This month, Danish software company Adform opens local office in Finland, following expansion of a number of recent openings across Europe. Adform is uniquely represented in all Nordic countries, and boasts more coverage across Europe than any competitive solution. The company now operates locally serviced offices in eleven European markets.

While it is more than likely that Adform is the world’s most complete panacea for managing online display advertising, it is certainly Europe’s. Within the interface media agencies and advertisers can purchase display ads in real time – so-called real-time bidding – perform media planning, execute rich media solutions and optimise activities across media centralising all reporting.

Finland presented high growth rates in digital advertising in 2011. Especially online display advertising was instrumental in creating this result, and Adform is certain that there is much more to come.

“Display advertising isn’t afforded the respect or attention it deserves. Things have changed of late, and there is more focus on planning and producing effective display ads,” says Christopher Fernandez, Adform’s newly appointed Business Development Director in Finland.

He points to Web TV and rich media ads as a major source of growth for the future. “The use of video banners is increasing. The popularity of Web-TV and the widespread use of Web-TV from advertisers spur demand. Similarly, there is great potential for Rich Media. ”

For the past two years, Christopher Fernandez has been Head of Digital at the media agency Virta Mediacommunity and has previously worked for Aegis Media.

“We are at our best when executing locally with our partners. Our goal is to make display media simple, relevant & rewarding to the Finland media market – that’s quite unique and clear. We have great confidence in our recent developments in Real Time bidding and Rich Media Solutions and excited to bring to Finland, but leadership is key; Chris comes highly recommended and we’re really very excited to what is potential will bring the market,” says David Fulton, Chief Commercial Officer of Adform

About Adform
Adform close the loop by integrating media planning, buying, optimization, and reporting for all online display advertising in one place, thus saving an enormous amount of time, money and resources.

Adform’s unique platform incorporates display ad serving, rich media, video, mobile, dynamic ads, personalised targeting, and real-time bidding through integrations with major inventory players, making display advertising simple, relevant and rewarding for media agencies and online advertisers. Adform was established in Denmark in 2002 and now has offices in 11 countries including Nordics, UK, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Visit http://www.adform.com or www.twitter.com/adforminsider for more information.

SAN FRANCISCO – Catalyst S+F, the unique “Marketing Capital” firm that provides marketing strategy and services that create value for companies that sit at the intersection of Madison Ave and Silicon Valley, today announced it has launched Good Buys Media a new business that offers publishers a unique way to connect with buyers and generate incremental revenue with weekly “media deals.”

“Think of us as a Gilt Groupe with flash sales for the media community. Good Buys Media (http://www.goodbuysmedia.com) targets media buyers searching for opportunistic and/or innovative buying opportunities against a targeted audience and helps them lock in special inventory at a special price,” says John Durham, Catalyst S+F’s CEO and Managing Partner. “The Good Buys Media service curates a collection of especially good media buys to a managed list of media buyers from agencies and brands on a weekly basis.”

For example via Good Buys Media’ weekly e-blast to 5,000 media buyers, Context Logic offered inventory on WISH, a social recommendation engine built on top of Facebook that surfaces up goods and services relevant to the consumer based on the consumer’s interests, friends, and context, well below its standard rate card cost. Similarly, See Jane Fly offered inventory at half-off for a limited time period on Wayfare a brand new quarterly online magazine that celebrates the journey of travel, offering endless inspiration, instant trip solutions, and the intersection of home, style, and travel.

“For publishers we provide an incremental bump in sales revenue, access to customers they may not currently be working with and a way of testing new inventory against established advertisers,” says Chris Arens, Partner and Client Services Director at Catalyst S+F. “For buyers we provide access to special opportunities for opportunistic budgets, access to innovative, exclusive deals they wouldn’t otherwise see and new testing opportunities without taking hundreds of meetings.”

Catalyst S+F (www.catalystsf.com) is a “Marketing Capital” firm that helps clients combine selling a product or service (Marketing) with sources of profit or benefit vs. the competition to produce ideas, intelligence and insights (Capital) that achieve an advantage in the areas of marketing, sales or consumer insights. A hybrid marketing services consultancy, structured like no other firm, Catalyst S+F brings intelligence, ideas and insights to sales, media and marketing for the purpose of providing an advantage in the marketplace for its clients.  The privately-held San Francisco-based company was founded in 2007 by John Durham and Cory Treffiletti, who together, have nearly 40 years of marketing and sales experience, much of it in the digital media industry. Catalyst S+F, where the S+F stands for Strategy and Fundamentals, has grown substantially in the last year and currently has 12 clients.

Comprehensive, industry-leading ad-delivery platform becomes even more powerful

RALEIGH, N.C. – aiMatch announced that its comprehensive ad-delivery platform, which includes Sales Order Management, Simulation-Based Forecasting, Business Intelligence and Data Visualization, now also includes Audience Targeting.

Audience Targeting is a powerful tool that enables publishers to make use of their unique audience data. Using aiMatch’s Audience Targeting, publishers can seamlessly create behavioral audience products and easily match users to these products. This enables the publisher to extend its high-value inventory by engaging and targeting the audience that their advertising clients desire across a site.

“Publishers have repeatedly told us that audience targeting ought to be a core targeting capability of their advertising platform,” said Jeff Wood, aiMatch CEO. “Behavioral data and declared user registration data is extremely valuable information that is part of the definition of the uniqueness of a publisher’s inventory.”

Publisher ad servers have been focused on content management driven and geo-targeted data constructed into packages to predict, sell and deliver. These are important, unique attributes for publishers as well and aiMatch was created to ensure that premium publishers have a complete view of all their ad sales and delivery data. Online advertising buyers are demanding audience products from sellers.

“While Audience Targeting is not ‘new’ to our industry,” concludes Wood, “when you add the ability to better understand, categorize, forecast, sell and accurately deliver a product that includes audience targeting as part of the publisher’s product mix in a single comprehensive platform, it’s new. Publishers demand rapid development so that they can meet changing demands and we’re happy to deliver.”

About aiMatch

aiMatch is an intelligent mobile, video and display ad delivery platform designed to help digital publishers manage inventory and maximize yield across all sales channels. Founded by experts in the field of advertising intelligence (ai), aiMatch takes a new approach by providing a comprehensive ad serving and data management platform delivered via the cloud as Software-as-as-Service (SaaS). aiMatch’s growing diversified global client portfolio includes DigitalSpy, a Hearst Corporation, Popcornflix.com, AdHub, APN News & Media of Australia, Digital Network Sales (DNS), Christianity Today International (CTI) and Photobucket. The company is headquartered in Raleigh, NC and has offices in London, UK. To learn more, visit www.aimatch.com.

Carat moderates global ad spend growth forecasts to 5.0% for 2011, and to 6.0% for 2012; long-term trend of two-speed world and rapid digital growth continues.

Carat, the world’s leading independent media communications agency, published its updated forecasts for global advertising expenditure for 2011 and 2012.

Carat’s data shows global advertising expenditure has and will continue to grow in 2011, outperforming the advertising market levels of 2008. Carat now predicts that global advertising expenditure will grow by + 5.0%, dipping from the + 5.7% predicted in March 2011, reflecting the caution sparked by global macro-economic factors, natural disasters and political instability in a number of parts of the world.

For 2012, Carat continues to predict robust growth with the global advertising market growing by
+ 6.0% (March 2011: + 6.2%), boosted by a year of events including the 2012 Olympics, the UEFA European Football Championship and the US presidential elections.

By media, digital remains the driving force in the market in terms of growth, continuing to outstrip other media sectors, followed by Out of Home and Television.

(NB: All figures in brackets show our previous forecasts from March 2011. The forecasts for August 2011 (and for future forecasts) include data from the Middle Eastern countries of Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Pan Arab, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.)

Sector Breakdown

Commenting on the Carat ad spend forecasts, Jerry Buhlmann, Chief Executive of Aegis Group plc, said:

“Carat’s updated global ad forecasts demonstrate that the recovery in most major advertising markets has continued in 2011 and is set to continue in 2012, against the backdrop of uncertain times. The impact of global macro-economic and political issues, combined with natural disasters, has led us to soften the full-year outlook for 2011 and 2012.

“At the heart of the market, the long-term trend of the two-speed advertising world and the rapid growth of digital are very much in force. The faster-growing regions of the world – particularly China, Russia and Latin America – will continue to eclipse performances from the developed economies. In terms of the growth in media share digital remains the leader of the pack, with Out of Home and TV growing faster than the overall market.

“Looking ahead, we remain cautiously optimistic, particularly about the outlook of 2012, when global events such as the Olympics will undoubtedly fuel advertising demand.”

Carat Advertising Spend Forecasts

Summary

The latest Carat ad spend forecasts show global growth of +5.0% in 2011, with the advertising market reaching US $481 billion – exceeding the pre-recession levels of 2008 when spending stood at US $469 billion, at current prices. The pace of growth, however, has slowed from the forecasts made in March when global ad spend was forecast to grow at +5.7%. Since March confidence has been hit by economic uncertainties, including the debt crises in the US and the Eurozone, political instability in a number of countries around the world and natural disasters.

Looking ahead to 2012, Carat expects the advertising market to continue to grow, up +6.0%, boosted by a year of events including the London 2012 Olympics, the UEFA European Football Championships and the US presidential elections.

By media, digital remains the driving force in the market, continuing to outstrip growth in other media sectors for 2011 and 2012, followed by Out of Home and Television.

Regional Review

Figures for the advertising market in 2011 remain in positive territory in almost all parts of the world with the exception of Spain and Italy – where macro-economic factors have hit confidence – and Japan, in the wake of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in the first part of 2011.

In the US, growth for 2011 is up +3.1% (March 2011: +3.7%). Digital continues to show the highest percentage growth at +11.3%.  Almost every category has increased its post-recession spending. Automotives, retail, pharmaceutical, movie studios, technology and packaged goods (both food and personal products) are investing heavily. The financial services sector has also made a strong return to the market. In 2012 political campaigns will be major spenders, ahead of the US presidential elections and the full year forecast is for an upbeat +5.4% (March 2011: +5.9%).

In Canada, the forecast for the advertising market in 2011 is growth of +6.1% (March 2011: + 6.4%), against a tough comparative 2010 when the Winter Olympics held in Vancouver boosted ad spend by +17.8%. Spend in 2012 is expected to increase by +6.6% (March 2011: + 6.5%).

In Latin America, the outlook is optimistic with growth expected to increase by 13% in 2011. Ad spend in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico is forecast to rise from US $21billion to US $24 billion. The ongoing growth seen in the region is expected to continue in 2012, +12.9%, driven by 13.8% growth in TV which holds a dominating 64% share of spend in the region. The share of spend in digital media is expected to increase to +6% (2011: +5.5%) in Latin America in 2012.

In Western Europe, overall growth for 2011 has been revised downwards from 3.5% to 2.3% with a mixed picture across the region in terms of both economic conditions and advertising expenditure. Spain and Italy have made significant revisions to their forecasts against a backdrop of economic instability. The outlook has also softened in the UK. Forecasts in France and Germany, meanwhile, remain broadly in line with previous estimates made in March.

In Spain, advertisers are cutting budgets due to the economic uncertainty. 2011 is forecast to decline by 2.9%, down 6.3 percentage points on the previous forecast in March of +3.4%. However a positive recovery is expected in 2012, up +1.9%, with the Olympics and Euro 2012 expected to stimulate advertising spend in the second and third quarters.

In Italy, the advertising market is also forecast to decline in 2011 by 0.5%, down 4.3 percentage points on the previous forecast of +3.8%. Like Spain, ad spend is expected to return to moderate positive figures in 2012, up +1.6%, again boosted by the Olympics and Euro 2012.

It is a mixed picture in the UK where growth forecasts for the current year have been revised down from +4.1% to +2.0% on the back of economic uncertainty – but have been increased for 2012 from +4% to +5.1% with big sporting events expected to help fuel growth. In the current year, like-for-like client spends have remained relatively lacklustre during the course of the year with retail (-13%) and government (-33%) spends seeing the biggest declines from January to June. By contrast automotives, telecommunications and travel/transport have performed strongly, each seeing +9% year-on-year growth in the first half. By media, TV had a strong start to the year, but slowed across the summer with little growth predicted across the latter part of the year, leading to predicted overall annual growth of +1.7%. Press spend is down and is unlikely to make gains in the second half: Newspapers -3.5%, Magazines -2.8%, and Out of Home is predicted to be down -1.4%, ahead of a strong 2012 at +5%. Cinema at +3.3% and Radio +2.1% are showing small revenue increases.  The outlook for 2012 is positive with the London 2012 Olympics and Euro 2012; forecasts are for the UK ad market to see a +5.1% increase in ad spend, an increase from the +4.0% predicted in March. Digital will continue to lead the way in revenue growth at +7.7%.

The advertising market in France is expected to increase by +2.6% (March 2011: + 2.9%). The first half of the year performed strongly, but with ongoing European economic uncertainties the second half of the year is expected to see growth moderate. The categories that performed strongly were retail (+9%), leisure/entertainment (+7%), telecommunications (+5%) and services (+6%). Ad spends are expected to increase by +2.5% (March 2011: + 2.7%) in 2012 an election year in France.

In Germany, the advertising market is expected to grow by 1.8% this year, on a par with the predictions made in March 2011. For 2012, a more moderate growth figure of 0.8% is anticipated, as Germany too feels the impact of economic instability. In Central & Eastern Europe growth has been revised upwards from +9.5% to +10.1% fuelled by double-digit growth from the faster-growing economy in Russia (+16.9%) and Turkey (+10.0%), but declines in the Czech Republic (-2.5%), Romania (-5.8%) and Hungary (-2.4%).

In the Asia Pacific region, forecasts in Japan have been downgraded from -1.1% to -2.9%, affected by the earthquake and tsunami which made the first half of the year very slow. However, in the second of the year and into 2012, the market is expected to be more active, with positive early indications from clients.

China ranks as the world’s second largest advertising market behind the US, with growth in 2011 expected to be +14.8%.  While advertising growth in China remains strong, the country is not entirely insulated from global economic uncertainties and, consequently, the pace of growth is expected to dip slightly in 2012 to 11.8% (March 2011: 11.8%).

In Australia forecasts have been revised down to +4.8% from +6.0% in March 2011. Adverse weather in the first half of the year and macro economic factors, both locally and globally, have softened the full year outlook for 2011. Forecasts for 2012 remain positive at +4.9%.

In the rest of the Asia Pacific region strong advertising growth is being seen in Indonesia (+15.2%), Malaysia (+11.5%), the Philippines (+16.8%) and India (+9.1%).

New York – Donovan Data Systems (DDS) announced the launch of the next generation iDesk, the industry-leading application for digital campaign management.

This latest application from DDS is the first of a series of major new technology developments. It addresses the unique needs of buying digital media for agency clients, while at the same time establishing the foundation to support all media in the future.

“Today’s launch is a very significant step for DDS and its clients. We’re using cloud-based, best-in-class technology to launch our new media applications and platforms. iDesk is just the beginning, ” says JT Batson, president, DDS Digital.

“This new generation of iDesk represents the biggest development effort in our history. For our agency clients – it is the new model for delivering future platforms and applications that are faster, more efficient, scalable and open,” says Michael Donovan, chairman and CEO, DDS.

“Feedback from early adopters in pre-launch trials has been fantastic. And this next generation is only the start” added Batson.

About iDesk

iDesk manages complex digital campaigns with thousands of placements in different currencies and languages. It simplifies digital campaign management by streamlining buying, placement, billing and reporting. With powerful search, auto-complete, instantaneous updates and automatic saving, it enables planners to work more efficiently than ever before.

iDesk was built over the last year by the DDS product and engineering team of more than 90 across the US, UK and Germany. It takes advantage of the three-year foundation of the original iDesk and is the first major application deployed following the build out of a new User Experience team, which has resulted in an overhauled user experience. It is also the first major development leveraging Agile development and also involved a major commitment to automated testing.

http://www.donovandata.com/our-products/digital-campaign-management-idesk/index.html

About Donovan Data Systems

Donovan Data Systems is the advertising industry’s leading systems and software provider. In the rapidly evolving world of media, developments including interactive and addressable television, new types of audience metrics and increased video-on-demand availability, present new challenges and opportunities for all stakeholders. DDS is working in collaboration with its clients and partners to identify, analyze and standardize business processes, to ensure that its clients benefit from unmatched execution and interoperability with industry players. For more about DDS, visit: donovandata.com

ROI-focused TV Campaign Credited with 55 Percent Boost in Registrations

IRCE 2011
HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. – For Ancestry.com, 2010 was a banner year for its new television advertising campaign, with home page visits climbing 64 percent and TV-attributable registrations up 55 percent from the previous year.

Ocean Media (www.oceanmediainc.com), a leading independent media planning and buying agency with offices in Huntington Beach and Los Angeles, was the media architect behind the successful campaign. Ancestry.com selected the firm in late 2009 to handle strategic media planning, buying and ad placement for a campaign that would cover the United States and, for the first time, Canada. Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com), which has been advertising on TV in the U.S. since 2007, is the world’s largest online family history resource with more than 1.4 million paying subscribers globally.

To support Ancestry.com’s objectives, Ocean Media developed a campaign that optimized both national and direct response networks and used its proprietary media attribution software to optimize the campaign by spot length, creative and network performance. Other elements of the campaign included an integrated national broadcast initiative and multi-channel promotions.

According to Lisa Johnson, Ancestry.com’s senior director of Acquisition Marketing, the company’s chief goals for its ad campaign were growth, awareness and ROI – and Ocean Media’s sharp focus on analytics was the key reason for its selection as the company’s agency of record.

“Our guiding principle is that return on investment, or ROI, should be at the forefront of every campaign,” said Mike Robertson, chairman and co-CEO, Ocean Media. “We’re risk averse by nature, which means we bring a disciplined approach to testing, evaluation, comprehensive analytics and optimization.

“Ocean Media’s commitment to analytics, in turn, helps us hone our strategies to reach the right audience and generate results, which has been our game plan for Ancestry.com, just as it’s been for the many online brands we’ve helped build through ROI-driven advertising,” Robertson said. “Since its online launch in 1997, Ancestry.com has done a phenomenal job building the world’s largest online community of people interested in their family histories. At Ocean Media, we’ve been thrilled to have the opportunity to show how we can help Ancestry grow its subscriber base in the U.S. and elsewhere.”

With more than six billion historical records and documents it has digitized and put online along with proprietary online search technologies and tools, Ancestry.com enables its subscribers to research their family history, build their family trees and make meaningful discoveries about the lives of their ancestors.

The campaign’s creative, from Penabrand, tells viewers: “You don’t have to know what you’re looking for; you just have to start looking.”

About Ocean Media

Ocean Media (oceanmediainc.com) is a leading independent media planning and buying agency, founded in 1996 and based in Huntington Beach, Calif., with an office in Los Angeles. Adhering to the philosophy that return on investment (ROI) should be at the forefront of every advertising campaign, Ocean Media develops media strategies that reach the right audience, incite action and generate results. With transparency and a risk-averse focus on continuous testing and evaluation, comprehensive analytics and optimization, Ocean Media has been the media architect behind campaigns that built such name brands as priceline.com (13 years of service), FreeCreditScore.com (12 years), Overstock.com (8 years) and Angie’s List (3 years), among others.

Powerful Tool Helps Marketers Optimize Media Plans with Insight into Actual Site Visitation

RESTON, VA, and MT. LAUREL, NJ – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, and ImpactRx, a pharmaceutical insights company, announced the availability of the comScore Physicians Panel Media Planning Tool, the only tool that provides health marketers and media planners with the key metrics needed to place online media buys that are targeted to physicians. Similar to comScore Media Metrix, this solution provides behavioral data on physicians based on actual observed online visitation patterns in a format that enables marketers and media planners to gain the critical insights needed to develop effective media plans. The permission-based research panel complies with health privacy laws and regulations, and at no time is patient-identifiable information provided by physicians to comScore.

“With the Internet becoming an extremely important part of physicians’ professional communication, reaching physicians online has never been more crucial for the health care industry,” said John Mangano, comScore vice president of health marketing solutions. “Until recently, the only information available on physicians’ online usage habits was collected through surveys. However, as researchers, we know that people can hardly remember the sites they visited 24 hours prior, much less the amount of time they spent online or specific pages they viewed. comScore’s tool measures actual online visitation and can quantify observed behavior over time, without needing to rely on physicians recalling their online activities. Having that kind of insight into physicians’ online behavior can help marketers optimize media plans and better engage with the medical community at large.”

Comprehensive Data Set Shows Site-Level Information for Health Properties

The Physicians Panel Media Planning Tool forms part of the foundation of the comScore/ImpactRx Physician Behavioral Measurement™ solution and is based on comScore’s proprietary permission-based panel methodology, which passively observes the actual online activity of a representative sample of U.S. physicians. Patient-level data are not collected at any time during measurement, in accordance with HIPAA regulations.

The tool contains visitation and engagement metrics provided quarterly on key categories and a broad listing of sites visited by physicians in these categories. The clear-cut format of the data set provides marketers with the greatest flexibility in looking for specific information, such as the rate of physician visitation to a specific category of sites or cross-visitation between two sites. Marketers and media planners alike can draw valuable insights from analyzing which properties attract the highest engagement from physicians and how these sites fare in relation to others. With the ability to easily find detailed information from the Media Planning Tool for particular media properties or site categories, media planners are able to create more effective media plans engaging doctors, and make more efficient use of their marketing dollars.

For more information about the Media Planning Tool or for more information on comScore Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Solutions, please contact John Mangano at jmangano@comscore.com.

About ImpactRx

Founded in October 2000, ImpactRx’s physician networks are the source of an unprecedented intelligence capability for tracking the promotional initiatives of the pharmaceutical industry and for measuring their impact on physician prescribing behavior. Based in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, ImpactRx is a private company with investment financing provided by Mediphase Venture Partners (    www.mediphaseventure.com), Oxford Bioscience Partners (    www.oxbio.com), Merck Capital Ventures and Omega Funds.

About comScore Health and Pharmaceutical Solutions

comScore Pharmaceutical Solutions delivers in-depth information needed to understand the impact that brand, condition-specific, and health websites have on consumers’ brand awareness, conversion, and patient compliance as well as insights into health care professionals’ online usage. comScore’s products deliver actionable insight to help refine consumer profiles, identify key alliances, optimize interactive marketing initiatives, benchmark against the competition and accurately measure the ROI of Web site and online marketing programs. For more information, please visit http://www.comscore.com/Industry_Solutions/Pharmaceutical.

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.

Aggregates All Campaign Data from Any Media Source Including DoubleClick, Google Adwords, Facebook, MSN and Google Analytics in Less Than 24 Hours

TrackSimple, a BlueKai Analytics offering, has launched a new feature to its existing media dashboard that allows users to aggregate campaign data from top media partners.  In less than 24 hours, users  can view and analyze campaign data from media channels including DoubleClick, Google Adwords, Facebook, MSN and Google Analytics.  Designed for agencies and marketers, TrackSimple consolidates digital campaign data from any channel to provide media performance visibility and analytics in one dashboard.  With all campaign data in one interface, users can slice, dice and analyze which campaigns are performing across different media channels and where to spend dollars to reach more qualified audiences.

“People are consuming media all over the Internet and marketers and their agencies are chasing those eyeballs with digital campaigns across increasing channels.  At the end of every campaign, agencies are tasked with consolidating all campaign performance into a digestible format for their clients. ” said Jon Ingalls, Founder of TrackSimple.  “We’ve simplified the way this integral data is gathered, consumed and shared.  Rather than manually compiling and building complicated spreadsheets, our solution pulls campaign data directly from the source; then let’s you slice and dice to figure out which audience and which media source is giving you the best bang for your dollars.”

Simply by entering login and password information into the TrackSimple secure dashboard solution, users gain a holistic view of their campaign data from vendors including DoubleClick, Google Adwords, Facebook, MSN and Google Analytics.  Agencies and marketers can also add additional campaign data sources from nearly any other source including custom in-house data-sources within a few days.

TrackSimple’s campaign dashboard marks the continuation of a trend that is rapidly gaining the attention of Madison Avenue and the idea in how advertising agencies are empowering themselves with technology to become more efficient and cost-effective.

In addition, BlueKai Analytics also offers a robust pre-campaign audience intelligence solution that provides new audience discovery and campaign targeting recommendations for agencies before a dollar is spent.  Once a campaign is implemented, BlueKai Analytics can also provide data profiles on audiences and metrics that can be used for future prospecting.

Company’s cross-media measurement solutions bridge gaps in traditional ad performance measurement to deliver faster, more accurate consumer insights

SAN FRANCISCO – Symphony Advanced Media, part of the Symphony Technology Group (STG), has announced their recent company launch. Symphony Advanced Media (SymphonyAM) provides cross-media advertising performance analytics and consumer insights to empower brand advertisers to make more efficient media allocation and segmentation decisions and track the performance of their live campaigns for a higher return on investment (ROI) on their media spend.

“As new media platforms emerge, brand leaders must navigate an increasingly complex array of options to engage and influence consumers. It’s more imperative than ever for marketers to fully understand how their media investments—strategically and down to the campaign level—are impacting their brand value and bottom line,” said SymphonyAM CEO Manish Bhatia. “SymphonyAM enables advertisers to get the full value out of their media investments with the right set of fast, actionable, granular insights.”

SymphonyAM recently expanded with the acquisition of San Francisco-based Factor Technology Group, a leading provider of advertising effectiveness measurement. Founded in 1999, FactorTG has executed more than 5,000,000 brand effectiveness surveys for global clients across the media, agency, automotive, CPG, financial services and pharmaceutical categories.

“Over the last two years, we have developed a great partnership with FactorTG to help our clients measure and optimize their advertising effectiveness,” noted Paul A. Pereira, vice president of analytics & search engine marketing at Hill Holiday. “We look forward to expanding this relationship and leveraging SymphonyAM’s access to even more consumer insights data.”

“SymphonyAM provides us with critical insights to help us understand the delivery and accountability of our direct-to-consumer media mix,“ said Pamela Stewart, director of consumer market research at Shire Pharmaceuticals. “We are pleased that FactorTG is now part of the larger Symphony Advanced Media organization and we are looking forward to a strengthened partnership.”

SymphonyAM’s advertising effectiveness measurement solutions utilize a unique methodological approach to combine qualitative consumer data with robust quantitative data. The result provides relevant and comprehensive insights about cross-media campaign performance—even on very short, live campaigns. This methodology enables SymphonyAM to address key shortcomings commonly found in traditional advertising measurement approaches, such as slow reporting and the inability to measure low-weight media.

SymphonyAM’s leadership team is comprised of seasoned executives from television, Internet, mobile, social media and consumer research organizations. SymphonyAM is headquartered in Palo Alto and San Francisco, CA, with offices in Princeton, New Jersey and New York City.

About Symphony Advanced Media

Symphony Advanced Media helps clients optimize their integrated channel strategies and media options to rapidly improve campaign performance, increase efficiency and drive more consumer response.

SymphonyAM’s analytics solutions combine behavioral data and survey-based solutions to provide actionable strategic insights on advertising performance across all media, including online, TV and mobile. Clients include leading global brand advertisers in the media, automotive, financial services, pharmaceutical, consumer packaged goods and telecom industries. Learn more about SymphonyAM at www.symphonyam.com.

SymphonyAM is part of part of Symphony Technology Group (STG), the global leader in marketing intelligence whose portfolio of companies include Symphony IRI, Teleca, and EYC.

ad:tech San Francisco 2011

HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. – Ocean Media (www.oceanmediainc.com), a leading independent media planning and buying agency, announced that priceline.com, the U.S. business of the Priceline Group of Companies, has extended its contract with the agency for an additional two years. Ocean Media shares honors with William Shatner as priceline.com’s longest-tenured partners in its advertising campaigns, having worked with the company for 13 years. Terms of the contract were not disclosed.

Priceline.com is the leading travel service for value-conscious leisure travelers, giving customers multiple ways to save on airline tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars, vacation packages and cruises. In addition to its extensive collection of published rates and fares, priceline.com’s famous Name Your Own Price® service can deliver even deeper savings of up to 60 percent on hotel rooms, 50 percent on airline tickets and 40 percent on rental cars.

The contract renewal affirms Ocean Media’s ability to sustain ad performance over time with forward-focused media strategies. Acting as the architect for priceline.com’s national ad planning and buying since the online travel service launched in April 1998, Ocean Media’s contribution to priceline.com’s U.S. success has been widely recognized by industry leaders. The Brand Institute, an independent marketing company, cited priceline in USA Today as being branded nationally faster than any other company in history. In the fourth quarter of 2010, the Priceline Group of Companies had $3.26 billion in gross travel bookings, an increase of 44.2 percent over a year ago.

“Ocean Media has done an exceptional job of developing and executing strategic and efficient media buys that work, to which priceline.com’s U.S. success can attest, from the very beginning and throughout our long relationship,” said Brett Keller, Chief Marketing Officer of priceline.com.

“We are excited to continue our valued partnership with priceline.com, one that has already spanned almost 13 years,” said Mike Robertson, founder and co-CEO, Ocean Media. “It makes us exceptionally proud of the longevity in tenure and success as their media agency and partner.”

About Ocean Media

Ocean Media (oceanmediainc.com) is a leading independent media planning and buying agency, founded in 1996 and based in Huntington Beach, Calif. Adhering to the philosophy that return on investment (ROI) should be at the forefront of every advertising campaign, Ocean Media develops media strategies that reach the right audience, incite action and generate results. With transparency and a risk-averse focus on continuous testing and evaluation, comprehensive analytics and optimization, Ocean Media has been the media architect behind campaigns that built such name brands as Priceline.com (13 years of service), FreeCreditScore.com (11 years), eHarmony.com (nine years), Overstock.com (seven years) and Angie’s List (two years), among others.

“BuzzPlanner” helps advertisers instantly improve brand metrics and ROI at scale, leveraging online conversations with custom, rich and standard media placements

Enhanced input – system upgrades include the ability to analyze specific brand goals and translate them into conversation targets that deliver greater ROI
Improved output – plans not only define the best URLs to advertise on, but now includes the ability to scale, as well as to identify the opportunity size and additional conversation target opportunities

SAN FRANCISCO – BuzzLogic, an online media company that improves brand metrics and ROI through its scaleable media index and analytics platform, has upgraded BuzzPlanner, its conversational media planner and key buying component of its online advertising platform. Updates to BuzzPlanner include the ability to: 1) input specific brand goals which generate hundreds of URLs that can be targeted with ads, 2) optimize the placements according to conversation change metrics, and 3) scale the media plan to maximize return.

After inputting a query based around specific audience and campaign objectives, the planning module intelligently ranks and outputs hundreds of URLs for targeted ad placement, which the company then places on behalf of the brand. BuzzPlanner also allows the company’s media team to optimize during the campaign as it uncovers more dense, relevant and higher reach conversations to greatly improve ROI.

For example, a consumer package goods (CPG) company looked to target a seasonal product to audiences nostalgic about autumn. After utilizing BuzzLogic’s index and analytics module to identify the genesis of relevant discussions around autumn, the BuzzPlanner then generated a customized media plan to reach millions of potential customers across several hundred URLs. Specifically, BuzzPlanner found both traditional autumn sites around holidays, as well as those pointed toward Fall TV show premieres, football and leaf peeping. Once the plan was implemented, the campaign was optimized. The BuzzLogic program was the highest performing element of the brand’s buy based around this campaign.

“We did business with more than 70 of the Fortune 1000 companies last year providing them the ability to improve ROI through our integrated solution using conversational metrics as our levers of optimization,” said Dave Hills, BuzzLogic’s CEO. “In a world where all content is social and conversations take place throughout the visible Web, the improvements to BuzzPlanner help scale and optimize media plans and buys for the highest return.”

BuzzLogic can uniquely produce and place a customized, horizontal media plan across the visible web reaching 208 million people, according to Comscore. The company’s proprietary tech platform utilizes indexing and ranking, versus cookies or other user targeting techniques.

About BuzzLogic

BuzzLogic’s proprietary index of content, unique analytics and scalable media capabilities enables brands to identify, impact and measure increases to their online brand persuasion. The company’s all-in-one technology platform combines indexing and analytics to determine which conversations are most critical to advertisers; it allows for scaleable media placements using standard rich media and custom ad units, and ensures the greatest return via optimization and reporting.

BuzzLogic’s clientele includes Proctor & Gamble, Toyota, Best Buy, PlayStation, Microsoft, and Starbucks. BuzzLogic is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. For more information, visit www.buzzlogic.com.

aiMatch addition makes it even easier for sales teams to identify products and inventory mixes — so they can spend more time selling

RALEIGH, N.C. – aiMatch announced that its comprehensive ad-delivery platform, which includes Simulation-Based Forecasting, Sales Performance Management, Advanced Delivery and Business Intelligence, now includes Sales Order Management, too. The company said that publishers have been integrating sales order management for too long, and it was time for an easier approach.

All too often, integration between third-party providers and common ad-delivery engines creates both data leakage and technical management problems. A single comprehensive offering from aiMatch solves both.

“Publishers can now work in a seamless flow, from RFP to Proposal to Approvals to Insertion Order to Campaign to Flight without having to re-key one character of data,” said aiMatch CEO Jeff Wood. “It may seem simple, but it’s built into our Advertising Platform — it doesn’t need to be integrated in — and this makes it easier to use and ultimately more insightful. There is only one login for our platform because it’s one system.”

Ad servers and workflow solutions have historically been difficult to integrate and maintain. Their differing taxonomies created needless friction, and the amounts and types of data elements in both systems were constantly changing. The process was an invitation to error.

Now, in addition to improving general workflow, implementing a single User Experience for both sales and ad operations streamlines communication between the two teams, so each can do their job better. Simple to use, simple to manage the unified platform makes it easier for the sales team to keep selling.

This story was first reported in DigiDay.

About aiMatch

Founded by a team of online advertising technology experts who have been entrenched in the industry since its inception, aiMatch is dedicated to putting advertising intelligence (ai) in the hands of online publishers, enabling them to create new and better defined audiences, launch new revenue opportunities, and maximize the value of their advertising inventory.

The aiMatch solution equips publishers with a comprehensive platform to help them make intelligent decisions. We solve the complexity of sales performance management, business intelligence, forecasting, simulation and ad delivery with unprecedented and scalable capabilities that match each publisher’s inventory with the best options.

aiMatch connects insights to action, enabling users to take a big-picture view of data and interact with it effectively. For more information, visit www.aimatch.com.

NEW YORK – Carat, the leading global independent communications network, announced it has been awarded U.S. media planning and buying responsibilities for theatrical marketing for the entertainment company Relativity Media, LLC. Carat’s work, which begins December 1st, will encompass the planned national release of 10 to 12 films within the next year, including Season of the Witch opening January 7th, followed by Kids in America and The Dark Fields slated for March 2011.

“Relativity is an entertainment company that is making all the right moves, and we couldn’t be more excited to be working with them,” said Martin Cass, president of Carat. “Our consumer centric approach to media with brands like adidas, Gillette and Red Bull translates perfectly to Relativity’s needs.”

Susan Taylor, EVP Managing Director for Carat West, and her team will work closely with the fully integrated studio’s marketing and distribution teams.

Thirty-two of Relativity’s films have opened at No. 1 at the box office and earned 43 Oscar® nominations. Fifty-one of Relativity’s films have each generated more than $100 million in worldwide box-office receipts.

In June 2010, Relativity Media announced a groundbreaking licensing agreement with Netflix, allowing Netflix’s subscribers to stream Relativity films during the “pay TV window.”

ABOUT RELATIVITY MEDIA, LLC

Relativity Media, LLC is a media and entertainment company that focuses on creating, financing and distributing first class, studio-quality entertainment content and intellectual property across multiple platforms, as well as making strategic partnerships with, and opportunistic investments in, media and entertainment-related companies and assets. Relativity owns and operates Rogue, a company that specializes in the production and distribution of films from new and cutting edge filmmakers. Building upon its foundation of financing and producing films, Relativity has grown to include music, sports and television divisions and the next-generation social network iamrogue.com. Relativity also owns and operates RelativityREAL, Relativity’s television arm, which has become one of the leading suppliers of reality television with more than 20 shows in episodic or pilot. RelativityREAL is run by Tom Forman; his past successes include Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and Kid Nation. This year, Relativity acquired the marketing and distribution operations of Overture Films and reached a first of its kind TV pay deal with Netflix.

To date, Relativity has committed to, produced and/or financed more than 200 studio-quality motion pictures through 2014. Released films have accumulated more than $14.0 billion in worldwide box office revenue. Relativity’s recent films include Despicable Me, Salt, Dear John, Brothers, The Wolfman, It’s Complicated, Zombieland, Couples Retreat, The Bounty Hunter, Get Him to the Greek, Robin Hood, Grown Ups, and, most recently, Nanny McPhee Returns and The Social Network. Upcoming films for Relativity include The Fighter, Skyline, James Cameron’s Sanctum in 3D and Wes Craven’s My Soul To Take in 3D. Thirty-two of the company’s films have opened at No. 1 at the box office. Relativity films have earned 43 Oscar® nominations, including nods for Nine, A Serious Man, Frost/Nixon, Atonement, American Gangster and 3:10 to Yuma. Fifty-one of Relativity’s films have each generated more than $100 million in worldwide box-office receipts. For more information visit the company’s website at www.relativitymedia.com

ABOUT CARAT

Carat, an Aegis Media Group company, is a global independent media communications network, with over 100 offices in over 80 countries. Carat provides a full range of services, including media and market research; communications planning; media planning and buying; multicultural communications; corporate trade; branded entertainment; direct and digital marketing; experiential and sponsorship services; and marketing analytics and consulting. For more information, visit the company’s website at www.carat.com.

Proprietary Auto Shopper Data Drives First Ever Real-Time Precision Targeting for Automakers

IRVINE, Calif. & NEW YORK – Autobytel (Nasdaq: ABTL), a consumer facing network of automotive shopping websites and Aperture, a leading provider of online audience measurement, planning and performance verification solutions, announced a groundbreaking partnership and integrated toolset that will offer automotive brands and content publishers unique insights and applications for marketing campaigns. The integration of Autobytel’s unparalleled auto-intender market data with Aperture’s real-time, “privacy-centric” household-level online consumer analytics will give automakers and publishers the opportunity to better understand the intent and profile of prospective car and truck buyers throughout the purchase funnel.

Jim Helberg, EVP Product, Marketing & Analytics for Autobytel Inc., stated that this suite of tools will allow brands to translate actual consumer shopping and media behavior insights into real-time campaign optimization rather than relying upon traditionally self-reported, historical survey or cookie data. Helberg added, “We chose to integrate with Aperture to launch this offering because we believe the methodology at the core of the Aperture audience data platform is quickly becoming the industry standard for measuring individual and household demographics, psychographics and purchase behavior.”

“Until now, the majority of automotive brands have targeted automotive buying audiences based on limited information,” Scott Knoll, General Manager for Aperture emphasized. “Our new measurement solutions provide a competitive advantage by enabling brands to optimize campaigns based on discrete audience understandings that simply cannot be revealed by limited, inferred data. In a tougher than ever auto market, the ability for automakers to optimize campaigns and or place them in precisely the right area of a publisher’s website, will separate the winners from the losers. In developing these tools, we recognized Autobytel as the industry leader in automotive consumer intender purchase information requests. They were the obvious partner.”

About Aperture

Aperture, a Datran Media company, is an award-winning, unique audience data platform that combines household-level data with online consumer behavior to help advertisers accurately identify, reach and measure online target audiences. Aperture modules include Audience Discovery, Audience Finder, Audience Reach and Audience ROI. The world’s largest advertising agencies and global brands depend on Aperture to connect unique consumer audiences with the compelling content, products and services they desire.

About Autobytel Inc. (www.autobytel.com)

Autobytel Inc., an online leader offering consumer purchase requests and marketing resources to car dealers and manufacturers and providing consumers with the information they need to purchase new and used cars, pioneered the automotive Internet when it launched autobytel.com in 1995. Today, the company is continuing to offer innovative products and services to help consumers buy, and auto dealers and manufacturers sell more used and new cars. Autobytel has helped tens of millions of automotive consumers research vehicles; connected thousands of dealers nationwide with motivated car buyers; and helped every major automaker market its brand online. Through its flagship website Autobytel.com®, its network of automotive sites, including Autotropolis.com®, Autoweb.com®, AutoSite.com®, Car.comsm, CarSmart.com®, CarTV.com®, and MyRide.com® and its respected online partners, Autobytel continues its dedication to innovating the industry’s highest quality Internet programs to provide consumers with a comprehensive and positive automotive research and purchasing experience, and auto dealers, dealer groups and auto manufacturers with one of the industry’s most productive and cost-effective customer referral and marketing programs.

First End-to-End Video Solution Covers Entire Campaign Lifecycle, Including Planning and Buying, Ad Serving and Campaign Management, and Post Campaign Analytics

REDWOOD CITY, CA – October 13, 2010 – YuMe, Inc., the leading video advertising technology company, today announced that it has launched ACE™ for Advertisers, the first end-to-end, buy-side video ad management system architected to serve the needs of media agencies, advertisers and agency trading desks. Built on the proven ACE technology platform, which serves more than 1 billion impressions per month, ACE for Advertisers provides an enterprise-class solution and professional services that mitigate the complexity of video ad campaign management

The ACE for Advertisers solution gives advertisers and agencies complete control over a digital video campaign’s entire lifecycle, streamlining processes for media planning and buying, ad trafficking and creative management, ad serving and optimization, and post-campaign analytics. It can deliver video ads to online, mobile and IPTV devices, giving advertisers multi-channel flexibility and future-proofing their investment. It also helps them to optimize ad spend across publishers, ad networks, and exchanges to achieve greater reach, campaign performance, and ROI.

“Our new ACE for Advertisers solution gives advertisers, agencies, and trading desks a platform through which they can engage in large-scale video advertising – with direct-private publishers, through ad networks and exchanges, and across mobile devices and connected TVs,” said Jayant Kadambi, co-founder and president of YuMe. “ACE for Advertisers enables them to run their own private network, giving them control, visibility, and the means to incorporate and leverage their own data and processes.”

A Layered Solution for Advertisers
In addition to empowering advertisers and agencies with total control over their video campaigns, ACE for Advertisers combines the best attributes of both ad management and demand-side platforms. ACE for Advertisers enables advertisers and agencies to create their own private networks and buy premium inventory at scale from their direct publishers; from YuMe’s network of more than 600 premium publishers, such as Microsoft, Viacom, and NBC; or from any other video ad network or exchange. These private networks can leverage data and insights from YuMe as well as in-house or third party providers, such as comScore, Quantcast, BlueKai, Datran and eXelate, for accurate audience targeting capabilities.

Ultimately, ACE for Advertisers is a ‘layered’ offering with a variety of solutions for advertisers and agencies to leverage as needed. It integrates with leading display advertising solutions like DFA/Mediavisor and Atlas, as well as supporting VAST and VPAID standards. ACE for Advertisers is “exchange ready,” enabling marketers to bid for and buy video pre-roll inventory dynamically off popular exchanges using custom APIs.

“YuMe has done an impeccable job of seamlessly integrating its proven video management platform into existing agency workflows and processes to give agencies greater control over their online video campaigns,” said Steve Katelman, Director, Strategic Partnerships at Omnicom Media Group. “By automating the planning and buying process for video campaigns, ACE for Advertisers lets agencies spend less time shuffling spreadsheets around and more time focusing on what they do best: creating innovative, strategic media plans that engage viewers and improve campaign ROI.”

The New Face of YuMe
The new ACE for Advertisers solution exemplifies YuMe’s position as the industry’s leading video advertising technology company. As its solutions set has evolved, so too has YuMe’s visual identity. Recently, YuMe refreshed its corporate Website to better promote its mission to create the most comprehensive, innovative, and effective video advertising technologies and services in the media industry. Its new corporate logo, a monitor emitting three RGB rays, represents YuMe’s ability to reach all screens: PC, mobile and IPTV. The RGB rays also represent the three pillars that support YuMe’s business, with green representing YuMe’s premium video ad network; blue representing its industry-leading enterprise solutions and services; and red representing its underlying focus on innovation.

About YuMe
YuMe is a video advertising technology company that makes professional video profitable for publishers and effective for Advertisers. Its robust ACE™ technology powers both its premium ad network and its industry-leading advertising management solutions, ACE for Publishers and ACE for Advertisers. YuMe’s premium ad network aggregates the best video content, representing hundreds of premium publishers including MSN, NBC and Fox News. As a result, YuMe gives publishers and advertisers unprecedented reach, brand safety, contextual relevance, controlled syndication, and consistent delivery across all digital media platforms–Web, downloads, mobile, and IPTV. YuMe is a privately held company headquartered in Redwood City, CA and backed by Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Menlo Ventures. For more information, visit www.yume.com, follow @yumevideo on twitter (www.twitter.com/yumevideo), or become a fan of YuMe on Facebook at www.facebook.com/yumevideo.

New Capabilities Offer Daily Campaign Reporting for On-The-Fly Digital Campaign Performance Management and Optimization

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, announced the introduction of the second generation of comScore AdEffx™ Campaign Essentials. The new service features several groundbreaking enhancements for digital media planning and optimization, including the availability of digital GRP “overnights,” campaign reporting across global markets, verification of ad delivery by audience and geography, and detailed campaign analysis by creative and placement strategy.

“The new comScore AdEffx Campaign Essentials service offers greater reporting efficiency, granularity, and flexibility than has previously been available,” said Anne Hunter, comScore vice president of Advertising Effectiveness Solutions. “As the digital media planning environment becomes increasingly global and real-time, it has never been more important to be able to optimize campaigns, verify who is seeing them, and to be able to course-correct and retool on the fly if the media plan is not being executed effectively. Campaign Essentials enables our clients to do exactly that, and represents an innovation that will be critical in helping brand advertisers optimize the value of their digital campaigns and further accelerate the shift of ad dollars online.”

Digital GRP “Overnights”
The Campaign Essentials service is evolving from its existing reporting of campaign-specific audience reach, frequency and GRPs on a total campaign period basis to delivering digital GRP “overnights,” which enables media planners to understand campaign performance in a real-time environment and retool their campaigns on the fly. It will benefit publishers by giving them the ability to closely monitor campaigns to ensure they’re delivering against the reach and frequency targets as mandated by the media buyers.

“The days of stepping awkwardly between digital and traditional ad platforms are over,” said Matt Timothy, President of VINDICO. “comScore has taken a big step in leveling the playing field for marketers. By offering views of digital performance that have long been the standard in the TV business, any buyer should be supremely confident about allocating dollars to the platform where the most valuable attention can be found.”

Audience, Frequency & Geographic Verification
Even the best planned campaigns can fail to reach their intended audience targets, and as websites attract a greater share of their audience from outside a single country’s borders, it is essential to verify that the correct audiences are being reached. Campaign Essentials enables media planners to ensure that their campaign is delivering its ads to its intended targets, and to optimize their strategy accordingly if they are not.

Too often campaigns deliver erratically to consumers, with many people only seeing the advertisements one to three times and a smaller group of people consuming the majority of ads and budget. Campaign Essentials allows clients to understand their frequency curves right away to ensure budgets are being allocated effectively and frequency caps are being enforced.

“In our business, knowledge is power,” said David Cohen, EVP, U.S. Director of Digital Communications, Universal McCann. “Daily intelligence from tools like Campaign Essentials can be a very powerful asset for marketers looking to maximize results and minimize waste. With demographic and geographic insights delivered throughout the flight, we are excited at the prospects and eager to start working with this new tool in our toolkit.”

Built-in Customization by Creative and Placement Strategy
Campaign Essentials also offers clients the ability to conduct detailed campaign analysis and understand performance by reach, frequency and GRPs according to the different sites, creative and placement strategies used in the campaign. With a built-in optimization dashboard clients can easily find the best performing sites for a particular campaign. They can also understand how ads were delivered according to the different placement strategies used – such as audience targeting, contextual targeting, premium pricing, efficiency pricing, run-of-network, and retargeting – and how they are performing in relation to one another. Additional flexibility has already been built into the system to allow marketers to ask new questions during the campaign without conducting time-consuming custom analysis.

For more information about comScore AdEffx Campaign Essentials, please email learnmore@comscore.com.

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

New Platform Automates Access to Undertone’s Quality Inventory; Four Agency Trading Desks Already Signed On

NEW YORK – Undertone Networks, an online advertising network, announced the release of Undertone DirectConnect, a new product built upon Undertone’s next-generation technology platform that integrates with agency trading desks (ATDs). DirectConnect automates access to Undertone’s high-quality inventory and allows agencies to target audiences using data from their preferred source. Four agency trading desks have signed on to leverage DirectConnect, making Undertone the first ad network to offer advertisers premium inventory electronically at scale.

Undertone offers DirectConnect at a time when use of centralized trading desks is becoming a popular strategy at digital agencies. Today, these trading desks leverage demand-side platforms (DSPs) to acquire inventory through ad exchanges, but supply is limited to remnant placements. According to a recent AdSafe Media report, 17 percent of exchange inventory is considered high risk to advertisers. DirectConnect addresses this challenge by enabling advertisers to tap into a new supply of quality, brand-safe placements, seamlessly.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Undertone on its DirectConnect program. It’s refreshing to see that they noticed a change in the marketplace and embraced it,” said Michael Finnegan, associate media director, MEC, a division of WPP. “Hopefully, Undertone’s progressive approach to biddable media will echo across the industry to enable greater access to top quality inventory. MEC looks forward to driving success with Undertone for our clients.”

DirectConnect is built with open architecture to integrate easily with multiple platforms, allowing Undertone to support buyers, their chosen DSPs and their preferred method of audience targeting. With this proprietary technology, Undertone can extend its cash-back Quality Guarantee to inventory purchased electronically, minimizing risk and protecting brand safety for its advertisers. DirectConnect supports rich media and in-banner video, and future versions will enable real-time bidding (RTB) and support pre-roll video, expandable and other high impact ad units.

“DirectConnect offers advertisers the best of both worlds—the ability to target precise audiences on their platform of choice combined with the premium inventory Undertone is known for in the market,” said Alan Schanzer, chief strategy officer, Undertone. “Our goal is to offer all our high quality products to advertisers through buy-side platforms.”

About Undertone Networks

Undertone Networks, an online advertising network, provides advertisers with quality placements on the web’s best sites. The company carefully selects its media partners and hand purchases all its inventory, delivering above-the-fold visibility and brand protection for marketers who care where their ads run online. The Undertone approach ensures that media buyers and the advertisers they serve can drive successful brand awareness and direct response initiatives with a comprehensive blend of high impact ad formats, rich media, targeting capabilities and personalized service. The company is based in New York, with fully staffed regional offices in major U.S. markets.

Pursuing Their Mission to Reshape Interactive, IAB’s Committees & Councils Announce Competition for Brand-Friendly Formats and Issue First Reports on Digital Audio and Local Advertising Opportunities

MIXX Conference & Expo 2010
NEW YORK – Last week as the MIXX Conference and Expo served as the central gathering point for digital marketing leaders during Advertising Week in New York City, IAB committees and councils have announced a number of groundbreaking initiatives:

- A Competition for New Brand Ad Formats – the IAB has issued an unprecedented call for competitive submissions of new, brand-hospitable ad formats to enhance the already existing list of IAB standard ad units. See www.iab.net/risingstars

- Digital Audio Committee – has introduced the first “Digital Audio Advertising Overview,” which defines the market, the audience and the growing marketing opportunities in digital audio. See www.iab.net/digitalaudio

- Local Committee – has released the industry’s first report designed to help marketers and agencies targeting local markets. See http://www.iab.net/targeting_local

“The IAB helps drive the industry forward through the efforts of 10 committees and 7 councils in various industry segments,” said Michael Theodore, VP, Member Services, IAB. “IAB’s committees and councils are comprised of some of the brightest minds in their space, working together to develop solutions that improve the interactive advertising and marketing ecosystem.”

IAB Committees

Audio
Chaired by Andy Lipset, TargetSpot; Brian Benedik, Katz 360
Digital Video
Chaired by Joey Trotz, CNN.com; Geoffrey Coco, Microsoft Advertising
Games
Chaired by JJ Richards, GM at Massive; Dave Madden, WildTangent
Interactive TV
Chaired by Chris Falkner, NBC Universal; Jared Iwata, Time Warner Cable
Lead Generation & Email
Chaired by Jason Oates, Datran Media
Local
Chaired by Ed Darmanin, The Weather Channel; Victor Wong, PaperG
Mobile Advertising
Chaired by Sharon Knitter, Cars.com; Cameron Clayton, The Weather Channel
Networks & Exchanges
Chaired by David J. Moore, 24/7 Real Media; Jay Sears, ContextWeb
Search
Chaired by Daniel Schock, Google; Saleel Sathe, Microsoft
Social Media
Chaired by Chris Cunningham, appssavvy; Seth Goldstein, SocialMedia

IAB Councils

Ad Ops
Chaired by Adrian D’Souza, Google; Dan Murphy, Univision
CFO
Chaired by Lisa Campbell, Cars.com; Michael Cohen, Associated Content from Yahoo!
Legal Affairs
Chaired by Jason Ryning, Microsoft Advertising; Stephen Hicks, Ziff Davis, Inc.
Multicultural Council
Chaired by Borja Perez, Telemundo; Mark Lopez, Terra Networks
Public Policy
Chaired by Dave Morgan, SimulMedia
Research
Chaired by Beth Uyenco, Microsoft Advertising; Stephanie Fried, NBC Universal
Sales Executive
Chaired by Sheila Buckley, The Weather Channel; Brian Quinn, Triad Digital Media

Over time, these committees and councils have addressed major issues in supply chain, research and measurement, simplifying the processes associated with buying, planning and creating interactive media.

The committees are open to representatives from IAB member companies. To learn more about getting involved, please email committees@iab.net.

For more comprehensive information about the work of the IAB Committees and Councils, please visit http://www.iab.net/member_center/councils_committees_working_groups

About the IAB:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 460 leading media and technology companies who are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising. Founded in 1996, the IAB is headquartered in New York City with a Public Policy office in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.iab.net.

NEW YORK – RSG Media Systems (www.rsgmedia.com), a leading provider of software solutions for the media & entertainment industry and digital publishers, is announcing the launch of Zoox™ Analytics solutions to help digital publishers maximize yield from ad sales.

The adage says, “Charge what the market will bear”. In reality, it’s hard to know how much that is. Too often sales managers rely on gut instinct or on what their representatives tell them. RSG Media’s new Zoox products use advanced analytics and predictive algorithms to advise managers when to charge more and when to make a deal, accurately predicting a narrow band within which market prices will fall.

By accurately calculating a price floor, based on 28 market conditions and inventory indicators, Zoox Analytics helps managers maintain pricing discipline. The results are significant. RSG has seen a 4-5 percent lift opportunity based on tests done using Zoox Analytics with some of the largest digital publishers in the industry.

Says Sriram Subramanian, head of RSG Media’s Analytics & Optimization group, “Often sales reps just want to close a deal and accept a price that is too low. There’s not only the direct cost of lower prices, there’s also the opportunity cost.”

In addition to pricing deals, the new Zoox™ Analytics decision support system enables Pricing and Inventory (P&I) teams to answer questions such as:

- How much inventory do I have for a DMA? How much targeted to adult males?
- Do I make more money selling individual units or packages?
- Are my packages giving valuable inventory away for cheap?
- Should I give in to the client’s quote? Or will I be able to get a higher price later?
- When the market’s moving, how can I tell immediately?

These questions are difficult to address thanks in part to the tremendous growth of online advertising and the accompanying innovation in ad formats, targeting and packaging. With Zoox Analytics, RSG Media has taken a unique approach to solving these problems. Zoox uses advanced mathematical models to predict inventory availability and recommend dynamic pricing that helps publishers maximize their return on inventory. Experts at RSG Media Research Lab monitor the models and make adjustments as necessary to keep them in tune with changing market trends.

This approach has been made possible through a combination of RSG Media’s years of experience in the media domain building sales systems and revenue management solutions for the top 20 media companies.

Adds Subramanian, “Our solutions based on rigorous mathematical models help provide decision support in critical areas of estimating available inventory to sell, price suggestion and identifying lost revenues due to mis-pricing. Instead of offering a one-size-fits-all, we start any engagement with an understanding of specific business requirements and issues that we use to fine-tune our models. Using the client’s data, we demonstrate a clear value proposition with a provable return on investment.”

For more information on Zoox™, go to http://www.rsgmedia.com/products/zoox%E2%84%A2-digital-media-tools/zoox%E2%84%A2-digital-media-tools.aspx

About RSG Media Systems

RSG Media Systems (www.rsgmedia.com) creates software products to manage and monetize media properties. The company’s products include: RightsLogic®, an enterprise rights and royalty management solution; Planit™ an ad sales proposal management system; AdVant™, optimizing ad sales revenue software designed to assist media companies in maximizing revenue, and Zoox™ digital ad sales software for pricing, inventory, and analytics groups. RSG Media Systems also designs strategies and implements custom technology solutions to meet its clients’ needs. Established in 1985, the company is headquartered in New York City.

Google has launched several new updates to DoubleClick Ad Planner, designed to enhance the overall experience with the tool. With these releases, one can streamline the process of building online media plans and campaigns while getting access to better data for more informed media planning decisions. A summary of these updates is included below, as per Google’s earlier announcement.

Custom Columns
A handy feature, custom columns allows you to customize the columns you view within the Ad Planner “Search by audience” interface. To access this new feature go to the “Search by audience” tab and click on the “Columns” drop down menu located on the upper right hand side of the “Placement” section. Choose column options from Placement Info and Country.

Exporting Google Display Network placements to existing AdWords campaigns
When the Export to AdWords feature was made available in Ad Planner back in June, you could easily export Google Display Network (GDN) placements from Ad Planner into a new campaign in AdWords. With this latest feature upgrade, you can now export placements into existing AdWords campaigns and ad groups as well.
The process is simple. Select GDN placements for export and click the “Export to AdWords” button found in the “Research by Audience” and “Media Plan” sections of Ad Planner. Exported placements will appear as either a new ad group or be incorporated into existing campaigns or ad groups in your AdWords accounts. These exported placements can be found in the “Networks” tab under “Managed placements.”

YouTube and Google Finance now included in Ad Planner
YouTube.com is now included in Ad Planner and comes in at number 2 on the latest Ad Planner 1000 list.  Google Finance has also been added to Ad Planner with this release and you can continue to see previously included Google properties such as Blogger , Orkut and Picnik .

Google Content Network is now Google Display Network
In June, the Google Content Network got a new name — the Google Display Network — to better reflect the breadth of Google’s display media offerings. You can run ads on the Google Display Network the same way you always have on the Google Content Network.

With this latest release, you will notice a change in the Ad Planner interface reflecting this new term, and you’ll see Google Display Network where you might have seen Google Content Network mentioned.

To read more about the Google Display Network check out the Agency Adwords blog post at <a href=”http://adwordsagency.blogspot.com/2010/06/introducing-google-display-network.html” rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”>http://adwordsagency.blogspot.com/2010/06/introducing-google-display-network.html</a>.
Visit www.google.com/adplanner to check out these latest updates to Ad Planner.

NEW YORK – RSG Media Systems (www.rsgmedia.com), a leading provider of software solutions for the media & entertainment industry and digital publishers, is announcing the launch of Zoox™ Analytics solutions to help digital publishers maximize yield from ad sales.

The adage says, “Charge what the market will bear”. In reality, it’s hard to know how much that is. Too often sales managers rely on gut instinct or on what their representatives tell them. RSG Media’s new Zoox products use advanced analytics and predictive algorithms to advise managers when to charge more and when to make a deal, accurately predicting a narrow band within which market prices will fall.

By accurately calculating a price floor, based on 28 market conditions and inventory indicators, Zoox Analytics helps managers maintain pricing discipline. The results are significant. RSG has seen a 4-5 percent lift opportunity based on tests done using Zoox Analytics with some of the largest digital publishers in the industry.

Says Sriram Subramanian, head of RSG Media’s Analytics & Optimization group, “Often sales reps just want to close a deal and accept a price that is too low. There’s not only the direct cost of lower prices, there’s also the opportunity cost.”

In addition to pricing deals, the new Zoox™ Analytics decision support system enables Pricing and Inventory (P&I) teams to answer questions such as:

• How much inventory do I have for a DMA? How much targeted to adult males?
• Do I make more money selling individual units or packages?
• Are my packages giving valuable inventory away for cheap?
• Should I give in to the client’s quote? Or will I be able to get a higher price later?
• When the market’s moving, how can I tell immediately?

These questions are difficult to address thanks in part to the tremendous growth of online advertising and the accompanying innovation in ad formats, targeting and packaging. With Zoox Analytics, RSG Media has taken a unique approach to solving these problems. Zoox uses advanced mathematical models to predict inventory availability and recommend dynamic pricing that helps publishers maximize their return on inventory. Experts at RSG Media Research Lab monitor the models and make adjustments as necessary to keep them in tune with changing market trends.

This approach has been made possible through a combination of RSG Media’s years of experience in the media domain building sales systems and revenue management solutions for the top 20 media companies.

Adds Subramanian, “Our solutions based on rigorous mathematical models help provide decision support in critical areas of estimating available inventory to sell, price suggestion and identifying lost revenues due to mis-pricing. Instead of offering a one-size-fits-all, we start any engagement with an understanding of specific business requirements and issues that we use to fine-tune our models. Using the client’s data, we demonstrate a clear value proposition with a provable return on investment.”

About RSG Media Systems

RSG Media Systems (www.rsgmedia.com)creates software products to manage and monetize media properties.  The company’s products, including Rights Logic®, a rights and royalty management tool, Planit™,  an ad sales proposal management system, and  AdVant™, optimizing ad sales revenue software, are designed to assist media, entertainment, cable and broadcast companies in maximizing revenue.  RSG Media Systems also designs strategies and implements custom technology solutions to meet its clients’ needs.  Established in 1985, the company is headquartered in New York City.

Hearst Deploys New Product Offering that Matches Quality Content to Targeted Audiences, Drives High-Value Traffic and Monetization to Publishers

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – Demand Media™, a leading content and social media company, announced the general availability of its Content Channels product offering. This turnkey solution enables online publishers to offer original, high-quality, topically-focused content to interested readers, while optimizing performance and building community engagement.

Content Channels is driven by the same content studio and proprietary technology platform that currently powers Demand Media’s highly trafficked web properties, including eHow.com and LIVESTRONG.COM, as well as USA Today’s “TravelTips” section. Content Channels is also now powering sections for two of Hearst Corporation’s leading online news sites, SFGate.com and Chron.com, providing an immersive content experience that appeals to intent-driven audiences.

“This is the culmination of efforts we’ve been focused on for the past several years, and it speaks to the heart of our mission to deliver the experiences consumers demand,” said Steve Semelsberger, senior vice president and general manager of the Business Solutions Group for Demand Media. “Hearst is the second major publisher to select our product for their sites and we appreciate the meaningful collaboration that complements the in-depth, news-driven features that have made forward-thinking publishers like Hearst and USA Today the leading publishers that they are today.”

Content Channels Overview

Content Channels is a managed service offering that provides publishers with a turnkey solution that combines Demand Media’s proprietary technology with its monetization tools and unique Studios-created content to acquire and engage intent-driven audiences. Content Channels leverages Demand Media’s capabilities to determine high value content topics, commission and manage the scalable production of unique articles and videos, and syndicate the content through the publisher’s website in order to grow traffic and increase financial performance. The content is evergreen, informative, actionable content for intent-driven audiences, delivered in easy-to-read, instructional formats. Publishers can leverage Content Channels to cost-effectively develop brand new sections or expand existing sections of their websites that entice audiences through rich and engaging content – without having to expend significant editorial, product or technical effort.

Leading Publishers Deploy New Media Solutions/Content Channels

Hearst Corporation news sites, Chron.com and SFGate.com are the latest publishers to utilize Demand Media’s unique content solutions. Demand Media’s Studio team worked closely with the editorial teams of both sites to ensure that content quality standards met the requirements of Chron.com and SFGate.com, and the articles and videos currently featured on those destinations were created by some of the most seasoned and highly-rated professionals in Demand Media’s freelance network.

In the case of the Houston Chronicle’s Chron.com, the team worked with Demand Media to create a “Small Business Resource Center” to complement their existing business news coverage by incorporating thousands of useful, business-related articles and videos. Content Channels also went live today on San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate.com for its “Home Guides” section. “SFGate.com delivers news, information and entertainment to a fast-paced, thriving, technology-centric audience,” said Michele Slack, vice president of digital media for SFGate.com. “Demand Media’s editorial team, innovative Studio model, proprietary technology platform and performance advertising are a win for our team.”

Earlier this year, USA Today launched “TravelTips,” a new section of its website designed to be a valuable resource for travelers searching for practical advice on thousands of travel-related topics featuring content produced exclusively by Demand Media’s content Studio.

Availability and Pricing

The Content Channels offering is available immediately and is licensed under a revenue sharing arrangement. Generally, Demand Media underwrites the cost to create and serve the content, and manages the performance-based advertising programs associated with the implementation of the Content Channel program. The publisher partner is typically responsible for selling display advertising for the Content Channels-powered section of the website.

For additional information, please visit: www.demandmedia.com/contentchannels

About Demand Media

Demand Media, Inc., is a leading online media company that informs, entertains and connects millions of people every day. Through a portfolio of vertical web properties reaching more than 80 million monthly visitors, a global network of digital partners, and a breakthrough content studio, Demand Media publishes what the world wants to know and share. Founded in 2006, Demand Media is headquartered in Santa Monica, CA with offices in Bellevue, WA, Austin, TX, New York, NY and London, UK. For additional information about Demand Media, visit: www.demandmedia.com

About Hearst Corporation

Hearst Corporation (www.hearst.com) is one of the nation’s largest diversified media companies. Its major interests include ownership of 15 daily and 38 weekly newspapers, including the Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News and Albany Times Union; nearly 200 magazines around the world, including Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and O, The Oprah Magazine; 29 television stations, which reach a combined 18% of U.S. viewers; ownership in leading cable networks, including Lifetime, A&E, History and ESPN; as well as business publishing, including a minority joint venture interest in Fitch Ratings; Internet businesses, television production, newspaper features distribution and real estate.

YPDD service enables yellow page publishers and CMRs to target new advertising sales leads.

PLAINFIELD, Ill. – Infutor Data Solutions, Inc., the market leader in providing high quality database products, announced the general availability of the Yellow Pages Data Delivery (YPDD) service. The new service will enable yellow page publishers and certified marketing representatives to analyze customers’ and competitive advertising expenditures across different yellow page publishers and different regions. YPDD generates customized reports that sales agents can use to perform market-level client and competitor analysis to revise and optimize their client’s advertising program.

YPDD is a superior online application built from current and historical advertising data compiled from 67 million records in 5,400 directories. The YPDD database is updated monthly and provides critical advertising information like ad sizes, UDACs, rates and page numbers of the advertisement layout. Customers have the flexibility to create market-level advertising analytic reports from the YPDD web browser interface, or download the advertising data into their CRM system to create custom reports.

“YPDD was recently deployed to a national yellow page publisher to identify gaps in their customers’ advertising plans,” said Gary Walter, President & CEO of Infutor. “Printed directories continue to be the most common reference for B2C purchase decisions. YPDD is a superior research tool that will drive more advertising sales for publishers.”

About Infutor Data Solutions, Inc.

Infutor Data Solutions, Inc. (http://www.infutor.com) is a market leader in providing high quality database products designed for distribution by major information resellers. Infutor’s core products include consumer, business, telephone and vehicle databases driving critical direct marketing, fraud and identity. Infutor maintains its headquarters in Plainfield, IL, and technical development centers in Cedar Grove, TN and San Rafael de Escazú, Costa Rica.

TAB Eyes-On Data Allows Planners to Compare and Combine Outdoor Media Market by Market with Other Media

NEW YORK – Telmar, a global supplier of advertising media information software and services announced the full integration of the Traffic Audit Bureau’s (TAB) Eyes-On Data into its suite of media planning services. Telmar’s integration of Eyes-On data allows advertisers, planners, and buyers the opportunity to fully realize the impact of outdoor advertising. Using the Eyes-On Data in Telmar systems, clients can use traditional media metrics such as % reach, average frequency, TRPS, and compare cost efficiencies using CPMs and CPPs. These industry-standard measurements for Out-of-Home facilitate bringing outdoor into the media mix.

“Telmar is the first to apply science to the TAB’s site level data and adapt it into a media-planning system that is fully compatible with all other media platforms,” said Stanley Federman, CEO, Telmar. “We’re delighted to provide media owners and buyers alike with a system to properly integrate this powerful media. Before the Eyes-On metrics, Outdoor as a category struggled with measurement; now it is a level playing field.”

“Media planners have always been challenged by a lack of standardized measurement when integrating OOH into multi-media campaigns,” said Andrew Marcus, VP Research for Clear Channel Outdoor. “Telmar recognized the need to put OOH in terms consistent with the advertising media industry. In order for operators to provide their clients with plans that fully integrate OOH, they needed fully compatible metrics.”

In partnership with MRI/GFK Eurisco, Telmar worked on the initial TAB Eyes-On ratings which improved the way previous metric systems measured audiences ‘likely to see’ an outdoor ad, with rich demographic and ethnographic data. Telmar brought data from a variety of sources including: recorded pedestrian traffic, circulation, and travel surveys together and applied a scientific method to the raw data.

About Telmar

Telmar is a world-wide leading supplier of advertising and media information software and services. Telmar’s 10,000 users across 85 countries include many of the world’s leading advertising agencies, publishers, broadcasters and advertisers. For advertisers and advertising agencies, Telmar provides software for survey analysis, data integration, media planning and optimization and more. For publishers and broadcasters, Telmar offers the ability to collect, store and manage media research for revenue management and optimization. Telmar has offices around the world including and is headquartered in New York City, New York. For more information on Telmar and its international services, please visit www.Telmar.com.

AUSTIN, Texas – This week at the OMMA AdNets LA conference, executives from Click Forensics, Razorfish, DataXu and Catalyst will participate in a panel discussion titled: “Simplify the Stack: Fighting the New Cost and Complexity of Media Buying.” The panelists will explore emerging strategies that big brands, agencies and ad networks can use to successfully navigate the newly automated world of display advertising, which includes everyone from data providers and exchanges to optimizers and verification services.

This year’s OMMA AdNets LA conference is designed to help marketers to sort through the tangle of display advertising 2.0. The event will examine ways marketers are balancing new audience targeting technologies with the enduring importance of context; how media buyers are navigating the new complexity; and strategies and tactics everyone can use to simplify the process. In addition, the event will look at how marketers, publishers and the ad technology providers can use this new tangle of ad nets to catch the big one – the true added value of digital advertising.

Panel Title: Simplify the Stack: Fighting the New Cost and Complexity of Media Buying

Panel Participants:

Moderator: David Szetela, Owner and CEO, Clix Marketing
Paul Pellman, CEO, Click Forensics
Angelique Gillmer, Group Media Director, Razorfish
Michael Baker, President & CEO, DataXu
Peter Platt, Chief Digital Officer, Catalyst

When: Monday, July 19, 2010 at 12:15pm PT

Where: Hyatt Regency Century Plaza
2025 Avenue of the Stars
Los Angeles, California 90067

For more information on joining the Click Forensics, visit http://www.clickforensics.com. Follow us on Twitter: @ClickForensics.

About Click Forensics, Inc.

Click Forensics® is the industry leader in online audience verification and traffic quality improvement for the online advertising community. Click Forensics provides audience verification and traffic quality management solutions for leading online search and display advertisers, agencies, publishers and ad networks. The company also regularly publishes industry data on online advertising audience quality. Click Forensics is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and is privately held with funding from Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. More information on Click Forensics and its offerings is available at www.ClickForensics.com.

Patel Named Digital Media Director in San Francisco, Brings Leading Industry Experience to Bear for Carat Clients

SAN FRANCISCO – Carat, the leading global independent communications network, announced the addition of digital media veteran Sankar Patel to its San Francisco team as Digital Media Director, reporting to Andrew Hoeberichts, SVP, General Manager, Carat San Francisco. Mr. Patel will be responsible for the direction of the digital media and integrated media programming for existing clients and will be a vital part of creating strategies for new clients.

“Throughout his career, Sankar has developed exciting, highly-integrated and effective programs that consistently represent the best of innovation in emerging media,” said Susan Taylor, Managing Director, West Coast at Carat. “We look forward to working with Sankar to drive digital media programs for our clients to new levels of creativity and impact.”

Previous to joining Carat, Patel created and managed communications plans for prestigious and innovative consumer brands including MINI USA, YouTube, Priceline.com and Columbia Sportswear Corporation. He brings an in-depth understanding of digital and emerging media, and proven experience taking a strategic and integrated approach to connections planning for his clients. His media agnostic approach to communications strategies, including broadcast, OOH, print, online and nontraditional formats, has brought together the online and offline worlds to great advantage for his clients.

“Sankar has honed his digital skills with top-tier consumer brands and is for us a deep, strategic asset,” said Andrew Hoeberichts, SVP, General Manager, Carat San Francisco. “We provide our clients with digitally-centric integrated media planning and his experience is a perfect fit. The Carat team and our clients will benefit immediately from his addition.”

Patel commented, “The agency’s commitment to always staying digitally ahead of the curve and creating truly consumer-centric campaigns drew me to them. Carat is taking a leadership position in emerging media and I’m excited to be a part of it.”

Patel and his teams have been the recipients of numerous awards such as JDPowers Catalyst award for Most Innovate Automotive Campaign and Creative Media Awards for Most Creative Media Plan by Media Post. His previous agency experience includes Grey Worldwide and Universal McCann.

About Carat

Carat, an Aegis Media Group company, is a global independent media communications network, with over 100 offices in over 80 countries. Carat provides a full range of services including media and market research; communications planning; media planning and buying; multicultural communications; corporate trade; branded entertainment; direct and digital marketing; experiential and sponsorship services; and marketing analytics and consulting. For more information, visit the company’s website at www.carat.com.

Tool enables advertisers to optimize media spend based on weighted beacons and transactional data

Redwood City, CA. – Turn Inc., the industry’s only end-to-end platform for managing data-driven digital advertising, today announced the release of the ROI Optimizer. The tool optimizes media spend against weighted consumer events online as well as values like shopping cart transactional data. For the first time advertisers can now effectively measure and optimize multi-event conversion strategies within a single campaign.

“A consumer’s path online can be circuitous and uniquely their own,” said Eric Anderson, VP of Operations, Trading Desk at Omnicom Group. “Because of this, it’s been difficult to effectively optimize for ROI when a conversion can involve several events and various values.”

For example, without the ability to optimize against transactional data, a customer who makes a purchase of $10 would be equally valued as a customer who converted for $1,000. In both instances a shopping cart beacon would record a single conversion with no distinction to dollar amount. Similarly, for automotive brands a conversion for downloading a car brochure could be a less valuable event than scheduling a test drive at a local dealer. The ROI Optimizer solves these challenges by allowing advertisers to select multiple tracking beacons and assign individual values and metrics to each.

“With Turn’s ROI Optimizer, now I can easily select multiple beacons, assign different click through and view through values to each, and then the Turn Platform will optimize the campaign’s media spend based on my custom settings,” said Anderson.

“The ROI Optimizer is the latest example of Turn’s approach to innovation,” said Bill Demas, CEO at Turn, Inc. “We are committed to working alongside our platform clients to create solutions that effectively leverage the power of data and streamline the process of planning, managing, optimizing and measuring data-driven digital advertising.”

For more information about Turn, visit http://www.turn.com/.

About Turn Inc.
Turn was founded to bring the efficiencies of search advertising to online display, and empower the world’s premier advertising agencies and brands to reach custom audiences at scale. We are a software and services company with the industry’s only end-to-end platform for delivering the most effective data-driven digital advertising with unmatched performance. Our self-service interface, optimization algorithms, real-time analytics, interoperability, and scalable infrastructure represent the future of media and data management. The company is based in Silicon Valley with locations in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Charlotte. For more information, visit www.turn.com.

New International Study by Oriella PR Network Finds Journalists Generally Happy with Their Jobs and Positive about the Impact of Digital Media on News-Gathering, Despite Uncertainty around “Offline” Media

Paid Content is Gaining Ground: One Fifth of Journalists Confirm Publications Are Researching Paid Content Models Including Apps and Micropayments

SAN FRANCISCO – Journalists today have greater demands than ever on their time; have less scope to research stories; and work in an environment of continued uncertainty, according to a study published today by the Oriella PR Network. For all these challenges, however, the third annual Digital Journalism Study finds journalists positive about the impacts of digital and social media on their reporting, and overall job satisfaction remains overwhelmingly high.

The study polled 774 journalists in 21 countries, including the U.S., the U.K., Brazil and Germany, and found that:

- Nearly half of the respondents (46 percent) to this year’s study said they are expected to produce more content than before
- One in three (30 percent) are working longer hours
- However, nearly half (46 percent) said their work has improved as a result of digital and social media – an increase from 39 percent in 2009
- Just 17 percent said their job satisfaction had declined as a result

At the same time, the study uncovered growing uncertainty over the future of ‘offline’ media, such as print, TV and radio, including:

- Forty percent of the respondents expect advertising revenues to fall by more than a tenth
- Over half of the respondents expressed the belief that their publications’ current offline formats may fold at some point in the future (2009 figure: 32 percent)
- However, 40 percent – and more than half of those polled in the U.S., the U.K., Spain, Brazil and Eastern Europe – believed that the transition to new media would create new opportunities.

In response, growing numbers of publications are researching, or have implemented paid-content strategies. Nearly one respondent in four (22 percent) said their publication is researching or has launched smart phone apps in order to deliver paid-content to mobile users and 16 percent are researching paid-content for iPads and e-readers. Twenty-five percent said their publication is considering flat-rate subscriptions and nearly a third (30 percent) only offer online content to existing print subscribers.

The study also demonstrates the extent to which digital and social media – i.e. blogs, Twitter and audio/visual content – have embedded themselves in newsrooms. Fewer than 15 percent of the journalists surveyed said their publications support no social or digital media at all – down from nearly a quarter two years ago. Meanwhile, adoption of blogs and Twitter has continued to grow, with 47 percent saying their publications have journalist-authored blogs, and 40 percent saying their publications use Twitter.

Shannon Latta, co-head of the Oriella PR Network and partner at Horn Group, said: “Our third annual study shows how widely digital and social media have embedded themselves into media organisations. While there is still a lot of experimentation going on, it is clear that publications see the greatest opportunities in their digital operations – not just in terms of offering new platforms for publishing content, but also in terms of making that content pay.”

“As these changes play out in newsrooms, communicators should expect journalists to become more demanding: their content needs to be high quality to attract the revenues media bosses expect. Brand communicators must make sure their public relations is coordinated across both social and conventional media, and addresses the basic requirements of news-gathering: strong news hooks, timely and compelling comment, and excellent, relevant visuals.”

About the 2010 Digital Journalism Study

The third annual Oriella Digital Journalism Study was compiled in May and June 2010, using an online survey of 774 journalists from broadcast, national, regional and trade media across Belgium, Brazil, Eastern Europe, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, The U.K. and The U.S. This year includes journalists from Brazil, Eastern Europe and the U.S. for the first time. The full report can be downloaded from: www.orielladigitaljournalism.com (registration required).

About the Oriella PR Network

The Oriella PR Network is an alliance of 17 communications agencies in 20 countries around the world. Our partnership of independent agencies was built upon a set of global best practices and close working relationships not offered by others of its kind. The network was founded by Brands2Life and Horn Group with the support of agencies around the world with whom they have worked successfully on client projects – in some cases for many years. Oriella partners exist in major and secondary markets throughout The Americas, Europe and Asia/Pacific.

For further information:

Website: www.oriellaprnetwork.com

Blog: www.oriellaprnetwork.com/blog

Twitter: twitter.com/oriellanetwork

Lotame Demonstrates the Metrics That Matter

NEW YORK – A new study demonstrates conclusively what web analysts have long maintained: If you want to raise awareness of your brand online, focusing on click-through rate (CTR) would be a big mistake. Optimizing an ad campaign to improve CTR, in fact, while likely to have no effect whatever on purchase intent and awareness, can actually drive down ad recall and, in the case of movies and TV shows, can reduce Intent to View.

These are a few of the findings of “Online Brand Optimization: Metrics That Matter and How to Use Them to Effectively Change Campaign Outcomes,” a white paper produced by Lotame using in-banner survey measurement from KN Dimestore, Vizu, and Lotame’s targeting and analytics platform, Crowd ControlTM.

“Everyone in this business knows CTR is way overvalued,” said Lotame CEO Andy Monfried. “But a lot of marketers are addicted to it, because measuring CTR is easy, and they don’t know what else to track. Brand-lift measurements can break that addiction, by showing all of us what really matters: Engagement, ad recall, and purchase intent.”

As part of the study, Lotame built custom brand surveys consisting of five questions designed to measure the campaign’s performance against key brand metrics.

The most common:

Purchase Intent, or Intent to View
Awareness (Aided)
Ad Recall
Brand Favorability

When a campaign began, Lotame fielded simultaneous surveys (control/exposed) to the same custom-built target audience. This was done to ensure that the baseline values for a campaign’s brand metrics represented the baseline of the target audience. If Lotame modified a target audience for a campaign, it also modified the target audience for the surveys, to ensure proper baseline measurement throughout the campaign. Finally, Lotame measured the correlation coefficients between these brand metrics, along with CTR, interactivity (aka engagement), and time spent with advertising, to arrive at its conclusions.

“Data is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days,” said Greg March, director of digital media for Wieden+Kenney, New York. “Lotame makes it actionable, not only in a way that serves the media you run with them, but also for audience discovery, so that it can inform fundamental strategic choices. They’ve brought this kind of data insight to W+K, and it’s helped us serve our clients better.”

“Optimizing campaigns for specific audiences – based on essential brand metrics as well as deep profile information – is at the top of every brand marketer’s digital agenda,” said Simon Kooyman, CEO of Knowledge Networks. “KN Dimestore’s unique real time brand metric data exchange informs in-flight optimization efforts, and we are pleased to provide Lotame a complement to its Crowd Control engine.”

The full white paper is available at Lotame’s Website (http://www.lotame.com/resources/whitePapers), and Lotame expects to release periodic updates to the correlation table to include more campaign data and address additional correlation metric opportunities, such as Likelihood to Recommend.

About Lotame

Lotame is a marketing technology company powered by the superior segmentation of audience data. Lotame’s flagship targeting and analytics platform, Crowd ControlTM, collects and interprets unstructured publisher data to make audience planning as easy as keyword buying. We activate audiences for advertisers with comprehensive online marketing solutions, provide publishers with multiple revenue streams from data and media, and sell to data buyers Lotame Audience Segments derived from our unparalleled knowledge of human behavior.

DUBLIN – Research and Markets has announced the addition of the “China Media Statistics 2009: The Year In Review” report to their offering.

2002-2010 PRC Media Statistics brings together all available national and regional year-end data to provide the first comprehensive one-stop statistical guide to the current state of China’s television, film, radio, print, new media and advertising sectors.

With historical data from as early as 1981 through 2009, the report charts the explosion in media since China embarked on its opening and reform program and puts recent growth in a historical context. Coverage of each sector starts with an Industry Snapshot for easy reference and contains detailed performance breakdowns for major players.

From broadcaster revenues, content production figures and Internet users to book sales, online game subscriptions and national ad spend trends, 2002- 2010 PRC Media Statistics collates published information on all aspects of the media business from clearly identified sources, including central government reports and research released by leading groups.

Whether making investment decisions, planning future business strategies, exploring new mainland co-operations or just tracking the wider China market, 2002- 2010 PRC Media Statistics delivers all the core data on the world’s most vibrant market in one convenient place.

Key Topics Covered:

Chapter 1: China Media Overall Statistics

Chapter 2: Tv Statistics

Chapter 3: Film Statistics

Chapter 4: Radio Statistics

Chapter 5: Print Statistics

Chapter 6: New Media Statistics

Chapter 7: Advertising Statistics

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/1a4b36/china_media_statis

LONDON – Omniture Summit EMEA 2010– Omniture, an Adobe company (NASDAQ:ADBE) and a leading provider of online business optimization software, announced the immediate availability of the company’s social media display advertising solution, Omniture SearchCenter Plus, allowing marketers to measure, manage and optimize targeted display advertising buys on Facebook. The release continues the evolution of Omniture’s technology allowing customers to understand how social media users are engaging with their content – also allowing them to capture rich, demographic segment data. This gives customers the ability to buy media specifically targeted to those high-value users.

Key benefits to SearchCenter Plus include the following:

Management and Optimization – Use management templates based on conversion metrics to create automated and effective bid strategies
Integrated Analytics – Seamless integration of impression, click and cost data from Facebook with site conversion data to optimize for ROI
Robust, Flexible Reporting – Deliver complete campaign overviews from one interface to manage and report performance results
Campaign Groups – Organize campaigns, ads or placements within custom groups to easily report and manage based on business criteria
Facebook Ad Buying – Create and manage targeted ad buys in the same application you use to measure and optimize campaigns

“At www.SimplyBusiness.co.uk we are always looking to try new things so we were very pleased to see that Omniture was rolling out new features almost as quickly as we wanted to use them,” said Alastair Douglas, head of marketing and analysis of Xbridge, one of the fastest growing technology companies in the UK and the firm behind online business insurance comparator SimplyBusiness.co.uk. “The Facebook integration means that we can run all of our new advertising trials in the same place as our more traditional PPC campaigns and analyse all the data that is stored in one place.”

“Social media channels, and Facebook specifically, continue to be an avenue of keen interest for marketers to build intent and customer loyalty,” said Brett Error, vice president and general manager, product and technology, Omniture Business Unit. “SearchCenter Plus helps our customers through the entire social media advertising process including planning, delivering, measuring and optimizing. As an integrated analytics, search marketing and advertising solution, SearchCenter Plus can help drive increased results for Omniture customers.”

SearchCenter Plus is available immediately. For more information, please contact your Omniture account manager.

About Omniture, An Adobe company

Omniture, a business unit of Adobe Systems Incorporated, is a leading provider of online business optimization software for managing and enhancing online, offline and multi-channel business initiatives. Hosted and delivered via on-demand subscription service and on-premise solution, Omniture software enables customers to capture, store and analyze information generated by their websites and other sources, providing business insights into the performance and efficiency of marketing and sales initiatives and other business processes. For more information, visit www.omniture.com.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information – anytime, anywhere and through any medium. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

RESTON, Va. – LucidMedia, a leading online advertising demand-side platform (DSP) with integrated real-time bidding (RTB), announced the launch of a self-service version of its powerful DSP (www.LucidMediaDSP.com) to enable agencies and advertisers to more efficiently and profitably manage their online advertising campaigns. Originally offered as a managed service only, the self-service DSP empowers agency media planners and in-house staff to securely take full control over their campaigns’ targeting and optimization programs by deploying the DSP as an in-house, white labeled solution with a proprietary base of more than 14,000 targeted categories, page-level transparency, and multiple layers of filtering to protect branded advertisers from inappropriate content.

LucidMedia developed its self-service DSP to improve efficiency and profitability by eliminating many of the cost structures and layers traditionally associated with online ad network buys while improving the levels of targeting, transparency and control available. It provides agencies and advertisers with the ability to easily audit the networks and exchanges on their media plans, efficiently acquire page-level contextually and demographically targeted inventory, ensure brand safety across all sources and, most importantly, enforce a universal frequency cap.

The self-service DSP provides:

Real-time Assessment (RTA): LucidMedia’s RTA provides immediate insights into real-time bidding availability involving traffic from the Internet’s leading traffic sources, covering up to 95% reach potential in the US. RTA at scale also provides branded advertisers with true preemptive brand safety and campaign optimization at the impression-level;
Real-time bid (RTB) inventory availability: Agencies and advertisers can get real-time insights by channel and by demographics, delivering the most flexible optimization available. LucidMedia’s optimization engine can evaluate thousands of campaign facets in real-time, project performance trends, and govern campaign targeting based on advertiser goals;
Dynamic inventory allocation: Inventory from all real-time bid sources, as well as spot buys, is automatically allocated to campaigns, enabling more efficient ad operations teams and higher returns;
Page-level semantic transparency: Provides deep insights into what drives the desired campaign outcomes and maximum campaign performance;
Proprietary content and audience targeting technologies: A universal frequency cap (UFC) and server-side database provide maximum control and leverage LucidMedia’s patented and proprietary content targeting and recently released audience targeting technologies;
Training: To support its self-service offering, LucidMedia offers direct training at no cost;
Custom data integrations: Integrations with all third-party data providers, as well as the ability to include advertiser-specific data, allows advertisers to easily reach the right audiences at the right time with their messages.
To learn more, interested agencies and advertisers can visit www.LucidMediaDSP.com.

“We developed LucidMedia’s self-service DSP based on the direct experience we’ve had in deploying our managed DSP service for hundreds of brand advertisers throughout the past 18 months, with continued focus on the ideals of a buy-side network paradigm that is more nimble, economical and in-touch with advertiser goals,” said Ajay Sravanapudi, Founder and CEO of LucidMedia Networks, Inc. “As industry-wide preference for agency-administered ad-buying and ad-trafficking platforms continues to grow, control is moving closer to the advertiser, intermediation is being reduced and prices are arriving at a true market-driven equilibrium. With an offering like our self-service DSP, advertisers can have more control over targeting, performance and safety.”

LucidMedia’s self-service DSP with integrated RTB gives agencies pre-impression filtering, post-impression auditing, and allows agencies to select the most effective impressions in real-time and then feed their campaigns with an optimization engine that automatically maximizes return on spend.

About LucidMedia

LucidMedia Networks, Inc. (www.lucidmedia.com) is a demand-side online display advertising management and targeting platform that delivers optimized, direct response and brand advertising campaigns to interactive agencies. LucidMedia DSP™ with ClickSense® page-level analysis and intelligent real-time bidding (RTB) is available as a managed service to interactive agencies and their brand advertisers. LucidMedia DSP employs an easy-to-use and secure agency interface to deliver proprietary campaign optimization, consolidated buying across the Internet’s largest repositories, unique insight into real-time inventory availability, universal frequency capping, and reach into 95% of the online population. Founded in 1999, LucidMedia processes 25 billion ad impressions every month for hundreds of major brand advertisers.

WESTERVILLE, Ohio – AdMall announced the availability of the Media Sales Mobile app, designed specifically for media advertising sales professionals. Media Sales Mobile features advertising opportunities, local prospect lists and nearby demographics, consultative sales tips and conversation starters.

The app also features news, trends and forecasts for advertising, digital media, broadcast and cable TV, radio, newspaper, and outdoor media.

“Time is money, and media account executives need resources that magnify their productivity – especially away from the office,” said C. Lee Smith, president and CEO of AdMall. “This free app delivers audience demographics and sales prospects within a 7-mile radius of where they are standing,” Smith said.

Media Sales Mobile includes consultative media sales tips, the latest insights from Media Sales Today and other sales consultants and a video section featuring Media Sales Monthly from AdMall and Local Marketing Minute from Ad-ology Research.

The Media Sales Mobile app is now available for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad free through the Apple iTunes store and coming soon for Motorola’s Droid and other smartphones running the Google Android system in the Finance section of the Android Market.

About AdMall

AdMall (http://www.admall.com) is the leading advertising prospecting system for media advertising sales professionals. AdMall is used by over 2,000 media properties nationwide. AdMall is a division of Sales Development Services (SDS), Inc. – a Westerville, Ohio firm founded in 1989.

TechTarget Recognized by BtoB Magazine for the 10th Consecutive Year

NEWTON, Mass. – Technology media company TechTarget, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTGT) announces that its technology media properties have been named to the BtoB Magazine “Media Power 50” list of the 50 most powerful business-to-business advertising venues for the tenth consecutive year – ranked #9 overall.

“Google, Yahoo, TechTarget and GlobalSpec are in the top 10 for delivering on the Internet’s promise of offering increasingly narrow audiences and doing so efficiently,” wrote Sean Callahan, Media Reporter for BtoB magazine.

The Media Power 50 was announced online today, will be published in the May issue of BtoB magazine, and can be found at, http://www.btobonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100503/FREE/305039989/1151

The full list of media in the 2010 Top 10 of the Media Power 50 with TechTarget by rank order include,

1. Wall Street Journal
2. Google.com
3. NFL
4. CNBC’s ‘Power Lunch’
5. Yahoo.com
6. Financial Times/FT.com
7. Forbes/Forbes.com
8. Bloomberg BusinessWeek
9. TechTarget
10. GlobalSpec

To develop the list, BtoB magazine editors interviewed industry analysts, top media buying agencies, the Company’s advertisers, and evaluated such data as advertising revenue and audience to establish the most impactful and powerful business-to-business advertising venues. The final Media Power 50 list was selected by a panel of editors and reporters.

“Once again we are proud that our media business model and websites are recognized by our customers, industry analysts and BtoB’s editors as leaders in technology marketing media,” said TechTarget CEO Greg Strakosch. “This honor is a reflection of our understanding of the technology markets, relentless focus on measuring advertising ROI, leadership in online advertising best practices, and continued product innovation.”

About TechTarget

TechTarget (http://www.techtarget.com), a leading online technology media company, gives technology providers ROI-focused marketing programs to generate leads, shorten sales cycles, and grow revenues. With its network of more than 80 technology-specific websites and more than 8.5 million registered members, TechTarget is a primary Web destination for technology professionals researching products to purchase. The company is also a leading provider of independent, peer and vendor content, a leading distributor of white papers, and a leading producer of webcasts, podcasts, videos and virtual trade shows for the technology market. Its websites are complemented by numerous invitation-only events. TechTarget provides proven lead generation and branding programs to top advertisers including Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, SAP and Symantec.

Operating company will be called The Midas Exchange

NEW YORK – WPP [NASDAQ: WPPGY] announced the formation of a new corporate trading division to help clients secure media credits in exchange for underperforming assets.

The new company, named The Midas Exchange, will be powered by GroupM, the world’s leading media investment management company and will initially operate in the United States.

The Midas Exchange was formed at the request of clients who asked that WPP, in cooperation with GroupM, enter the corporate trading arena to complement current services, seamlessly deliver a media plan consistent with objectives and be fully accountable for the total media product.

The new division will be headed by Kathy Kladopoulos, who has been named president of The Midas Exchange. Most recently Kladopoulos worked as EVP and managing director of Carat Trade, which she launched nine years ago.

Kladopoulos pointed out that many WPP clients already engage in corporate trading with independent companies, but prefer that transactions be implemented by the same media agency network that handles their traditional media responsibilities.

“Independent trade companies working outside a network don’t always work toward the common goal, which is to deliver an optimal media product and use corporate trade where it is most advantageous to the client,” Kladopoulos said. “The key to the process is to maintain the integrity of the media plan consistent with set objectives and use corporate trade where it can add value and efficiency. The integration of this service with the strategic media plan is critical to achieve success.”

The Midas Exchange will purchase under-performing assets from a client at up to full book value for “trade credits” or sometimes cash. These assets could include discontinued product lines, excess inventory, real estate, capital equipment, transportation vehicles and any other assets that the client cannot liquidate at book value. The client will then use the “trade credits” as a partial payment substitution to purchase media or other goods and services.

Also, because of its relationship with WPP, powered by GroupM, The Midas Exchange is in a unique position that will allow it to trade original television programming for advertising inventory, a significant difference from traditional corporate trading operations.

“We plan to work directly with WPP through GroupM Entertainment to produce and/or license TV programming to television networks in exchange for inventory access to be used by The Midas Exchange,” Kladopoulos said. “This will provide much greater access to key inventory on the most desirable TV networks, which generally are less inclined to participate in corporate trade deals.”

Kladopoulos also pointed out that while the new company will work for GroupM agency clients, it will remain an autonomous operation totally separate from the agencies and their buying teams. The execution of media activity funded by media credits will be managed directly by implementation personnel at The Midas Exchange and not through the traditional GroupM/agency trading groups who place traditional paid media.

ABOUT WPP

WPP is the world’s largest communications services group. Through its operating companies, the Group provides a comprehensive range of advertising and marketing services including advertising; media investment management; consumer insight; public relations and public affairs; branding and identity; healthcare communications; direct, digital, promotion and relationship marketing and specialist communications. The company employs over 138,000 people (including associates) in 2,400 offices in 107 countries. For more information, visit www.wpp.com

ABOUT GROUPM

GroupM is the leading global media investment management operation. It serves as the parent company to WPP media agencies including Maxus, MEC, MediaCom, and Mindshare. Our primary purpose is to maximize the performance of WPP’s media communications agencies on behalf of our clients, our shareholders and our people by operating as a parent and collaborator in performance-enhancing activities such as trading, content creation, sports, digital, finance, proprietary tool development and other business-critical capabilities. The agencies that comprise GroupM are all global operations in their own right with leading market positions. The focus of GroupM is the intelligent application of physical and intellectual scale to benefit trading, innovation, and new communication services, to bring competitive advantage to our clients and our companies.

Turn Platform v2.1 provides actionable bid & audience insights in real time.

Redwood City, CA – Turn Inc., the smart platform for digital advertising, today unveiled visually intuitive bid forecasting and audience extension tools that empower agencies and brands to make fully-informed media planning and buying decisions across real-time ad exchanges. Media planners can immediately see how targeting and bid price choices affect audience size, available impressions, and daily spend before ever purchasing the first impression. Additionally, as planners hone detailed targeting criteria, the size of an audience can shrink to the point of limited effectiveness. With one click, Turn’s audience extension multiplies audience reach by layering Turn data with third-party data providers to paint a rich picture of “look alike” segments that achieve the scale needed for successful campaigns.

We can finally test various buying strategies against our audiences prior to going live with any campaign. –Keith Pieper, Director of R&D at Cadreon The new paradigm includes a shift from buying placement on websites to buying audiences in real time as agencies seek to reduce media waste and boost campaign performance.
“We believe that in order to make online advertising more effective and efficient, we need to be buying audiences rather than inventory,” said Quentin George, Chief Digital Officer of Mediabrands. “Turn is an important technology and platform partner for us that enables real-time decision making, valuation, optimization and campaign transparency. They play a crucial role in the solution set that we are building for our agencies and advertisers.”

Turn’s bid forecasting and audience extension places the power of “what if” in the hands of media planners. Planners can now clearly see audience reach, optimum frequency, and bid estimates on inventory across every real-time ad exchange. From a single screen, planners can define inventory sources, targeting criteria, and pricing models, while audience estimates are graphed visually in real-time using various metrics. Estimates are based on a sliding window of blended benchmark data maintained within the Turn platform.

“Fully-informed planning and buying decisions put agencies and brands in a better position to boost performance and improve overall ROI,” said Bill Demas, CEO at Turn, Inc. “These insights are delivered when planners need them the most – before the campaign begins, leading to significantly improved efficiencies.”

Turn is NAI certified and an active member in The Centre for Information Policy Leadership.

To learn more about Turn, visit www.turn.com.

About Turn Inc.
Turn empowers the world’s best advertising agencies and brands to deliver the most effective data-driven digital advertising. Our focus is to build intimacy between premium brands and their targeted audience. Turn’s real-time media planning, buying and optimization platform delivers custom audiences at scale with unmatched performance and actionable analytics, across the highest-quality inventory available. The company is based in Silicon Valley with locations in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Charlotte. For more information, visit www.turn.com.

TV hit hardest as consumers reduce media time by 2 hours a day; Internet is most popular media.

BOSTON – The economic crisis hit the U.S. advertising market much harder than expected, with overall revenue dropping from $77 billion in 2008 to $67 billion in 2009. According to the new Yankee Group report, “2009 Advertising Forecast Update: Less TV, More Internet,” the lion’s share of the decline was due to TV advertising, which plummeted from $52 billion in 2008 to just $41 billion in 2009.

“The 2008-2009 recession drove down the value of everything—from home prices to TV advertising revenue,” said Carl Howe, director at Yankee Group and author of the new report. “As consumers have become worried about the economy, they’ve reduced the amount of time they spend on media to less than 12 hours a day, down from nearly 14 hours in 2008. This shift in behavior has caused ad revenues to drop significantly.”

Other key findings include:

TV and video watching decreased a full hour per day. Consumers spend a total of 3 hours and 17 minutes watching TV, DVDs, videos and pre-recorded programs.
TV’s loss was the Internet’s gain. While time spent online decreased by 40 minutes per day from 2008 to 2009, consumers still spend more time online—4 hours and 13 minutes daily—than with any other medium. Internet advertising revenue increased from $24 billion in 2008 to nearly $26 billion in 2009.
Mobile is the only category that gained time. Consumers spent 40 minutes per day talking on mobile phones in 2009, up 12 percent from 2008. Mobile Internet use grew 36 percent, to 11 minutes a day, and texting grew 55 percent, to 27 minutes a day.
About Yankee Group

The people of Yankee Group are the global connectivity experts—the leading source of insight and counsel trusted by builders, operators and users of connectivity solutions for nearly 40 years. We are uniquely focused on the evolution of Anywhere connectivity, and we chart the pace of technology change and its effect on networks, consumers and enterprises. Headquartered in Boston, Yankee Group has a global presence, including operations in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

Campaign Planning Tool Reduces Waste, Delivering Efficiency and Effectiveness for Advertisers and Higher CPMs for Publishers

RESTON, VA – comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, announced the launch of comScore Audience Advantage™, a digital audience optimization platform that enables publishers to provide advertisers and media planners with the ability to accurately reach their most valuable audiences.

Using anonymized data from its proprietary research panel of opt-in Internet users that is aggregated into a variety of important consumer segments, comScore builds sophisticated predictive algorithms that can be used by publishers to determine which of their site visitors should receive a particular ad. The predictive algorithms use a robust array of descriptive consumer variables, including demographics, search activity, site visitation, online and offline transactional behavior. Early tests of the Audience Advantage platform have shown lifts in reaching the desired audience segment of 3-5x, representing a substantial gain in campaign efficiency.

“The comScore Audience Advantage platform represents a revolution in the media planning and buying process by enabling publishers to use the lookalike models to reach the audience that mirrors the advertiser’s best prospects. This allows them to deliver a campaign that is on point in both message and audience,” said Erin Hunter, comScore executive vice president. “Audience Advantage offers significant value creation for the online advertising ecosystem that benefits all stakeholders. Publishers will be able to demonstrate higher value in the campaigns they deliver, thereby justifying higher CPMs, while advertisers will be able to minimize wasted impressions and reduce the total cost of advertising outlays. It is truly a win-win for the digital advertising industry.”

How comScore Audience Advantage™ Works
comScore Audience Advantage uses proprietary anonymous audience scoring algorithms to determine optimal audiences for advertisers using sophisticated and predictive variables available as inputs. These variables are derived from a multitude of observable behaviors in the digital environment as measured through the comScore opt-in research panel, including site visitation, search activity, video views, advertising engagements, online purchases or any other number of behaviors that may be relevant to purchaser particular advertiser. The Audience Advantage platform does not rely on cookies to construct its predictive algorithms. Rather, they are built using the actual observed behavior and characteristics of the opt-in comScore panelists.  Importantly, the Audience Advantage platform can also leverage third-party databases that are integrated with the comScore research panel to provide anonymous offline purchase behavior as another critical and highly predictive input to these algorithms.

Using all available behaviors as inputs, Audience Advantage determines a predictive score for various audience segments. Participating publishers then use this score to anonymously identify and deliver to advertisers “lookalike” audiences from the behavior they observe among their own site visitors. Campaigns can be planned at a granular level, for example, against only 5 or 10 percent of consumers most likely to purchase a particular brand with the objective of reinforcing loyalty, or they can be planned against a much larger segment of consumers who are dual brand buyers with the objective of inducing switching to the advertiser’s brands.

Who Can Benefit from comScore Audience Advantage™?
The comScore Audience Advantage platform can improve campaign efficiency and effectiveness for advertisers across a variety of industry verticals, including Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), Entertainment, Retail, Telecom, Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals, Travel, Automotive and Technology. Each industry can derive benefit from its own relevant set of predictive variables. Some examples include:

CPG – offline brand and category purchase behavior
Entertainment – movie ticket purchases and/or rental behavior; musical artist listening/affinity
Retail – online and offline purchase behavior
Telecom – mobile device ownership; shopping behavior
Financial Services –credit card usage; new credit card account applications; insurance company used
Pharma – health information searchers; branded Rx site visitors
Travel – booking method; hotel / airline / rental car preferred
Auto – new and used vehicle purchase data; dealer quote requests; online vehicle configurations
Technology – peripheral usage; browser usage; computer configurations

End-to-End Media Planning Optimization and Evaluation
comScore Audience Advantage can also be used in conjunction with the comScore AdEffx™ advertising effectiveness suite, offering comprehensive end-to-end media buying, optimization and performance evaluation. The AdEffx™ suite offers the ability to evaluate campaigns on a post-buy basis to determine among which consumer segments the ads were actually delivered and evaluate their effectiveness in generating lifts in branding metrics or actual consumer behavior, such as site visitation, search activity and both online and offline sales.

To learn more about comScore Audience Advantage, please email learnmore@comscore.com

Focus Turns to Adoption for the Digital Ecosystem

CARLSBAD, Calif. – The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) announced that the “4A’s/IAB Standard Terms and Conditions Version 3.0” (Ts&Cs) have been finalized and are ready for adoption throughout the interactive industry. This is the first update to the voluntary standard advertising contract since 2002 and includes critical components that take into consideration how interactive advertising platforms have evolved. This contract will become the standard by which media companies and agencies or advertisers expedite the most common types of interactive media buys.

The changes from Version 2.0 represent the input of more than 100 finance, legal, sales and buying leaders from a cross-section of media companies and agencies who volunteered to help improve the protracted, time-consuming negotiations that had plagued interactive advertising. The announcement was made at IAB’s third Annual Leadership Meeting, Ecosystem 2.0: Revenue the Next Wave, in Carlsbad, California, where leaders from across the digital media landscape have converged to address the most critical issues facing the industry.

“This took an extraordinary amount of effort from leaders across the interactive advertising ecosystem,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. “We are now doing everything we can to educate our members on the benefits of this voluntary standard and are confident that the industry sees the great benefit of streamlining the interactive buying process.”

“These revised Ts&Cs answer the current needs of the industry and take into account important newer platforms, such as social media,” said Nancy Hill, President and CEO of the 4A’s. “Implementation of the new document throughout the industry will help us all realize the important efficiency improvements we have been looking for.”

Buyers and sellers of interactive advertising have found themselves burdened with protracted, time-consuming negotiations and lengthy addendums for the past several years. To remove these frictions and delays, and work toward a standard document that could be utilized by all industry stakeholders, the IAB and 4A’s launched a joint Ts&Cs Taskforce in April 2009 to create this new version of the Ts&Cs. The document now encompasses the breadth of advertising platforms and tools that are currently utilized in the creation of an interactive advertising campaign, including performance-based advertising and user-generated content platforms. This contract will become the standard by which media companies and agencies or advertisers expedite the most common types of interactive media buys.

In addition to including new interactive platforms, the “4A’s/IAB Standard Terms and Conditions for Interactive Advertising Version 3.0” contain updates across the following key areas:

Data usage
Third-party ad-serving, tracking, and billing
Billing and payment terms
Cancellation terms
Editorial adjacencies
Late creative
Indemnity
As part of the process of educating the marketplace and encouraging adoption, the IAB and 4A’s held two joint webinars for its members. A recording of one of those webinars can be found at: http://www.iab.net/member_center/1524/member_seminars

Additionally, the Taskforce has released “An Educational Guide to the 4A’s/IAB Standard Terms and Conditions Version 3.0,” which documents the rationale behind both the new and unchanged language. The 4A’s and IAB strongly urge all those who review the new version to read the Educational Guide first. Both the Educational Guide and the Ts&Cs can be found at www.iab.net/tscs3

About the IAB

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 460 leading media and technology companies who are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising. Founded in 1996, the IAB is headquartered in New York City with a Public Policy office in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.iab.net.

About the 4A’s

The 4A’s is the national trade association of the advertising agency business. The 1,196 member agency offices it serves in the United States employ 65,000 people, offer a wide range of marketing communications services, and place 80 percent of all national advertising. The management-oriented association helps its members build their businesses, and acts as the industry’s spokesman with government, media, and the public sector. For more information, please visit www.aaaa.org.

NEW YORK – ReplaceAds™, the largest source of audio, video, and display ad inventory in the Internet radio business announced that it has appointed AdPlayerz as its new advertising sales and sponsorship representative.

“We are very excited to be partnering with ReplaceAds as our premier Online Radio inventory provider,” says AdPlayerz CEO, Jeffrey Eisenberg. “ReplaceAds has experienced consistent growth over the last six months, and can deliver reach and scale to brand advertisers in the online radio category, which is a perfect match for AdPlayerz.”

Over the past six months, ReplaceAds has consistently ranked #2 for monthly unique users in comScore’s™ Entertainment Radio category. According to the report, ReplaceAds reached 19.5 million North America uniques in January 2010, an increase from 17.7 million in December 2009.

”We look forward to working with AdPlayerz and their nationwide sales team. We feel AdPlayerz will effectively sell and market the ReplaceAds brand. AdPlayerz will replace Triton Media for premium ad buys and placement on all ReplaceAds stations. Agencies and advertisers can now access advertising and sponsorship opportunities through an AdPlayerz sales person in their region,” says John Williams, CEO of Jetcast, Inc., the company behind ReplaceAds.

About ReplaceAds™

The ReplaceAds™ (www.ReplaceAds.com) network is made up of thousands of professional online radio and television broadcasts that are consumed by millions of people each day. ReplaceAds is the premier Internet solution for Advertisers because it provides an unmatched audience that can be targeted, measured, and optimized, ensuring the best campaign performance via Internet radio and television broadcasts. ReplaceAds is a product of Jetcast, Inc. (www.Jetcast.com).

About AdPlayerz®

AdPlayerz, Inc. (www.Adplayerz.com). is an advertising sales company founded to address the need for quality sales and marketing representation within high-growth vertical markets. Built around a national team with experience in advertising, sponsorships, custom publishing, and event marketing, AdPlayerz delivers relevant and integrated media to the advertising world. AdPlayerz offers advanced reach, segmented audience targeting, rich media, ad serving, and reporting tools for advertisers across multiple distribution platforms including online radio, print, web, mobile, and digital magazines. AdPlayerz provides publishers with effective monetization through exclusive and non-exclusive direct branded sales and network representation.

DUBLIN – Research and Markets has announced the addition of eMarketer’s new report “US Advertising Spending” to their offering.

Spending for US online advertising will have decreased in 2009 by 4.6% – the first drop since 2002. However, the slowly recovering economy, combined with basic structural changes in how marketers and the public use media, will lead to Internet ad spending growth in early 2010.

While it was previously estimated that 2009 online ad spending would grow by 4.5%, several factors have changed:

Reports from major portals through Q3 2009 showed either mild growth (Google, for search) or sharp downturns (Yahoo! and AOL).

Research from the IAB and PwC through Q3 2009 indicated an overall online ad market in decline. Continued softness in key areas keeps driving down classified advertising, formerly the third-biggest online ad format. But search ad spending remains relatively steady and banner ad spending is down by only a small amount.

The 100 largest advertisers are still putting a relatively small share of their measured media budgets into display advertising. These major marketers are, in general, still holding back from greater online ad investment, which continues to stymie overall market growth.

The primary structural change is the spending uptick for non-advertising marketing. Making all Internet ad spending estimates incomplete indicators of the industry’s health. The new marketplace is a rapidly evolving ecosystem built on top of the social Internet. As marketers look to engage their audience with relevant, trustworthy messages, that increasingly means smaller shares of marketing budgets going to traditional advertising.

Key questions this report answers:

What are the key digital advertising trends over the next five years?
Which ad formats will get the most growth? Most new dollars?
How has Internet advertising affected the total media universe?
What are researchers forecasting for US ad spending?

Key Topics Covered:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

US Online Advertising Spending, 2008-2014 (billions and % change)
Key Questions

THE EMARKETER VIEW

TOTAL INTERNET

Reasons for Total Internet Forecasts
Quarter by Quarter
Internet Ad Formats
Total Media

COMPARATIVE ESTIMATES

Total Internet
Search
Display
Video
Total Media

Sources/Contributors:

Barclays Capital
Bernstein Research
Carat Insight
Citi Investment Research
Collins Stewart LLC
Cowen and Co.
Credit Suisse
eMarketer
Forrester Research
GroupM
Inside Digital Media, Inc.
Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)
Jefferies & Company
JPMorgan
LiveRail
MAGNA
Mintel International Group, Ltd.
Morgan Stanley
Myers Publishing LLC
Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.
Piper Jaffray & Co.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)
SNL Kagan
Thomas Weisel Partners
UBS
Yankee Group
ZenithOptimedia

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/e65f82/us_advertising_spe

AdXpose’s Campaign Verification and Optimization Technology Helped MediaCom Optimize Display Ad Campaign for Leading Consumer Electronics Client

SEATTLE – Mpire, the market-leading advertising verification and optimization technology company, announced that its patent-pending AdXpose service was selected by MediaCom, one of the world’s largest strategic planning and buying agency networks, to help optimize display advertising campaigns for a leading consumer electronics company. After implementing AdXpose, the technology delivered substantial performance increases by reducing budget spent on wasted impressions and refining creative based on user engagement reports.

MediaCom began testing AdXpose in August to assess and improve the performance of its online display buys. The goal of this optimization was to reduce the cost per sale on a campaign running across numerous ad networks and exchanges where they were buying on a CPM and CPC basis. Mpire’s AdXpose technology was embedded into the client’s buy across thousands of sites within Mpire’s AdXpose-certified ad network, and via several other ad networks and direct buys, which were vetted by AdXpose.

Over the course of four months, the MediaCom team was able to achieve a significant increase in the number of unique viewers (+45%), viewer engagement (+33%) and click-through rates (+20%) across the AdXpose network by removing underperforming sites from the network buy, and providing enhanced visibility and transparency by quantifying the percentage of ads that were actually being viewed or interacted with.

MediaCom also used AdXpose’s “heat mapping” reporting feature to glean insights about how users interacted with the ads.  The technology captured what percentage of viewers “moused over” or clicked on the ad, which creative images or ad copy attracted their attention, and total time spent interacting with the ad. When viewed next to the overall campaign results at the individual site placement level, the AdXpose data illuminated a direct correlation between interaction with ads and increased click-through and conversion rates.   Armed with this information, MediaCom optimized site distribution and page location of the ads, as well as the creative images and copy, which led to a significant increase in conversion to sale.

“With AdXpose we have visibility of things we’ve never seen before in any reporting suite. We have a host of new reports to help us assess the quality of the inventory we’ve purchased, as well as reports to give us a deeper understanding of how users are interacting with our creative.  When combined these reports enable us to optimize our media buys and creative to deliver unprecedented efficiency,” said Justin Barton, digital group head at MediaCom.

“MediaCom’s campaign showcases the full breadth of performance enhancing capabilities of AdXpose, and demonstrates how savvy marketers can leverage data insights to create more targeted and effective campaigns,” said Kirby Winfield, chief revenue officer at Mpire.  “As the landscape for display advertising continues to grow and evolve, more and more marketers are turning to AdXpose to obtain greater transparency, efficiency, safety, and results from their campaigns.”

About Mpire
Mpire is the market-leading advertising optimization technology company that is evolving traditional online advertising into a more relevant and engaging medium for publishers and advertisers. Its patent-pending AdXpose™ is the first and only verification and optimization technology that gives brand marketers and agencies transparency and confidence anywhere their ads run across the Internet, including exchanges, ad networks and direct publisher placements. Backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Ignition Partners, Mpire is based in Seattle, Washington.

700 Marketers say they require “Triple-Play Services” from Online Media Companies

NEW YORK – Interactive sales teams with category and relationship expertise, services that provide solutions to marketer challenges and better measurement are just some of the organizational and systemic challenges that inhibit online ad growth revealed in “Building Brands Online,” a study released by Bain & Company, the global business consulting firm, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The results were presented in New York at a meeting comprised of senior marketing, advertising and media industry executives.

Key findings of the study “Building Brands Online” include:

Online ad formats and creative have not evolved to meet marketers’ needs
Media companies lack category expertise when they sell to brand marketers and engage with them too late in the media planning process
Marketers want integrated campaigns instead of platform-specific media programs
While marketers see high value in online advertising and believe that it could be effective at all stages of the purchase funnel, current industry practices inhibit greater investment of brand ad dollars
Marketers express needs for differentiated services for their brands and believe that media companies and agencies have to meet those differentiated needs for online advertising to grow.
“The study provides a wealth of insights into how brand marketers perceive online media and what the marketers would like to see media companies do for them. The findings led us to develop an interactive advertising action plan for the industry as a whole, but more importantly, so that the sellers of online media can be more effective at garnering their share of brand advertising dollars,” said Sherrill Mane, SVP, Industry Services, IAB.

“Unmet marketer needs create a major opportunity for media companies to collaborate directly with marketers,” said John Frelinghuysen, a partner in Bain & Company’s media practice and lead author of the study. “But few media companies currently have the capability to fill the gaps in online sales and service.”

The path forward for media companies consists of six steps based on the needs expressed by marketers:

Create segmented offerings to meet the separate needs of advertisers who are focused on building brands and those who are looking for direct response
Make brand-focused marketers a priority by building a sales force of category experts who respond directly to those marketers’ specific needs
Develop a full range of solutions with more engaging options and formats, including social networks, video and other rich media
Offer deeper service and support customized to vertical industries, to help advertisers plan, create and measure the brand impact of online ads
Optimize the ways that ad inventories are sold, with a range of approaches from full-service to self-service to partnership with ad networks and resellers
Enhance organizational effectiveness by setting the right priorities, clarifying internal roles and accountability and investing in sales staff skills and incentives
“Ultimately, marketers are looking for media companies to offer a true triple-play service model from direct response to awareness to high impact brand engagement,” said Frelinghuysen. “This model is the key to staving off continued price erosion of online inventory.”

The IAB acknowledges the following member companies, whose financial support enabled this important research:

24/7 RealMedia
AOL
Everyday Health
Meredith Corporation
MTV Networks
NBC Universal
ValueClick Media
Yahoo!
About the IAB:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 375 leading media and technology companies who are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising. Founded in 1996, the IAB is headquartered in New York City with a Public Policy office in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.iab.net.

About Bain & Company, Inc.

Bain & Company, a leading global business consulting firm, serves clients on issues of strategy, operations, technology, organization and mergers and acquisitions. The firm was founded in 1973 on the principle that Bain consultants must measure their success by their clients’ financial results. Bain clients have outperformed the stock market 4 to 1. With 41 offices in 27 countries, Bain has worked with over 4,150 major multinational, private equity and other corporations across every economic sector. For more information visit: www.bain.com.

Digital Media Experts Hire Industry Veteran Tony Katsur, Formerly of Travel Ad Network, Heavy Inc., and DoubleClick, to Lead Platform Unit

NEW YORK – MediaMath, the leading digital media buying platform, announced a separation of its business into Managed Service and Platform divisions. In response to an unmet need in the advertising industry, MediaMath is now offering agency clients software-as-a-service access to its best-in-class technology so they can execute their own trading strategies, as well as an independent managed services option for agencies that prefer a full-service approach.

“We’ve had the advantage of being the first media buying platform, the largest algorithmic buyer of real-time biddable inventory, and a leader in the integration of both supply and data,” said Joe Zawadzki, CEO of MediaMath. “However, as our agency clients have evolved, they have demanded direct access to our platform as well as advanced strategic support and training for more complex campaigns. Tempered by two years of development, millions in monthly spend, and billions of daily impressions passing through our system, we are ready to support this need with two distinct sales, technical service, and development organizations.”

To lead MediaMath’s Platform unit and continue to provide agency clients with the most scaled media buying platform in the industry, the company also announces that it has hired industry veteran Anthony Katsur as General Manager, Platform.

Katsur is a long-time leader in New York’s technology community. Before joining MediaMath, he was Chief Technology Officer at Travel Ad Network where he managed all development and operations of the ad serving infrastructure, including a re-architecture of the technology platform. Previously, he served as Chief Operating Officer to both Heavy Inc. and Panther Express Corp. Katsur’s extensive technology and engineering experience is rooted in seven years at DoubleClick, where he managed all levels of the engineering division, created and managed its real-time ad serving infrastructure, and directed the software development process for enterprise software applications. He brings a depth of domain expertise, relationships and senior technical and operational leadership to the MediaMath Platform unit.

“Having lived this migration twice before, I’m excited to do it again,” says Tony Katsur, “MediaMath has had the most advanced engineering and quant resources pointed at the platform problem for over two years. They’ve started solving real-life business problems for agency clients with technology underpinning their service offering, but now is the right time to dedicate separate resources to each side of the business so that clients can choose the solution that is the best fit for them, with a great degree of control and influence over platform development. I’m looking forward to leading the Platform team, continuing the build out of a world-class organization, and furthering our commitment to provide the best platform in the industry.”

The MediaMath buying platform provides advertising agencies with the self-serve technology and back office assistance to trade effectively across leading display advertising sources. The platform offers real-time optimization and heavily scaled data supply, which is innovating the digital media industry. It also includes a common interface and workflow, data management layer that integrates marketer and third-party data, PhD-designed algorithms and bid optimization, and deep relationships with over a dozen major sources of quality supply, including Yahoo! RightMedia, Google’s DoubleClick Advertising Exchange, Microsoft AdECN, Facebook and others.

ABOUT MEDIAMATH

MediaMath’s automated buying platform provides advertising agencies with access to tens of billions of impressions daily, and a simple workflow that manages the powerful analytics and rich data necessary to make best use of them. Headquartered in New York, the company was founded in 2007 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs, marketers, technologists, and quants. For more information, visit www.mediamath.com.

Web-Based Solution Recommends TV Campaigns Based on Matching of The Advertising Households Receive With Products They Actually Buy

TRA Continues its Innovation by Becoming the First Media Research Company to Provide a Built-In Recommendation Feature for Purchaser Targeting

New York, NY – TRA, Inc., unveiled today that the Media TRAnalytics® media research system now includes an Optimizer, a fully customizable web-based media planning solution designed to further improve advertising accountability and ROI on ad spending by automatically recommending TV campaigns based on matching of TV program audiences with the products and brands these audiences actually buy.

The Optimizer enables users to find the best mix of networks, dayparts and programs to reach their target audience as determined by TRA’s Media TRAnalytics®, which merges second-by-second measurement of TV tuning from set-top box data with verified offline purchasing behavior from shopper card data. The Optimizer then compares users’ original plans with a new optimal plan, ensuring that advertisements effectively and efficiently reach their intended purchaser targets.

This automation of planning and buying scenarios for media planning by buyers and sellers builds upon TRA’s single-source measurement position to provide true insight and accountability for advertisers, agencies and networks.

Mark Lieberman, the CEO of TRA, Inc. said: “Partnering with our clients in the development of our product roadmap and our development and release of the Media TRAnalytics® Optimizer furthers TRA’s commitment to create new forms of research and innovative products that improve advertising accountability and increase ROI on ad spending.”

TRA is the first company in the world to match set top box data with purchase data on the same exact households and is the only company that combines set top box data from multiple software platforms (Navic and TiVo) into a single seamless weighted representative national sample with high correlation to ratings and brand share currency.

Now, with the release of the Optimizer, TRA becomes the first media research company to provide a built-in recommendation feature for purchaser targeting. TRA has begun training its customers to use the Media TRAnalytics® Optimizer which:

- Offers Scenario Planning which allows users to collaborate and optimize the impact of the media buy

- Recommends a media schedule for the users selected target and compares and quantifies differences to original media buy
-  Targets can be based on variations of category and/or brand purchasing as well as a wide range of demographic filters.
-  Users can define certain constraints or goals based on brand business practices (e.g., commitments made in the upfront market).

- Reduces time and resources required and increases efficiency in the media planning process

Planners can spend most time on high-level strategic thinking and insightful manual over-rides of the optimized plan, instead of on assembling information.

About TRA, Inc.

TRA, Inc. (True ROI Accountability for Media — http://www.traglobal.com ) is a media and marketing research company whose proprietary patent pending platform, Media TRAnalytics®, cost effectively matches the ads that people actually receive with the products people actually buy, giving advertisers, agencies and media transparency, accountable measurement, media planning and improved return-on-investment for their advertising spend. TRA has 1.5 million households of TV set top box data from multiple software platforms, 54 million households of purchase data and the largest single source database ever – 370,000 households. TRA employs proprietary measurement technologies and proven algorithms developed and refined over a 10-year period with 40,000 man-hours invested into developing TRA’s Media TRAnalytics® platform over the past 2 years. TRA’s clients include television networks, consumer packaged goods companies and media agencies. Investors include Kodiak Venture Partners, WPP and Arbitron, Inc. TRA is ISO 27001 certified, the information security management system standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) designed to ensure security controls to protect information assets.

New Service Provides Attitudinal and Behavioral Insights into Mobile Consumers

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, announced the availability of comScore Plan Metrix Mobile, the next generation of its industry-leading Plan Metrix media planning tool for use with mobile consumer segments. Developed in response to marketers’ demand for sophisticated media buying tools in the mobile medium on par with those available for other media, comScore Plan Metrix Mobile provides marketers and their agencies with superior data quality by combining reported mobile behavior measurement and key mobile device ownership characteristics with comprehensive attitudinal, lifestyle and product usage information.

“With more than one-third of mobile users actively engaging with digital content on their phones, it is increasingly important for media planners to understand more sophisticated audience characteristics to effectively reach consumers on their mobile devices,” said Evan Neufeld, vice president and senior analyst of mobile for comScore. “comScore Plan Metrix Mobile gives media planners and buyers the tools needed to target mobile consumers, meeting both their demographic and psychographic requirements, as well as providing insight into the role that device ownership characteristics play in consumer targeting.”

comScore Plan Metrix Mobile provides deep insight into the mobile consumer including technology ownership and usage, expanded demographic profiles, lifestyle, attitudinal, product purchase and offline media consumption data. It allows mobile marketers to identify a set of mobile Web properties that meet target demographic and psychographic requirements across more than 5,000 variables, including purchasing habits and media consumption. This additional level of detail and granularity around consumer profiles is one that marketers are accustomed to having in other media, and need to have in order to justify placement in mobile media. Also included are the key additional dimensions of the characteristics of mobile device ownership and an understanding of mobile content consumption needed to truly optimize mobile media buying.

comScore Plan Metrix Mobile will enable advertisers and agencies to build powerful media plans and persuasive campaigns based on a deep understanding of the target audience’s on-device and off-device behavior, align marketing strategies with key consumer interests and lifestyles, and identify relevant mobile properties and size any target audience based on the needs of a particular media plan. The service will enable publishers to deliver more value to their advertiser clients with improved knowledge of consumer lifestyles, attitudes and product preferences, command premium pricing by proving the relevancy of one’s site to advertiser clients, and benchmark site performance against competitors in attracting key consumer target segments.

Additional product highlights include:
Access to audience attributes across 18 different consumer profile segments including demographics, traditional media consumption, usage of telecommunications, electronics/computers, and /apparel and other behavioral segments.
Access to mobile device ownership characteristics in nine key categories including cell phone brand, operator, price of handset, length of current subscription, mobile phone use, ownership of current handset, monthly payment tier, payment option and type of additional plan.
Access to mobile content consumption with reporting at the category, sub-category and individual brand levels.

“As the mobile marketplace evolves, advertisers, publishers and ad networks need increasingly granular levels of audience data to evaluate strategies and meet their goals,” continued Neufeld. “Plan Metrix Mobile provides parity with what media planners and buyers are accustomed to in the online space while simultaneously taking into consideration variables unique to the mobile marketplace. It is the right solution at the right time to deliver the consumer targeting and performance metrics needed to justify the allocation of ad dollars towards the promising mobile medium.”

For more information on comScore Plan Metrix Mobile, please contact us at: learnmore@comscore.com

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

Expanded Lineup of Top Tier Speakers And The Ad Revenue Conference Report Will Address Cutting Edge Practices To Increase Publisher Revenue And Protect Their Brands

Ad Revenue 2009
PALO ALTO, Calif. – PubMatic (www.PubMatic.com), a global company that provides premium online publishers technology and a full service solution to manage and monetize non-guaranteed ad inventory, announced an expanded lineup of speakers and the upcoming release of the comprehensive Ad Revenue Report that will be made available to all Ad Revenue 2009 attendees (www.AdRevenueConference.com).

The report will cover premium publisher trends and data and will include a comprehensive guide to the online display advertising ecosystem. Sponsors including AudienceScience, CPX Interactive, eXelate, MediaMath, Pulse 360, and premier sponsor interCLICK will join forces with PubMatic to discuss how to drive more revenue for online publishers.

Ad Revenue 2009 Lineup Includes:

9:00 am Opening Keynote: Amar Goel, Founder & Chairman, PubMatic
10:00 am Panel: The Blurring Lines of Ad Exchanges, Ad Marketplaces, and Ad Networks

Moderated by Michael Learmonth, Reporter, Digital Media & Advertising, Advertising Age

Panelists:

Jay Sears, Strategic Products & Business Development, ContextWeb
Jed Nahum, Director of Network Planning and Strategy, AdECN
Philip Smolin, GM, Platform Solutions, Turn
Rob Rasko, President and COO, CPX Interactive
Tom Sipple, VP, IAC/Dictionary.com

11:05 am Presentation: Ad Effectiveness: A Closer Look at Ad Networks for Branding Campaigns

Michele Madansky, Michele Madansky Consulting

11:30 am Panel: Standardization, Innovation, & Monetization: How New Ad Units Are Impacting Publishers

Moderated by Joe Mandese, Editor-In-Chief, MediaPost

Panelists:

Tom Bowman, VP, Strategy and Operations, Global Advertising Sales, BBC Worldwide
Kirsten Rasanen, VP, Product Development, TV Guide
Jeremy Fain, VP Industry Services, IAB
Ryan Whittington, VP, General Manager, bizjournals

1:30 pm Presentation: Turning Your Ad Operations Into A Revenue Center

Rob Beeler, VP Content & Media, AdMonsters

1:55 pm Panel: The Evolution of Media Buying and What That Means for Publishers

Moderated by John Ebbert, Managing Editor, AdExchanger

Panelists:

Andrew Kraft, VP Technology Solutions, Collective Media
Darren Herman, Founder & President, Varick Media Management
Joe Zawadzki, CEO, MediaMath
Matthew Greitzer, VP Search Marketing and Head of ATOM Systems, Razorfish
Sean Kegelman, SVP, Partnerships, VivaKi Nerve Center

2:55 pm Presentation: Government Regulation & Internet Advertising: Everything Publishers Need to Know, and Nothing They Don’t

Alan Chapell, President, Chapell & Associates

3:20 pm Panel: The New Economics And Revenue Opportunities of Data

Moderated by Greg Stuart, Digital Media Advisor

Panelists:

Antony Taylor, VP, Head of Display Platforms, Yahoo! Inc.
Eric Hippeau, CEO, Huffington Post
Jeanne Houweling, VP Ad Network Solutions Group, PubMatic
Jeff Hirsch, President & CEO, AudienceScience
Mark Zagorski, CRO, eXelate

4:00 pm Closing Keynote: Jack Flanagan, Executive Vice President, comScore

4:25 pm: Happy Hour & Networking presented by interCLICK

In addition to the conference panels and presentations, attendees will receive the Ad Revenue Report. The Ad Revenue Report is a collaborative effort made possible by many interviews with the brightest minds in online advertising, including:

Jon Aizen, COO, Dapper
Larry Allen, President, Yieldex
Joe Apprendi, CEO, Collective Media
Pascal Bensoussan, VP Products & Marketing, Aggregate Knowledge
Alex Hooshmand, VP Client Services, BlueKai
Randy Nicolau, CEO, Demdex
Brian O’Kelley, CEO, AppNexus
Andrew Pancer, COO, Media6 Degrees
Nathan Woodman, Managing Director, Adnetik (Havas Digital)
Nat Turner, President, Invite Media
Randy Nicolau, CEO, Demdex
Brian O’Kelley, CEO, AppNexus
Andrew Pancer, COO, Media6 Degrees
Calvin Lui, CEO, Tumri
Howard Manus, VP Marketing & Operations, CNNMoney.com

To learn more about Ad Revenue 2009 or to request an invitation, please visit: www.adrevenueconference.com

About PubMatic

PubMatic is a global Ad Revenue Optimization company that provides premier online publishers with a full service solution to manage and monetize non-guaranteed ad inventory. PubMatic’s real-time Ad Price Prediction technology ensures that premium publishers get the most money from their advertising space by deciding in real-time which ad network or exchange can best monetize each impression.

Brand Advertisers Can Now Take AdFrames’ Enhanced Creative Capabilities Anywhere on the Web

SAN FRANCISCO – To save advertisers money, VideoEgg, the rich media ad network that guarantees brand engagement, today introduced VideoEgg ToGo, a solution that allows advertising creative on the VideoEgg network to run on any site within a broader media buy at no additional cost. With VideoEgg ToGo, brand advertisers can take advantage of VideoEgg’s rich media advertising capabilities, including design, ad serving and reporting, while increasing the reach of campaigns and eliminating third-party rich media fees.

Since launching AdFrames and pioneering the cost-per-engagement (CPE) pricing model, VideoEgg has provided accountable, interactive online advertising to over 500 brands by engaging consumers with a full-page, invitation-based rich media experience across its network. VideoEgg ToGo enables media buyers to extend AdFrames across non-VideoEgg Network sites for free, adding no incremental rich media or creative costs. With rich media-serving fee CPM’s averaging $1.00, VideoEgg ToGo allows brand advertisers to save tens of thousands of dollars on a typical media buy.

“Our goal with VideoEgg ToGo is to enable advertisers to fully maximize the value of the AdFrames experience by taking it anywhere on the Web,” said Troy Young, CMO for VideoEgg. “The VideoEgg network of 100 million uniques across 900 sites, blogs and applications provides a cost efficient foundation with guaranteed engagement. Media buyers can then take the same experience for free to vertical sites on their plan. The economics of this approach are really smart for advertising agencies like Carat and Deep Focus, and their clients.”

With VideoEgg ToGo, advertisers on the VideoEgg network are able to utilize the full range of benefits offered by the AdFrames platform, including:

* Rich media functionality, such as localization services, Twitter functionality, RSS feeds, social sharing, multi-clip video and in-unit browsing.
* Dimensionless ad units that can live in any size—IAB standard or otherwise—and in any environment.
* Direct support from VideoEgg’s creative team to integrate ads into third-party sites, eliminating the need for third-party rich media providers.
* Access to VideoEgg’s full reporting of campaign metrics, including impressions, engagements, time spent with the ad unit, clicks to site and viral sharing.

Carat is one of several agencies to take advantage of VideoEgg ToGo and eliminate third-party rich media fees for their advertising clients, such as Outback Steakhouse. As well as running Outback campaigns on VideoEgg’s expansive network of online environments, Carat is bringing AdFrames’ rich media overlay experience to other consumer-oriented sites, like Citysearch.com.

“We love the VideoEgg ad experience and wanted to extend it across our media buy,” said Lina Miranda, senior media planner for Carat. “VideoEgg ToGo allows us to exploit AdFrames’ rich media capabilities with no incremental costs to our clients.”

“Online advertising today calls for engaging experiences that capture consumer attention across a wide variety of environments and afford brands the opportunity to interact directly with consumers, while also providing consumers the opportunity to interact with each other,” said Ian Schafer, CEO for Deep Focus. “The VideoEgg ad experience allows our creatives to come up with innovative ideas as well as leverage the latest social media tools so viewers can share their enthusiasm with friends. With VideoEgg ToGo, our clients have richer experiences, greater reach and deeper insight, making their media dollars work harder than ever before.”

VideoEgg works with major brands such as Starbucks, Unilever, Sprint, Kia Motors, EA, Mercedes and Target to ensure ad campaigns provide engaging experiences for consumers. To see how VideoEgg is changing brand marketing online, check out the demos at http://www.videoegg.com.

About VideoEgg, Inc.

VideoEgg is a new kind of rich media advertising network that guarantees brand engagement. The network is composed of over 100 million uniques across more than 900 leading video, gaming and social network sites as well as social applications, bringing outstanding consumer reach and engagement to its advertising partners. An advertising innovator, VideoEgg was the first to commercialize interactive advertising overlays onto video, an approach that is being widely adopted by the industry. Founded in 2005 and based in San Francisco, with offices across North America, in the UK and Australia, the company is privately held and backed by August Capital, First Round Capital, Maveron, WPP and Focus Ventures. For more information on VideoEgg, please visit http://www.videoegg.com.

Follow VideoEgg on Twitter: http://twitter.com/videoegg

AdFrames and VideoEgg are trademarks, servicemarks or registered trademarks in the United States and other countries. All other brands, names, or trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.