The predictions are below, but you can read more about them here on Advertising Age.

1.  The vGRP metric gets adopted once released and AdXpose/Comscore finally makes sense to most people

2.  Trading Desks are no longer the bright shiny object for Madison Avenue as they begin to mature and become growth businesses for holding companies.  Holding companies need to make a strategic decision whether or not they are going to continue to support them and if so, they must acknowledge and realize they are building technology organizations.  If not, we’ll start to see some trading desks spinning down (or out) of holding companies in 2012.

3.  Agencies who are not agencies will challenge the agencies.  I like the title on this one:  tomorrow’s madison avenue will look different than todays.  Read more about it in-depth over at Ad Age.

4.  Attribution drives dollars to currently undervalued assets.  By using engagement mapping, TrueCPA, or other fun names for understanding conversion attribution, media buyers will actually be able to purchase sites that aren’t part of the lower purchase funnel.

5.  And of course, what marketing technology trend and prediction list would not include Consolidation and Investment as a headline?  Mine certainly will.

I’m super excited about the above 5.  There are quite a few more but these are my starting five going into 2012.

I always tell my team at The Media Kitchen that you can learn a lot from what other companies are doing; the good, the bad, and the ugly… so study them.  On the web, it’s relatively easy to study companies and their respective infrastructure as the source code of competitors is only 1 click away.

I teamed up with my friends over at Evidon who own the Ghostery product and had them send me a data dump of 3^rd party tags that were placed on 20 e-commerce sites (list below).  Note, the data I have is fairly reliable but not perfect, so I may have missed a partner here or there.  However, I do have over 150+ partners who had tags down on these 20 e-commerce destinations, so I feel I have a directionally accurate view of who was part of the marketing technology ecosystem for Holiday 2011.

Sites I tracked were Best Buy, CouponCabin, Sports Authority, LL Bean, Gap, Dicks Sporting Goods, Bed Bath & Beyond, SVPPLY, DSW.com, Modells, Zappos, Old Navy, Disney, Target, Walmart, Gilt, Sears, Amazon, NewEgg, and Piperlime.

I counted a total of 413 partner tags/pixels placed across these 20 sites (note, I only went to 1-2 pages per site and assumed tags would be similar across most pages).

Executive Summary (full report can be downloaded here)

• Best Buy, CouponCabin, and Sports Authority properties contained 43% of all tags placed.  The top 10 of the 20 sites accounted for 85% of all tags placed.  I am actually surprised that Amazon didn’t fall into the top 3, but again, Ghostery told me they only had 3 tags down on their pages (Turn, DoubleClick, Google Analytics).

• The top 3 tags placed across all 20 sites were Google Analytics, Omniture, and DoubleClick.  No real surprise here.
• The biggest surprise IMHO is that Google+1 outranks Facebook and Twitter as social plug-ins that are embedded across these ecommerce publishers.
• The DSPs are in-line with the recent Forrestor report so I didn’t find anything crazy in those numbers.
• Google Analytics has 70% coverage across these 20 e-commerce sites.  Imagine the data that Google could/is collecting.  Just saying.

In order to digest this 1000+ cell data dump, I created a schematic whereas I broke down the product (such as Tag Management) and took the top companies and their % composition the 20 e-commerce destinations.  The link to the excel sheet is at the bottom of this post.

Web Analytics software:  Google Analytics (70%), Omniture (60%), Foresee (40%), Webtrends (15%), Yahoo Analytics (15%), Coremetrics (10%)

3^rd Party Ad Serving:  DoubleClick (55%), Microsoft Atlas (25%), ValueClick MediaPlex (35%), MediaMind (5%)

Tag Management:  BrightTag (20%), TagMan (5%)

DSP:  AppNexus AdNexus (30%), Turn (25%), MediaMath (20%), Invite Media (20%),  AdNetik (10%), X+1 (10%), Lucid (5%), DataXu (5%), Rocket Fuel (5%)

Exchange:  Right Media (35%), AdBrite (15%), OpenX (10%)

SSP:  PubMatic (50%), Rubicon (25%), Admeld (10%)

Social Plug-Ins:  Google +1 (45%), Facebook (40%), Twitter (15%), AddThis (15%)

Site Optimization:  Omniture (60%), Monetate (20%), RichRelevance (20%), Visual Website Optimizer (15%)

I believe the Omniture & DoubleClick tag data above is a bit misleading because those are grandiose tags that can do many different things and without the right context, they could be categorized incorrectly.  I tried my best.

Conclusion

Google dominates pretty much up and down the marketing technology stack. I still think they should buy Adobe to become the monopolistic dominant player (to get Omniture), but I don’t believe the government will ever allow that.

I was actually surprised that Omniture didn’t have even higher composition of the 20 ecommerce players.

I couldn’t tease out DoubleClick AdX from their other tags so that’s why they weren’t included in the Exchange part.

And of course, since I work, play, and invest in the marketing technology ecosystem, I’m conflicted up the wazoo with many of the companies mentioned in this post as well, as, the data in the chart linked below.  I have done my best to tease out bias.  Please proceed with caution but honestly, I don’t think you need to.  Contact me if you are interested in discussing.

Thought you might find all of this data interesting.  I have included my chart here in case you want to download it and play with it.  The full report I put together is located here.  Please remember to give proper attribution if you use it.

I’m curious to look at this data in 2012 and compare it to 2011 (I don’t have historicals).  I’m sure we’ll see some interesting changes.

Happy holidays.

Darren Herman is the Chief Digital Media Officer of The Media Kitchen (part of kbs+) and is President of kbs+ Ventures which is an early stage marketing technology institutional investment arm of the agency.  His tweets can be found at @dherman76 and blogging here at http://www.darrenherman.com

The above quote stuck out from a recent conference I went to when we were talking about advertising and operating systems.  There are not enough advertising dollars in the ecosystem to be the only revenue model for digital media companies so we must look elsewhere.

Mobile impacts our future in ways many do not realize yet.  When you are in the middle of the early part of the Gartner Hype Curve, you do not know how large an opportunity can become and often times, it is underestimated.  Being hyperbolic on purpose, I feel we are underestimating the importance of location, which is brought to use by mobile data.

The key essence of the line, “Help demand find supply, not supply find demand” is all about enabling a process, interface or system to help consumers consume, at its purest form.  Let consumers pull information, not just have it pushed down to them.

Mobile affords the opportunity for an interesting ratio (balanced maybe) of push vs. pull marketing.  The majority of marketing is push – supply finding demand.  We buy banners, magazine pages, television spots, billboards and the like so marketers can reach customers.  With location data as now part of the marketing optimization mix, consumes can now request and pull information.  Early current forms of this are platforms like Groupon or FourSquare.

However, what happens when customers can reach us?  What happens when push budgets are down 80% and that money is invested to marketing around pulling?  Could this happen?  It is happening, but Madison Avenue needs to retool and rejigger for this.

There is a famous quote by Henry Ford which says, “If I asked consumers what they would of wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”   This of course, refers to the automotive empire he ignited.  Steve Jobs has similar quotes.  And of course, Mark Zuckerberg does too.  In a world where consumes can pull messages or find supply, do we (as consumer) know what we want or need?

(open question, start thinking….. now)

There is no doubt that there will be mergers and acquisitions.  The main reason why deals fail is because the integration between the two companies doesn’t happen.  There are a slew of reasons for this, but most of the time, culture and mismanaged expectations are what drives companies not to integrate well.

If I were going out on my own and wanted to start a services organization, I’d build up a company specifically geared toward making integrations work and take a % of the deal for compensation.  I’d have a team of ad tech and business professionals who have been through it before and make sure that all the boxes are checked around a solid integration.

There will be no shortage of M&A in the ad tech space in the next 12-24 mos so this should be a nice opportunity

As of around 11pm last night, I’m back on the iOS platform as I got up and running on my new iPhone 4S.

Reasons why I switched back:

• I found that I didn’t want to have to “work” to make my phone optimal.  I ended up having to manually do many things on the Charge to get things the way I wanted them.
• The battery life was terrible.  I went thru between 2-3 batteries on any given weekday (work) day.
• The phone was not refined; I couldn’t change things like the font on my email and the on/off switch was where my thumb touched when I held the phone which caused me to power on/off at sub optimal times

Things I learned about Android:

• It wasn’t as hard to get up and running as I expected.
• It actually looks pretty sweet (except for the startup screen, which is scary)
• The App Store is pretty robust.  I was pleasantly surprised that the only App I couldn’t really find was Instagram
• Loved the integration with Google Apps

I’m excited to be back.  Any iOS apps I should be downloading? I’m looking for a solid RSS app.

“The best way for a startup to get a dataset like that is to create some sort of self-expression platform, a way to express what you’re into …,” says Lavingia, who also designed the Turntable.fm iPhone app. “You can’t directly ask users, ‘Hey we’d love all of your data! List the songs you like and the albums you’ve bought and the places you’ve visited and the food you’ve eaten.’ But you need these answers to ultimately make money.”

The above quote comes from a post on TechCrunch titled Pinterest Joins Twitter and Facebook As The Newest Self-Expression Engine.  It’s hot on the heels of a few other posts (Bloomberg, Betabeat, Uncrunched, TechCrunch) that talk about how Facebook and the like are building massive data assets on the backs of consumers and reselling them to advertisers.  Consumers for the most part, are not fiscally compensated, but some of the technology services can argue that they are getting value in exchange for their data.

Bloomberg’s latest headline, “Getting Rich From Others Has Never Been Easier,” pretty much sums it all up.

I think there’s an expression, “there’s no free lunch in life.”  When was the last time you signed up for a service and wondered how it was making money?

For the next 24 hours, look at all the sites you visit.  Are they collecting your data and reselling it?  Are you making any money off of your data?

I think we are going to see some sort of reform in this area.  Imagine going to a website and seeing a “ratings” of some kind which shows what they are doing with your data, similar to how the movie world uses different types of ratings (G, PG, PG-13, R, MA).  A little icon or graphic which shows if your data is being sold, transferred, stored, etc.  I think I’d like this – and folks like Apple who take leadership positions with App Stores would have to roll this out next to each app I download.  I’d like to know what’s happening with my data.

Just some food for thought on this Tuesday morning.

Paul admitted he wasn’t an advertising guy, but knows technology enough to understand how tech will influence advertising in the next few years.  The data he used to back his claims were based on the thousands of applications YCombinator receives and is able to forecast and see trends in where innovation is happening.

Here is a summation of the 9 trends that’s pushing advertising, per Paul, but I tend to agree as well.

1. Tablets are important and might call for their own unique advertising platforms to take advantage of the user interface.  Apple and Android will dominate the market and Apple will dictate the ad formats.   Tablets are genuinely a big deal and we aint seen nothing yet.  My take:  Yes, he’s spot on.  Tablets penetrate and are both a content consumption device but increasingly, a content creation device, as long as we can innovate and create good input devices.

2.  All data lives in the cloud. All data about a consumer, transaction, records, etc will live in the cloud and ostensibly, be located in one database that can be used.  What will hold this back will not be technology, but will be government and policy.  My take:  Totally.  We’re seeing this today.  I’m all about data.

3.  More stuff happens peer 2 peer.  Paul used an analogy that I don’t know if I agree with, but he claims that hotels exist because consumers couldn’t find any other way of staying in a remote city or town, so hotels were built to meet this demand.  Now with services like airbnb, hotels could cease to exist as we know them.  My take:  I like what he’s trying to say, but don’t know if I buy the entire analogy.  Not everyone wants to stay in someone else’s home.

4.  There are going to be a lot more startups.   I liked where Paul went with this.  He basically said that engineers had 2 choices after college:  go to graduate school or join a big company.  Now, they have 3.  The third oppty is to create a startup.  Paul threw out the 1% number which was how many developers/engineers start companies… and if this increases 10%, then that’s 10x the amount of startups in the ecosystem.  Again, we aint seen nothing yet with the volume of startups out there… there are going to be many.

5.  Facebook is already a big deal.   Paul said that the $1.6bln from Facebook is quick and simple money and they haven’t really began monetizing yet.  They are focused on growth and even have a Facebook Growth Group, which is one of the most powerful groups in Facebook.  He thinks that when they start monetizing, they can seriously move into markets and kill competitors such as PayPal or Wepay.  My take:  I agree with Paul, but they have to be careful in how they approach this as to not alienate developers and users.  I don’t want Facebook to be 100% of the services I use as a consumer.

6.  Software eating the world.  Don’t be an advertising company that does software.  Be a software company that does ads.  Having this mentality is obviously valley-driven, but allows you to scale a business and think more product focused, which theoretically, should have better outcomes.

7. Target Ads Precisely.  Google could target their ads much more precise but they don’t have to yet, as the market isn’t necessarily requiring it or does it make economic sense for Google to do it until they must.  Paul said a great quote:  ”Assume you can read someone’s mind, what ad would you give them.”  My take:  This is one of our investment thesis at kbs+p Ventures – application of data to drive advertising decisioning.

8.  More things will be done by numbers.  If an investor had to place a bet on quantitative measurement/analytics of creative, bets should be placed on measurement.  Numbers will/can/do drive decisioning and with ROI driven world, we need to quantify it.  My take:  Spot on, another investment thesis of kbs+p Ventures as well as what we apply at VMM and The Media Kitchen.  Couldn’t agree more.  I even treat my fantasy football teams this way.. and I want 2-1 this past weekend!

9.  Creative.  Creative will begin to become “generated.”  Paul essentially argued that the best creative in the “future” world will have to be generated because of all the varieties that are needed.  My take:  I think he’s onto something if we’re able to deliver the right creative to the right person at the right time.

I loved Paul’s opening.  This wasn’t 100% of everything, but was a lot of it.  My friend Roger of IA Venturesc also talks about similar trends on his blog, in a post titled, changing polarity in advertising, if you want to continue being inspired…

We all know the positions that Yahoo! and AOL are in.  I won’t go into that here, other than they will need to make some short term decisions rather quickly.

As a proactive entrepreneur, what if you could acquire the assets of Right Media (including client contracts) from Yahoo! and Platform-A (whatever is left of it) from AOL, roll them up, put on top of a 2.0 infrastructure such as AppNexus and scale the business?

Pros:

• Client contracts lead to instant revenue
• RMX has a name for itself in the industry
• Could probably get it for fire-sale pricing

Cons:

• Contacts/clients might not transfer
• Yahoo! inventory is not guaranteed if moved away from Yahoo!, so that would need to be written into the agreements
• Implementation of both platforms might be more hassle then they are worth
• Much of Yahoo! RMX talent has already left, but not all

There is an opportunity here, at least at first glance.  It’s less about the technology and more about the contracts to advertisers.  The hypothesis that the acquisition of these both would lead to a faster time to market and revenue out of the gate.  There are probably quite a few other ad tech companies that you could bundle in here at the same time.  Might be worth investigating?  I’m sure a few people probably are…

Back in December 2010, I wrote a post about wanting to experiment with different Operating Systems.  It took me about 7 months to convince myself, but I finally did it.  I’ve been told by friends that they think I’ll probably go back to the iOS, but I am looking forward to this experiment.  My entire computer infrastructure in my home is Apple-OS, so this will be the first non-native OS in my home.

I ended up getting the Samsung Charge, because I was growing impatient not knowing when the Galaxy S2 would come out; should the Galaxy SII perform better, I can always switch.

The first 18 hours with the phone have been great. It’s actually been a lot easier to setup than I thought it would be and Android is very much intuitive.  I’d say that the Android system allows the user to have a lot more control.  A good parallel here is manual vs. automatic cars.  The Apple iOS is very much an automatic transmission, it (just) works. The Android OS is a manual (stick) transmission that isn’t necessary, but allows for much more tweaking.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the Android Marketplace.  There hasn’t been an app yet that I cannot find and love how Android allows for multiple apps to be open at the same time (which I suppose is coming in iOS 5).

The phone also has 4G, which is much, much faster than my 3G.

So far, so good.  Looking forward to exploring.

Today’s announcement with Adobe is powerful and did not come out of left field.  Back in March, I blogged about why I’m long on ADBE.

IBM + Adobe + EMC combined have a $266 billion combined market cap.
MDC + Publicis + IPG + WPP + Omnicom have a combined $44.1 billion market cap.

One could certainly argue about multiples and valuation of stocks (tech vs. services) but you get the idea – there is material market cap differentials between the two cohorts.

Over the next decade, as Madison Avenue grows a digital backbone and big tech expands it’s marketing services, our world is going to collide.  I’ve seen both sides in their current form today and there are pockets of brilliance but there is a really long way to go.  I have to assume that the M&A landscape on both sides of the table here are going to be fascinating and corporate development folks are going to be busy.

Note:  It’s not a winner take all game here.  Many partnerships are going to be found between these businesses, however, at what point does cooperation turn into competition?  (I like competition)