The graphic below shows that the teasers and extended cuts have reached ~55 million views (and counting!) while the actual TV ads recorded ~12 million views.

Allan Johnson, Content Strategist at Sharethrough, has kindly agreed to give us further insights.

Otilia Otlacan: What are the main drivers behind such a discrepancy and behind the viral quality shown by most Super Bowl ads?

Allan Johnson: The discrepancy has a lot to do with expectations. What’s great about Super Bowl spots is that people are conditioned to experience them as content they want to watch, not interruptive ads. People expect them to be good because historically, they are. They have big budgets and big cameos, and there’s way more creative freedom offered to the agencies producing the spots. Brands set out to entertain as a priority. Still, everyone knows that the spots themselves are going to have to be :30 or :60 in order to air on TV. So if you know the content is going to be great and there can be an extended cut which might run another 47 seconds longer, but which tells a story unconstrained by the :30 intervals, then viewers naturally know that the extended cuts will be the more entertaining format. Viewers are smart. Watch the Seinfeld ad that was edited for the Super Bowl and then watch the extended cut and it’s clear that the extra time makes a big impact in being able to properly set up the jokes.

Otilia Otlacan: What is the shelf life of a Super Bowl ad, can you comment on how quickly the online buzz vanishes post-game?

Allan Johnson: For a truly viral ad that really impacts the culture, the shelf life of a Super Bowl spot can last for months, even years. Probably the best, most recent example of such a spot was last year’s “The Force” for VW. That spot continues to perform exceptionally well. In addition to still being used on TV, it has steadily added millions of views each month and has collected over 50 million as of today. It will be interesting to see if such an impactful spot exists from this year’s crop. Both the Seinfled Acura spot and the Ferris Bueller Honda spot are showing signs of long lives. “The Bark Side” also looks as if it might stay relevant for month’s to come. “The Bark Side” is currently outperforming VW’s actual Super Bowl spot, “The Dog Strikes Back,” by 2 to 1, even though it was released as that spot’s teaser.

Otilia Otlacan: The top 5 most viral Super Bowl ads of 2012 were all car commercials. Is this a coincidence, have these campaigns been managed better, or is there an organic affinity between cars and the Super Bowl?

Allan Johnson: This was clearly a dominant year for the auto industry. What’s interesting to note, is that just 5 years ago, Audi was the only car manufacturer even advertising in the Super Bowl. They’ve come a long way fast. I think their preeminence was a direct consequence of VW’s success last year with “The Force.” That was such a runaway success that all their direct competitors in the auto industry felt that they needed to catch up, and it turned into an arms race. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next year. Will the other industries feel left in the dust themselves and come back with a vengeance? I wouldn’t be surprised to see this happen.

About Sharethrough
Sharethrough provides brands with a repeatable, scalable and transparent approach to distributing video content that guarantees viewership and maximizes shared engagement. Sharethrough drives engaged audiences for brand videos through its social video ad products, unique publisher network and proprietary targeting and optimization tools. Sharethrough is used by many of the world’s leading brands, including Sony, Microsoft, General Motors, Victoria’s Secret, Nestle and LEGO, as well as top agencies such as Pereira & O’Dell, Universal McCann, Evolution Bureau and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. Founded in 2008, Sharethrough is a privately held company based in San Francisco, Calif. For more information about Sharethrough, please visit www.sharethrough.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Campaigns should be optimized for engagement to maximize yield.

- Tracking ad engagement validates that impressions were viewable.

- Clicks are not the exclusive indicator of purchase intent.

About mediaFORGE

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

Website Features that Attract Visitors Include Compelling Brand Value Messages Updated on a Frequent Basis Along with Content that Engages Visitors

RESTON, VA – A groundbreaking study from Accenture (NYSE: ACN), comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), and dunnhumbyUSA aimed at helping consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers better understand the link between consumers’ usage of brand websites and their in-store brand buying behavior found that visitors to CPG brand websites buy 37% more in retail stores than non-visitors to the brand site. The study, Are Your CPG Brands Maximizing the Return on Your Digital Investment?, also concluded, that to maximize impact, website content needs to be updated regularly and contain brand value messaging that both engages visitors while also providing compelling reasons for them to purchase the brand at retail.

“CPG marketers currently invest millions of dollars in their brand websites, and the results of this study confirm the importance of this investment. Brand websites can attract and influence the behavior of the most valuable segments of any brand’s franchise,” said comScore vice president Mike Zeman. “But it’s clear that the content and utilities on these sites need to be highly engaging if they are to attract a meaningful numbers of visitors. Marketers who do this successfully stand to gain an attractive return by growing their brands’ sales in retail stores.”

Brand Website Visitors are Heavier Buyers of the Brand and Category at Retail

The study found that visitors to CPG brand websites are valuable and frequent buyers of the brand in retail stores, completing 41 percent more transactions than non-visitors. As a result, brand websites are able to attract heavier-than-average brand buyers, who spend 37 percent more on the brand in retail stores than non-visitors. Website visitors also are also heavier buyers within a brand’s product category, spending 53 percent more category dollars than non-visitors.

John LaRocca, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships at dunnhumbyUSA, noted: “The Accenture / comScore / dunnhumbyUSA research highlights the significant yet underutilized potential of brand websites and digital communications as key drivers for building customer loyalty and preference for CPG brands. Since website visitors have higher affinity to the brand and the overall product category, there is an opportunity for brand marketers to drive loyalty through personalizing the website experience, catering to the preferences of their best customers.”

Compelling Features of Successful Brand Websites

The length of time that visitors spend on a brand’s website was found to be a key determinant of their likelihood to buy the brand in retail stores. The study identified three important characteristics of brand websites that are associated with a higher likelihood that visitors will buy the brand in retail stores:

1. Brand value messaging that provides a persuasive reason for a website visitor to buy the brand

2. Fresh content updated on at least a weekly basis, such as “pulse surveys”, user generated reviews, status on weight loss plans, etc.

3. Content that engages visitors. This can include promotions, philanthropic appeals, demonstrations, live chat, apps and games.

Jerry Lohse, senior director, Accenture Interactive said, “Marketers who create compelling CPG brand website experiences for consumers are extremely effective in driving incremental and profitable in-store sales.” To illustrate his point, Lohse said, “Analysis shows that consumers visiting the best of the ten CPG brand websites evaluated in the research study, spent over 200 percent more on the brand than non-visitors. Moreover, the research shows that the price paid per unit of the brand at the best of the ten CPG brand websites in the study was two percent more than for non-visitors in brand.”

Research Study Design

The study was based on an integrated panel of one million U.S. Internet users who have given comScore explicit permission to have their online activities continuously measured and matched to their in-store brand buying behavior provided by dunnhumbyUSA. This integrated panel provided a single-source, privacy-protected data mart containing each panelist’s online activities and their in-store buying behavior. Using the comScore-dunnhumbyUSA database, the study examined ten individual food and household product brands with annual sales between $40 million and $3 billion. These brands had at least 100,000 unique visitors to their websites and as many as 2.3 million per month. The study covered the time period from September 2010 through February 2011. Leveraging comScore’s knowledge of the digital user, dunnhumby’s shopper understanding, and Accenture’s experience in operating and maintaining consumer packaged goods websites, the study quantified the linkage between CPG brand buying at retail and digital behavior by comparing the in-store purchase behavior of website visitors and non-visitors and identifying the common components of successful CPG brand websites. For website performance scoring criteria, the Accenture Web Evaluator was used for this survey. The Accenture Web Evaluator provides a comprehensive assessment of how well companies use their websites to attract and retain customers, support and reinforce their brand, deliver services and generate sales.

The research was conducted with the endorsement of the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) and the Food Marketing Institute (FMI), and the results were presented January 29th at their joint board meeting in Orlando. “Creating a better understanding of the relationship between a brand’s online presence and real-world shopping is important, relevant and timely to our membership and their future growth potential,” noted Denny Belcastro, Executive Vice President, Industry Affairs and Collaboration, GMA. Patrick Walsh, Senior Vice President, Industry Relations, Education and Research, FMI, added, “Finally some tangible observations pointing to a return on our members’ brand digital spend… looking forward to the next phase that adds social media as well.”

Additional Information

To obtain a copy of the study report, Are Your CPG Brands Maximizing the Return on Your Digital Investment? please visit any of the following links:

- www.accenture.com/us-en/Pages/insight-cpg-brands-maximizing-return-digital-investment.aspx

- www.comscore.com/cpg_brands_maximizing_return_digital_investment

- www.dunnhumby.com/us/cpg-brands-maximizing-return-digital-investment

A follow up study is planned for 2012 to help CPG brand marketers better understand the difference between brand websites, social networks and other digital marketing channels, including display advertising, in their ability to reach specific types of in-store brand buyers. CPG brand marketers interested in participating in this research study should contact the following:

- Mike Gorshe, Senior Director, Accenture Consumer Goods & Services at michael.a.gorshe@accenture.com or (312) 693-5818

- Mike Zeman, Vice President, comScore CPG Marketing Solutions at mzeman@comscore.com or (312) 775-6630

- John LaRocca, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships, dunnhumbyUSA, at john.larocca@us.dunnhumby.com or (513)-632-0613.

Deadline to participate is March 31, 2012.

About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 244,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$25.5 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2011. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. comScore provides syndicated and custom solutions in online audience measurement, e-commerce, advertising, search, video and mobile and offers dedicated analysts with digital marketing and vertical-specific industry expertise. Advertising agencies, publishers, marketers and financial analysts turn to comScore for the industry-leading solutions needed to craft successful digital, marketing, sales, product development and trading strategies. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

About dunnhumbyUSA
dunnhumby is the leader in personalizing the world’s experience of retailers and brands. Analyzing data from over 350 million people in 28 countries, we help companies put customers at the center of every decision. We use our insight to improve customers’ experience of stores and communications to earn their lifetime loyalty. Our work with some of the world’s biggest retailers and brands has demonstrated that companies which deliver value to customers through personalization become and stay their customers’ first choice. This strategic approach to putting the customer first in business improves our clients’ like-for-like sales and profit margins – or, put simply, their brand value. dunnhumbyUSA is a joint venture of The Kroger Company and London-based dunnhumby. Employing more than 1,900 people in 30 offices in Europe, Asia and the Americas, dunnhumby serves a prestigious list of companies including The Kroger Co., Tesco, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Kimberly-Clark, Macy’s, Panera Bread Company, PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble. dunnhumby also includes the word of mouth marketing experts BzzAgent and price optimization company KSS Retail. For more information, visit www.dunnhumby.com.

Otilia Otlacan: Bizo has recently been ranked the #4 fastest-growing company in the Bay Area, in an industry that is insanely competitive. What are Bizo’s main growth drivers and what sets it apart from the competition?

Russell Glass: We’ve really seen our business grow, entering 2012 at an $18M+ run-rate and 6 consecutive months of accelerating growth. There are a few factors fueling the kind of hyper-growth we’ve experienced since we started the company in 2008. At a macro-level, we’re all consuming most of our information online so it’s inevitable that advertising dollars would flow online to keep up with the eyeballs. Across the 400+ brands that we support, we’re seeing a very tangible and significant shift of dollars online where ad spend can be better targeted and more effectively deployed, measured and tracked.

Against this backdrop, Bizo’s focus, platform and the team we’ve built have separated us from the pack. We uniquely focus on helping marketers reach very specific business audiences across the web. Given that business professional audiences are among the most affluent, educated, and influential online, this generally makes Bizo not only a top performing channel for any B2B brand but for any B2C marketer looking to reach high-net-worth audiences.

And, the platform we’ve built is fueled by business demographic data on more than 80% of business professionals in the US, which gives our advertisers the kind of precision and reach they can’t get elsewhere.

But, the real key to our success is our people. We’re approaching 60 employees, about double the staff we had this time last year. Hiring the right people to support this growth isn’t easy, but I’ve had as my consistent top priority to make sure we maintain this A-level team and strong, positive culture that we’ve built which, at the end of the day, is probably our most potent differentiator.

Otilia Otlacan: It’s all about audience targeting these days, or so it seems. What kind of publisher is advantaged in this ever changing media buying landscape and what can publishers do in order to facilitate audience buys on their properties?

Russell Glass: Audience targeting data is of course a win for marketers, but is arguably just as valuable and creates huge opportunities for publishers of just about any shape and size. Over 2,000 business publishers have partnered with us to get a better handle on the demographics of their own web audiences and to leverage our platform to enable their advertiser clients to more precisely target audiences on their web properties – and across the web. This is creating an upsell opportunity in every conversation a publisher has with an advertiser, and is increasing and diversifying a publisher’s online revenue streams.

Otilia Otlacan: Your company, Bizo, specializes in reaching and engaging business professionals. What are some of the challenges you are facing when working with this audience?

Russell Glass: The key to a successful display campaign is putting the right message in front of the right audience – at scale. Since we’ve now collected and organized rich, anonymous demographic data on over 100 million business professionals, our platform has the inherent scale to drive success for most marketers looking to reach different segments of business audiences. It’s only when a marketer’s target audience becomes overly granular (e.g., CFOs in the Pharmaceutical Industry in Wyoming) that there may just not be enough unique individuals of a certain profile for audience-targeted display advertising to be effective. That can be a challenge because the marketer knows we can do it, but we have to push back and tell them that there’s simply not enough scale to be worthwhile.

Otilia Otlacan: For our curious hardcore ad ops readers, please tell us something about the ad platform and the tools you are using and about the typical day in your ad ops team.

Russell Glass: The platform that ties all of our activities together is BAMP, our proprietary Business Audience Marketing Platform. We recently moved our ad server of record to AppNexus from DFP. In fact, all of our advertiser campaigns and managed publisher inventory are also run through AppNexus, and our primary source of RTB inventory is also AppNexus. We use Simpli.fi for keyword retargeting and Adap.tv and BrightRoll for pre-roll inventory.

For billing, pacing, and reconciling we use a home-grown application built on salesforce.com’s Force platform. We call it the Silver Bullet.

To ensure and monitor our advertisers’ brand safety, we use a combination of a blacklist of domains (4 years’ worth of domains we’ve seen that we don’t want our ads on), AdXpose and Proximic brand safety segments.

As with most ad ops teams, there is no “typical day.” We try to staff our team with smart people that really love solving the problems that come along with online advertising. Each member on the team has to be well versed in trafficking and buying RTB media on multiple platforms, creative QA, retargeting and conversion pixel placement, campaign optimization, and pacing and reconciliation.

Otilia Otlacan: I’ve filled in my bizographic information at http://www.bizo.com/businessProfessionals/your_bizo_cookie and noticed that the ad inventory for international audiences appears to be rather limited. Do you have plans on chasing non-US audiences and if so, do you have any partners lined up?

Russell Glass: We currently reach business professional audiences with scale in U.S., Canada, and the UK. We plan to build out our non-U.S. audiences more aggressively in the future since many of the brands we support are global, so there is a clear opportunity to extend our capabilities into other regions. That said, we believe we’re still just scratching the surface of the market opportunity for Bizo in North America and that remains our focus today.

Otilia Otlacan: Last but not least, is there anything else you like to share with us?

Russell Glass: One area you’ll see us diving into more aggressively this year is working with consumer brands to reach the business audience. In addition to brands using Bizo to target high-net-worth individuals, we’re also seeing increased demand from consumer brands who want to reach businesspeople in general. With more disposable income, this audience is more likely to purchase many different types of consumer products, from cell phones to financial services.

To this end, last year we collaborated with comScore to marry Bizo’s unique bizographic data with comScore’s insights into the online behavior of consumers. The comScore Bizo Index gives marketers additional insights into Bizo’s audience segments as desirable and effective consumer purchasing segments. For example, a marketer for a telecommunications company can use these insights to target their ads at Bizo’s “Small Business Professional” audience, which is shown to be 161% more likely to purchase mobile phones and plans online than the average U.S. Internet user. Here are some other interesting data points: our Tech Professional audience is 580% more likely to buy computer hardware online, and our Marketing audience is 112% more likely to visit airline sites.

These are just a few examples – we’ve uncovered powerful connections between consumer behavior and Bizo’s business audience segments across a wide range of product and service areas, so we’ll be working to further explore these opportunities this year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Earned media” is inconsistent and famously difficult to value. Jun Group (www.jungroup.com), the premier social video platform, has recently announced a study that provides simple metrics for valuing earned media – and clear evidence that social video programs consistently deliver earned media results. We have spoken to Mitchell Reichgut, Founder and CEO of Jun Group, who kindly shared some of his experience and thoughts on earned media measurement.

Otilia Otlacan: Earned media is notoriously difficult to quantify and value, even when digital. Why is that?

Mitchell Reichgut: Earned media is an outgrowth of “viral video,” which has always been a hit-driven phenomenon, not a consistent distribution strategy. Brands would be delighted when their video “went viral,” but little effort went into exploring the reasons why a video took off or the value of the results. Social video picks up where the viral dream left off. Essentially, it’s brand advertising that is targeted and shareable. Social video is paid media that drives consistent and significant earned media activity, all of which is measured and reported in real time.

Otilia Otlacan: Jun Group has recently announced a set of metrics to assist marketers in valuing earned media. Can you share with us what made you look so closely into this topic?

Mitchell Reichgut: As our targeting and sharing technology advanced, the earned media portion of our campaigns rose dramatically. Eventually it go to a level where we were consistently delivering things like recipe and coupon downloads, Facebook visits, clicks to brands’ Web sites, tweets, sharing, etc. We never charge for this activity, but our clients were increasingly asking us about its value. That was the genesis of the study.

Otilia Otlacan: Would you say that video content is more or less likely to generate earned media, by comparison to other content formats? Why?

Mitchell Reichgut: Video is far and away the most effective way to generate earned media – it’s visceral, emotional, and it’s easy to share. The biggest and most popular social advertising programs have all been video-centric.

Otilia Otlacan: In your experience, what makes a piece of video content a likely candidate to go viral?

Mitchell Reichgut: The most important thing to understand about “viral video” is that it is not an organic phenomenon. Videos that reach over 1 million users require a mass media component (i.e., AOL, Boing Boing, MSN, etc.). Even homemade videos that rise to prominence don’t do so on a peer-to-peer basis. They come to the broader public’s attention through a feature on one or more mass media outlets. The brand-sponsored videos that reach millions of people are the products of sophisticated and well-funded online media strategies. They may involve PR companies, media partnerships, or distribution firms like Jun Group. Outstanding creative is a critical component, but 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds, and being creative is by no means a guarantee of success.

Otilia Otlacan: Is there anything else you would like to share with us?

Mitchell Reichgut: Advertisers covet earned media for good reason – it’s perhaps the most powerful form of marketing available. We have deconstructed the myths around “viral video” and provided advertisers with reliable and consistent tools for driving these results. To us, it’s one of the most promising trends in online media.

About Mitchell Reichgut

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

Prior to founding Jun Group, Mitchell headed up the New York interactive division of Bates Worldwide Advertising. As General Manager/Creative Director, he helped grow Bates Interactive into a 70-person integrated unit, with clients such as Perrier, Moet & Chandon, and Warner-Lambert.

Earlier, as Creative Director of the New York office of Think New Ideas, Mitchell supervised Web development for clients such as Budweiser, Chrysler, Sony, and Continental Airlines.

A graduate of Boston University’s College of Communications, Mitchell began his career as an Art Director at Grey Advertising where he created print and television advertisements for clients such as Procter & Gamble, Parker Brothers, and Stride Rite.

Mitchell wrote and directed The Scene, a 20-episode online drama that was viewed over 8 million times in 90 countries. He has published two national comic book series, and he recently wrote and produced an online drama entitled Stream, starring Whoopi Goldberg.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOISE, Idaho – Balihoo (www.balihoo.com), the premier provider of Local Marketing Automation (LMA) technology and services to national brands with local marketing needs, today announced the most significant local marketing trends and related key strategic initiatives for national brands in 2012. The insights are based on developments, research and observations working with national brands, such as Kohler, Pearle Vision, Geico and 1-800DOCTORS.com. Balihoo helps these companies raise visibility and increase sales through local outlets such as dealers, agents, distributors, retailers and franchisees.

“Local marketing is quickly emerging as one of the biggest opportunities in the shifting marketing landscape, delivering impressive results for national brands who rely on reaching consumers at the point of final preference and purchase,” said Shane Vaughan, vice president of marketing for Balihoo. “As this shift happens, marketers need to be prepared to execute their local campaigns across a growing, integrated ecosystem of new media and social channels – the Local Web – in order to deliver greater customer relevance, response and return on their marketing investment.”

According to the recently released 2011 CMO Council Report, “Localize to Optimize,” 30 percent of marketers have embraced local marketing automation software platforms and 27 percent are currently evaluating them. Further, BIA/Kelsey estimates the overall local advertising market growing from $136.3 billion in 2010 to $153.5 billion in 2015, representing a 2.1 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and coinciding with a 14.4 percent CAGR for online/interactive ad revenue. Based on this data, Balihoo predicts Local Marketing Automation will become a mainstream marketing tool by the end of 2012.

Additional Balihoo predictions and recommendations for 2012 local marketing strategies include:

Continued Dramatic Increase in Localization of Media Channels. With the decline in effectiveness of analog media, marketers have new and improved options for reaching consumers at the local level on digital media. However, national brands must identify resource-effective processes for researching, buying and tracking localized media, and local affiliates will need education and training on the new channels.

National Brands Demand Integrated Marketing Analytics. While marketers largely believe that localized efforts are essential to business growth and profitability, only a small portion of them have a formal plan for monitoring their impact. Brands need to share their expectations with their vendors, partners and internal teams, and require integrated marketing metrics across all mediums, segments and geographies in order to enable enhanced decision making and budget justification.

Content Marketing Moves Downstream to Local Businesses. As social media and content marketing adoption continues to show growth and effectiveness, local businesses will look to their national counterparts for a regular stream of fresh content customizable with geographic details.

For the complete list of Balihoo Local Marketing Predictions for 2012, please visit our series of blog posts, starting here: http://bit.ly/ypJQ3t.

About Balihoo

Balihoo is the premier provider of Local Marketing Automation (LMA) technology and services to national brands with local marketing needs. By automating local marketing, Balihoo gives national brands unprecedented control over local marketing execution and the ability to control the customer experience closer to the point of purchase. Additional information about Balihoo is available at www.balihoo.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industry Leaders on vCE and vGRP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Survey of Nearly 200 Advertising and Marketing Industry Thought Leaders Showcases Emerging Data Approaches & Identifies Key Challenges to Widespread Adoption

NEW YORK – Continuing to demystify the myriad of digital data now available to marketers and online publishers, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) teamed with strategic consulting firm Winterberry Group to create a new study titled “From Information to Audiences: The Emerging Marketing Data Use Cases.” The white paper reveals new practices in data aggregation, management and deployment and spotlights barriers to widespread adoption. Its findings are based on research results from a survey of nearly 200 industry thought leaders and influencers, as well as Winterberry Group’s own quantitative and qualitative research.

The study found that forward-thinking marketers have begun shifting from traditional data focused on products, channels and campaigns to the real-time identification and optimization of consumer audiences. The long-established use of personally identifiable information (like names and postal addresses) for targeted marketing purposes is increasingly being complemented by aggregated and anonymyzed “digital data”—with a focus on improving ad effectiveness (through better targeting) as well as efficiency (through more economical media buying).

“The plethora of new data sources, targeted technologies and advertising delivery platforms enable marketers to amass more intelligence from varied sources,” said Patrick Dolan, Executive Vice President and COO, IAB. “This promising resource can only bear fruit if marketers can take that raw data and harness it effectively, going beyond traditional usage. This study shows us that there are some hurdles we need to address before we can expect widespread adoption—and the ability for ‘big data’ to deliver big result.”

Currently, the data-driven marketing use cases with the most potential are still in the early adoption stage, and the white paper scrutinizes four of them in greater detail:

Audience Optimization – At a low maturity level. Early adopters include digital advertisers and ecommerce players who use resulting audience profiles to find “look-alike audiences” across channels–-from tablets and laptops to smartphones and other mobile devices.

Channel Optimization – At a low maturity level. Early adopters include publishers and e-commerce players who integrate data on customer preferences and intent across the various media channels to deliver more relevant advertising in real time.

Ad Sales/Yield Optimization – At a low maturity level. Early adopters are primarily publishers, who use such tactics as third-party data overlays, enterprise data management platforms and data exchanges to create richer audience data sets designed to maximize rates and improve the attraction of remnant inventory.

Media Buying/Ad Targeting – At an intermediate maturity level. Early adopters include digital ad agencies and demand-side platforms that enable advertisers to identify and target high-value customers across channels by using real-time bidding and more efficient bidding prices.

The study also identified several challenges to widespread optimization of marketing data, including the need for:

Aggregation and Anonymization – While traditional data management practices were built largely around “personally identifiable information” elements—usually consumer names and postal addresses—the collection, analysis and segmentation of online data now requires the aggregation and anonymization of virtually all data sets.

Improved Operating Infrastructures – The primary barrier to widespread marketing data optimization is legacy operating infrastructures—characterized by rigid organizational “silos” and a lack of data-savvy expertise in marketing, IT and sales operations.

Strong Service- and Technology-Enabled Partners – The fastest, most efficient “big data” aggregation, analysis and throughput solutions require strong service- and technology-enabled partners. The burgeoning data supply chain is proving to be extremely agile in streamlining and processing data for marketing performance—supported by of a new class of open-source tools, as well as maturing advertising optimization that offer new solutions for managing and redeploying large quantities of disparate data sources.

Marketing Data Governance – Data governance has emerged as a critical priority for everyone in the data ecosystem. But whereas organizations have long employed policy experts to advise on the regulatory ramifications of data utilization, many are coming to see marketing data governance—defining the “rules of the road” for assigning distinct data sources to different promotional tasks—as equally important.

“The digital marketplace has been growing by leaps and bounds, with data collection and usage representing a very complex and integral part of the puzzle,” said Jonathan Margulies, Managing Director, Winterberry Group. “Early adopters are making strides in pointing the ecosystem in the right direction, but a substantial ‘data divide’ continues to distinguish a small group of early adopters from those who have yet to explore the real potential impact that data may have on their advertising effectiveness.”

“From Information to Audiences: The Emerging Marketing Data Use Cases” represents the latest addition to the IAB’s efforts to demystify data and bolster dialogue between media planners, publishers and data providers. It builds upon last year’s “Data Segments & Techniques Lexicon” and an earlier “Data Usage & Control Primer” The former provided media planners with a framework for clearer communication with publishers and data partners, while the latter addressed and helped resolve the contractual and competitive challenges that surround data usage and collection within the interactive advertising landscape. Both of those industry efforts were developed by the IAB Data Council, which is dedicated to enabling revenue growth through the establishment of quality, transparency, accountability, and consumer protection in data usage.

Supporting sponsors for the study include BlueKai, eXelate, Janrain, ShareThis and V12 Group.

Complete findings are available for download at www.iab.net/marketingdatause.

About the IAB

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies that 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 Winterberry Group

Winterberry Group is a unique research and strategic consulting firm that helps advertising, marketing, media and information companies grow value. Affiliated with Petsky Prunier LLC (“PPLLC”)—a leading investment bank providing merger and acquisition advisory services to companies in the same industries—the Firm offers its clients strategic perspective that is unparalleled in its addressable industries, while PPLLC maintains exceptional relationships with industry executives and business owners. This combination of market intelligence, research and strategic operating experience (as well as the ongoing dialogue among buyers and sellers of marketing businesses) provides an educated outside perspective that we bring to each engagement. For more information, please visit www.winterberrygroup.com.

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

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

Key findings in the report:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAN FRANCISCO – Greystripe, the largest brand-focused mobile ad network and a division of ValueClick Inc. (Nasdaq: VCLK), announced impressive results from its new mobile advertising units known as Ad Boosters, launched in October of this year. This next generation mobile ad format features social media integration, as well as local content and deals. They are aimed at making mobile advertising more relevant and valuable to smartphone users.

Ad Boosters are placed around a 300×250 full screen smartphone ad making it more engaging and interactive with the use of a branded logo and multiple click options. This improved engagement and interactivity drives higher click-through rates (CTR), as Ad Booster campaigns run to date have shown a 300 percent increase in CTR compared to similar-sized ad units that do not have the Ad Booster functionality.

Ad Boosters offer industry-focused and social units. Industry-focused ad boosters – a first for mobile ads – offer formats focused on targeted verticals, including: retail, consumer-packaged goods, automotive, travel, technology, consumer electronics, entertainment and health. These customizable boosters allow advertisers to direct users to multiple actions related to advertisers’ needs. Social Boosters allow brands to add buttons to engage users with social connections, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+.

One of the first campaigns to run was a large consumer electronics brand that specializes in cameras. The campaign ran with two buttons: “Find Nearest Location” and “Watch Video”. The campaign has delivered 1.4 million impressions and saw 4 percent click-through rates – meaning 56,000 users clicked on the ad. Fifty-two percent of users clicked the locator button and 48 percent clicked the video button.

“Consumers’ mass adoption of the mobile web coupled with the rise in social media makes it a no brainer that mobile ads with social components will perform better than traditional formats,” said Kurt Hawks, VP of Operations at Greystripe. “We’re finding, despite a smaller screen than a PC, smartphones are becoming advanced enough to deliver more than a message but a true call-to-action – whether that means to find the nearest store location or participate directly in a location-based daily deal. Mobile ads are growing up and we’re excited to see consumers respond.”

The boosters, which are fully customizable, run in-app as an interstitial unit on iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices. Buttons include:

Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Google+
Mobile Website
Daily Deals
Buy
Video
Coupon
Store Locator
Recommend
Download
Call

For more information, visit: www.greystripe.com/boosters

About Greystripe

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

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

About ValueClick, Inc.

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

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

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

Specific enhancements include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Brand.net

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

The company is privately held and headquartered in Silicon Valley.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – In spite of the introduction of more than 150 new ads plugging new models and holiday promotions, automotive advertisers have experienced a lukewarm reception from U.S. consumers in Q4, according to Ace Metrix, the authority in television advertising effectiveness. The company, which today revealed lists of the most effective luxury and non-luxury automotive ads to break so far this quarter, found Q4 ads from Chevrolet to be a notable exception, leading the non-luxury automotive category in effectiveness—a category that performed far better than its luxury counterpart. This trend is a departure from last year when luxury brands out-performed non-luxury brands in effectiveness.

“Consumers tend to dislike sales event promotional ads, yet this year many brands opted for this type of messaging instead of better-performing, more creative brand/product messaging,” said Peter Daboll, CEO of Ace Metrix. “The result is the disappointing performance of many of the nearly 35 holiday-themed automotive ads to break so far this season. Case in point: it’s astounding that four of the ‘Top 10’ luxury automotive ads were below norm– a clear signal that many automotive brands have stepped away from good creative this season and fallen back on ‘Buy it now, you idiot’ messaging wrapped up in sales events and bows.”

Verbatim quotes from consumers who were surveyed included: “It’s the Christmas car bow ad…I think advertisers should know we’re tired of these and they should do something else…” “How many times are car companies going to show a car as a Christmas gift?…It makes me NOT want to buy [from them].”

Lexus, a brand typically in the Top 10 creative rankings, was conspicuously absent this quarter. Last year, the brand had more brand/product ads and had an average Ace Score of 584. This year, Lexus geared its creative toward holiday-themed sales event ads (“December to Remember”), resulting in a 14 percent drop in their average Ace Score to 504 – well below norm for the luxury automotive category.

One consumer said of the Lexus ads, “People don’t buy other people cars, and even if they did, do you think hearing one annoying jingle would really clue them into the fact they were getting a new car? No!”

On a positive note, luxury brands like Cadillac, Audi and Mercedes-Benz got their holiday messages right with Ace Scores above the norm. In addition, ads longer than the standard 30 seconds dominated both lists.

“One trend we are seeing a lot of is what we’re calling ‘the return of story-telling’—longer spots that allow a brand to tell a story,” Daboll commented. “Chevy’s top-ranking ads are a great example of this, as is the top-ranking Thomas Keller BMW ad.”

Most Effective TV Ads for Non-Luxury Automotive, Q4 To Date*

Most Effective Luxury Automotive TV Ads, Q4 To Date*

*Definition: Ace Score is the measure of ad creative effectiveness based on viewer reaction to national TV ads. Respondents are randomly selected and representative of the U.S. TV viewing audience. The results are presented on a scale of 0-950, which represents scoring on creative attributes such as relevance, persuasion, watchability, information, attention, etc.

Ace Metrix will reveal the Top 10 Ads of the Quarter and Top Ads for the Year on January 4th, 2012.

Ace Metrix is the industry authority in measuring and understanding the impact of advertising creative. Through patent-pending Ace ScoreTM measurement technology, Ace Metrix collects and measures the consumer impact of every nationally breaking TV ad in near real-time. Through its Creative Lifecycle Management TM suite of products, Ace Metrix provides actionable creative analysis, from ideation through real-time in-market performance optimization, to many of the world’s leading advertisers and agencies. Ace Metrix works with leading global advertisers. For more information, visit www.acemetrix.com.

Follow Ace Metrix on Twitter for additional insight: Ace_Metrix.

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

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

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

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

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

About Specific Media

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

STAMFORD, Conn. – InsightExpress, a leading marketing research and data analytics firm, announced the launch of Tablet AdInsights, a pioneering new ad effectiveness solution that measures the brand impact of campaigns running across tablet devices.

A timely response to a growing industry need, Tablet AdInsights was born out of InsightExpress’ industry leading AdInsights® offering. Tablet AdInsights allows advertisers, agencies and publishers to measure the brand impact of tablet-focused campaigns against metrics such as awareness, message association, favorability, consideration and intent.

Tablet AdInsights recruits respondents directly from their device while surfing the Internet. Using the AdInsights proven test/control methodology, InsightExpress recruits the control group (unexposed) prior to the campaign and any potential exposure. Once a campaign launches, respondents for the test group (exposed) are randomly recruited.

“At InsightExpress, we believe in staying way out ahead of the curve, not only providing clients with the solutions they need today, but also the ones they will rely on tomorrow. Tablet AdInsights fills a significant industry gap by allowing advertisers, agencies and publishers to understand the effect of campaign exposure via these revolutionary devices,” said Drew Lipner, EVP, Group Director at InsightExpress. “Given our longstanding expertise in brand communications and mobile research, InsightExpress is uniquely positioned to lead the research community down this exciting path.”

“As we have witnessed the tablet phenomenon and experienced the profound effect on media, a critical need has emerged to measure ad-effectiveness. With Tablet AdInsights, we are able to measure an ad’s brand impact within this unique environment,” said Paul Borgese, Director of Research and Insights at The Weather Channel Media Solutions. “We have partnered with InsightExpress on our ad effectiveness initiatives for many years, and see Tablet AdInsights as an extension of the creativity and vision that sets them apart in the research industry.”

About InsightExpress

InsightExpress is an industry leading marketing research and data analytics provider specializing in the measurement of brand communications. The company’s proven approaches include message evaluation, advertising effectiveness, creative development and cross-media optimization. With vast industry expertise, proprietary methodologies and an exclusive platform, InsightExpress helps agencies, media and marketers optimize marketing initiatives across online, mobile and other media. Founded in 1999, InsightExpress is headquartered in Stamford, CT, with offices in San Francisco and New York. For more information, please visit our corporate Web site at www.insightexpress.com or our InsightfulAnalytics blog at http://blog.insightexpress.com/; you may also call us at 203.406.3233.

In Time for the Holidays: ‘Mobile Shoppers’ Study Shows How Ubiquitous Data Spawns Savvier Consumers

NEW YORK – Understanding the crucial role of mobile in marketers’ holiday strategies, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and its Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence released “Mobile Shoppers,” a new report that looks at how consumers’ access to mobile data will inevitably influence both what they buy and where they buy it. In addition, the study unveils the first-ever ranking of the most mobile shopping savvy cities in the U.S.

When it comes to being adept, able and prone to shop on mobile devices, “Space City” consumers nabbed Houston the highest spot on the list, followed by New York and Atlanta. Perhaps surprising to those who think of San Francisco as the hub of technology on-the-go, the Bay Area did not break into the top 10, landing instead at 11th place in the rankings.

The complete “2011 IAB U.S. Mobile Shopping Savvy Cities Index” is as follows:

1) Houston
2) New York
3) Atlanta
4) Los Angeles
5) Dallas/Ft. Worth
6) Tampa/St. Petersburg
7) Chicago
Philadelphia
9) Washington, D.C.
10) Seattle/Tacoma
11) San Francisco/Bay Area
12) Boston
13) Detroit
14) Minneapolis/St. Paul
15) Phoenix

The rankings were determined by looking at the mobile shopping audience today along with the distribution of mobile-savvy shoppers across major U.S. cities. The research used to determine the list refers to “mobile shopping” to mean both completing purchases via a phone or tablet and using a phone or tablet to research or shop for products that are later purchased in physical retail locations or online.

“Early data this holiday season already indicated the growing importance of mobile as a shopping tool,” said Joe Laszlo, Deputy Director, IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence. “Identifying mobile shoppers and delivering relevant messages to consumers as they are in shopping mode represents a key opportunity for marketers. That’s why we took this study one step further – pinpointing cities where advertisers would need to quickly embrace mobile strategies as a part of their overall plans to attract shoppers, both during the holiday season and throughout the year.”

Some of the other findings explored in this report include:

- Mobile shoppers are younger and have higher incomes than the average mobile user

- Ten percent of U.S. mobile users use their mobiles for comparing prices

- Almost 20 percent of U.S. mobile users use their phones to text or call family or friends about a product while in a store

To download the entire “Mobile Shoppers” study please visit www.iab.net/mobileshoppers

Methodology

In creating the “2011 IAB U.S. Mobile Shopping Savvy Cities Index,” IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence leveraged BIGinsight’s Simultaneous Media Survey (SIMM), a biannual survey of over 20,000 consumers, conducted in June 2011, a large enough sample to yield data on mobile usage for each of the top 15 U.S. DMAs. The IAB examined four key data points: ownership of a mobile device (primarily smartphones or tablets), propensity to be influenced by mobile coupons, ownership of a mobile retail app on a handset or tablet, and ownership of a mobile social media app. For each of these data points, the IAB constructed an index for each DMA relative to the U.S. national average. The IAB then combined them into a single metric, weighting device ownership most heavily, followed by coupon influence and retail app ownership. Social media apps, as conduits for sharing shopping and other information, received a relatively lower weighting.

About the IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence

The IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence, an independently funded and staffed unit inside the IAB, is charged with driving the growth of the mobile marketing, advertising and media marketplace.

The Mobile Center devotes resources to market and consumer research, mobile advertising case studies, executive training and education, supply chain standardization, creative showcases and best practice identification in the burgeoning field of mobile media and marketing. Our agenda will focus on building profitable revenue growth for companies engaged in mobile marketing, communications and advertising, and helping publishers, marketers and agency professionals understand and leverage interactive tools and technologies in order to reach and influence the consumer. For more information or to find out how to join, please visit www.iab.net/mmcoe.

About the IAB

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies that 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.

DIRECTV has teamed up with direct response systems leader CoreMedia Systems Inc. to begin rolling out the integration of Nielsen TV ratings for DIRECTV into CoreDirect DRTV software systems, eliminating the need for CoreDirect users to manually input DIRECTV ratings and performance data. It also will provide more accurate performance data for DIRECTV’s 11 genre-based cable network clusters, including precise quarter-hour data.

“The seamless integration of DIRECTV ratings within CoreDirect will simplify the buying process for our DR agency partners by providing an open and easily accessible view of DIRECTV ratings and demographic information,” said Amy Leifer, vice president, Advertising Sales, DIRECTV. “By using CoreDirect, agencies will be able to more easily analyze DIRECTV’s market performance so they can better manage their return on investment.”

“Our clients will now be able to reference DIRECTV’s ratings data during the planning, in-flight and post analysis stages of DRTV advertising campaigns,” said Glenn DeKraker, CEO of CoreMedia Systems. “As a result, they will be more efficient and accurate while achieving better performance for their campaigns.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Tremor Video

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

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

About Nielsen

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

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

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

The research surfaced five key findings:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

San Francisco – Vizu Corporation (www.brandlift.com), an online ad technology company whose solutions allow advertisers and publishers to measure and optimize Brand Lift in real-time, announced that it has completed an enhanced integration with Adap.tv, the company that connects video advertising buyers and publishers directly on one platform. This next phase of integration will provide buyers in the Adap.tv Marketplace with the ability to measure and optimize towards brand metrics, such as awareness and intent, in real-time and directly within the video experience. This partnership supports Vizu’s “Value in Video” initiative, an effort to provide the industry with the ability to measure and optimize Brand Lift generated by video advertising in real-time.

Until recently, video buyers have been unable to move beyond completion and clickthrough rates, the inadequate metrics by which video campaigns are measured and optimized. Through this enhanced integration, advertisers are now able to determine the contribution of different creative, messages, targeting, and frequency to overall campaign performance and quickly evaluate and adjust them to optimize performance.

“The ability to show Brand Lift in real-time is a game-changer for the industry,” said Jason Shulman, vice president of sales at Adap.tv. “In fact, our annual State of Video Report indicated that brand lift ranked the top three most important metrics for video campaigns, reinforcing that brand awareness and intent are top of mind.”

“The fragmented landscape of video serving technologies is one of the key challenges facing the growth of online video advertising,” said Dan Beltramo, CEO of Vizu. “This integration with Adap.tv is the next step in our “Value in Video” initiative, allowing our customers to seamlessly access our Brand Lift measurement and optimization capabilities within the Adap.tv Marketplace.”

Advertisers are already taking advantage of the integration, and benefiting from the unique capabilities Adap.tv and Vizu are now bringing to market. In one case, a major CPG company running a branding campaign to increase purchase intent for a leading line of odor-eliminating products found that the Adap.tv and Vizu solution provided a powerful one-two punch, delivering:

- 84% lift in purchase intent for the product amongst people who had been exposed to the campaign;

- Brand Lift that significantly outperformed the market norm; this campaign performed in the top 10% of all CPG campaigns as measured by Vizu;

- Identification of the top performing pre-roll creative provided the opportunity for in-market optimization of Brand Lift.

The Adap.tv-Vizu case study can be downloaded in its entirety at: http://brandlift.vizu.com/knowledge-resources/case-studies/pdf/Vizu Case Study – Adap.tv.pdf

Vizu Corporation (www.brandlift.com) brings the same metrics used to measure and optimize brand advertising effectiveness in the offline world to the online medium. By providing the first real-time, enterprise technology platform that allows brand advertisers and their partners in the digital media ecosystem – publishers, ad networks, exchanges, and demand side platforms – to collaborate around measuring and optimizing Brand Lift metrics, Vizu enables its customers to move their target audience through the purchase funnel, from building awareness to creating intent and preference. Vizu’s brand advertising effectiveness platform is used by over 60% of Advertising Age’s Top 100 Brand Advertisers and Comscore’s Top 50 Media properties to support all key aspects of the advertising lifecycle, including media buying, audience profiling, and Brand Lift optimization.

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

NEW YORK – The IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence today released the final version of “Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions,” or MRAID. This initiative defines a common API (Application Programming Interface) for mobile rich media advertisements, establishing a framework of principles and guidelines to help the mobile marketplace reach new levels of consistency, efficiency and effectiveness.

Mobile’s range of benefits has secured incredible interest from agencies, publishers, vendors and ad designers, driving rapid growth. However, the accelerated speed of adoption also led to inefficiencies, including a marketplace cluttered with multiple, incompatible APIs from a variety of rich media vendors working with publishers to enable in-app advertising. This fragmentation placed undue burden on marketers and agencies, requiring that their advertisement’s underlying code be rewritten several times in order to run across different apps. With MRAID in place, the API “Tower of Babel” will be eliminated, allowing agencies to be able to quickly and easily run creative across applications from different publishers.

“With apps becoming more and more central to the consumer mobile experience and brand marketers’ plans, the industry needs to have set guidelines and principles when it comes to communication between ads and apps,” said Joe Laszlo, Deputy Director of the IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence. “MRAID is the next crucial step in bringing mobile to scale.”

“Greater emphasis is being placed on mobile by advertisers, which is a fantastic tribute to mobile’s benefits for brands. However, the industry’s rapid growth also gave birth to a number of inefficiencies that need to be addressed if we’re to move ahead,” said Scott Jensen, Vice President of Digital Products & Applications at The Weather Channel Companies, a participating member company of the IAB’s Mobile Marketing Center Board of Directors. “Simplifying and streamlining the process for designers of ad creative through MRAID today will only further the chance of stronger mobile media buys in the future.”

For a copy of MRAID 1.0 and more information about MRAID, the working group and its members, please visit: http://www.iab.net/mraid.

About the IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence

The IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence, an independently funded and staffed unit inside the IAB, is charged with driving the growth of the mobile marketing, advertising and media marketplace. The Mobile Center devotes resources to market and consumer research, mobile advertising case studies, executive training and education, supply chain standardization, creative showcases and best practice identification in the burgeoning field of mobile media and marketing. Our agenda will focus on building profitable revenue growth for companies engaged in mobile marketing, communications and advertising, and helping publishers, marketers and agency professionals understand and leverage interactive tools and technologies in order to reach and influence the consumer. For more information or to find out how to join, please visit www.iab.net/mmcoe.

About the IAB

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 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.

BOSTON, MA – DataXu (www.dataxu.com) today announced the launch of DX3.  DX3 is the only fully-integrated digital marketing management platform.  DX3 enables marketers to acquire and retain more customers by optimizing across the most profitable audience segments, media channels, and creative messages. Using DX3, marketers can improve campaign performance by up to 2X and save millions of dollars on media, technology and service fees.

The deluge of consumer behavioral data created by ubiquitous computing presents an historic opportunity and challenge for the CMO.  The rapid evolution of digital media, and the accompanying proliferation of hard-to-implement point solutions, has made it difficult to formulate and act on enterprise-wide decisions driven by the effective use of real-time customer intelligence.

Industry experts are taking notice.  In the September 2011 Forrester Research Inc. report, “The Future of Digital Media Buying,” report author and senior analyst Joanna O’Connell observed that the demand-side platform (DSP) model would evolve, alongside data management and analytics capabilities, into an integrated enterprise solution. “DMP/analytics platforms and centralized media buying platforms will increasingly merge into a unified stack.” That vision is now a reality with the launch of DX3.

DX3 provides users with an easy-to-use console, powered by industry-leading machine learning technology, that enables marketers to use Big Data to make fast, intelligent decisions that drive sales. This unique approach to digital marketing helps organizations gain a better understanding of their customers and achieve the most profitable conversion rates in the industry. And because DataXu does not own media or data, it is a neutral “referee” that creates brand-specific algorithms to continuously optimize marketing investments against unique business objectives.  Additionally, for marketers who need more “hands on” help, DataXu provides expert advice and custom solutions that have come to define data-driven innovation and competitve advantage.

“Today’s way of working with digital media is broken and everyone knows it,” said Mike Baker, Co-Founder and CEO of DataXu. “The biggest challenge for CMOs is creating value from the flood of consumer data as everything goes digital.  DX3 is a game changer  because it allows marketers to use their existing digital investments to discover real-time consumer insights that drive sales.”

DX3 provides marketers with a simple console that enables continuous testing and learning to improve key business decisions. DX3 brings together:

·         Programmatic buying of a Demand Side Platform (DSP) across  display, social, mobile, and video, and premium private, guaranteed, and exchange-traded media.

·         Active analytics™ – scalable, multivariate automated decision-making – that  converts consumer and campaign insights into actions in real time to  generate better results and save marketers time and money.

·         Unified audience management capabilities combining both 1st-party data and more than 20,000 3rd-party segments to create custom audience segments that drive higher customer acquisition and retention.

·         Multitouch attribution-aware buying that allocates spending to the best-performing media channels, partners, and data, across all digital channels.

“We need a way to capitalize on vast amounts of data – enterprise to digital marketing – in real time,” said Jonah Spegman, Director of Digital Media/Marketing for Scripps Networks. “DataXu has accomplished something unique with DX3 – managing the lifecycle of digital marketing in one centralized platform. By taking full control of our data and cutting out middlemen, we can now make decisions quickly and work with a clearer understanding of how best to reach lucrative digital audiences.”

About DataXu

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

PALO ALTO, CA – Auditude (www.auditude.com), the leading provider of video advertising technology and monetization for premium content owners and distributors, released a report showing online video publishers, content owners and distributors have greater advertising revenue opportunities as viewer acceptance increases around TV-like commercials within online video. Furthermore, completion rates of ad breaks streamed within live content jumps significantly, compared to those within video-on-demand content. The report indicates that video publishers, content owners and distributors can increase revenue potential based on viewer acceptance of ads in premium content.

The Auditude Video Monetization report shows how content type, length of video stream, ad format and placement affect viewers’ response to ads. The analysis is based on a sample of over 11 billion ad impressions running through Auditude’s video ad serving platform. Auditude’s study reaffirms that:

Live vs. Video-on-Demand: Completion rates of ads on live content are significantly higher (86%) compared to video-on-demand content (60%). This suggests that live content actively engages viewers who know that they may not see that content again after its current availability and, therefore, are more willing to sit through digital commercial breaks.

Mid-Roll Completion: Mid-roll video ads have the highest (75%) completion rates as viewers are watching long-form content that they have likely committed to seeing through completely. These ads are the closest comparison to the TV viewing experience as they can be programmed similarly to television with multiple commercials during a single break within online viewing. This insight has strong potential ad buying ramifications given the popularity of the pre-roll ad format today.

Professional vs. User-Generated Content (UGC): Viewers complete in-stream ads on professional content 68% of the time, versus 52% for UGC. The study also highlights that there are more linear video ad opportunities served into professional content than UGC, regardless of content length. This suggests that advertisers possibly view this type of content as safer and more brand-friendly, and are therefore willing to buy more of it.

Overlays on Video: There are more overlay (non-linear) ads served within UGC vs. professional content. Overlays tend to be more intrusive and are viewed as a performance- or action-oriented product for brands willing to risk exposure on UGC content.

“Our research shows that content owners and distributors can create a highly-engaging ad experience in online video that closely resembles what is present on television. For example, the power of tune-in during digital live content can be just as impactful as on television, and maybe even more so given the interactivity of the creative execution. This provides tremendous opportunities to maximize the value of digital video content and make it available to audiences no matter how they are accessing that content,” said Jeremy Helfand, CEO of Auditude. “With the growing distribution of IP-based video content on desktops, smartphones, tablets, game consoles, and other devices, we see strong cross-platform revenue opportunities within digital video. These are the types of ad experiences where content owners and marketers will find great success.”

Auditude’s study shows that publishers, content owners and distributors must evaluate several elements of the video ad experience, including length of individual content, placement of ad breaks, and the ad format to use. In-stream commercial breaks are the preferred ad solution for professional content while overlays are typically used for monetizing UGC. Audience behavior shows an acceptance of ad breaks in exchange for premium content, similar to a television experience. With multiple ad breaks inserted effectively within digital video, publishers can amplify revenue opportunities for their content.

Auditude’s Video Monetization report examined video ad impressions across 300 publishers to better understand user viewing habits and engagement. This study encompassed thousands of ads from a wide array of advertisers.

The full report is available on Auditude’s site at www.auditude.com.

About Auditude
Auditude provides video advertising technology and monetization solutions for premium content owners and distributors. Its platform enables content owners and publishers to rapidly scale the business requirements and ad serving needs around premium video content. Auditude works with marquee broadcast and professional content organizations in online video to help grow video ad revenue opportunities through superior technology. Clients include Comcast, Major League Baseball, Dailymotion, Dick Clark Productions, FoxNews, Major League Gaming, Lionsgate, UK’s Channel 5, and Starz Media, among others. Auditude has been named one of the top private companies in America by Business Insider, Always On and The Hollywood Reporter. Auditude is based in Palo Alto with offices in London, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City. For more information, please visit us at: www.auditude.com.

The study also found that TV ad breaks have an impact on casual games played on personal devices. Survey participants noted that they preferred games which didn’t take long to complete, or which were not time-dependent, so that they could fit their games activity into the ad breaks.

“Understanding when and how `focus shifts’ between the TV and personal devices occur is key to delivering a superior multi-screen user experience, as well as providing an opportunity to retain the attention of viewers on advertising,” concludes Park.

Note: This ethnographic study presents the findings of twelve in-home observations of individuals who actively engage with multiple personal devices within the home setting while watching TV. The observations and semi-structured interviews were carried out with consumers in the USA and UK in August 2011.

About Strategy Analytics

Strategy Analytics, Inc. provides timely and actionable market intelligence focused on opportunities and disruptive forces in the areas of Automotive Electronics and Entertainment, Broadband Connected Home, Mobile & Wireless Intelligent Systems and Virtual Worlds. Headquartered in Boston, MA, with offices in the UK, France, Germany, Japan, S. Korea and China, Strategy Analytics works with clients through annual multi-client services, management team workshops and custom consulting engagements. For more information, please visit http://www.strategyanalytics.com/

San Francisco – Vizu Corporation (www.brandlift.com), an online ad technology company whose solutions allow advertisers and publishers to measure and optimize Brand Lift in real-time, today announced that it has completed an integration with Firefly Video, which is powered by Tribal Fusion’s E9 Audience Engagement Platform. The integration represents the next step in Vizu’s “Value in Video” initiative, an effort to provide the industry with the ability to measure and optimize Brand Lift generated by video advertising in real-time, wherever and however the video is delivered. In so doing, Vizu will help address one of the key challenges facing the growth of the medium – a fragmented landscape of video serving technologies.

“Vizu’s real-time capabilities are a core part of our Insights Focus suite of analytics,” says Kelle Martin, Executive Director of Audience Insights at Tribal Fusion. “Metrics like viewing time and completion rates are important, but at the end of the day advertisers want to know if they’re driving Brand Lift against traditional brand funnel metrics, from building awareness to creating intent and preference. This integration with Vizu makes it incredibly easy for our customers to do that.”

“Many of the advertisers we work with leverage Firefly Video to engage with and influence their target audiences,” says Dan Beltramo, CEO of Vizu. “This integration allows our customers to measure and optimize Brand Lift generated from these units in real time, maximizing the return on their video investment.”

Advertisers are already taking advantage of the integration, and benefiting from the unique capabilities Firefly Video and Vizu are now bringing to market. In one case involving a campaign run by the world’s largest children’s entertainment network, Firefly Video was proven to drive significant tune-in intent for a new feature length television movie. Specifically, Firefly Video leveraged their integration with Vizu’s Ad Catalyst solution to show:

- 251.1% lift in consumers’ intent to tune into the feature-length television movie amongst those who were exposed to the campaign

- This campaign performed in the top 10% of all entertainment campaigns measured by Vizu

- Brand Lift was generated after just two exposures, indicating the branding effectiveness of Firefly Video’s video units

Vizu’s Ad Catalyst solution, part of the company’s brand advertising effectiveness platform, is used by leading brands, agencies, ad networks, and publishers to measure and optimize the effectiveness of online brand advertising efforts in real time. Ad Catalyst measures the Brand Lift generated by online advertising campaigns, replacing click-through rates with a much more appropriate metric for brand advertisers. As Brand Lift data is available in real time, it also enables in-market optimization of campaigns. Leveraging an intuitive dashboard, the contribution of different creative, messages, targeting, and frequency to overall campaign performance can quickly be evaluated and adjustments made that ensure both Brand Lift and return on advertising spend are maximized.

“Video advertising is inherently a brand-building medium, and requires brand-relevant metrics,” says Harris Bernstein, Regional VP of Sales at Tribal Fusion. “Vizu’s real-time Brand Lift metrics helps us provide the proof that our video units deliver superior value to advertisers. The integration will make it easier for us to provide this proof to all of our customers. We are very excited to be working with Vizu.”

The Firefly Video-Vizu case study can be downloaded in its entirety here.

To learn more about the “Value in Video” initiative, read the press release at: http://brandlift.vizu.com/about/press-releases/20110926.htm

Firefly Video (http://www.fireflyvideo.com/) is an online video advertising company that provides brand advertisers the ability to effectively complement their TV and pre-roll buys, easily, efficiently and with full brand safety. Leveraging Tribal Fusion’s E9 Audience Engagement Platform, Firefly Video combines mass reach and world-class targeting to connect advertisers with their most desirable prospects and drive brand lift across a worldwide audience of 453 million unique users.  Firefly Video enables brand advertisers to connect with consumers who are most interested in their brand and engage with them by combining the impact of video with interactivity. Firefly Video combines the best of TV advertising: emotionally engaging full-motion ads, with the best of display advertising: interactive engagement, fine-grained targeting, user feedback, social sharing and intelligent insights.

Vizu Corporation (www.brandlift.com) brings the same metrics used to measure and optimize brand advertising effectiveness in the offline world to the online medium. By providing the first real-time, enterprise technology platform that allows brand advertisers and their partners in the digital media ecosystem – publishers, ad networks, exchanges, and demand side platforms – to collaborate around measuring and optimizing Brand Lift metrics, Vizu enables its customers to move their target audience through the purchase funnel, from building awareness to creating intent and preference.  Vizu’s brand advertising effectiveness platform is used by over 60% of Advertising Age’s Top 100 Brand Advertisers and Comscore’s Top 50 Media properties to support all key aspects of the advertising lifecycle, including media buying, audience profiling, and Brand Lift optimization.

San Diego, CA – Ad-Juster, Inc. today announced it has partnered with Adometry™, Inc., the leader in cross channel attribution, verification and optimization solutions, to give digital publishers improved visibility and control over ads running across their sites. As part of the agreement, Ad-Juster will integrate its delivery data collection service with Adometry TagScan™. This will help Ad-Juster publisher partners ensure that third-party data from ad exchanges, ad networks, trading desks and direct ad buys do not interfere with site performance by introducing latency, distributing malware or collecting unauthorized data.

Adometry TagScan gives publishers the transparency and controls needed to enforce policies and identify issues, both before trafficking ads and with ongoing monitoring of their sites. TagScan can alert ad operations teams before issues are escalated or become crises. Publishers working with Ad-Juster can now seamlessly enable TagScan to monitor ads running through their systems and alert them of any policy violations – all without the need to import ad creatives.

“Tag management is a key part of digital campaign success, and our integration with Adometry’s TagScan is an important step in providing the ‘why’ to specific tag-related discrepancy situations,” said Mike Lewis, President of Ad-Juster, Inc.

“Our goal is to improve the performance of online advertising for digital publishers, advertisers and agencies,” said John Dietz, vice president of Product Management for Adometry. “By teaming with Ad-Juster, we are helping its publisher partners prevent data leakage, protect against malware, and improve site performance for the advertisers they serve.”

About Adometry
Adometry, Inc. provides scoring, auditing, verification, and attribution metrics to optimize results for online advertisers, agencies, publishers, and ad networks. Tracking billions of impressions in real-time, reporting on where they appeared, for how long, and to what effect; the Adometry mission is to bring greater levels of transparency and accountability to the online advertising industry. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Adometry is privately held and backed by Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. For more information visit www.adometry.com.

About Ad-Juster
Ad-Juster is the world’s only 3rd party reporting and discrepancy management tool. Ad-Juster currently provides actionable data to over 60 digital agencies, networks and publishers. Ad-Juster automatically identifies and reports ad delivery discrepancies – helping manage one of the digital ad world’s most painful problems. See Ad-Juster.com for more information.

New York, NY – According to a new study by VINDICO, the leading online video ad management platform, mid-roll video ads offer advertisers higher performance than pre-roll or post-roll video ads within long-form video environments. VINDICO analyzed millions of video ad impressions within the consumer and packaged goods category delivered by VINDICO over the past 12 months to identify viewing trends and help marketers set benchmarks for advertising success.

VINDICO’s data revealed that mid-roll ad placements in the study worked better than pre- or post-roll ads: 93 percent of mid-roll video ads were viewed in their entirety, compared with only 83 percent completion of post-roll video ads and 85 percent completion of pre-roll video ads. Pre- and post-roll ads are attached to most ad-supported content regardless of length, whereas mid-roll ad placements are typically found only in longer-form online content, such as in the middle of a TV program or movie.

“The industry has grown accustomed to predominantly using pre-roll ads as the main vehicle for delivering brand messages via video,” said Matt Timothy, president of VINDICO. “However, our data shows that online viewers may respond better to mid-roll ads particularly because they are delivered within ‘full meal’ video environments as opposed to ‘snacking’ opportunities, such as a movie trailer or video clip. As a result, mid-roll within episodic content where the viewer is invested in watching the full video event tends to offer higher completion rates. Advertisers should consider giving more emphasis to mid-roll when developing their video media plans.”

The study also revealed that many video ad campaigns that run in long-form environments lack sufficient labeling of pod position, suggesting there is a huge opportunity to further understand online viewing behavior.

“There is a tremendous opportunity for marketers and publishers to better understand not only which pod placements work best, such as pre-roll or post-roll, but also the frequency and timing of such video ad placements within each piece of content,” Timothy added.

Serving almost 40 percent of all online video ads, VINDICO provides advertisers and leading agency groups such GroupM, Havas, IPG, Publicis and Omnicom the easiest way to buy, serve and track all online video ad campaigns with a single video ad management platform. A market leader, VINDICO delivered more than 15.7 billion video ad impressions over the last 12 months, including five billion video ads in Q2 2011, up from 1.8 billion in Q2 2010.

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

LOS ANGELES – Online publishing is thriving according to global research by Econsultancy and the Rubicon Project published today, with 73% of publishers saying online display advertising revenue has gone up in last year. Nearly half of publishers (44%) now sell their online display advertising via real-time bidding (RTB), which itself is delivering twenty percent more revenue to publishers. The research also found that two thirds (66%) of publishers sell inventory through online advertising networks.

the Rubicon Project, the US-based advertising technology company, commissioned Econsultancy to survey more than 1,000 internet advertising professionals, including nearly 500 online publishers, sales houses and rep firms, in August and September 2011. The survey follows the publication of a companion report which delivered analysis of similar questions to advertisers and agencies.

Increasing Revenue for Publishers

- The vast majority of publishers surveyed say that their rate card prices have either gone up since last year (40%) or stayed the same (46%). Only 14% of respondents say pricing has decreased. Direct-sold premium inventory accounts for 55% of sales volume, delivering 67% of revenue for publishers (this number is somewhat lower in the US, where 50% of inventory is sold by direct sales team and accounts for 62% of revenue).
- Publishers in the United States are more likely than their European counterparts to say that rate card prices have gone up in the last year (46% of US respondents compared to 36% in Europe).

A similar survey in 2009 found that only 53% of publishers had enjoyed increased display advertising revenues over the previous year. The research shows that supply-side platforms are playing a prominent role in the online advertising ecosystem where real-time bidding is becoming increasingly prevalent. Publishers cite the main benefits of working with supply-side platforms as the ability to open up inventory to RTB (58%), incremental revenue (54%) and extraction of greater value from inventory (48%).

Impact of RTB; growth of Private Marketplaces

- On average, real-time bidding has given publishers 20% uplift on their remnant display ad revenue.
- One in 10 publishers say they have established a private marketplace, and further 35% say they are planning to.
- More than three quarters (78%) of publishers with private exchanges say that this has resulted in demonstrable revenue and a positive lift on yield.

“The truth is in the data, and this report shows that RTB represents a watershed moment for publishers around the globe. RTB is having a positive impact on publishers’ cross-channel monetization strategy, and aligns squarely with the value advertisers are gaining,” said Kara Weber, SVP of Marketing at the Rubicon Project. “We predict that 2012 will mark the confluence of two key trends: a massive influx of new dollars coming online, accompanied and powered by RTB and the broader burst of innovation around the automation of digital ad buying and selling. And most importantly, publishers who leverage a single platform to control access to their inventory, and monetize that asset across all buying channels, can ensure that every impression is sold for the highest possible price.”

The Role of Online Advertising Networks

Econsultancy also surveyed online advertising networks around the world and discovered that 37% of online advertising networks are using RTB for both buying and selling inventory. Around a third (31%) are using RTB just for buying, while 7% are using real-time bidding just for selling. 60% of the ad networks surveyed revealed they buy inventory from other ad networks and 60% buy from online advertising exchanges.

For publishers working with ad networks:

- Three-quarters (74%) of US publishers sell through ad networks, compared to 61% in Europe.
A third (33%) of publishers say they work with more ad networks than a year ago, but 28% work with fewer ad networks.
- On average, globally, 42% of display inventory goes to ad networks, increasing to 51% for the US but decreasing to 34% for Europe.
- On average, globally, 35% of display advertising revenue comes from ad networks (42% in North America and 27% in Europe), up from 33% in 2009.
- One third of pubs do not work with advertising nets and the challenges faced when working with them have increased. One third of all publishers consider channel conflict and data leakage as problems.

Linus Gregoriadis, Econsultancy’s Research Director, added, “This research shows a positive commercial environment for publishers globally, with rate card prices holding steady or increasing for the vast majority of responding companies. Real-time bidding is creating opportunities for publishers who are having to adapt quickly to a fast-changing environment. Ad networks and exchanges continue to play an important role, while supply-side platforms are becoming increasingly influential in the marketplace.”

“The research also looks at how publishers are reacting to data privacy legislation, with half of respondents saying they are worried about changes relating to the use of cookies. Worryingly, a significant proportion of publishers (21%) have a poor understanding of data privacy law and its implications.”

This is Econsultancy’s second Online Publishers Survey Report, produced in association with the Rubicon Project. The study, supported by the IAB UK, IAB France, IAB Europe and AOP, follows a similar piece of research carried out in 2009 and is based on a survey of over 1,000 online advertising professionals carried out in August and September 2011. This report is specifically focused on results from almost 500 publishers around the world. A copy of the full report is available for download from here.

About the Rubicon Project

the Rubicon Project launched in 2007 with a mission to automate buying and selling across the $65 billion global online advertising industry. Powered by data-driven algorithms and pricing intelligence data, REVV, the company’s yield optimization platform, has optimized nearly two trillion ad transactions for more than 450 of the largest properties on the Internet. REVV helps premium Web publishers like Time Inc., News International and CareerBuilder make more money by optimizing their ad space, eliminating unnecessary ad operations costs and protecting their brands. The platform powers the REVV Marketplace, the world’s largest premium display advertising marketplace. More than 650 ad networks, exchanges and DSPs access premium inventory and audiences through the REVV Marketplace and its unparalleled reach of more than 575 million unique users. Headquartered in Los Angeles, with offices in New York, Seattle, London, Paris, Hamburg and Sydney, the company is backed by $60 million in funding from Clearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, IDG Ventures Asia, Comcast Ventures and News Corporation.

About Econsultancy

Econsultancy is a digital publishing and training group used by more than 200,000 Internet professionals every month. Econsultancy has offices in New York and London, and hosts more than 100 events every year in the US and UK. Many of the world’s most famous brands use Econsultancy to educate and train their staff.

New York – PubMatic (www.PubMatic.com),  a media technology company that provides a holistic inventory, data and advertising revenue optimization platform for digital publishers, today released a study conducted with research firm IDC showing that Real-Time Bidding (RTB) will amount to $6.47 billion in ad spend by 2015 in the U. S. and major markets in Western Europe. The IDC findings, led by Karsten Weide, Program Vice President, Digital Media and Entertainment, have been published in PubMatic’s Ad Revenue Report, which published in conjunction with the Ad Revenue 4 conference taking place today in New York City.

PubMatic’s Ad Revenue Report is available here: www.pubmatic.com/adrevenuereport

The IDC research analyzes the state of RTB across the United States and in Western European nations France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The report estimates the current and past spending on RTB-based display ad sales and forecasts yearly growth until 2015. Highlights from the research include:

·      RTB-Based Spending: By 2015, RTB-based spending will stand for 27% in the United States (up from 10% in 2011), 25% in the UK (up from 6%), 21% in France (upfrom 4%) and 20% in Germany (up from 4%). Total spending on RTB in the US will reach $5.1 billion; $680 MM for the UK; $219 MM for France; and $495 MM forGermany.
·      Expected Growth: Display advertising sales based on RTB will experience strong growth until 2015 in the US (71% from 2010-2015), the UK (114%), France (103%) and Germany (99%).
·      Direct vs. Indirect Sales Related to RTB: By 2015, the majority of indirect ad revenue volume will be traded using RTB in the US and the most developed European markets. By 2015, RTB-based direct sales will contribute to 15% of total RTB sales in the US, 7% in the UK, 14% in Germany, and 13% in France.

“Real-Time Bidding is rapidly penetrating the display ad market, with spending nearly doubling in 2011. Furthermore, we expect it to double again in 2012. The value it brings to both publishers and marketers is undeniable,” said Karsten Weide, Program Vice President, Digital Media and Entertainment, IDC.

“Spending on RTB will grow not just for indirectly sold inventory – premium inventory will also be sold via RTB on a much greater scale in the near future,” said Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO of PubMatic. “The benefits of automation are clear for all parties in the display ecosystem.”

Catalysts for RTB
RTB has been growing due to its promise of improving return on investment for publishers, agencies and advertisers. Through RTB, publishers stand to improve yield, automate sales processes, and reduce costs. Agencies and advertisers benefit because RTB trading improves campaign efficiency and return on ad spend.

The Future: Automating Direct Sales
The mounting pressure to improve profitability will compel more and more publishers to transition into RTB-based trading of directly sold inventory. As advertisers become more comfortable with the process for indirect ad sales, they will demand more ways of incorporating it with ad buys, which will include media bought directly from publishers.

Methodology
Information for the Ad Revenue Report was gathered by IDC through multiple sources including in depth interviews with senior online advertising industry executives in the US, UK, France and Germany as well as IDC’s own proprietary research. IDC uses a predictive model to forecast RTB data.

The full IDC report is available here: www.pubmatic.com/idc

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

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

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, and dunnhumbyUSA, a global leader in building brand value for consumer goods and retail companies, released results of multiple studies measuring the offline sales impact of online display advertising for consumer packaged goods (CPG) advertisers. Retail sales were measured by analytically linking the permission-based comScore panel of one million U.S. Internet users to their anonymous loyalty card in-store purchase data provided by dunnhumbyUSA; no identifiable personal data was disclosed. By comparing the in-store brand buying of households exposed to online advertising with that of households not exposed, it was possible to determine the impact of online advertising campaigns. The results of the studies indicate that exposure to online display ads can lead to improved in-store sales for CPG brands.

“Effective advertising has always been about increasing awareness, favorability and purchase intent in order to increase in-store conversion,” said comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni. “After several years of conducting advertising effectiveness research for CPG brands, we are learning how digital campaigns can lift sales in retail stores. It’s now clear that online ad campaigns should be an integral part of any CPG marketer’s integrated communications strategy.”

“The comScore dunnhumbyUSA research highlights the potential impact of an integrated, customer-driven approach across channels,” added Matthew Keylock, Senior Vice President, New Business Development & Partnerships at dunnhumbyUSA. “With these results we are one step closer to a more comprehensive understanding of what motivates shoppers to buy and how online advertising can play a significant role along the path to purchase.”

CPG Campaigns Show Median Offline Sales Lift of 21 Percent

An analysis of multiple CPG online ad campaigns that involved comparing the offline buying of households exposed to advertising with the buying behavior of households who were not exposed revealed a median in-store sales lift of 21 percent among the exposed households, with five out of every six campaigns generating a positive sales lift. Approximately 70 percent of campaigns generated a double-digit sales lift, and more than 40 percent generated lifts of at least 30 percent.

Ads Anonymously Targeted to In-Store Brand Buyers Drive Incremental Conversion

comScore also analyzed the offline sales results of a limited set of ad effectiveness campaigns that leveraged a new advertising product called Microsoft CPG Online Effect. This solution uses sophisticated predictive targeting algorithms powered by anonymous in-store buying data from dunnhumbyUSA coupled with online browsing data from comScore. These targeting algorithms are deployed by Microsoft Corp. across its network of sites.

The results showed an in-store sales lift of 42 percent, double the lift from campaigns that were not targeted using this approach. These results demonstrate how targeting algorithms can help improve efficiency and effectiveness in display ad delivery, providing more relevant ads to consumers, improved ROI for advertisers and higher CPMs for publishers. Dr Pepper Snapple Group is one of more than 20 CPG advertisers that have used this purchase-based targeting solution.

*Non-purchased based targeting includes, but is not limited to, the following types of media-placement strategies: contextual, audience, run of site/run of network, etc.

Mr. Fulgoni added: “Based on these results, the power of purchase-based ad targeting is clear. By delivering a relevant and persuasive message to the appropriate consumer segment, brand buying at retail stores can be increased substantially. It’s clear that the level of accuracy in reaching a brand’s consumer target that is possible with the Internet can drive ROI several times higher than what can be obtained using traditional media channels.”

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.

About dunnhumbyUSA
dunnhumby is the global leader in personalizing customers’ experience of retailers and brands. Analyzing data from over 350 million people in 25 countries, we help companies put customers at the center of every decision. We use our insight to improve customers’ experience of stores and communications to earn their lifetime loyalty. Our work with some of the world’s biggest retailers and brands has demonstrated that those companies that deliver value to customers through personalization become and stay their customers’ first choice. This strategic approach to putting the customer first in business improves our clients’ like-for-like sales and profit margins – or, put simply, their brand value. dunnhumbyUSA is a joint venture of The Kroger Company and London-based dunnhumby. Employing more than 1,500 people in 30 offices in Europe, Asia and the Americas, dunnhumby serves a prestigious list of companies including The Kroger Co., Tesco, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Kimberly-Clark, Macy’s, Panera Bread Company, PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble. For more information, visit www.dunnhumby.com.

NEW YORK – Mobile display advertising broadly outperforms online display advertising, according to a new study revealed by Millward Brown’s Dynamic Logic at Advertising Week’s Mobile Media Summit on Wednesday. The study, which offers important “do’s and don’ts” for effective mobile advertising, warned against the repurposing of online creative for mobile and stressed the importance of creative quality, an attribute that has become more necessary as mobile advertising’s novelty erodes.

“Similar to other new advertising mediums, consumers were overwhelmingly receptive to mobile display advertising in its nascency but now that its novelty is wearing out, creative quality matters more than ever,” said Ali Rana, senior vice president and head of Dynamic Logic’s Emerging Media Lab. “Today, poor creative can even have a negative impact on a brand, compared to the past three years when creative quality did not matter as much within mobile display advertising.”

Dynamic Logic revealed three important factors that drive a successful mobile campaign:

1.          The location of a brand name or logo within a mobile ad matters: Left-side brand placement is generally most effective and has a strong impact on advertising recall
2.         Clear and persistent branding is important for brand awareness
3.         A strong call-to-action encourages interactivity and engagement to help drive purchase intent

The three biggest mistakes mobile advertisers make are:

1.          Repurposing online creative by cropping it for a mobile environment
2.         Showing one’s brand only through a product shot
3.         Cluttering ads with too much text or too many logos

These best practices mirror those which Dynamic Logic has established for online creative.

“With only a brief window to capture a consumer’s attention, both mobile and online campaigns need to be well-branded and clear to build awareness,” says Rana.

Why is Mobile Advertising so Effective?

The average mobile campaign has a positive impact on the five traditional brand metrics, especially ad awareness, and significantly outpaces online brand metrics.

While mobile advertising effectiveness is still driven by novelty, it also benefits from the larger proportion of the mobile screen devoted to the advertisement compared to online. In addition, the copy and content are typically more focused due to size and technology constraints. Finally, as consumers become more acceptant of mobile ads, the medium offers better targeting than most media.

Mobile works well at communicating messages for high-involvement categories like financial services; however, some of the best campaigns are found in low-involvement categories like CPG, where ads are more effective in moving persuasion metrics such as favorability and purchase intent.

Picking the Right Mobile Creative

Based on their growing body of evidence that supports the power of strong mobile creative, Dynamic Logic is developing a new copy testing system optimized for the mobile display advertising landscape. In beta now and coming to market later this year, this groundbreaking solution allows agencies and advertisers to optimize their mobile creative and get the most out of their mobile media spend.

Follow Dynamic Logic’s Emerging Media Lab on Twitter @emergist. For more information on mobile measurement solutions, please contact sales@dynamiclogic.com.

About Dynamic Logic

Millward Brown’s Dynamic Logic (www.dynamiclogic.com) is the world leader in digital insights. Founded in 1999 as a pioneer of the digital revolution, Dynamic Logic helped establish the Internet’s true marketing value to businesses by developing solutions that measure beyond click-through to quantify the full brand impact of online advertising. Now, as Millward Brown’s Digital Practice, Dynamic Logic continues to lead the industry — developing innovations to optimize and track digital ad impact, specializing in emerging media platforms, and integrating insights across all digital and non-digital media. For marketers, agencies, and publishers alike, Dynamic Logic offers the most cutting-edge and adaptable solutions to make the most of every digital marketing dollar.

LOS ANGELES – Online advertising is growing around the world according to research conducted by Econsultancy. Sponsored by the Rubicon Project, the advertising technology company, two thirds of the advertisers and agencies polled in the US (68%) and 57% of those in Europe (including the UK) said they had increased their investment in online display advertising in the last year. Nearly a quarter (23%) of the advertisers say they have moved budgets from search to display advertising in the past year.

The growth of Real-Time Bidding and the rise of the Demand-Side Platform (DSP)

- The research, which questioned over 400 advertisers and agencies globally, reveals that over a fifth (23%) of the advertisers and agencies surveyed say they use a demand-side platform (DSP) which takes an average of 32% of the media plan.
- This is highest in the US, where 39% of the advertiser and agency respondents surveyed say they buy display advertising through DSPs.
- An average of 34% of trading desk spend goes to real-time bidding (RTB): 41% in US and 34% in Europe.
- However, the survey also reveals that 37% of responding companies say their trading desks spend less than 20% on RTB and that 17% of advertisers and agencies do not allocate any display advertising budget to their trading desks.

“The shift in dollars from search to display comes as no surprise; we’ve seen this trend rapidly increase over the last year with the increased availability of automated, easy-to-use buying tools that make spending in display as easy as search. The rise in RTB spend represents another milestone in this trend toward more programmatic buying, as the overall buying strategies of agencies and trading desk gravitate in that direction,” said Kara Weber, SVP of Marketing at the Rubicon Project. “Yet, it’s not all about RTB. The research also shows that ad networks play a predominant role – clearly illustrating that the buyers are using multiple channels to maximize ROI, not yet placing all bets on the RTB marketplace. We’ll be watching this trend carefully through 2011; we predict the shift to automated buying channels, including but not limited to RTB, will be dramatic in 2012.”

Performance and audience targeting remain key concerns

- Of those advertisers using demand-side platforms, 82% use more than one DSP and 15% say they use more than four.
- When rating a DSP ‘performance’ is viewed as one of the three most important criteria by 75% of the advertisers surveyed, followed by technology (51%), audience (46%) and reach (35%), and improved targeting is seen as a key benefit of working with a DSP by 64% of advertisers.
- This is followed by real time understanding of campaign performance at 60% and the ability to buy at impression level for 53% of advertisers, with liquidity (lack of available inventory), cited as a challenge for over half of those surveyed (54%) and service levels an issue for 51%.

Linus Gregoriadis, Research Director at Econsultancy, notes, “The survey results reflect the huge transformation of the online display advertising environment since we last carried out this research two years ago. Advertisers and agencies have more opportunities than ever to target the right audience. Ad networks and exchanges continue to prosper, while real-time bidding is having a major impact on the industry and is fueling the growth of demand-side and supply-side platforms.”

Online advertising networks continue to command significant spend

- The research also reveals online advertising networks are receiving an average of 55% of the average media plan, up from 31% in 2009, when Econsultancy conducted similar research.
- Evidently, online advertising networks are seen as an important part of the media mix. Of those advertisers working with ad networks, 43% say they work with at least five different ad networks compared to 30% two years ago.
- Over a third of advertisers (34%) buy from between five and ten online advertising networks – up from a quarter (23%) in 2009 – and 46% of advertisers say they are dealing with more networks than they were a year ago. This is particularly high in the US with 53% of advertisers and agencies dealing with more ad networks than they were a year ago.

The main advantages of RTB are listed as improved performance, reduced media wastage, better targeting capabilities, and lower cost per acquisition. Performance is also seen as the main advantage of ad networks with 79% of advertisers citing this as one of their top three criteria for rating an online ad network. The importance of reach has declined since 2009 however, when 67% of survey respondents highlighted it, which could be because of the growth of DSPs providing near total reach of the available inventory in key markets.

This is Econsultancy’s second Online Advertisers Survey Report, produced in association with the Rubicon Project. The study, supported by the IAB UK, IAB France, IAB Europe and AOP, follows a similar piece of research carried out in 2009 and is based on a survey of over 1,000 online advertising professionals carried out in August and September 2011. This report is specifically focused on results from more than 400 advertiser and agency respondents. A copy of the full report can be downloaded here.

About the Rubicon Project

the Rubicon Project launched in 2007 with a mission to automate buying and selling across the $65 billion global online advertising industry. Powered by data-driven algorithms and pricing intelligence data, REVV, the company’s yield optimization platform, has optimized nearly two trillion ad transactions for more than 450 of the largest properties on the Internet. REVV helps premium Web publishers like Time Inc., News International and CareerBuilder make more money by optimizing their ad space, eliminating unnecessary ad operations costs and protecting their brands. The platform powers the REVV Marketplace, the world’s largest premium display advertising marketplace. More than 650 ad networks, exchanges and DSPs access premium inventory and audiences through the REVV Marketplace and its unparalleled reach of more than 575 million unique users. Headquartered in Los Angeles, with offices in New York, Seattle, London, Paris, Hamburg and Sydney, the company is backed by $60 million in funding from Clearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, IDG Ventures Asia, Comcast Ventures and News Corporation.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) today announced EA Legend, a dynamic platform developed to provide marketers with campaign and audience insights across mobile, social, online and console games reaching over 300 million* people worldwide. The insights suite aggregates metrics, brand impact, social buzz, ad effectiveness, and ROI across all of EA’s ad products and platforms. EA Legend is powered by nPario, an expert in providing data products and services that enable companies to deliver better and more relevant experiences to their audiences and marketers. EA Legend will be presented to conference attendees for the first time ever at this year’s Advertising Week in New York City, NY on October 4, 2011 at 4pm EST.

“EA increased its worldwide audience reach by 30% this year across its mobile, social, online and console products. Combining that major jump in reach with the launch of EA Legend puts us in perfect position to compete directly for ad dollars that have traditionally gone to TV,” said Dave Madden, Senior Vice President of Global Media Solutions at Electronic Arts. “EA Legend gives us an edge by providing marketers with actionable insights across all of our platforms and a complete view into how their campaigns are driving engagement with consumers.”

EA Legend presents many benefits for advertisers, such as:

- Key cross-platform campaign performance indicators such as impressions, clicks, unduplicated reach, demographic profiles, social media buzz, and ROI metrics.
- Segmented audience insights based on demographic, psychographic, and social data.
- Ability to drill down into the factors that impact campaign effectiveness including audience engagement, audience segmentation and type of creative all measured over time.

“EA and nPario’s collaboration around EA Legend revolutionizes how advertisers can leverage their data,” said Bassel Ojjeh, CEO of nPario. “EA has some of the most premium and engaged audiences in the world, and nPario’s Data Management Platform allows EA to deliver audience and performance insights across multiple platforms at an infinite scale.”

EA Legend aggregates multiple internal and 3rd party data sources, providing marketers a single view into consumer’s response to their campaign. With this cross platform insights capability, EA Legend sets new standards for measuring the effectiveness of advertising in interactive entertainment. For example, marketers running ads on SCRABBLE on the iPhone™, ad integrations in The Sims Social™ on Facebook®, and sponsored content within Madden NFL Football on the console would be able to easily login and generate accurate unduplicated reach and campaign metrics across the three platforms. EA Legend empowers marketers giving them the opportunity to understand their EA ad campaigns with unparalleled detail and clarity, through a dynamic and user friendly tool.

For more information on advertising opportunities within EA’s digital entertainment properties, please email: advertise@ea.com. For more information about Advertising Week, please visit: http://www.advertisingweek.com/index.php

*EA Internal Data

About Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:ERTS) is a global leader in digital interactive entertainment. The Company’s game franchises are offered as both packaged goods products and online services delivered through Internet-connected consoles, personal computers, mobile phones and tablets. EA has more than 100 million registered players and operates in 75 countries.

In fiscal 2011, EA posted GAAP net revenue of $3.6 billion. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, EA is recognized for critically acclaimed, high-quality blockbuster franchises such as The Sims™, Madden NFL, FIFA Soccer, Need for Speed™, Battlefield, and Mass Effect™. More information about EA is available at http://info.ea.com.

About nPario Inc.

With operations in North America and the EMEA region, nPario offers data products and services that enable organizations to understand and target consumer intent. Led by CEO and co-founder Bassel Ojjeh, nPario’s team has worked on the largest data sets in the world for companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Adobe, Oracle and SAS. Today, we are channeling our expertise into nPario. For additional information visit www.npario.com

NEW YORK – DoubleVerify, the pioneer and worldwide leader in online media verification and compliance, today published its 1H 2011 Trust Index.  The report found a significant reduction of non-compliance among the industry’s best-performing ad networks and platforms.  The findings illustrate that advertisers and networks are continuing to standardize their brand protection and compliance practices, ensuring their online media spend brings the highest return on investment.  The worst-performing online advertising companies continued to demonstrate inconsistency in their ability to comply with advertisers’ preferences.

According to the report, the most compliant ad networks from January to June 2011 were (alphabetically): AudienceScience, Casale Media, Dedicated Media, Epic Marketplace, interclick, Microsoft Media Network, Specific Media, Spectrum, a Centro product, Undertone, and Yahoo! Network Plus. Advertising platforms that were most compliant include (alphabetically): DataXu, Invite Media, The MIG’s Zeus Advertising Platform.

As advertisers have increasingly demanded verification to be included with third-party buys from ad networks, exchanges, DSPs and agencytrading desks, the Trust Index has provided advertisers with in-depth data about partner compliance and brand safety trends in online advertising.  Other key findings from the report showed:

-      In the first half of 2011, the non-compliance rates for ad networks were at their lowest ever, since 18 months ago. The best-performing networks had an average non-compliance rate of 0.6 percent, but the bottom tier’s rate was 26 percent (compared to 2 percent and 35 percent respectively in 2H 2010).
-      The most compliant ad platforms (DSPs and agency trading desks) maintained an average non-compliance incident rate of 4 percent, and the lower tier platforms decreased their average non-compliance rate to 20 percent – showing that ad exchanges can provide great value when verification is applied.
-      All publishers saw decreases in the average international traffic incidents in their campaigns. Top performing publishers had a 0.1 percent non-compliance rate. The publishers that struggled most had an incident rate of 18 percent, which is an improvement from 40 percent in 2H 2010.

“The Trust Index has emerged as the industry standard for measuring advertising compliance and is a strong indicator of the positive impact media verification has had in online ad campaigns. Over the past 18 months, we’ve seen the continual decrease in the incidence rate of non-compliance when verification is applied,” said Oren Netzer, CEO of DoubleVerify. “Advertisers, networks and platforms that actively and consistently use verification on all of their campaigns and inventory are experiencing vast improvements in brand protection. This further indicates that online advertising needs to integrate verification on a long-term basis so that trust is permeated throughout the ecosystem.”

The Trust Index examined the industry’s overall progress against non-compliance. In analyzing how non-compliance on specific campaigns changed over time, DoubleVerify saw that advertisers who monitored, remediated and blocked non-compliant impressions witnessed a 53 percent decrease in inappropriate content and an 86 percent decrease in internationally targeted traffic (up from 77 percent in 2H 2010).

Other key highlights around advertising delivery normsinclude:
-      47 percent of ads on verified campaigns were served below the fold (compared to 37 percent in 2H 2010)
-      14 percent of advertising pages includedmultiple ads by the same advertiser (compared to 11 percent in 2H 2010)
-      5 percent of ads in verified campaigns were shown alongside a competitor’s ads (same as in 2H 2010)

DoubleVerify examined metrics from hundreds of advertisers, thousands of verified campaigns and more than 150 billion impressions to produce this bi-annual report, which can be downloaded at: www.trustinadvertising.info and www.doubleverify.com/trustindex.

Methodology
DoubleVerify used a robust set of data analysis tools to analyze online advertising campaign activity across more than 150 billion advertiser campaign impressions from January 1, 2011 to June 30, 2011. Multiple types of non-compliant incidents were analyzed, including instances of ads served off white lists, on black lists, alongside inappropriate content, multiple ads from the same advertisers, ads alongside competitors’, ads served below the fold and ads served to out of geographically targeted audiences. Incidents were then weighted according to the severity of the impact that the incident had on the brand’s compliance score.  The data in the analysis was carefully normalized to the best of our ability. Advertising delivery providers into three main categories: advertising networks, platforms and publishers. Impression thresholds were applied to each group to ensure the highest level of accuracy.

About DoubleVerify
DoubleVerify (www.doubleverify.com) is the worldwide leader in online media verification and compliance, and the top choice of marketers, agencies, ad networks and publishers looking to ensure brand safety, campaign transparency and regulatory compliance. DoubleVerify verifies over 40 billion advertising impressions per month for hundreds of leading Fortune 500 marketers, advertising networks and platforms. DoubleVerify is headquartered in New York City, with sales offices in London and engineering offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. Investors in DoubleVerify include JMI Equity, Institutional Venture Partners, Blumberg Capital, First Round Capital and Genacast Ventures.

Theorem India now has capacity for 1,000 employees.

“We are very proud to announce our growth to 1,000-people seating capacity,” said B. N. Chandrakanth, the company’s President, Global Services. “Theorem believes in creating work spaces and work environments that are on par with global benchmarks, which is why we have created state-of-the-art facilities for our employees.”

In total, Theorem India’s Global Delivery Center at Mysore is spread across five acres. The company is also working to complete an employee recreation center and cafeteria.

“Progress on construction has been brisk, and the facility is in its final stages,” Chandrakanth said.

The new facility addition is the latest chapter in Theorem’s story as one of the fastest-growing on-line media companies. The company’s commitment to its hub in Mysore makes it one of the leading providers of global opportunities for young graduates in the area.

About Theorem, Inc.

With over 700 employees on four continents, Theorem, Inc. is a global leader in creative services, media operations, reporting and analytics to over 100 leading agencies, publishers, networks, technology providers and brands. For more information, visit www.theoreminc.net or call 973-665-1700 x207.

Following a chat with Shane Keats, Director of Product Marketing at DataXu, we found out more about the DX Social platform and what it brings to advertisers and buying desks.

DX Social was born out of the pressing need to add a social component to DataXu’s high speed data trading platform. For the time being, the social component ties into the Facebook Ads API, where vast audiences are to be found. Keats suggested DX Social may be looking into adding more social networks / platforms in the future, but for the time being the focus remains on leveraging the power of the Facebook platform.

But what exactly does DX Social do?

In a nutshell, it allows media buyers to translate audience data gathered through display advertising on non-social web properties into Facebook highly targeted audiences. The process involves, of course, the Facebook API, as well as DataXu’s own audience analytics and filtering algorithms.

The DX Social advantages?

We believe this platform to be very powerful if used to its full potential:

- the cookie-free DX Social has the RTB benefits without the troubles usually associated with cookie-dependent solutions, thus avoiding many of their privacy pitfalls;

- superior ad optimization applied to social media campaigns, that would otherwise not be possible by advertising solely on Facebook, since Facebook does not let advertisers see and take action at impression level;

- social retargeting, a concept that has been so far elusive to say the least, but made possible through DX Social’s audience building capability, where a media buyer can opt to re-message only the most socially engaged sub-set of an existing audience;

- social media engagement through display media, achieved by replicating audience engagement data from social media into display campaigns, and targeting only those who are most likely to engage with the brand.

Advertisers who already tried DX Social reported excellent results, including 3-digits percentage lift in “likes” of their Facebook page achieved in only several days, while maintaining the “like” stickiness (no unlikes) ¹.

The DataXu DX Social platform appears to be very much in line with the general trend of moving away from the ad networks model to that of RTB ad exchanges, a trend that was started by the increasing need for transparency on the buy side. In its current form, DX Social seems to have retained the key advantages of both networks and exchanges, particularly the level of transparency required to eliminate the arbitrage usually associated with ad networks.

Currently, DX Social is open to US and European advertisers only, though Shane Keats assured us that the platform will open up globally quite soon. The company, DataXu, has recently opened their London office where the landing team is led by ex-Yahoo agency group head Martin Brown ².

About DataXu
Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, DataXu provides the only cross-channel Demand Side Platform for online, mobile, social and video advertisers. Impression level decisioning and actionable analytics increase digital campaign performance, improves operational efficiencies and delivers unique consumer insights to advertisers. DataXu’s executive team unites leading executives in digital media with MIT technologists. The private company is backed by Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners and Menlo Ventures. For more information, visit www.dataxu.com or follow them on Twitter at @dataxu.

San Francisco -Vizu Corporation (www.brand lift.com), an online ad technology company whose solutions allow advertisers and publishers to measure and optimize Brand Lift in real-time, today announced the launch of its “Value in Video” initiative. The program’s objective is to provide the industry with the ability to leverage in-stream, real-time testing of consumer sentiment wherever and however video is delivered, addressing one of the key challenges facing the growth of the medium – a fragmented landscape of video serving technologies.

As a first step in this initiative, Vizu also announced enhancements to its brand advertising effectiveness platform to fully support the VAST/VPAID standards developed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), allowing anyone serving video inventory compliant with these standards to leverage Vizu’s in-stream capabilities to measure and optimize Brand Lift.

“Our broadcaster partners utilize a variety of players and online video platforms, so putting together an all-encompassing measurement methodology was a challenge,” says Joshua Iselin, Managing Director of TVN, Australia’s largest in-stream video network. “With Vizu now enabling Brand Lift measurement and optimization via VAST/VPAID compliant inventory, we have multiple options at our disposal. The ability to survey viewers in-stream is a major technological innovation – as a result we’ve seen incredibly high response rates, helping to alleviate an issue that plagues the industry. We are proud to be working with Vizu to pioneer in-stream video measurement and optimization.”

“If advertisers can’t measure the performance of video on the entire media plan, they’re not getting the full picture. VAST/VPAID were developed to meet that challenge, and to bring more confidence to video advertisers,” says Daryl McNutt, BrightRoll’s Senior Vice President of Research and Marketing. “BrightRoll is a major proponent of standards like these that help move the industry forward, and we’re happy to see partners like Vizu support them as well.”

Leading brands, agencies, ad networks, and publishers leverage Vizu’s Ad Catalyst solution, part of the company’s brand advertising effectiveness platform, to measure and optimize the effectiveness of online brand advertising efforts in real time. Ad Catalyst measures the Brand Lift generated by online advertising campaigns, replacing click-through rates with a much more appropriate metric for brand advertisers. As Brand Lift data is available in real time, it also enables in-market optimization of campaigns. Leveraging an intuitive dashboard, the contribution of different creative, messages, targeting, and frequency to overall campaign performance can quickly be evaluated and adjustments made that ensure both Brand Lift and return on advertising spend are maximized.

“We strongly believe in the value of video, and that it has the potential to accelerate the flow of brand advertising dollars online. We are thus investing to ensure the medium reaches its full potential,” says Dan Beltramo, CEO of Vizu. “We’re excited to announce our support of the VAST/VPAID standards, but aren’t stopping there – we will soon be announcing integrations with many leading video player technologies, ensuring our customers can measure and optimize their video efforts anytime, anywhere.”

Vizu Corporation (www.brandlift.com) brings the same metrics used to measure and optimize brand advertising effectiveness in the offline world to the online medium. By providing the first real-time, enterprise technology platform that allows brand advertisers and their partners in the digital media ecosystem – publishers, ad networks, exchanges, and demand side platforms – to collaborate around measuring and optimizing Brand Lift metrics, Vizu enables its customers to move their target audience through the purchase funnel, from building awareness to creating intent and preference.  Vizu’s brand advertising effectiveness platform is used by over 60% of Advertising Age’s Top 100 Brand Advertisers and Comscore’s Top 50 Media properties to support all key aspects of the advertising lifecycle, including media buying, audience profiling, and Brand Lift optimization.

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that 180 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in August for an average of 18 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in a record 6.9 billion viewing sessions.

YouTube Partner Rankings Now Fully Released in Video Metrix

August marks the first month of official rankings for comScore YouTube Partner Reporting within the Video Metrix offering, for a never-before-seen comparison of viewership across thousands of YouTube partners and their channels. This offering provides a comprehensive and granular view of the unique audiences within different YouTube partner channels, enabling advertisers to more-easily create and optimize campaigns across specific channels to reach desired target audiences.

The data revealed that video music channels VEVO (60.6 million viewers) and Warner Music (30.9 million viewers) assumed the top two positions. Gaming channel Machinima ranked third with 17.7 million viewers, followed by Maker Studios with 10 million, Demand Media with 8.4 million and Revision3 with 6.6 million. Within the top 10 partners, TheGameStation demonstrated the highest engagement with 76.5 minutes per viewer on average. Machinima was a close second on average engagement at 72.6 minutes per viewer, while accounting for the second most videos viewed (289 million) after VEVO. Interestingly, 68.1 percent of Machinima viewers were male and 70.3 percent were under the age of 35.

*YouTube Partner Reporting based on online video content viewing and does not include
claimed user-generated content

For more information about comScore Video Metrix YouTube Partner Reporting, please visit comscore.com/youtube or email youtube@comscore.com.

Top 10 Video Content Properties by Unique Viewers

Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in August with 162 million unique viewers, while VEVO ranked second with 62.3 million. Facebook.com remained at the #3 position with 51.7 million viewers, followed by Viacom Digital with 49.9 million and Microsoft Sites with 46.4 million. Total viewing sessions reached another all-time high in August at 6.9 billion, with Google Sites generating the highest number of viewing sessions (3.5 billion). The average viewer watched 18 hours of online video content during the course of the month, with Google Sites (5.7 hours) and Hulu (3.2 hours) demonstrating the highest engagement.

Top 10 Video Ad Properties by Video Ads Viewed

Americans viewed more than 5.6 billion video ads in August, with Hulu generating the highest number of video ad impressions at 996 million. Tremor Video ranked second overall (and highest among video ad exchanges/networks) with 764 million ad views, followed by Adap.tv (720 million) and BrightRoll Video Network (603 million). Time spent watching video ads totaled more than 2.5 billion minutes during the month, with Hulu delivering the highest duration of video ads at 426 million minutes. Video ads reached 50 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 37.6 times during the month. Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 38.1.

*Video ads include streaming-video advertising only and do not include other types of video monetization, such as overlays, branded players, matching banner ads, homepage ads, etc.
**Indicates video ad network
†Indicates video ad exchange

Other notable findings from August 2011 include:

- 85.8 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
- The duration of the average online content video was 5.3 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.5 minutes.
- Video ads accounted for 13.4 percent of all videos viewed and 1.3 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

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.

San Francisco – Vizu Corporation, an online ad technology company providing a real-time brand ad effectiveness platform to leading advertisers and publishers, today announced the launch of the Brand Lift Norms module for its Ad Catalyst solution. Vizu’s customers can now benchmark their campaigns’ performance against thousands of other ad campaigns measured and optimized by Vizu.

“Advertisers and publishers can now compare online ad campaign performance against Vizu’s Brand Lift Norms along two key marketing dimensions. The first is the branding objective of the campaign, such as awareness, favorability, or intent. The second is the advertiser category, such as CPG, retail, entertainment, or automotive,” says Dan Beltramo, CEO of Vizu. “Vizu’s Brand Lift data has been a powerful optimization tool for a long time, but now our clients can also benchmark their relative results, which will enable a new level of performance management.”

Vizu’s normative data is derived from thousands of brand advertising campaigns that have been measured using Vizu’s Ad Catalyst solution. Campaigns are carefully classified into a detailed taxonomy, allowing Vizu to provide Brand Lift benchmarks for typical advertising objectives and across many industry-standard advertiser categories and sub-categories. Normative data is shown along with other campaign data in Vizu’s web-based interface, and is available to all customers of Vizu’s Ad Catalyst solution.

“Vizu’s Brand Lift Norms have helped us demonstrate that we regularly outperform the market on key funnel metrics, which is extremely valuable to our sales and marketing efforts,” says Chris Rouse, Director, Research and Audience Insights, at Collective.

“The ability to benchmark your brand campaign’s performance against a relevant metric – Brand Lift – and against a market norm for the category or objective is a must for any advertiser,” notes Paul Gunning, CEO of Tribal DDB.

“While the data is typically used by our customers on a campaign by campaign basis, we’ve also seen some interesting trends across this data,” adds Mr. Beltramo. An analysis of Vizu’s normative data showed:

· On average and relative to other advertiser categories, CPG advertisers are generally driving the greatest Brand Lift with their campaigns (often 20-30%), with the beverages sub-category leading all others (often greater than 30% lift).

· Financial services and computer & electronic advertisers were on the other end of the spectrum, delivering the lowest average Brand Lift with their campaigns (often less than 10% Lift).

· Awareness and Intent were the brand funnel metrics most often measured by advertisers, at two to three times the rate Attitudes, Favorability, and Preference were measured.

· Nearly 26% of campaigns measured did not result in overall Brand Lift prior to optimization.

“Long ago John Wanamaker famously said, ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.’ Vizu’s clients do far better than that. Leveraging real time data on the performance of creative executions, exposure frequency, and targeting – measured against a relevant metric, Brand Lift – Vizu’s customers not only know what is working, but what to do about the part that isn’t,” says Mr. Beltramo.

Vizu Corporation (www.brandlift.com) brings the same metrics used to measure and optimize brand advertising effectiveness in the offline world to the online medium. By providing the first real-time, enterprise technology platform that allows brand advertisers and their partners in the digital media ecosystem – publishers, ad networks, exchanges, and demand side platforms – to collaborate around measuring and optimizing Brand Lift metrics, Vizu enables its customers to move their target audience through the purchase funnel, from building awareness to creating intent and preference. Vizu’s brand advertising effectiveness platform is used by over 60% of Advertising Age’s Top 100 Brand Advertisers and Comscore’s Top 50 Media properties to support all key aspects of the advertising lifecycle, including media buying, audience profiling, and Brand Lift optimization.

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:ADBE) today announced that Adobe® SearchCenter+, a comprehensive search marketing management system within the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, has added keyword performance predictive analytics through a partnering agreement with OptiMine Software, Inc. This agreement will enable search marketers to achieve significant increases in paid search performance (i.e. higher return on ad spend, increased leads, higher conversion rates, increased revenue, greater profit per keyword, etc.). Tests done with search marketers using OptiMine’s keyword modeling have shown improved performance of 25 percent or more.

“Digital marketers are examining their paid search spend in the context of many other digital channels, like social, display and email,” said John Mellor, vice president of business development, Omniture Business Unit, Adobe. “Having the ability to predict the return on paid search becomes critically important when deciding on marketing mix and budget allocation. SearchCenter+ helps our customers spend their paid search budget on keywords that will impact the metrics most important to their business.”

The addition of OptiMine predictive keyword analytics to SearchCenter+ is particularly powerful for Adobe customers because SearchCenter+ captures the actual performance of each keyword in every one of the customer’s paid search campaigns. The OptiMine algorithms will now leverage SearchCenter+ keyword performance data, giving these algorithms a highly valuable data source to more accurately predict keyword performance and automatically generate optimal bids accordingly. Adobe customers can begin adding this new feature to their SearchCenter+ contracts immediately.

“We are delighted to partner with Adobe SearchCenter+ and believe the relationship validates the significant customer returns generated through our unique ability to automatically model every keyword,” said Jim Moar, chief executive officer, OptiMine. “The integration of our automated bid optimization coupled with SearchCenter+’s robust data will enable Adobe’s Online Marketing Suite customers to be even more successful.”

About the Adobe Online Marketing Suite

The Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture®, offers an integrated and open platform for online business optimization, a strategy for using customer insight to drive innovation throughout the business and enhance marketing efficiency. The Suite consists of integrated applications to collect and unleash the power of customer insight to optimize customer acquisition, conversion and retention efforts as well as the creation and distribution of content. For example, using the Suite, marketers can identify the most effective marketing strategies and ad placements as well as create relevant, personalized and consistent customer experiences across digital marketing channels, such as onsite, display, email, social, video and mobile. The Suite enables marketers to make quick adjustments, automate certain customer interactions and better maximize marketing ROI, which, ultimately, can positively impact the bottom line.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

LOS ANGELES – Ace Metrix™, the authority in television advertising effectiveness, announced the most effective Back-to-School TV ads, a list led by Microsoft and dominated by technology companies and brands, including Best Buy, Staples, Dell, and Wal-Mart.

“Notably, apparel retailers did not make much of a splash with consumers this back-to-school season,” said Peter Daboll, CEO of Ace Metrix. “JCPenney was a notable exception, winning big with consumers with their ‘pennies from heaven’ spot that promoted the company’s contributions to local after-school programs. This philanthropic tactic, which was used last year in the Number One back-to-school ad from Kohl’s, has been an effective way of getting consumer attention for apparel retailers.

“The usual reliance of apparel retailers on typically ‘in the box’ ideas like promotion of sales events are just not effective in breaking through to consumers in a cluttered advertising environment.”

Microsoft’s top-rated ad, achieving an Ace Score of 651, offered a free Xbox with the purchase of a Windows 7 PC, an offer also made by Dell, which had the 9th most effective ad with an Ace Score of 569.

Top 10 Most Effective Back to School Ads*

*Definition: Ace Score is the measure of ad creative effectiveness based on viewer reaction to national TV ads. Respondents are randomly selected and representative of the U.S. TV viewing audience. The results are presented on a scale of 0-950, which represents scoring on creative attributes such as relevance, persuasion, watchability, information, attention, etc.

In addition, five of the top 10 ads were focused on college students. By comparison, many of the poorer performing ads were focused on messages around children’s apparel. Crayola was a notable children’s brand to break into the most effective ads promoting its dry erase crayons and achieving an Ace Score of 589.

About Ace Metrix

Ace Metrix is the industry authority in measuring and understanding the impact of advertising creative. Through patent-pending Ace ScoreTM measurement technology, Ace Metrix collects and measures the consumer impact of every nationally breaking TV ad in near real-time. Through its Creative Lifecycle Management TM suite of products, Ace Metrix provides actionable creative analysis, from ideation through real-time in-market performance optimization, to many of the world’s leading advertisers and agencies. Ace Metrix works with leading global advertisers. For more information, visit www.acemetrix.com

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, released data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that 180 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in July for an average of 18.5 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in a record 6.9 billion viewing sessions.

YouTube Partner Reporting Now Available in Video Metrix

comScore is now able to provide YouTube Partner Reporting within the Video Metrix offering, for a never-before-seen look at viewership across hundreds of YouTube partners and their channels. This new feature provides a comprehensive and granular view of the unique audiences within different YouTube partner channels, enabling advertisers to more-easily create and optimize campaigns across specific channels to reach desired target audiences. The July data release for YouTube Partner Reporting includes dozens of beta partners, while comScore and Google plan to initiate reporting of more partners with the release of August data.

A first look at select YouTube partners from the current list of beta partners revealed that Machinima reached 16.9 million viewers with the highest engagement at 1.2 hours per viewer over the course of the month. Maker Studios drew 11.4 million viewers, who viewed an average of 8.9 videos, while Demand Media attracted 15.2 million viewers.

Channels with particularly niche audiences included Maker Studios with 50 percent of their viewers falling between the ages of 12-24, and IGN with 70 percent of its audience being male viewers. In addition, men account for 83 percent of the time spent viewing Revision3’s shows, whereas women account for over 66 percent of the time spent viewing Alloy’s YouTube videos. Howcast was also notable in that 75 percent of its viewing audience had children in their households. comScore is proud to be the first and only measurement source available to provide the industry with YouTube insights of this caliber.

*YouTube Partner Reporting based on online video content viewing and does not include
claimed UGC content

For more information about comScore Video Metrix YouTube Partner Reporting, please visit comscore.com/youtube or email youtube@comscore.com.

Top 10 Video Content Properties by Unique Viewers

Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in July with 158.1 million unique viewers, while VEVO ranked second with 62.1 million. Facebook.com climbed to the #3 position with 51.4 million viewers, followed by Microsoft Sites with 49.5 million and Viacom Digital with 47.3 million. Total viewing sessions reached another all-time high in July at nearly 6.9 billion, with Google Sites crossing the 3 billion mark to account for more than 40 percent of all viewing sessions online. The average viewer watched 18.5 hours of online video content during the course of the month, with Google Sites (5.9 hours) and Hulu (3.4 hours) exhibiting the highest engagement.

Top 10 Video Ad Properties by Video Ads Viewed

Americans viewed more than 5.3 billion video ads in July, with Hulu generating the highest number of video ad impressions at 963 million. Adap.tv ranked second overall (and highest among video ad exchanges/networks) with 674 million ad views, followed by Tremor Video (639 million) and BrightRoll Video Network (522 million). Time spent watching video ads totaled more than 2.4 billion minutes during the month, with Hulu delivering the highest duration of video ads at 409 million minutes. Video ads reached 49 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 35.9 times during the month. Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 40.4 over the course of the month.

*Video ads include streaming-video advertising only and do not include other types of video monetization, such as overlays, branded players, matching banner ads, homepage ads, etc.
**Indicates video ad network
†Indicates video ad exchange

Other notable findings from July 2011 include:

- 86.0 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
- The duration of the average online content video was 5.3 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.5 minutes.
- Video ads accounted for 12.4 percent of all videos viewed and 1.2 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

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.

LOS ANGELES – The war for tablet computing marketshare is being aggressively waged via TV ads, and Ace Metrix™, the authority in television advertising effectiveness, reported that Samsung has won the battle for most effective tablet ad year-to-date with an Ace Score of 650 for its “Feel Free” ad promoting its 7-inch Galaxy tablet. On a campaign basis, Ace Metrix found that Apple’s iPad campaign led the battle for overall effectiveness, with an average Ace Score of 627 for its five ads this year compared to Samsung’s average Ace Score of 607 for its six ads.

“It’s important to note that each of the tablet ads in our Top 10, which also included Blackberry and HP, did very well, and scored above the norm. Despite Samsung’s ‘Feel Free’ homerun, Apple’s iPad campaign firmly leads other tablet makers on an aggregate basis,” said Peter Daboll, CEO of Ace Metrix. “iPad’s market momentum preceded all other tablet manufacturers, making the ad game a serious one in converting consumers away from Apple’s initial awareness and product trial.

“Capturing consumers’ attention and willingness to try a tablet other than iPad is the name of the game in this tablet war, and solid creative that conveys compelling advantages– like ability to multi-task, size, ease of use– is just one tactic in competing with the market leader.”

Tablet makers have aired 35 ads this year, eight of which were from HP, more than any other tablet maker. Two of the eight appeared in the Top 10, including its leading ad featuring comedian Russell Brand, which achieved an Ace Score of 633 (compared to HP’s average Ace Score of 605).

On a campaign level, both Samsung and Blackberry achieved an average Ace Score of 607, but only two of Samsung’s ads appeared in the Top 10 compared to two out of three of Blackberry’s Playbook ads and four out of five of Apple’s iPad ads.

The most effective ad among women was iPad’s “Tablet Computer Has Many Uses” ad, while Blackberry’s “Take Anywhere to Take you Anywhere” ad was tops among men.

Most Effective Tablet Ads of 2011, YTD*

*Definition: Ace Score is the measure of ad creative effectiveness based on viewer reaction to national TV ads. Respondents are randomly selected and representative of the U.S. TV viewing audience. The results are presented on a scale of 0-950, which represents scoring on creative attributes such as relevance, persuasion, watchability, information, attention, etc.

Among the lowest scoring tablet ads were two ads from Toshiba, two from HP, two from Samsung, three from Kindle, one from Nook, and one from Blackberry Playbook.

About Ace Metrix

Ace Metrix is the industry authority in measuring and understanding the impact of advertising creative. Through patent-pending Ace ScoreTM measurement technology, Ace Metrix collects and measures the consumer impact of every nationally breaking TV ad in near real-time. Through its Creative Lifecycle ManagementTM suite of products, Ace Metrix provides actionable creative analysis, from ideation through real-time in-market performance optimization, to many of the world’s leading advertisers and agencies. Ace Metrix works with leading global advertisers. For more information, visit www.acemetrix.com.

Follow Ace Metrix on Twitter for additional insight: Ace_Metrix.

TORONTO, Canada – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, announced the availability of AdEffx Campaign Essentials™ in Canada, comScore’s campaign audience validation tool used by digital marketers, agencies and publishers alike to verify the accuracy of audiences targeted in digital campaigns. The service features an interactive dashboard with several highly sought functions for digital media planning and evaluation, including daily reporting of campaign demographics and traditional post-buy metrics such as Reach / Frequency and GRPs.

“Digital ad spend in Canada reached $2.2 billion in 2010, marking a significant milestone as it surpassed daily newspaper ad revenues for the first time,” said Brent Bernie, president of comScore Media Metrix Canada. “Second now only to TV, the need for enhanced accountability in online campaigns has never been greater. Validating the target group delivery and return on investment for digital display, classified and video advertising is paramount if the industry is to continue to grow and ultimately challenge the number one placeholder.”

comScore AdEffx Campaign Essentials was first introduced in 2009 to the United States, and today is also available in Europe and Canada. The recent acquisition of AdXpose®, the Seattle-based leader in campaign verification, optimization and brand safety, further enhances comScore’s Campaign Essentials offering by enabling the development of a truly comprehensive, end-to-end validation solution. Campaign Essentials and the AdXpose offerings are currently both available in Canada, providing marketers, agencies and publishers with the ability to leverage key synergistic benefits of the solutions, such as:

- Measurement of the actual audience composition reached and the frequency for specific media buys
- Effectiveness of impressions that were actually seen, as opposed to those that were served tracking pixels but never actually seen by a consumer
- Optimizing placements and creatives based on performance, using real-time bidding platforms and online campaign alerting
- Comparing the performance of online and offline media plans using the same post-buy measures used in TV, such as reach, frequency and GRPs
- Creating custom segmentation to allow for reporting of specific audience target groups
- Evaluation of the safety of ad placement and effectiveness of brand messages in different contexts
- An understanding of consumer engagement with ads

Clients Voice Support for Campaign Essentials

AOL Canada recently signed on as the first publisher client of Campaign Essentials in Canada, representing the necessity of campaign validation from all players in the market. “AOL`s commitment to lead the online industry in innovation and exceptional client service starts with pairing our initiatives with the right tools and technology,” said Graham Moysey, general manager of AOL Canada. “Campaign Essentials aligns perfectly to help us achieve these goals by delivering targeted, real-time campaign results to our esteemed customers.”

“In our business, knowledge is power. Daily intelligence from tools like Campaign Essentials can be a very powerful asset for marketers to maximize results and minimize waste. By working to offer digital performance tracking tools that have long been the standard in the TV business, comScore has taken a necessary step for the industry. This product addresses the increasing need for the analytical tools that will help us understand and verify campaign delivery and performance in a real-time environment.”

– Jennifer Holgate, SVP Digital, Starcom MediaVest Group

“The outcome of our campaigns measured by comScore Campaign Essentials helped to reaffirm some of our current thinking with regard to our digital media strategies. It provides us with new insights that were never previously available in the Canadian marketplace. We are able to more clearly demonstrate the reach of our online campaigns successfully aligned with our demographic target. A better understanding of who we’re able to reach online is critical to making intelligent media buys.”

– Karl Flanders, VP Media, Saatchi & Saatchi Canada

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 business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

LOS ANGELES – Ace Metrix™, the authority in television advertising effectiveness, revealed the most effective beer ads among beer drinkers year-to-date, a list dominated by ads promoting packaging innovations such as Bud Light’s “my Bud Light” scratch-on bottle, Miller Lite’s Home Draft, and Budweiser’s 4th of July can.

“This list is particularly notable as both Budweiser and Miller have announced recently new packaging innovations aimed at driving sales,” said Peter Daboll, CEO of Ace Metrix. “It’s clear that Americans like seeing creative packaging for beverages, with three of Bud’s six ads in the top 10 featuring clever new can and bottle innovations. We saw this also with Coca-Cola’s “Shape” ad, the most effective ad of Q2, which promoted Coke’s new bottle shape.”

Top 10 Most Effective Beer Ads of 2011 Among Beer Drinkers, YTD*

*Definition: Ace Score is the measure of ad creative effectiveness based on viewer reaction to national TV ads. Respondents are randomly selected and representative of the U.S. TV viewing audience. The results are presented on a scale of 0-950, which represents scoring on creative attributes such as relevance, persuasion, watchability, information, attention, etc.

“Budweiser clearly has their finger on the creative pulse this year, pumping out a majority of the ads that truly appeal to American beer drinkers. Almost every Bud ad in the top 10 and beyond had very high likeability scores, a hallmark of great advertising,” said Daboll. “Their clever use of promoting product innovation in their advertising pushed information and relevance scores higher.”

Notably, only one ad from Miller Lite, which featured its “home draft” packaging, appeared in the Top 10 list of most effective ads among beer drinkers. This was one of four ads from MillerCoors’ brands that made the list (vs. six from Budweiser), which also included Miller High Life’s “Live the High Life” Veteran’s Day ad, the second most-effective ad scoring an Ace Score of 637 just behind Bud Light’s “Dog Sitting” Super Bowl ad, which scored the highest Ace score among beer drinkers, 643. “Dog Sitting” was one of two Super Bowl ads, both from Bud Light, in the Top 10.

Overall, ads for light beer, with four from Bud Light and only one each from Miller Lite and Coors Light, represented a majority of the top ads on the list.

About Ace Metrix

Ace Metrix is the industry authority in measuring and understanding the impact of advertising creative. Through patent-pending Ace ScoreTM measurement technology, Ace Metrix collects and measures the consumer impact of every nationally breaking TV ad in near real-time. Through its Creative Lifecycle ManagementTM suite of products, Ace Metrix provides actionable creative analysis, from ideation through real-time in-market performance optimization, to many of the world’s leading advertisers and agencies. Ace Metrix works with leading global advertisers. For more information, visit www.acemetrix.com.

Follow Ace Metrix on Twitter for additional insight: Ace_Metrix.

SPOKANE, Wash. – Banner Marketing, a Spokane-based integrated marketing and advertising firm, has released the second volume of the Banner Retail Index, which reveals top trends of the most popular furniture store websites. The most visited websites offered online coupons; did best with special offers such as $250 off; and displayed bedroom products. The new edition of the report, which includes webstore data from the first six months of 2011, focuses on how top furniture retailers are marketing to current and potential customers.

“We received a lot of positive feedback from the first report, which helped us to refine and improve our second edition,” said John Dresel, CEO of Banner Marketing. “We’ve shifted gears a bit to include more information on what specifically the top retailers are doing to draw in customers, knowing that this information can help struggling retailers improve their marketing practices.”

Data to support the index findings was collected from Jan. 1, 2011 through June 30, 2011 and includes information from the 109 furniture retailers that Banner Marketing serves nationwide.

Key highlights from the Banner Retail Index Vol. II include:

- The 10 webstores with the highest traffic rates incorporated nearly all of the online elements needed to attract and measure visitors, including offers, specials, videos, brands and analytics.
- The webstore with the best rate for converting visits to coupon requests had only 4,284 visits but 595 coupon requests, for a conversion rate of 13.89.
- The most popular offer category was for offers up to 10 percent off a purchase price; it was used in 375 promotions, generated 2,337 requests and had a conversion rate of 6.232.
- The most effective offer category was $201 to $250 off a purchase price; it was used in only three promotions, generated 80 requests and had a conversion rate of 26.6667.
- Among the 15 top offers in all webstores, one-third involved $100 off a purchase price.
- Among the 50 most popular products across all webstores, the most viewed online were bedrooms, followed by living rooms and sectionals.

The Banner Retail Index can be downloaded at www.bannerretail.com/newsroom.

About Banner Marketing

Banner Marketing helps businesses grow through integrated marketing: a combination of digital and traditional marketing strategies that reaches a company’s key consumers and inspires them to buy. In business since 1983 and based in Spokane, Wash., Banner develops creative content to support its clients’ brands (from traditional circulars to cutting edge websites), keeps that content up-to-date, tracks program results, and provides reporting to refine and adjust strategies for even greater success. Banner provides cohesive programs and experiences that translate into stronger brands, increased sales, and improved advertising spend and frequency. Learn more at www.bannerretail.com.

AOL Canada will leverage the power of Campaign Essentials to evaluate the real time effectiveness of its online properties against specific demographic targets and to provide real-time feedback to advertisers on campaigns running on AOL properties.

Preliminary results, based on five weeks of Campaign Essentials data, show that AOL Canada properties over deliver on UVs by four to 12 per cent across various targets, including adults 25-54, online visitors in Ontario, and high-income $100K+ households.

“Any publisher can show pre-campaign audience composition based on comScore’s available monthly reporting suite but now AOL can provide in-flight and post-campaign data that shows actual delivery against those targets,” says Andrew Consky, director of research, AOL Canada. “Since online is the only medium that affords this calibre of exact reporting, results like this will be a valuable asset to our customers and in turn, will have a huge impact on our business.”

Available immediately, AOL will offer Campaign Essentials to clients as a value-added service for campaigns that meet a minimum impression threshold.

“It is our responsibility as thought leaders in the industry to keep up with the latest innovations,” says Graham Moysey, general manager, AOL Canada. “Most importantly, this new tool will help us further enhance the white-glove service that AOL delivers to its advertising clients.”

Source: comScore, Inc., Total Canada, Home and Work, May 2011; Campaign Essentials May 10 to June 15, 2011.

About AOL

AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL) is a premier global media company with a suite of brands and products serving consumers, advertisers and publishers worldwide. The AOL Huffington Post Media Group is a leading source of news, opinion, entertainment, community and digital information comprised of a wide range of destination websites, including AOL.com, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Moviefone, Engadget, Patch, AOL Music, StyleList and MapQuest. The AOL Advertising.com Group includes Advertising.com, ADTECH, goviral, Pictela, Video, Content Solutions and Sponsored Listings and serves a combined content and advertising market at scale through video, brand advertising, content and ad serving. AOL is focused on engaging consumers and providing online advertising services and solutions on both AOL Huffington Post Media Group destination websites and third party websites, in addition to serving consumer platforms including AOL Mail, AIM, about.me, and mobile experiences. AOL also operates one of the largest Internet subscription access services that serves as another distribution channel for its consumer offerings.

About comScore

comScore is a global leader in measuring the digital world and the preferred source of digital marketing intelligence. Through a powerful combination of behavioral and survey insights, comScore enables clients to better understand, leverage and profit from the rapidly evolving worldwide web and mobile arena.

comScore provides syndicated and custom solutions in online audience measurement, e-commerce, advertising, search, video and mobile and offers dedicated analysts with digital marketing and vertical-specific industry expertise. Advertising agencies, publishers, marketers and financial analysts turn to comScore for the industry-leading solutions needed to craft successful digital, marketing, sales, product development and trading strategies.