Online Marketing News Roundup for April 21, 2009

Online marketing businesses today announced a slew of offerings, some timed to coincide with this week’s ad:tech conference in San Francisco. Here are some items in the PR pipeline:

ReachLocal opens a local advertising platform. For local advertisers, national brands, and agencies, the platform called ReachLocal Xchange will give access to Internet audiences in a targeted format. ReachLocal says it will provide a single media buy, full campaign tracking and reporting, and optimization technology. Publishers, in turn, can create custom ad inventory offers.

Interpublic’s Mediabrands announces Greenhaus, an invitation-only consultation practice to foster start-up social media platforms. Led by Quentin George, chief digital officer of Mediabrands, and Brian Monihan, SVP and global lead of social media at Mediabrands’ division Universal McCann, the program is set up as an intense six-month program set around four topics: understanding the media economy; campaign lifecycle; media math and metrics; and about the RFP.

In theory the platforms that go through Greenhaus will emerge to support clients of Mediabrands and IPG. To date a handful of companies including Tubemogul, Justin.tv, Worldgolftour, 80/20 Publishing, 750 Industries, Widgetbox, Kosmix, and Danoo have already been through the Greenhaus program.

Rubicon Project, which created an ad network optimization platform, moves to a buy side solution with Rubicon onDemand. Buyers can use onDemand to fill their campaigns, and make buys targeted by audience segment such as demographic, geographic location, and contextual or behavioral segment.

When a video plays on YouTube, does a marketer hear the sound of a customer conversion? Omniture just added the ability to measure viral video campaigns to its SiteCatalyst. Omniture promises the new component “delivers increased insight into the performance of viral video campaigns and how they potentially impact consumer behavior and interaction with a publisher’s Web site.” It can also be used for marketers who sell advertising against online video to view and provide metrics.

Omniture also announced a publisher-side analytics and ad serving integration with 24/7 Real Media. Publishers will be able to serve relevant ads by creating visitor segments through Omniture SiteCatalyst on sites that are shared with 24/7’s Open AdStream. There are additional inventory management features, including insight into which pages have the highest value for advertising.