AllThingsD independently confirmed that this has been discussed at the FTC, but it’s in the earliest of stages. Google and the FTC both declined to comment.

The players are all too familiar, but the game is different, as the FTC largely cleared Google in a separate search and patent antitrust investigation last year.

Google is nowhere near as dominant in advertising as it is in search, but the company has clearly been building up its advertising stack through acquisitions and its own product development — with regulators’ permission, so far.

The cornerstone of those was buying DoubleClick in 2007, which the FTC itself cleared. The commission said at the time, “We want to be clear, however, that we will closely watch these markets and, should Google engage in unlawful tying or other anticompetitive conduct, the Commission intends to act quickly.” Since then, Google added other important buys such as AdMob and Invite Media and built its AdX ad exchange.

The question is whether Google is using anticompetitive tactics to try to force its combined “end-to-end” solution onto advertisers, for instance by taking a loss on some products in order to make the full package more attractive.

IDC reported this week that Google had 24.1 percent of the $3 billion U.S. display advertising market in the first quarter of this year, widening its lead over Yahoo and Facebook.

But that’s hard to do on phones and tablets — especially Apple’s iOS devices — which is one of the reasons there’s a big mobile ad gap. And it’s one of the reasons there are several startups that claim they can handle “cross-platform” ads.

Here’s one of them: Tapad, a two-year-old company founded by Are Traasdahl, who’s best known as the guy behind Thumbplay, the company that enjoyed a brief but lucrative run selling ringtones a few years ago.

Tapad is notable as much for its pitch as its backers, who include a who’s who of New York City-based ad tech angels, including former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt and AppNexus founder Brian O’Kelley, who pitched in on a $1.8 million round in 2011.

Now they’re back, along with venture firms FirstMark Capital and Avalon Ventures, in a $6.5 million round. Publicly traded Firsthand Technology Value Fund provided the new money for the round, which I’m told values Tapad at more than $140 million.

No terms disclosed, but earlier this month AdAge pegged the price at below $100 million.

Microsoft got Atlas as part of its $6.2 billion aQuantive buy, and it has been selling off that one in parts, at fire-sale prices, for years; last summer it took a write-down on the entire thing.

Ever since Kara Swisher reported the sales talks back in December, two competing narratives have sprung up around the deal: Either Facebook was buying Atlas to help build out its ad network, or Facebook was buying Atlas to help build up its internal business.

Educated guess: Both versions are correct.

The theory, advanced to me by smart folks who have some skin in the game: Facebook’s plan is to use Atlas’ data tracking abilities on sites outside of Facebook to prove the value of the ads it runs on its site right now, which will give them the ability to increase ad pricing. Once Facebook’s ads can generate the same kind of pricing that Google commands, Facebook can finally head out to other sites and compete for the ad dollars they’re currently handing to Larry Page and company.

In any case, that won’t happen in the near future. Integrating and overhauling Atlas, which was essentially abandoned by Microsoft years ago, will take many months, and the whole thing may not be done for another year. After that, don’t be surprised if Facebook tries selling you an ad on a site they don’t own.

That might be part of the play here. But I hardly think that’s the whole answer.

To my mind, an Atlas play would really be about attribution.

After all, it is attribution that’s the biggest driver of ad dollars online since day one. Google is a perfect example here: It’s incredibly easy to draw a straight line from the keyword you advertise on, to the text you deliver to a searcher, to the landing page you send the searcher to — and finally to the sale (or failure to make a sale). It’s that ease of attribution that made Google into the most successful direct marketing property in history.

As of now, Facebook isn’t a serious contender for those direct marketing dollars. Just think about how often you’ve heard or read the question, “Do Facebook ads work?” (most common answer: Maybe). If Facebook wants to compete at Google levels for ad dollars, it needs to develop a way to let advertisers and agencies draw that direct line between Facebook ads and ROI.

That’s especially true since digital media has made the entire marketing world far more accountability-focused — to the point that some of the world’s largest agencies are shifting to pay-per-performance models. If accountability were a huge leg up for helping Google in the dot-com era, it’s likely a make or break for Facebook today.

Which brings us to the speculation about Atlas. The ad network theory makes sense because Atlas can 1) do complicated computations around which ads are served when, and 2) draw complex pictures around how users engage across different types of media — including interactions between Facebook and other media properties. Meanwhile, Facebook’s privacy changes from last May allow the site to leverage user data to serve ads to users while they’re not on Facebook.

If you put those points together, it does seem likely that an ad network may well be in the works, and Atlas may become a key piece of technology behind it. But if that’s the only piece of thinking going on here, then Facebook is essentially looking to solve the revenue hurdles of its core business by using that core business to support a side project. That’s an awfully convoluted and less strategic path to growth.

It seems a lot more likely that Facebook is less interested in using Atlas to port data out onto the Web, than it is in using Atlas to bring all those off-Facebook conversions back into the world of Facebook itself. In other words, Facebook wouldn’t look to Atlas as the backbone of a new ad network; Facebook would look to Atlas as the infrastructure for tools that show how users engage with Facebook ads, and where Facebook fits in the conversion path. Those are the tools that Facebook needs to prove that yes, Facebook ads do work. And no matter how lucrative an ad serving business or ad network would be, building those tools is infinitely more valuable.

Of course, beating Google at the ad network game may be one of Facebook’s goals (and it’s certainly something Sheryl Sandberg has the chops for). But if Facebook isn’t thinking first and foremost about its attribution problem, then it’ll never beat Google for ad dollars — ad network or no. Zuckerberg, Sandberg and company are smart enough to realize this. And if they are looking to buy Atlas, attribution is the reason.

Bill Wise is CEO of Mediaocean, a marketing technology company that powers $130B in media spending globally. Follow him at @billwise.

FreeWheel won’t spell out the funding amount for this round, but says that it’s less than the $17 million round it raised in 2010, and that it doesn’t need as much money now, because it is “closing in on profitability.”

Prior to this round, FreeWheel had raised about $30 million over the last four years.

DirecTV has also signed on as a FreeWheel customer, which means it is one of the many big broadcasters, cable networks and Web companies that use FreeWheel to manage their video ad business, like Comcast, AOL, Viacom, etc. DirecTV will use FreeWheel to manage the ads it runs on its “TV Everywhere” services.

Over time, FreeWheel has also moved into display advertising, which means it’s not only the “DoubleClick of Web video,” but is often competing with Google’s DoubleClick, as well.

Not coincidentally, FreeWheel’s founding team, lead by CEO Doug Knopper, are DoubleClick veterans.

Schireson joined New York-based 10gen in 2011, and previously served as COO at MarkLogic. Before that he spent nearly a decade at Oracle where he was chief applications architect and vice president for eCommerce and Self-Service Applications.

MongoDB has certainly got a lot of momentum behind it. It has been downloaded 3.8 million times. 10gen’s commercial customers include Cisco Systems, Disney, eBay, Salesforce.com and FourSquare. It has raised more than $81 million in funding from investors including Flybridge Capital Partners, In-Q-Tel, Intel Capital, NEA, Red Hat, Sequoia Capital and Union Square Ventures.

Merriman, a former CTO at DoubleClick, the Web advertising company that Google acquired for $3.1 billion, started MongoDB in 2007 with current CTO Eliot Horowitz.

Now Bazaarvoice has someone to run their new business: Ad tech veteran Ari Paparo.

Paparo’s most recent job was at AppNexus, where he spent a year and change; before that, he was at Nielsen for a spell. But he’s best known for his work at DoubleClick, both before and after the display ad giant sold to Google.

Bazaarvoice is one of many companies trying to leverage the copious amounts of data that e-commerce sites generate into new opportunities, like advertising; clients include Walmart and Best Buy.

E-commerce heavyweight Amazon, which has been circling around ads for a couple years without making a major push, is still thought to have a $1 billion ad business of its own.

AllThingsD has learned that Peluso, who is currently the Global Consumer Chief Marketing and Internet Officer at Citigroup — and a Gilt director since 2009 — will be taking over in February. Ryan will become chairman and Susan Lyne will become vice chairman.

Over the past year, Ryan has focused on the company’s financial performance, trying to ready the fast-growing flash sales site for an initial public offering. In doing so, the company has gone through a number of restructurings, including a round of layoffs and the closure of some divisions, such as the men’s apparel business Park & Bond. Most recently, the company has decided to sell-off Jetsetter, its luxury travel division.

The appointment of Peluso will provide some stability to the organization since, as a board member, she is familiar with the business. At the same time, she will provide a fresh perspective to the executive team. Ryan, who became CEO two years ago, has been aggressive about moving into new areas, including the full-priced men’s apparel business, Park & Bond, and a grocery business, called Gilt Taste, which has also faced cutbacks.

“I’m biased because I’ve been working with her for three years, I think she’s great,” Ryan said. “She’s fantastic. I approached her a year and a half ago to persuade her to be here permanently. When I told the board five months ago that I wanted to start the search, I went to her first.”

Peluso has been with Citigroup since 2009, and prior to that, she was the CEO of Travelocity for six years. She joined Travelocity following the company’s 2002 acquisition of Site59, a travel site she created. Site59 was focused on last-minute travel deals, similarly to Gilt, which sells heavily discounted merchandise. “I’ll be getting back to my roots of running an e-commerce company,” she said in an interview. “I’ve gotten to know the team really well over the past three years on the board, and when the board approached and asked if I would consider doing it, I felt like it would be a great fit.”

The five-year-old site has grown quickly, selling high-end apparel at a discount online from brands that are looking to sell off overstock. Gilt was valued at $1 billion last May when it raised $138 million. Ryan, who made his name as CEO of DoubleClick, which was acquired by Google, said he will now be turning his attention to other start-ups that he has co-founded with his business partner, Dwight Merriman, including news site Business Insider and 10gen, a database software company.

“Both of them were quite small two years ago, and today they are getting pretty big and interesting. 10gen now has 200 people, and by summer 300. I’m not planning on being the day-to-day CEO anywhere, but I do plan to spend more time at the companies. I’m a very active board member.”

He said starting this quarter, Gilt has reached profitability, excluding some expenses, and that the business is starting to generate cash — a huge turnaround since losing $50 million last year. For now, the emphasis on going public seems to be on the back burner. Ryan said its a goal that “will happen at some point in one to two years.” Previously, the timeline had been the fourth quarter this year or early 2013. “It’s not something I want to rush into. You look at Zynga and Groupon, and it doesn’t excite me.”

Of course, that’s now also a decision that Peluso will be weighing in on, but so far it doesn’t seem to be her first priority. “My most important job is to build a foundation, and make sure we have an extraordinary business,” she said.

Will she be making big changes at the company, which has already gone through a lot? “It’s too soon to say,” said Peluso, which is the safe answer for now. “I have an inside perspective. I’ve been able to spend lots of time with the team, but I’m not going to presume to know everything. I’ll be starting in [February], and when I do, I’ll be eager to dive in and learn a lot.”

The full press release:

GILT APPOINTS MICHELLE PELUSO AS CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

NEW YORK, December 6, 2012 – Gilt, www.gilt.com, today announced it has appointed Michelle Peluso as Chief Executive Officer effective February 2013. Ms. Peluso is currently the Global Consumer Chief Marketing and Internet Officer at Citigroup and has served on the Board of Directors of Gilt since October 2009. Kevin Ryan, Gilt’s Founder and current CEO will become Chairman and Susan Lyne will become Vice-Chairman.

“I’m tremendously excited to be leading a company with a brand I love and a team I’ve come to greatly admire,” said Peluso. “Gilt has done a terrific job establishing itself as one of the most innovative online shopping destinations and I am looking forward to continuing to build on Gilt’s growth and success.”

Every day at noon EST, Gilt launches new, limited-time sales of the most sought-after products and most desirable brands in fashion, home décor and leisure. Launched in December 2007, the company is the leader in the flash-sale space and has attracted millions of loyalists by offering them special access to coveted merchandise and experiences at insider prices.

Ms. Peluso has been with Citigroup since 2009. Prior to that she was the Chief Executive Officer of Travelocity from 2003 to 2009 after serving as the company’s Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President of Product Strategy and Distribution. Under her leadership, Travelocity experienced a significant upturn in both revenue growth and profitability. Ms. Peluso joined Travelocity following the company’s acquisition of Site59, a travel site she created and launched in 2000. Site59 was the leader in the US “last minute deals” arena and won numerous honors for innovation before it was acquired by Travelocity in March 2002. Prior to leading Site59, Ms. Peluso served as a White House Fellow and Senior Advisor to Labor Secretary Alexis Herman and worked as a case leader for The Boston Consulting Group in New York and London.

“Michelle’s deep Internet experience, coupled with her operating and marketing background, made her my ideal choice to be Gilt’s CEO going forward,” said Kevin Ryan, Founder and CEO, Gilt. “We have worked together for three years as fellow Board members and I am thrilled she will be leading Gilt to its next level of growth and market leadership.”

“We have had the opportunity to get to know Michelle as a Board member and her insight and strategic advice have been invaluable,” said Susan Lyne, Chairman, Gilt. “She has a clear vision for Gilt and the Board and I are confident in her leadership and excited about the many opportunities ahead.”

Ms. Peluso has received the Stevie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Business; she has been recognized by the National Italian American Foundation with the Special Achievement Award in Business, and Fast Company Magazine named her a “customer-centered leader.” Most recently she was named as one of the world’s most influential CMO’s according to a Forbes study conducted by Appinions. She received her master’s degree in economics, philosophy and politics from Pembroke College at Oxford University where she was a Thoroun Scholar, and her bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

According to sources close to the situation, Facebook is looking seriously at purchasing Microsoft’s Atlas Solutions ad-serving platform.

Sources said the social networking giant has been conducting due diligence on the media measurement platform, part of its efforts to create its own advertising network for third-party Web sites to compete with Google’s DoubleClick offering.

Atlas has been quietly on the market for some time and has been looked at by a number of companies, such as Adobe, said sources. But the effort to sell it got a jumpstart with recent interest from Facebook, which had been debating buy-versus-build options.

While there are some technological issues in taking over Atlas, sources said the prospect of starting from scratch was more daunting than picking up a platform that already delivers billions of ad impressions a day.

Atlas was acquired by Microsoft as part of its 2007 purchase of aQuantive for $6 billion. The new price for Atlas will be substantially lower, said sources, but could involve a more complex advertising agreement between Facebook and Microsoft.

Facebook declined comment and I am awaiting a response from Microsoft.

(Business Insider is also reporting that the pair are in talks.)

Google could be forgiven for fumbling tech that’s further away from its search business — if, say, its Wildfire acquisition goes sour. But if anyone should have figured out SEM, it should be Google. What’s going wrong?

To answer that question, you need to start with Google’s peculiar relationship with SEM — and with marketing software generally.

For advertisers and agencies, SEM software exists to make search buying more efficient. But from Google’s standpoint, SEM tools serve a different purpose entirely. They’re automated pipes that drive advertiser spend into search engines — including into Google search. Additionally, they’re ways to offer upsell off of Google’s existing ad network.

So while standalone SEM platforms such as Kenshoo or Adobe’s Efficient Frontier have to work very hard to make advertisers happy, Google doesn’t really need to work too hard to achieve its own goals in SEM (namely, increased revenue and higher share of spend). Google’s mammoth share of search queries fairly guarantees it a lion’s share of search budgets, with or without good marketing tools. Plus, a bevy of other search marketing providers already provide great automation to help advertisers spend more money in search, including within Google search itself. Google’s chief goals for SEM are already largely achieved by the rest of the market. Doing beyond the bare minimum amounts to duplicating efforts — which means wasting Google resources.

The goal of providing a pipe into Google search even creates a disincentive for Google to help advertisers spend money outside of Google ad networks. It’s no surprise that Forrester notes how DoubleClick Search “supports biddable buys on fewer media outlets than its competitors.” Kenshoo, by comparison, goes so far as to provide integration into Facebook, while IgnitionOne “supports 11 display networks and can programmatically create mobile-device-specific ad versions.” As channel-agnostic and network-agnostic buys become increasingly critical to marketers, failure to provide good cross-outlet support can really hinder advertisers using Google products. But from Google’s perspective, effectively supporting channel-agnostic buys means helping advertisers take ad spend away from Google — which is bad business.

Forrester does “hope that [Google’s] plan to integrate DoubleClick Search into a comprehensive Google online advertising suite will solve this platform’s shortfalls.” I’m less optimistic, because mediocrity runs across a lot of Google’s tech stack beyond search. Michael Greene, a senior analyst at Forrester, has rightly pointed to Google as a prime example of “media and technology behemoths … making credible runs at the end-to-end ad tech stack, even if some of their stacks suffer from a mix of ‘best-in-class’ and ‘just good enough.’” But that’s not a surprise. If Google’s aims for the tech stack are just to provide a system of pipes that support Google Advertising, then building a tech stack out of cheap parts is really all that’s required in most instances. Going above and beyond that is, again, counterintuitive.

Which is why the marketing community really needs to ask if Google is the best business to provide the end-to-end tech stack that marketers want. For Google’s tech stack competitors which don’t have ad inventory to sell (Adobe, for example), the chief reason to create a tech stack is to provide marketers with a suite of useful, integrated products, and to make money in the process. That’s a setup for a win-win (pending good execution, of course). But Google has its own agenda. And if that agenda gets in the way of creating good products so close to Google’s core business, how can we expect Google to provide better than ho-hum technology across the entire marketing spectrum? If Google wants the marketing world’s technology business — and not just its ad dollars — then it’s a question the company needs to answer, soon.

Bill Wise is CEO of marketing systems provider Mediaocean.

Yahoo said today in a regulatory filing that it had hired one of Google’s top sales execs, Henrique De Castro, as its COO.

Earlier today, I had reported that CEO Marissa Mayer had been close to nabbing the advertising exec, who has most recently been Google’s president of partners business solutions.

De Castro is getting a pile of money for taking the job, including a $600,000 yearly base salary and an annual bonus that could double that figure. In addition, the Silicon Valley Internet giant will give him $36 million in stock grants, including a one-time retention equity award of $18 million and $18 million in the form of performance-based stock options.

He is also getting $1 million in “make-whole” cash for forgoing compensation from Google and $20 million in stock to replace his shares at the search giant that will vest over four years.

That is a very big check, although Mayer garnered an even bigger one when she joined the company in July.

Yahoo’s regulatory statement on the De Castro hiring is embedded below in its entirety, so you can read about his new riches for yourself (unless Yahoo’s persnickety legal head tries to block it).

Said a Google spokesperson about the departure: “We’re grateful to Henrique for all of his contributions at Google and wish him all the best in his new role at Yahoo!”

Both Mayer and also former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson have made previous overtures to nab De Castro, who has held a number of high-level jobs for Google across the globe, including at DoubleClick, in display ads and with major partners.

While he had previously rebuffed those efforts, this time De Castro bit.

There were signs he might this past week, after De Castro canceled a major offsite for his employees, and several attendees who know him well said he was not present at the company’s first night of its annual Zeitgeist event for advertising and publishing clients. The suave De Castro is usually a more noticeable fixture at such gatherings.

This is Mayer’s first big hire at Yahoo, having added only lower-level or less well-known execs to her stable of talent since she was appointed.

She touted the hire in a tweet, although the news was long out the door, while also noting on Twitter it was her first full day at the office since having her first baby two weeks ago.

My first full day back in the office, and I’m excited to kick it off by announcing my new COO, Henrique de Castro: businesswire.com/news/home/2012…

— marissamayer (@marissamayer) October 15, 2012

The hiring does create a potential issue in the sales arena, especially with current head of revenue Michael Barrett. De Castro and Barrett worked together at Google and multiple sources said the pair did not get along there.

It might not matter. While Barrett has publicly said he planned to stay at Yahoo under Mayer — he was hired by interim CEO Ross Levinson this summer before she arrived — many sources said he does not want to be at the company for the long term.

De Castro has a lot of work to do for the big payout he is getting and it will be a big challenge for him to turn around the troubled organization.

Along with declining growth, search market share, engagement and more, Yahoo also has had a management turnover issue of epic proportions.

De Castro will presumably be in charge of making it all better at Yahoo when he arrives sometime before the beginning of the year and is likely to focus on operations while Mayer zeroes in on products.

One area of trouble: While she has lavished attention on cultural issues and on the company’s tech troops, sources said most of the advertising and media leadership at Yahoo have had little interaction with Mayer since she arrived this summer.

Advertising, of course, is Yahoo’s biggest money maker.

The Portugal-born De Castro has a lot of experience here and is decidedly more of a charmer than Mayer.

More importantly, he is a very high-profile hire, as well as a colorful one. He speaks a menu of languages, dresses with a lot of style and is a worldwide traveler. I know him a little bit and find him to be smooth and confident, even if a little cagey.

Before Google, De Castro worked at Dell and also McKinsey.

All this makes him a perfect choice for Mayer, who is also a former Googler, since she has been considering purchasing a range of companies in the advertising tech space. The most likely candidate of late is PubMatic, which has been in early talks with Yahoo about being acquired.

The Silicon Valley start-up would be a solid add to Yahoo’s ad platform offerings, especially if it wants to stay competitive with Google. PubMatic helps publishers effectively manage their display ad inventory, and competes with Google’s AdMeld.

(Ironically, Barrett ran that start-up, which he sold to Google for $400 million about a year ago.)

Here is the De Castro hiring document from Yahoo:

YHOO-20121015-8K-20121015

And here is the official press release from Yahoo:

Henrique de Castro Named Chief Operating Officer of Yahoo!

October 15, 2012

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) announced today that Henrique de Castro has been hired as chief operating officer (COO). Reporting directly to Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, de Castro will be responsible for strategic and operational management of Yahoo!’s sales, operations, media and business development worldwide.

“Henrique is an incredibly accomplished and rigorous business leader, and I’m personally excited to have him join Yahoo!’s strong leadership team,” said Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!. “His operational experience in Internet advertising and his proven success in structuring and scaling global organizations make him the perfect fit for Yahoo! as we propel the business to its next phase of growth.”

“The combination of Yahoo!’s unique properties with high quality content, its renewed focus on outstanding user experience and its massive reach bring tremendous value to users, advertisers and partners,” said de Castro. “This is a pivotal point in Yahoo!’s history, and I believe strongly in the opportunity ahead. I can’t wait to join Marissa and the team and get started.”

De Castro brings more than 20 years experience leading operations, strategy, partner management and revenue generation for some of the world’s leading brands. Most recently, he was vice president of Google’s worldwide Partner Business Solutions group, where he was responsible for advertising platforms and services for Google’s publisher and commerce partners. Prior to that, he led Google’s media, mobile and platforms organization, where he helped to grow the business significantly. Prior to Google, de Castro spent two years at Dell Corporation, where he managed sales and business development operations across Western Europe. He has consulted for McKinsey & Company, where he advised numerous clients across many different industries. His career also includes senior positions in private equity and advertising businesses.

De Castro will join the company on or before January 22, 2013, or as soon as he has satisfied his obligations to his current employer.

No comment from Google about price, but people familiar with the transaction tell me it’s around $250 million, plus earnouts, employment agreements, etc. I’ll try to narrow that down a bit for you as the day goes on. Wildfire raised a reported $14 million over four years. [UPDATE: As TechCrunch and others have noted, some of Wildfire's investors are saying they're getting $350 million for the company; one of them I talked to insists this number is before earnouts and the like. I'm reasonably confident Google will have to disclose a price in its next 10Q or perhaps before that, so we'll see what they tell shareholders.]

The logic here is straightforward: Google will integrate Wildfire into its growing display advertising “stack,” which is anchored by DoubleClick and Google’s AdX exchange. The idea is to convince marketers that they can buy both social ads and conventional display ads from Google, even if they want to buy them on competing platforms like Facebook.

This is one of Google’s least surprising buys, since the company already tried to get its hands on Buddy Media, a Wildfire competitor. But Buddy went to Marc Benioff and Salesforce.com in June, so Wildfire was the next logical candidate.

Buddy passed on Google at least in part because the company was concerned about getting the deal through antitrust regulators. And like just about every deal Google does these days, it wouldn’t be surprising if the Feds took a look.

But since social ads are one of the few categories where Larry Page and company are far behind the competition, the Google guys seem confident that this one won’t be a problem.

And what will Facebook think about their biggest competitor buying a service that specializes in Facebook advertising? Good question, and I’m asking Facebook now. (Update: “We aren’t commenting,” says Facebook rep Brandon McCormick.)

But my hunch is that even if Sheryl Sandberg wanted to shut the door on her old company, she wouldn’t do it for fear of creating her own regulatory problems. Which means the only question is whether Facebook will be an enthusiastic Wildfire partner, a heel-dragging partner, or somewhere in between.

Image via .shock

According to sources close to the situation, the search for a new CEO for Yahoo is closing in on key candidates.

But, said sources, it appears to be coming down to a contest between interim Yahoo CEO Ross Levinsohn and Hulu CEO Jason Kilar.

“It’s pretty much a choice between picking a media exec or a product exec,” said one person, referring to Kilar and Levinsohn respectively, about leading the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant. “It’s about defining what Yahoo is going to be.”

Jim Citrin of Spencer Stuart is conducting the search.

At this point, said sources, it appears to still be a situation that is Levinsohn’s to lose. Along with having been at Yahoo for several years, the media-savvy exec has also recently scored points with the hiring of a new and very well-regarded sales chief, Michael Barrett.

In addition, some Yahoo board members feel that adding yet another new CEO into the mix from outside could further destabilize a company that has gone through the leadership wringer over the last year.

That has included the ousting of two CEOs since last fall — Carol Bartz and Scott Thompson — in less than ideal circumstances that has called into question the competence of its board.

Actually, more precisely, its incompetence.

The newly formed board of Yahoo — most of the directors responsible for recent snafus have departed — is now very wary of making another such mistake, which is apparently why it did not name Levinsohn immediately.

“This has to be seen as a process that really is not slapdash,” said another source. “Yahoo can’t afford to make another mistake.”

No, it cannot.

But in keeping Levinsohn hanging, some inside the company feel the board is doing just that.

“The employees at Yahoo cannot take yet another all-hands meeting where we meet another CEO and hear another new vision for the company,” said one longtime staffer. “It’s hard to imagine that again without becoming nauseous.”

Still, Kilar is a favorite choice of some Yahoo board members; he is now out-of-contract with Hulu and is reportedly in the middle of negotiating his exit there.

“Jason is a free agent,” said a source close to the situation at the premium video service, which includes News Corp. (which owns this Web site) and Disney, as well as Comcast. “And he is looking for this next thing.”

He should, since tensions between Kilar and his major media partners/owners remain high and his departure seems imminent.

Whether taking on the huge task of fixing what ails Yahoo is that is unclear; some expect Kilar to favor moving on to a start-up.

One other issue: Neither Levinsohn nor Kilar has ever run a public company, although both have worked for them.

Other candidates Yahoo has spoken to are part of a list it has gone to several times before.

They include News Corp. digital exec — and longtime Levinsohn friend and business partner — Jon Miller, who has definitively declined to be considered due to his relationship with Levinsohn; former Yahoo exec Dan Rosensweig, who is now CEO of Chegg and who has declined several overtures; and former aQuantive CEO Brian McAndrews, whom sources said is also not interested in the job.

Other possible execs — none of whom appear to have bitten the Yahoo line either — include former Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell and former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt.

There appear to be no women candidates among those in the talent search. (What a shockeroo!)

It will be interesting to see if the usually lugubrious Yahoo board will act before the annual meeting, which is in one week. The choice certainly cannot drag on, though.

“Yahoo needs to move forward with someone,” said another source.

“Advertising is based on one thing: Happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing … It’s okay. You are okay.”

Don Draper, “Mad Men,” Season 1, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”

I wonder what Don Draper would think today when the 23-year-old digital media buying whiz quips back, “Maybe, but let’s load it up into the system, along with 5,000 other versions of copy, and measure how many Facebook ‘Likes’ it drives within our target demo.”

I love the “Mad Men” version of the ad business. The storytelling. The simplicity. The glasses of scotch at 10 am. But these days in digital, it feels like the Math Men media buyers (with their terabytes of data) are taking over for the Mad Men creatives. It may not make for great TV drama, but they’ve got the performance data to prove that it’s their turn in the driver’s seat.

For years, digital ads were bought and sold by young media buyers from ad agencies and smooth salesmen from online publishers and networks, sealed over the modern version of the “three-martini lunch.” But with the steady advancement in online advertising technology over the last ten years, the geeks — I mean the Math Men — have gained the upper hand in determining how to spend these digital marketing dollars. Today, ad buying and selling is automated across nearly every digital channel, driven by complex algorithms crunching terabytes of data, all employed to meet rigorous ROI objectives — typically measured by new customer acquisition, profit margin, or revenues.

It all started in search, where Overture introduced (and Google perfected) a keyword ad marketplace for search pages. We take that marketer proposition for granted now, but it was heretical at the time — only pay us when a user clicks on your ad (versus every time we show your ad), and you decide how much to pay for that click (versus the same price for every advertiser). And sophisticated marketers took full advantage by leveraging technology platforms from Math Men companies like Efficient Frontier to maximize the efficiency of their search ad spend across millions of keywords, bids and text ad copy.

Since then, several major advances in advertising technology have further enabled the Math Men:

• Six years ago, Right Media introduced the first ad exchange for display ads, enabling the Math Men and their algorithms to buy and sell banner ads and skyscrapers across the Web. Google subsequently perfected the display exchange via their DoubleClick acquisition as well.
• Three years ago, Blue Kai introduced the first ad targeting-data marketplace, enabling the Math Men to leverage anonymous audience targeting data to further enhance marketers’ campaign performance.
• A year ago, Facebook launched its own ad platform API to enable Math Men and their algorithms to bid for Facebook ads based on user attributes. It seems likely that Facebook will eventually extend its monetization platform to third-party publishers, similar to what Google did with AdSense, as Facebook already has a strong distribution foothold via Facebook Connect.

It feels like we are witnessing the tipping point in digital media buying. Measured by dollars or by impressions, greater than 50 percent of online advertising is bought via APIs today (granted, most of this is still search). In a few years, I believe that 90 percent of all digital ad impressions, and more than 75 percent of digital ad dollars, will be bought and sold programmatically.

As we witnessed with search marketing, once a) marketers get a taste of the increased spend efficiency offered by these emerging platforms, and b) these platforms (and the associated marketer tools) become sufficiently easy to use, the dollars will flow, and quickly. The Math Men at Efficient Frontier are leveraging these display, data and social platforms to deliver superior ad spend performance for marketers across all digital channels today. It’s no longer just about search.

And the Mad Men are taking note. In the last few years, the ad agency holding companies have rolled out their own technology-driven digital ad “trading desks” to help their clients take advantage of these ad trading platforms. I wonder if they’ve replaced the scotch in the mini bars with the Math Men’s drink of choice, Red Bull.

Chris Moore is a partner with Redpoint Ventures and has been enabling the digital Math Men with investments in Efficient Frontier, Right Media, Blue Kai, Auditude, Inadco, Extole, Intent Media and eBureau. Follow him on Twitter @Redpointvc and @Moorski.

Industry sources expect the Department of Justice, who had been reviewing the $400 million transaction for antitrust violations, to approve the deal in the next couple weeks, perhaps as early as this Friday.

It’s unclear whether the DOJ will impose any restrictions on the deal. But Web ad players, reading tea leaves and DOJ body language, are betting the sale goes through unhindered. No comment from Google; I’ve yet to hear back from a Department of Justice rep. UPDATE: “Our investigation is ongoing,” a DOJ spokeswoman emails.

Admeld helps publishers sell their ads by negotiating bids from multiple buyers, and is a big player in the complicated and fractured display advertising business. Google, which has long been dominant in search advertising, has been steadily increasing its presence in display ads via acquisitions like DoubleClick and Invite Media.

So it was easy to see why regulators might give another big deal some scrutiny. In fact, at this point, every big deal Google makes will get a hard look from Washington, which is already pursuing a broad antitrust investigation. But so far regulators have yet to stop a deal, including Google’s $750 million acquisition of AdMob and its more recent deal for ITA. Next up: The $12.5 billion Googorola deal.

The DOJ first began looking at Google-Admeld six months ago, and in late July extended their review. At the time, Google published a blog post explaining why the company couldn’t dominate display ads, even while its executives told Wall Street it had big ambitions in display.

More recently, Google has gotten help making its case from competitors. Facebook, for instance, is already ahead of Google in the display ad market, at least by the estimation of some analysts.

And Yahoo, which still competes fiercely with Google for display ad dollars, has put together a battle plan designed specifically to take on Google: It has lined up a coalition of big Web players with AOL and Microsoft, and it has begun pulling back its inventory from third-party ad buyers, including Google’s Invite Media.

(Image credit: iStockphoto/alexsl)

People familiar with Yahoo say that this week it told at least three retargeting companies — Criteo, TellApart, and ValueClick’s Dotomi — that it would stop selling them its “Class 2” remnant inventory, which the companies used to purchase on behalf of clients and essentially resell at a premium. The idea, theoretically, is that Yahoo will sell more of those ads itself.

The move follows the formation of an ad alliance between Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, which is meant in part to decrease the amount of inventory those companies sell to third-party players like retargeters. Industry sources believe Yahoo’s U.S. team, led by Ross Levinsohn, intends to follow its retargeter ban by going after ad networks — a much larger group of outside players who buy and resell Yahoo’s inventory.

But so far Yahoo appears to be acting on its own when it comes to keeping its stuff away from outsiders. Neither AOL or Microsoft have made similar moves.

Yahoo declined to comment and I haven’t heard back from Criteo and ValueClick. TellApart CEO Josh McFarland offered this statement via email:

TellApart maintains a good working relationship with Yahoo, yet this approach to the ad marketplace would be increasingly opposite that of Google’s.

It was my team at Google that built the ecosystem around AdWords, and third parties fueled huge growth in search advertising revenue as a result. DoubleClick is now compounding that success with real time bidding and an open Ad Exchange, which offers full access to all owned properties and the Google Display Network. This approach stands in contrast to Yahoo’s.

Retargeters try to track Web users as they visit clients’ sites — usually retailers — and try to sell them related ads when they move to other properties. (Here’s an illustrated guide from Criteo about the process, though it doesn’t mention the part about Criteo buying ads on other properties).

They’re part of a larger trend in Web advertising that puts a greater value on who sees the ads, and pays less attention to where they see them — which has diminished the ability of Yahoo and other “premium” publishers to charge high prices for their inventory. Meanwhile, retargeters, ad networks and other outsiders have been able to buy cheap unsold inventory from Yahoo and others, and resell it at a premium.

The Yahoo-led coalition with AOL and Microsoft is meant in part to give those companies more control of their inventory, and eventually the ability to raise prices. And apparently Yahoo’s unilateral move this week is meant to do the same thing.

But there’s a fundamental catch-22 here: Reclaiming inventory will only work if Yahoo can sell it. And the reason that Yahoo was willing to hand it off to third-parties in the first place was because it couldn’t sell it.

Yahoo U.S. head Ross Levinsohn is trying upgrade his sales technology and staff with a variety of moves, including his recently announced deal to buy Interclick, though that deal won’t close for several months.

The former DoubleClick executive, who sold his company to Google for $3.2 billion, had his pick of high-profile jobs, but instead has landed at a company most people probably have never heard of.

You can be sure that between Rosenblatt’s appointment and an injection of capital from Benchmark, that’s about to change.

Both Rosenblatt and Benchmark’s General Partner Matt Cohler will join the company’s board. Neither 1stdibs nor Cohler would disclose details of the investment.

In an interview, Rosenblatt told me that, unlike DoubleClick, this is not an advertising play.

“What was exciting to me about DoubleClick was that it was an opportunity to usher an industry into the digital age,” he said. “I think we have a comparable opportunity here at 1stdibs in the luxury marketplace. That’s what gets me excited about it. It’s not an ads business.”

The company’s obscurity in tech circles did not dissuade Rosenblatt from the opportunity.

“I have never come across a company that is as unknown among the Internet crowd, but is known as well as it is in its vertical,” he said.

Rosenblatt quoted from a Bain & Company study to highlight the size of the opportunity. It found that only three percent of luxury spending was spent online as of 2009, even though the market size totaled $257 billion in 2010.

Already, Rosenblatt said, 1stdibs’ gross merchandise volume of goods (the value of goods sold by dealers on the site) was set to exceed $500 million in 2011. He said the average price of each item sold is $5,000, which sets it apart from other luxury players, like One Kings Lane and Gilt Groupe, both of which are focused on offering daily discounts for items.

1stdibs plans to expand into more categories and geographies for growth. It has already gone beyond furnishings to real estate, fashion, fine art and jewelry. The company is a marketplace, so it makes money by charging dealers a listing fee to post items on the site. Currently, it has 1,200 dealers, who sell 6,000 items a month. Because dealers and sellers connect directly, similarly to eBay, 1stdibs does not stock inventory or have to manage warehouses.

Rosenblatt said he discovered the company through Benchmark’s Cohler.

Cohler said he learned of the site through his brother, a well-respected interior designer who was helping him decorate his house.

Cohler said that countless items in his house were found on 1stdibs. “I was astonished to see how incredibly powerful it was,” he said.

Ironically, Cohler was able to close the investment with 1stdibs and recruit Rosenblatt faster than it took to redecorate his house, which “is never really done,” he joked.

Cohler said that Rosenblatt’s appointment will lend the company the operational expertise it needs to scale a large Internet company. “I don’t think there’s anyone better in the world to take the company forward,” he added.

The 1stdibs marketplace was founded in 2001 by Michael Bruno, who had the goal of bringing the Paris flea market — famous for its one-of-a-kind items — to the Internet.

Bruno, who Rosenblatt calls a charismatic entrepreneur, will continue to play an active role at the company by working on strategy and consulting directly with customers.

Rosenblatt will continue to sit on the boards of Group Commerce, Twitter and IAC.

You gotta hand it to those geniuses over at the Googleplex, thinking up adorkable names for all their various plots and schemes.

And for its latest look-see of the Yahoo situation, it has revived an old one: “Project Porcupine,” presumably from the old joke about how you hug a porcupine.

Very carefully.

Or maybe you don’t hug it at all, which is why all the rumors about the search giant hooking up with some unnamed private equity firms have been so unclear and, well, hard to grab ahold of.

According to sources, there are three clear aspects of what is actually going on:

1. Interest in using Google’s vast cash hoard as part of an investment it would make in a deal — meaning the company was approached, which it is, often.

2. Desire of Google’s crafty Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora to perhaps find a clever way to get ahold of Yahoo’s display inventory to add to Google’s own fast-growing DoubleClick display advertising subsidiary — meaning Arora has been making the rounds at Yahoo to gauge interest.

3. Pure enjoyment in messing with Microsoft execs — who are now allied with Yahoo via its Bing search technology — as well as getting up any price the software giant would have to fork over to be part of any consortium that will be cobbled together in what is sure to be a hopelessly complex deal.

Whether incoming or outgoing or just an early version of Mischief Night, any one of these options — while interesting to contemplate — is certainly fraught for Google.

Remember the trouble three years ago when Google tried to do a simple search-advertising partnership with Yahoo, in order to pull it out of the clutches of Microsoft?

That effort ended with a resounding oh-no-you-don’t by the Justice Department, which promised an antitrust lawsuit was awaiting such a move to bring together the No. 1 and No. 2 search services.

And if it was a no-no then, any formal relationship or even arm’s-length investment in Yahoo by Google would inevitably be more closely scrutinized this time around.

In fact, what I wrote in 2008 applies a dozen times more emphatically today:

“It is bad for advertisers, it is bad for consumers, it is bad for innovation, no matter how well-intentioned Google is.”

Fast forward to today, after Google has already played a worrisome game of chicken with regulators over a number of acquisition deals — which makes trying to bring back Yahoogle akin to reaching for the third rail.

But that’s not what it’s going to do, in truth, because — even though Yahoo is still a tempting target — there is usually only one outcome to hugging a porcupine.

Ouch.

Think about the federal government’s blocking of the $39 billion AT&T and T-Mobile merger and you might want to reread Google’s blog today, penned in reaction to the news that the Justice Department is making a second request for information about its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

“This is pretty routine,” wrote Google’s Motorola integration exec Dennis Woodside. “We’ve gotten these kind of requests before.”

Maybe Google has (and it has with other purchases) — but in actuality, only four percent of transactions got such a follow-up request from regulators.

To be fair, it is much more common in high-profile, big-money deals like this one, but it means a longer closing period and more uncertainty around the Android mobile ecosystem until it’s done.

Still, Google has good reason to be patient. Despite tough criticism and brutal lobbying, it won approval from Justice for its $700 million deal to buy flight data service ITA Software in April, after nine months of scrutiny and a number of conditions imposed.

And the search giant waited out an intense six-month Federal Trade Commission approval process last year for its $750 million acquisition of mobile advertising start-up AdMob. It had an even harder time with the FTC’s nod of its 2007 DoubleClick purchase for $3.1 billion.

One that it lost — an obvious bridge too far that I dubbed Yahoogle — was Google’s 2008 effort to meld a troubling partnership with Yahoo in search advertising.

So, we’ll see soon enough which way D.C. — which just had Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt up to the Senate for an antitrust hearing chit-chat — will go.

Until then, here’s Woodside’s whole blog:

An update on our Motorola acquisition

Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 5:30 PM ET

Posted by Dennis Woodside, SVP Google

Since we announced our plans to acquire Motorola Mobility, we’ve been excited about the positive reaction to the proposed deal — particularly from our partners who have told us that they’re enthusiastic about our defense of the Android ecosystem.

And as David Drummond said when we announced our plans in August, we’re confident that this deal will be approved. We believe very strongly this is a pro-competitive transaction that is good for Motorola Mobility, good for consumers, and good for our partners.

That said, we know that close scrutiny is part of the process and we’ve been talking to the U.S. Department of Justice over the past few weeks. Today we received what is called a “second request,” which means that the DOJ is asking for more information so that they can continue to review the deal. (This is pretty routine; we’ve gotten these kind of requests before.)

While this means we won’t be closing right away, we’re confident that the DOJ will conclude that the rapidly growing mobile ecosystem will remain highly competitive after this deal closes. We’ll be working closely and cooperatively with them as they continue their review.

Prior to today, I kept hearing chatter, none of it stronger than word-of-mouth gossip, that Google really did want to make a run at the video site. That struck me as a stretch, given that Google was already facing a wide-ranging federal antitrust probe, and that adding the video site that dominated the market for “professional” content would be a giant red flag for regulators.

Now it seems like a really, really long stretch.

Google could easily afford to shell out a couple billion for the site, owned by a consortium that includes Disney, Comcast and News Corp. (News Corp. also owns this Web site).

At the end of June, Google had $39 billion lying around, and it makes a couple billion more in profits each quarter. And Google biz dev boss David Drummond made a point of telling investors this morning that the $12.5 billion Google wants to spend on Motorola won’t slow it from making other deals.

But Motorola makes Hulu that much more unlikely for two big reasons:

• Google could certainly argue that it wouldn’t break antitrust rules with a Hulu deal for a lot of reasons. They could note, for instance, that Hulu doesn’t have truly exclusive rights to its programming, but shares the licenses with content owners who show the stuff on their own sites (i.e. Fox.com, NBC.com, etc.). But TV is different from mobile advertising or flight search software — people have an emotional attachment to it, and regulators respond accordingly. Note that Comcast had to abdicate any control of NBC Universal’s Hulu stake as a condition to getting its merger done. It’s that much harder to imagine Washington giving Google the go-ahead to control the online output of three of the four broadcast networks at the same time it is asking for control of a giant handset-maker.
• Even if Google thought it could get the deal done, it would have to convince Hulu’s owners, too. Google says it thinks it can get Motorola approved by Washington by the end of the year, but that seems crazily optimistic — as Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney notes, both ITA and DoubleClick took 9 to 11 months for sign-off. If you’re Disney/News Corp./et al and you decide you do want to sell, you want to find a buyer who can actually make it happen.

Then again, perhaps Google could offer a 63 percent premium and a gazillion-dollar break-up fee as insurance, just like it did with Motorola today, and Hulu’s owners would be willing to take the non-risk. Goohulu may have a very, very low chance of survival, but I can’t call it DOA just yet.

Last week, after FindTheBest nabbed $6 million in funding from Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins, veteran entrepreneur Kevin O’Connor talked to me about the content platform, which structures data into a hopped-up comparison service for products and services.

Comparing, organizing and filtering everything from summer camps to mountain bikes to investment advisors to Hollywood agents, it’s a leads business for “considered decisions,” with added hopes of selling its technology to anyone in need of a human- and machine-powered curation engine.

The new venture funding for the Santa Barbara, Calif., company comes after a small seed round of $750,000 from O’Connor, who founded online advertising pioneer DoubleClick and others.

Here’s a screenshot of the service, which could take almost any topical direction, as well as the video of my interview with O’Connor:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110728/findthebests-kevin-oconnor-talks-about-comparison-engine-now-running-hot-on-6m-in-funding-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110718/hearst-owned-magazines-launching-daily-deals-with-group-commerce/ http://allthingsd.com/20110718/hearst-owned-magazines-launching-daily-deals-with-group-commerce/#comments Mon, 18 Jul 2011 12:00:15 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=98990 Hearst-owned magazines are treading on Groupon’s territory with the launch of group-buying discounts, starting off with Road & Track and Car and Driver.

Hearst will be using a platform built for big media publishers by Group Commerce, a New York-based company founded by former Google and DoubleClick executives David Rosenblatt, Jonty Kelt and Andrew Glenn.

The offers, which will start rolling out later this summer, will primarily target the male-dominated audiences of the two magazine brands. Later, Hearst will expand it to other demographics through such well-known magazine properties as Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and Esquire.

So far, Group Commerce has launched with other major media outlets, such as DailyCandy, Thrillist and the New York Times. It has raised $18.5 million in capital and grown to 75 employees since officially launching in March. In all, its network of publishers is already reaching 15 million subscribers who have signed up to receive deals.

Rob Houghlin, the publisher and chief revenue officer of Car and Driver and Road & Track, said they’ve been looking at doing something in the social commerce space over the past four or five years.

“It’s a brand new way to connect some of our advertisers with our most trusted asset — our users,” he said. “Advertisers are looking for new ways to talk to current and potential customers. They don’t want to move distressed products, but they want to offer special products to consumers who want it. It’s a platform of credibility first and value second.”

The deals will be promoted through the magazines and through other online experiences, such as newsletters, blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and mobile applications.

Some of the initial offerings include a custom product bundle from Gladiator Garage, which sells workbenches and storage units for garages, and an exclusive Corvette driving school package at Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch in Nevada.

Kelt, who is the CEO of Group Commerce, said the company will be working with Hearst to get all of its magazines up and running with deals by the end of the year. He said the magazines serve perfect niches that can be catered to.

“The whole premise of our business is that relevance is really important,” he said. “The media companies have strong vertical titles and know who their reader is.”

Kelt said there are two distinct advantages to partnering with publishers: The cost of acquiring customers is much lower because they already have the readers and combining offers alongside content can be particularly powerful.

If you think about it, newspapers have always had content and advertising — from classifieds to display ads — that people have been interested in. That will likely be the company’s only hope if it wants to contend with the massive marketing machines already assembled by Groupon and LivingSocial.

“Great content is really powerful, but great content with great commerce is even more powerful,” Kelt said. “You’ll be more engaged and more valuable than if you just had content from that brand.”

Here’s a mock-up of how the deals will look on Road & Track. This is not a final version, obviously:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110718/hearst-owned-magazines-launching-daily-deals-with-group-commerce/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110511/group-commerce-raises-more-funding-to-ramp-up-daily-deals-platform-for-publishers/ http://allthingsd.com/20110511/group-commerce-raises-more-funding-to-ramp-up-daily-deals-platform-for-publishers/#comments Thu, 12 May 2011 03:39:34 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=5341 New York-based Group Commerce, which came out of stealth only two months ago, has raised an additional $10 million in funding to help quickly ramp up a platform that enables publishers and media partners to get into the daily deals market.

The company, founded by former Google and DoubleClick executives David Rosenblatt, Jonty Kelt, and Andrew Glenn, has now raised a total of $18.5 million.

Group Commerce’s CEO Kelt confirmed the ink was still drying on the check. “We only recently came out of stealth mode. The topline is that things are going really well. We wanted to accelerate what we were doing.”

The round was funded by the company’s current investors: Spark Capital, Carmel Ventures, Lerer Media Ventures, and Bob Pittman, the founder of MTV Networks and now chairman of media and entertainment platforms at Clear Channel. This publication also reported on the funding.

Kelt said there was a lot of investor interest and they could have raised more but they decided to stick with insiders.

Unlike Groupon and the hundreds of clones sprouting up all around it, Group Commerce is building a white-label platform that can be used by publishers and media companies that have traditionally been in the local commerce business, but have been left out of the Groupon phenomenon. Some of its early customers include: DailyCandy, Meredith Corporation, Thrillist and the New York Times.

Seattle-based Tippr is a direct competitor. Having been in the market for longer, Tippr has about 70 partners, including Fox and NBC affiliates in some local markets. Tippr has raised about $9 million, and has 120 employees.

Kelt said the money will go toward supporting its current customer base as well as additional media partners in the pipeline. Two months ago, they had 35 employees. Today, they have 50 with sales members in six cities; they want to be at 100 employees by the end of the year and in 15 markets.

Group Commerce gives its partners the choice of using its own sales force to sell the daily deals, or relying on Group Commerce’s sales force. Additionally, it tries to match relevant deals to the readers of the different publications. “As a general comment, I’d say we are getting better at it, and therefore our partners want us to be more aggressive.”

The funding market for daily deals is hot right now. Gilt Groupe, which also has a daily deals business called Gilt City, just raised $138 million, and Groupon is eager to file for an initial public offering. Last month, LivingSocial raised $400 million.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110511/group-commerce-raises-more-funding-to-ramp-up-daily-deals-platform-for-publishers/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110421/groupon-coo-will-be-googles-margo-georgiadis/ http://allthingsd.com/20110421/groupon-coo-will-be-googles-margo-georgiadis/#comments Thu, 21 Apr 2011 18:14:09 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42971

Margo Georgiadis (pictured here), VP of Global Sales Operations at Google, will be COO of Groupon, Google confirmed.

She is currently located in Chicago, where the social buying site is headquartered.

A Google spokesman confirmed the move by Georgiadis, while Groupon–which specifically denied a query about her appointment that BoomTown made Tuesday–dithered.

In a statement, her boss, SVP and Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora said:

“I’m grateful for all that Margo has done for our team over the past two years. We will miss her, but we’re also very excited that she’s joining a terrific company and a great partner for Google.”

Besides COO, I will officially bestow the title of “Chief Cat Wrangler” on Georgiadis, for the massive organizational job ahead for her at the notoriously chaotic start-up. (As evidenced by Google being the company confirming a major Groupon hire.)

Still, Groupon’s growth had been stunning. It now has thousands of employees and has already washed out one COO, former Yahoo exec Rob Solomon, whose departure was reported here.

It has also turned down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google, raised a badillion dollars in venture funding from tech’s top investors and also is prepping an IPO valuing the company at upwards of $15 billion.

Phew!

Georgiadis must bring calm to this perfect storm.

Because of her solid resume (see below) and quiet demeanor, I had included her in a list of candidates several weeks ago and had queried the social buying company about her specifically this week.

In fact, when I asked for a comment if Georgiadis was hired on Tuesday, a Groupon spokeswoman said: “This would be news to me. Nothing to announce yet.”

At the time, Google had the class to simply say “no comment.”

(Lesson learned!)

Crain’s Chicago Business’ John Pletz first posted on Georgiadis’ hiring earlier today.

In any case, Georgiadis is just the kind of candidate that Groupon has been looking for–a competent and experienced sales and operations exec who would not overshadow its quirky CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason.

As I wrote two weeks ago:

Lastly, and perhaps most important, the Groupon COO candidate is going to have to accept that the role will not be a CEO-in-waiting, either before or after its inevitable IPO in the next year.

While I have received several tips that co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason might not stay its principal exec, extensive checking with sources inside and outside the company indicate that such a move is highly unlikely.

“Andrew is beloved to the board, by investors and, most of all, by employees,” said one source. “He’s not going anywhere.”

Indeed, Mason has a close working relationship with co-founder Brad Keywell, as well as Groupon co-founder and Chairman Eric Lefkofsky.

In fact, despite other business interests, Lefkofsky has been very involved in all key decisions with Mason.

That job, presumably, would fall to the new COO, which Groupon should be hiring sooner rather than later.

“Groupon needs a world-class COO, who can manage hyper-growth, but also who knows that a No. 2 stays in the background while doing it,” said another source. “That’s a tall order.”

Groupon has looked at a number of top execs, most specificially at former DoubleClick and Google exec David Rosenblatt. Sources said the high-profile exec did not want to play second fiddle to Mason or move to Chicago.

That’s moot now. Here is Georgiadis’ bio at the Silicon Valley search giant, which shows why Groupon picked her:

Georgiadis is responsible for driving Google’s sales operations and strategies across regions, channels and products as well as leading the sales technology teams which enable the successful commercialization of Google’s products (e.g., AdWords, AdSense, display and mobile ads) with advertisers and publishers.

She also leads the company’s local and commerce businesses, working to extend services like Checkout, Google Places and commerce search to small and large businesses alike.

Before joining Google, Margo was a principal in Synetro Capital LLC, a private investment firm based in Chicago. She also spent five years as the executive vice president of card products and chief marketing officer of Discover Financial Services where she led a radical turnaround of business performance and revitalized its rewards leadership with award-winning new products, customer experience and marketing. Prior to Discover, Margo was a partner at McKinsey and Company for 15 years in London and Chicago. She was a leader in the firm’s marketing and retail practices, and also co-founded and led the customer acquisition and management and retail marketing practices.

She has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110421/groupon-coo-will-be-googles-margo-georgiadis/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110411/your-google-preview-up-of-course-but-so-is-facebook/ http://allthingsd.com/20110411/your-google-preview-up-of-course-but-so-is-facebook/#comments Mon, 11 Apr 2011 16:40:15 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=31647 Google announces its Q1 earnings on Thursday. And as usual, search engine marketer Efficient Frontier is providing an informal sneak preview: The company, which helps advertisers buy digital ads, says search engine spending is up 17 percent in the first three months of this year.

That’s not a formal estimate of Google’s performance, of course. But since Google dominates search, it’s certainly a good directional indicator.

Meanwhile, Google nemesis Facebook (remember when Microsoft and Yahoo used to vie for that title?) is also growing: Efficient Frontier says pricing on the social network’s ads has moved up more than 40 percent since the end of last year. It predicts ad spending on Facebook will grow more than 200 percent this year.

The company also says that ad buyers and sellers are indeed using display ad exchanges like Google’s DoubleClick/AdX, and that there is 300 percent more inventory in that system than there was a year ago. But more inventory equals lower prices, which are down 30 percent.

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