Still smarting from the OPA report on brand metrics last week, the ad nets have decided to come out fighting against the negative publicity. The OPA report suggested that ad nets provide advertisers with negligible brand uplift and had little effect in creating purchasing intent among users. In his rebuttal piece in Ad Age, Adify CEO Russ Fradin argues that the study is misleading, especially in relation to the way the report defines premium inventory. The OPA study described ad nets as "aggregators and sellers of non-premium ad inventory, typically across small- to medium-size third-party sites". Fradin points out that close to 85% of inventory in the top 25 ad networks comes from the comscore 100 sites. He goes on to argue that an advertiser’s view of premium inventory can be subjective, and the report fails to acknowledge the important role of ad nets in the current display eco-system. They really are getting hit from all angles at the minute. [AdAge]

There are rumours this morning that German media group Axel Springer AG is looking to purchase affiliate powerhouse, TradeDoubler. TradeDoubler is one of the biggest affiliate companies in Europe. If the deal was to go through it would be expected that Axel Springer would merge TradeDoubler with its own online marketing firm, Zanox. TradeDoubler is expected to have a price tag of around 200 million euro. [Affiliates4U]