Liz Schimel, EVP and Chief Digital Officer, Meredith National Media Group

The biggest challenge for a media company like Meredith is shifting the focus from customer acquisition to customer engagement across platforms, Meredith chief digital officer Liz Schimel said at paidContent 2012 this morning.

Part of that means making the brands available on the right platforms, but not all of them. “We get approached by a lot of companies and say no,” Schimel said. “HP knocked on the door, and we said no, we’re not going to do that one.” Most of Meredith’s readers are “mass-market women,” so if a platform or device is “too male-centric or too niche, we don’t do it.”

Nick Bogaty, Adobe’s director of business development for the digital publishing group, says Adobe’s main goal in the next five years is to “enable publishers to continue to drive paid circulation and make this an attractive platform for advertisers. … That’s the key thing we’re trying to solve as a technology provider.” Adobe recently worked with Wenner Media to create the first iPad edition of “Us Weekly.” The company noticed a lot of people left copies of the celebrity gossip magazine on planes, and other people picked them up. So Adobe built “pass-along” features into Us Weekly’s digital edition. Readers can share a web version of the digital magazine — and their friends can sample it before hitting a paywall.

Barnes & Noble’s Jonathan Shar, GM of digital newsstand and emerging content, says more consumers want ”an edition that’s customized for a platform,” taking factors like screen size into account. Barnes & Noble has found that the best way to do that is often through PDFs with additional features — like adjustable type size — layered on top to customize a digital edition for a Nook tablet or Nook iPhone app.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

There aren’t many companies in technology who have had a better record than Apple over the last five years, but iAd, an Apple-designed technology for inserting compelling advertisements within mobile apps, is not among its hits. There’s a general interest among big brands for a better type of in-app advertisement than the banner, but those brands have balked at the up-front costs of participating in iAd campaigns as well as Apple’s trademark preference for control of those campaigns.

Teresi’s job, according to a Bloomberg report, will be to convince more brands and advertising agencies to bet on iAd, which Digitas North America president Colin Kinsella told our audience at paidContent Advertising 2011 could lead to a “creative renaissance” in the mobile ad industry. iAd allows advertisers to create ads with richer graphics and interactive elements that simply aren’t possible with the usual mobile ad formats, since iAd is built directly into iOS itself.

But it hasn’t been compelling enough, and so Apple has been chopping the price of entry into the program. Last we heard, the company required brands to spend a minimum of $400,000 just to participate, down from $1 million when it was first launched. It also made changes to the way it charges advertisers for ad clicks. Andy Miller, who led the iAd program after Apple acquired his startup Quattro Wireless, left Apple last year.

Teresi is a veteran of Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE), where he is currently vice president and general manager, media solutions. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was in charge of Adobe’s efforts to sell analytic tools to digital publishers and video providers, with an emphasis on mobile technology.

According to figures from ZenithOptimedia, global advertising revenues will reach $486 billion in 2012, a rise of 4.7 percent compared to 2011. With wider economic pressures bearing down on the overall ad market, digital ad spend is still seeing healthy growth: it will account for slightly more than one-fifth of all ad spend, but more than half of all growth, as advertisers become more confident in digital media metrics, and the ad industry gets more sophisticated in what it offers to brands and publishers in the name of digital advertising — which will remain a key way of funding digital content, as media companies continue to tinker with other charging models. Here are some specific areas to watch in this space:

Social media and advertising. Social networks already make money from marketing and advertising services — according to an estimate from eMarketer in September, Facebook apparently will have made some $3.8 billion in advertising revenue in 2011 — so 2012 will be the year that we see more social networks, not just Facebook, look at leveraging their audiences to grow this even more.

These advertising services will be a crucial piece to put into place for Facebook in particular as it gears up for a widely-expected IPO. Keeping in mind recent IPOs for Groupon (NSDQ: GRPN) and Zynga, in which people questioned the longer-term business models for these social media properties, Facebook will be looking for big and consistent sources of revenue to demonstrate to the investor community that it has a solid foundation for the long haul.

As my colleague Jeff pointed out, they may also be the source of more debates about online privacy. Facebook has already started laying the groundwork for how it might draw on the content and nature of a users’ activity on the site as a route to promoting products and services to others within users’ timelines. Similarly, Twitter is moving to new ways to advertise brands to users, for example, with promoted tweets populating people’s timelines. There are very likely more innovations along these lines in the pipeline.

New ad formats on social networking sites may, to some, feel like a violation of an individual’s space, and we may see more challenges and questions coming from regulators and users as a result. On the other hand, some argue that if these services free to use, this is the price to pay. What might equally be interesting is to see whether ad-driven sites like these at any point consider paid, ad-free versions of their services.

Ads get a bit more personal. I don’t think that it will be only social networking sites that make use of our personal information in new ways in advertising. Companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) are also looking at ways of leveraging its databases to make its advertising units more valuable. One example is a new search ad format that automatically inserts your gmail address to sign you up for marketing lists if you click on a link in the ad. The other area that is worth watching here is mobile advertising, where an advertiser uses potentially a combination of an opted-in user’s location, browsing activity and purchasing habits to deliver relevant ads and offers to consumers.

Consolidation: small, medium and large? Last year saw some significant acquisitions that pointed to ongoing consolidation as digital advertising continues to mature: Google’s $400-million AdMeld purchase (which officially closed earlier this month); ValueClick’s $75-million acquisition of mobile ad firm Greystripe; and Adobe’s purchase of Efficient Frontier, all of which further pad out the bigger companies’ ad services business.

There will very likely be at least a few more deals like these, but the question is whether consolidation could also extend to bigger players like Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and AOL (NYSE: AOL). They are still some of the strongest companies in online advertising (with 13.1 percent and 4.2 percent of the overall display market, according to eMarketer) but they are being hit hard by companies like Google and Facebook, once known respectively for search and social ads but already now bigger than AOL and Yahoo in display revenues.

If you believe the reports, Yahoo is already in play: Alibaba, the China-based internet giant that is a parter of Yahoo’s in that country, currently wants to buy Yahoo out of China, but Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder, apparently also has an option to buy Yahoo outright, too. He has already enlisted the help of lobbyists in Washington, which could prove useful if Ma decides to bite.

As for AOL, it recently had to weather an embarrassing leaked letter from one of its biggest investors, Starboard Value, ripping apart the company’s business strategy and accusing it of focussing too much on “money-losing” areas like its content business. AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong’s response has been: be patient. But if things don’t start looking brighter for AOL in 2012, investors like Starboard could take things up another notch and call for something a little stronger.

Read the rest of the posts in our Coming in 2012 archives.

For most of its existence, Efficient Frontier was known as a search marketing firm. By 2009, it had hit some tough times, and had brought in former Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) sales vet David Karnstedt, who was doing a six-month stint as an executive-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures. Over the past two years, Karnstedt expanded Efficient Frontier’s abilities, turning it into an ad buying platform and a tool for optimizing display and search ads. And that’s where Adobe’s interest comes in. It’s not clear what role Karnstedt will have once the companies are merged.

Adobe began building up its own ad capabilities two years ago as well, when it acquired analytics firm Omniture (NSDQ: OMTR) for $1.8 billion. Earlier this year, Adobe stepped up those efforts with the purchase of audience data management company Demdex.

Analytics, data, and optimization are the key points of online media buying and selling, so Efficient Frontier can be expected to raise Adobe’s profile among publishers and agencies to a greater degree by adding to its current offerings. As Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of Adobe’s Digital Marketing Business, puts it in a statement, Adobe’s “customers need to know where, when and how to spend their digital marketing dollars to get the greatest return.”

With Adobe ceasing to produce its Flash multimedia software for mobile — a sign that HTML5 is the lingua franca of tablet content — the company has instead been concentrating more and more on its strength as an ad tech firm. Adobe’s moves in that direction have been clear for some time. And with real-time bidding and audience buying only accelerating, expect Adobe to continue to make a few more acquisitions over the next year, especially as consolidation leads other online ad players to look for a larger suitor. Release

The discovery was made first by the blog SlashGear, which notes that not only is Flash not pre-loaded on the new Ice Cream Sandwich device, but it doesn’t appear to come up in the Market app storefront, either.

When asked about this, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) confirmed to the blog that Flash for Ice Cream Sandwich had not yet been released but “as far as we know, Adobe will support Flash for ICS.”

Update: A spokesperson for Adobe has emailed us a statement:

“We are planning a final release of Flash Player for Android by the end of the year that supports the Android browser on Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), after which we will continue providing updates for critical bug fixes and security patches for existing supported device configurations.”

Additionally, Adobe also plans to release one more version of its Flash Linux Porting Kit by that time.

It was only two weeks ago, on November 9, that Adobe announced that it would be discontinuing Flash for mobile devices and would instead concentrate on developing for HTML5 (fast emerging as the standard for web video) and Adobe Air for apps.

At the time, Adobe confirmed that as part of that, it would “no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1″ for Android and the BlackBerry PlayBook.

That Android Flash support came out the very next day, when Adobe posted a new app to the Market on November 10. Shouldn’t that, theoretically, be the end of the story? Google seems to indicate otherwise.

We have contacted Adobe to clarify this. Meanwhile, that it took a few days for the tech world to sit up and notice the lack of Android support in those new devices is a bit of a damning vote for how relevant Flash might for people to enjoy mobile content anyway.

The argument up to now has been that Flash is very ubiquitous in the wider internet, and as mobile devices become more capable there would be more need for them to work more like computers, and to therefore be able to read Flash-enabled video and audio content, in order to have a truly seamless web media experience.

But even that position seems to be getting questioned: a November report from Web Technology Surveys notes that Flash is only used on 26 percent of all websites, and is in decline.

That seems to indicate that even if Flash does get released for Android Ice Cream Sandwich, it might not be as useful as one thinks.

The guidelines, issued in October, came after Senators complained that companies often fail to disclose losses they incur at the hands of hackers. American firms have been victimized by such attacks for years, including a notorious 2010 incident in which Chinese hackers stole source code from Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE) and at least 20 other companies.

The SEC document is supposed to help companies determine when they must disclose “cyber incidents” to investors through routine public filings or special Form 8-K notices. While guidelines aren’t the same as laws, they shape compliance officers’ perceptions of what they have to report, and thus will shape information public companies include in their filings.

The agency notes that it is mindful that disclosures could provide a “roadmap” for intruders who may be snooping around for things like security manuals and blueprints, but the SEC nevertheless asks for very specific information. Here, for example, is what a firm should disclose if an attacker steals its intellectual property:

“the registrant should describe the property that was stolen and the effect of the attack on its results of operations, liquidity, and financial condition..”

Roland Trope, a lawyer and professor at West Point, says such rules are well-intentioned but misguided. Trope worries that the disclosures will be of interest not only to investors but also to hackers wishing to calibrate future attacks. He says the SEC filings could be akin to damage reports used by a military after a bombing raid.

Trope and fellow security expert Tom Smedinghoff shared these concerns in a letter this month to the ABA‘s subcommittee on cybersecurity, saying that disclosures “would undermine a company’s cybersecurity by providing precisely the sensitive cyber defense information that an adversary seeks in order to plan and execute a cyberattack on the enterprise.”

For now, it is unclear how many companies will disclose hacking attacks or what they will report. The Financial Times, however, has noted that executives may feel impelled to report on incidents ahead of whistle blowers who can receive large awards for tipping the SEC about when a company is not complying with the law.

In an interview with paidContent, Trope said that for now company lawyers will likely use vague language in an effort to avoid spilling too much. More broadly, Trope thinks the SEC is right to push for an end to the silence surrounding cyber-attacks but that it should instead focus on teaching companies how to nail down their high priority assets. This includes not just intellectual property but also internal manuals on cyber security — which too often are placed online where they can be siphoned by an intruder.

Instead, Trope advocates a form of security known to techies as “air gapping” and which, to the rest of us, sounds like something out of James Bond. An “air-gapped” security system involves placing sensitive information on a computer that is not connected to the internet at all. The computer should in turn be placed under guard in a secure room and only available to a handful of executives, who should also be monitored to ensure they do not download anything.

This form of old school security may sound heavy handed but it has been used for years by the nuclear industry and, says Trope, is infinitely preferable to any type of cloud-based system. “The cloud is the most insecure place on earth to put secure company information. No nuclear power company would put its cyber defense information in the public cloud.”

The views of Mr. Trope as expressed in this article are his own and have not been approved by and should not be attributed to the U.S. Military Academy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

The news was first reported by ZDNet, which copied what it says will be the official statement that Adobe plans to release — probably today, now that the cat’s been let out of the bag:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

ZDNet also included a summary of what the company plans to send to its partners further explaining the move to stop development on Flash Player for mobile browsers. It says that Adobe will now focus development efforts on apps, “expressive content” for the mobile desktop, and HTML5.

The news is a belated victory for the late Steve Jobs, who as CEO of Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) was unequivocal in his criticism of Flash and why it was not supported on Apple’s iOS mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad and iPod.

“Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven — they say we want to protect our App Store — but in reality it is based on technology issues,” Jobs wrote in an open letter on Apple’s site that gave a line-by-line explanation of why it is that Apple hated Flash so.

Those reasons included performance issues — Flash is one of the main reasons for crashes on Mac computers, he noted — but also criticism of Adobe owning a closed platform would not be optimized for Apple products.

Adobe had long argued that Flash needed to be on all mobile devices, including Apple’s, because of its ubiquity on the web. But the weight of content that has either been optimized for iOS, Android and the rest in the form of apps, or through other web technologies like HTML5, has made Adobe’s claims sound hollow.

It wasn’t all about Apple versus Adobe, of course: Flash currently works on Android devices and RIM’s PlayBook — devices that Adobe says it will continue to support.

We have contacted Adobe for comment and confirmation, but there is actually already some indirect admission of what is to come on the site already.

Yesterday the company posted two documents, giving a business update with some top-line guidance for Q4, which ends December 2, as well as an outline of its growth strategy.

Central to this will be the cutting of 750 jobs in North America And Europe as part of a restructuring that is expected to result in a charge of $87 million to $94 million for Adobe.

From the looks of it, neither mention mobile Flash by name, and shift the focus elsewhere. The two goals in mobile will be as follows:

» Shifting resources to support even greater investment in HTML5, through tools like Adobe® Dreamweaver, Adobe Edge and PhoneGap, recently added through the acquisition of Nitobi
» Focusing Flash resources on delivering the most advanced PC web experiences, including gaming and premium video, as well as mobile apps

Adobe will be having a call later today to discuss this in more detail — Flash required to participate, of course. We’ll be on that call later to hear what more Adobe has to say.

In an interview with paidContent, Glaser didn’t specify what kinds of products the board is hoping to see from Nielsen, saying that it will be up to Nielsen once he fully starts. “We’ve decided not to comment on the strategy,” Glaser said, adding that he had been more involved in the company as part of managing the search to replace Lunsford. But now, he’ll step back a bit. “I’m taking the Goldilocks approach,” Glaser said, adding that he’s not completely stepping away from overseeing the company, but not being involved on a regular basis either. “In other words, ‘just right.’”

Lunsford has been with RealNetworks since 2008 and will continue to on at the company “in a senior capacity, reporting to Nielsen,” RealNetworks said.

While RealNetworks is a pioneer in online video and audio, with both a consumer side and an enterprise side, but a lot has changed in the streaming media space since the company opened its doors in 1995. For one thing, the increase in the amount of internet radio providers, including Pandora (NYSE: P), Last.fm and Spotify. While RealNetworks jettisoned subscription music service Rhapsody last year, the company has lately been looking to connect with other streaming services instead of simply offering direct competition.

For example, it’s looking to get some mileage from Apple’s delayed iTunes Match cloud service, which allows users to store their entire music library in the cloud for listening on their various devices. Whenever Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is ready to launch the service, RealNetworks has released a software called “Rinse,” which promises “to clean up their music collections” before using iTunes Match. The service fixes misspellings of song titles and artist names, identifies songs without titles and remove duplicates.

Nielsen, 41, most recently served as VP of the Digital Imaging Group at Adobe Systems (NSDQ: ADBE), which includes Photoshop, Elements and Lightroom, in addition to mobile, web and tablet solutions. Prior to his seven years at Adobe, Nielsen spent five years at Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) in the media segment. Release

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It’s been noted many times that online video is the fastest growing segment of internet advertising. This year, U.S. online video advertising revenues of around $2 billion, eMarketer says, while the total online ad market will be about $30 billion. Video is attractive to advertisers for obvious reasons: it tends to command more attention than text or audio alone, and therefore provides the kinds of engagement metrics that brand marketers value.

But video advertising’s rise, which has been gathering speed since the depths of the 2009 ad recession thanks to the growing penetration of broadband connections in general, is not growing unimpeded. For one thing, media buyers still complain of the lack of premium inventory as well as the lack of easily comparable measurements.

For example, there’s a debate about whether Gross Ratings Points are best for online video measurements; GRPs are the standard metric for TV. Advertisers and media buyers are familiar with GRPs, which is part of that appeal. But others feel that more usual methods of online measurement, such as calculating engagement — such as how many people watched most of a video or clicked a link within the ad — are the best way to determine effectiveness, and in turn, how much to spend on a web video.

This past summer, Auditude, which has raised nearly $40 million about $32 million in the past four years, scored a major coup when Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the interactive web arm of the sports, chose it to build a rich media ad serving platform for inserting live ads. The MLBAM is betting heavily on video ads as a substantial revenue for its growing online and mobile efforts.

The company’s track record of landing other large video publishers, as well as its flexibility to work on most devices, led Adobe to make the acquisition. “Adobe can now offer an unparalleled platform for authoring, distributing, analyzing and monetizing digital video experiences everywhere – simplifying workflows, increasing consumer engagement, delivering insights and driving increased revenue for content publishers,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media Business Unit, Adobe, in a statement.

Auditude’s advertising server platform will be joined with Adobe’s own video technologies. Adobe also plans to fit Auditude’s offerings into its Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, which provides analytics and ad optimization services. The tools help marketers decide on a content delivery strategy and ad placements.

The acquisition follows very closely to the previous two deals Adobe did. In addition to Omniture, the company bought audience data management company Demdex in January. The common denominator in all these deals was “data and ROI,” the two main things that drive the majority of online ads. And they’re also the two essentials of unlocking still greater online video ad spending.

There’s an expectation that with so many data providers rising through the online ad space, there will have to be a consolidation taking place, especially with the economy to remain volatile and uncertain through the next year. Other online video platforms — and there are many — will be looking at this deal closely and will likely accelerate plans to take on more funding, sell themselves or look to partner with others over the next few months.