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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

About OpenX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Campaigns should be optimized for engagement to maximize yield.

- Tracking ad engagement validates that impressions were viewable.

- Clicks are not the exclusive indicator of purchase intent.

About mediaFORGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compelling Features of Successful Brand Websites

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

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

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

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

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

Research Study Design

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

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

Additional Information

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

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

- www.comscore.com/cpg_brands_maximizing_return_digital_investment

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

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

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

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

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

Deadline to participate is March 31, 2012.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About LiveRail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Mitchell Reichgut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Bizo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About ZEDO

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

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

Advertising: Global Industry Guide is an essential resource from MarketLine for top-level data and analysis covering the advertising industry. It includes detailed data on market size and segmentation, textual analysis of the key trends and competitive landscape, and profiles of the leading companies. This incisive report provides expert analysis on a global, regional and country basis.

Scope of the Report:

- Contains an executive summary and data on value, volume and segmentation
- Provides textual analysis of the industry’s prospects, competitive landscape and profiles of the leading companies
- Incorporates in-depth five forces competitive environment analysis and scorecards
- Covers the Global, European and Asia-Pacific markets as well as individual chapters on 5 major markets (France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US).
- Includes a five-year forecast of the industry

Highlights:

- The global advertising industry grew by 5.9% in 2010 to reach a value of $86,758.2 million.
- In 2015, the global advertising industry is forecast to have a value of $113,424.8 million, an increase of 30.7% since 2010.
- Food, Beverage & Personal/Healthcare is the largest segment of the global advertising industry, accounting for 25.4% of the industry’s total value.
- Americas accounts for 42.1% of the global advertising industry value.

Why you should buy this report:

- Spot future trends and developments
- Inform your business decisions
- Add weight to presentations and marketing materials
- Save time carrying out entry-level research

Key Topics Covered:

Global advertising
Advertising in Asia-pacific
Advertising in Europe
Advertising in France
Advertising in Germany
Advertising in Japan
Advertising in the United Kingdom
Advertising in the United States

Companies Profiled:

WPP Group plc
Omnicom Group Inc.
Publicis Groupe SA
The Interpublic Group of Companies, Inc.
For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/cbcfe5/advertising_globa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Balihoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Tremor Video

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

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

About TubeMogul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Jumptap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Greystripe:

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

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

About ValueClick, Inc.:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About CPX Interactive

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

About Semcasting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Industry Leaders on vCE and vGRP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re on it. Last year, we partnered with AdXPose, which was acquired by comScore. Now we can document for our partners when we serve an ad and it is seen. comScore has shared with us numbers that validate our intuition that above and below the fold have become meaningless because of reader habits, and that new ad units can help generate new revenue for publishers.

For example, last year  one in four ads above the fold was never seen, and 32% of  all ads were delivered but never seen. This means ads below the fold, while traditionally less costly, were almost as effective as those in the traditional “best” spots above the fold.

Because we have been serving ads for over a decade, we were in a position to spot this early, and to do something about it.

We’ve come up with some new, best-in-class products that can be used by any publisher, whether they use our ad server or any other. They’re aimed at creating additional revenue for publishers, while assuring brands and advertisers their ads will be seen (we can prove it) in a brand-safe environment. As far as we know, we’re the first to do this.

We started as the infrastructure for our publisher partners when we served the ad. As we evolved, we became more of a full service outsourced ad operations company. This enabled us to learn more about how online advertising technology really works to help marketers, and therefore to help publishers.

This year, we have begun to launch new best-in-class products for all publishers whether they use our ad server or not. The best-in-class InView format, for example, will appear only if we know the user will see it – and that can be measured. This InView product is designed to meet the new ways readers consume publications.

We will also offer other best-in-class products for all publishers (regardless of which ad server they use). “TVAds OnPage” is a best-in-class video ad format. Ad Ops services from ZEDO are also best-in-class because we are a US company with high standards and because as the only ad ops company that builds an ad server we are a true technology expert that can run any ad server perfectly.

During the course of this year, we will roll out three more products for all publishers that are best-in-class.

We continue to move forward in product development, knowing we operate in a very fast-moving environment and we must continue to prove our value.

About ZEDO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the IAB

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies that are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising. Founded in 1996, the IAB is headquartered in New York City with a Public Policy office in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.iab.net.

About Winterberry Group

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

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

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

Key findings in the report:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

About 24/7 Real Media, Inc.

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

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

24/7 Real Media: The Science of Digital Marketing

About Panache

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About LiveRail

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

Among the three selected apps, Weico is most influential as it is the most popular third party mobile app for Sina Weibo – the Twitter equivalent in China, and it now has over three million registered users and 500,000 daily active users; Guohe helped Starbucks to fill the most important position on Weico, and when users click on the banner ad, they will be directed to a HTML5 mini site that enables them to check-in and share about being at a Starbucks store without ever leaving the ad. It has achieved over 40,000 daily impressions between Dec 18 to 20, and the click through rate is around 1.4% on average.

“We are thrilled to team up with Starbucks,” said Neo Zhang, co-founder of Guohe Ad, “Guohe selected a few high quality mobile apps for this ad campaign and the feedback is very encouraging. We will continue to explore how we can better serve both developers and advertisers.”

“It is the first time for Starbucks to tap mobile advertising in China and it is really an impressive campaign,” said Lu Huang, Marketing Director of President Starbucks Coffee Shanghai, “The ad targeting and integration of social media efficiently helped Starbucks to convert mobile users into our real customers, it also enabled Starbucks to celebrate Christmas with customers in the online and offline world, and communicate the idea of Starbucks fourth place experiences.”

About Guohe

Guohe is the leading mobile ad management platform focusing in providing the most innovative solutions for advertisers and developers. It currently provides ad mediation, yield optimization, ad serving and data metrics services to thousands of app developers and brand advertisers. Launch in January 2011, Guohe has partnered with over 10 major ad networks globally, and is now headquartered in Beijing with offices in Shanghai and Taipei. Learn more about Guohe at http://www.guohead.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Greystripe

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

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

About ValueClick, Inc.

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

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

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

Specific enhancements include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Brand.net

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

The company is privately held and headquartered in Silicon Valley.

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.

Pangis has spent most of her career at 24/7 Real Media, in two separate stints. Between the two, she received her MBA and worked at a technology start up. As Director of Global Deployment and Business Integration, she oversaw all global projects and the coordination of joint venture expansions, mainly in Asia. Nicolle coordinated the opening of DTSI, a joint venture between 24/7 Real Media and Dentsu in Korea. When 24/7 Real Media was acquired by WPP in 2007, Pangis led the team that ensured the company was properly integrated into the WPP ecosystem.

In running Global Media and Technology Product Management since 2007, Nicolle has overseen the launch of five new versions of the company’s proprietary ad serving technology, Open AdStream®; numerous partnership agreements and integrations and most recently the launch of 24/7 Connect and 24/7 Real Media’s real-time bidding capabilities.

“I am delighted to be moving into this new role and leading the expansion of our footprint in Europe and the U.K.,” said Pangis. “The landscape of digital marketing has become very complex and I look forward to working with our clients to grow their revenue opportunities by leveraging the impressive single platform solution we’ve developed over the past several years for publishers and advertisers.”

Pangis holds a Bachelor of Science in Communication from Boston University and an MBA in Strategic Management and Marketing from Rutgers Business School. An active member of the IAB, she was instrumental in creating the IAB Networks and Exchanges Guidelines and currently serves as co-chair for the review and enforcement of these Guidelines in the industry.

Her new role is effective immediately.

About 24/7 Real Media, Inc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most Effective Luxury Automotive TV Ads, Q4 To Date*

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

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

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

Follow Ace Metrix on Twitter for additional insight: Ace_Metrix.

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

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

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

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

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

About Specific Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Mediaspace Solutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

About InsightExpress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the other findings explored in this report include:

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

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

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

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

Methodology

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

About the IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence

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

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

About the IAB

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies that are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising. Founded in 1996, the IAB is headquartered in New York City with a Public Policy office in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.iab.net.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Tremor Video

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

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

About Nielsen

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

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/

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

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

The research surfaced five key findings:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BALTIMORE & LONDON & SINGAPORE – Millennial Media, the independent leader in mobile advertising, announced mmStudio, a suite of mobile advertising tools intended to enable advertisers and agencies to easily deliver compelling mobile ads on Millennial Media’s global mobile platform. Millennial Media is integrated with over 10 rich media vendors, and inside mmStudio, advertisers have access to wireframes that will allow them to design traditional ad creative like expandable banners and interactive video, as well as Millennial Media’s proven mobile experiences that allow advertisers to engage consumers.

“With mmStudio, we’re making innovation easy, and giving advertisers tools that will allow them to collaborate with us to create next generation mobile ads,” said Jamie Fellows, SVP, Product, Millennial Media. “Both consumers and advertisers have raised their expectations around mobile advertising, and brands need a platform partner that will allow them to deliver on these expectations, and drive true engagement whether it be with the ads we create, the advertiser creates or via our rich media partners.”

The mmStudio experiences are capable of being served like creative or used as immersive destinations that allow brands to forge a connection with consumers. A few of the initial creative solutions included in mmStudio are:

Mobile Circular: Advertises up to 20 products within a single creative. In market for more than a year, Millennial Media’s Mobile Circular allows brands to replicate a traditional free standing insert.

360° View: Enables consumers to interact with an object and rotate it 360° in any direction, highlighting a product’s features in a rotating, customizable format.

“Smash It”: Interactive game unit that prompts users to tap certain objects on the screen to gain points, while avoiding other images that will cause them to lose the game. Players can easily post scores to social media sites, driving viral interest in the ad.

The Cube: Supports up to six images—one on each “side” of the cube. The cube is navigated by four arrows that rotate the cube in the guided direction to give the appearance of a 3D view.

Media Gallery: Enables advertisers to display a series of different images that progress from left to right. Image progression can be user initiated through swipes or taps from the consumer, or the images can load automatically.

“Millennial Media’s release of mmStudio is a great initiative to further facilitate richer experiences within mobile advertising. Features like 360° View promote more in-depth & dynamic consumer interaction and are therefore potentially more likely to influence decisions further down the purchase funnel,” said Milton Elias, Head of Mobile, Starcom MediaVest Group.

Inside mmStudio, advertisers have access to wireframes that will allow them to design their ad creative and simplify the process of creating mobile ad units. The wireframes will give advertisers an easy to use solution to design everything from the new creative units like the “Smash It,” to traditional mobile advertising formats like expandable banners. The Millennial Media platform is also integrated with over 10 rich media vendors, such as Celtra, Crisp, and others, giving advertisers the flexibility to work with Millennial Media to develop their creative, use wireframes to design their own units, or use their current creative partner.

Wireframes are also available for other Millennial Media creative products, such as Interactive Video, where advertisers can overlay interactive features on top of their video content. Interactive Video is a high impact HD video ad layered with interactive features that deliver a uniquely mobile, actionable experience to customers. The interactive elements encourage customers to engage with the ad, and can be tailored by advertisers to deliver against their specific goals. Advertisers can select from over 15 different feature options including “Buy,” “Download,” “Locate,” or “Share,” and choose the option that best fits their individual campaign.

Before the wide-release of mmStudio, Millennial Media had previously made the new ad formats available on a limited basis to select advertisers. Examples can be seen here: http://www.millennialmedia.com/research/campaign-summaries/.

About Millennial Media

Millennial Media is the leading independent mobile advertising and data platform. As an independent company, Millennial Media commands an impressive share of the mobile display advertising market. The company’s technology, tools and services also power some of the largest companies in the media business today. Millennial Media is committed to growing the mobile advertising marketplace by becoming the preferred partner to all advertisers seeking to reach mobile consumers, all application and media developers seeking to maximize ad revenue, and all mobile operators seeking to further monetize their networks. Millennial Media was named one of the top 75 fastest growing private companies in America by the Inc 500.

Visit http://www.millennialmedia.com for more information; and join our Facebook community, follow us on Twitter at @millennialmedia or subscribe to our YouTube page at http://www.youtube.com/user/millennialmediavideo for exclusive videos. Mobile developers can visit http://developer.millennialmedia.com/ to learn more about monetizing their apps.

NEW YORK – 24/7 Real Media, Inc., WPP’s ad technology company, announced the availability of real-time bidding (RTB) within its proprietary ad management technology, Open AdStream®. With this new capability, 24/7 Real Media delivers the first enterprise-level technology solution that enables real-time bidding within a single ad management platform driving increased yield and superior control.

24/7 Real Media’s new RTB capabilities allow a publisher to put its inventory into a single ecosystem that dynamically allocates revenue and delivers optimal yield. This unique capability differentiates Open AdStream from other platforms in the marketplace today by allowing the publisher to filter and assign value to biddable inventory based on audience and context unlike other systems that require publishers to segment specific inventory for RTB. 24/7 Real Media’s new capabilities also give advertising clients a simple solution for bidding on premium, first-tier inventory from a trusted, accountable source.

“At 24/7 Real Media, we are always looking to innovate in ways that help our clients recognize new revenue opportunities,” said David J. Moore, Chairman, Founder and CEO at 24/7 Real Media. “By enabling publishers to open up their inventory for real-time bidding in a controlled way, we enhance the publisher’s ability to identify the actual worth of each segment of inventory on their site. Similarly, advertisers are guaranteed quality inventory from a biddable environment, where their messages are most likely to resonate with online users.”

Open AdStream’s real-time bidding technology provides publishers new opportunities for more revenue with less risk, serving ads to a new bidder only if it beats an earlier price or set floor. Unlike ad exchanges in the market today, 24/7 Real Media’s Open AdStream provides access for real-time bidding within a single decision engine. By using a singular system, instead of integrations between multiple systems, the experience for the users viewing the ads is improved due to faster page loading speeds and there are far less complexities for publishers managing their inventory. Publishers will receive only one report for all inventory sold and their cost is reduced because fewer calls are made by the ad server.

“The addition of real-time bidding to our technology platform allows publishers to surface inventory through RTB in the same way they leverage reserved inventory to ensure the highest yield on each impression,” said Nicolle Pangis, EVP, Product Management Global Media and Technology at 24/7 Real Media. “For advertising clients looking for a way to bid on top-tier inventory, we provide a simple, intuitive and accountable means for them to do so.”

Not only will this technology power publishers working with 24/7 Real Media, but it will also serve clients of the Media Innovation Group (MIG) and GroupM’s Xaxis through a connection to WPP’s proprietary DSP technology.

About 24/7 Real Media, Inc.

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

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

SAN FRANCISCO – Since launching its mobile video ad format earlier this year, Greystripe, the largest brand-focused mobile ad network and a division of ValueClick Inc. (Nasdaq: VCLK), has seen an increasing number of brand advertisers flock to video.

The mobile video ad units were launched in June 2011. Since then, over 30 brands have run campaigns, delivering over 100 ad creatives throughout the Greystripe network on iOS, Android and the mobile web. The demand for mobile video ads has increased significantly in recent months; Greystripe has already seen a 300 percent increase in the number of campaigns booked so far in Q4 of 2011 relative to all of Q3 2011.

Universal Pictures and its agency, Ignited, ran a successful campaign with Greystripe to drive trailer views and promote the theatrical release of the new film The Change-Up. The two-week campaign, targeting men 18-34, generated nearly nine hundred thousand complete trailer views. A video of the ad displayed on an iPhone can be seen here. In addition to entertainment, retail, consumer-packaged goods, insurance and electronics brands have all run mobile video ad campaigns with Greystripe.

“We are consistently seeing mobile ad dollars flowing to mobile ad digital as users embrace multiple screens — often using their smartphones and tablets while watching TV,” said Vikrant Gandhi, senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan.

Greystripe is benefiting from the massive shift of broadcast advertising budgets into mobile, driven by the efficiency and effectiveness of reaching the 40 percent of TV watchers who are on their smartphones and tablets at the same time (Nielsen). In addition, advertisers are flocking to Greystripe’s video format because of impressive campaign results. On average, consumers have watched the entire video ad 50 percent of the time, with click-through-rates of between 1 and 3 percent. This is particularly impressive because users have the option to skip Greystripe video ads at any time.

“Mobile video ads will be the major growth driver for brand advertising spend in 2012, as traditional broadcast budgets continue to flow into mobile and online screens,” said Michael Chang, Greystripe general manager. “Greystripe is well positioned to take advantage of this video-fueled growth because of a fantastic ad user experience and our ability to serve more full-screen mobile video ads into premium content than any other mobile ad network – over 1 billion per month.”

For more information visit: http://www.greystripe.com/videoads/

About Greystripe

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

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

About ValueClick, Inc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York, NY – CPX Interactive, a digital advertising company and global distribution engine, and AppNexus, the world leader in real-time advertising technology, announced that CPX has chosen AppNexus as its exclusive ad server in order to maximize operational and cost efficiencies for its clients. The new ad serving relationship with AppNexus, coupled with CPX’s vast reach and expertise in data integration, targeting and campaign optimization, will enhance its ability to provide agencies and advertisers with increased performance and publishers with the most sophisticated yield management controls and monetization tools on the market.

Additionally, CPX was named as one of the inaugural app providers for AppNexus’ groundbreaking new App Marketplace for the digital ad technology industry, also announced today at the AppNexus Summit. Through the AppNexus App Marketplace, CPX is building a customized reporting app to present relevant information to its multitude of publishers within the AppNexus Console user interface.

As a result of the exclusive ad server arrangement, AppNexus will provide CPX with its comprehensive suite of core ad infrastructure for buying and selling including ad serving, third-party data management and first-party data collection and support for more real-time and directly negotiated media campaigns.

“We are thrilled to announce our exclusive partnership with AppNexus and are extremely confident in its world-class platform to manage CPX’s enormous reach of nearly two billion global impressions per day,” said CPX CEO, Mike Seiman. “AppNexus has an incredibly scalable platform which can handle our rapidly growing ad serving and real-time bidding needs and, in allowing it to do so, we remain focused on our core competencies – designing and executing digital campaigns, driving the highest yield for our publisher partners and generating powerful and proprietary first-party campaign data.”

CPX Interactive delivers 60 billion impressions per month to more than 300 million global unique users in 65 countries and is recognized in the online advertising sector as a top-tier ad network. Some of their more than 4,000 direct publishers include Accuweather, Beliefnet.com, Examiner, Free Online Games, myYearbook, Local.com and Publishers Clearing House. CPX Interactive also works with 300+ advertisers, globally, on both performance and brand initiatives alike in verticals ranging from CPG, automotive, travel and finance to entertainment, social, health and retail.

“CPX is one of the most innovative ad networks in the market, renowned as an early adopter of industry-leading technologies,” said Brian O’Kelley, CEO and Co-Founder, AppNexus. “We look forward to helping the company continue to push boundaries and differentiate its business on top of the AppNexus platform.”

About CPX Interactive
CPX Interactive is a digital advertising company and global distribution engine, creating end-to-end solutions for advertisers and publishers across the online display advertising landscape. CPX Interactive delivers 60 billion impressions to more than 300 million unique users in 65 countries every month. The company was named to Inc.Magazine’s list of fastest growing privately held US advertising/marketing companies in both 2008 and 2009. For more information, visit www.cpxinteractive.com.

About AppNexus
AppNexus is the world leader in real-time advertising technology, serving the largest and most innovative buyers and sellers of online advertising, including Microsoft Advertising Exchange, Collective and Technorati Media. Led by the pioneers of the Web’s original ad exchanges at Yahoo!’s Right Media and Google’s DoubleClick, AppNexus offers the industry’s most advanced technology platform that empowers companies to build, manage and optimize their entire online advertising businesses. Based in New York City, AppNexus is backed by an outstanding group of investors including Microsoft, Venrock, Kodiak Venture Partners, First Round Capital, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and Ron Conway. For more information, visit www.appnexus.com.

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.