider to them.

A good example of a very sophisticated company that we’re working with is One Kings Lane. They don’t necessarily have a deep agency relationship so we’re working with them directly.

Also, we’re not in the business of working with small businesses. We have some channel partners that we work with but most of our customers are large or mid‑size enterprises or agencies. Our minimums for display and/or for Facebook are $10,000 a month.

Any thoughts about how commerce is going to change because of social media?

Companies are going to find it useful to tie user purchasing behavior or recommendation behavior more closely into the existing social networks that exist out there. We work with a lot of companies who are trying to understand things like influential customers. Are the influential customers the same ones who are spending the most with them? It’s usually not the case. You may have an influential customer who can spread the word about your product or service that isn’t necessarily the biggest spender on your product or service.

The big trends are going to be tapping into influence and creating viral offers that are spreadable.

The other trend will be companies tapping into existing databases of their most valuable customers and getting them to advocate on their behalf within these social networks. Companies are going to get these users to encourage other users to become fans, to make purchases or to learn more about new products.

There’s this new opportunity for existing, valuable customers to be the voice of the brand which will increase with more social media opportunities and integration.

With XA.net, the overall idea is to provide a media‑buying platform that spans both the social‑‑when I say, social, I mean Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn ‑‑and also the Google world, the search world, right? It would seem, from a marketer’s perspective, that they really need one platform to control both. Do you agree with that?

Yes. I think where we come down on it is that the search business is one that’s been around for a while and there are a lot of solutions out there already. We think that a targeting optimization problem is a much more difficult one and a much more diffused one. Our goal is to have a platform that helps marketers across that spectrum which includes what people traditionally today think of as display or social display.. We see ourselves as having a role to play when there is an existing relationship between the company and the customer.

In the past, with search for the most part, there was no pre-existing relationship available when someone goes to a search engine and searches for a company. We’re going to be in the business of both acquisition as well as retention, and helping companies understand the value and tradeoffs between how they communicate with customers through these various online channels. But search is not currently a part of what we think our customers are typically looking for.

There are a bunch of search marketing companies that have created display platforms or social platforms. What we hear almost universally from customers that we talk to is how, in many cases, the only reasons they use those add‑ons is because they’re paying next to nothing for them. The problem is they’re missing a lot of opportunities because they’re getting very little actual value out of those platforms. We think most marketers are smart enough to go to the best‑of‑breed. We have no interest in being a search provider, but we believe that, on the social and display side, we are a best‑of‑breed provider and can help them out.

What do you think is the biggest gap right now in terms of skill set in digital? Sales? Marketing? Engineers?

First, people with the best and most transformative technology, and the people with the loudest and most effective sales voices are not usually in the same company. I think the inefficiency is in a lot of good salespeople who sell inferior products, and a lot of good technology companies do not yet have the similar salespeople to sell their products. That’s one of the things out there; it’s just a reality. It’s hard to find great talent right now even though there are a lot of people in the market.

On the sales side, there’s an acute need for expanding the base of salespeople who can help translate some of the amazing innovation that’s happening week‑by‑week into the hands of customers. Part of the problem is that it’s hard for customers to understand, because things are changing so quickly. I see that as the biggest area that the industry needs to work on: we need to align the messaging, capabilities and the customers’ understanding of all of the above into a single package.

You have a product called optim.al which focuses on the development of ad creative. A lot of creative people out there are concerned that automation has taken money out of their pockets. What are you seeing about that creative role and how it’s evolving in social?

If it appears like some doors are closing on the creative side, it’s out-weighed by others opening. In certain systematic systems we are working with, companies that have their creative partners login to our own optim.al tool and submit the creative. Some of the creative thinking may be different in that now they think about adding and creating a group of elements that work together. These new tools help creative people figure out new ways of interaction with the consumer. The best thing in our system is the real-time aspect. Within 10 seconds of an ad being turned on, they can receive feedback – it’s potentially a different world than creating a magazine ad, and having it run a month later without actually knowing what the reaction was among consumers. For creatives, there’s this opportunity to engage very meaningfully, and then get almost instant feedback from those creative ideas.

We’re never going to be in a situation where we don’t need creative minds to come up with things that are going to grab people’s attention. The targeting and the matching of the creative to the targeting – all of that stuff can be made more systematic through systems like ours. But the inputs are always going to need to be creative, and you’re always going to need people to think “outside the box” to come up with those components.

Looking into XA.net’s future, what are some milestones that you want your company to achieve?

We want to be seen as the go‑to authority for social and data‑driven media buying.

The other thing I would say is that so far we have been a company focused on building technology. We’ve done pretty well in terms of, given our size, getting into the marketplace and having top‑notch customers. The next two years for us is about building a sales and marketing presence, and getting our name out there. That will be our focus for a while. You’ll start to see more announcements around that.

- John Ebbert, AdExchanger

http://www.adexchanger.com/the-state-of/xa-net/

Last week, several demand-side platform (DSP) companies were informed that their advertiser clients could no longer buy Yahoo! remnant, display ad inventory through their DSP seat on the Right Media Exchange (RMX). Instead, those advertisers will need to get their own seats on RMX if they want to buy Yahoo! remnant display ads. Read more.

AdExchanger.com reached out to a selection of companies in the ad ecosystem which use DSP technology. They were asked the following question:

“What’s your reaction to Yahoo! requiring seats for advertisers on Right Media Exchange versus buying through DSPs, ad networks, etc.?”

Rob Leathern, CEO, XA.net

“My answer to this is two parts: 1) the handling of it, and 2) the business strategy/larger picture. As to 1) keep in mind that they told us this at 6.30pm EST on the Tuesday before Thanskgiving to be effective as of December 2nd. This doesn’t give us a lot of time to make a transition for our clients to their own seats. Regardless of the business reasons for the decision, doing this now, in Q4 before a holiday weekend for firms who have spent millions of dollars on their platform is a big middle finger move by Yahoo.

I personally believe it’s a completely wrongheaded approach to partnership, in stark contrast to the relationships we have with companies who have ad platforms like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn and is a sign of a former Internet giant with great assets flailing around for a workable strategy. If they had an easy-to-use self-service model for advertisers to buy from them directly that would be one thing, but they don’t – and *in fact* they told us not more than 6 months ago that the Yahoo! sales team valued DSPs and companies like ours who helped them better service both large customers with complex needs AS WELL AS customers who spend less than $25k per IO since in their words at the time ‘it costs them $10,000 to create and manage an insertion order [IO] through their internal process’. I can’t think that’s improved in the last 6 months.”

– http://www.adexchanger.com/ad-exchange-news/yahoo-right-media-dsps/#xa

Quova’s Data is Paired with XA.net’s Cutting-edge Real-Time Bidding Expertise to Provide Digital Marketers with More Effective and Efficient Media Buys

NEW YORK & SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Quova, a Neustar Service and a leading provider of fixed IP geolocation data, today announced a partnership with XA.net, Inc., a fast-growing company creating technologies to help marketers engage their customers and prospects through real-time bidding for online display ads, to target advertising based on Quova’s IP data and intelligence. The combination now makes available Quova’s Audience Targeting Solutions (ATS) across XA.net’s demand-side platform: optim.al. ATS provides marketers with valuable intelligence based on IP addresses allowing for more precise targeting of business and consumer audiences.

“optim.al is integrated across all major online inventory sources, so this is a truly powerful solution for advertisers.”

“What is exciting about this partnership is that marketers can tailor their display ads to a specific audience in real-time by using Quova’s hyper-local data while bidding through the optim.al platform,” said Miten Sampat, vice president, Product Strategy, Quova. “optim.al is integrated across all major online inventory sources, so this is a truly powerful solution for advertisers.”

The companies also are collaborating on an innovative analytics offering that enhances XA.net’s industry-leading optim.al for Social advertising platform, the leading Facebook ad testing and management system.

“Though we have seen quite a bit of unbundling of data and media over the past several years, we fundamentally believe that our clients’ media-buys are more efficient and effective when data and media are priced and optimized together,” said Rob Leathern, Founder and CEO, XA.net. “We are excited to partner with Quova to bring our cutting-edge Real-Time Bidding expertise together with their world-class data, into one seamless and compelling package for our clients.”

Learn more about IP Audience Targeting

http://www.quova.com/ip-audience-targeting/

Contact Quova Sales: sales@quova.com

About Quova

Quova provides high-quality IP intelligence data. This data allows companies, large and small, to use detailed demographic and network characteristics to prevent fraud in online commerce; regulate online content (DRM) to stay compliant; and marketers to localize content and analyze traffic. Quova is the only full-service IP geolocation provider with a team of analysts, customer technicians and developer advocates who add human IP to network IP to offer consultative services along with its data. Quova is a Neustar Service, based in Mountain View, California. www.quova.com. Follow @quova on twitter.

Learn more about optim.al

http://optim.al

Contact XA.net Sales: sales@xa.net

About XA.net

XA.net is the first advertising technology company to be both an approved Facebook Ads API Tools vendor and have built its own robust real-time bidding and audience infrastructure, integrated with all major ad inventory sources. Based in San Francisco and backed by a proven team of social media and audience experts, the XA.net technology team created optim.al for Display and optim.al for Social, the leading multivariate ad platform for Facebook.