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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About LiveRail

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

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

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

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

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

About Bizo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Jumptap

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

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

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

About CPX Interactive

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

About Semcasting

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

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.

REDWOOD CITY, CA – YuMe, the operating system for TV 2.0, today announced that it is partnering with Samsung Electronics, the technology leader and innovator in electronics and telecommunications, to provide advertising on Samsung’s Smart TV Platform through YuMe’s Connected Audience Network. As part of this partnership, Samsung will host the first-ever connected TV Brand Lift study through YuMe’s relationship with Vizu, an online ad technology company whose solutions allow advertisers to measure and optimize Brand Lift in real-time. State Farm, North America’s leading choice for auto and home insurance, is the charter advertiser for this video advertising survey trial.

“Our sales partnership with YuMe allows Samsung to leverage their strong relationships with brands, agencies, and third-parties for the Samsung Smart TV Advertising Platform,” said Daniel Park, Vice President, Samsung Electronics, Media Solution Center. We believe the ability to reach consumers through Samsung’s market-leading Smart TV’s and Blu-ray Disc players presents a unique and compelling value proposition to marketers. YuMe is a valuable partner in evangelizing this opportunity and bringing brand advertisers in to participate in this interactive, emerging platform.”

The new connected TV Brand Lift study will gauge how ads impact consumers’ perception by randomly sampling viewers and presenting a small subset with an on-screen survey served from Samsung’s Smart Hub. Viewers respond to the survey using their TV remote. Responses from viewers who have not been exposed to the advertising are compared to those from viewers surveyed while the advertising is running in order to calculate the Brand Lift generated by the campaign. Powered by Vizu, this metric helps Samsung-YuMe advertisers improve messaging and audience targeting for current and future ad buys.

As the charter advertiser for this launch, State Farm is extending the reach of its popular Super Bowl MVP Aaron Rodgers campaign across all screens to drive both brand and social media marketing objectives.

“We are extremely excited to be part of YuMe’s Connected TV launch. The living room is becoming the ‘hub’ of household entertainment, both for traditional as well as online viewing, and the connected TV platform provides a State Farm-branded experience prior to the consumer watching their chosen video,” said Edward Gold, Advertising Director, State Farm Insurance Companies.

“With this new capability, our solutions now enable advertisers to measure and optimize Brand Lift across multiple screens, comparing and contrasting the results generated in traditional digital channels with those from connected television,” said Dan Beltramo, CEO of Vizu. “We are very excited to test this capability with YuMe and Samsung as we jointly lead the way into the next realm of digital media branding measurement.”

Samsung Smart TV advertising inventory expands the reach of YuMe’s Connected Audience Network to include the global leader in connected TV sales. YuMe provides advertisers with an integrated campaign platform for reaching consumers across TV, mobile, and online devices. YuMe’s premium video ad network enables advertisers to reach their target audience at scale whenever and wherever they consume content. With world class customer support, brand-safe content, unmatched data and analytics, powerful reporting, and tremendous reach, the Connected Audience Network offers the essential tools marketers need to engage consumers and ultimately exceed their campaign goals.

“Connected TV is an emerging platform, and we are excited to offer built-in solutions for evaluating ad campaign success across multiple platforms, which have never before been available to brands,” said Jayant Kadambi, CEO, YuMe. “Our YuMe platform works seamlessly to integrate multiple technologies that give companies like State Farm real-time viewer feedback, allowing them to successfully monetize cross-platform campaigns.”

About Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

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

About State Farm

State Farm and its affiliates are the largest provider of car insurance in the U.S. and is a leading insurer in Canada. In addition to providing auto insurance quotes, their 17,800 agents and more than 66,000 employees serve 81 million policies and accounts – more than 79 million auto, home, life and health policies in the United States and Canada, and nearly 2 million bank accounts. Commercial auto insurance, along with coverage for renters, business owners, boats and motorcycles, is also available. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company is the parent of the State Farm family of companies. State Farm is ranked No. 37 on the Fortune 500 list of largest companies. For more information, please visit http://www.statefarm.com or in Canada http://www.statefarm.ca.

About Vizu

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 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.

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

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

Specific enhancements include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Brand.net

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

The company is privately held and headquartered in Silicon Valley.

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Digital Element

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

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

About Adcloud

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

1 WSI Internet Marketing Trends Report 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW YORK – Cross Pixel Media, the first and only fully transparent audience marketplace that provides buyers with superior audience data, today announced the completion of its first round of funding, led by kbs+ Ventures, the venture arm of Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners (“kbs+”), a leading full-service advertising agency. Cross Pixel Media intends to use the funding to expand its analytics offering, develop new data partnerships, and enhance its technology. Terms of the investment were not disclosed.

“We have been using an increasing amount of data to make marketing decisions for our clients, across planning, buying, research, social, and CRM. With this in mind, we sought out an investment in a data management company who can help us enrich our insights and data access, which led us to Cross Pixel Media,” said Darren Herman, President of kbs+ Ventures and Chief Digital Media Officer of The Media Kitchen and kbs+. “Their unique data offering enables agencies like ours and our brand clients to identify and access high value audiences for insights and to serve them advertising based on their specific interests. Their approach provides a level of transparency, customization and creativity like none other we’ve encountered in the data ecosystem.”

Cross Pixel Media provides audience data for more than 50 FORTUNE 500® advertisers. Cross Pixel Media’s unique approach to data transparency enables these advertisers to increase the performance of their audience-based campaigns by as much as 500 percent while providing unique insights into the online behavior of each client’s audience. Their transparent way of doing business enables buyers to know the source of the data being utilized and align advertiser with beneficially situated audiences. Cross Pixel manages more than 90 million unique US profiles containing more than 300 million data points at any given time. No other online data provider offers as much exclusive data that is gleaned from exclusive relationships with online retailers and research web sites as Cross Pixel Media.

“Marketers are increasingly leveraging data to find new consumers and drive online ad performance, and they need better quality data to do that. Because we are fully transparent about our sources, advertisers can trust that there ads are being delivered to a mutually aligned, high value audience,” said Alan Pearlstein, CEO of Cross Pixel Media. “The support from kbs+ will help us identify new opportunities that are meaningful to the advertising community and with their guidance, continually improve our product and data offering. We are very excited about this partnership and the value it will bring to Cross Pixel.”

This story was first reported in Venture Wire, here.

About KBS+ Ventures

kbs+ Ventures is a thematic investment arm of kirshenbaum bond senecal and partners which backs early stage entrepreneurs who have solid teams and great ideas. The main investment areas that kbs+ Ventures focuses on are: ad technologies, mobile, and design infusion. For more information, please visit: www.kbsp.vc

About Cross Pixel Media

Cross Pixel Media provides marketers, agencies, and their technology partners with superior data gathered exclusively from superior sources. The Company has relationships with more than 450 ecommerce sites and deep research sites that provide audience data to advertisers for use in their audience targeting campaigns. Cross Pixel is the only provider of this kind of data that enables buyers to see the data source and optimize campaigns against such data from these individual sources. For more information, please visit: http://www.crosspixel.net/

NEW YORK – ChoiceStream(R) an innovator in online personalized marketing solutions for major brands, today announced Audience Intelligence Reports as part of its CRUNCH Audience Targeting Platform. CRUNCH uses proprietary intent data to predict how audiences will react to brand messages. The platform observes the unique attributes of consumers who respond to a campaign, and then creates a custom audience segment. With Audience Intelligence Reporting, marketers can now gain insight into how consumers are reacting to their display ads, as well as detailed audience demographic and engagement reports, which can then be used to drive key decisions across the marketing organization. The easy-to-consume Audience Intelligence Reports provide marketers with clear conclusions rather than labor-intensive spreadsheets that place the burden of analysis back on the client.

“ChoiceStream CRUNCH turns ‘traditional’ audience buying on its head; it selects the best audience for our client’s campaign based on in-market performance – rather than selecting audiences pre-flight,” said Jenna Umbrianna, Manager of Platform Media for Hill Holliday. “And CRUNCH’s Audience Intelligence reports provide actionable insight into who those audiences are and why they respond, which enables us to make better decisions on behalf of our clients. It is information we can use immediately to improve ad performance.”

CRUNCH combines a rich, proprietary database of consumer intentions from partners with select sources of behavioral data to customize the audience most likely to engage with the advertiser’s display ad campaign. As a result, CRUNCH targeting gets smarter with each ad response. With Audience Intelligence Reports, CRUNCH users will gain insight into these unique attributes in order to improve their display ad strategy, refine creative, and share with other marketing functions to align campaigns across all advertising (including television and print), public relations, and direct marketing. For example, advertisers can leverage reports to determine where and when to run television ads based upon detailed audience information; while email marketers can learn about an undiscovered audience and create a campaign specific to that group of consumers.

“We’re taking the valuable data that CRUNCH reveals and sharing it with our advertising and agency clients so that they can get closer to their customers,” said Steve Johnson, CEO, ChoiceStream. “Our clients are gaining tremendous insight into the demographic and behavioral composition of their ideal audience and how that changes over the course of a campaign, season and year.”

ChoiceStream, Inc. ( www.choicestream.com ) is an innovator in online advertising and personalized marketing solutions. For more than ten years, companies like AT&T, Zappos, Tesco, Ticketmaster and MTV have relied on ChoiceStream to create a more engaging, personally relevant experience for their consumers. By transforming shopping behavior and media consumption into intelligence about a consumer’s unique preferences, ChoiceStream is able to help today’s biggest brands target their most qualified prospects with the right advertisement, email promotion and product recommendations to improve brand engagement, conversion rates and customer loyalty.

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced the immediate availability of Adobe® AudienceResearch, a new audience measurement tool that provides publishers and digital marketers with certified metrics on the size and engagement of digital audiences for websites, mobile applications and digital magazine editions. These key metrics are captured by Adobe SiteCatalyst®, an industry leading online analytics application, and provide publishers with the information most critical to attract advertising dollars. AudienceResearch is available at no additional cost to SiteCatalyst customers. In conjunction with AudienceResearch, the company also announced the general availability of the Adobe Audience Certification Program. Under this program, publishers become Adobe Certified Publishers, meaning Adobe has certified that their digital audience data meets certain criteria regarding the accuracy of data collection and reporting. Adobe Certified Publishers can contribute their data to the AudienceResearch tool.

AudienceResearch provides census-based measurement of metrics, meaning that the metrics are generated by counting all relevant traffic, a method considered more accurate and representative of actual traffic and behavior than panel-based methods. Panel-based methods monitor the behavior of a small group of volunteer consumers (i.e. the panel) and then use statistics to generate estimate metrics. The statistically generated results from panel-based estimates often differ significantly from census-based results and have been a point of controversy in the advertising industry. Adobe Certified Publishers can arm their direct sales teams with these certified, census-based metrics, including metrics that have been accredited by the Media Ratings Council, and advertisers can rely on these metrics as they make media planning decisions.

“We count many of the world’s largest publishers as our customers. With this strong customer base and pent-up demand for census-based metrics, we anticipate strong adoption of AudienceResearch,” said Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Marketing Business Unit, Adobe. “AudienceResearch has the potential to provide the industry with a reliable, cross-channel currency for measuring digital audience size and engagement, bringing greater confidence into the digital advertising planning, buying and selling process.”

Today’s announcement builds on Adobe achieving MRC accreditation for key SiteCatalyst metrics. To achieve accreditation, Adobe has put in place innovative methods of auditing site implementations of SiteCatalyst as well as cleansing and certifying raw site traffic, giving advertisers and publishers the most accurate view of digital audience metrics. Additionally, publishers using the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to create digital magazine editions for tablet devices may elect to have their metrics automatically certified as analytics is natively built into the Digital Publishing Suite. This native integration ensures the integrity of data collection.

Become an Adobe Certified Publisher

Publishers currently using Adobe SiteCatalyst can become an Adobe Certified Publisher, which assures advertisers that the certified digital audience size and engagement metrics provided by the Adobe Certified Publisher have met certain requirements for data collection integrity and reporting accuracy. Adobe Certified Publishers can contribute these key metrics to AudienceResearch. Participation in the Adobe Audience Certification Program is complimentary for existing SiteCatalyst customers. To participate, contact an Adobe account manager.

Publisher Support for Census-based Measurement via AudienceResearch

Chris Reynolds, executive director of analytics, Condé Nast

“Condé Nast is leading the market by taking our world-class brands into the new digital age using the insights garnered from our long-standing relationship with Adobe SiteCatalyst and the technology from Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. We’re excited to see Adobe bringing together the content creation and delivery workflows with measurement and monetization solutions that will help us highlight the value of our brands to our advertising partners.”

Kim Vignola, vice president, research & analytics, E! & G4, NBC Universal

“Many online publishers feel that their traffic is underrepresented in panel-based services. The Adobe AudienceResearch tool is enabling advertisers to have confidence in the internal data that we know to be stable and accurate. The set-up is quick, and minimal traffic was filtered out through the accreditation process.”

Heather Idema, corporate research director, Bonnier Corporation

“As the digital landscape continues to rapidly advance, consumer’s expectations are revolutionizing the way publishers supply the demand for quality content. Publishers and media buyers are constantly seeking measurement solutions that provide our digital mediums with an ‘apples to apples’ comparison that is credible and simplifies audience measurement. The certification of Adobe’s syndicated platform offers us a stage to help better represent our digital venues, ultimately opening the flood gates to more business.”

Ryan Whittington, senior vice president, digital revenue at The Business Journals

“With the rapid increase in the consumption of digital content across mediums and on many devices, publishers face the difficult challenges of providing a unified view of the audience. We need content and measurement solutions that meet the needs of the audience however they choose to consume, which is why we’re excited to see Adobe stepping up to the challenge of simplifying digital audience measurement..”

About the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite

The Adobe Digital 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, e-mail, 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.

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.

NEW YORK – Online targeting platform leader [x+1], www.xplusone.com, announced the introduction of a Web services application programming interface (API) that will provide greater flexibility for integrating a company’s existing website infrastructure with [x+1] Origin, its leading digital marketing hub.

This new offering gives marketers a choice between using traditional browser-based tag integration or the cloud-based Web services APIs. [x+1] Origin is the only digital marketing hub offering this integration option.

As a capability of the company’s leading Site+1 website personalization product, the many benefits of this approach include ease of integration across a breadth of third-party Web infrastructure systems and alternative channel platforms such as mobile, a fast growing area for online customer interactions. The API connection provides data exchange in real time, meaning any changes in user data or behavior are made instantly available for website personalization and media targeting in [x+1] Origin with no latency.

How it works: Application servers inside a marketer’s data center communicate with the [x+1] Web services API over a secure public or private network connection. A user’s browser does not interact directly with the [x+1] servers or domain/cookie space, providing increased control and security for the marketer.

Tom Caputo, Vice President of Product Management for [x+1], said the new offering has tremendous implications for marketing data management, allowing both data capture and data querying in real time via the server-to-server API.

“Our clients told us they wanted increased control and greater options for real-time integration of our digital marketing hub into their Web and data infrastructure,” Caputo said. “Our new architecture and APIs makes it easier for them to integrate these systems, creating a central hub for their digital marketing efforts. At the same time, we’ve given clients a choice of integration methods.”

Other benefits of the Web services API integration:

• Increased security and client control as all page content flows through the marketer’s Web infrastructure

• Better visibility into and control over page load times as all decision requests are sent server-to-server on managed bandwidth, reducing the number of browser-to-server round trips

• Elimination of the need for [x+1] cookies and tags, making content decisions and conversion tracking applicable even in cases where the browser or device does not support third-party cookies

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

San Francisco, Calif. – BuzzLogic announced today that it has launched an innovative online advertising platform called Spectrum, centered upon emotive-based advertising. Spectrum identifies and understands the influence of content at a page level—versus the site or category level—and executes real-time bids and ad placements based on content that’s highly relevant to a brand’s campaign goals.

Using emotive-based ad targeting, BuzzLogic connects advertisers with highly targeted, highly engaged audiences. The company can help a brand develop an emotional connection with consumers via custom ads seeded amongst the most authoritative and influential content on the Web. This is sourced real-time and without the use of cookies.  Emotive-based targeting captures the emotional connection an audience has with specific page content.

“What keeps a brand manager awake at night is not how to raise click-through rates or how to get more impressions – it’s how to make an emotional connection with their consumer,” said Dave Hills, CEO of BuzzLogic. “With Spectrum, we have the ability to help a brand target, reach and persuade an engaged audience through understanding the emotional mindset that content creates with its audience. An appropriately placed and well-timed ad can evoke the same emotion as the content on the page.  This creates a more powerful connection to the brand which results in greater purchase intent.”

Spectrum boasts the ability to uncover and understand page-level content (versus the typical site or domain level data).  In milliseconds, the content on thousands of pages can be scored based on its relevance related to a brand’s campaign goals. The system then dynamically bids upon the most influential URLs at scale—be it hundreds or millions of URLs.

Given no two brand’s have the same campaign goals, advertising schedules and execution are also unique. For example, two competing Japanese car brands may be running campaigns at the same time and have different marketing objectives. In this instance, pages that were categorically common to both campaigns would have different values and scores allowing each brand to reach consumers in a specific mindset that meets their independent goals.

Just as no one page of content has absolute value, one ad does not fit all. Once content is identified as a good fit for the brand’s message, Spectrum builds the optimal ad for the environment. This customization is as important as finding the right audience and pages, since the brand’s customized ad unit(s) draws engagement and connection with the consumer.

Further, as bids are won and ads placed, Spectrum indexes all pages in real time. The intelligence gathered overtime improves performance of the system as a whole.

About BuzzLogic
BuzzLogic is the only emotive-based media company that helps brands target, reach and persuade engaged audiences by delivering the right ad, in the right place at the right time to the most motivated customers in the right mindset. BuzzLogic creates customized digital media packages with proprietary technology that utilizes emotive-based targeting at the page level and real-time bidding—at scale and without cookies—to achive superior results and insights for brands and advertisers.
BuzzLogic’s clientele includes Kraft, Toyota, Best Buy, Microsoft, and Starbucks.
BuzzLogic is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. For more information, visit: http://www.buzzlogic.com, or follow at Twitter.com/BuzzLogic.

NEW YORK – Online targeting platform leader [x+1], www.xplusone.com, announced the availability of Media-Aware Home Pages, a new solution that connects display media experiences with personalized website messaging by going beyond clicks to leverage user interactions across the entire Internet. The launch follows a three-month joint development beta period with a consumer subscription services client.

Media-Aware Home Pages know what online media consumers have been exposed to even if they didn’t click on a display ad. It then uses this information to empower marketers to provide more relevant and consistent website messages to improve campaign engagement and performance. With a focus on quality at scale, Media-Aware Home Pages don’t retarget publisher audiences.

“This solution distinguishes [x+1] from ad technology providers who require clicks in order to capture and leverage customer experience data,” said Toby Korner, Vice President of Client Solutions for [x+1]. “With click-through rates (CTR) for online ads averaging only about 0.2% to 0.3%, this process is very limited in reach. Media-Aware Home Pages open up vast new opportunities for marketers to tailor messages to audiences they couldn’t before, going beyond the click to deliver greater content and message relevance and results.”

Media-Aware Home Pages work with [x+1]’s Media+1 and Site+1 products, and are fully integrated with Origin, [x+1]’s Digital Marketing Hub. Benefits include:

- The integration of display ads with website content personalization for a consistent consumer experience
- Better-performing websites
- More insight and understanding of online behavior

For example, a man visits a sports-themed website and is exposed to a company’s ad. Later, if he searches for the company or its product, or visits the company’s site, the Media-Aware Home Page creates a consistent site experience specifically geared to him and his interest in sports – even though he never clicked on an ad.

“The more personalized someone’s online experience and interaction with a brand, the more likely they’ll be to take a desired action – a registration, a purchase,” said Korner.

Using a tracking pixel, Media-Aware Home Pages record who was served which ad and where. When a user later visits a company’s activated Media-Aware Home Page, either through search or typing in a URL, [x+1]’s patented Predictive Optimization Engine (POE) leverages sophisticated mathematical models to determine the optimal messaging for the webpage based on the user’s previous site and ad exposure.

The process happens automatically and in milliseconds, eliminating any manual creation of landing pages by the marketer.

About [x+1]

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

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

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

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

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

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

About aiMatch

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

Roy Pereira: Our Shiny Ads self-serve advertising platform has always allowed online publishers to take smaller ad buys for their ad products.  We’ve allowed those publishers a large degree of customization for those ad products including setting their own price, pricing model, and targeting options.

Some of our online publishers have registration-only sites where they collect at least the user’s email address and perhaps their gender, age and name.  To enable these online publishers to leverage that data, without privacy issues, and offer more targeting options to their advertisers, we’ve introduced Shiny Ads Audience Targeting.

We’ve also had several of our publishers who run social network want a more complete “Social Ads” platform that is similar to other larger social networks.  Shiny Ads Audience Targeting gives them that product as a black box without them having to tie separate multi-vendor products together.

Otilia Otlacan: Is the new new Shiny Ads Audience Targeting solution cookie based?

Roy Pereira: Cookies are used for frequency capping ads as well as to cache user information. Unlike an ad network based solution, Shiny Ads Audience Targeting only operates directly on a publisher’s site(s) and does not aggregate across a multi-publisher network.  Thus, the user’s data (and cookies) never leave that one publisher’s control.

Otilia Otlacan: Audience targeting is usually tightly linked to certain privacy issues, particularly in the EU legislation. What are the implications of this new addition to the Shiny Ads platform for your EU-based publishers?

Roy Pereira: Shiny Ads Audience Targeting is able to obtain user data either from the publisher itself (if it has it) or deduce it from several sources, including 3rd-party data marketplaces.  We work with our publishers to ensure that they have the right to use the data they have on their users to ensure that it meets privacy laws in the countries they are based in.  If the user data is sourced by our system, then our license agreement with the data marketplaces provides sufficient privacy coverage.  No PII data is stored on our systems.

Otilia Otlacan: One of Shiny Ads’ key features is the straightforward integration with mainstream ad servers used by publishers. Will this still be the case?

Roy Pereira: You are correct that our core product, Shiny Ads Self-Serve Advertising Platform, is unique in that it directly integrates with 7 of the top ad servers.  This has a lot of benefits including removing the burden of adding JavaScript ad tags and having to reserve inventory.

To allow for the real-time user-acquisition nature of Shiny Ads Audience Targeting, we’ve had to inject our own optimizing server in the flow.  This allows our solution to obtain the user data (from which ever source), and optimize the ads available based on that viewer’s information.  The prediction engine uses historical performance data for similar users to create a list of the most likely interesting ads and does so in real-time.  This creates a much higher conversation rate for the ad campaign which completes the CPC campaign quicker and generate more revenue for the publisher as more ad buys are completed in less time.

Otilia Otlacan: The online advertising space is changing at great speed – what’s on the roadmap for Shiny Ads in the near future?

Roy Pereira: Our mantra in the Shiny Ads office is sell-side automation for premium inventory.  We are always looking at how we can increase revenues and profit margins for premium publishers.  We will be expanding our programmatic buying abilities as well as distribution sources.  The first brings in more deals to the publisher’s ad products directly using our existing and future APIs and ordering interface, of which we already support three; smaller advertiser, smaller agency, and inside sales.  The second allows the purchased ads to be directly integrated into more destinations such as ad servers.

About Roy Pereira, Founder & CEO Shiny Ads
Roy has over 15 years of experience in technology companies and has been involved in 5 startups with his first in 1992, which focused on Internet and Email software. He has been a marketing executive at both medium-sized public corporations and VC-funded startups. He has a highly technical background with several patents and Internet standards to his name.

Follow Roy Pereira on Twitter at http://twitter.com/roymap and on LinkedIn at http://linkedin.com/in/roypereira.

More about Shiny Ads: see ShinyAds.com or check out the demo at vimeo.com/shinyads/intro.

“We are very excited about the launch of Shiny Ads Audience Targeting which is the first offering of it’s kind to be delivered directly to online publishers” said Roy Pereira, Founder & CEO, Shiny Ads, “It is further extension of our mandate to provide publishers with automation tools for the monetization of their premium inventory.”

Shiny Ads Audience Targeting is built to be scalable and able to handle complex targeting and optimization calculations in real-time. It is the first advertising technology entirely built on the brand new event-based persistent architecture called node.JS which gives the product tremendous speed and makes real-time machine learning with big data a possibility. Shiny Ads Audience Targeting is available to online publishers with registered users with optional gender, age, location and other information.

About Shiny Ads

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

NEW YORK – Real-time bidding on open ad exchanges has been the province of websites with the broadest audience. Now a new product from Martini Media, the digital platform for uber-influencers, promises to bring so-called long tail sites—which generate influence over time rather than mass splashes—into the world of self-adjusted campaigns. On MartiniLIVE, selected advertisers will be able to set their price for premium inventory on the kinds of niche sites that attract a disproportionate percentage of the people with the most money and influence online.

MartiniLIVE introduces four advancements to the real-time bidding model. First, the exchange brings sites that represent priority media for the new uber-influencers into an automated buying platform. Second, whereas most exchanges deal principally in remnant inventory—the opportunities member websites could not sell directly, and so are available at unusually low rates at auction—MartiniLIVE puts a higher percentage of premium inventory up for bid. Third, the exchange allows advertisers to buy contextually—not just demographically—with behavioral and psychographic targeting in specific interest channels, including sports, tech, fashion, finance and travel. Fourth, MartiniLIVE brings rich media to the exchange model, so advertisers can bid on video ads.

“We’re putting the most important audience online at advertisers’ fingertips,” said Adam Chandler, CRO of Martini Media. “The people with the most buying power and influence can now be engaged in real-time, giving advertisers control over all the dynamics of buying.”

A June 2011 study by WPP’s Added Value, “Beyond Influence,” commissioned by Martini, found that a new class of uber-influencers account for 25% of the online population. These “Pollinators” get most of their information, and source the bulk of their sharing, from niche websites that cater to their personal passions, from travel to wine to technology. They spend more, buy more often, and welcome relevant advertising, more than any other group. The study concluded that advertisers on the Martini platform have a 92% chance of engaging Pollinators and their cousins, Influentials, who account for another 40% of Internet users.

On MartiniLIVE, publishers get real-time control over the parameters of bidding. So smaller sites with premier audiences can attract premium brand ads at a fair price from ad agency trading desks.

“We’re extremely pleased to partner as a technology provider to Martini Media as it launches MartiniLIVE,” said Michael Rubenstein, President of AppNexus, the real-time ad platform foundation for the new exchange. “We we believe this exciting offering will help bring real-time bidding to a high-caliber audience.”

About Martini Media

Martini Media is the platform for engaging people with the most influence and money online. Martini allows advertisers to build campaigns influence-first by scaling niche sites—the places these people prioritize because they cater to passions—into an audience of more than 120 million. Martini provides a publisher network of 1,000 sites in lifestyle and business with revenue support encompassing Web, video, mobile, email, social and data. For more than 270 premium-advertising clients, Martini combines proprietary audience targeting and tracking with full-service marketing support. Martini Media was founded in 2008, funded by Venrock, Reed Elsevier Ventures and Granite Ventures, along with a number of prominent angel investors. For more information, see www.martinimedianetwork.com.

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.

Emeryville, CA – Tribal Fusion, the global online display advertising provider, and BlueKai, the world’s only complete platform for data management, analysis and acquisition, have struck a new deal to more deeply integrate BlueKai Exchange data for audience insights and online media buying through Tribal Fusion.

The agreement enables display campaigns planned and bought through Tribal Fusion to be tailored based on users’ purchase intentions ‘in real time, all the time’ and enable additional scale when targeting campaigns at users with specific purchase intent behavior, as well as improved campaign optimization and faster set-up times.

It will also help Tribal Fusion provide richer audience insights reports for its advertiser and agency clients to detail the precise purchase behavior of converting customers and enable even more effective media planning and buying.

The deal builds on the two companies’ existing relationship in which Tribal Fusion is a BlueKai Premier Partner and adds a new layer of integrated data to Tribal Fusion’s already extensive user data and profiling platform, E9.

“BlueKai’s purchase intent data, in particular, is complementary to our own interest-based data, increasing the efficiency of our audience insights and look-alike models,” says Doug Conely, Senior Director of Data and Targeting at Tribal Fusion. “We’re also excited about the opportunity to extend our dynamic ad capabilities using auto model and travel destination purchase intent data.”

“We recognized the potential of third-party audience data several years ago and were an early partner of BlueKai,” says Dilip Da Silva, CEO of Tribal Fusion. “We’ve built our technology to work hand in hand with theirs and our teams have worked closely together over time to understand the pockets of opportunity and scale our businesses. This integration is the next step.”

“We are excited to see partners like Tribal Fusion embrace the BlueKai Exchange as one of their integrated third-party data sources,” says Jon Ingalls, Chief Marketing Officer at BlueKai.  “The partnership is a testament to Tribal Fusion’s ongoing commitment to delivering data-centric targeting strategies and meaningful audience analytics to their clients.”

Tribal Fusion (www.tribalfusion.com) is a digital marketing solutions company that drives superior results at all levels of the purchase funnel. Our company is built around dedicated vertical teams that leverage their industry-specific knowledge of “what works” to create fully customized advertising solutions to help companies capitalize on opportunities at every level of the consumer decision process. From custom “brand channels” to increase awareness to vertical-specific targeting tools to drive immediate purchase, Tribal Fusion offers smarter solutions that drive greater results.

Tribal Fusion is a part of the Exponential Group of online businesses – a technology-enabled media services company that delivers innovative products and services to meet the demands of today’s digital advertisers and publishers. Through a variety of offerings that includes Tribal Fusion, the Exponential™ group of businesses enables online advertisers to reach their target audiences from around the globe to across town. Headquartered in Emeryville, CA, Tribal Fusion operates offices across the US, India, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

BlueKai (www.bluekai.com) provides leading solutions for comprehensive data management, acquisition and analytics to maximize performance from all audience data. The BlueKai Platform™ is a complete technology solution for managing private data assets and analyzing campaign performance to maximize return on marketing dollars. The BlueKai Exchange™ is the world’s largest marketplace for anonymous 3rd party audience data, with exclusive access to BlueKai Intent™ and branded data in reaching more than 200M unique users across the entire marketing funnel. As an industry leader in consumer transparency and control, BlueKai has created book-end solutions including a registry for consumers to see what marketers know about them, edit their online preferences and gain rewards through charitable donations. The privately-held company is based in Cupertino, Calif. and is a recipient of the 2011 OnMedia B2B Company of the Year Award.

ad:tech London 2011
LONDON & MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Quova, a Neustar Service and a leading provider of high-quality Internet Protocol (IP) geolocation data, today announced the availability of its IP Audience Targeting Solutions (ATS), an advanced, highly scalable audience targeting system for online display advertising. ATS helps brand marketers more effectively implement online display advertising at an organizational level without the use of cookie-based tracking or targeting. Powered by Quova’s ‘User Type’ data, ATS provides a vehicle to reach a specific audience with a tailored message.

“Quova’s IP Audience Targeting Solutions has enabled Mediasmith to effectively reach the business community through small business and enterprise targeting,” said David L. Smith, CEO and Founder, Mediasmith. “Combining scale and accuracy, Quova is a valuable part of our targeting strategy.”

Quova’s IP intelligence and real-time network analytics enable brand marketers to select the type of organization they want to see their ads, whether it’s a university, convention center or place of business. Marketers can develop ad creative that is geared specifically to these segments and through ATS, deliver it in the most relevant context to the person viewing an ad.

“Different than de facto advertising practices, ATS allows marketers to target audiences based on where they log onto the Internet. This means brand advertisers can reach consumers or enterprise customers with special offers at their place of work, play, study, or travel,” said Miten Sampat, Vice President, Product Strategy, Quova, a Neustar Service. “Agencies and marketers will be impressed with how this scales for campaigns.”

More about delivering ads based on IP addresses

Quova’s ATS utilizes a proprietary database of over 3.5 billion publicly available IP addresses to create a custom target set for each campaign. Quova manages the entire process from start to finish: determining custom IP placements, running targeted ad campaigns, ad optimization and reporting.

An IP address is a numerical label assigned to each device (e.g., computer, printer) participating on a computer network that uses the IP for communication. For more than 10 years, Quova has been a leading provider of IP data to the online advertising ecosystem to help businesses understand the location of their users. Quova supplies valuable IP intelligence to leading search engines, government agencies, fraud and security companies and many others in the online advertising ecosystem.

For more information about IP intelligence, Quova’s IP ATS for display advertising, pricing, and a free consultation, please contact a Quova sales representative at sales@quova.com.

ABOUT QUOVA

Quova provides high-quality IP intelligence data. This data allows companies, large and small, to use detailed demographic and network characteristics to prevent fraud in online commerce; regulate online content (DRM) to stay compliant; and marketers to localize content and analyze traffic. Quova is the only full-service IP geolocation provider with a team of analysts, customer technicians and developer advocates who add human IP to network IP to offer consultative services along with its data. Quova is a Neustar Service, based in Mountain View, California. http://www.quova.com/. Follow @quova on twitter.

NEW YORK – Online targeting platform leader [x+1], www.xplusone.com, announced Funnel R/F, a powerful toolset that enables marketers to optimize their media plan by identifying and executing the best combination of online ad reach and frequency to more effectively move consumers through the purchase funnel. It will be available Sept. 30.

“It provides a holistic view of how audiences are performing at each funnel stage, diagnostics for optimizing the media plan at both the strategy and partner level, and insights for maximizing impact of the communication plan across each channel.”
Funnel R/F evaluates and manages the impact of each element of the media plan based on its ability to move consumers to the next funnel stage. It does this by using advanced analytics to identify a campaign’s Optimal Frequency Range (OFR), boosting ad frequency where needed.

Using Funnel R/F, marketers can realize significant gains in cost efficiency and campaign effectiveness by quickly identifying wasted impressions, under- and over-exposure and weak performers in a media plan. By reallocating spend to greater effect across the entire digital media plan, direct marketers will drive increased performance, while brand marketers will see improvement in reach and campaign scale.

With its advanced analytics and reporting, Funnel R/F is fully integrated with [x+1] Origin, the company’s end-to-end Digital Marketing Hub. This integration allows under-exposed consumers to be automatically targeted through real-time bidding (RTB).

The concept of “effective reach” is well established in traditional media planning, referring to the audience reached with the minimum threshold of frequency to drive consumer engagement. However, Funnel R/F applies this concept to digital media in a whole new way, allowing reach and frequency to be monitored and managed throughout each funnel stage, across both display and search.

Going beyond “attribution modeling” solutions, Funnel R/F provides both performance and brand marketers with actionable insights based on their unique marketing funnel definitions. Marketers or agencies can define their funnels and set strategies for each media plan element in a self-service UI. The platform provides custom reports on total campaign health, effective reach and frequency metrics, cross-channel impacts by funnel stage and separate media partner effectiveness for top-of-funnel and remarketing tactics.

Some key benefits of Funnel R/F include:

Advanced analytics that will improve performance across the entire media plan
Reach/Frequency metrics and funnel impact overall and by media source
Identification of audience overlaps across media properties
Frequency control for RTB based on the entire plan
Expert support from the [x+1] Analytics Team and Account Managers

“The typical media attribution methodology unfortunately rewards both over- and under-messaging throughout the funnel,” said Leon Zemel, Chief Analytics Officer of [x+1]. “Media partners are incented to lower their cost per action (CPA) by showing more impressions to likely-to-convert consumers at the bottom of the funnel, and by ‘cookie bombing’ to capture attribution for sales that would have happened anyway.”

“The result is media plans that don’t scale,” added Zemel. “Marketers over-allocate bottom-of-funnel tactics like search and remarketing or under-allocate top-of-funnel media that reaches new prospects and feeds the sales cycle.”

“Funnel R/F provides an advanced analytic toolset that continually evaluates and maximizes media effectiveness based on each company’s unique marketing funnel and strategies,” said John Nardone, Chairman and CEO of [x+1]. “It provides a holistic view of how audiences are performing at each funnel stage, diagnostics for optimizing the media plan at both the strategy and partner level, and insights for maximizing impact of the communication plan across each channel.”

To learn more about Funnel R/F please click here.

About [x+1]

For more information, please visit www.xplusone.com; follow us on twitter @xplusone.

LONDON – Digital Element, the leading provider of IP geolocation technology, today announced a global expansion of NetAcuity Edge™, the first product of its kind to offer highly accurate IP-to-postcode targeting. This non-cookie-based dataset meets the pressing demand from advertising networks, web publishers, search engines, social networks, e-tailers and analytics platforms to offer a richer, safer, more personalized online experience while protecting user privacy.

Based purely on Internet network infrastructure analysis of ISP nodes, and insight derived from Digital Element’s global partners, NetAcuity Edge maintains the traditional user anonymity associated with IP geolocation data while delivering an unprecedented level of IP-to-postcode targeting precision. Originally launched in the United States in 2009 and the UK in 2010, NetAcuity Edge now extends hyperlocal targeting capabilities across all of Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

NetAcuity Edge is currently being deployed by Alterian (LSE: ALN), the leader in customer engagement technology and solutions, in its WebJourney Analytics solution. WebJourney provides a new kind of web analytics that focuses on creating a more personalized web experience. NetAcuity Edge allows WebJourney to conduct postcode segmentation of web visitors in real-time, giving Alterian clients an extremely powerful tool for understanding and engaging with prospects, customers and website visitors.

“We are finding that our clients clearly recognize the need to be able to segment online audiences and target their messages, however previous technologies touting ‘hyperlocal’ geotargeting simply did not offer the reliability or accuracy that they required,” said Rusty Warner, Vice President, Product Marketing, Alterian. “NetAcuity Edge erases the limitations once associated with postal-code targeting and now offers technology with exceptional granularity—not only in Europe but around the world. Our clients also feel comfortable knowing that no personally identifiable information is collected or stored.”

Postcode precision geotargeting with NetAcuity Edge

Since its initial launch, NetAcuity Edge has revolutionized the IP geolocation space by providing the only validated IP-to-postcode geographic data on the market. While IP targeting techniques traditionally rely on routing infrastructure analysis to an approximate city-level location, NetAcuity Edge combines traditional infrastructure analysis with anonymous insight gleaned from a network of global commercial partners to better map the Internet. The result is the most granular and accurate hyperlocal dataset that maintains user anonymity and complies with the highest standards of end-user privacy.

“With competition intensifying in the digital landscape, this is a breakthrough moment for any business looking to gain a competitive edge by delivering truly relevant messages online,” said Frank Bobo, Digital Element’s Vice President of Business Development. “Online businesses can now better meet consumer demand for personalized content while preserving complete user privacy.”

Digital Element’s clients include the Internet’s leading online retailers, publishers and advertising networks who understand the value in using hyperlocal targeting to make the online experience more personally relevant for their customers.

About Digital Element

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

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

NEW YORK – ad pepper media, the leading international digital marketing services and technology solutions provider, today announced the launch of adXplus real-time bidding (RTB) platform. Built on ad pepper’s existing proprietary iSense and SiteScreen technologies, adXplus enables advertisers to reach their target audiences, in true context and with full brand protection measures, across all of the leading RTB-enabled ad exchanges and sell-side platforms as well as ad pepper’s own publisher network.

The adXplus platform features unique components that allow advertisers to manage RTB media buying including:

• Multi-level targeting – Award-winning proprietary semantic targeting and re-targeting solution iSense enables precise delivery of ads to the true context of web pages in more than 3,500 categories across 12 languages.

• Smart bidding – Bid values for each impression and user are adjusted in real-time based on multiple data points to yield the best campaign performance.

• Brand protection – ad pepper’s SiteScreen prevents ads from being delivered on potentially brand-damaging web pages. Advertisers can select from 18 controversial content filters. While black list management prevents ads from appearing on specific domains and URLs. Additionally, keyword URL wildcards prevent ads from delivering to any webpage containing specific keywords.

• Optimization – Powered by sophisticated algorithms, the optimization engine can be adjusted to meet advertiser-specific goals and continuously adjusts delivery to best performing audiences and content segments to meet these objectives.

adXplus is a fully managed service, operated by dedicated support teams based in ad pepper’s 16 offices across Europe and North America, supporting global campaigns and leveraging the ad pepper’s extensive expertise in delivering effective media campaigns. There are currently more than 100 live campaigns testing positively on the new  platform.

“adXplus was designed to constantly adjust bid values for every impression based on a multitude of data criteria including user, context and performance enabling us to deliver the right ad to the right user in context yielding the best possible campaign performance,” said Sacha Carton, Director Product & Technology  Development and Director of the Board. “The URL-level brand protection controls we have built in enable advertisers to deliver ads in brand safe environments while benefiting from the reach and content diversity afforded by the millions of websites available through RTB.”

“adXplus is the result of ad pepper’s many technology investments over the years that allow us to bring highly efficient, next-generation media buying, delivery, reporting and optimization capabilities to our clients worldwide,” said Ulrich Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of ad pepper media International N.V. “With a unique ability to leverage our semantic analysis capabilities in 12 languages, we are positioned to lead the expansion of RTB advertising in Europe and North America.”

About ad pepper media
ad pepper media is one of the leading international digital marketing services and technology solutions provider. The company provides a broad range of display, lead generation, email, search engine and affiliate marketing services as well as semantic targeting, ad serving and eCRM technology solutions to media agencies, advertisers and publishers. With 16 branches in eight European countries and the USA, ad pepper media is currently managing campaigns for thousands of national and international advertisers in more than 50 countries.
For more information on the company, group companies and solutions, please visit http://www.adpepper.com/.

NEW YORK CITY – Cox Digital Solutions announced the launch of its industry-leading Smart Select™ customization tool. Now for the first time, advertisers can use Smart Select™ to deliver custom campaigns targeted across content at scale using Social, Audience, and Relevance Selectors™ to ensure that the right messages are delivered on the right sites.

Unlike basic targeting that uses contextual cues, Smart Select™ uses hundreds of proprietary attributes to scan and rank the sites in the Cox Digital Solutions network of more than 6,000 sites allowing for more precise content targeting and better results for advertisers. Recognizing the increased importance of social media in advertising buys, Smart Select’s™ state-of-the-art intelligence gives advertisers the ability to choose sites that index high for social media presence with the Social Selector™.

“Our team has fine-tuned the Smart Select™ methodology for more than three years,” explained Ani Vemprala, Director of Audience Development at Cox Digital Solutions. “This solution provides more options to advertisers looking to refine and expand their media selection and help advertisers engage more effectively with their target users. We are thrilled to be bringing this tool to market – it’s a game changer.”

Smart Select™ leverages proprietary site selection methodology by using unique dimensions to rank the quality sites within the Cox Digital Solutions network using three Selectors™ – Social, Audience, and Relevance. The Social Selector™ finds the most socially influential sites in the network. The Audience Selector™ helps determines that composition of users on sites and the Relevance Selector™ determines the relevance of a site in a given category. All of these Smart Select™ rankings enable advertisers to customize their online buy to target those sites that index high for the Selectors™ that are most important to them.

Smart Select™ limits wasted impressions and maximizes efficiency while providing a revolutionary level of customization at scale. This tool addresses the needs of a changing market allowing advertisers to take control of the media buying process and select only those sites that are smart for their campaigns.

About Cox Digital Solutions
Cox Digital Solutions provides compelling online advertising solutions that connect advertisers with engaged users and publishers with quality brands. As the only company to offer the largest integrated source of premium national reach and local engagement including 6,000+ specialty content and 2,000 local sites, Cox Digital Solutions delivers results for advertisers, agencies, and publishers. Cox Digital Solutions, a division of Cox Reps, part of Atlanta-based Cox Media Group, is headquartered in New York, NY. Learn more at www.coxdigitalsolutions.com.

SAN FRANCISCO – Kontera, the leading technology company that is maximizing the value of content, introduced INTENTclick, a premier network that is optimized for direct response advertisers and quality publishers in performance driven categories. Continuing its strategic expansion, Kontera now operates two networks: INTENTclick, the premier direct response network, and Kontera’s flagship brand and publisher network, which reaches more than 170 million unique Internet users each month.

INTENTclick uses advanced semantic analysis, combined with real-time web trend and user context analysis, to predict consumers’ interests and intent. The network is specifically designed to monetize SEO driven content and is initially offered only to publishers with content sites focused on “make money” or “save money” topics, with additional categories to be added in the future.

“We recommend INTENTclick to our thousands of publishers through our adk2 publisher ad-server platform (http://www.adk2.com),” said PLYmedia president and coo Avishay Raviv. “An INTENTclick campaign is easy to set up, and we have found that for those publishers who have content in the “save money” or “make money” categories, this is a really great way to increase their effective cpm, thus boosting their income.”

For publishers, INTENTclick delivers:

Exclusive in-text placements
Thousands of offers
Incremental monetization
Easy setup – for a single site or a network of sites
INTENTclick is powered by Kontera’s Synapse technology platform, enabling advertisers to gain greater targeting precision and to reach qualified consumers across thousands of focused, response oriented sites.

For performance advertisers, INTENTclick delivers:

Superior optimization
High conversion
Precise targeting for a qualified audience
Exclusive in-text inventory
Flexible ad formats (text and rich media)
Dedicated account management

“As a technology company with multiple offerings and a rapidly expanding footprint, we’ve scaled to a level where we can effectively manage multiple products, multiple market segments, and multiple networks,” said Yoav Shaham, CEO of Kontera. “This segmentation of networks gives us the power and flexibility, to fully serve both brand advertisers and direct response advertisers, in the unique ways that satisfy their differing campaign objectives.”

Kontera continues to scale its products to become a trusted technology provider and go-to partner for both publishers and advertisers. In the past six months the company has brought to market its leading mobile solutions, its highly lauded Social Boost family of products, and now INTENTclick.

For more information about INTENTclick visit www.intentclick.com

About Kontera

Kontera delivers context, consumer interest, and results.

Kontera’s real-time Synapse platform uses sophisticated semantic and web trend analysis to predict intent and to instantly react to user’s interests with relevant information and ads. With Kontera, advertisers gain greater targeting precision across the entire web, users find information that is relevant to their interests, and publishers increase interaction with their content. Kontera’s delivery platforms and solutions encompass the PC web, mobile devices, and major social platforms.

Kontera delivers its context and interest capabilities to the market through multiple partners. It is the exclusive in-content analysis and engagement platform for more than 15,000 web publishers. Kontera’s real-time Synapse platform is also being used within major advertising platforms.

The company works with top brand advertisers such as Toyota, Microsoft, Samsung, Kraft and P&G on its flagship brand network to identify context and interest, and to provide unique brand experiences to more than 170 million users each month. Independent comScore studies verify that Kontera’s targeted display ads and premier brand experiences deliver five times the brand lift of traditional banners.

To learn more about Kontera, Social Boost, related content solutions, Mobile Advertising, Semantic Advertising or Contextual Advertising visit: www.kontera.com follow: facebook.com/Kontera, twitter.com/kontera

About PLYmedia

PLYmedia Inc. is a pioneer in the development of a monetization platform — adk2. It provides publishers with the cutting edge of advertising technology (ad-server), enabling them to maximize their revenue and to localize their video content.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Jumptap, the leader in targeted mobile advertising, announced partnerships with four leading providers of primary off-line data, helping mobile advertisers deliver highly-targeted and effective campaigns. These partnerships are the first in the industry to combine off-line audience insights and true network scale.

Jumptap’s advertisers have already seen great results from this deeper level of data. Jumptap recently helped a major auto advertiser target ads to ZIP codes including customers that show a high inclination toward its brand. Ads targeted to these ZIP codes showed lift over broadly targeted ads in virtually every campaign. One campaign showed an 85 percent lift over the control campaigns not using data targeting. For more information on this campaign and other data, download Jumptap’s June 2011 MobileSTAT report.

As part of these strategic partnerships, Acxiom, a leader in marketing services and technology that provides consumer segmentation and targeted direct mail solutions, supplies Jumptap with anonymous information to assist advertisers in reaching audiences in a specific demographic or life stage.

Datalogix, the leader at integrating database marketing and digital media, provides Jumptap with the ability to use anonymous purchase-based data in key verticals such as retail, consumer packaged goods, loyalty and more. Past purchases are the strongest predictor of future purchase behavior and the Datalogix database includes almost every U.S. household and contains over $1 trillion in consumer purchase behavior.

“There is no question that mobile marketing will be of increasing value to companies that want to drive deeper brand loyalty and customer engagement,” said Chris Scoggins, SVP & GM DLX Platform, Datalogix. “This partnership allows Jumptap to leverage Datalogix’s proprietary targeting segments, thus ensuring that the correct audiences are reached across all mobile devices.”

Polk, the automotive data and marketing solutions leader, supplies Jumptap with offline indexing reports for vehicle segments, make and model information by ZIP code. This comprehensive, anonymized data helps advertisers on the Jumptap network target mobile device users who are more likely to buy certain makes and models of automobiles.

“Initial test results have shown a significant lift in click-throughs when Jumptap has used Polk ZIP data to prioritize targeting,” according to Andrew Price, Vice President, Sales and Client Services at Polk. “We are very encouraged by Jumptap’s leadership in utilizing third party data for mobile targeting and look forward to continuing to integrate Polk data into Jumptap’s automotive ad campaigns.”

TARGUSinfo, the leading provider of On-Demand Insight, delivers AdAdvisor elements, which leverage TARGUSinfo’s proprietary offline segmentation platform – providing audience targeting capabilities on large numbers of U.S. households based on lifestyles, propensities, brand preferences and many other attributes.

“Increasingly, marketers are creating content to leverage the interactivity of mobile devices. This innovative content can go to waste without the right audience to interact with it. AdAdvisor’s unique data goes beyond demographics to behaviors and lifestyle characteristics of large groups of U.S. households. In a privacy friendly manner, AdAdvisor will help Jumptap effectively deliver the appropriate audiences to marketers at scale,” said Paul McLenaghan, Vice President of AdAdvisor, TARGUSinfo.

A common, key ingredient to all of these partnerships is a commitment to privacy standards. Each data partner certified that its practices comply with Jumptap’s privacy standards, which require that users are given notice and choice about how their data will be used. Aggregated information from the partners will be leveraged to provide enhanced targeting based on partner data, without personally identifying users. In addition, Jumptap provides its own opt-out for ads delivered to users of apps or mobile browser users, allowing users to choose to decline ad targeting, if they wish.

Because of these partnerships, Jumptap’s advertisers are able to target relevant ads to mobile users more likely to be in certain life stages, segments, or even more likely to purchase a certain type of product. The benefit for the users is they are served more relevant advertising, seeing offers that more closely match their situation and needs. Publishers also benefit as they serve ads that better suit the needs of their users which results in better ad performance and a better consumer experience.

“The unique benefit of mobile advertising is that it reaches consumers on a personal level, which is both a challenge and a tremendous opportunity for advertisers,” said Paran Johar, Chief Marketing Officer at Jumptap. “Our relationship with each of these partners benefits advertisers with higher return on ad spend, rewards our publishers with better monetization, and provides consumers with the most relevant ads.”

Jumptap Privacy Standards

Jumptap is committed to preserving the balance between respecting consumer privacy and delivering relevant ads that align with consumer interests. As a charter member of the DAA mobile advisory committee, we understand that mobile devices are far more personal than PCs and we have designed our policies with this in mind. We firmly believe in both transparency and choice when it comes to the collection and use of data.

We strive to maintain high standards. It is our practice to avoid sensitive issues, such as medical information, for profiling and we offer one of the most extensive opt-out programs in mobile advertising. We are committed to working with industry organizations on establishing and upholding standards. We strive to make privacy protocols simple to execute and we are constantly evolving to stay on point with the advanced innovations in targeting and ad delivery. Our privacy policy is available on our website and can be viewed here.

About Jumptap

Jumptap is the leader in targeted mobile advertising. With an unmatched portfolio of technology patents, Jumptap’s data-driven solutions deliver the highest ROI for advertisers, and the best yield for publishers, across multiple platforms. The company partners with digital and media agencies, publishers, wireless carriers and brand advertisers, to deliver an array of mobile advertising solutions. For more information, visit www.jumptap.com or follow us on twitter.com/jumptap.

About Acxiom

Acxiom is a recognized leader in marketing services and technology that enable marketers to successfully manage audiences, personalize consumer experiences and create profitable customer relationships. Acxiom’s superior industry-focused, consultative approach combines consumer data and analytics, databases, data integration and consulting solutions for personalized multichannel marketing strategies. Acxiom leverages over 40 years of experience in data management to deliver high-performance, highly secure, reliable infrastructure management services.

About Datalogix

Datalogix is the leader at integrating database marketing and digital media. Our mission is to leverage the power of purchase-based audience targeting to drive measurable online and offline sales. We offer audience segmentation and integrated media programs directly and through all leading digital media companies. Datalogix is based in Westminster, CO, with offices in New York, Boston and Chicago. Please visit us at www.datalogix.com.

About Polk

Polk is the premier provider of automotive information and marketing solutions. The organization collects and interprets global data, and provides extensive automotive business expertise to help customers understand their market position, identify trends, build brand loyalty, conquest new business and gain a competitive advantage. Polk helps automotive manufacturers and dealers, automotive aftermarket companies, finance and insurance companies, advertising agencies, media companies, consulting organizations, government agencies and market research firms make good business decisions. A privately held global firm, Polk is based in Southfield, Michigan with operations in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. For more information, please visit www.polk.com.

About TARGUSinfo

TARGUSinfo, the trusted provider of On-Demand Insight® to the most recognized brands, links and delivers 300 billion real-time attributes a year to drive smarter and more profitable customer interactions on the Web, over the phone and at the point of sale. For more than a decade, America’s top brands and most respected companies have turned to TARGUSinfo to enable improved audience targeting, better customer experiences, higher conversion rates and increased customer lifetime values by using TARGUSinfo identification, verification, scoring and location solutions. TARGUSinfo offers a complete range of solutions to help organizations make better real-time decisions leveraging patented processes built on a proprietary network of hundreds of data feeds and its unique predictive analytics capabilities. A profitable and privately held company, TARGUSinfo is headquartered in Vienna, Va. with offices in San Diego, Chicago, San Francisco and New York. For more information, visit www.TARGUSinfo.com.

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.

NEW YORK – The wealthiest American consumers, those in homes with at least $100,000 annual incomes, have long been difficult for marketers to reach through traditional media like TV and radio, but “Affluent Consumers in a Digital World,” a study from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) finds these higher-income Americans embracing digital media – and its ads.

The study, conducted for the IAB by Ipsos Mendelsohn, which has been surveying the affluent market since 1977, found that 98 percent of affluent consumers use the Internet, as compared with 79 percent of the general population. They spend 26.2 hours online weekly, 17.6 hours watching TV and 7.5 hours listening to the radio. The general population, on the other hand, spends about twice as much time weekly with TV and radio – 34 hours and 16 hours, respectively – and just 21.7 hours on the Internet.

“Affluents have long been one of the hardest to reach and most important consumer groups,” said Sherrill Mane, Senior Vice President of Industry Services, IAB. “They’re now more important than ever – not only do they control most consumer spending power, but they may be the key to leading our economy out of the recession. And the new research shows that when it comes to digital media, the old paradigm has been superseded: the wealthiest Americans use digital media far more than their less affluent counterparts.”

According to the survey, affluents overall currently comprise 21 percent of U.S. households, have 70 percent of all consumer wealth, and spend 3.2 times more than other Americans on purchases.

This sought-after segment, using the Internet to a greater extent than other Americans, tends to recall more ads – and to be more aware of advertised brands, products and services. Eighty-eight percent of affluent consumers recalled being exposed to one or more digital ads during the previous week, compared with 84 percent of non-affluent Internet users. Within these groups, affluents recalled 21.1 ads on average, versus 20.2 for non-affluents.

Compared with non-affluent consumers, affluent consumers are also somewhat more likely to be aware of new products (55% vs. 49%), new companies (51% vs. 49%), and new websites (46% vs. 44%) after viewing digital ads.

In addition, 59 percent of affluent consumers reported taking action based on a digital ad during the preceding six months. “While that number doesn’t differ significantly from other Internet users, it is of great significance to advertisers seeking to reach this elusive, yet important, market segment,” said Mane. “The combined reach, exposure and influence of digital as an ad vehicle to affluent households is simply unprecedented.”

The receptivity of affluent Americans to digital advertising is underscored by their greater understanding of the ad-supported web model and the benefits of ad targeting, as compared with non-affluent consumers:

- 32 percent of affluents vs. 23 percent of non-affluents said they’d be willing to share information about themselves in order to “get a more customized online experience.”
- 72 percent (vs. 61%) agreed with the statement, “Most websites are free because they are supported by advertising.”
- 57 percent (vs. 51%) said they would “prefer to see ad-supported online content that is free, rather than paying for content that is ad-free.
Part of what affluent consumers want (37% vs. 32% for non-affluents) from that customized experience are ads relevant to their current shopping interests – ie., auto ads if they’re ready for a new car, airline ads if they’re planning a trip – wherever they may be on the Internet.

“Affluent consumers have increasingly come to desire relevant and customized experiences, in part because they are living technology-infused lifestyles,” said Bob Shullman, President of Ipsos Mendelsohn. “Virtually all the affluent are online. Their ownership of tablets and e-readers has increased by 50 percent over the past six months, and shows every indication of continued growth. They have come to expect the benefits of digital media, even if it doesn’t alleviate all work-life pressures.”

Affluent Americans are twice as likely as the general population to own smartphones (33% vs. 17%), and seventy-nine percent of the affluent say their lives have become “intertwined with technology” over the past decade. However, they are more likely to say that their lives have become “more complicated” (59%) and “more stressful” (58%), as opposed to “more fun” (47%) or “easier” (33%).

The study was conducted online in the period February 22-28, 2011. Respondents consisted of a national sample of 2,088 online adults 18+, with 1,025 from households with $100,000 or more annual incomes, and 1,063 from households under $100,000.

For a full summary of the study, please go to www.iab.net/AffluentConsumers .

About Ipsos Mendelsohn

Ipsos Mendelsohn, a division of Ipsos OTX MediaCT, specializes in providing media and marketing insights to clients interested in better understanding the upscale segments of the American consumer marketplace. Conducting high-quality media and marketing research, Ipsos Mendelsohn has been reporting on the demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal characteristics of the American affluent population for the past 34 years in its syndicated offering, The Mendelsohn Affluent Survey. Because of its accumulated expertise in delivering insights into the passions, behavior, and attitudes of this highly valued marketplace, Ipsos Mendelsohn is recognized internationally as the definitive research source for the media habits and lifestyles of the affluent marketplace in the United States.

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.

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.

In the report, Forrester defines a DMP as “a unified technology platform that intakes disparate first-, second-, and third-party data sets, provides normalization and segmentation on that data, and allows a user to push the resulting segmentation into live interactive channel environments.”

“The DMP definition in the report is spot on,” said David Jakubowski, CEO of Aggregate Knowledge. “At the end of the day, neutral audience and analytics platforms are ideal for the type of DMP solutions cited in the report as these types of platforms have no conflicts of interest and can turn billions of events into actionable audience insights,” said Jakubowski. “Our job as technology providers is to make the integrations easy and the insights visible and actionable.”

The report goes on to highlight that a DMP solution should be treated as a technology decision rather than a media buying decision as it warrants a large investment in terms of time, energy, and money. According to the report, the marketers will need to work with IT (tagging), CRM and analytics (data, access to offline database, analytical capabilities), legal (data transfer), and others.

Forrester spoke to many first-party data providers and recommended that marketers examine existing marketing technologies to identify what, if any, gaps exist. If a CRM team has a relationship with an MSP, it suggested that the CRM and interactive marketing teams engage in a joint conversation with the MSP, and “if the solution feels incomplete, look elsewhere or push your MSP to partner with a DMP like Aggregate Knowledge.”

“It can feel overwhelming at first,” said Jakubowski. “That’s why there should be different levels of product offerings – clients have different need sets and sophistication levels. For example, as an easy way to get started, AK offers a ‘First Steps’ product that requires no pixels, no tagging, and no risk. This brings the benefits of automated and consolidated reporting without the complexities of tagging. More sophisticated clients, on the other hand, can go straight for the advanced, fully enabled solution.”

Forrester interviewed over 20 companies, including data providers, media platforms, ad networks, and marketing service providers, as well as their clients. The report stated that “Aggregate Knowledge is very flexible and easy to work with” and noted the AK Platform’s “intuitive interface and rich reporting capabilities.”

To download the complete complimentary report, visit the AK website at www.aggregateknowledge.com.

About Aggregate Knowledge

Aggregate Knowledge is a leading SaaS (Software as a Service) company delivering the campaign and audience analytics on which the world’s largest advertisers make their digital media decisions. The patent-pending AK™ Platform combines campaign analytics with audience data mining and multi-touch attribution to make media accountable, helping advertisers, agencies, DSPs, ad networks, SSPs, and publishers manage with the software they need to run their businesses themselves.

Aggregate Knowledge is funded by premier venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, DAG Ventures, First Round Capital, OVP Venture Partners, and Foundation Capital.

More information can be found at www.aggregateknowledge.com.

“DIRECTView is one of many sources of data Nielsen is incorporating in our efforts to provide higher quality local TV audience measurement,” said Steve Hasker, President, Nielsen Media Products & Advertiser Solutions. “Our innovative approach to enhance local TV measurement addresses the technological limitations of using set top box data alone, and we expect it will provide valuable benefits to local TV markets.”

“The integration of our DIRECTView data with Nielsen’s local market data marks an important milestone for return path data,” says George Shababb, President, Kantar Media Audiences North America. “The sample size and granularity made possible through return path data advances what audience measurement has traditionally been able to deliver and will help offer advertisers in local markets an improved service.”

Nielsen selected Kantar Media’s DIRECTView service because it is one of the largest set top box services in the United States that anonymously covers live and time-shifted viewing. Nielsen’s use of the DIRECTView data to enhance its industry-leading audience measurement approach follows a successful proof-of-concept test that provided greater stability in local TV audiences.

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.

About Kantar Media

Kantar Media is a unit of Kantar, a leading information, insight and consultancy group that is part of WPP. WPP is the world’s largest communications services group with billings of $66 billion and revenues of approximately $15 billion. Kantar Media, which is represented in over 50 countries, helps clients master the world’s multimedia momentum through analysis of print, radio, TV, Internet, cinema, mobile, social media, and outdoor worldwide. Kantar Media offers a full range of media insights and audience measurement services through its global business sectors—Audiences, Intelligence, TGI and Custom. Kantar Media companies also include Compete, Cymfony and SRDS. Drawing upon the deepest expertise in the industry, Kantar Media tracks more than 3 million brands and delivers insight to more than 22,000 customers worldwide. www.KantarMediaNA.com.

Otilia Otlacan: Your company, Buysight (www.buysight.com), has recently announced the launch of an ad platform that can bring display ads closer to the paid search model of effectiveness. Why do you think there was a need to push display ads in that direction, what was the main driver?

Jeff Weitzman: Display has failed to meet the needs of a very large segment of online advertisers, specifically transaction-driven advertisers that traditionally use direct-response marketing methods. Most of them use paid search extensively, but display has not been able to deliver the return on investment they need. Even recent advancements in “audience” targeting have not met their goals. Audience buys work well when you’re trying to create awareness of your brand within a target group. If you are measuring success by incremental sales driven, however, you need to be even more specific in your advertising. Search has been successful because it receives a clear intent signal from the consumer and delivers a real-time ad in response to that intent. That’s what we’re doing with display ads: intent and response. In our case, the intent signals need to be collected and interpreted. It’s harder to do that paid search, but the opportunity is huge.

Otilia Otlacan: There’s talk of a resurgence of display ads for quite some time, yet no breakthru ad products have surfaced out of it (save for a few new ad formats). How would a RTB intention-based ad product fall into the new landscape of display ads?

Jeff Weitzman: Display ad revenues are growing, but not as fast as they should be. I think as an industry we’ve focused on how online display can be more like TV. People see the dollars going into television and they want to tap into that revenue stream. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but they are very different media, and it’s not clear those dollars will shift easily. We’re taking a somewhat different approach. We’re trying to expand the pool of advertisers using online display, and make it possible for them to spend far more money online than they are at present. They spend on paid search, but the inventory for the keyword pool they need is ultimately limited. If we can proactively reach and out find the right users for them as opposed to waiting for them to search, these advertisers will spend a lot more money.

Otilia Otlacan: Branding vs direct response: in the light of the recent Forbes and Coremetrics survery, would you say that branding is slowly becoming obsolete?

Jeff Weitzman: I think you’re referring to the study that showed marketers are focused on customer retention and acquisition. (“Bringing 20/20 Foresight to Marketing”) Keep in mind that that survey was conducted among companies who are heavy spenders on Internet advertising, and the industries they covered are heavy direct-response marketers. So perhaps the Forbes survey isn’t the right one to look at with regard to brand advertising. I don’t think branding is becoming obsolete at all. That said, branding and direct response are two very different approaches to marketing and accomplish different things. Generally speaking, branding is focused on generating awareness and consideration of the brand in the consumer’s mind—so-called “top of funnel” goals. While direct response can generate those responses as well, DR campaigns generally focus on conversion to sale and tend toward highly measurable media. The Forbes study showed the heavy online marketers see customer acquisition and retention as a top priority, nd the stats show they are heavy buyers of search marketing. We know we can meet those marketer’s need for retention and acquisition in the display space using our Buyer Targeting.

Otilia Otlacan: New advertising models and new targeting solutions usually come with their own set of metrics, or with a re-interpretation of traditional ones. What metrics should media buyers look for in a real-time user-intent targeting campaign?

Jeff Weitzman: In this case I think our clients’ existing metrics are going to be the most relevant. They need to drive transactions and they know how much they are willing to spend to see a given return in orders and revenue. So our clients usually look at return on ad spend, or cost of marketing. The biggest challenge in our space is attribution. Most are still using a “last click” attribution model, meaning their are giving credit for the entire sale to the last touchpoint they had with the customer before a purchase. This model has obvious flaws; common sense tells us that a consumer may be influenced by repeated touchpoints with the advertiser and ultimately decides to purchase based on their total experience with the advertiser. Display ads may cause a consumer to make a decision to purchase, but they may choose to run a search or click on an email they are reminded about that had an offer in it. We’re starting to see more attention being paid to attribution. From our perspective, we need to optimize to the client’s metrics, not convince them to use different metrics.

Otilia Otlacan: Buysight’s Buyer Targeting platform has just been launched: could you share some of the early feedback you have received and plans for the near future?

Jeff Weitzman: The response from our “early adopters” has been very positive. They’ve seen a significant bump in customer traffic, all of which is from new customers that have not been to their site recently, and that seeing is converting to sale at a significantly higher rate than their store average. Those incremental sales are very valuable to them, and they now have the potential to turn them into long-term loyal customers. We still have a lot of upside in the platform as we refine our targeting algorithms, and as the number of merchants participating grows.

About Jeff Weitzman, CMO Buysight
Jeff Weitzman is a veteran of over twenty years in online advertising, marketing, and publishing. Before joining Buysight he was Chief Marketing Officer of Common Sense Media, a non-profit organization and the leading online and educational resource for parents and teachers involved in their children’s media and technology lives. For over six years in executive roles at Coupons.com, including President & COO, he helped lead the company through rapid growth to its industry-leading position.
Prior to Coupons he led Client Services at Yahoo! and was SVP of Operations at Seth Godin’s Yoyodyne, Inc. He helped pioneer business-to-business internet communities as Chief Operating Officer of Counsel Connect in the early 90’s. Weitzman was an attorney at Shearman & Sterling and graduated from Cardozo School of Law and Dartmouth College.

AUSTIN, Texas – Greg Richardson, a leading Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur, has joined the Advisory Board of AdRevolution, the Austin-based technology company that is leading the revolution in highly targeted interactive marketing in the digital space.

Richardson is formerly an investor with Elevation Partners, a leading private equity firm focused on digital media investments. Greg helped lead the investments in Bioware and Pandemic Studios, combining the two companies and then as CEO leading them to an acquisition by Electronic Arts for $860m.

Greg is currently the founder and CEO of CDR Entertainment, a developer and publisher of online games. He holds a BA in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley and recently earned a PhD in social gaming from the same university.

Before joining Elevation, Greg served as the VP and GM of EA Partners, a $350M business unit within Electronic Arts.

“I’m thrilled to have Greg as part of the team,” said Andrew Westmoreland, the founder and CEO of AdRevolution. “His breadth of experience in the digital space will help us drive forward to the next level.”

AdRevolution was founded in 2005 and uses sophisticated algorithms to deliver true one-to-one advertising through any digital channel. Already consistently profitable, AdRevolution is expecting 200% growth this year as the company moves into new business verticals where it delivers average revenue increases of 400% for its clients.

“The digital advertising space offers dynamic opportunities for those who can provide real value to both brands and consumers,” said Richardson. “Andrew is a very smart guy who has some great technology. I think that’s a winning combination.”

About AdRevolution

AdRevolution is leading the revolution in highly-targeted interactive marketing with the powerful algorithms of its Natural Intelligence Marketing Engine (NIME). Using NIME’s one-to-one targeting capabilities, AdRevolution presents relevant ads to consumers, increasing revenues for advertisers, publishers and e-tailers on any digital channel. Learn more at www.adrevolution.com.

By partnering with TRUSTe’s TRUSTed Ads compliance platform, Adconion Direct actively seeks and employs industry best practices regarding online advertising and tracking in its quest to adhere to the high standards as outlined in the OBA self-regulatory guidelines. As the largest provider of OBA compliance services, TRUSTe offers the most recognized privacy brand, 14 years of deep privacy expertise and the most comprehensive compliance monitoring platform. This combination of capabilities will allow Adconion Direct to deliver accurate privacy notices reliably across billions of ad impressions while at the same time offering easy-to-understand privacy information and choices to consumers.

“Ad verification and delivery are an integral aspect of our business” said Brian Baumgart, President of Adconion Direct. “We are pleased to leverage TRUSTe’s OBA solution so that we can provide our advertisers and consumers alike with enhanced campaign transparency, choice and accountability.”

“We are excited to work with Adconion Direct to enable OBA compliance capabilities across their diversified and global media footprint,” said Chris Babel, CEO TRUSTe. “Our research has shown that transparency and choice can serve as powerful tools to help advertisers build deeper trust with their consumers. Through our partnership with AdXpose, we can uniquely position Adconion Direct to deliver this trust to advertisers through a blend of high quality media and the most advanced compliance and brand safety technologies.”

“We are extremely pleased that our partnership to date with Adconion Direct has blossomed,” said Ryan Polley, COO of AdXpose. “Continuing the relationship with our OBA solution further demonstrates Adconion Direct’s commitment to providing its customers with the industry’s leading technology for the verification and delivery of ad campaigns across its network.”

Adconion Direct’s partnership with AdXpose has improved the safety and performance of digital ad campaigns. AdXpose helps block suggestive keywords and prevents ads from appearing on inappropriate sites. It also provides insights and analytics that help the advertisers and agencies who work with Adconion Direct to make more informed media buying and campaign planning decisions.

About Adconion Direct
Adconion Direct (www.adconiondirect.com) is a multi-channel digital distribution platform spanning Display, Email and Social Media, for agencies and advertisers looking for quality and scalable results, backed by a global media company with significant worldwide reach. Committed to continuously deliver results, deep insights and innovative distribution options to market, Adconion Direct is an ideal performance partner of choice for agencies and advertisers alike.

Adconion Direct is the standalone performance solutions business within Adconion Media Group, (www.adconion.com), one of the largest independent global audience and video content networks, reaching nearly 325 million unique users worldwide – one-quarter of the total global Internet population. Currently, Adconion has 16 offices in 8 countries around the world. It is a member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), is one of the first companies to be IAB certified with its first ever Ad Networks & Exchanges Quality Assurance program and is a founding member of IASH Europe.

About TRUSTe
TRUSTe is the largest provider of OBA compliance services, serving notices on more than 10 billion ad impressions per month and the leading provider of online privacy solutions with a broad suite of privacy services to help businesses build trust and increase engagement across all of their online channels – including websites, mobile applications, advertising, cloud services, business analytics and email marketing. Over 4,000 web properties including those from top companies like Apple, AT&T, Disney, eBay, Facebook, HP, Microsoft, Nationwide, Pfizer and Yelp rely on TRUSTe to ensure compliance with evolving and complex privacy requirements. TRUSTe’s mission, based on a “Truth in Privacy” framework, is built on a solid foundation of transparency, choice and accountability regarding the collection and use of personal information. TRUSTe’s privacy seal is recognized and trusted by millions of consumers as a sign of responsible privacy practices. For additional information on TRUSTe and its offerings, please visit http://www.truste.com/ads.

About AdXpose
AdXpose is the leader in digital advertising analytics solutions. The company’s SaaS technology provides advertisers and publishers with greater transparency and confidence in the quality, safety, and performance of their digital advertising campaigns. The actionable optimization metrics captured by AdXpose solutions help its customers realize increased ROI, more profitable margins, and measurable ad effectiveness. AdXpose is headquartered in Seattle, WA, with offices in New York City, and is backed by Draper Fischer Jurvetson and Ignition Partners. For more information, visit www.adxpose.com.

-Creates new standard for the advertising industry in which all interested parties can participate

NEW YORK – Tremor Video, the largest independent online video technology company, is developing a first of its kind in-stream privacy compliance solution for behaviorally targeted video advertising. The implementation marks the first time the ad choices consumer notification icon has been applied to in-stream video within the player. This is the launching point of an industry-wide leadership initiative for digital video advertising privacy.

The icon will be incorporated into all of Tremor Video’s targeted video ads as part of its commitment to the online advertising industry’s self-regulatory privacy program, which is being managed by the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA). The video solution will be available in September to all Tremor Video advertisers, as well as publishers that use the company’s proprietary Acudeo® video ad monetization platform. Tremor Video will share the learnings from this endeavor to inform the future efforts of the DAA and Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) for video privacy programs.

Tremor Video currently employs the Advertising Option Icon and “Ad Choices” text in some of its interest-based in-banner advertisements, designed to provide consumers a better understanding and greater control over customized ads that they receive. The company expects the icon will appear in 100 percent of the behaviorally targeted video in-banner campaigns it serves by the third quarter of 2011. The DAA has developed standards for digital display advertising, which Tremor Video has translated into in-banner video, but no such standard exists for streaming video.

“We take privacy very seriously, and we want consumers to feel comfortable with the ads they see,” said Jason Krebs, Tremor Video’s SVP and Chief Media Officer. “Tremor Video is proud to be at the forefront of protecting consumer privacy and leading the way toward video advertising transparency. The ultimate goal is to give consumers relevant advertising that becomes part of the information and entertainment experience. We are also happy to take the first step for the industry that benefits all parties.”

Tremor Video is the industry leader in targeted video advertising, and its technology platforms help advertisers match their ads to the most relevant consumers.

As reported in Ad Age, Tremor Video is the first company to offer the Advertising Option Icon within in-stream video ads. It is the latest in Tremor Video’s list of firsts, as the company is:

- The first and only to offer in-stream brand protection, determining brand-safe environments for all in-stream content within Tremor Video’s network.
- The first and only to offer a cost-per engagement (CPE) in-stream video pricing model for pre-roll, meaning advertisers only pay when consumers engage with an ad.
- The first and only to offer premium site placement controls that let advertisers approve a site list and only run the ads within that list.

Much of the industry self-regulation effort thus far has focused on display advertising, and the complicated nature of video advertising has prevented the implementation of an industry-wide in-stream standard. Interactive creative elements and the time span of pre-roll video ads raise questions of when a notification icon should appear within the ad and for how long.

“Standard banners are static images with little interactivity, as opposed to video, which offers a wealth of consumer engagement opportunities,” said Ragu Kamakshisundaram, Director of Product Management at Tremor Video. “Rather than wait for a standard, we’re building our self-regulation solution to ensure our ads are in line with privacy compliance.”

For the benefit of consumers and the entire video advertising industry, use and behavior of the icon will align with the initiatives currently endorsed by the DAA and in use for display ad units. The icon will appear within the video player on top of ad units and will link to a page where consumers can learn more about targeted online advertising, including how to opt-out of receiving interest-based advertising from Tremor Video. In addition to hosting its own opt-out functionality, Tremor Video also participates in the DAA’s consumer choice opt-out page.

About Tremor Video

Founded in 2005, Tremor Video (formerly Tremor Media) (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 its 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.

NEW YORK – Online targeting platform leader [x+1], www.xplusone.com, announced that Bill Seely has been named Vice President of Analytics, reporting to Leon Zemel, Chief Analytics Officer. He returns to [x+1] after a three-year hiatus in which he held senior analytics positions, most recently as Vice President of Digital Measurement and Analytics at Publicis Modem.

From 2005 to 2008, Seely worked on a wide range of site optimization assignments at [x+1] for major clients including Delta Airlines, American Express, America Online, Verizon and Match.com. He has broad experience in technical and business roles, all centered on his passion for digital marketing, quantitative analysis and database technology.

Seely got his start in marketing analytics at Frito-Lay in 1988, analyzing syndicated scanner data in a wide range of applications including optimization of pricing and marketing mix, forecasting sales and promotions and data mining. In 1997 he moved to New York City and began his career in the digital space with USWeb/CKS.

He has since worked in marketing analytics in a wide range of industries including financial services (JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America), consulting (Monitor), interactive television (Ensequence) and advertising (Publicis).

“Considering the breakneck pace of new developments in digital media and marketing, and specifically [x+1]’s role as a leading player in the space, it’s an exciting time to be back in a key role here,” said Seely. “I’m looking forward to finding new ways to drive client growth using a combination of strategic insights and cutting-edge tools and analytics.”

“Bill’s undeniable talent, enthusiasm and vast knowledge of marketing analytics will be a welcome addition to our team,” said Zemel. “His insight and creativity in solving client problems are a tremendous asset, and his experience and knowledge of online marketing is second to none. We’re glad to welcome him back into the [x+1] fold.”

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

McLean, Va. – Clearspring, provider of the largest online content sharing and analytics platform, AddThis, announced that its social influence and intent data is now available on the BlueKai Exchange, which is the largest marketplace of audiences worldwide. The Clearspring audiences, aggregated anonymously from 9 million unique domains globally, represent the largest data set of its kind available via BlueKai. Clearspring’s key Influence and Intent-driven audiences across verticals such as auto, travel, finance, and retail are now available for brand marketers who are looking to tap into the viral benefits of social sharing.

This deal represents Clearspring’s first agreement with a data exchange to deliver its influence and intent-driven audiences. Earlier this year, Clearspring rolled out its audiences to the top demand side platforms including MIG, a WPP Company, Invite Media, MediaMath, Data Xu, and Turn, along with the leading ad exchange, Right Media. The company has also integrated directly with several trading desks and is now available via eight channels.

“As data-driven campaigns quickly become the norm, advertisers are increasingly using exchanges like BlueKai to find and manage highly-targeted audiences like those we’ve created with real-time data, based on users’ sharing and search activity,” remarked Peggy Fry, chief revenue officer for Clearspring. “Our goal is to make sure our audiences are everywhere buyers want to use them.”

“Clearspring’s social audiences will add to the data depth and breadth on the BlueKai Exchange, the largest marketplace for comprehensive 3rd party data acquisition,” said Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “With social media playing a larger role in the online advertising ecosystem, we’re excited to be partnering with Clearspring to provide social data at scale and making this audience actionable for our exchange and platform clients.”

Clearspring leverages its proprietary real-time data processing engine to aggregate and synthesize anonymous influence and intent data from across its AddThis platform, in order to build and deliver valuable audiences to publishers and advertisers. AddThis currently reaches more than 9 million domains and 1 billion unique users monthly.

Clearspring CEO Hooman Radfar will be speaking at the invitation-only BlueKai Data Summit tomorrow at the Plaza Hotel in New York City on a panel titled, “What’s Next? Driving Data Possibilities From Social, Video and Mobile.” The panel also includes Tod Sacerdoti, CEO of BrightRoll, Jayant Kadambi, president of YuMe and Jorey Ramer, VP corporate development of Jumptap.

Clearspring data has been made available in the BlueKai Exchange since July 18th.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — When consumers want to learn more about a vehicle or car maker, they are reaching for their mobile devices at an astonishing rate. Data released today from a study from Jumptap, the leader in targeted mobile advertising, and based on data from comScore, found that traffic to mobile automotive sites is increasing at a much greater rate than their online counterparts. While visitors to online auto sites are growing at 30 percent year over year, visitors to mobile auto sites have grown 463 percent, more than 15 times the rate of growth for online visitation.

The research showed that those visiting mobile auto content sites were more likely to own a tablet than the overall mobile population, and also much more likely to own a smartphone.  A full 69 percent of visitors accessing mobile auto sites are using smartphones compared with the roughly 31 percent of mobile device users who have smartphones overall. These data points suggest that the rapid adoption of smartphones and tablets as a visual and portable research tool may prove to have a great effect, and introduce new modalities, related to how people research and shop for cars.

“At Ford, we moved aggressively to mobile marketing, prior to the shift in consumer behavior of using smartphones and tablets to do auto research. This recently published study from Jumptap and comScore further validates that this is where the market is headed, and our assumptions were correct,” said Brian McClary, Social & Emerging Media Specialist for Ford Motor Company.  “We’ve seen some great success so far running mobile campaigns on Jumptap’s network, and will continue to work with them to find ways to target this audience as it continues to evolve.”

According to the study, Edmunds.com is the most accessed auto site on mobile, with 17.1 percent of mobile consumers who access auto content visiting the site.

“Buying a car has always been a mobile process,” said Stephen Gandee, VP Mobile & Emerging Technology for Edmunds. “You have to ultimately go to a dealership to test drive the car and make sure it’s right for your lifestyle and budget, so having access to the information, pricing and available inventory in your area at your fingertips just makes smart consumer sense. We are seeing the traditional auto buying process being disrupted with the availability of this information on the mobile device.”

The study also took a look at the demographic make-up of mobile auto site visitors. Whereas consumers visiting online auto sites closely mirror the overall online population, visitors to mobile auto sites are more likely to be male than the typical mobile user. While men make up 48 percent of the overall mobile audience, they make up 66 percent of mobile auto content users.

“At Jumptap, we work closely with major auto manufacturers to find the best ways to reach the right mobile audience through data and targeting,” said Paran Johar, Chief Marketing Officer for Jumptap. “As brands realize the power and potential of mobile advertising, they are increasingly calling on us to help them understand mobile audience through in-house analysis and outside research. Our auto study, the first in a series of vertical-specific studies Jumptap will be conducting this year, paints a picture of a very fast-growing population of people using smartphones and tablets to research automotive information.”

Jumptap’s Chief Media and Revenue Officer, Todd Anderman, and Stephen Gandee, VP Mobile & Emerging Technology at Edmunds.com presented the full research study at the Mobile: IAB Marketplace in New York City on Monday, July 18th.

For more information on the event, visit http://www.iab.net/events_training/2011/mobile/overview.

For more information on the study, email Sharon Harris at sharon.harris@jumptap.com.

Reporting Methodology
Online data for this research study was sourced from comScore’s global panel of 2 million Internet users. Mobile data was sourced from comScore MobiLens, Plan Metrix Mobile study, and Mobile Metrix product.

About Jumptap
Jumptap is the leader in targeted mobile advertising. With an unmatched portfolio of technology patents, Jumptap’s data-driven solutions deliver the highest ROI for advertisers, and the best yield for publishers, across multiple platforms. The company partners with digital and media agencies, publishers, wireless carriers and brand advertisers, to deliver an array of mobile advertising solutions. For more information, visit www.jumptap.com or follow us on twitter.com/jumptap.

Otilia Otlacan: You have recently launched Local Yokel Media – Congratulations! – the first hyperlocal online ad marketplace. What were the main drivers of this launch, what made you look into hyperlocal opportunities?

Dick O’Hare: With the tremendous growth of the Internet, consumers continue to migrate online for local information.  More local businesses are moving their advertising spend online, to follow this audience.  As a result, online local advertising is now a $16.1 Billion market and growing rapidly.  Meanwhile, “hyperlocal” content is booming—filling the editorial void left by the waning coverage from traditional local media organizations.  This valuable, community-level content presents a compelling, targeted advertising opportunity.  Research shows that 80% of consumer spending happens within 20 miles of home.  Local Yokel Media (LYM) focuses on those 20 miles (or less) to help local marketers reach only those communities within their immediate service area on publisher content those community audiences know and trust.  This level of granular ad targeting delivers “geo-contextual” relevance which drives overall ad performance and media efficiency.

Local Yokel Media is the Internet’s first hyperlocal online ad marketplace.  We are aggregating hyperlocal websites, local blogs and websites of community newspapers to empower marketers to reach granular, local geographies in contextually relevant content.  Hyperlocal campaigns can now be done efficiently and at scale through LYM’s unique platform.

Otilia Otlacan: Geotargeting comes in many flavors already and it’s been years that targeting by zip code is possible in many ad servers, networks and exchanges. How does a hyperlocal targeting compare to zip code targeting, and why would it yield better results for local businesses?

Dick O’Hare: The big difference between more “traditional” geotargeting and what Local Yokel Media is offering boils down to contextual relevance.  Zip code targeting through more traditional means does not deliver contextual relevance between the advertiser and the content the reader is consuming.  It is mainly executed through data overlays.  Content is the proxy for geography in our business model, therefore we deliver “geo-contextual” relevance to the advertising.  It’s all about local businesses reaching local audiences in their service area on local content those audiences know and trust.  We aim to deliver this at scale…all from one platform.  Our campaign data shows that this level of granular, local targeting in context can outperform more traditional geotargeting by multiples.

Otilia Otlacan: What can you tell us about how audience pools are formed in a hyperlocal targeting context? Take, for example, a typical employee who spends maybe 9 – 10 hours a day in location X (at work) and the rest of the day in location Y, some 20 miles distance from X.

Dick O’Hare: Industry research confirms that 80% of consumer spending occurs within 20 miles from home.  Local Yokel Media is all about focusing on those 20 miles for local businesses to communicate their ad message only to the communities within a short drive to their location or within their service area.  That said, from your question above, we mainly focus on where these audiences live (and work if work is within a close proximity).  We see different media consumption patterns with local media vs., say business media.  For example, we often see an increase in ad reception on the weekends when there is more leisure time to consume local media.

Otilia Otlacan: What other targeting options are available through LYM? Any word of advice for those tempted to go about setting targeting options in the same way they’d do it in a standard ad network that supports geotargeting?

Dick O’Hare: Our main targeting offering is hyperlocal targeting, but we also offer behavioral, demographic, zip code targeting, mobile and search engine marketing for advertisers looking for a broader solution.  As far as geotargeting through standard ad networks, that has rapidly become a commodity.  Local Yokel Media is aggregating highly valuable “geo-contextual” ad inventory that can perform better and is truly unique.  We are aggregating, organizing and monetizing this level of inventory and look to become the market specialist in hyperlocal ad inventory monetization.

Otilia Otlacan: I understand that LYM is already in use by a good number of publishers. What was their #1 feature request during the trial period?

Dick O’Hare: Publishers are looking for innovative ways to monetize their inventory to appropriate advertiser sets at more realistic, premium price points.  We are starting to deliver this for our early publishers and also offer them full control and transparency on the direct advertisers Local Yokel Media supplies to them.

Otilia Otlacan: What post-launch plans do you have for LYM? Is it possible that we will get to see it working with non-US publishers and advertisers?

Dick O’Hare: Our plan is to continue to scale LYM across the US market and build a rich, robust marketplace consisting of hyperlocal ad inventory in the “nooks and crannies” of the US DMA’s with thousands of advertisers leveraging this off one platform.  The US market will be our focus for the immediate future.

About Dick O’Hare
Dick O’Hare has been a digital media industry veteran for the past fourteen years with DoubleClick, AOL and Yahoo.  At Yahoo, Dick created and managed the Global Strategic Partnerships and Emerging Marketing Channels team to forge strategic partnerships with Yahoo’s top 25 global clients.  In addition, Dick and his team developed and executed monetization strategies for video, mobile and social media.

Prior to Yahoo, Dick was with AOL Media Networks where he managed sales and account management teams across six US sales regions.  Before joining AOL, Dick served as General Manager of the Business and Technology Network within  DoubleClick’s media business.

Dick also has over ten years of experience in the offline media industry at CMP Media.  While there, he was Publisher of Home PC Magazine, leading it to the #1 position in its category.  During his tenure, CMP Media went public and  later was sold to United News and Media.

Dick holds a BA in Economics from the College of the Holy Cross and resides in New Canaan, CT his wife Claire and three children.

NEW YORK – Undertone, which delivers display, high impact and video advertising solutions, announced the launch of dynamic targeting and creative capabilities which enable advertisers to target and modify ad campaigns based on changing conditions including weather, stock market fluctuations, fuel prices and more. With dynamic targeting and creative, advertisers can deliver more relevant ads automatically, and in real-time, when conditions are most likely to affect product desirability and consumer consideration.

Dynamic targeting and creative are designed to benefit advertisers across a range of industry sectors. Financial services advertisers, for example, can use the technology to run ads only when a stock index rises or falls to a certain level. They can then dynamically update their ad creative to include the current market conditions, further increasing relevance and impact.

At launch, dynamic targeting and creative will enable advertisers to leverage weather reports, financial indices, lottery jackpots, and fuel prices. Additional feeds can be quickly layered into the technology to meet advertisers’ specific requirements.

“Dynamic targeting and creative enable our advertisers to leverage offline, real-time events to influence ad delivery in a scalable, brand-safe environment,” said John Sabella, Chief Technology Officer, Undertone. “On-demand, dynamically updated ads can now be delivered specifically to users who may be impacted by critical events as they are happening.”

Dynamic targeting is the latest addition to the suite of targeting capabilities available through Undertone’s proprietary ad serving platform, Undertone Ad Server™.

About Undertone

Undertone delivers quality display, high impact and video experiences for advertisers, publishers and the global audiences they serve. Undertone’s Digital Advertising Suite™ is a single solution to manage multi-format, digital ad campaigns across the best sites on the web. The product portfolio is architected as a unified platform that supports targeting, optimization and reporting across display and in-stream video. Armed with the insights to turn data into better decisions, Undertone helps marketers around the world create value from their online investments. For more information, go to www.undertone.com.

CAMBRIDGE, MA – Jumptap, the leader in targeted mobile advertising, announced that it has been awarded its 14th patent issued by the United States Patent Office.  The patent, #7,970,389, is titled “Dynamic Bidding and Expected Value.”

Jumptap’s patent portfolio, which has grown by eight new patents in the past 12 months, covers targeted advertising on mobile devices – including phones and tablets – powered by data such as demographic, geographic, behavioral, contextual, and transactional information.  As such, Jumptap believes the portfolio is fundamental to the operations of any mobile advertising business that seeks to use data for targeting.   The complete list of the company’s patents is available on its web site at http://www.jumptap.com/intellectual-property.

The latest patent awarded to Jumptap is related to a computer-implemented method for positioning targeted sponsored content on a mobile communication facility, the method comprising the steps of:

-        Receiving data corresponding to a transaction event having occurred via the interaction of a user with the mobile communication facility, wherein the transaction event includes transmission of data representative of a first product or a first service being purchased by the user;

-        selecting advertising content based at least upon a relevance between an advertisement for a second product or a second service and the purchased first product or first service in the transaction event, wherein the relevance is further based on information relating to compatibility of the advertising content, second product, or second service with the mobile communication facility; and

-        presenting the selected advertising content on a display of the mobile communication facility.

“As mobile advertising becomes more driven by technology and marketers seek more effective targeting, Jumptap is uniquely positioned to deliver the most effective methods of reaching key audiences,” said George Bell, CEO of Jumptap.  “Jumptap’s impressive roster of 14 patents demonstrates our commitment to technological leadership, and has been an integral aspect of our dynamic growth.  We look forward to continue driving innovation and engagement.”

The inventors of the patent are Jorey Ramer, Adam Soroca, and Dennis Doughty.   The company currently has 70 published patent applications and anticipates additional patent awards over the coming quarter.

About Jumptap
Jumptap is the leader in targeted mobile advertising.  With an unmatched portfolio of technology patents, Jumptap’s data-driven solutions deliver the highest ROI for advertisers, and the best yield for publishers, across multiple platforms.  The company partners with digital and media agencies, publishers, wireless carriers and brand advertisers, to deliver an array of mobile advertising solutions.  For more information, visit www.jumptap.com or follow us on twitter.com/jumptap.

New York – Digital media industry veteran Dick O’Hare today launches Local Yokel Media (LYM) the Internet’s first hyperlocal online ad marketplace specializing in monetizing hyperlocal ad impressions.  For the first time in the Internet’s history, any local or national business serving a defined geography can target audiences in their immediate service areas on local online content communities have come to know and trust.

“We have seen a seismic shift in traditional local media over the past five years,” says Mr. O’Hare, Local Yokel Media’s CEO and Founder.  “Hyperlocal content, specifically, community- level content being produced both by individuals and institutions, has proliferated as local coverage by more traditional, offline local media organizations has waned.  It is said that 80% of consumer spending happens within 20 miles of home. This presents a compelling ad targeting opportunity for local, regional and national brands looking to target extremely tight geographies.  We have found this level of local contextual relevance drives ad performance.  In some instances, it can even outperform search engine marketing.”

The hyperlocal market segment has been growing rapidly over the last few years with market entrants such as AOL’s Patch, Gannet, Post Local and others.  Where many of these players are focusing on content creation, LYM’s unique market position is that of monetization specialist.

“Genuine local targeting and ad creative can produce dramatic response-rate improvements for marketers,” says Greg Sterling, of Sterling Market Intelligence and Opus Research. “There are billions of dollars in the local market; this is a giant opportunity that has been waiting for a scalable platform and approach.”

“Hyperlocal is a growing market with lots of companies coming into that space. Dick has the right background and perspective to help these new niche sites generate ad revenue while at the same time making it painless for national and local marketers to zero in on their customers where they live and work,” says Wenda Harris Millard, President and COO of Media Link, a leading media advisory firm.

With its proprietary ad serving platform and unique, cartographic technology, LYM aggregates hyperlocal websites (websites whose content address a specific community), local blogs and websites of community newspapers, organizes them by zip code and makes them easy to target.  Local Yokel Media’s internal campaign data show this level of “geo-contextual” ad targeting (targeting down to the community level in contextually relevant content) drives ad receptivity and overall ad performance.  This now can be done from one platform.

LYM’s unique value proposition lies in its ability to deliver very granular, local ad campaigns at scale while offering professionally created ad templates advertisers can leverage for optimal results.  These campaigns can be executed at a small fraction of the cost of more traditional offline local marketing efforts like direct mail.

Early ad campaigns confirm that consumers are more receptive to ads that target their specific needs in their own local community, thus improving overall ad performance.  By contrast, a consumer targeted by zip code, a traditional big-media approach, might have to drive 50 or 60 miles to reach an advertiser’s storefront.

“The results we received from our campaign with Local Yokel Media were multiple times what we previously saw from our offline ad campaigns, ” says Dan Hageney, Founder of Connecticut Green Organic Lawn Care Company serving Fairfield County, CT.

More than 60 publishers have signed up for LYM’s ad marketplace and many are already seeing positive results.  “Local Yokel Media has done a terrific job in delivering curated ads with more premium revenue to our local websites,”  says Marty Hersam, COO at Connecticut’s Hersam Acorn Newspapers. “We look forward to working more closely with them to capture more local advertisers looking to target the communities we serve.”

Dick O’Hare, a digital media industry veteran for the past 15 years holding senior management positions at DoubleClick, AOL Media Networks and Yahoo, Inc. has assembled a seasoned digital media team with decades of experience from such industry stalwarts as Yahoo, AOL, DoubleClick, iVillage and Quigo.  The LYM team is committed to making geographically targeted local advertising easier on both the local advertisers and publishers.

“Local Yokel Media is poised to finally crack the code of making local advertising work online.  Dick is one of the smartest online execs I’ve ever met and his hyperlocal ad strategy is certain to be successful,” says Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia, former founder of Real Media and TACODA and an investor in LYM.

Local Yokel Media (http://www.localyokelmedia.com) the Internet’s first hyperlocal online ad marketplace specializing in monetizing hyperlocal ad impressions has raised angel funding from seasoned industry veterans like Mr. Morgan, Joe Apprendi, CEO and Founder of Collective Media and Joe Zawadski, CEO and Founder of Media Math.

NEW YORK – GroupM announced the launch of Xaxis, a global audience buying company that combines all of the demand-side data and technology resources of WPP (NASDAQ:WPPGY) and the trading leverage of the GroupM agencies into a single comprehensive resource. Housing the world’s largest pool of audience profiles in its proprietary database and reaching more touchpoints than any other solution in the industry, Xaxis empowers GroupM clients to deliver targeted advertising to global audiences more effectively than ever before. At launch, Xaxis will have a presence in 11 countries across North America, the UK, Europe and Australia, with plans to expand into additional markets later this year.

WPP’s introduction of Xaxis attests to the rapidly growing importance of audience buying and the demand for solutions that allow advertisers to target specific audiences directly, independent of website, app or media platform. Xaxis’ proprietary data management platform, which aggregates audience information across multiple online and offline channels, enables GroupM clients to target highly-specific Audience Portraits across the universe of addressable media. By reaching only the most relevant audiences via a variety of media platforms – display advertising, mobile ads, video ads and paid social media – Xaxis delivers dramatically improved performance at lower cost than other industry solutions.

In forming Xaxis, WPP brings together a broad portfolio of audience buying capabilities that have been independently developed and optimized in various parts of GroupM and WPP Digital over the past three years in businesses including B3, targ.ad, GoldNetwork, GroupM DSP and the GroupM Marketplace. In 2010 alone, the businesses that have combined to form Xaxis executed approximately 4,000 campaigns for more than 400 GroupM clients. Xaxis will be led by CEO Brian Lesser, who previously served as global general manager of the Media Innovation Group (MIG), WPP’s digital marketing technology company.

“Xaxis streamlines and improves advertisers’ ability to directly target specific audiences, at scale and at lower cost than any other audience buying solution,” said Brian Lesser. “In addition to more effective audience targeting, Xaxis navigates the complex and highly specialized digital marketing environment of DSPs, ad exchanges, ad networks, optimization tools and data suppliers. Because Xaxis operates a proprietary technology platform without bias to any media company, we can better provide objective and comprehensive insight to our partners.”

“Over the past three years we have made significant investment in our demand-side buying capabilities across North America and key European markets. We are pleased to combine that knowledge and expertise into the industry’s first, completely self-contained audience buying solution,” said Rob Norman, CEO of GroupM Interaction. “As a proprietary platform, Xaxis is able to better protect client data, more effectively integrate real-time bidding with search and more seamlessly execute campaigns across multiple media owners and digital platforms.”

Xaxis will launch with products that help advertisers generate brand awareness, engage with customers and drive actions across all digital media channels with measurable return on investment. One such product allows advertisers to precisely extend the reach of television audiences through digital media with zero waste. Xaxis also provides advertisers exclusive access to audience targeting in premium contextual environments comprised of GroupM’s top media partners. All Xaxis media products are supported by insight and analysis made possible by the proprietary Xaxis data management platform, the only technology of its kind amongst media agencies.

“Historically, the most robust technology solutions have been applied to the process of selling media on behalf of publishers,” said Mark Read, CEO of WPP Digital. “With Xaxis, we introduce a significant advance to the demand-side of the equation, allowing us to optimize and target client campaigns with an unprecedented level of precision across multiple digital platforms. No other media group offers advertisers a comparable level of sophistication and reach in their audience buying capabilities.”

About Xaxis

Xaxis is the world’s largest audience buying company. Through its proprietary platform, Xaxis offers advertisers a single, comprehensive resource from which to reach and engage with global audiences across the universe of digital media. Xaxis does this for its GroupM agency partners, Maxus, MEC, MediaCom, and Mindshare. Xaxis has a presence in 11 countries across North America, Europe, and Australia. Xaxis is part of WPP.

Xaxis | Digital Brilliance

ABOUT GROUPM

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

Cambridge, MA – ChoiceStream®, an innovator in online personalized marketing solutions for major brands, launched CRUNCH, the first custom audience advertising platform that uses proprietary consumer intent and conversion behavior to predict how audiences will react to brand messages. Building on ChoiceStream’s 10 years of harnessing customer data to predict and drive marketing performance, the new platform will allow brands to find qualified prospects regardless of where they are online, helping advertisers find well-qualified reach in the most cost-efficient way. CRUNCH combines a rich, proprietary database of consumer intentions from partners with select sources of behavioral data to customize the audience most likely to respond to the advertiser’s display ad campaign.

CRUNCH is the only advertising platform that is focused on audience targeting at the individual level, going well beyond the practice of targeting to pre-defined commercially available segments.  CRUNCH creates custom audiences of individually-selected consumers who are best suited for the particular campaign. Targeting gets smarter with each ad response; individuals enter and leave CRUNCH’s custom audience segment as their intentions and interests change allowing CRUNCH to persistently optimize to the most responsive consumers.

In a variety of beta tests, CRUNCH delivered extraordinary results. For example 3,100 new, pre-qualified shoppers were delivered to one client’s shopping cart, in less than 60 days. In another test, on average, new registrants sent to a client via CRUNCH spent 35% more on their subsequent purchases,  and in a third test, CRUNCH lowered a client’s cost to engage new shoppers by 30% and lastly,  CRUNCH provided a 73% percent higher click through rate from another’s client’s prior baseline.

“The CRUNCH platform takes performance of online display advertising to a new level, and bridges the gap between brands and consumers,” says Steve Johnson, CEO, ChoiceStream. “CRUNCH replaces the imprecise practice of guessing an advertiser’s target audience with a fully automated means of using up-to-the-minute consumer intent data to help brands discover their perfect audience, the only service that can do this today.”

CRUNCH offers a full service, easy-to-use solution to agencies and advertisers that eliminates the burden of manually configuring audience targets, sourcing media and tracking performance.  CRUNCH provides audience analytics that reveal to advertisers undiscovered audiences, and provides insights they can apply across their integrated marketing programs.  To expand its unique data footprint, CRUNCH has integrated with selected data management platforms, such as AlmondNet Data Division and eXelate.  Because CRUNCH is integrated with AppNexus, it has the option to use real-time bidding to get the inventory and ad serving necessary for large-scale campaigns.

“Because we manage a campaign from completed creative to delivery of final results, one might call CRUNCH a ‘custom audience targeting platform.’   Unlike DSPs, we have our own algorithms that allow us to optimize audiences for our client’s specific campaigns which learn and improve as our client keeps using our platform,” adds Mr. Johnson. “We also provide detailed audience analysis – what types of people saw and responded to the campaign – at the end of each campaign as part of our service. No other company provides the full-service audience targeting and back end reporting that CRUNCH does.”

“When you have great data like ChoiceStream your ability to deliver an effective brand message goes up,” says Colin W. Gillis, Director of Research and Senior Technology Analyst at BGC Financial, L.P. “And I like that the best data is kept proprietary.”

CRUNCH works closely with its clients to improve their return on ad spend by optimizing campaign performance to the engagement or conversion events that advertisers care most about.  CRUNCH is available to brand and direct response advertisers across all vertical markets.

ChoiceStream, Inc. (www.choicestream.com) is an innovator in online advertising and personalized marketing solutions. For more than ten years, companies like AT&T, Zappos, Tesco, Ticketmaster and MTV have relied on ChoiceStream to create a more engaging, personally relevant experience for their consumers.  By transforming shopping behavior and media consumption into intelligence about a consumer’s unique preferences, ChoiceStream is able to help today’s biggest brands target their most qualified prospects with the right advertisement, email promotion and product recommendations to improve brand engagement, conversion rates and customer loyalty.

RALEIGH, N.C.- aiMatch, the intelligent ad-serving platform for online publishers, announced that it has signed an agreement to help Hachette Filipacchi’s global entertainment website Digital Spy maximise advertising revenues across its international portfolio.

Global entertainment news site Digital Spy reaches 10 million unique users and serves 130 million pageviews per month. It is one of the U.K.’s largest entertainment news websites, and has recently launched in the United States. The company will be the first in the U.K. to utilize aiMatch’s platform to help better define and deliver target audiences for advertisers, who will be able to reach segments of Digital Spy’s engaged audience through highly targeted campaigns. The publication will also use aiMatch’s advanced business intelligence technology to better understand the correlation between different editorial content and advertiser revenue, enabling Digital Spy’s business teams to help advertisers reach audiences following editorial content covering specific TV shows, movies and celebrities.

“Advertisers are looking to buy audiences, but many ad servers are stuck on archaic site and zone pairings and focus just on ad delivery,” said Richard Swan, ad operations manager of Hachette Filipacchi Media. “aiMatch offers a fresh approach to ad serving, one where we can match our ad products to our editorial content and ratecard, giving editors, sales and traffic teams a common point of reference. At the same time, aiMatch provides us forecasting based on actual simulations, ensuring greater accuracy for both impression and revenue projections.”

The aiMatch platform allows publishers to not only track typical ad delivery metrics but also key pricing information such as ratecard, goal and floor price. Innovative data visualisation technology transforms these complex data sets into easily understandable dashboards for sales and operations to better perform their jobs.

“Like many premium publishers, Digital Spy wants to get the most revenue out of its content,” said aiMatch CEO Jeff Wood. “Our enhanced data capabilities give Digital Spy unique insight into which content is driving the most revenue, and help the sales team predict availability across many content segments.”

By displaying the highest value inventory available for sale, together with advertisers that have bought this inventory in the past and the value of those campaigns, the aiMatch platform provides actionable data direct to the Commercial & Inventory teams.

“It’s great to be working with a team of technology experts that really understand publishers’ business requirements and listen to our feedback,” said Richard Swan. “Plus I’m seeing new functionality released to customers every month.”

About aiMatch

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