Native advertising — the insertion of contextually relevant advertising amidst other content — is viewed with suspicion by much of the ad community, which sees it as unscaleable, and perhaps the opposite of its drive towards programmatic (automated) sales.

During the Summary Panel today at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Desert, one hypothesis by moderator Terry Kawaja, CEO, LUMA Partners, playing devil’s advocate, was that “agencies cannot create the volume and quality of native content necessary to populate every native ad.”

New York Times Executive VP of Advertising Meredith Levien. rising to the bait, strongly disagreed. “Good native advertising puts the onus on the reader to decide whether to engage or not,” she said, noting that The Times, Buzzfeed, Forbes (her former employer) and others have set up native ad areas that are clearly differentiated from other content, and highly successful. “It’s not like we have (columnist) Thomas Friedman writing for Pepsi,” she said.

Facebook VP of Ad Products, Monetization and Atlas Brian Boland, a keynoter at BIA/Kelsey’s ILM show in December, vigorously defended native advertising — not surprisingly, since Facebook is banking heavily on it. Native advertising, when combined with personalization, provides “unprecedented value,” he said. “People are going to a place where they want to discover what is important to them. It creates an opportunity for people to be excited about what they see.”

Boland noted that Facebook has recently been criticized for pushing the envelope with native advertising by having video ads. But critics should have done their homework, like Facebook has, Boland said. He noted that Facebook did reams of testing and research, and the feedback has shown that the video ads are totally engaging viewers.

Going forward, Facebook is developing a set of formats to enable people and advertisers to express themselves via native advertising on every platform — especially mobile. Boland acknowledged, however, that such formats are better suited towards larger media concerns. A handful of publishers will similarly see how things evolve, he said. But it remains “a challenge for mid-sized publishers.”

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The New York Times and other news organizations have been hampered by the short cuts of HTML and hyperlinks, but are now reclassifying to provide more structured, fluid data in a major development with massive implications, noted New York Times VP of Research Operations Michael Zimbalist, who keynoted Day 2 at ILM East. The benefits are immediate in terms of SEO, but longer term, provider richer product for consumers, said Zimbalist.

“Information has become increasingly granular or structured,” he said. “Each unit of content has extensive machine readable metadata about itself.” Fluid information can move more easily among machines and people.

In the case of The New York Times, it can now process the 300 pieces of professional content it produces every day — a brick of compiled information — into multiple formats, including things such as personal editions and slide shows. “You are reaching underneath the databases the power the Web to do new things,” said Zimbalist.

The key is to move the surplus of names to strong identifiers that are linking to data cloud driven by meta data. The Times, for instance, is embarking on moving all its data to DBpedia, which drives Wikipedia, Freebase, which is owned by Google, and GeoNames. To date, 29,000 names have been recontextualized for a new semantic platform — a “super librarian” — which includes 39 percent of people (“Edgar Allen Poe”), 31 percent of organizations, 76 percent of locations (“Park Slope”) and 14 percent of descriptions. “The future is bright for librarians,” joked Zimbalist.

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The tie with major online newsletters such as Daily Candy and Thrillist is especially interesting as they come with e-mail lists already at the core of their businesses. They also represent different targeted audiences: shopping-oriented females and action-oriented males. Specific audience targeting is a core focus for Group Commerce (although it is arguably true for its many white-label rivals as well).

Based in a loft in SoHo, Group Commerce has positioned itself as the “blue chip” in the space, and grants publishers full control over their lists. It has won Series A funding of $8 million from former AOL President Bob Pittman, Spark Capital, Carmel Ventures and Lerer Media Ventures. Pittman’s extensive background should prove to be a major door opener for the company.

CEO Jonty Kelt is appearing on the morning-long Deals SuperForum at ILM East, which is March 21-23 in Boston.

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Local news cooperatives are now in development in San Diego, Chicago, Hawaii and San Francisco. The latter, known as The Bay Area News Project, is building up with a $5 million investment from philanthropist Warren Hellman, who apparently thought it would be a better idea to start fresh than buy The San Francisco Chronicle.

According to an article by James Rainey in the Los Angeles Times today, the 15-person BANP (a placeholder name) envisions potential revenues of $12 million a year with a four-pronged strategy developed by CEO Lisa Frazier, a former McKinsey consultant who is getting paid $400,000 a year.

Revenues are expected to come from multiple sources, including public radio style members and syndication payments from news outlets that use the project’s content. The New York Times, for instance, has lined up to run stories twice a week in its Bay Area edition (as it has in Chicago as well).

The site has snared New West founder and Industry Standard Editor Jon Weber as its editor. It will rely partly on paid interns from UC Berkeley, and is operating out of donated law office space. We’ll follow it — and the others — with interest. With enough of a bankroll, and much lower costs, there is no reason why these sites can’t compete against newspapers, win new types of users and advertising, and save the day for journalism.

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A couple of stories caught my attention today. First, Reach Media Group (RMG), a digital out-of-home company that we’ve previously written about, signed a deal to push New York Times content to its network of 800 coffee shops, cafes and eateries in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco.

According to the press release, RMG’s digital place-based network (formerly known as “Danoo”) has been entirely re-envisioned to emulate the familiar, trusted design of NYTimes.com. We think this move will add considerable credibility to the fledgling network. It can offer a more compelling content experience (assuming you find the NYTimes content compelling) and ultimately, a more legitimate advertising sales proposition.

For some time now, we’ve said that digital out-of-home or digital place-based advertising models will develop rapidly over the next five years. But this scenario relies on the consolidation of the market, more standardized advertising options, and more targeting and mobile content connectivity.

We think we’ll get there. The potential for consumers to view condensed content on a screen and then connect to www.NYT2day.com for the full story offers advertisers a proxy for performance, and the user a simple way to more fully engage in the content.

The second interesting story today comes from The Omaha World Herald, which reports that New York equity firm CCMP Capital Advisors has made an offer to purchase Omaha-based InfoGroup — formerly known as InfoUSA. A deal like this has been expected since late last year, when the company hired an advisor to essentially find a buyer.

According to The World Herald, the sale of InfoGroup has been supported by Vin Gupta, the company’s founder and former CEO. While Gupta is no longer an officer of the company, he still sits on the board of directors. In our view, InfoGroup’s sale makes good sense for the company and the shareholders. Taking it private will enable the company to continue its re-branding process from InfoUSA to InfoGroup.

For years we’ve been asked by companies around the globe if InfoUSA or any of its competitors offered similar business listing information. Shifting the name to InfoGroup would certainly enable the company to expand it offerings beyond its current borders.

Should this deal be finalized, it would presumably be the end of Gupta’s involvement, active or passive, in the company he founded almost 40 years ago with $100 and the vision to compile, aggregate and verify the names, addresses and telephone numbers of millions of businesses in America. Certainly, it has been a difficult job. But Gupta and his pioneering colleagues can proudly take credit for delivering hundreds of millions of qualified leads to SMBs.

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Newspaper Bag Promotes "All The News That's Fit to Go"

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