Ad industry sources say the Web giant is pulling back direct access to its inventory from “demand side platforms” (DSPs), a group of ad technology players that includes several well-funded start-ups, as well as Google.

The news follows a similar move the company made earlier this month, when it told a group of “retargeting” companies that they wouldn’t be able to buy Yahoo’s inventory, either.

Both decisions are part of a larger strategy designed to give Yahoo more control of inventory it has been selling to outsiders, which is supposed to eventually give Yahoo the ability to sell the ads at higher prices.

In this case, Yahoo is taking back ad inventory from DSPs, a relatively new class of companies designed to help ad buyers negotiate “real-time bidding” exchanges, like Google’s AdX and Yahoo’s Right Media. Yesterday, Yahoo told DSPs, including MediaMath, Turn and Google’s Invite Media, that they could no longer buy Yahoo’s inventory on behalf of their clients; instead, clients like big advertising holding companies would have to get their own “seats” on the exchange, and buy directly themselves.

The move doesn’t cut off DSPs from Yahoo’s ad business entirely. The companies can still license their technology to agencies, ad buyers, etc., which some of them are already doing. And DSPs can buy non-Yahoo inventory from Right Media on behalf of clients.

Still, the move is clearly meant to strip out another layer of middlemen between Yahoo and the people who buys its ads. And it is ideologically aligned with the company’s move to spearhead an alliance with competitors AOL and Microsoft, which is supposed to give all three of them the ability to push back against Google and third-party ad players like ad networks.

The move goes into effect Friday, Dec. 2; given that the U.S. is about to enter into a two-day Thanksgiving holiday, that gives DSPs and their clients just a few days next week to rearrange the way they do business, and that has caused a scramble in the ad tech world. Both Yahoo and Google declined to comment.

Sources say that Finnegan, who served as president/chief digital officer at Starcom for the past two years, may end up replacing current Tremor CEO Jason Glickman. But multiple sources tell me that there’s no deal yet, and that Finnegan may end up at a different company altogether. I haven’t been able to reach Finnegan or Glickman for comment.

Tremor is one of the biggest players in the video ad business, and has been at it for four years. It’s also raised a big pile of money: $82 million, $40 million of which came in a round that closed earlier this year.

Finnegan has now worked for two of the biggest ad holding companies–prior to Starcom, he ran Omnicom’s OMD Digital group–as well as doing a brief stint at Vibrant Media, an “in-text” digital ad start-up.

Under the deal, Omnicom, part of New York-based Omnicom Group Inc., is expected to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy display ads for its clients through Google over the next two years, said a person familiar with the situation. In return, Google will work with Omnicom to build a global “trading desk” that allows the company to buy display ads more easily on Google’s ad exchange, an auction-like system that matches ad buyers and sellers to advertising space across large groups of websites.

Omnicom says it was already buying ads on Google’s exchange using its own technology system.

As part of the deal, Google, which reports second-quarter earnings Thursday, will provide analytics services to Omnicom to help it understand how its display ads are performing, the companies said.

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So today’s a chance for the company to impress investors again, as it unveils its Q2 earnings. In a lovely bit of timing, it has primed today’s pump with news that it had persuaded Omnicom to commit “hundreds of millions” of dollars into Google’s display ad exchange over the next two years.

What else can Google do to convince the Street? Here’s Citigroup (C) analyst Mark Mahaney’s always-helpful cheat sheet, which tries to handicap investors’ reactions to a range of different results (click image to enlarge). The consensus calls for revenue of about $5 billion and earnings of around $6.50 a share; both numbers are up about 21 percent over the previous year:

This is normally the part of the post where I go over other interesting stuff that Google might address during its call, like its back-and-forth with China, the impact of its Nexus One failure, or the “when will YouTube turn a profit” question.

But Google is doing its best to keep these calls closely focused on its core search business and its moves into display ads. And as of Q1, it has banished CEO Eric Schmidt from the proceedings, lest he say an interesting word.

Still, you can always hope. I’ll be covering the earnings report and subsequent call live today, starting at 4 pm eastern; check back later in the day for a link.

Green has rounded up about $2.5 million in financing for the Ventura, Calif.-based company. Founder Collective and Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures led the company’s first round; angel investors include Josh Stylman, a co-founder of Interpublic’s Reprise Media, and Omnicom vet Jerry Neumann.

The Trade Desk is one of a growing number of “demand-side platforms” that are supposed to help ad buyers grab inventory from exchanges like AdECN and Google’s AdX. The idea is that the exchanges, which churn through a staggering number of ad impressions at very fast speeds, require ad buyers to use specialized software and services if they want to make the most of them.

It’s still unclear if ad buyers and publishers will embrace the exchanges. But investors love the notion, as well as the idea that the big ad holding companies, or perhaps even Google (GOOG), will want to buy a DSP or three. So the market for this stuff is beginning to get a bit frothy.

That’s one of the reasons Green is reluctant to use the word DSP to describe his seven-man company. But given that his team is still building the product and that he doesn’t want to talk about it until it’s up and running, we’ll have to use that term for now. You can get just a bit more info here.

Now Razorfish is formally on the block: The Financial Times reports that Microsoft (MSFT) has hired Morgan Stanley to hawk the agency and suggests that French ad conglomerate Publicis Groupe could be a buyer. Then again, so could every other big ad holding company, including Omnicom (OMC) and WPP (WPPGY).

The FT throws out a value of $600-$700 million for Razorfish, down from the $800 million price tag that AdAge put on the shop last summer, which was the last time sales chatter heated up. At the time, the buyer was supposed to be WPP. Microsoft paid $6 billion for all of aQuantive in 2007.

Why has everyone been so convinced that Microsoft would sell something it bought in 2007? Because everyone thought that Microsoft never wanted Razorfish–it wanted the rest of aQuantive’s ad network business. And presumably what it really wanted was Doubleclick’s ad network business, but Google (GOOG) beat it out on that deal. Yahoo (YHOO) had already bought RightMedia and WPP bought 24/7 Real Media. (Boy, a lot of money was spent on ad networks back then! And not coincidentally, a flood of ad network start-ups flooded the market shortly after those transactions went through.)

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s own people have never tried particularly hard to argue that the company was committed to owning an ad agency. Though they did try to argue that owning one wasn’t a conflict with the online publishing business it keeps burning money on. Now that won’t be a problem.

[Image credit: g-hat]

Yesterday, for instance, Omnicom (OMC) reported that “organic revenue”–an accounting term that factors out wildcards like currency fluctuation and acquisitions–dropped 6.6 percent in the last quarter.

Today we hear from heavyweights Interpublic Group (IPG) and WPP, which have similar tales to tell. Interpublic reports a 5.6% decline in organic revenue; WPP says 5.8 percent.

Not mentioned in WPP’s three-month update: Any info about its sensational lawsuit against ad start-up Spot Runner, which it accuses of being a privately held pump-and-dump scheme. While the Spot Runner imbroglio is sexy, it has no impact on the company’s top or bottom lines.

But Omnicom management made hopeful noises yesterday about a recovery that might appear by the end of the year, and WPP has the same supercautious optimism: “The first half of 2009 will clearly be very difficult, with the second half, although continuing to be tough, likely to improve relatively. Any recovery, of sorts, will probably come in 2010.” Small comfort, but I’ll take it.

That’s presumably because the profit slump isn’t as bad as Wall Street expected. But maybe investors are buying some of the optimism CEO John Wren doled out–sparingly–during the company’s earnings call.

Not only was he hopeful that the “pace of economic decline [will find] a bottom,” he said, but he was hopeful that things could actually start picking up in the media business by the fourth quarter when “massive stimulus spending by most governments should start to have a positive impact.”

See, Bob Pittman? You’re going to get your ad industry bailout after all!

Speaking as an ad-supported media employee, I’d be overjoyed if Wren is correct. But the informal poll I’ve been taking of publishers–on and offline–for the past couple weeks has me thinking that’s he’s probably early. But it sure would be awesome if I didn’t have to run this crater art for much longer.

Advertisers and programmers are doing their best to fight back. They’re tinkering with ad formats–notice all those movie ads that feature the film’s title and release date running across the top of the ad, designed to combat fast-forwarders? And they’re integrating the ads directly into the shows themselves–it’s impossible to watch Bravo’s “Top Chef” without understanding that it’s sponsored by Glad and Diet Dr. Pepper, because everyone on the show keeps referring to Glad and Diet Dr. Pepper.

But here’s another, more straightforward approach: Create ads with visuals so arresting, you have to stop fast-forwarding and watch them.

That’s what happened to me with all three of these ads, all of which happen to be produced by the same agency, Omnicom’s (OMC) 180la, for the same client–Sprint’s (S) Boost Mobile brand.

Now, the ads aren’t actually going to do anything for me–our household is locked into a different Sprint plan, along with one from AT&T (T), for a long time. But now I’m sharing them with you, so that’s worth something, right?

That’s because it’s a Facebook app campaign, which makes it very difficult for its sponsor to blow much dough, no matter how hard it tries. In this case, Citi is sponsoring a “Magnetic Lyrics” app, a takeoff on  the refrigerator magnet word games favored by vaguely literate folks. In this case you assemble lyric snippets to your favorite songs by either Nickelback or Mary J. Blige.

Don’t like either act? Me either. But presumably lots of people do, and Citi is doing a broad deal with both of them. In any case, what’s relevant here are the economics, which are small scale.

I don’t have specifics, but I assume that Citi and its vendors–Atmosphere BBDO, a digital agency owned by ad behemoth Omnicom (OMC), and Buddy Media, a start-up that specializes in social media campaigns–are spending a modest amount to actually develop the app. I’m guessing it’s under six figures. And Citi will likely pay a small bounty for each user who plays with it–perhaps $1 per user. So far, that’s about $5,400.

And what does Facebook get out of this? Well, Citi (C) will need to buy some ad space to promote the app, so you can tack on a few bucks more to the campaign. But not much–Facebook has had a notoriously hard time convincing advertisers to pay up for its inventory. And it has a lot of inventory.

The takeaway: Assume Citi continues to exist in some form, it’s going to have to continue to spend money on marketing, and most of that will still be on big-blast campaigns like the ones you’re used to seeing on TV. But small, targeted plays like this could be an effective complement. And if you get a lot of marketers investing a lot of money in these kinds of gimmicks, then Facebook has a real income stream, which it could use.