Otilia Otlacan: Bizo has recently announced the launch of Bizo Data Solutions, enabling B2B companies to efficiently engage their target audiences across an entire marketing funnel. Can you tell us more about the type of company benefiting most from Bizo Data Solutions?

Chris Mann: Bizo Data Solutions is designed to benefit brands and enterprise companies that have heavily invested in building out their existing “marketing technology stack,” including CRM, marketing automation, web analytics, content management, data management platforms, and media channels.

Otilia Otlacan: Social platforms are notoriously difficult to integrate with. How does Bizo Data Solutions work with social media campaigns, what have you found to be the most challenging?

Chris Mann: Social media continues to hold a lot of promise for today’s marketers as companies are discovering that their prospects and customers are increasingly on social channels not only at home, but also during the workday. The way marketers use Bizo Data Solutions in conjunction with social media channels will vary across companies depending on their specific business needs. We currently have one client who is exploring how to add Bizo data to its social link shortener in an effort to determine the business demographics of its social audience. Outside of Bizo Data Solutions, we have multiple customers who are using our social advertising capabilities to reach their target audiences on LinkedIn and Facebook. I think the main challenge with social media, and any other marketing channel for that matter, will be for marketers to determine how each channel fits within the larger attribution picture when it comes to determining the ROI driven by specific tactics and strategies.

Otilia Otlacan: What types of metrics and dashboards are available through Bizo Data Solutions? Could we see a screenshot of the reporting interface?

Chris Mann: Bizo Data Solutions integrates with marketing technologies including Adobe® AudienceManager, Salesforce, Eloqua, BlueKai, [x+1], Google Analytics, and more by powering them with our demographic data on more than 120 business professionals. As such, our customers will see the value in the analytics and dashboards that reside within these systems. However, when marketers combine Bizo Data Solutions with Bizo Advertising Solutions, which provides powerful, targeted display advertising, marketers can truly begin to reach their prospects anywhere on the Web. Through Bizo Advertising Solutions, marketers can use audience analytics to determine if they’re driving their target audiences to their websites, and trend display ad campaign performance over time. Below is a screenshot from Bizo’s own audience analytics dashboard demonstrating how we’ve been increasing traffic from our own target audience (marketers) to the Bizo website since the beginning of the year—a trend that validates that our programs are indeed reaching the right audience!

Otilia Otlacan: Bizo is currently focused on the much sought-after U.S. business audiences. Is there any plan to extend the reach outside the U.S.?

Chris Mann: In addition to the U.S., we have a strong presence in both Canada and the United Kingdom. Since many of the 600+ brands we support are leading, global brands, we’ll continue to keep a close watch on the needs of our clients to help prioritize as we expand internationally in the future.

Otilia Otlacan: What’s next for Bizo?

Chris Mann: Bizo will continue to strive to be the ultimate choice for B2B marketers when it comes to reaching their target audiences anywhere online and at every stage of the marketing funnel. Our focus has always been on providing unparalleled precision when it comes to B2B targeting, and in just the last twelve months, we’ve expanded our capabilities to support this effort with social ad targeting, CRM retargeting, company targeting, and more. As for Bizo Data Solutions, we will continue to focus our product development on Bizo’s role “behind the firewall,” partnering with other marketing technology providers who will join our mission to break down information siloes and empower marketers to use their data more effectively.

About Chris Mann, VP of Product Management at Bizo
Leading product management at Bizo Chris has a passion for building new businesses. With over 20 years product management and sales experience Chris comes to Bizo from Coremetrics where he is credited with building the market leading real time product recommendation business for e-commerce. Previous to Coremetrics he held multiple product management roles with IBM’s WebSphere business unit over a 10 year span. Chris is passionate about family and all things cycling. In his free time can be found on the roads and trails of Marin County.

About Bizo
Bizo is how B2B marketers identify and reach their target audiences online. Fueled by Bizo’s audience of more than 120 million professionals around the world, including more than 85% of the U.S. business population, the Bizo Marketing Platform can precisely target business people by specific business demographic criteria. Bizo’s customers use the platform’s data management and targeting capabilities to reach audiences anywhere they travel online and engage those that come to their websites, landing pages, and social channels. Bizo has earned the confidence of more than 600 SMB marketers and large global brands including AMEX, Mercedes Benz, Monster, Salesforce.com, Porsche, Microsoft, AT&T, and UPS who use Bizo to impact every stage of their sales and marketing funnels.

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NEW YORK - Precision Health Media, the leading source for digital health media with 61 million users a month (comScore) and Spongecell, a leader in interactive advertising solutions, have partnered to give pharma brands unparalleled targeting and engagement in brand-safe environments.

“We have heard from several media agencies that inventory for contextually relevant placements for Rx video ads is extremely limited. By combining the high engagement of Spongecell creative with PHM’s vast reach and contextual technology we are jointly delivering a very innovative video solution for Rx brands”

With Precision Health’s new video channel, pharma marketers can pair the massive reach of PHM and its laser-targeted ConditionMatch^® technology with engaging, easy-to-build Spongecell ad units.

ConditionMatch^® finds the top-performing content pages for a pharma brand’s video, while Spongecell’s technology presents the video in a highly engaging creative unit. The interactivity of Spongecell’s ads boosts consumer engagement by 154% over standard, static ads. Moreover, PHM’s Video Channel needs no special player to take advantage of any and all standard banner inventory.

Spongecell’s technology enables this across-the-web scalability by embedding video in a banner ad without going over the 40K file size restriction. And unlike other video solutions, which can be an interruption in the user experience, Spongecell’s in-banner video technology requires users to scroll over the banner to initiate the video ad.

With this new offering, pharma brands are able to leverage their TV campaigns and other video assets to deliver scale in contextually relevant environments online. This is key to expanding brand awareness. “We have heard from several media agencies that inventory for contextually relevant placements for Rx video ads is extremely limited. By combining the high engagement of Spongecell creative with PHM’s vast reach and contextual technology we are jointly delivering a very innovative video solution for Rx brands,” stated Bill Jennings, CEO, Precision Health.

“With engaging interactive features, like our user-initiated in-banner video player, and unparalleled ease-of-implementation, Spongecell has been fortunate enough to work with leading brands and ad agencies,” said Ben Kartzman, CEO, Spongecell.  “We are very excited to partner with Precision Health to deliver our solution to their pharma clients. PHM understands the unique needs of the pharma industry and provides the kind of high-precision targeting that Pharmas need in order to maximize the impact of their interactive banner ads.”

Precision Health’s ConditionMatch® uses contextual technology and historical performance of health content (without cookies) to rank pages across its 220 site partners.

About Precision Health Media

New York-based Precision Health Media (formerly Good Health Media) delivers specific health condition audiences to pharma and consumer brands. The company is backed by Metamorphic Ventures, Cava Capital and several individual investors including Mike Perlis (CEO Forbes), Rick Thompson/Larry Braitman (Founders Adify, Flycast), Joe Apprendi (Founder Collective), Richard Forman (Health Venture Group), Geoff Judge (Partner iNovia), Bill Benedict (Alpine Meridian), Chris Young (Founder Digital Broadcasting Group). ConditionMatch is a trademark of Precision Health Media. For more information, visit www.precisionhealthmedia.com.

About Spongecell

Spongecell is an award-winning advertising technology company that transforms standard ads into dynamic, interactive ad experiences that run anywhere on the web.  Spongecell’s data-driven ad solutions help brand advertisers and their creative and media agencies deliver more effective video and display campaigns and better analyze consumer engagement. An independent, privately owned company, Spongecell is headquartered in New York City and has offices across the United States and Europe. For more information, visit www.spongecell.com.

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Data Management Company Rolls Out Premium Demographic Data Using “Wisdom of the Data Experts” Validation Approach

Cupertino, Calif. – BlueKai, the only end-to-end SaaS solution for data management, analysis and activation, today announced a new methodology designed to provide brands and marketers with qualified third party data through a consensus approach to audience validation. By letting a cross-section of public data providers judge data as opposed to a single entity, BlueKai’s methodology offers a more transparent and accurate approach to assessing the quality of data segments.

BlueKai will be deploying this new methodology in various phases, with the first installment being applied to the validation of demographic data across the company’s data offering. Immediately available are BlueKai Premium Demographic categories for gender. Age groups and Household Income categories will be available before the end of June.

“In a world of limitless audience data, marketers have been clamoring for a more viable way to ensure they are targeting the right audiences,” said Pieter De Temmerman, SVP of Exchange and Global Business at BlueKai. “We feel that the single-expert methodology is a flawed approach. There is far too much data across the digital landscape for one data provider or company to be the unchecked arbiter. We see consensus across a diverse group of data experts as the best way to validate audience quality and accuracy.”

BlueKai’s methodology for data validation works as follows:

· “Consensus” testing was run across BlueKai’s publicly available branded and unbranded 3rd party data to understand where data sources agreed on the demographic profile of a user’s cookie.

· Attributes are assigned as medium or high confidence depending on how many data sources concur and only in the case where there is no conflicting opinion.

· Premium Demographic segments are tested regularly to continue to meet the specified standard of excellence in data quality.

“Audience data validation is definitely an industry challenge and V12 Group supports BlueKai’s new approach to surfacing valuable signals that is concurred across a large ecosystem of data experts”, says Kelly Leger SVP/GM of V12 Group Digital Solutions. “This is going to be a true value-add to marketers and publishers who are tapping into demographic targeting today.”

About BlueKai
BlueKai is the world’s first and only complete enterprise data activation solution for intelligent marketing. BlueKai offers its customers a system for managing and activating all their 1st, 2nd and 3rd party data in all marketing and customer engagements. BlueKai represents the only end-to-end SaaS solution for marketers and publishers looking to maximize their cross-channel marketing efforts and create a proprietary solution for unlocking reach, scale and efficiency using data. BlueKai leads the data-driven marketing space with the industry’s first, and most advanced, Data Management Platform as well as the industry’s first, and most well-connected, Data Exchange. BlueKai currently works with thousands of companies and is currently trusted by almost half the Fortune 30 brands to activate their data. In 2013 BlueKai was named to Forbes “50 Most Promising US Companies” list as well as Fast Company’s “10 Most Innovative Global Companies in Big Data”.

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Hispanic-targeted marketing is the “Electric Car” of advertising challenges.

Like auto execs, we marketers will freely admit that our current methods are short-sighted (thanks, in our case, to a seismic shift in consumer demographics), and yet we’re hesitant to embark on a new, more future-focused path because the ROI picture remains cloudy.

Fortunately, there’s good news for fence-sitters: Hispanic-targeted marketing can be simple to implement, powerfully effective, and no more expensive than the status quo. We just haven’t been given the whole story… until now.

As with electric vehicles, there’s a host of misinformation about Hispanic consumers that’s been needlessly sabotaging our efforts. So to start, let’s debunk the three biggest misconceptions about the Hispanic market—and in the process, flesh out the contours of an “emissions free” Hispanic-targeted marketing strategy:

Myth #1: Online marketing doesn’t work well with Hispanic consumers

Proponents of this myth would have you believe that digital marketing strategies (such as Web marketing and mobile advertising) are less effective with Hispanic consumers than other demographics, when in reality the opposite is true.

On average, Hispanic Internet users spend 40% more time online than other users, and generate 50% more page views. In mobile, the numbers are even more striking: 45% of U.S. Hispanic mobile users have smartphones, compared with only 34% of the general U.S. market. Furthermore, a full 30% of U.S. Hispanics use their mobile phones as their primary access to the internet.

Hence, far from abandoning high-tech marketing methods like mobile, we should be expanding our digital efforts when targeting the growing U.S. Hispanic demographic.

Myth #2: Hispanic consumers don’t spend as much money as other demographics

This myth conveniently ignores the fact that U.S. Hispanics spent over $1T in 2011, at a growth rate twice as fast as the general economy’s. In addition, U.S. Hispanics spend, on average, more dollars than non-Hispanics on mobile products and services, while netting higher CPMs (Costs per Thousand Impressions) in online search marketing campaigns—which proves they’re more valuable than average consumers when viewing highly targeted communications.

Not only are Hispanics pouring into the middle class (e.g., 25% of the 2012 freshman college class was Hispanic), they’re quickly becoming the fastest growing and most coveted consumer group in the U.S.

As the coveted “new” customers, clients, and patients for local merchants and service providers, U.S. Hispanics represent the premier revenue growth opportunity for local businesses and national brands alike.

In other words, now is the time to be targeting this lucrative market effectively.

Myth #3: Hispanic-targeted content means regular content in Spanish

While it’s true that 80% of U.S. Hispanics still speak Spanish at home, successive generations are increasingly willing to consume Hispanic-targeted content in English.

So what do we mean by “Hispanic-targeted content”? Despite the above myth, translating content into Spanish does not make it Hispanic-targeted. Rather, both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking Hispanics want unique content with true cultural relevance.

Ultimately, this involves producing new, tailored content for Hispanic audiences, and then delivering that content in a fully bilingual fashion to satisfy both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking consumers.

Life After Myth

Now that we know some traps to avoid, let’s focus on the positive:

Because U.S. Hispanic consumers are more receptive than other demographics to social media marketing, “intent-based” inventory marketing, and especially targeted communications—there’s an enormous opportunity for advertisers to engage with Hispanic audiences in ways that maximize receptivity and ROI.

National advertisers like WalMart, 7-11, Tide and H&R Block are leading the charge on capturing and influencing U.S. Hispanic consumers. Meanwhile, online search destinations like YaSabe have found terrific receptivity from local businesses looking to target Hispanic consumers.

With more than 52 million Hispanics in the United States (and growing by more than 1M per year), the demographic shift is far too massive and widespread to treat with a status quo response. These incredibly desirable consumers account for 80% of U.S. population growth. (And a growing population coupled with rising purchasing power equals huge market opportunity.)

But don’t worry: Hispanic-targeted marketing doesn’t have to mean spending more—just spending more intelligently.

The key is focus—direct and strategic targeting. Digital marketing, search marketing, content marketing—these tactics all still apply. They just need to be tailored to meet the needs and preferences of a new market.

In other words: You don’t have to treat Hispanic consumers differently. You just have to treat them personally.

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SAN MATEO, CA – Aggregate Knowledge (AK), a media intelligence company that brings an exact science to the art of media buying, today released its Q1 Global Media Intelligence Report. Leveraging the AK Media Intelligence Platform that combines media and audience data, the latest report identifies seasonal trends and insights for Fortune 500 brands, advertisers and agencies to reach more customers and drive increased revenue.

“We’re witnessing the end of advertising as we know it,” said David Jakubowski, AK chief executive officer. “Brands are starting to realize the importance of digital marketing and using analytics to inform media buying decisions across all channels – these insights resulted in more than $120 million media buys in Q1 alone.”

According to Accenture Interactive’s latest survey, CMOs are beginning to address the gap in digital measurement and performance by making decisions based on actionable insights.

AK’s Global Media Intelligence Report analyzed more than 27 billion impressions across Q1 to uncover key insights into customer engagement and reach, such as why marketers should advertise on one digital channel over another. With this data, brands can increase the efficiency of their multimillion dollar media budgets, resulting in better reach and more sales.

The report looks at cost, reach efficiency, user quality and funnel attribution indices across the four most prevalent channels in the digital marketing world – exchanges, networks, portals and social. Key highlights for 2013 Q1 include:

• Exchanges continue to be cost effective. Coming off the high season of Q4, portals delivered the lowest cost at 2.5 times below the indexed industry average

• Portals and social continue to drive reach efficiency, with portals improving 5 times quarter over quarter

• Social continues to deliver the highest quality users, performing 65 percent better than the industry overall and 33 percent better than the next best channel

• Social influence in the attribution funnel increased 61 percent from Q4 highlighting its value when looking at all customer touch points

“AK’s quarterly report has illustrated the power of using Multiple Touch Attribution (MTA) as a measurement lens [over Last Touch Attribution],” said David Carrel, Senior Vice President at Digitas. “This is consistent with Digitas’ use of MTA enabling our clients with a competitive advantage in driving increased revenue.”

Download the full report and infographic here. Connect with AK on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

About Aggregate Knowledge
Aggregate Knowledge (AK) is the only media intelligence company that offers advertisers and agencies an exact science to pinpoint where to reach highest performing customers in a single platform. AK’s patented Media Intelligence Platform™ (MIP) is the only data management solution that combines both media and audience data, enabling marketers to most effectively allocate media dollars, resulting in increased reach, higher sales and dramatically improved media spend efficiency. To learn more, visit www.aggregateknowledge.com.

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Launches Open Access Project with Data on +100 National TV Ad Campaigns

NEW YORK – Simulmedia, a pioneer in audience-based television ad targeting, today at the ANA Financial Management annual conference in Phoenix, announced it has launched Open Access Project an initiative that will allow free access on its website (Simulmedia.com) to key parts of its database, insights and platform tools. This includes access to reach, frequency and cost performance data on recent national TV campaigns from more than 100 national advertisers.

This is a beta release and will be expanded over the next month to include more than 300 national advertisers and more than two years of campaigns. Within the searchable database at launch will be actual reach and frequency charts for each campaign by month and by different target audiences, the share of voice comparisons for each market competitor, the reach contributions by each TV network on the campaign as well as the cost-per-reach points for each network.

“Audience fragmentation across channels, timeslots and devices has made TV advertising much less efficient than it used to be. Two-thirds of TV spots today in the U.S. are wasted and don’t need to be” says Dave Morgan Simulmedia’s CEO. “Our mission is to show exactly which ones they are and how brands and agencies can avoid that kind of waste while continuing to harness the power of TV’s reach capabilities. This kind of information with this granularity and transparency has never before been offered to the advertising and media marketplace.”

Simulmedia has built the largest data-driven unwired advertising TV network in the U.S. today. The Simulmedia Audience Network reaches more viewers than the top two broadcast networks combined, the result of unique inventory partnerships with seven of the eight largest cable, satellite and teleco TV operators and more than 30 national cable networks. The platform processes daily, second-by-second anonymous viewing behaviors from more than 50 million US TV viewers – fused with Nielsen’s entire national measurement panel and anonymous consumer purchase data from MRI.

“With predictive technologies and programmatic media management system, Simulmedia is able to turn this data into highly-precise campaigns for agencies and advertisers that want to deliver massive incremental reach against specific target audiences without the enormous wasted frequency that weighs down virtually all national TV campaigns today, and so undermines the efficiency of TV advertising,” adds Mr. Morgan. “We deliver national campaigns with guaranteed reach, frequency and audience composition and back it up with robust, timely and transparent measurement and insights into the actual audiences reached.”

Over the course of 2013, Simulmedia will also open up on its website (Simulmedia.com) access to its TV media planning tools, its programmatic activation tools, and its transparent reporting and measurement tools.

“TV advertising is about to become a lot more open, transparent and less wasteful,” concludes Mr. Morgan. “TV’s capacity to reach US consumers with impactful messaging is still unparalleled, but it needs more openness and to better leverage data to achieve its full potential.”

Simulmedia, Inc. (www.simulmedia.com) is a New York City-based television ad targeting company and operates the Simulmedia Audience Network, the world’s first data-driven audience network for television. The company’s targeting platform leverages predictive technologies and anonymous viewing data from more than 50 million US TV viewers to help national advertisers and their agencies better reach their target audiences, and better measure the results. Simulmedia aggregates TV audiences through partnerships with TV system operators and national networks and reach all 115 million US TV households. Over the past year, the company helped dozens of national marketers and their agencies target, deliver and measure more than 400 campaigns and see results which were 25-300% better than they were able to achieve with traditional TV ad scheduling and targeting methods.

Founded and led by Internet entrepreneur Dave Morgan, Simulmedia is backed by Avalon Ventures, Union Square Ventures and Time Warner Investments.

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