Watertown, Mass. November 3, 2008 – Bluestreak, a marketing technology company and division of Aegis Media, today announced the availability of Bluestreak 5.0 as an enterprise-class ad serving platform specifically designed to deliver, measure, de-duplicate and report anonymous consumer-level marketing activity across multiple digital media channels. “For interactive advertisers and agencies, the new version of Bluestreak relieves a significant frustration many marketers face by offering a convenient solution to integrate and evaluate display, rich media and search data,” said Art Muldoon, SVP of sales and marketing.

Bluestreak 5.0 provides four primary benefits that enable greater data insights and client support to improve digital marketing campaign performance, reduce media costs and increase value for marketers:

Integration of multi-channel campaign data – Agencies and advertisers can deploy and track their campaigns across display advertising, rich media, video, search and e-mail channels in a de-duplicated, coordinated manner. This feature reduces the day-to-day guess-work and time trying to understand disparate campaign information in while elevating the analysis around consumer-level actions and campaign data.

Conversion Attribution Reporting – Bluestreak also resolves marketers’ concerns about “the last ad clicked” methodology, whereby the final media unit interacted with receives all the credit for a conversion, overlooking the impact other media impressions might hold. Bluestreak’s Conversion Attribution Report measures all of the various consumer touch points during a campaign and helps marketers understand the consumer’s media path and consider the impact of creative. Bluestreak tracks ad exposure to present insightful data about the multiple sites, views, and channels that lead to eventual purchase or other actions.

Custom Marketing Dashboards – Bluestreak’s innovative marketing dashboard makes it easy to spot highlights and trends from digital campaigns. The clear, colorful charts and graphs allow time-pressed executives convenient access to marketing insights so they can determine the impact of their media investment. In addition, Bluestreak’s solution can aggregate results across campaigns, clients, and geographies for the largest global advertisers.

Industry Leading Global Support – Finally, Bluestreak upholds these new features with our industry leading support team to ensure that Bluestreak’s agency and advertiser clients are completely satisfied. From the initial setup of the Ad Manager, to training, to custom reports, Bluestreak’s support team is dedicated to client success around campaign objectives.

Added Alison Kuryla, General Manager of Bluestreak, “We are consistently working with our clients to improve ad serving as a streamlined, efficient data solution. Bluestreak 5.0 addresses clients’ needs to unlock greater media insights. With features like conversion attribution reporting, Bluestreak has become an effective platform to track campaign results and reduce ambiguities about media impact. This helps agencies achieve better campaign ROI without increased spend.”

About Bluestreak
Bluestreak, founded in 1999, is part of the Aegis Media global digital marketing network. Bluestreak provides an enterprise-class third party ad serving and campaign analytics solution for advertisers and agencies. Combining power and ease-of-use, Bluestreak delivers the essential workflow, analysis and optimization for professional marketers interested in improving campaign efficiency and ROI. One centralized approach to tracking multiple channels – display ads, search, rich media/video and email. Bluestreak is the smarter ad server.

Bluestreak ad tags usually come as SCRIPT SRC with a backup NOSCRIPT section. These are then trafficked in DoubleClick DFP as Rich Media creatives. You will then need to add the %n and %c macros to minimize caching and ensure clicks are counted correctly.

Your initial Bluestreak ad code may look like:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=’JavaScript’ SRC=http://s0b.bluestreak.com/ix.e?jss&s=123456&u=&n=Insert_Time_Stamp_Here&cltk=Insert_Click_Track_URL_Here>
</script>

<noscript>

<a href=’http://s0b.bluestreak.com/ix.e?hr&s=123456′ target=_top>

<img src=’http://s0b.bluestreak.com/ix.e?ir&s=123456′ border=0></a>

</noscript>

As you may have guessed already, Insert_Time_Stamp_Here this should be replaced with %n and Insert_Click_Track_URL_Here this should be replaced with %c – the good folks at Bluestreak make this really easy.

Your new Bluestreak ad code, ready to be trafficked in DFP should then look like:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=’JavaScript’ SRC=http://s0b.bluestreak.com/ix.e?jss&s=123456&u=&n=%n&cltk=%c>
</script>

<noscript>

<a href=’%chttp%3a%2f%2fs0b.bluestreak.com/ix.e?hr&s=123456′ target=_top>

<img src=’http://s0b.bluestreak.com/ix.e?ir&s=123456′ border=0></a>

</noscript>

Regardless of the complexity of the ad tags you may receive through Bluestreak, the placeholders for the macros will always be clearly marked – they’re really the easiest tags to work with!

The move is the most recent in a series of digital acquisitions and deals from Aegis Group, and will provide Aegis Media with the means to manage, optimise and measure all forms of online advertising, particularly rich media advertising (Bluestreak’s specialty). The plans are to integrate the newly-acquired ad serving technology into Isobar – Aegis’ digital network, which includes Carat Fusion.

There’s no doubt that the data collected through Bluestreak’s ad serving platform will have a further use in developing future product offerings, probably focusing on demographic and behavioral targeting.

Aegis pais $12.5 million for Bluestreak, which some analysts interpret as a very good deal – Bluestreak has extensive expertise in developing rich media solutions, a very sought-after commodity. Google purchased DoubleClick for an impressive $3.1 billion, while Microsoft shed no less than $6 billion for aQuantive. Agencies groups have also entered the ad serving game, the most notable one being WPP Group’s acquisition of 24/7 Real Media for $64 million.
“Ad serving is in the spotlight right now,” Aegis CEO Robert Lerwill said in a statement. “We believe the combination of media and ad serving is the most interesting of all. While we will continue to work with other industry ad servers, owning our own technology in-house will give us a step change in product development across both search and display.”

No word yet as to Aegis entering the video ads world but, giving the current speed of developments, such a move can’t be too far down the road.