PROXIMITY BASED ATTRIBUTION TAKES OFF:  Over the past few years marketers have used consumers’ latitude/longitude cell coordinates to serve ads.  The execution here is pretty simple – if you’re within range of a store an ad for that retailer can be served to your mobile device.  But what about harnessing the power of proximity in reverse to prove an ad campaign drives foot traffic?  That’s the gist of the new partnership between Pandora and Foursquare.  The attached AdWeek link includes details of how the program works along with some early successes.  This type of tracking works especially well for brands whose primary KPI is foot traffic.  A good example is an account like Subway, who can now measure how often Pandora listeners visit a store after being exposed to an ad compared to those who were not exposed.  Sufficed to say, this is a powerful new tool for marketers to use as they try to link mobile ads to foot traffic.

TRADITIONAL TV SLOW TO PICK UP DIGITAL ADVANCEMENTS:  eMarketer is featuring some fairly interesting stats on the state of linear TV in the attached link.  While there’s a decent amount of buzz around Addressable (targeted) TV and Programmatic buying, neither is taking a significant bite out of the overall TV revenue pie yet.  Addressable TV is still hard to scale – at 72M data-linked addressable set tops in the US there’s only about a 30% reach of the population, which is limiting to reach-based TV campaigns.  And Programmatic buying still seems to be swim-laned to OLV, with only 5% of traditional TV being transacted this way.  Both buckets are starting to grow though, as illustrated in the two charts below.  So it’s worth keeping an eye on this trend over the next few years.

NN SUPPORTERS TAKE TO THE STREETS:  Finally, in case you missed it yesterday an “Internet-Wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality”.  The day was marked by a few real life protests, like the one pictured below at the FCC HQ in DC.  But mostly this went online, as 80,000+ publishers wielded the power of their collective audience to rally against the FCC’s plan to dismantle NN.  Overall the public relations push back seems to be working.  Over the last two months over half a million public comments have been filed with the FCC, which have been overwhelmingly in support of NN.  The tech industry’s positioning that it’s a power grab by Big Cable to be able to charge more for premium data delivery seems to be working.  Will this effort ultimately save NN, or at least soften the rules changes?  Only time will tell.

Have a great Thursday guys!