Today sees the launch of one more venture capital fund backed by a large European telecoms carrier: Orange, the retail face of France Telecom, is teaming up with the advertising giant Publicis and Iris Capital Management to start OP Ventures Growth, a new $400-million-plus fund to back French and other European technology startups.

Orange and Publicis are contributing half of those funds, $200 million (€150 million) with the total to be used both for seed capital/early stage investments, as well as later rounds; and the deal will see the carrier and ad giant effectively become minority partners (24.5 percent each) in Iris.

The move underscores how the older guard of media and communications are continuing to invest to make sure that they, too, are in the thick of newer innovations — and they are using the vehicle of VC cash to get there. The move comes just a week after Telefonica also announced more startup activities — the launch of its Wayra incubator — and amidst reports that the Spanish carrier is gearing up,  within days, to announce another significant investment in a startup.

OP Ventures says it will be looking to invest up to €15 million ($20 million) in individual projects. Meanwhile, seed and early-stage investments will likely be more in the region of up to €3 million ($6 million) per project.

This is not the first time that Orange has acted as VC — or the first time it has partnered with Publicis to do it.

Orange has stakes in both the streaming music service Deezer, as well as 49 percent of the online video site DailyMotion, for which it paid $80 million. Both of these were strategic investments for the company: it has an extensive IPTV/mobile operation in France and has integrated both of these services into those offerings, using them to upsell its customers into more advanced services. (Orange also has extensive holdings outside of France, including a mobile JV in the UK with T-Mobile called Everything Everywhere, as well as mobile operations across the rest of Europe and in emerging markets like Africa. It has not made as much of a converge play in these other markets, as it has in France.)

The Deezer investment, a minority share of an undisclosed amount, has also seen Orange taking the service into other markets like the UK, but last month, TechCrunch understands that while Orange decided to keep its stake in Deezer, it decided not to increase its investment in the company; this new activity may have been one reason why.

Orange also announced in November 2011 that it was teaming up with Publicis for a $300-million VC fund. It’s unclear whether today’s announcement is the transferring of that fund, or a new one altogether. (We’re finding out.)

Within OP Ventures, Orange and Publicis Groupe will each have a minority 24.5 percent interest in Paris- based Iris. Iris’ management meanwhile keep a controlling 51 percent interest. The company will continue to be run by Iris’ Pierre de Fouquet and Antoine Garrigues, with the supervisory board including Maurice Lévy, Chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe and Gervais Pellissier, deputy CEO of France Télécom-Orange, who becomes deputy chairman.

Partnering with Iris for the fund is a smart move for the other two: the company has been around since 1986 and has contacts into the investment communities of some 18 European countries, where it has in total invested $1.1 billion. Iris already manages funds for some of Europe’s biggest public venture funds, including the European Investment Fund and French public investor CDC Entreprises (Groupe Caisse des Dépôts).

The group says the fund is “immediately operational” with another fund to come online by the second quarter of 2012.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Confirming rumors earlier reported by Bloomberg, mobile carrier France Télécom-Orange and advertising juggernaut Publicis Groupe have teamed up to launch a venture capital fund.

The companies have committed to jointly put in 150 million euros (presumably split 50/50), and are seeking outside investors to double the size of the fund, which will focus on backing budding entrepreneurs building digital companies in France and the rest of Europe.

Bloomberg pegged the size of the fund at ‘more than 100 million euros’. If enough investors line up to back the new fund, it will reach its actual target size of 300 million euros ($411.5 million).

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This week, Nielsen plans to launch its new “Online Campaign Ratings” system that tracks ad performance and audience demographics thanks to data from a partnership with Facebook. It will allow advertisers to pay for similar insights into their web campaigns as Nielsen provides for their television commercials, such as reach, frequency, and gross rating points, as well as anonymized biographical data such as age, gender, and location.

Reliable, granular, third-party campaign measurement could help advertisers improve ad targeting and gain the confidence about the impact of their ads necessary to shift spend online and away from television. The data could convince advertisers to choose Facebook because they can actually target based on this same audience demographic data.

Some users may be alarmed about being tracked through their Facebook data, but advertisers are only see the same data through OCR as they see when buying ads on Facebook, and GigaOm reports that users will be able to opt out.

Here’s how Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings system works:

1. Advertisers tag their ad with a Nielsen code snippet
2. Facebook records when logged in users view tagged ads on Facebook.com or other sites
3. Nielsen tracks where an ad is being seen and how often
4. Facebook’s anonymized, aggregate audience demographic data is combined with Nielsen’s impression data
5. Advertisers receive reports within days about the performance of their ad campaign

Niether Nielsen or Facebook gain access to all the data at any point, protecting the privacy of those tracked. Users don’t volunteer or get paid for being tracked the way they do for contributing to Nielsen TV ratings, but they don’t have to take any action, just browse normally.

Nielsen first announced plans for OCR in September. It also pulls demographic data from other media companies and publishers, and has been testing OCR since March with over 20 brands including Proctor & Gamble and Publicis Groupe S.A.’s Starcom MediaVest.

Early tests showed that OCR could track 42% of impressions of a given ad, while traditional panel sample online ad tracking methodology typically only tracked 3%. OCR was also able to determine what percentage of an ad’s impressions were reaching the target audience.

By contributing its data, Facebook is betting on the high performance of it’s own advertising product. It may hope to show Facebook Ads more frequently reach their intended targets and are correlated with better downstream conversion rates. The site would also benefit from a general reallocation of advertising spend to online display from TV.

Nielsen and Facebook had previously partnered to run Nielsen-designed polling ads on the Facebook home page. These BrandLift poll ads helped advertisers determine whether an ad campaign had increased purchase intent.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Nielsen Media Research plans to release a new online advertising audience measurement service, and it has secured existing partner Facebook as its first participant from which it will collect data, according to The Wall Street Journal. This online gross ratings points system would track frequency and reach, similar to Nielsen’s television ratings system.

The service may track age, gender, and possibly location of people seeing online ads in anonymous aggregate form. The results would provide advertisers with more exact measurement of who is seeing their ads, which may encourage them to shift spend towards the internet.

Nielsen would merge data from Facebook and other participating websites with its demographic panel data to create the ratings system. Marketers including Proctor & Gamble, as well as media buyer Publicis Groupe S.A.’s Starcom MediaVest have signed on as early testers for the research, according to the report. These and many others spending on advertising have been looking for better ways to measure online advertising.

While advertisers are realizing social media is an important element of marketing campaigns, the dearth of concrete metrics on reach have made some hesitant to pull dollars away from mediums like television which have more established measurement systems. Current online measurement metrics like site traffic and clicks aren’t sufficient for determining the audience of display ads.

Facebook stands to gain from Nielsen’s new rating system: third-party analysis of the company’s data, that shows results for advertisers, in turn make Facebook’s advertising products look more promising.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook