Otilia Otlacan: Congratulations on your recent move to Bizo! It’s been a week already – how does it feel, what do you like most about your role at Bizo?

Frannie Danzinger: My move to Bizo feels fantastic! What I like most is the culture and the passion fueled by great people.

Otilia Otlacan: Could you share with us some of the projects that you’ll be working on?

Frannie Danzinger: As Director of Marketplace Development, I am creating two Advisory Councils, one for CMO’s/Marketing Directors and one for Agencies (Media Planners/Buyers). The goal of these Advisory Councils is to foster a thought-provoking environment for peer-to-peer networking and communication, while impacting and shaping the future of digital marketing. I will also focus on furthering communications with marketers and agencies on how Bizo can help accelerate digital success starting with a sound marketing and media strategy.

Otilia Otlacan: You have a wealth of experience in B2B media strategy. In your opinion, how does audience targeting find its place into the mix?

Frannie Danzinger: Thank you. My recent move over to Bizo was fueled by my obsession with not only making sense of great data, but using this data with strategic vision to help marketers succeed in the current, fast-paced, highly competitive environment. Audience targeting is pretty simple and makes perfect sense! The greatest challenge and also the greatest opportunity is building a media strategy that is nimble enough to use the compelling data to learn, to grow and ultimately, to succeed. Additionally, audience targeting certainly can be successful on its own merits (assuming it meets the needs of stated objectives), but also should be considered as a part of an overall strategic approach, and multi-faceted media program.

Otilia Otlacan: Numerous reports have surfaced in the past couple of years about the unintentional budget waste happening in many agencies. Are there any specific tools or metrics available to B2B media buyers to help maximize the efficiency of online campaigns?

Frannie Danzinger: This is a pretty challenging question to answer. I don’t think “budget waste” is necessarily attributed to agencies, nor marketers, per se. In digital media specifically, budget waste is really a function of the need to test, learn, optimize and repeat, to garner the greatest levels of success. So one marketer’s waste is another marketer’s investment in getting the most out of a given campaign or program, as long as learnings are being applied methodically to optimize performance. As the optimization process advances, waste percentage gets smaller, however the best online campaigns are still seeing 95%+ waste. This begs another interesting discussion around the notion of “waste” itself. If the core KPIs or a given program involve driving traffic to a destination URL or engaging with an audience and 95% of the audience targeted still did not take action, an additional measure of awareness or brand lift should be considered as well. In turn, this changes the view of waste, and properly channels the expectations of a media effort against primary and secondary KPIs.

Otilia Otlacan: In your view, which of the current media buying trends will have the highest impact in 2012?

Frannie Danzinger: The greatest impact in this coming year will come from the maximization of true, quality, content integration in messaging, coupled with that content reaching the most succinctly targeted audience.

Otilia Otlacan: Last but not least, is there anything else you would like to tell our readers?

Frannie Danzinger: I feel lucky to be in this every-changing world of marketing each and every day. The environment that we face is both exciting and scary all rolled up into one, and those opposing emotions have a profound effect on the accelerated energy in our business. If you are reading this all the way through, I congratulate you on sharing my passion and energy, and encourage you to dig deeper, father and smarter with every thought you have, and to understand that the wild and crazy media ideas we come up with, can all become reality – keep digging!

About Frannie Danzinger
Prior to joining Bizo, Frannie Danzinger spent more than 14 years at gyro (formerly HSR Business to Business and GyroHSR), a leading business-to-business advertising agency. Most recently, she led gyro’s global media strategy practice as the senior vice president of media.  Danzinger was instrumental in gyro’s media business expansion, growing overall media revenue by more than 250 percent and building a global media team of 20.   Key media clients included Lincoln Financial Corporation, Dymo, Pitney Bowes and PNC.  Prior to this role, Danzinger founded ProMedia LLC, where she served as president and media director.  While running ProMedia, Danzinger was instrumental in establishing first-to-market media ideas for clients such as Flight Options, Avantair, Cleveland Grand Prix and Duke Energy, while exceeding expected ROI benchmarks.  Before launching ProMedia, Frannie was associate media director at Wyse Advertising in Cleveland.

About Bizo
Bizo is how marketers reach and engage business professionals, wherever they travel online. Bizo can precisely target more than 100 million professionals around the world, including more than 80 percent of the U.S. business population. This unprecedented reach and targeting gives marketers cost-effective access and insight into business professionals – the most valuable online audience segment. Simply put, Bizo knows business audiences. More than 400 leading brands including AMEX, Monster, Salesforce.com, Microsoft, and FedEx count on the precise display ad targeting, social media measurement, and deep audience analytics that the Bizo Audience Marketing Platform provides to successfully execute their branding and direct response initiatives.

For more information on Bizo, or for a free look at the Bizographic make-up of your website audience, visit www.bizo.com.

ST. LOUIS – GMS Local, a service of GroupM and provider of local online services for national brands, announced research revealing a gap in the perceived local digital media activity expressed by national brands with brick and mortar locations versus what is actually being implemented. While 69 percent of marketers surveyed indicate they spend greater than the national average of 25 percent of budgets allocated to local marketing, 33 percent have yet to implement basic local digital efforts that positively impact business performance, such as online business directory listings. An exploration of the research is detailed in the white paper “Perception vs. Execution: Examination of Brands’ Local Business Strategies Reveals Gaps to Act On.”

As the Internet speeds to the forefront of local advertising, marketers are bullish about their current and future investments in local advertising – particularly in local digital media, the research revealed. Eighty-three percent of marketers surveyed expect their local online spending to increase at a greater rate than the projected national growth (25 percent) over the next three years. Such growth supports the expansive consumer activity happening in the local digital marketplace, where up to 20 percent of searches conducted have local intent (jumping to 40 percent on mobile devices), and the adoption of location-based check-in services is happening in the masses, with companies such as Foursquare topping 1 billion check-ins. According to Borrell Associates, local digital advertising is expected to grow 18 percent in 2012, with local online spend projected to surpass all other channels by 2015. This growth, compared to the gap in what marketing executives perceive their brands are doing at the local level and the reality of their execution over the past 12 months – and into 2012 – shows national advertisers are missing the opportunity for sizeable gains.

“Every single data point we see shows consumers becoming more mobile and reliant on digital for their local information. This rapid consumer shift has created challenges for brands as they attempt to keep up, and we are seeing a willingness to invest, as validated in this research,” said Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search. “The research also shows a clear disconnect between what brands believe they are doing with those investments and what is actually being done. We speak to advertisers daily that have enormous blind spots in local digital coverage, and who welcome the education and strategy needed to resolve their willingness to spend and target which is hindered by the inability to determine what to do first and next.”

Additional insights from the research include:

- One of three national brands has yet to invest in the basic local digital effort of online business directory listings.

- Only 55 percent of national brands surveyed have initiated geo-modified paid search campaigns.

- While half of all consumers are making business selections off consumer ratings and reviews, less than 50 percent of national advertisers invest in local online review sites.

- Thirty-two percent of marketers attribute their insufficient engagement to a lack of awareness, with respondents specifically stating they are unaware of offerings, don’t understand them or believe them to be unnecessary.

- Fifty-eight percent indicate that funding prevents them from engaging more in the local digital space.

Brands will continue placing big bets on the online local space given the consumer shift to this space for their discovery efforts, with 70 percent of marketing executives for national brands reporting their local online investments as a percent of total local advertising outpace current national averages. As detailed in the whitepaper, national advertisers can overcome these challenges with deeper education around opportunity in the local digital space and self-assessment of the reality of their allocation and programs.

Additionally, following a three-step action plan will help advertisers reach optimal performance and local digital success:

- Conduct an online local listing business audit

- Diagnose the ‘local storefront’ for your brand by applying social media tools that listen to consumer sentiment at the local store level

- Practice education, innovation and experimentation

“Technology and mobility have opened the gateway for national brands to be able to create personalized experiences with consumers at the local level,” said Steve Scherfy, Local and Mobile Manager for GMS Local. “From business location listings to local social intelligence, managing the entire digital storefront is key.”

For the study, marketing executives and managers of national brands with a minimum of 500 physical locations were surveyed. The comparative study, conducted between September and November 2011, set forth to investigate the challenges that brands within the digital marketplace face, including the ability to understand emerging technology, analyze what is relevant and act on these tools based on their business needs. It also explored how engaged each national brand is with local marketing. Survey questions with local digital marketing averages and best practices from national data were utilized to gain reaction and comparative “self-assessments” against those averages by participating respondents and brands.

About GMS Local

GMS Local is a service of GroupM, and comprehensive digital solution focused on creating meaningful connections between brands and consumers at the local level. Using paid, earned and owned media solutions, GMS Local maximizes local consumer engagement opportunities for national advertisers with an extensive local footprint. Local digital marketing perspective can be found at www.gmslocal.com, or on the GMS Local blog.

LOS ANGELES – OpenX Technologies, Inc. (OpenX), the world’s leading independent provider of digital advertising technology, announced the appointment of senior online advertising industry executive Eric Rosenthal as General Manager of the company’s Enterprise business. In the newly created role, Rosenthal will be responsible for rapidly increasing adoption of OpenX Enterprise, the company’s paradigm-shifting Software as a Service revenue serving platform. The appointment is immediately effective.

Launched in February 2011, OpenX Enterprise is the company’s digital ad technology platform that combines the capabilities of a true premium ad server with new, advanced ad exchange technology which enables publishers to maximize yield across all their ad revenue channels in real-time. Specifically, unified real-time ad decisions allow publishers to maximize the value of every ad impression, including allowing them to take full advantage of a wide range of Real-Time Bidding buyers in a controlled way. Combined with groundbreaking ad operations tools, highly sophisticated data capabilities, and massively flexible architecture with complete APIs, OpenX Enterprise solves some of the most fundamental challenges facing publishers.

“We’re very pleased that Eric is joining the team and look forward to him using his deep experience and knowledge of the industry to help grow our business and continue furthering the global adoption of OpenX Enterprise,” said Tim Cadogan, chief executive officer, OpenX. “Eric brings a wealth of experience from working directly with publishers and has a rare knowledge and understanding of what they need in today’s rapidly changing online advertising ecosystem to be successful.”

Prior to joining OpenX, Rosenthal was at AOL where he was Vice President of National Sales and a member of the executive team that led Publisher Partner Development for AOL’s Rich Media Ad Serving platform (Pictela) for both publishers and agencies. In 2011, Rosenthal’s team achieved a tenfold increase in revenue. Rosenthal also brings experience as Senior Sales Director at DoubleClick (now Google DoubleClick) where he helped generate an annual run rate of more than $50M. Prior to AOL, Rosenthal was Vice President of Sales at Kyte (now Kit Digital), a leading online, social media and mobile video platform for live and on-demand content, where he increased revenues by more than 200%.

“I’m extremely excited to join OpenX and help publishers maximize their ad revenue through OpenX’s unique revenue serving vision,” said Eric Rosenthal, general manager, Enterprise. “OpenX had an incredible 2011 with hundreds of publishers signing up to use OpenX Enterprise. It’s truly a great time to be joining the team and helping to scale the business.”

Rosenthal began his career as Regional Sales Manager at Verizon Business before holding roles at Solbright (now part of Operative) and Panther CDN (now CDNetworks). He is a graduate of Ithaca College and holds an MBA in Marketing from The George Washington University School of Business.

About OpenX

OpenX is the world’s leading independent provider of digital advertising technology that enables businesses to manage and maximize their ad revenue. OpenX products, including OpenX Enterprise and OpenX Market, provide a comprehensive revenue serving platform by combining ad serving with a unique ad exchange.

OpenX Technologies, Inc. is based in Los Angeles and is backed by leading investors including Accel Partners, Index Ventures, SAP Ventures, AOL Ventures, Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, Inc., Presidio Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. For more information, please visit www.openx.com.

Typically the first to adopt new advertising technologies, online publishers demand innovative solutions along with white-glove service supported by teams that understand their business. The Global Publisher Unit helps publishers expand beyond the basic ad unit experience and scale their rich media product offering with advanced, innovative technologies such as dynamic creative optimization, mobile and in-stream video.

The MediaMind Global Publisher Unit has collaborated with the IAB to develop four of the six IAB Rising Star Formats recently launched for North America. In response to MediaMind’s announcement of this new Unit, Peter Minnium, Head of Digital Brand Initiatives at the IAB stated, “The IAB views the MediaMind Global Publisher Unit as a key partner in setting industry standards and developing innovative formats that will enable consumers to connect with brands more effectively.”

Many of the leading global publishers already benefit from partnering with this unit. “As a unified team, we are even better positioned to support key global publishers such as MSN, Yahoo!, the budding social media marketplace, as well as news and entertainment broadcast channels such as NBC, CBS, etc.,” said James Dillon, Senior Vice President of the MediaMind Global Publisher Unit.

For more information on MediaMind, visit http://www.mediamind.com .

About MediaMind
MediaMind, a division of DG (NASDAQ:DGIT), is a leading global provider of digital advertising campaign management solutions to advertising agencies and advertisers. MediaMind provides media and creative agencies, advertisers and publishers with an integrated platform to manage campaigns across digital media channels and a variety of formats, including rich media, in-stream video, display and search. During 2010, MediaMind delivered campaigns for approximately 9,000 brand advertisers, servicing approximately 3,800 media and creative agencies across approximately 8,200 global web publishers in 64 countries.

NEW YORK / LOS ANGELES / SAN MATEO / TORONTO – Intertainment Media Inc. (“Intertainment” or the “Company”) (TSXV:INT / OTCQX: ITMTF / FRA: I4T) announced that it has finalized its early stage investment in Shiny Ads, an award winning advertising technology company, which specializes in the sell-side automation of premium inventory for online publishers.

Shiny Ads and its suite of products is well positioned to capture a share of the estimated $14 billion dollar self-serve ad market. Winner of the Foreign Affairs Technology Growth Initiative and chosen by the IDC as a top 10 digital company to watch, Shiny Ads currently counts an impressive list of clients including CBS Interactive, DeviantArt.com, Wikia.com, AdWeek.com, Unanimis.co.uk, and SourceInterlink as well a number of other tier one brands.

“Intertainment Media is very excited to close its investment in Shiny Ads. The potential for this advertising technology to successfully deploy on a global scale is, in our opinion, phenomenal.” said David Lucatch, CEO of Intertainment Media. “Intertainment Media is committed to its philosophy of investing, nurturing and developing leading edge technologies digital and social media platforms and the Shiny Ads investment was a natural fit with that mandate.”

“We are extremely happy to have an organization such as Intertainment Media share in our vision for our technology.” said Roy Pereira, CEO and Founder of Shiny Ads. “We look forward to tapping into their experience and resources as we look to take Shiny Ads to the next level.”

“The investment in the Shiny Ads platform provides a fantastic strategic opportunity for Intertainment Media’s current portfolio of investments.” said Brad Parry, CMO of Intertainment Media. “The ability to more efficiently direct premium advertisers to our available inventory across our multiple platforms will ensure that we are securing the best possible returns for our inventory.”

The initial early stage investment of $250,000 will provide Intertainment Media with an ownership stake in Shiny Ads and also provides the opportunity for Intertainment Media to increase its investment by an equal amount within six months at today’s valuation and will also provide Intertainment Media with a seat on the Shiny Ads board.

About Intertainment Media – www.intertainmentmedia.com
Intertainment Media Inc. is one of Canada’s leading technology incubators and is focused on developing, nurturing and investing in technologies and companies that provide technology solutions for brands and consumers alike.
Intertainment Media also owns and operates a number of key properties including Ad Taffy, itiBiti, Ortsbo, Deal Frenzy and Magnum, with investments in leading edge technologies and social media platforms including theaudience.com . For more information on the Company and its properties, please visit www.intertainmentmedia.com

Headquartered in the Toronto, Canada region, with offices in New York, Los Angeles and San Mateo, CA, Intertainment Media Inc. is listed on the Toronto Venture Exchange under the symbol “INT” (TSXV:INT) and in the US on the OTCQX Exchange under the symbol “ITMTF”. Intertainment is also traded in Europe, on the XETRA Exchange under the symbol “I4T”.

About Shiny Ads – www.shinyads.com
Shiny Ads is an advertising technology company specializing in sell-side automation of premium inventory. The award-winning Self-Service Advertising Platform is a core product offering. With Shiny Ads, smaller advertisers are able to quickly and easily purchase advertising without the need of industry knowledge, graphic designers, or a large budget. Shiny Ads is NOT an ad network, nor does it solicit directly from advertisers or ad networks. Shiny Ads is a solutions provider that supports direct sales team and works in conjunction with ad networks – providing online publishers with access to an untapped revenue stream. Visit website at ShinyAds.com or check out the demo at vimeo.com/shinyads/intro.

NEW YORK — Mojiva (www.mojiva.com), the mobile ad network that specializes in making “big idea,” cross-platform mobile strategies come to life at scale, today announced a multi-execution ad campaign with American Family Insurance (www.amfam.com) that emphasizes engagement and awareness with mobile audiences. The leading insurance provider offers auto, homeowners, life, health, business and farm/ranch insurance in 19 states. The campaign, which will run through February and is facilitated by Mindshare, includes mobile web and app buys on the Mojiva network and is highlighted by a sponsorship with a leading social gaming application.

The innovative American Family Insurance mobile campaign has three key executions for targeting all consumers 21+ who are on-the-go and looking for insurance:

· In-App Sponsorship – Through the highly integrated in-app sponsorship between AmericanFamily Insurance and a major social gaming application, players are alerted to a “word of the day” through Facebook and twitter profiles along with text and interstitial advertising in-app. Once the word is played, they are awarded with tips and tricks to help raise their scores when playing the game. American Family Insurance selected relevant words to elevate brand awareness while encouraging interaction.

· Request a Quote – With consumer convenience in mind, American Family Insurance provided consumers with the ability create a calendar reminder to contact agents to request a quote at a later date. This execution encapsulates the focus on making insurance easy and accessible while also leveraging the multi-function capabilities of mobile.

· Survival Guide – With recent extreme weather events, the survival guide execution provides consumers with tips on what to do during a natural disaster, which can be captured by using the phone’s screen shot functionalities, to save for later. The ad unit gives consumers the ability to contact an agent for additional assistance. The intent of this rich media piece was to add value to the user experience and make it easy for them to take the next step in buying insurance.

“With this campaign, we worked with American Family Insurance to identify mobile as a key medium for engaging in-market consumers, because thinking about insurance and actively pursuing a quote can happen almost anywhere,” said Christophe Dilworth of Mindshare.

“Mobile expands our campaign’s reach and influence, while offering an effective way to target appropriate audiences,” said Stephanie Oslie of American Family Insurance. “Because of mobile marketing’s strong demographic and geographic targeting capabilities, we can identify consumers in need of insurance products and services with ease.”

“We are seeing more and more companies from vertical markets such as insurance allocating a higher percentage of their media mix towards mobile as they begin to understand the potential reach, value and brand benefits of influencing target audiences on mobile devices,” said Tony Nethercutt, General Manager of North America for Mojiva. “American Family Insurance and Mindshare are making mobile an important component of their campaign and being extraordinarily creative in both executions and strategy.”

Crisp Media and Theorem Creations, who are members of the Mojiva Mobile Creative Alliance (mojivamca.com), were selected to develop the three different rich media creative executions.

About Mojiva
Mojiva (www.mojiva.com) is a mobile ad network, which reaches more than one billion devices globally and represents 8,000 mobile publishers and apps. Through deep and open integration with all major rich media providers and ad servers, Mojiva provides ad agencies with every imaginable mobile media execution across mobile web sites, apps and devices. Founded in May 2008 and based in New York City, Mojiva is led by ateam of advertising and media veterans from Google, Doubleclick, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL and AdMob, with more than 100 years of collective experience in mobile marketing and technology.Mojiva is an independent mobile ad network operating under parent company Mojiva Inc., which has a total of $35 million venture funding from Pelion Venture Partners, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and Shamrock Capital.

SALT LAKE CITY – mediaFORGE, a dynamic display media provider, released a white paper detailing its position on why optimizing campaigns for impressions, post-impression attribution, and click-through rate (CTR) does not give an adequate understanding of campaign performance, and how post-engagement is able to substantiate performance with much more meaningful results.

Given the influx of media coverage around online ad measurement, and the creation of the “Making Measurement Make Sense” (3MS) initiative by IAB, ANA, and 4As, it’s clear that advertisers are consensually dissatisfied with current performance metrics. What’s less clear is how to identify the best solution.

mediaFORGE’s white paper was written to empower advertisers to make the right decisions when exploring campaign metrics amidst the growing clamor of proposed solutions.

“Optimizing campaigns is about much more than identifying a metric to report against,” explains mediaFORGE CEO, Tony Zito. “It also determines the design of your campaign, including who you’re targeting and how. It’s important that advertisers understand the implications of the metrics they choose, and we hope this paper will give them a step in the right direction.”

The full whitepaper can be downloaded from the mediaFORGE website at mediaFORGE.com/resources. Some of the paper’s key conclusions include:

- Limited viewable ad inventory challenges validity of attributed view-through conversions.

- Narrowing target audience to optimize campaigns for clicks leads to substantial opportunity cost.

- Campaigns should be optimized for engagement to maximize yield.

- Tracking ad engagement validates that impressions were viewable.

- Clicks are not the exclusive indicator of purchase intent.

About mediaFORGE

mediaFORGE is a dynamic display media company that delivers a personalized and interactive ad experience designed to capture prospects and increase revenue. Its pioneering shared-revenue model charges marketers according to measured engagement that can be attributed to incremental revenue – never for impressions or view-throughs. With mediaFORGE, online marketers can employ the best aspects of display advertising with a low-risk business model, transparent data reports, and best-in-class account managers, making it the most compelling and efficient paths to optimal return on ad spend (ROAS). For more information, visit mediaFORGE.com.

NEW YORK – Powered by increased spend from direct advertisers, adMarketplace, the leading search syndication platform, posted its fourth consecutive record quarter as revenue increased 78% in the fourth quarter over the same period in 2010.

“The Internet’s largest search advertisers are demanding search performance at scale outside of the major engines and these results show that adMarketplace delivers,” said Chief Executive Officer James Hill.

Direct advertiser spend increased 115% year over year while the average cost-per-click increased 44% from the year-ago quarter. This was driven by exceptional performance on adMarketplace’s platform.

adMarketplace published three case studies in the fourth quarter documenting outstanding performance results that it delivered to Volvo, ADT and CreditCards.com.

“We are seeing increased budgets from 85% of our direct advertisers who pass us sufficient, relevant performance data,” said Adam Epstein, President and Chief Operating Officer. “This gives us the ability to scale our search syndication platform.”

adMarketplace expects continued growth in 2012, aggressively hiring engineers and salespeople. The company hired 25 new employees in Q4.

adMarketplace’s success comes amid mixed results from the other major search syndication networks. In their recent fourth quarter results, Google reported a paltry 15% gain in network revenue and Yahoo reported that search revenue declined 3%. Last week, InfoSpace purchased TaxACT for a reported $285 Million, diversifying itself away from its search syndication business.

About adMarketplace: The Internet’s largest marketers and agencies rely on adMarketplace to deliver search performance outside of Google, Bing, and Yahoo. With over 250 million searches each day across distribution channels worldwide, and backed by powerful, easy to use tools and expert account specialists, adMarketplace is the leading platform for search syndication advertising.

BALTIMORE – Millennial Media, the independent leader in mobile advertising, announced a new solution for advertisers to drive usage and engagement within their branded apps. The new “App Engagement Program” will allow brands to re-engage users who have previously downloaded their app, and use mobile display ads to drive them back to specific destinations inside the app. Advertisers who use the new solution will also gain unique conversion metrics, and the ability to retarget consumers with relevant messaging.

With the App Engagement Program, advertisers can anonymously identify consumers who have already downloaded their app, and use mobile display creative to deep-link these users back into the app. The deep-linking process will drive usage, and brands can leverage the initial interest that led to the app download to re-engage users and drive further interaction. As users are driven to different locations inside the app, advertisers will also gain unique intelligence on consumer behavior and will be able to track in-app transactions.

“Consumers now expect brand name companies to have a mobile app, yet it still takes a concerted effort from the brands to drive adoption,” said Jamie Fellows, SVP of Product at Millennial Media. “Brands need to make sure the experience is good, they need to make sure users are finding the app, and perhaps most importantly, they need to take steps to drive sustained consumer usage.”

For brands looking to drive initial adoption of their app, Millennial Media also offers the ability to run App Discovery campaigns and drive downloads via paid media. The Millennial Media platform reaches over 200M monthly unique users globally, providing advertisers an opportunity to efficiently drive downloads in a crowded market.

“Millennial Media has once again demonstrated its ability to both identify a major unmet need for mobile marketers and create a sound client-ready solution,” said Paul Gelb, VP, Mobile Practice Lead, Razorfish. “Improvements to retention and usage exponentially increase the value of an application and each new user. Advancement in this area opens up new opportunities for brands to generate unprecedented ROI from their investment in applications.”

For more information on the App Engagement Program and Millennial Media’s suite of advertiser solutions, visit http://www.millennialmedia.com/advertise/targeting/.

About Millennial Media

Millennial Media is the leading independent mobile advertising platform company. Our technology, tools and services help app developers and mobile website publishers to maximize their advertising revenue, acquire users for their apps and gain insight about their users. We offer advertisers significant audience reach, sophisticated targeting capabilities and the ability to deliver rich and engaging ad experiences to consumers on their mobile connected devices. Visit www.millennialmedia.com for more information.

SAN FRANCISCO – LiveRail for Advertisers Gives Agencies One Platform to Target, Deliver and Track Video Advertising

LiveRail, provider of the world’s largest real-time online video ad platform, today announced the launch of LiveRail For Advertisers, a new ad serving product that makes video campaigns easier to execute, more effective, and more measurable.

LiveRail For Advertisers (LFA) is a brand new platform designed from the ground up for online video and eliminates many of the complexities associated with traditional, legacy technology. LFA streamlines workflows with its video-native tools and interface, dramatically reducing the workload and time associated in trafficking, launching and managing large, multi-publisher video campaigns. Agencies can now leverage LiveRail technology for consistent campaign delivery at scale across their entire media plan; including major broadcasters, portals, ad networks and exchanges.

Advertisers and agencies can also take advantage of LiveRail’s native data integrations (with partners like Affine) to target their video ads to the appropriate audience, content or domain within the publishers they buy from. LFA’s “zero wasted impressions” technology enables agencies to control and pace their campaign’s delivery, reducing wasted spend and ensuring that publishers only deliver within the plan. For the first time, agencies can now dynamically analyze media environments for every impression request, ensuring brand safety and appropriateness of the content/media, and restricting delivery in real-time where needed.

LiveRail for Advertiser’s MRC-accredited reporting and analytics give video ad buyers insight into how their ads are performing through a multitude of filters, dimensions, and video-specific performance metrics. LFA empowers marketers with the data to truly understand the impact and ROI of their video ads, across all the placements, on all publishers, networks and platforms they buy from, helping demonstrate the value of media spend and inform future media purchasing decisions.

“Because we sit at the hub of the online video ad ecosystem, we understand the needs of all parties involved,” said Mark Trefgarne, LiveRail CEO. “Our full- and self-service options let advertisers and agencies select the level of support they need so they can leverage our video expertise. By combining the world’s best video ad technology with the consultative support of industry experts, we believe that LFA will become an indispensible tool for all agencies serious about video.”

LiveRail For Advertisers is a third-party ad server for video. Advertisers and agencies utilizing LFA must maintain their own direct media relationships, as LFA cannot be natively used to access or purchase inventory. For more information about LiveRail For Advertisers, visit http://www.liverail.com/LFAPR.php

About LiveRail

LiveRail is the core technology at the heart of the online video advertising ecosystem. LiveRail solutions enable and enhance the monetization of internet-distributed video and handle over 2 billion video ad impressions per month for many of the world’s largest media and advertising clients. Founded in 2007, LiveRail’s senior team is led by its founders, Mark Trefgarne (CEO) and Andrei Dunca (CTO). LiveRail Inc is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with offices in New York, NY and Cluj-Napoca, Romania. LiveRail is backed by Pond Ventures.

New York – Mojiva, the mobile ad network that specializes in making “big idea,” cross-platform, mobile strategies come to life at scale, today announced a monumental achievement as the first mobile ad network to reach more than one billion unique devices globally each month.

Key findings and statistics from Mojiva’s rapidly growing mobile ad network include:
·       More than 45 Billion monthly ad requests, in 190 countries.
·       Reach of approximately 224 Million monthly unique devices in the United States.
·       The United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain and Italy achieved significant saturation of devices serving mobile ads to more than 33 Million, 10.6 Million, 5.5 Million, 6.4 Million, and 8.7 Million devices respectively.
·       Content partners on Mojiva encompass more than 8,000 publishers and apps.

The staggering growth of Mojiva’s ad network is attributed to the exponential usage of smartphones and tablets globally, as well as an increase in advertisers extending campaigns into mobile. In June 2011, research firm IDC predicted that vendors would ship more than 472 million smartphones globally in 2011. This has resulted in similar growth in mobile advertising, as eMarketer predicted that mobile ad spending will grow to $2.61 billion in the US alone in 2012.

“Mojiva’s achievement of this significant milestone underscores both the dramatically growing importance of mobile devices in online content consumption and Mojiva’s role as a key enabler in monetizing mobile media,” said Robert Coolbrith, senior research analyst at ThinkEquity. “We believe that mobile advertising will rapidly become a key component of large brands’ marketing mix over the next five years and that ad networks and tech-driven intermediaries such as Mojiva will help to accelerate this shift by driving efficiency and transparency across the mobile ad ecosystem.”

“Our primary goal is to help marketers deliver relevant advertising to the right mobile users within premium apps and mobile web content, and to make it worth the effort by delivering scale. This is no easy technical challenge. Surpassing one billion unique devices reached per month is indicative of the quality of our technology and our commitment to being leaders,” said Dave Gwozdz, CEO of Mojiva. “With this kind of reach across all types of tablets, smartphones, etc., marketers that want to reach the mobile consumer can move the needle in a hurry.”

The billion unique devices seen on the Mojiva mobile ad network aremade up of smart phones, feature phones, tablets and touch screen devices such as the iPod Touch, and data is from the month of December 2011.

About Mojiva
Mojiva (www.mojiva.com) is a mobile ad network, which reaches more than one billion devices globally and represents 8,000 mobile publishers and apps. Through deep and open integration with all major rich media providers and ad servers, Mojiva provides ad agencies with every imaginable mobile media execution across mobile web sites, apps and devices. Founded in May 2008 and based in New York City, Mojiva is led by a team of advertising and media veterans from Google, Doubleclick, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL and AdMob, with more than 100 years of collective experience in mobile marketing and technology. Mojiva is an independent mobile ad network operating under parent company Mojiva Inc., which has a total of $35 million venture funding from Pelion Venture Partners, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and Shamrock Capital.

By enlisting the very consumers that advertisers hope to attract, this type of software could result in a new generation of less intrusive, more engaging online advertising that pays consumers.

OBJE is making plans to help spur this evolution in advertising along by acquiring and joint venturing with innovative startups, getting them funded and leveraging their expertise to develop all-new platforms.

For more information on the company’s social media analytics initiative, please visit www.obsceneinteractive.com/investors.

Obscene Interactive is a division of Obscene Jeans Corp. that develops innovative technology tools to service the fast-growing social media and online content production sectors alongside companies such as Monster Worldwide (NYSE: MWW), LinkedIn Corp. (NYSE: LNKD), Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX), and Groupon, Inc. (NASDAQ: GRPN).

About Obscene Interactive

Obscene Interactive (OTCBB:OBJE) is an emerging global developer of social media tools and applications. OBJE’s cutting-edge technology platform enables its titles to be accessible to a broad audience of consumers all over the world, supporting multiple platforms for universal appeal. Obscene Interactive is focused on delivering the best in social media solutions to the mass market. For investment information and performance data, please visit www.ObsceneInteractive.com/investors.

SAN FRANCISCO  – Bizo, the global leader in business audience marketing, today announced that Frannie Danzinger has joined the company as director of marketplace development.  A well-known creative media strategist with a local and national skill base in media research, strategic planning, media placement, creative idea development and media negotiations, Danzinger brings more than 20 years of experience in the business-to-business and consumer media environments to Bizo.

Prior to joining Bizo, Danzinger spent more than 14 years at gyro (formerly HSR Business to Business and GyroHSR), a leading business-to-business advertising agency. Most recently, she led gyro’s global media strategy practice as the senior vice president of media.  Danzinger was instrumental in gyro’s media business expansion, growing overall media revenue by more than 250 percent and building a global media team of 20.   Key media clients included Lincoln Financial Corporation, Dymo, Pitney Bowes and PNC.  Prior to this role, Danzinger founded ProMedia LLC, where she served as president and media director.  While running ProMedia, Danzinger was instrumental in establishing first-to-market media ideas for clients such as Flight Options, Avantair, Cleveland Grand Prix and Duke Energy, while exceeding expected ROI benchmarks.  Before launching ProMedia, Frannie was associate media director at Wyse Advertising in Cleveland.

Danzinger joins Bizo during a time of explosive growth for the company.  Bizo also announced today that the company ended 2011 with an annual run rate of over $18 million, increasing its year-over-year Q4 run-rate by 133 percent, and recorded its 6th consecutive month of accelerating growth.   Over 400 leading brands are now using the Bizo platform to reach their target audiences online, and the company also grew its targetable audience of online business professionals to 100 million uniques each month, through the addition of more than 800 new publisher partners including Forbes, Crains B2B, PC World and Thomson Reuters.   Last quarter, the company was ranked the fourth fastest-growing private company in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times.

“Over the past few years, the brands we support have grown increasingly hungry for new and better ways to reach their audiences and build their brands online.  Given our position in the business audience marketing ecosystem, Bizo is uniquely positioned to help marketers access and reach precisely targeted business audiences at scale,” said Russell Glass, CEO of Bizo.  “Attracting heavy-hitting industry talent such as Frannie is a testament to the company’s momentum and the huge opportunity we see to extend our leadership in the market over the coming years.”

About Bizo

Bizo is how marketers reach and engage business professionals, wherever they travel online.  Bizo can precisely target more than 100 million professionals around the world, including more than 80 percent of the U.S. business population. This unprecedented reach and targeting gives marketers cost-effective access and insight into business professionals – the most valuable online audience segment.  Simply put, Bizo knows business audiences. More than 400 leading brands including AMEX, Monster, Salesforce.com, Microsoft, and FedEx count on the precise display ad targeting, social media measurement, and deep audience analytics that the Bizo Audience Marketing Platform provides to successfully execute their branding and direct response initiatives.

For more information on Bizo, or for a free look at the Bizographic make-up of your website audience, visit www.bizo.com.

New York – LiveIntent, the platform for buying and selling email ad inventory exactly like display, today announced it has integrated its services with advertising technology from Convertro, the leader in providing advertisers enhanced transparency into the effectiveness of their online marketing channels and optimization. This integration provides advertisers with a better understanding of the value of LiveIntent’s inventory within their overall digital media footprint.

Previous constraints in the email space only made it possible to track last click conversions or direct consumer behaviors back to email, but Convertro’s Multi-Attribution service allows advertisers access into every marketing touch that led to a conversion without limits on the number of touch points, cookie windows and other constraints. By partnering with Convertro, LiveIntent can now attribute an action back to an email ad placement, even if the consumer decides to shop around before converting into purchase.

“This integration was driven by our goal to provide advertisers with more knowledge and transparency into the impact of our email advertising offerings, ” said Jason Oates, President LiveIntent. “With Convertro’s unique attribution service, we can now prove to advertisers how effective their email advertising campaigns are by identifying how they impact the top (awareness) and bottom (conversion) of the sales funnel. This is important to brand and direct advertisers.”

“By tapping into Convertro’s technology, LiveIntent will now be able to prove to advertisers accurate contribution of email marketing efforts to best optimize their revenue from email ads,” said Jeff Zwelling, CEO and Co-Founder, Convertro. “Convertro strives to provide advertisers with transparency and in turn, give our customers the attribution they deserve.”

This integration is one of many strategic initiatives from LiveIntent, including new product offerings to its portfolio and personnel additions to accommodate the company’s rapid growth.

About LiveIntent
LiveIntent is the only company with a real-time display ad platform for email. LiveIntent works with advertisers, publishers and agencies to provide ad optimization, DSP / trading desk and exchanges capabilities. The company is venture-backed by Shasta Ventures, Battery Ventures, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures and Grape Arbor VC. LiveIntent was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in NYC. For more information and a demonstration of the company’s technology in your own inbox, visit www.liveintent.com.

Jun Group defines earned media as a series of actions that users initiate after watching a social video. These post-view actions include Facebook page visits, brand page visits, store locator usage, coupon and recipe downloads, Tweets, e-mail shares, replays, and clicks to watch more videos – all of which are measured by Jun Group’s Voyeur analytics dashboard.

Jun Group’s study placed a monetary value on each action based on conservative industry data. A visit to a brand’s Facebook page, for instance, is valued at $1.00 in the study, which is on the low end of pricing for cost-per-click advertising.

Once the values were assigned, Jun Group analyzed 7.9 million social video views for brands across a number of vertical categories, such as CPG, health and beauty, sports, technology and luxury goods. Videos ranged from 15 seconds to 3 minutes-long and users opted-in to see them in exchange for virtual goods or currency.

Importantly, all of the earned media activity measured by the study was generated after users received their virtual rewards. “When you respect people, don’t interrupt them, and put them in control, they respond in a positive way,” Reichgut said. “It’s that simple.”

According to the study, Jun Group’s average social video campaign delivered 30.1 percent of additional media value above-and-beyond the media spend. In other words, clients that spent $100,000 with Jun Group in 2011 received over $130,000 of value on average.

Facebook page visits were by far the most popular earned media action, representing 62 percent of all post-view activity in the Jun Group study. Brand-specific actions, such as store locator usage, brand page visits, etc., were the next-most popular actions, accounting for 15 percent of the post-view activity. Surprisingly, Tweets were the least popular action, representing approximately one percent of the post-view activity.

About Jun Group
Jun Group is the premier social video platform. The company’s distribution technology delivers millions of monthly opt-in video views across social networks, mobile devices, premium content sites, and YouTube. Jun Group distributes videos from 15 seconds to 3 minutes-long with exceptionally high completion rates and significant post-view activity,
such as web site visits, coupon downloads, and store locator usage. The company’s analytics dashboard, Voyeur, provides real time data about views, shares, likes, tweets, ratings, comments, and geographic dispersal down to the state and town. Founded in 2005, Jun Group’s clients include Fortune 500 brands, major entertainment companies, and media and creative agencies. For more information, visit www.jungroup.com.

A week ago I attended an event in New York City at which Comscore unveiled its new Validated GRP(TM) tool that rates the effectiveness of digital ads. Validated GRP takes the rating standards advertisers apply to TV advertising (Gross Rating Points) and establishes a similar metric that will apply to digital advertising. For advertisers, this is a metric to judge online campaign effectiveness–to make an apples to apples comparison between the effectiveness of TV and the effectiveness of online display and video ads.

In the development of its Validated GRP tool, Comscore conducted a  major study on the quality of campaign delivery  that allowed it to investigate discrepancies between expectations and reality when it comes to ad delivery. The full study, the results of which will be released in March, included twelve major brands with household names like Ford, Sprint, Kimberly Clark, and Kellogg’s.

To conduct the study, Comscore used the AdXPose technology it acquired earlier last year. The AdXPose team tipped us off in advance because we were already partnered with them. We got a sneak preview of the study’s highlights, which we are now free to share here.

In December 2011, Comscore measured 2,975 placements on 380,898 site domains — totaling over 1.7 million impressions, all delivered in iframes.

The conclusion? Something we, as an ad server and a advertising technology partner for publishers, have already observed: many ads are served, but not seen. That’s because web pages are no longer mostly short pages with static user experiences; they’re long pages with dynamic usage. Many use the increasingly popular “infinite scroll”. By the time an ad at the top of the page is served, the reader may have already scrolled by. Yet many ads further down may be very visible to the user. In Comscore’s own words:

“It’s not just an ‘above the fold versus below the fold’ issue. Sometimes people scroll down quickly to get to the content they want, and miss home page ads. In those cases, the action might be below the fold. Compelling ads can work in both places – but only if they’re visible.” Comscore found that 24% of ads above the fold were not visible.

While this is not great news for the advertisers who paid for those campaigns, It is great to see Comscore measure this for advertisers. And it’s why we developed the InView slider formats. Web pages, like the Huffington Post and Daily Mail are getting longer. And they are increasingly optimized for tablets where users are quick to scroll and therefore quick to skip past the top of the page to get to the content they want to read.

Comscore’s findings become very important, especially as online advertising moves from simple banner display ads to on-page video. And I believe it will move to great video ads for cars, cosmetics and movies etc right on the page. Right now, we’re selling the InView Slider ad unit with great confidence that it works for advertisers wherever you place it. It only appears if the reader is going to see it. The InView slider gives publishers a way to boost revenue, and gives advertisers a great way to guarantee to catch scrolling readers.

We’re also launching an in page video ad that will appear when the viewer is guaranteed to see it.

The InView slider has been quickly adopted by publishers since the summer because all the revenue for the publisher is additional and yet there’s no additional work involved.

We look forward to Comscore publicly presenting the full results of its study in March, and of course we are proud to be their partner in making advertising on the web as good as the best advertising on national TV.

About ZEDO

ZEDO, Inc. is a digital ad solutions company that offers products and services for a publisher’s premium, self service, and remnant inventory. Products include ad network optimization, innovative rich media formats for publishers’ direct sales teams, full featured ad serving, behavioral targeting data built into the ad server, an exchange-like platform for publishers to sell behavioral and DMA targeted inventory at high CPMs (see: www.zedoadnetwork.com), a self service platform to allow advertisers to buy directly from a publisher, outsourced ad ops and more. These products are integrated into one technology platform for publishers to choose from, or use seamlessly together. ZEDO has been in the internet advertising industry for over 10 years, and is the most successful independent ad server in the US. The company provides innovative solutions that boost revenues for Internet publishers. ZEDO is headquartered in San Francisco and has four development centers in Russia and India.

Reach out to ZEDO at http://www.zedo.com, or follow the company on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/ZEDOadsolutions) and Twitter (http://twitter.com/zedoinc).

NEW YORK – Tremor Video, the largest independent online video advertising technology company, and TubeMogul, the fastest-growing media buying platform for video advertising, announced that Tremor Video has purchased InPlay, TubeMogul’s industry-leading video analytics for publishers. Tremor Video will integrate InPlay directly into VideoHub, its enterprise video platform, enabling a complete end-to-end video analytics solution for publishers.

InPlay helps publishers understand real-time engagement, viewership and performance data, and is relied on daily by hundreds of top media companies, video platforms and content creators. The transfer of ownership gives Tremor Video an industry-best set of publisher video analytics, allowing the company to give publishers and their partners the ability to measure, track, report and deliver on the signals driving the performance of video content.

TubeMogul, which started as a video measurement company for publishers, shifted its focus in the past year after launching the industry’s first demand side platform for video advertising. Although TubeMogul is divesting its publisher analytics, the real-time reporting tools developed for TubeMogul’s video advertising platform will be unaffected, giving clients uninterrupted access to audience, engagement and brand impact data by site and by ad.

The deal continues to enhance Tremor Video’s VideoHub suite of products, making insights gathered from more than 1 billion video streams available to help publishers understand how their videos are discovered, what drives engagement and much more. InPlay will be available to all publishers as part of VideoHub for Publishers, launching in Q1 2012.

“Publishers are demanding an analytics suite that provides a clear picture of how viewers are interacting with content in order to determine what creates the most value for advertisers,” said Bill Day, CEO of Tremor Video. “InPlay gives us industry-leading technology and a sound product that meets this market demand. By integrating with our existing VideoHub technology, Tremor Video can now offer our partners a view across the entire video landscape.”

“TubeMogul InPlay was built to help publishers better understand their viewers to drive deeper engagement, and it has largely delivered on that promise,” said Brett Wilson, Co-founder and CEO of TubeMogul. “As we shift our focus from publishers to brand advertisers, this deal helps us align our capabilities with the needs of marketers, while ensuring they get the transparency and reporting they have come to expect.”

The InPlay acquisition is the latest in a series of deals for Tremor Video. The company’s other recent purchases include ScanScout in November, 2010 and mobile ad platform Transpera in February of this year. Tremor Video plans to continue to be acquisitive, fueled by $37 million in funding raised earlier this year.

TubeMogul is also seeing tremendous growth, with recent partnerships in the connected TV, mobile and social space as well as new contracts with major agency trading desks worldwide. The company was recently named the seventh-fastest growing independent company in the San Francisco Bay Area, spanning Silicon Valley and beyond.

About Tremor Video

Tremor Video (www.tremorvideo.com) provides in-stream video advertising solutions to Fortune 1000 brand advertisers and top tier publishers. Widely regarded as the leader in online video advertising technology, the company leverages its award-winning decisioning engine, innovative video ad formats and publisher technology to deliver the campaign results and scale advertisers should expect from digital video. Tremor Video is the only video ad platform that can provide 100% brand safety by scanning and categorizing every single video stream before an ad is ever served. In addition, Tremor Video’s award-winning SE2 technology gets smarter at finding and engaging viewers with every ad served, enabling the company to welcome and encourage pay-per-engagement pricing. Founded in 2005, Tremor Video is backed by top-tier investors, including Canaan Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth, General Catalyst, Keating Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, Time Warner Investments, and W Capital Partners.

VideoHub, a division of Tremor Video, is a first of its kind analytics console that helps marketers and agencies monitor the complex video ecosystem to dynamically match ads with content and viewers, deliver upon marketing goals, and maximize brand impact. Unlike traditional video management platforms, VideoHub focuses on effectiveness and delivers real-time analytics for deep transparency across ads, content, viewers, and performance. To request a demo, visit videohub.tv.

About TubeMogul

TubeMogul is the only video marketing company built for branding. As a demand side platform for video, TubeMogul integrates real-time media buying, ad serving, targeting optimization and brand measurement into its PlayTime platform. Over half of the Fortune 500 use TubeMogul to simplify the delivery of video ads in any format, optimize the impact of their brand message and maximize the effect of every dollar they spend.

Founded in 2006, TubeMogul is based in Emeryville, CA with offices in New York, London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto and Sydney.

Emeryville, CA – Tribal Fusion, the global online advertising provider owned by Exponential, is the world’s second largest source of display advertising, according to comScore’s December 2011 rankings of the leading global display networks. The measurement service reported that Tribal Fusion’s premium publisher network reached more than 490 million unique users globally, behind only Google (1.2 billion) and just head of AOL Advertising (477 million), which includes its Advertising.com ad network subsidiary.

Tribal Fusion says the new ranking reflects its growing global presence and increased demand from brand advertisers for campaigns that take advantage of its rich-media capabilities to offer more engaging creative executions at scale

“Brand advertisers across the globe are increasingly looking for new ways to leverage digital media to connect with their prospective customers and are looking for the same kind of high-impact and emotionally engaging creative messaging that they get from traditional TV advertising,” says Dilip DaSilva, founder and CEO of Tribal Fusion and parent company Exponential.

“Online advertising has primarily been focused on bottom-of-the-funnel acquisition and conversion of customers. But as brands are realizing that their potential customers are spending an increasing amount of time on digital media relative to traditional channels such as television, they are looking for opportunities to drive brand awareness and perception via digital media.

“Our premium publisher network is an essential part of our Advertising Intelligence Platform, and is critical for driving audience insight and large-scale reach that helps brand advertisers learn about and reach their prospective customers. And beyond just reaching their prospective customers, our tight integration with our publishing partners, allows brands to connect at scale with prospective customers using high-impact, engaging messaging,” adds Mr. DaSilva.

Founded in 2001, Tribal Fusion has expanded across the globe and now operates offices in 37 locations worldwide including the United States, Canada,  Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, South Africa, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand.

“Digital media can be accessed by visitors in any country, as a result most premium publishers attract a global audience,” concludes Mr. DaSilva. “Through our ability to monetize publisher inventory in so many countries, we have now become the partner of choice for premium publishers in every country.”

Tribal Fusion (www.tribalfusion.com) is a global online advertising provider that drives sales for the world’s top brands by helping them learn about, reach and engage their online audiences more effectively.

We combine our premium publisher network, advanced online ad technology and integrated audience data on a single platform to deliver audience insights, targeting and creative solutions that transform the way brands connect with their prospective customers.

Tribal Fusion reaches almost 500 million monthly unique users, was founded in 2001 and is part of the Exponential Group of online businesses – a technology-enabled media services company headquartered in Emeryville, California with operations in 37 locations worldwide.

Now, all ads served by LiveIntent technology may contain the AdChoices logo. Clicking on the logo will bring users to the LiveIntent AdChoices page that explains why that ad was served to them and how they can opt-out of future ads from LiveIntent. There, users will also be able to read about LiveIntent’s privacy policy as well as visit the Network Advertising Initiative and the Digital Advertising Alliance to see their opt-out choices from other participating companies.

“At LiveIntent, we’re committed to being fully transparent and notifying users of their choices,” said Matt Keiser, CEO, LiveIntent. “Consumers have the right to know they are being targeted for ads and making them aware of this trackingwill strengthen advertiser-consumer trust in the long term.”

LiveIntent for Publishers (LFP) enables publishers to insert LiveTags into their newsletter templates to serve direct sold and LiveIntent exchange campaigns into emails newsletters, to monetize and maximize the yield of their newsletter inventory. LiveIntent for Advertisers (LFA) give marketers the ability to target and deliver ads to relevant audiences, on email open while optimizing results.

“We strive to be fully transparent to our readers and all consumers,” said Brian Riback, E-Marketing Strategist for The New York Daily News. “As our readership grows, we want to continue to protect consumer privacy and remain completely supportive to our readers, whether we reach them on the desktop, tablet or mobile.”

“Maintaining a rock-solid relationship with our customers is paramount as we look to keep the highest standards of choice in how they consume ads every day,” said Paul Rostkowski, President of Varick Media Management (VMM).  “Having LiveIntent be AdChoices-compliant gives us the assurance and confidence in their process of delivering our ads to the people who want to see them.”

About LiveIntent
LiveIntent is the only company with a real-time display ad platform for email. LiveIntent works with advertisers, publishers and agencies to provide ad optimization, DSP / trading desk and exchanges capabilities. The company is venture-backed by Shasta Ventures, Battery Ventures, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures and Grape Arbor VC. LiveIntent was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in NYC. For more information and a demonstration of the company’s technology in your own inbox, visit www.liveintent.com.

NEW YORK – VINDICO, the leading online video ad management platform, announced the renewal of their Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation, which was initially granted in June 2010. Through this MRC accreditation renewal, VINDICO continues to demonstrate its commitment to building trust in online video advertising.  The accreditation will continue to benefit the global brands that work with VINDICO, as well as institute a benchmark for success in the industry.

Established to ensure audience measurement research is valid, reliable and effective, the MRC accreditation process requires companies to undergo rigorous third-party audits to guarantee compliance with industry standards. VINDICO’s accreditation indicates its video advertising platform is compliant with the MRC’s standards for Media Rating Research and the applicable guidelines published by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. MRC members include leading media and technology companies, such as AOL, Microsoft, CBS and FOX, among others.

“VINDICO has taken strides to make online video as trusted and easy to work with as any other measured media,” said George Ivie, CEO and Executive Director of the Media Rating Council. “Renewal of its MRC accreditation further solidifies VINDICO as a quality leader in the industry.”

VINDICO has deep market penetration, serving almost forty percent of all online video ads in the United States. The company provides video advertising management solutions to over 200 brands through their leading agency groups such as GroupM, Havas, IPG, Publicis and Omnicom. The VINDICO solution reduces complexity for advertisers by providing an efficient and reliable way to serve video ads across multiple networks.

“Video advertising is one of the advertising industry’s fastest growing categories, with eMarketer estimating that online video ad spending in the U.S. will reach more than $7 billion in 2015,” said Matt Timothy, president of VINDICO. “Renewal of MRC accreditation reinforces our commitment of giving advertisers the confidence they need to make larger investments in online video and demonstrates our data remains up to the MRC’s rigorous standards.”

About VINDICO
As the first ad management platform dedicated exclusively to video, VINDICO allows advertisers to serve, track and measure all of their online video ad activity. Since 2006, VINDICO has been the gold standard in online video platforms, providing standardized reporting and analytics for the online video industry. The power of online video isn’t just the audiences it reaches and how it reaches them. Its strength also derives from its ability to track an ad campaign and precisely measure the campaign’s effectiveness. For more information, please visit http://www.vindicogroup.com or follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/VINDICO_Group.

About MRC
The MRC is a non-profit Industry association established in 1964 composed of leading television, radio, print and internet companies, as well as advertisers, advertising agencies and trade associations whose goal is to ensure measurement services that are valid, reliable and effective. Measurement services desiring MRC accreditation are required to disclose to their customers all methodological aspects of their service; comply with the MRC Minimum Standards for Media Rating Research; and submit to MRC-designed audits to authenticate and illuminate their procedures. In addition, the MRC membership actively pursues research issues they consider priorities in an effort to improve the quality of research in the marketplace. Currently approximately 70 research products are audited by the MRC. Additional information about MRC can be found at www.mediaratingcouncil.org.

LOS ANGELES – the Rubicon Project, the online advertising technology company, reveals details for its Real Time Trading Summit (#RTTS12) in New York City. On February 15th at 8:00 a.m. EST at the Hudson Hotel, the Real Time Trading Summit will convene leaders from across the advertising ecosystem to discuss and reveal the opportunity of automated ad trading for comScore 500 publishers and their advertisers.

Attendees will include executives from top media companies, agencies and leaders in the advertising technology ecosystem. With a stellar speaker lineup delivering actionable insights, the Real Time Trading Summit will bring attendees and their business into the new world of Real Time Trading. The Summit will feature “The End of Advertising,” a conversation between Michael Wolff, contributing editor for Vanity Fair, Wired and British GQ and Jay Sears of Rubicon Project.

The Real Time Trading Summit will feature visionaries, industry experts and advertising leaders including:

Michael Wolff, author of Burn Rate & contributing editor, Vanity Fair, Wired and British GQ
Joanna O’Connell, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
Tim Gentry, Head of Optimisation & Effectiveness, Guardian News & Media
Frank Addante, CEO & Founder, Rubicon Project
Randall Rothenberg, President & CEO, IAB
Vikram Somaya, VP, Global Operations and Audience at Thomas Reuters
Roland Cozzolino, CTO, MediaMath
JT Batson, President, DDS Digital
And more to be announced.

Real Time Trading Summit is an invite-only event. The content will be focused on helping educate and facilitate conversations among the comScore 500 publishers. To request an invitation or find out more information, please visit: http://www.regonline.com/realtimetradingsummit

About the Rubicon Project

the Rubicon Project launched in 2007 with a mission to automate buying and selling across the $80 billion global online advertising industry. REVV, the company’s real-time trading platform, has executed nearly two trillion trades for more than 450 of the largest properties on the Internet. REVV helps Comscore 500 publishers like Time Inc., News International and CareerBuilder make more money by optimizing their ad revenue, eliminating unnecessary ad operations costs, protecting and growing their direct sales channel and ensuring their sites’ visitors are safe. Today, REVV analyzes more than 1 trillion bids resulting in more than 100 billion successful and protected trades each month from more than 52,000 advertisers using 700 buying channels (ad networks, exchanges and DSPs). Ad buyers turn to REVV for single point real-time access to the #1 network reach of users (650 million uniques as ranked by Quantcast) across premium inventory and audiences. Headquartered in Los Angeles, with offices in New York, Seattle, London, Paris, Hamburg and Sydney, the company is backed by $60 million in funding from Clearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, IDG Ventures Asia, Comcast Ventures and News Corporation.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Jumptap, the leader in targeted mobile advertising, announced that Bob Hammond has joined the company as Chief Technology Officer. Hammond will oversee engineering and technology efforts for the company, with a focus on scaling all aspects of Jumptap’s platform and extending the company’s lead in mobile audience targeting.

Hammond is a well-known digital media technology leader and brings more than 24 years of experience in the advertising, technology and media industries. He comes to Jumptap from Vibrant Media, a NY-based online ad network. There, Hammond served as SVP of Technology and oversaw more than 50 engineers and led all aspects of technology for the more than $100M ad network.

“Bob has been a trail blazer in the ad network and technology areas for years, and has witnessed the development of supply/demand management, Real Time Bidding and algorithmic buying in display and video ad networks alike,” said George Bell, CEO, Jumptap. “His experience guiding ad networks at all stages – start-up, hyper-growth, and scaling for stability – will provide great insight for Jumptap. Bob is a born leader with enthusiasm to burn, and we’re delighted to have him join the team.”

Prior to Vibrant Media, Hammond served as VP of Engineering at Yahoo! following the company’s acquisition of Maven, a video ad network where Hammond was SVP of Engineering for three years. In his role at Yahoo!, Hammond managed and oversaw engineering for the company’s Video Platform and Syndication Group, including management of core development teams, product QA, product UI design, and technical documentation for the Maven product line. Before Maven, Hammond spent more than six years at Mirror Image, serving as Chief Technology Officer for the final three.

“It’s clear that mobile is the frontier of advertising innovation,” said Bob Hammond, CTO, Jumptap. “Jumptap is a leader with superior targeting that creates the relevancy needed to make mobile advertising successful. I’m thrilled to be joining such a high growth and technology driven environment.”

About Jumptap

Jumptap is the leader in targeted mobile advertising. Reaching 95 million mobile users in the U.S. and 142 million mobile users worldwide, Jumptap uses its extensive technology portfolio, as well as industry-first partnerships with third- party data providers, to understand mobile audiences better than any other ad network and provide intelligent targeting with scale. Through its large network of premium publishers and apps, and constant campaign optimization, Jumptap delivers the best ROI for advertisers and highest yield for publishers and developers. Jumptap has pioneered mobile advertising privacy standards and is committed to unlocking mobile opportunities for all parties through its ongoing industry research, such as its Understanding Mobile Audience series and monthly MobileSTAT reports. Visit http://www.jumptap.com and http://www.jumptap.com/blog for more information; join our Facebook community, follow us on Twitter at @Jumptap and check out our latest ads at the Jumptap Ad Gallery http://www.jumptap.com/gallery.

SAN FRANCISCO – Greystripe, a division of ValueClick Inc. (Nasdaq: VCLK), is announcing impressive expansion within the company, strengthening its position as the go-to mobile ad network for brand advertisers in North America and Europe. Since May, the company has doubled its team and opened four new offices in the U.S. while expanding its presence in Europe.

The largest brand-focused mobile ad network has doubled the size of its sales, engineering and operations staff, allowing it to offer innovative new products to its base of thousands of brand advertisers, agencies and mobile publishers.

As part of the expansion of its team, Greystripe has opened new sales offices in Atlanta, Seattle, Minneapolis and Phoenix. They are also announcing nine new executive hires. These new hires are:

Brian Pearlman, senior account executive, from Millennial Media
Ryan Bleich, senior account executive, from AOL
Chris Backschies, regional sales manager, from WeatherBug
Terah Bocchi, senior account executive, from Belo Phoenix
Jeff Margolis, senior account executive, from Adfusion
Bill Kramer, regional sales manager, from quadrantONE
Josh Parker, account executive, from Specific Media
Matt Sexton, regional sales manager, from RadiumOne
Ken Yonan, regional sales manager, from Specific Media

“We’re excited to grow our team and continue expanding in the coming year,” said Kurt Hawks, vice president of operations for Greystripe. “In 2012, we look forward to using this growth to reach advertisers in every significant U.S. market, continue innovation and push the envelope by creating the best in brand advertising for mobile.”

In 2011, Greystripe launched two new mobile ad units: video advertising and its popular Ad Boosters. Both have seen impressive results. Over 55 brands have run mobile video ads, delivering over 200 ad creatives. On average, 50 percent of consumers have watched the entire video ads, with click-through rates between 1 and 3 percent. Ad Boosters are a next generation ad format featuring social media integration, local content and deals. These Boosters make mobile advertising more relevant and valuable to smartphone users and have shown a 300 percent increase in click-through rates compared to similar ads without the Boosters.

After officially launching in Europe in February through a series of partnerships, Greystripe hired Tim Scoffham to head EU mobile growth. Scoffham came to Greystripe from 4th Screen Advertising, where he was the commercial head. The company has now established a direct European presence in the U.K., France, Germany, Spain and Sweden.

To find out more about Greystripe, visit www.greystripe.com

About Greystripe:

Greystripe, a division of ValueClick, Inc. (Nasdaq: VCLK), is the largest brand-focused mobile advertising network in the US by reach. Greystripe delivers the highest engagement and most sophisticated targeting for brand marketers, the maximum revenue for publishers and app developers, and the best ad experience for users. Greystripe’s proprietary advertising platform serves billions of rich media impressions to over 40 million users of touch-driven devices through more than 3,500 application titles and mobile websites across all major mobile platforms.

For more information, please visit: http://www.greystripe.com

About ValueClick, Inc.:

ValueClick, Inc. (Nasdaq: VCLK) is one of the world’s largest digital marketing companies. Through a unique combination of data, technology and services, ValueClick increases brand awareness and drives customer acquisition at scale for the world’s largest advertisers, and maximizes advertising revenue for tens of thousands of online and mobile publishers. ValueClick’s brands include Commission Junction, ValueClick Media, Dotomi, Greystripe, Mediaplex, Smarter.com, CouponMountain.com, Investopedia.com, and PriceRunner. The Company is based in Westlake Village, California, and has offices in major advertising markets worldwide. For more information, please visit http://www.valueclick.com.

NEW YORK – Solve Media, the TYPE-IN advertising company, today announced it has added Ian Schafer to its Board of Directors. Mr. Schafer is the founder and CEO of Deep Focus, a full-service digital engagement agency. Formerly a vice president of new media at Miramax Films, he is one of the most influential voices in the industry, and a recognized leader in interactive marketing and social media. He will provide senior counsel to Solve Media executives as the company continues to change how brands and publishers advertise online.

“The future of advertising lies with innovative and creative approaches like Solve Media’s TYPE-IN that can capture a user’s attention in a powerful yet unobtrusive way, and deliver measurable results in lift, recall and participation rates,” said Mr. Schafer. “Solve Media has grown quickly because they are addressing a critical market need. I look forward to helping Solve Media reach its next stage of growth.”

Mr. Schafer has received a number of industry recognitions including being named a ‘Media Maven’ by Advertising Age and one of Adweek’s“Young Ones.” He also serves on the executive board of the Social Media Advertising Consortium. He joins Chris Fralic and Scott Johnson on Solve Media’s board.

“As one of the industry’s foremost experts, Ian has an uncanny ability to anticipate trends in the creative and media agency landscape,” said Ari Jacoby, CEO of Solve Media. “His leadership, knowledge and strategic insight will be invaluable as Solve Media continues to seek innovative and impactful ways to drive true engagement for brands.”

Since its launch in 2010, Solve Media’s TYPE-IN platform has been delivering performance-based campaigns for leading brand advertisers seeking superior engagement, awareness and recall. Unlike traditional engagement metrics that essentially measure ad exposure, TYPE-IN ads create lasting memories that benefit brands beyond clicks and drive loyalty and sales. The company’s approach has attracted more than 3,000 publishers and leading advertisers, including Toyota, Microsoft, Universal Pictures and AOL.

ABOUT SOLVE MEDIA

Solve Media was founded by veteran entrepreneurs and technologists focused on innovative Internet advertising solutions. The Company’s proprietary online advertising system, the TYPE-IN™ was designed to create new and highly effective opportunities for brands to advertise online. The platform leverages CAPTCHA authentication for brand messaging to bring unprecedented consumer engagement. With the platform, Solve Media: guarantees brand message delivery and increases recall rates and return on investment for advertisers; creates new revenue opportunities for publishers; and simplifies the authentication process for consumers. Backed by First Round Capital, New Atlantic Ventures, AOL Ventures and prominent angel investors, Solve Media is based in New York City and Philadelphia. http://www.solvemedia.com

REDWOOD CITY, CA – YuMe, the operating system for TV 2.0, today announced the results of a joint study with Nielsen, which quantifies the true impact of online video when combined with a major CPG TV advertising campaign:  reach, frequency, and recall increase substantially even as the CPM rate decreases. The results offer a compelling look at how brands can effectively and easily reach more viewers with a complementary, TV 2.0 media mix of TV and online video. Planning across both media as part of a single holistic campaign delivers an impact and return on investment which dramatically exceeds that of TV alone.

For this study, YuMe utilized Nielsen TV/Internet Fusion to assess the impact of a $500,000 online video ad buy for a PHD client’s $2.6 million TV flight. The flights ran concurrently throughout September 2011. Results show that a $500,000 spend on the Connected Audience Network, YuMe’s premium, in-stream video ad network, increased reach against the targeted 35–54 age demographic by 7 percentage points. In addition, more than 6 million people in the target demographic were not reached by the TV schedule alone, and were picked up only when online video was added to the schedule.

A high level summary of key findings from the YuMe-Nielsen study highlights the many benefits of a TV 2.0 campaign strategy:

•    Content present on multiple media extends reach:  YuMe online video increased reach for the targeted 35–54 age demographic by 7 percentage points when complemented by a TV flight. In addition, nearly 9 million people were exposed to the campaign on multiple screens.

•    Average frequency across screens increases:  The number of respondents exposed to the PHD campaign three or more times increased by 31 percent, while those exposed to the campaign six or more times rose by 52 percent.

•    Low eCPMs for online video drive substantial cost efficiencies:  Although less than one-sixth the cost of the TV schedule, the $500,000 spend invested in the YuMe Network drove an increase of 34 percent in gross rating points (GRPs) from the original TV schedule. The efficiency of the online video spend was nearly double that of the concurrent TV spend and the cost per point (CPP) was reduced by 11 percent.

•    Brand and message recall improves with YuMe:  Impression-per-impression, YuMe online video outperformed TV in terms of both brand and message recall compared to the campaign TV norm. Results of a Nielsen TV Brand Effect analysis showed an increase of 22 percent for brand recall and 31 percent for message recall one day post-exposure.

•    YuMe outperforms online video ad network norms:  YuMe’s Connected Audience Network outperformed its peers in both brand and message recall, demonstrating an increase of 33 and 50 percent respectively seven days post -exposure.

“We know our consumers are watching multiple screens throughout the day and sometimes watching more than one screen at a time,” said Kelley Train, PHD. “Because of this fact, we are constantly pushing our media to be more about reaching the right audience versus the platform in which the ad is being delivered. Utilizing both TV and YuMe’s video network as complimentary partners, we were able to achieve valuable additional reach, efficiency and effectiveness for our client.”

As consumers diversify their entertainment activities across an array of connected devices, it becomes more difficult for advertisers to maximize reach on a single platform. By complementing a schedule of TV ads with a concurrent online video flight, advertisers can reach consumers whether they are watching TV or online video to increase scale and reinforce the brand’s message.

“TV and digital ad planners can no longer operate in a vacuum in which online video advertising remains a silo apart from TV spend, because it fails to account for the fact that audiences are no longer stationary,” said Ed Haslam, Vice President of Marketing for YuMe. “Dual-platform campaigns offer demonstrable value and greatly outperform a TV-only campaign while improving overall cost efficiency.”

For more information, and to download the full report on the YuMe-Nielsen study, please visit www.yume.com/content/whitepapers.

About YuMe
YuMe is the software infrastructure provider powering digital video and the next generation of television with its operating system for TV 2.0. Its video advertising technology and services seamlessly connect advertisers, app developers, content distributors, consumer electronics manufacturers, and publishers across the globe. YuMe’s patent-pending Relevance Engine powers its premium in-stream video ad network, the YuMe Connected Audience Network, and its industry-leading advertising management solutions, ACE for Publishers and ACE for Advertisers. The YuMe Relevance Engine matches the right ad to the right audience on whatever screen they are viewing—PC, mobile, or connected TV. YuMe is a privately held company headquartered in Redwood City, CA with its European headquarters in London. The company is backed by Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures, Intel Capital, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung Ventures, and Translink Capital. For more information, visit www.YuMe.com, follow @YuMevideo on Twitter (www.twitter.com/YuMevideo), or like YuMe on Facebook at www.facebook.com/YuMevideo.

Dozens of clients and partners have adopted Krux technology, including leading media companies such as The Wall Street Journal Digital Network and NBCUniversal.  Further, the company continues to expand its global footprint, with additions to its client roster including major European media companies, such as Financial Times and Sanoma, and the Japanese publisher Recruit.  Krux is also driving key partner relationships outside the US, such as the recent integration of its technology with the leading European Supply-Side Platform, Improve Digital.

One of the key drivers of the rapid adoption of Krux solutions is the increased focus on transparency and control when it comes to how companies manage consumer web data.  A number of Krux clients have recently reported on their success with the company’s data protection technology, Krux Data Sentry.  As Peter Naylor, EVP Digital Media at NBCU explained, “With a network as broad and diverse as NBCU, combined with the partnership complexity that comes with running the Universal Ad Platform, I sleep much better at night knowing we have Krux in our corner and a solution like Data Sentry protecting our most critical asset: our audience data.”

Most important, as of January 2012, the company saw its global reach grow more than 300% over the course of the previous year.  Through widespread adoption of Krux’s solutions by leading premium publishers around the globe, such as The New York Times, Recruit, Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal, Krux has rapidly become the Internet standard for web data protection.  Having developed durable reach of more than 200 million Internet users worldwide, Krux is ideally positioned to drive further adoption of its end-to-end services for consumer data management.  Today, anyone with a website can put data to work making every content, commerce, and advertising interaction feel more personal and more relevant.  Through its growing client, partner, and user reach, Krux supports this shift to a more personal web.

“I’m thrilled to see 2011 investments in our team, our technology, and our US and EU market presence catapult us into 2012,” said Tom Chavez, co-founder and CEO of Krux Digital.  “We’re deepening partner relationships and adding to our client roster almost daily, all while continuing to advance our technology lead, delivering cloud-scale Big Data solutions for some of the consumer web’s most pressing challenges.”

About Krux:
Founded in 2010, Krux delivers data fabric for the consumer web.  The company’s platform helps websites capture, control, and connect data across screens and sources.  With Krux, companies deliver cooler, safer, faster, smarter web experiences.  With Krux, consumers gain confidence that their favorite websites are operating under the plain light of day.  Dozens of website operators in the US, Europe, and Asia have adopted Krux technology, including companies like NBC Universal, Sanoma, Recruit, Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal Digital Network.  Find out more at www.kruxdigital.com.

“Utilizing our online reach of more than two billion daily ad impressions and our ability to target IP addresses directly, CPX is in a unique position to expand the scope and granularity of audience targeting,” said Jonathan Slavin, Chief Revenue Officer of CPX Interactive. “By integrating Semcasting’s data, we can now offer our agency and advertiser partners the ability to link detailed user demographics to precise locations and create next-level audience modeling and look-alike targeting, all at better than an 80 percent match rate against not only our own direct traffic, but also against RTB and exchange traffic.”

“Semcasting’s ability to connect our industry-leading public data to more than 1.4 million home IP zones and 3.8 million business IP zones in the US means advertisers and their agencies now have a way to leverage their existing investments in customer and marketing intelligence to plan their online campaigns. Semcasting’s data and analytics capabilities combined with CPX’s ability to deliver messaging directly to these IP zones at massive scale makes this a synergistic partnership. CPX is an ideal distribution partner for us,” said Ray Kingman, CEO of Semcasting.

About CPX Interactive

CPX Interactive is a digital advertising company consistently serving more than two billion daily ad impressions. Its global distribution engine includes both a private marketplace of more than 4,000 quality publisher sites and an on-demand network with access to virtually every major aggregator of digital media. CPX campaigns are churned through a continuous cycle of planning, execution, optimization, reporting and analysis – each leveraging the company’s unparalleled scalability. CPX has proven success with more than 300 major brands worldwide. For more information, visit http://www.cpxinteractive.com.

About Semcasting

Semcasting is a supplier of predictive data solutions that help marketers, agencies and ad networks target online and offline customers. IP Audience Zones was built with the same predictive modeling technology used in the development of Semcasting’s premium data. It contains detailed, publicly available and modeled information on more than 227 million individuals–mapped as demographic zone clusters to IP Addresses. Semcasting data is licensed to data compilers and ad networks and is used by hundreds of public and private companies each month for targeting T&E, finance, retail telecommunications, and political campaigns.

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced the launch of its Validated Campaign Essentials™ (vCE) product, a new measurement solution for validating digital ad delivery. vCE enables a holistic view of campaign delivery and a verified assessment of ad-exposed audiences via a single, third-party source. Unlike existing single-point solutions, it provides an unduplicated accounting of impressions delivered across a variety of dimensions, such as ads delivered in-view, in the right geography, in a brand safe environment and absent of fraudulent delivery. A U.S.-based vCE Charter Study involving 12 national premium brands found that, in many cases, ads are delivered but not in-view or on target and therefore never have a chance to make an impact.

“The display advertising market today is characterized by an overabundance of inventory, often residing on parts of a web page that are never viewed by the user. This dilutes the impact of campaigns for advertisers and represents a drag on prices to publishers,” said Dr. Magid Abraham, President and CEO of comScore. “Conversely, some ads below the fold are quite visible and deserve more credit. comScore’s introduction of vCE signals an evolution in digital advertising that will bring greater transparency and accountability to the market. Ultimately, this type of third-party validation will help identify and appropriately price the proportion of online ad inventory that delivers value, improve buying and selling decisions, and instill more confidence and trust in the industry.”

vCE enables a comprehensive, holistic view of validated impressions, which can be expressed as ‘validated gross rating points’, or vGRPs. This new metric reflects measurement of ads that were not only delivered, but that had an opportunity to have an impact on consumers. Validated impressions are also the basis for vCE’s campaign audience reports, which include reach and frequency, comprehensive demographics, and behavioral segments only for people with a valid exposure.

vCE Charter Study Findings
To better understand the quality of ad delivery today, comScore conducted a U.S.-based vCE Charter Study, which involved 12 national brands, 3,000 placements, 381,000 site domains and 1.7 billion ad impressions. Select advertisers from the charter study include Allstate, Chrysler, Discover, E*TRADE Financial, Ford, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Kimberly Clark, Kraft, and Sprint. All of the impressions analyzed in the study were delivered in iframes and none required publisher site pixels.

Topline study results are included below, and a full whitepaper with detailed insights and analysis will be published in March 2012.

- Across all charter campaigns measured, 69 percent of the ad impressions were classified as being ‘in-view.’* The remaining 31 percent were delivered but never seen by a consumer, a likely result of a consumer scrolling past the ad before it loaded or a consumer never scrolling the ad into view. In-view percentages varied by site and ranged from 7 percent to 91 percent.

- An average of 4 percent of ad impressions were delivered outside the desired geography, but individual campaigns ran as high as 15 percent. In many cases, ads were served in markets where the advertised product is not sold, meaning wasted ad spend and sub-optimal effectiveness results.

- 72 percent of Charter Study campaigns had at least some ads running next to content deemed “not brand safe” by the advertiser, meaning that the content is deemed objectionable by the brand. This type of unsafe delivery has the potential to damage the brand, creating a difficult situation for all members of the digital advertising ecosystem.

A separate UK-based vCE Charter Study is in progress, with enrollment currently underway. To learn more about participating in the study, please contact Mike Shaw ( mshaw@comscore.com), Head of EMEA Advertising Effectiveness Products. vCE is available in the U.S. immediately and will be gradually rolled out in international markets throughout the first quarter of 2012.

*In-view parameters are consistent with those that have been recommended by an industry consortium called the ‘Making Measurement Make Sense’ initiative, consisting of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the American Association of National Advertisers (4A’s) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB.) These parameters say that at least 50 percent of the advertisement must be viewable for at least 1 second in order to be considered in-view.

Industry Leaders on vCE and vGRP

“One big issue with internet advertising is that not all ads that are served end up being seen. This is a core issue raised by the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative. In order for marketers to have the same confidence in the digital channel as they do in TV, we need measurement around the visibility of ads. What comScore is doing with the vGRP initiative based on validated impressions is an important step in that direction.”
–– Mike Donahue, EVP, Strategic Partnerships, 4As

“At Kellogg’s we are continually seeking to improve the overall effectiveness of every media dollar spent. Key to enabling our decisions is understanding who each impression reaches, how visible our ads are, and where the greatest efficiencies exist. Being able to validate our media delivery through a single source with vCE creates opportunities for both near real-time optimizations as well as enhanced future planning.”

––Aaron Fetters, Associate Director Global Digital Strategy and Analytics at Kellogg Company

“comScore’s new validated Campaign Essentials product is a step forward in addressing several fundamental issues surrounding the current state of counting online ad impressions. comScore’s introduction of validated ad impressions and vGRPs is aligned with the 3MS recommendations of moving the industry to a viable impression standard. vCE is an innovative solution that adds a level of transparency that is welcomed.”

—John Kahan, GM, Business and Customer Intelligence, Microsoft’s Online Services Division

“It is critical that we can understand the extent to which ads delivered on our sites are actually viewed by the intended audience. This type of insight allows us to improve our relationships with consumers and our advertising partners. comScore’s vCE is a welcome innovation, and I am particularly excited about how this measurement solution can help us optimize our site content and the advertising that we deliver on it.”
–– Scott McDonald, Senior Vice President, Research & Insights, Condé Nast

“The inclusion of vCE within the overall comScore suite of tools will offer us another metric to provide to our clients with the type of data they require and have been seeking for many years. They want to know that the money they are spending online is doing its job and will actually have a chance to make an impact. This type of third-party, holistic validation is a great start to do just that and is a win for all parties in the industry. Once standards are in place this can and will serve as a new currency in the marketplace.”

–– Julian Zilberbrand, SVP Global Digital Director, Technology Activation Group, Starcom Mediavest Group

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

NEW YORK – VINDICO, the leading online video ad management platform, has commenced operations in London, Paris and Madrid. VINDICO now offers European advertisers a video ad platform to seamlessly serve, track and measure all of their online video advertising. VINDICO announced the company’s launch into the UK in September and also announced that it had appointed Sonia Fernandez as general manager of European operations at that time.  Since then, VINDICO has launched operations in France and Spain to address the rapidly growing needs of the broader region.

VINDICO’s European expansion comes as IAB Europe’s AdEx reports that digital display, which is inclusive of online video, has recently overtaken search as the fastest growing online ad format in all of Europe, with an average growth rate of 21.3 percent. In the UK specifically, eMarketer predicts video will see the most growth in online advertising, with ad spend forecasted to reach $850 million by 2015, compared with $150 million in 2011. In Spain, the online video market will reach 33 million euros in 2012, accounting for 3.7 percent of total online display ad spending, according to the IAB Europe.

“Demand for online video advertising is surging in many European markets, and we expect this explosive growth to continue in 2012,” says Matt Timothy, president of VINDICO. “The growth that VINDICO is experiencing in both the US and abroad is representative of marketers’ increasing investment in digital video. With operations in the UK, France and Spain, VINDICO is well positioned to meet the needs of advertisers to reach European consumers through the powerful medium of online video.”

VINDICO has deep market penetration, serving almost forty percent of all online video ads in the United States. The company provides video advertising management solutions to over 200 brands through their leading agency groups such as GroupM, Havas, IPG, Publicis and Omnicom.

About VINDICO:
As the first ad management platform dedicated exclusively to video, VINDICO allows advertisers to serve, track and measure all of their online video ad activity. Since 2006, VINDICO has been the gold standard in online video platforms, providing standardized reporting and analytics for the online video industry. The power of online video isn’t just the audiences it reaches and how it reaches them. Its strength also derives from its ability to track an ad campaign and precisely measure the campaign’s effectiveness. For more information, please visit http://www.vindicogroup.com or follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/VINDICO_Group.

Combining Adap.tv’s RTB technology with Collective’s audience data, Collective’s private exchange will offer pre-roll video advertising space across targeted audiences and premium publishers in real-time auctions. Publishers include IPC, WWE, The Independent, Sony Music and iVillage.

The move will see Collective become the first in the UK to launch an RTB private ad marketplace for premium video programming.

“Our marketplace gives advertisers and agency partners a new way to access premium VoD inventory, but with this inventory being in such demand, we don’t see it as a low cost entry to buy video in the UK,” said Jamie Estrin, Director of Collective Video. “RTB pricing is controlled by supply and demand, and high quality premium video is always in high demand in the UK.”

Adap.tv’s interface will run the exchange that connects buyers with Collective’s pre-roll inventory.

“Our unique partnership with Collective will see the launch of the UK’s first RTB private marketplace for video,” said Brian Fitzpatrick, MD for EMEA at Adap.tv. “Real-time bidding is relatively new in the video space – our technology will offer Collective Video’s clients a new way to trade VoD directly.”

About Collective
Collective helps brand advertisers connect and engage with target audiences across display, video and social media. Collective’s industry expertise provides a strategic advantage to its clients by leveraging proprietary audience modelling, insights and ad effectiveness metrics. Our flagship products, Collective Display and Collective Video®, are powered by AMP®, our market-proven data and media management platform. Collective is headquartered in New York with offices in London, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Collective’s investors include Accel Partners®, Greycroft Partners and iNovia Capital.
http://uk.collective.com/

About Adap.tv

Adap.tv builds the technology that makes buying and selling video advertising simple and efficient. The company’s products – Adap.tv for Advertisers, Adap.tv for Publishers and the Adap.tv Marketplace – work in harmony to connect video advertising buyers directly to sellers on a single platform. The Adap.tv Marketplace is the industry’s largest video marketplace for premium publishers and brand name advertisers, with over 6,500 sites selling inventory and hundreds of campaigns running daily. Based in San Mateo, CA and with sales offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle and London, please visit http://adap.tv/.

Robert was CFO of QXL ricardo plc from 1998 to 2008, overseeing development from start-up to the company’s sale to Naspers. He managed a wide range of corporate actions including the company’s dual listing IPO, consolidating the European online auction market with nine acquisitions, the largest over $1 billion, and launching an MBO. The QXL Group was the best performing share on the London Main Market in both 2004 and 2005 and in the All-Share in 2007 with an over 35,000% share price increase in 5 years. Robert was short-listed for CBI / Real FD, “FD of the Year” in 2007 and the following year negotiated the £1 billion sale of QXL via a public take-over offer. Prior to QXL, Robert was CFO of AOL UK and previous roles included that of M&A at Bertelsmann USA and at Verulam Investments. Robert started his career at Bain & Co, having left Cambridge with a First class degree and a post-graduate degree in Engineering. He has an MBA from Insead.

Dr Neil V. Sunderland, Chairman of Adconion Media Group, commented:

“Robert Dighero is an outstanding independent director and entrepreneur who brings insight, vision and a wealth of experience from a commercial and investment perspective to the Adconion board. He is well respected amongst the investment community with comprehensive knowledge of corporate governance issues in both public and private markets. His extraordinary performance as the CFO of the QXL Group speaks for itself. Robert will play a key role in supervising the further development of our corporate infrastructure.”

The Adconion board comprises distinguished figures from the digital and investment community. The enlarged board of directors will continue to support Adconion’s global growth and investment in technological innovation within the online digital advertising space.

ABOUT ADCONION MEDIA GROUP US

Adconion Media Group (www.adconion.com) is one of the largest independent global audience and video content networks, reaching over 325 million unique users – or one-quarter of the total global Internet population – every month. Dedicated to true partnerships with agencies and marketers, Adconion arms agencies with customized solutions and innovative products designed in-house while delivering significant global reach across multiple platforms through a single network. As a digital media holding company, it manages a portfolio of brand and performance solution businesses worldwide. Adconion US wholly owns Adconion Direct, a multi-channel distribution platform spanning display, email and social media; Joost Media, a digital media company devoted to video and content syndication; RedLever, a global studio specializing in developing and producing brand-integrated and associated content; and smartclip, Europe’s leader in digital video advertising.

Adconion has 24 offices in 12 countries around the world. It is a member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), is one of the first companies to be IAB certified with its unique Ad Networks & Exchanges Quality Assurance program in the US and is a founding member of IASH Europe. For more information, visit www.adconion.com.

Los Angeles, CA – PK4 Media, the premium online video advertising network and publishing company today announced the acquisition of JSFOUR, a media and technology company. As part of the acquisition JSFour founder, Jimi Smoot, will join PK4 Media as the VP of Product Development. The two companies have been in collaboration to develop an advanced video distribution platform named Bishop.

The Bishop Video Platform (BVP) is designed for the next generation of online video. At the core of Bishop’s DNA is JSFour’s Render platform, which was engineered for publishers to lower the cost associated with running video on their site. PK4 Media brings advertisers to the mix to offset any cost. Bishop is at the intersection of JSFour’s technology and PK4’s distribution strength. The platform provides an easy-to-use solution for publishers and advertisers seeking to incorporate video on their website, or in their marketing mix.

This ground-breaking format enables a new breed of marketing. Publishers no longer need content delivery network (CDN) relationships, a video player, or an expensive video platform. Now they can quickly and easily upload video to Bishop, embed a player and begin optimizing their content. Videos are automatically monetized. This easy to deploy solution also benefits creators. As content is deployed and syndicated across more than 4,000 sites within the PK4 Media distribution network, royalties go right back to the content creator.

“When JSFour showed us their low cost and streamlined method for publishers to add video their site, light bulbs went off instantly,” said PK4 Media CEO and Founder, Tom Alexander. “We knew that the publishers we have relationships with would benefit from this platform, and any costs would be offset through our brand partners. We acquired the technology almost immediately.”

Mr. Smoot built the Render Platform, the main asset acquired by PK4Media and the technology behind Bishop, while moonlighting during his tenure at Initiative. Throughout his diverse carrier, Jimi has worked on all of the sides of the advertising ecosystem gaining a unique perspective on the ins and outs of the business. He has held several positions in media sales and account planning. Most recently serving as Innovations Manager at Initiative, he was responsible for identifying cutting edge technology-based marketing opportunities for Dr Pepper, VIZIO and KIA. Holding a seat on the thinkLA Adzoo board, Jimi is an active member of the Los Angeles advertising community.

“As someone who is passionate about innovation, I’m absolutely pumped to see some of my technology advance a whole new video platform,” said Jimi Smoot, newly appointed VP of Product Development at PK4 Media.  “Bishop combines content creation with a broad and vast distribution system, enabling the next generation of online video advertising.”

PK4 Media is a premium advertising network and publishing company with a proprietary video platform for publishers, advertisers and content creators. The company offers a brand-centric, performance-based media solution through a unified network of brand-safe publishers.  The platform delivers advanced tracking, targeting and optimization capabilities extending beyond typical video ad solutions.

About PK4 Media
Founded in 2009, PK4 Media is headquartered in Los Angeles, California with sales offices throughout the United States, including San Francisco and New York. PK4 Media is a privately-held company led by industry leaders from OMD, Blue Lithium, ValueClick, Publicis, and Initiative. For more information, please visit: www.pk4media.com.

LONDON – MirriAd Limited, the market leader in digital product placement, announces the launch of the ‘Hub’, an integrated solution for broadcasters. MirriAd has developed a unique platform for the digital placement of branded imagery seamlessly into professional video that is scalable and can be managed by broadcasters directly. For the first time, broadcasters can enable large sales forces to sell product placement inventory whilst maintaining control of the content.

Leading brands have confirmed that previewing opportunities, understanding the context and knowing the precise size, position, and duration of the placement opportunity de-risks what can otherwise be considered a risky purchase.

The MirriAd Hub is a brand new concept and relies on a networked technology which empowers producer/broadcasters to cost effectively meet client needs for reliable and valuable placement in premium content. The Hub handles media logistics locally, analyses video content, creates inventory suitable for contextual placements and then places it in a secure portal or ‘walled garden’ for sale.

A Hub located at a broadcaster’s premises devolves total control of the creative and commercial decision making to the sales and production teams with fast turnaround at minimal overhead. The Hub is provided by MirriAd as part of the service business model, requiring only minimal initial capital outlay from the broadcaster.

Seven Network, a leading national broadcaster in Australia, deployed a Hub in late spring 2011. After initial trials, Seven launched the Hub Digital Product Placement service commercially in the middle of 2011, to great effect. Today, Seven is placing brands digitally into several top rated shows and long running series. The process is working seamlessly between production and sales organisations and has resulted in a fast growing new revenue stream for the network, having amortized the initial investment within the first six months of commercial operations.

The Hub uses MirriAd’s ZoneSense software technology running on local hardware central to which is a cluster of NVIDIA’s very high performance GPUs. This enables broadcasters to create inventory comprised of visuals at high speed combined with analytical and marketing data which can then be placed in an online Catalogue for sale to brands and agencies. The Catalogue is integrated directly into the MirriAd platform and supports all the producer/broadcaster editorial approvals and compliance processes, thus ensuring that inventory offered to brands and agencies is ready to go.

Mark Popkiewicz, MirriAd CEO, said:

“Seven is a fast mover with high standards for production values and commercial operations. They have deployed a new commercial process which fits seamlessly into their operations and the Hub is central to that. We will be launching our new services such as MirriAd Analytics and the MirriAd Catalogue within Seven early in 2012.”

Kurt Burnette, Chief Sales & Digital Officer, Seven Media Group said:

“MirriAd has proven to be the leading technology in digital product placement. The introduction of The Hub provides further ability for our customers to see exactly what, when and where integration can happen across Seven Network owned and produced properties, in advance and all in one place. Each program and opportunity can be carefully selected for its impact and relevance to the brand.

“MirriAd and Seven have been working together for 12 months and have fully developed the offer for the Australian market, ensuring the MirriAd and Seven offering remains the world’s best practice for advertisers.“

About MirriAd

Launched in September 2007 by CEO, Mark Popkiewicz, previously a director of BBC Ventures, MirriAd aims to revolutionize product placement for the digital era. MirriAd has developed an end to end solution able to digitally place brand imagery into any video on demand and at scale. MirriAd’s digital placements have been extensively researched and proven to achieve excellent results for brands whilst positively impacting production values and the viewer experience on line and on TV.

Headquartered in London with offices in New York and Mumbai, MirriAd is privately owned with institutional investors including Oxford Technology Management, Oxford Capital Partners, STV Group PLC, Seraphim Capital and South East Growth Fund and notable angel investors Bruce Smith and Stephen Bullock.

LAS VEGAS – Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd, a global leader in digital media and digital convergence technologies, announced the launch of Samsung AdHub, its advertising platform for the Samsung Smart TV platform. Through the newly-announced AdHub service, brands can deliver 3D, video and interactive advertisements into the living room via Samsung’s market-leading Smart TVs.

Samsung AdHub allows delivery of advertisements to the front-page of Samsung’s Smart TV interface, with multiple forms of compelling digital interactivity. Advertisements will be dynamic, allowing audiences to click to access video content, new applications and services, or the web browser. The company’s new Smart TV advertising platform will provide marketers and ad creatives new monetization models and opportunities to engage and interact with target audiences.

Samsung AdHub also enables a unique 3D video advertising experience within the Samsung branded 3D VOD service, ‘Explore 3D’ application. Samsung is the first consumer electronics manufacturer to offer 3D advertising on Smart TVs, giving advertisers new opportunities to create compelling and visually dynamic content in native 3D.

“Samsung is delivering the future of Smart TV now. With Samsung AdHub, we are enabling a richer content ecosystem that will benefit advertisers, application developers and consumers. Samsung’s global reach and expertise in Smart TV is creating a unique and innovative way for marketers to reach audiences with exciting and interesting content. We are helping brands break creative boundaries,” said Daniel Park, Vice President of Samsung’s Media Solution Center.

“Our complete Smart TV advertising solution is another example of our commitment to drive innovation in the TV market. Our goal is to create new opportunities throughout the Smart TV value-chain; providing a platform for advertisers and developers to participate is a key element of this goal. Ultimately, we think this is a win for consumers, because a dedicated way for developers to monetize services will contribute to a richer, more robust content experience,” added Park.

Samsung has already begun running several campaigns from leading advertisers such as State Farm and Best Buy. The company has also formed advertising sales partnerships with Rovi and YuMe. Smart TV advertising has launched in Korea and the United States.

Samsung expects to deploy its Smart TV in-app advertising solution in 2012. Smart TV application developers will be able to incorporate in-app capabilities available through the Samsung SDK (Software Development Kit) 3.0 for Samsung Smart TVs.

Visit http://www.samsungadhub.com for more information about Samsung AdHub.

About Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is a global leader in semiconductor, telecommunication, digital media and digital convergence technologies with 2010 consolidated sales of US$135.8 billion. Employing approximately 190,500 people in 206 offices across 68 countries, the company operates two separate organizations to coordinate its nine independent business units: Digital Media & Communications, comprising Visual Display, Mobile Communications, Telecommunication Systems, Digital Appliances, IT Solutions, and Digital Imaging; and Device Solutions, consisting of Memory, System LSI and LCD. Recognized for its industry-leading performance across a range of economic, environmental and social criteria, Samsung Electronics was named the world’s most sustainable technology company in the 2011 Dow Jones Sustainability Index. For more information, please visit www.samsung.com.

About Rovi

Rovi Corporation is focused on revolutionizing the digital entertainment landscape by delivering solutions that enable consumers to intuitively connect to new entertainment from many sources and locations. The company also provides extensive entertainment discovery solutions for television, movies, music and photos to its customers in the consumer electronics, cable and satellite, entertainment and online distribution markets. These solutions, complemented by industry leading entertainment data, create the connections between people and technology, and enable them to discover and manage entertainment in an enjoyable form.

Rovi holds approximately 5,100 issued or pending patents worldwide and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with numerous offices across the United States and around the world including Japan, China, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom. More information about Rovi can be found at http://www.rovicorp.com/.

About YuMe

YuMe is the software infrastructure provider powering digital video and the next generation of television with its operating system for TV 2.0. Its video advertising technology and services seamlessly connect advertisers, app developers, content distributors, consumer electronics manufacturers, and publishers across the globe. YuMe’s patent-pending Relevance Engine powers its premium in-stream video ad network, the YuMe Connected Audience Network, and its industry-leading advertising management solutions, ACE for Publishers and ACE for Advertisers. The YuMe Relevance Engine matches the right ad to the right audience on whatever screen they are viewing—PC, mobile, or connected TV. YuMe is a privately held company headquartered in Redwood City, CA with its European headquarters in London. The company is backed by Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures, Intel Capital, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung Ventures, and Translink Capital. For more information, visit www.YuMe.com, follow @YuMevideo on Twitter (www.twitter.com/YuMevideo), or like YuMe on Facebook at www.facebook.com/YuMevideo.

NEW YORK – The year ended with an extremely strong Q4 for online advertising as U.S. paid search spending grew 22% year-over-year resulting in the best quarter to date. Retailers drove much of this spending, as holiday shopping initiatives pushed their search budgets up 26% year-over-year. Mobile search advertising among retailers was up a huge 269% YoY and accounted for 14% of total retail search budgets – peaking at 24% on Black Friday.

These figures are released quarterly by IgnitionOne, a leading digital marketing firm, managing more than $1 billion in online advertising.

Key findings in the report:

•    Mobile search is growing at an enormous rate – YoY mobile search ad impressions are up 317% and spend is up 269%. Among retailers, mobile search ad spend accounted for 14.2% of total paid search budgets, compared to 5.2% last year. This spiked on Black Friday with 24% of retail search ad spend going towards mobile queries.

•    Search advertising has its best quarter ever – It was a strong holiday season for search with advertising spend up 22% YoY in Q4. Search advertising spend among retailers was up even higher at 26% YoY. There were also large YoY increases in impressions (42%), clicks (42%) and transactions (67%).

•    Search costs (CPCs) declining – In total, Q4 CPCs are down -8.6% YoY and -2.3% compared to last quarter. This trend benefits both marketers and Google as clicks cost less while monetizing at the same rate and expanding impression base and higher clickthrough rates point to revenue growth for Google. The trend is driven by Google, as Yahoo!/Bing saw a YoY 6.4% increase in CPCs.

•    Google retains market share lead – In mid-Q4, Yahoo!/Bing held only a 16.6% share of the search market, but as expected, given its retail consumer focus, it rebounded with a stronger holiday shopping season.  However, by the end of Q4, search market share remained largely unchanged from the previous quarter, with Google commanding 81.8% compared to Yahoo!/Bing at 18.2%.

•    Europe search advertising also on the rise – Q4 shows gains for European search advertising as spend increased 14%, clicks increased 22% and Clickthrough Rate (CTR) increased 19%.

•    Google continues to grow in display – Spending on display was up 9.3% and impressions were up 31.5%. The growth for Q4 came from Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which saw a 105.5% increase in spend.

“Adoption of smart phones and tablets is exploding and mobile search is becoming a major part of the shopping experience for many consumers,” said Roger Barnette, President of IgnitionOne. “Advertisers are responding to this trend, which is clearly shown in the enormous growth of mobile search advertising spending.”

This report is the latest in a series of reports from IgnitionOne reviewing trends across the online advertising landscape. Previous quarterly reports can be downloaded at http://bit.ly/ignitiononeresearch

About IgnitionOne
IgnitionOne is the world’s first closed loop Digital Marketing Suite, offering multiple solutions to improve online performance within a single interface. Solutions include ad management and optimization (search, display and Facebook), cross-channel attribution and website optimization. The company was formed in 2011 by combining online ad management platform, SearchIgnite, with audience profiling and on-site optimization from Netmining.

Ignition One currently powers more than $20 billion in revenue each year for some of the world’s leading online marketers, including General Motors, Chico’s, Ann Taylor, Fiat and advertising agencies such as MRM Worldwide, CyberAgent and more.

For more information, please visit http://www.ignitionone.com or follow the company on Twitter @ignitionone.

BOSTON, MA and COLOGNE, GERMANY – DataXu (www.dataxu.com), provider of the industry’s #1 ranked demand-side platform (DSP), announced that it has acquired the leading European DSP service provider, Mexad.  With offices in Germany, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland, and Brazil, Mexad leads in European and Latin American market share, providing local service and superior results for customers across more than 60 countries.

Known for its exceptional customer service and expertise, Mexad will now offer DataXu’s leading digital marketing management platform, DX3 – the #1 ranked Current DSP Offering in the December 2011 Forrester Research, Inc. report, “The Forrester Wave™: Demand-Side Platforms, Q4 2011” – to brands and agencies looking to increase the returns on their digital investments. By uniting best-in-class service and technology, the combined powerhouse now offers advertisers a trusted neutral partner with the largest number of local service centers in the world.

Becoming part of DataXu comes at an important time for brands looking to run global programs, leveraging the effectiveness and efficiency of an enterprise-class platform.  As economic concerns deepen, companies are looking to digital marketing to increase sales and drive higher profits. Multinational advertisers that have relied on DX3 to optimize their digital marketing efforts in North America can now derive the same benefits at unrivalled global scale with country-specific expertise and local service.

“Budgets are growing by double digits as brands seek to capitalize on the cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and accountability that digital provides,” said Sacha Berlik, CEO of Mexad. “While we pride ourselves on supporting a variety of solutions, we’ve been acquired by the best in the industry.  We look forward to bringing our clients new capabilities provided by DX3, such as advanced attribution management and active analytics, which are not currently available from any other vendor in Europe.”

“The advertising industry is undergoing a seismic change as consumers around the world embrace digital devices and marketers struggle to keep up,” commented Mike Baker, CEO and co-founder of DataXu. “To succeed in this new world, a marketer needs to partner with a firm that offers not only the best technology, but also a globally-scalable service capability with expertise in data and analytics.  Together, Mexad and DataXu will provide a unique value to the world’s largest brands.”

About DataXu

DataXu has developed the industry’s only fully-integrated enterprise digital marketing management (DMM) platform – DX3. Comprised of the #1 ranked demand-side platform as well as sophisticated data management and attribution management capabilities, DX3 defines a new class of enterprise solutions that manage, optimize, and automate digital marketing initiatives to turn Big Data into profitable actions. DataXu’s executive team unites leading executives in digital media with MIT technologists. The private company is backed by Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners and Menlo Ventures. For more information, visit www.dataxu.com or follow us on Twitter at @dataxu.

About Mexad

Mexad, founded in 2008, is the first and leading European RTB-service provider with offices in London, Paris, Milan, Madrid, Cologne, Warsaw and Sao Paulo (Brazil). With access to over 20 billion RTB ad impressions per day, Mexad purchases the relevant ad placements at the right time for the right user for its media-agency clients. As the leading RTB specialist Mexad offers its agency clients the technology and services for using various auction-based exchange technologies for the purchase of advertising space on the Internet, in a synchronized, effective and brand-safe manner.

NEW YORK – PubMatic (www.PubMatic.com), a media technology company that provides a holistic inventory, data and advertising revenue optimization platform for digital publishers, announced that Forrester Research, Inc. has named it a leading sell-side platform.

PubMatic’s recognition was published in “The Forrester Wave: Sell-Side Platforms, Q4 2011,” which evaluated companies based on 34 criteria including the platform’s current offering, strategy and market presence.

“PubMatic has been leading the way for helping publishers maximize revenue for nearly five years and we’re delighted that our technology, innovation and commitment to service have been recognized by both Forrester and our clients,” said Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO of PubMatic. “In the coming months, we will continue to deliver industry-leading products and services that help publishers navigate the increasing complexity of the digital marketplace.”

The analysts noted that while all leading sell-side platforms offer strong publisher controls and deep levels of reporting, PubMatic specifically “excels at yield optimization and serving publisher needs like audience data management.” The company stood out as the only technology provider whose data management capabilities were cited in the report.

“Leading publishers are increasingly adopting sales platforms that enable them to gain new insights into their media and audience to identify new sales opportunities,” said Kirk McDonald, President of PubMatic. “PubMatic provides one complete solution to meet these publishers’ needs and we will continue to lead this category by offering publishers even more ways to grow their businesses.”

About PubMatic

PubMatic’s (www.PubMatic.com) ad management and monetization technology combines an impression-level ad auction, the most comprehensive brand protection tools, and enterprise ad operations support to give the Web’s top publishers the most control over their revenue and brand. Some of the world’s most respected online publishers have chosen to work with PubMatic, including The Huffington Post, eBay, United Online, TV Guide, and the majority of the comScore Top 10.

PubMatic is privately held, backed by funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Nexus Venture Partners, and Helion Ventures, and has seven offices around the world in the US, Europe, and Asia.

The addition of the latest digital video advertising technologies to 24/7 Real Media’s award-winning Open AdStream® ad management platform, creates new and expanded revenue generating opportunities for clients of both companies and gives 24/7 Real Media the industry’s most comprehensive integrated advertising management platform.

“Panache’s technology capabilities and extensive selection of video ad formats are unmatched in the industry,” said David J. Moore, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of 24/7 Real Media. “The addition of these assets to 24/7 Real Media’s robust offerings, will empower us to satisfy the large and growing appetite for video in the digital advertising marketplace.”

Online video advertising is expected to continue its explosive growth. A recent study released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), conducted by Advertiser Perceptions, shows that 69% of marketers and 55% of agencies plan to increase their digital video advertising, with 22% growth predicted in the next 12 months.** 24/7 Real Media is now positioned to help its clients seize this growth opportunity. Panache’s Ad Catalog includes a portfolio of 25 formats, all of which are supported on a range of commonly used video players.

“24/7 Real Media is a respected leader in multiplatform ad management, targeting and analytics,” said Steve Robinson, President, Panache. “Our combined capabilities create opportunities to greatly boost video and advertising revenues for our clients across all formats and devices, while reducing their operating costs and increasing efficiencies. Any publisher serious about profitable video ad monetization needs to pause, put decisions on hold, and look at what our combined companies bring to the table.”

By fully integrating Panache’s digital video advertising capabilities into its market-leading technology platform, Open AdStream, 24/7 Real Media leaps ahead on in-stream video with workflow, formats, and analytics-driven insights that drive new revenue opportunities for publishers, advertisers and agencies alike. Advertisers now have access to scaled reach with brand safe video capabilities across 24/7 Real Media’s Global Web Alliance and many of the premium publishers leveraging Open AdStream.

** Source: An Inside Look at Demand Side Perceptions of Digital Video Advertising, http://www.iab.net/digital_video_perceptions

About 24/7 Real Media, Inc.

24/7 Real Media, Inc., a WPP company, provides digital marketing solutions for advertisers and publishers globally by empowering them to reach their target audiences with greater precision and transparency, resulting in better ROI. 24/7 Real Media’s award-winning ad management platform, Open AdStream®, and its Global Web Alliance of high quality publisher websites, have turned the art of reaching audiences across any digital medium into a measurable science. Behind every insight, there’s the experience of 18 offices in 12 countries, billions of global advertising impressions served every month and a stellar reputation as a leader in the digital marketing industry. 24/7 Real Media is headquartered in New York and operates throughout North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. For more information, please visit www.247realmedia.com.

24/7 Real Media is a member of the NAI and adheres to the NAI privacy principles that have been applauded by the FTC. These principles are designed to help ensure Internet user privacy. For more information about online data collection associated with ad serving, including online preference marketing and an opportunity to opt-out of 24/7 Real Media cookies, go to: www.networkadvertising.org.

24/7 Real Media: The Science of Digital Marketing

About Panache

Panache provides digital video ad fulfillment software and services that help premium publishers accelerate ad revenues through ad planning, innovative ad formats, workflow processes and performance metrics. Paired with professional services and unparalleled domain expertise, Panache enables leading premium publishers such as Fox News, CBS, and MTV Networks to grow their digital video advertising business with ease. Founded in 2006, Panache is a privately-held company headquartered in Los Angeles.

SAN FRANCISCO – LiveRail, the first real-time video ad technology platform for publishers, networks and agencies, and MediaMath, the first and only enterprise-class DSP, announced that LiveRail will serve MediaMath as a video ad serving partner.

Through LiveRail’s technology, MediaMath can now empower marketing professionals to deliver more video advertising in real time across a network of top publishers, utilizing the same automatic buying, efficient pricing, and seamless delivery buyers expect from MediaMath’s platform. The DSP will also sell video inventory from LiveRail’s network of publishers.

Through strategic partnerships with the leading DSPs, LiveRail is now powering the industry transition toward automated, real-time video ad buying. With LiveRail’s technology, DSPs can manage their real-time video ad sales alongside their display sales, and also use LiveRail as a video ad server. LiveRail’s direct relationships with publishers also provide DSPs with both the video ad inventory and consumer targeting that buyers are eagerly taking advantage of.

Nearly $50 million will be spent on video RTB this year, but rapid growth in video ad networks, DSPs, and agency trading desks will lead to triple-digit growth in 2012. LiveRail’s technology touches all sides of the video advertising spectrum, helping agencies, DSPs, and publishers manager video ad sales, inventory, and analytics while ensuring multi-platform delivery, support of VAST and VPAID standards, and total buying transparency.

“Programmatic buying is taking off in the display ad space and buyers are increasingly interested in exploring the potential of video RTB,” said Joe Zawadzki, MediaMath’s CEO. “Because LiveRail offers fully automated buying and easy ad serving through its network of publishers, they were the ideal partner to accelerate our real-time video offering.”

“By further expanding its video offering, MediaMath is showing that ad buyers are very interested in the potential and efficiency of RTB for video,” said Mark Trefgarne, LiveRail CEO. “We’ve seen interest in video RTB grow steadily over the past half year, which is a great sign for the video ad segment. More potential buyers encourage more publishers to adopt the technology, opening up more inventory and creating more opportunities to match advertising to targeted viewers.”

About LiveRail

LiveRail delivers technology solutions that enable and enhance the monetization of Internet-distributed video. By focusing specifically on challenges and opportunities created by online video, its tools are designed to be easier, more efficient and more effective than traditional display ad servers to deliver and track advertising into this new medium. Founded in 2007, LiveRail’s senior team is led by its founders, Mark Trefgarne (CEO) and Andrei Dunca (CTO). LiveRail Inc. is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with offices in New York City and Romania. LiveRail is backed by Pond Ventures.

SAN MATEO, Calif. – Brand.net, the company that connects the world’s biggest brands to their customers across digital media, announced a major expansion of the contextual, targeting, brand safety and campaign optimization features of its video advertising solution.

“Our first generation video product was designed to meet our brand advertisers’ request for guaranteed in-stream only campaigns, in premium, brand-safe environments, with branding impact optimization and measurement completely integrated across video, rich media and display,” said Elizabeth Blair, CEO of Brand.net. “During 2011, demand has consistently exceeded our capacity. With this product release, we increase our in-stream video media delivery capacity more than tenfold and significantly expand the available features and functionality, all while maintaining our full set of reach, frequency, audience composition, media delivery, pricing and quality guarantees.”

Specific enhancements include:

- An expanded set of contextual options within Entertainment, News, Lifestyles and other content categories

- Expanded audience targeting from leading third-party audience data providers including eXelate, Nielsen, Catalina, and Bizo, and more granular geo targeting options

- Full RTB integration with leading video ad exchanges, including Doubleclick Ad Exchange and Adap.TV
Brand-safe environment assurance, through enhanced SafeScreen™ page-level content quality filtering, and full support for third-party verification options

- Impression cross-format campaign optimization to ensure achievement of campaign guarantees and maximum brand KPI performance across display, rich media, and in-stream video formats

- Expanded reporting insights across delivery, composition, GRP, TRP, completion and engagement metrics

Brand.net video continues to incorporate only 100% IAB and VAST-compliant in-stream ad formats, with no hidden in-banner video ad bundling. The success of campaigns including in-stream video can be proved through Brand.net’s full suite of branding-impact measurement solutions, including attitudinal surveys, ActivityLink™ online behavioral impact, and social media measurement. Brand advertisers can also add in-stream video to SalesLink® campaigns, where Brand.net has delivered a more than 500% average ROI.

By extending the MFP guarantees to all types of video campaigns, traditionally a more unpredictable format, Brand.net is enabling large brand advertisers to more effectively plan, execute, and measure their video ad campaigns.

About Brand.net

Brand.net (www.brand.net) connects the world’s biggest brands to their customers across digital media. The company’s MFP™ advertising platform guarantees reach and frequency, audience composition, media delivery and pricing in quality environments up to a year in advance. Brand.net optimizes every interaction for branding impact, proving success through online engagement, awareness and offline purchase. The company leads the industry with an offline sales average ROI of over 500%.

The company is privately held and headquartered in Silicon Valley.

ATLANTA – Digital Element, the leading provider of geolocation and IP Intelligence technology, announced that Adcloud, an independent technology and service provider for the optimized exchange of online advertising, has deployed its NetAcuity Edge global, hyperlocal geolocation data to accurately target ads down to postcode geographic areas.

Adcloud provides up to 5,000 advertising contacts per second for 3,500 advertisers on more than 500 premium websites in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Spain. Its clients include Spiegel QC, Swisscom and Omnicom Media Group. Adcloud has integrated NetAcuity Edge within its new postcode-level targeting product, which the company offers to its customers as part of a cutting-edge targeting suite aimed at reaching locally defined target groups with more accuracy and granularity. This newfound depth in targeted advertising provides Adcloud customers with higher value on the buy side and better monetization for the sell side.

“There is a high demand for more specific targeting of performance campaigns aimed at potential customers with an affinity for a particular product or service within a specific geographic location,” said Henning Lange, managing director of Adcloud GmbH. “Especially in the local market, performance is an extremely relevant topic. We’re seeing a lot of demand by customers that are only active in smaller regions of Germany, for example. With Digital Element’s technology, we can increase the overall performance of customers’ campaigns by improving campaign flow, targeting levels, and, ultimately, response rates.”

Now extending hyperlocal targeting across the globe, NetAcuity Edge has revolutionized the IP geolocation space by providing the only validated IP-to-postcode geographic data on the market. While IP targeting techniques traditionally rely on routing infrastructure analysis to an approximate city-level location, NetAcuity Edge combines traditional infrastructure analysis with anonymous insight gleaned from a network of global commercial partners to better map the Internet. The result is the most granular and accurate hyperlocal dataset that maintains user anonymity and complies with the highest standards of end-user privacy. In fact, Adcloud’s geotargeting complies with the data protection guidelines set out in Section 15 of the German Federal Data Protection Act.

“During the past year, European marketers have increased their online advertising spends as they place more focus on digital forms of marketing and communications,” said Frank Bobo, Vice President, Digital Element. “And with those increased budgets come additional demands for higher performing campaigns that more efficiently and accurately target potential customers to deliver exceptional return on their online advertising investments. Adcloud is proactively rising to meet these performance demands by expanding its geolocation services to more precisely target the right campaign to the right user at the right time in the right place.”

In 2011, it is projected that $18.7 billion (approx. €13.8 billion) was spent in online advertising in Western Europe, while Eastern Europeans are estimated to have spent $3.2 billion (approx. €2.4 billion). In 2012, the growth is expected to continue with online ad spending expected to reach its highest levels in the last few years (17.5 percent in Eastern Europe and 12.1 percent Western Europe). By 2014, online ad spend growth will reach 20.5 percent across all of Europe.1

About Digital Element

Digital Element delivers the de facto standard in IP Intelligence, providing coverage for 99.9999 percent of the Internet. Digital Element’s patented technology combines Internet routing infrastructure analysis with hundreds of millions of partner-derived online end-points, resulting in the most accurate IP geolocation data available today. Most of the world’s largest networks, websites, video portals and social networks deploy Digital Element’s IP technology to target advertising, localize content and video streaming, manage geographic rights, and enhance analytics. As the industry pioneer, Digital Element has long been the technical leader in evolving non-invasive IP Intelligence technology and now offers many IP datasets including Country/Region/City/Postcode Geography, Connection Speed, Domain Name, ISP, Company Name, Industry, Home/Business, Language, and Proxy information.

For more information on how to uncover new levels of insight about online users, please visit www.digitalelement.com. Digital Element is a business unit of Digital Envoy.

About Adcloud

Adcloud is an independent technology and service provider for the optimised exchange of online advertising. The Adcloud technology enables clients to offer and optimally control campaigns on their own advertising space. All participants can manage their own advertising space and campaigns on the Adcloud Marketplace and either use these exclusively for their own clients and placements or release them for trade to the whole platform. Today, Adcloud provides up to 5000 advertising contacts per second for 3500 advertisers on over 500 premium websites in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Spain. Adcloud’s clients include Goldbach Media, Omnicom Media Group, OMS, Ringier, SevenOne Interactive, Spiegel QC, Swisscom, Tamedia, Tomorrow-Focus Media and VivaKi. Adcloud has been a subsidiary of Deutsche Post since the beginning of 2011. More information at: http://adcloud.com.

1 WSI Internet Marketing Trends Report 2011

NEW YORK – Online targeting platform leader [x+1], www.xplusone.com, announced that the DSP component of its digital marketing hub was named a leader in the Demand-Side Platform (DSP) category in a new report from Forrester Research, Inc.

[x+1] was singled out in “The Forrester Wave™: Demand-Side Platforms, Q4 2011” as being the only vendor they assessed that “offers coordinated [ad] targeting and optimization across display media and clients’ sites.” It also was among the vendors who received the highest rating in the Forrester report for company leadership.

[x+1] was also cited by Forrester in the report for its “long legacy of managing proprietary client data sets … for targeting purposes.” Further, Forrester found that [x+1] was rated well by its clients, receiving particularly high marks for “its audience targeting capabilities, its strategic guidance, its overall responsiveness and the strength of its management team.”

According to Forrester, [x+1] also was lauded by its “large and happy client base” for its campaign execution (including algorithmic optimization) and overall client support, further noting that clients “are highly likely to recommend [x+1] to others.”

Some of the criteria for being selected for review by Forrester were strength in real-time bidding (RTB), with at least half of impression volume being RTB-enabled; the ability to support large media buyer clients, with monthly impression volume of 2 billion-plus; and an offering that included a range of self-service tools available to clients.

The company’s flagship solution is [x+1] Origin, its digital marketing hub, which allows marketers to optimize and manage all inbound interactions on websites; connect and synchronize all outbound communications across display, email and mobile; and centralize data from all sources, allowing data-driven insights from each channel to easily inform other channels.

The company has long-term client relationships with Fortune 500 companies in financial services, telecommunications, insurance and travel, with particular strengths in data management via the integration of client, customer and third-party data sources to achieve marketing performance gains.

“For more than 10 years, our company has been in the forefront of advertising technology in terms of consistent product innovation, strong results and cutting-edge solutions and capabilities,” said John Nardone, chairman and CEO of [xdone+1]. “This recognition by Forrester of our position as a DSP leader is another validation of our unwavering commitment to excellence, client satisfaction and the overall advancement of our industry.”

For more information on [x+1] and digital marketing integration, visit www.xplusone.com; follow us on twitter @xplusone.

interclick has built an industry leading data valuation platform optimized to work with large data volumes across multiple providers and marketplaces. It dramatically improves data targeted solutions and optimizes returns for advertisers across a variety of pooled premium supply. interclick brings new premium supply and a rich set of campaign reporting tools that will allow Yahoo! to provide improved insights on performance.

“With interclick, Yahoo! has acquired technology and talent that will enable us to offer better and more efficient campaigns to marketers,” said Wayne Powers, SVP of North American Advertising Sales at Yahoo!. “We are pleased to welcome the interclick team to Yahoo! and look forward to the innovative new solutions we will be able to offer.”

Yahoo! expects to complete the acquisition of interclick through a “short-form” merger. In the merger, all remaining shares of interclick common stock (other than shares held by interclick, Yahoo! or their subsidiaries, and shares held by stockholders, if any, who properly exercise their appraisal rights under applicable Delaware law) will be acquired for $9.00 per share. After the merger, interclick will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo!.

In order to complete the “short form” merger, Yahoo! will exercise its “top-up” option pursuant to the merger agreement to purchase directly from interclick an additional number of shares, for $9.00 per share (the same price paid in the tender offer). Together with the shares purchased in the tender offer, Yahoo! will own at least 90% of the outstanding shares of interclick common stock.

About Yahoo!

Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) is the premier digital media company, creating deeply personal digital experiences that keep more than half a billion people connected to what matters most to them, across devices and around the globe. And Yahoo!’s unique combination of Science + Art + Scale connects advertisers to the consumers who build their businesses. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. For more information, visit the pressroom (pressroom.yahoo.com) or the company’s blog, Yodel Anecdotal (yodel.yahoo.com).

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – Double Fusion, the leading independent in-game advertising network, announced its acquisition of NeoEdge Networks, a pioneer in social and casual in-game advertising. This strategic acquisition of NeoEdge’s assets positions Double Fusion as the premier, comprehensive in-game advertising solution for advertisers, brand marketers and publishers to reach any demographic playing any game genre on the PlayStation®3 system as well as social and casual platforms.

NeoEdge and its partners add over 100 million monthly video impressions in numerous casual and social games to Double Fusion’s extensive global network of 3 billion monthly impressions in top games from publishing partners such as Ubisoft, THQ and 2K Sports. In addition, much of this new social inventory is based on the latest highly engaging advertising formats designed to deliver powerful brand interaction with consumers.

“This acquisition highlights our commitment to deliver a complete 360 degree in-game advertising solution for our clients and partners,” said Dan Chambers, Double Fusion’s Head of Sales. “Gaming has become much more than the entertainment of choice for males 18-34. With the dramatic rise of social and casual gaming, it’s now mainstream and appeals to women as well as Generations X and Y. You can basically find a game to fit every age and demographic.”

By offering a full spectrum of dynamic in-game advertising opportunities in console, social and casual gaming, Chambers points out that Double Fusion enables advertisers and brand marketers to reach “super targeted, super engaged, super consumers” with high impact campaigns.

According to technology researcher Gartner Group, worldwide spending on gaming will exceed $74 billion this year, up 10.4% from 2010. By 2015, spending will reach $112 billion with online gaming rising to $28.3 billion in 2015. PopCap Games Research reports that there are an estimated 98 million social gamers in the US, a 71% increase since just 2010.

Leveraging this explosive growth, in-game advertising is proving to be a ‘must have’ in today’s media buying mix. Gaming offers a uniquely engaging environment that leads to across the board better brand awareness and recall versus TV, radio, print or other media. In-game ads provide access to an affluent, brand-literate audience and reach every segment of the population. Having worked with some of today’s blue chip brands including McDonald’s, Twentieth Century Fox, Dr. Pepper, State Farm and Toyota, Double Fusion has exclusive in-game opportunities with 2K Sports, as well as games like Pro Evolution Soccer 2012, Square Enix’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment’s Mortal Kombat and Ubisoft’s Shaun White Skateboarding and Driver®: San Francisco.

“THQ has always had an excellent relationship with Double Fusion and we are excited about their recent expansion,” said Tim Walsh, Vice President, THQ Partners. “We have and will continue to embrace in-game advertising to add realism, information and an additional revenue stream for us and our developers.”

To expand its presence in Canada, Double Fusion also sealed an exclusive sales relationship with Toronto-based Cue Digital Media. Recently named one of “Canada’s Most Promising New Digital Companies” at The Digi Awards, Cue represents several highly visible, U.S.-based digital content sites, including UFC.com, Heavy.com, CollegeHumor.com, celebrity news site TMZ.com and FunnyOrDie.com.

“We are excited to add Double Fusion to Cue’s roster of top tier media properties,” commented Cue CEO David U.K. “With Canada’s gaming industry representing $1.7 billion in economic activity in 2011, with an expected growth rate of 17% over the next two years as per ESRB 2011 Canadian Study, there is clearly a massive opportunity for Canadian marketers to reach deeply engaged consumers through in-gaming advertising.”

To help leverage its expanding footprint, Double Fusion has also opened a New York sales office. Newly hired Jesse Paynter, with over 6 years of experience at AOL as well as stints at Turner Broadcasting and Ryan Partnership, will lead the team as VP of East Coast Sales. Paynter will be joined by Senior Sales Director, Lou Bridda and Sales Director, Don Snellings. Senior Sales Director Michele Sushin has also joined Chambers in Double Fusion’s West Coast office.

About Double Fusion

Double Fusion is one of the world’s leading in-game advertising networks with unmatched reach across console, social and casual gaming. Double Fusion connects Fortune 500 brands to millions of video game players through its award-winning dynamic ad-serving technology and marketing services. Double Fusion provides highly engaged, authentic experiences for gamers and the advertisers looking to reach them across all demographics, platforms and game genres.

Privately-held and headquartered in Santa Monica, Double Fusion has offices and/or affiliates in Buenos Aires, Jerusalem, London, Madrid, New York, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto.

For more information: www.doublefusion.com and www.facebook.com/doublefusionads.

With Shopper Access, brands can connect both display and video ad campaigns with actual offline sales to understand campaign effectiveness and optimize it to increase their return on investment. This depth of data also allows brands to activate marketing campaigns using purchaser-based definitions such as light or heavy shoppers of specific products and categories, shoppers of competitive brands, “switchers” and other shopping-based behaviors.

For example, a diaper brand can use Specific Media’s Shopper Access to reach moms with an ad for baby wipes to drive cross-category and line-extension purchases. Specific Media is in discussions to apply the shopper-based solution to a number of brands from the largest CPG companies.

Nielsen Catalina Solutions, a joint venture between Nielsen and Catalina Marketing, accesses 60 million households from a subset of Catalina’s shopper data warehouse. Shopper Access provides insights into how advertising influences consumer purchase behavior. The data is anonymous and aggregated using a secure third-party agent, and does not contain personally identifiable information (PII) to protect the privacy of individuals. The shopper data is matched with Specific Media’s online audience and further modeled based on proprietary Nielsen Catalina Solutions’ shopper profiles.

“Nielsen Catalina Solutions is pleased to work with Specific Media on Shopper Access,” said Mike Nazzaro, CEO of Nielsen Catalina Solutions. “Specific Media has unmatched scale in display and video, a long history of pioneering precision marketing using behavioral triggers and a solid track record of data governance and integrity. They’ve also made significant investments in growing their CPG category and have emerged as a strong leader in this space.”

“The breadth and depth of the Nielsen Catalina Solutions data and analytics are unparalleled in the industry,” said Vic Catalfamo, vice president and head of Global Consumer Goods Category, Specific Media. “Our multi-year alliance with Nielsen Catalina Solutions will now allow our large base of CPG brand customers to reach shoppers whenever they are online, with display and video campaigns that are truly scalable across the Internet.”

About Specific Media

Specific Media is a digital media company driving viewership for content owners, engagement for brands and relevance for consumers. With capabilities spanning original programming, cross-channel distribution and addressable advertising, the company connects audiences, content and brands, adding meaning to each touch-point. As people discover new ways to consume content, Specific Media creates impactful media experiences no matter where they are.
www.specificmedia.com

“To date, tablet apps have focused almost exclusively on business to consumer markets. However, the business to business tablet app market is a rapidly growing segment as users are showing extreme loyalty and desire to fully exploit their tablet’s capabilities,” said Rick Ehrman of Frank N. Magid & Associates. “Enterprise mobility is a big topic and we expect to see more apps in 2012 in customer relationship management (CRM), accounting, project management, and for people who need access to apps while on their feet, such as warehouse and retail staff.”

According to research compiled by Frank N. Magid & Associates, nearly 70% of tablet owners prefer their tablet compared to their PC and more than 20% are already using the limited number of business applications. These numbers are expected to grow as more business applications are developed and released.

“Our goal with the iPad application is to give clients full access to their advertisements and make it as easy as checking their email or getting on Facebook,” said Isaac Ferreira, Operations and Technology Director. “In addition to the reporting, the application will provide users direct access back to the Mediaspace website, which is already fully optimized for the iPad.”

Mediaspace Solutions is a leader in national, regional and local newspaper, magazine and tablet buys throughout North America. For more than 11 years Mediaspace has delivered unmatched media placement services to advertisers and agencies throughout the United States.

This announcement follows the recent introduction of the Mediaspace Tablet Network. The company is also in the midst of a multi-part blog series on tablets and how they are changing the way advertisers reach their target audiences. Mediaspace continues to expand its offering to meet the needs of the ever-changing advertising marketplace. For more information call Scott Olson at 612-253-2137, or e-mail solson@mss-mail.com.

About Mediaspace Solutions

Mediaspace Solutions works with national and regional advertisers to successfully reach their target markets. Mediaspace maximizes advertising budgets, increases ROI and reduces operational drag. We do this through expert talent, incredible service and proven buying strategies. To learn more about Mediaspace or download our latest white paper or executive interview, visit www.mediaspacesolutions.com.

NEW YORK – appssavvy (www.appssavvy.com), an activity advertising technology company, and its platform adtivity™ by appssavvy, since launching in September has been embraced by more than 125 publishers and advertisers. To further adtivity by appssavvy’s growth and strong results delivered by the platform, including an engagement rate of 4-to-8 times industry average across unlocked and newly created, center-of-the-experience, activity-based display ads, the company today announced the completion of its Series 1-A $7.1 million venture capital round.

“Activity-based advertising we believe will be the emerging digital advertising category that paid search and behavioral targeting were a few years ago, and which video is today. Today’s Series 1-A venture capital round is further evidence of the activity advertising opportunity for both publishers and advertisers,” said Chris Cunningham, co-founder and CEO of appssavvy. “Following the lead of the social space, especially social games, web publishers have identified the need to make their properties a more active, rather than passive, experience. This will create new activity ad inventory and opportunities for our vision and the adtivity by appssavvy platform, but more importantly better display advertising that reaches people when they’re most engaged and as part of what they’re doing.”

appssavvy had previously raised $3.1 million from True Ventures, The New York Times Company and individual investors, including Scott Kurnit, founder of About.com and currently founder and CEO of AdKeeper, and Howard Lindzon, co-founder and CEO of StockTwits, among others. Today’s completed Series A-1 round of $7.1 million includes current investors and new investor, AOL Ventures, and brings the total raised by appssavvy, to date, to $10.2 million.

“Behavior on the Internet has changed where people are much more activity-focused. We feel there is a tremendous opportunity for advertising to adjust to this shift, focusing on reaching consumers as they engage in sites versus the current focus on where people are,” said Tony Conrad, founding member and venture partner at True Ventures. “Since its inception four years ago, appssavvy identified people’s activities online as a tremendous opportunity to not only change advertising, but change it for the better, and for all those involved, including publishers, brand advertisers and, most importantly, consumers.”

adtivity by appssavvy, prior to launch, was under development for more than a year and built on appssavvy’s vision that the future of advertising is focused on what people are doing, not where they’re doing it. In just a few months, more than 70 publishers and developers have partnered with appssavvy and integrated the adtivity platform and adtivity Mobile SDK into activities representing millions of daily opportunities for advertisers.

Unlike existing technologies that deliver ads based on a page loading, the adtivity API is attached to the event of performing an activity, including updating statuses, collecting, sending and earning virtual goods, polls and contests, and completing a level, visiting a friend or sending a message within a game, and “Like”ing something to name a few.

“The adtivity platform is enhancing our ability to monetize our games in the context of our players experiences,” said Dan Hart, chief revenue officer of Arkadium, a premier developer, publisher and distributor of casual, social, and mobile games. “We have found that activity-based advertising delivers a strong additional revenue stream and enhances our profitability.”

Since launching adtivity by appssavvy, every partner has expanded their integrations and usage of the platform to include new, additional activities, thus increasing the inventory creating the largest activity network available to brands. More than 50 brand advertisers, including American Express, Chase, Coca-Cola, Electronic Arts, HP, Sony and State Farm, to name a few, have implemented activity advertising campaigns.

appssavvy will put today’s Series 1-A round to work by continuing to enhance the adtivity platform, build partnerships and relationships with publishers and advertisers, and expand internationally. For more information about adtivity by appssavvy, visit: www.appssavvy.com.

About appssavvy
appssavvy (www.appssavvy.com) is an activity advertising technology company. Through its adtivity™ platform, appssavvy enables leading web, social and mobile publishers to unlock and create new, display advertising opportunities reaching people as they perform activities. adtivity by appssavvy offers scalable, center-of-the-experience, display ads, thus creating the most effective way to deliver and receive advertising. For more information, visit www.appssavvy.com.

NEW YORK – VideoHub, a division of Tremor Video, and Nielsen, a global information and measurement company, today announced an alliance giving VideoHub customers access to Nielsen Online Campaign RatingsTM gross rating points (GRPs) via VideoHub for Advertisers. The relationship marks the first time Nielsen has integrated its GRP data with an online video advertising platform.

The incorporation of data from Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings into VideoHub marries the standard GRP metric used in TV advertising to online video performance for the very first time. The collaboration gives advertisers a single metric for their gross reach — the total number of people exposed to an ad — and effective reach – more granular insight into the quality of the ad exposure and actual performance across all screens.

With Nielsen’s online GRPs, advertisers using VideoHub can now see what demographic audiences their campaigns reach online. Then, via the VideoHub advertising platform, they can understand how those audiences responded to their campaigns and identify the key signals driving performance metrics like engagement and brand lift.

Nielsen data is now available to every advertiser running campaigns through VideoHub, whether those campaigns run on the Tremor Video network or VideoHub is being licensed outside that network. Tremor Video is the largest independent online video technology company, with more than 2,000 campaigns currently running through VideoHub.

“Debate over whether the GRP is good or bad for the digital space has gone on for years, but those days are coming to an end,” said Kelly McEttrick, Director of Platform Strategy for VideoHub. “Advertisers can now look at their demographic reach, and then evaluate how their campaign performed within each audience segment. A single view into gross reach and effective reach is the kind of insight advertisers have only dreamed of until today.”

“Marketers want to cleanly compare the reach of online video media to other media – principally TV,” said Steve Hasker, President, Media Products and Advertiser Solutions, Nielsen. “Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings provides a standard GRP across platforms, so that online can be measured the same way we measure GRP’s on TV. We’re excited to work with Tremor to help advertisers understand the audience reach and brand engagement of online video, and we look forward to bringing the same service to VideoHub publishers in the future.”

Clients using VideoHub will also be able to order customized Nielsen Online Brand Effect reports to combine their GRP data with ad effectiveness metrics to further evaluate reach and brand impact of their ads.

Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings combines traditional Nielsen TV and online panel data with aggregated, anonymous demographic information from participating online data providers. It is the only Internet measurement system accredited by the Media Rating Council (MRC) that provides GRPs for online advertising campaigns, enabling for the first time, consistent cross-platform reach and frequency metrics.

VideoHub for Publishers launches in 2012, also incorporating Nielsen’s online GRP data.

About Tremor Video

Founded in 2005, Tremor Video (www.tremorvideo.com) provides in-stream video advertising solutions to Fortune 1000 brand advertisers and top tier publishers and is widely regarded as the leading video company online. Leveraging their innovative video ad formats and publisher technology, Tremor Video delivers the mass reach and campaign results advertisers should expect from digital video. Tremor Video is the only video ad platform that can provide 100% brand safety by scanning and categorizing every single video stream before an ad is ever served. Powered by award-winning SE2 technology, Tremor Video’s video algorithm also gets smarter at finding and engaging viewers with every ad served, enabling the company to welcome and encourage pay-per-engagement pricing. Tremor Video is a privately held company headquartered in NYC with 10 national and international offices.

VideoHub, a division of Tremor Video, is a first of its kind analytics console that helps marketers and agencies monitor the complex video ecosystem to dynamically match ads with content and viewers, deliver upon marketing goals, and maximize brand impact. Unlike traditional video management platforms, VideoHub focuses on effectiveness and delivers real-time analytics for deep transparency across ads, content, viewers, and performance. To request a demo, visit videohub.tv

About Nielsen

Nielsen Holdings N.V. (NYSE: NLSN) is a global information and measurement company with leading market positions in marketing and consumer information, television and other media measurement, online intelligence, mobile measurement, trade shows and related properties. Nielsen has a presence in approximately 100 countries, with headquarters in New York, USA and Diemen, the Netherlands. For more information, visit www.nielsen.com.

San Francisco, CA – Krux (KruxDigital.com), the technology leader in audience data control solutions, released research findings (http://bit.ly/kruxtags) on tag proliferation and its implications for web performance and website data security.  The report reviews the state of the market; highlighting the business improvement opportunities for website operators; and challenging the industry to seek better standards for measuring web performance.

Using proprietary cloud-based data scanning techniques, Krux sampled a representative set of URLs from more than forty top US consumer-oriented websites throughout October 2011.  From that sample, the company calculated the number and types of JavaScript tags observed across web pages, measured typical page load times against both the Content Ready and On Load markers, and evaluated the types of tags present and their relative contribution to overall page latency and data leakage.

The research surfaced five key findings:

1.    Consumer web operators are suffering from ‘tag bloat,’ with an average of 25 tags per page across the sample, peaking at a staggering 121 tags.
2.    Tag proliferation erodes web performance, Krux observed significantly delayed page load times as a result of web operators’ expanding use of tags to enrich their websites.
3.    Third-party tags pose serious risks to website operator data security, with an average of nearly 30 data collection events per page view (with an ‘event’ defined as anytime a cookie is set, referenced, or modified on a consumer’s browser).
4.    Tag count and page latency are only loosely correlated, indicating a marked lack of standardization when it comes to the management, prioritization, and execution of tags in support of page performance optimization.  Website operators are crying out for new, intelligent approaches to tag management.
5.    The industry as a whole requires new metrics for measuring web performance and its connection to tags.

Krux undertook this study to provide clearer insight into tagging, latency, and data security challenges facing the industry.  The research reflected some surprising insights.  The analysis uncovered sites burdened by as many as 120 tags, consumers suffering through load times nearing 15 seconds, and nearly a third of data collection being conducted by parties who may be intentionally obfuscating their sources and purposes.

The report offers the Krux perspective on the role tags play across today’s consumer web; and an analysis of tag proliferation and its implications for web performance and data security. It also explores best practice considerations for website operators as they tackle the tagging conundrum. And finally, in the appendix, the company issues a call to action for the industry to anchor on a new set of standards for gauging web performance.

“Recent technology advances give web operators the tools they need to regain control, grow their business, and ensure the safer, faster, and smarter web experiences consumers have come to expect,” said Tom Chavez, Krux co-founder and CEO.  ”But technology is only part of the answer.  We issue a challenge to the industry — for all parties to raise the bar on transparency, data security, and web measurement standards overall.”

One such solution, Krux SuperTag, acts as an ‘ad server for JavaScript’.  It provides publishers with full tag lifecycle management; including workflow, flighting, pacing, and targeting – striking the right balance of control over tagging between AdOps pros and their IT counterparts.  Further, it serves as a secure gateway through which an operator can manage all of its data transactions.  This ensures that their trusted partners have access to the right data at the right times – and only then.  Most importantly, it can deliver page load improvements in excess of 30% through sophisticated tag parallelization, data throttling, and real-time decision making to balance user experience and revenue opportunity.

As Mr. Chavez summed it up, “Excessive page latency equals revenue loss, and unfettered access to websites by third-parties leads to significant opportunity cost from data leakage and theft.  Website operators need to ensure optimal web experiences for consumers and to protect the precious media and data assets on which their businesses were built.  Tag management is only part of the solution, but it’s likely one of single the best places to start.”

For more information and the complete research report, please visit www.kruxdigital.com.

About Krux Digital
Founded in 2010, Krux is building data fabric for the consumer web.  The company’s platform helps large and small websites control, energize, and responsibly monetize consumer data across screens and sources.  With Krux, websites become more secure, more intelligent conduits of consumer interests, behaviors, and intent.  With Krux, consumers gain confidence that their favorite websites are operating under the plain light of day.  More than twenty leading publishers and website operators in the US and Europe have adopted Krux technology.  Find out more at www.kruxdigital.com.

“Adding someone with Evan’s knowledge and expertise to the team will help us bring Insights Driven Media to a market that holds an immense opportunity for Resonate,” said George Stewart, CRO of Resonate Networks. “His experience working with major brands and building local sales teams from the ground up will further speed the growth of our business in 2012.”

Rullman joins Resonate Networks to build the company’s presence in the Midwest.  There he will introduce agencies and brand marketers to Insights Driven Media, which provides brands with insights that are transformed into actionable media. With more than 15 years of experience in the online advertising industry, Rullman comes to Resonate from ChaCha where he was Senior Director of Branded Ad Sales in the Central Region. Prior to that, Rullman was Senior Director/VP of Branded Ad Sales for the Midwest Region at Demand Media.

About Resonate  
Resonate is the first online ad company to connect advertisers with audiences by understanding why people engage with a brand, campaign or issue. Its unique approach asks people about the values that drive their decisions allowing Resonate to deliver the right audience in the most optimal locations online. The result Insights Driven Media that deepens convictions and change minds in a way that traditional online advertising can’t. Visit www.resonatenetworks.com to learn more.