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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The publicly accessible resources for the DPA Toolset are now available dpatools.cablelabs.com.

“By opening access to the DPA Toolset to vendors, developers and the public at large, CableLabs is offering a speed-to-market resource that will accelerate the availability of technologies supporting advancements in electronic advertisement delivery, including the dynamic insertion of commercials into viewer-requested VOD streams,” said Don Dulchinos, CableLabs Senior Vice President, Advertising and Interactive Services.

The DPA Toolset streamlines the testing and validation process for SCTE-130-compliant technologies by allowing developers to emulate multi-platform architectures involved in the delivery of interactive advertising messages and related content across an array of distribution channels. These channels may include VOD streams, web pages, interactive program guides and other media vehicles.

The DPA Toolset solves a pressing challenge for advanced advertising technology developers: the need to assure interoperability across complex labyrinths of web services and message flows involved in the dynamic delivery of targeted advertising to cable customers. The DPA Toolset provides a specific, well-defined, interoperable and multi-vendor message set for each use case that occurs in the implementation of advanced advertising at national, regional and local levels. With the DPA Toolset, technology developers can test the performance of their solutions in advance of deployment at both isolated service points and across multiple service points involved in advanced advertising implementations.

How it works

The DPA Toolset creates profiles that define the valid web services message for every use case tied to SCTE-130 implementations. These profiles, combined with Web Service Description Language (WSDL) descriptions that define the functionality and parameters of web services involved in SCTE 130 implementations, can be used to test all elements and attributes of messages in an environment that emulates real-world deployments.

The toolset provides a two-pronged approach: a set of profiles and a tool to exercise those profiles. The profiles are exercised in a software emulator that can represent any SCTE-130 service at the message level. The toolset allows any mixture of real and emulated devices to make up a testable configuration. It validates that an actual message exchange contains the correct set of messages, and validates each message exchanged against a specific example of a profile.

Interop event

CableLabs hosted an interoperability event in July 2011 that allowed advanced advertising vendors to exercise the DPA Toolset for the first time.

“It’s critical to our business that the BlackArrow Advanced Advertising System maintains support for the latest standards — ensuring seamless deployments, and maximum interoperability. The DPA Toolset offers our development team a ready resource for testing and verifying the interactions of complex technologies within a real-world emulation environment,” said Chris Hock, Senior Vice President of Product for BlackArrow. “Our participation in the advanced advertising event held at CableLabs this summer enabled us to use the DPA Toolset in a laboratory environment to verify key interoperable aspects of our technical development.”

Although the DPA Toolset is initially directed at implementing and testing SCTE-130 messaging, the technology is generic to any web services messaging environment, including very large and complex problem spaces. The CableLabs community license allows free, non-commercial use of the DPA Toolset to address any problem space. CableLabs invites developers to contact the organization for further commercial use or distribution.

About CableLabs

Cable Television Laboratories (www.cablelabs.com) was founded in 1988 by members of the cable television industry. The Emmy Award winning laboratory is a non-profit research and development consortium that is dedicated to pursuing new cable telecommunications technologies and to helping its cable operator members integrate those advancements into their business objectives. Cable operators from around the world are members. CableLabs maintains additional web sites at www.cablenet.org, www.ebif.tv and www.tru2way.com.

Advanced Digital Cable™, CableCARD™, CableHome®, CableLabs®, CableNET®, CablePC™, DCAS™, DPoE™, DOCSIS®, EBIF™, Go2BroadbandSM, M-Card™, OpenCable™, PacketCable™, PeerConnect™, and tru2way® are marks of Cable Television Laboratories, Inc.

NEW YORK – 24/7 Real Media announced its new offering, 24/7 Connect: an exclusive pipeline between digital advertising spend and premium inventory. With the 24/7 Connect offering, 24/7 Real Media expands upon its proprietary technology platform, Open AdStream®, to facilitate relationships between world-class advertisers and premium publishers for mutual benefit. On the sell-side, publishers gain a single point solution for campaign and deal management, with seamless ad management integration through Open AdStream, an intuitive user interface and no retagging necessary. On the buy-side, agencies and advertisers gain full-service access to premium publisher inventory and audiences. As a WPP company, 24/7 Real Media is uniquely positioned to bring this automated technology offering to market and service clients who are navigating both sides of the ever-changing but consistently fragmented buying equation.

“24/7 Real Media is constantly looking for ways to improve online advertising opportunities for both advertisers and publishers,” said Nicolle Pangis, EVP Product Management, Global Media and Technology at 24/7 Real Media. “We saw the market need to create a direct connection between advertisers and agencies looking for premium inventory opportunities for their campaigns, and publishers who want brand-safe creative to monetize their high quality sites and valuable audiences. We are bringing together both buyer and seller in a way that benefits both parties with 24/7 Connect. Most importantly, we are the first in the industry to offer a technology solution with transparency and premium opportunities with a focus on brand safety.”

Open AdStream publishers make their premium inventory available through 24/7 Connect and leverage 24/7 Real Media’s strong industry, advertiser, and agency relationships to expand revenue opportunities for their site. Publishers have the ability to input and categorize site and audience data for enhanced revenue opportunities.

“24/7 Real Media’s Open AdStream technology brings enormous value to our clients.” said Adam L. Soroca, Chief Product Officer & General Manager of Jumptap, the leader in targeted mobile advertising. “24/7 Connect enables Jumptap’s top brands and agencies direct access to plan against our premium mobile inventory and audiences. 24/7 Connect makes mobile media planning as easy and familiar as online, while accelerating our ability to make data driven insights.”

Likewise, advertisers and agencies using 24/7 Connect gain access to premium Open AdStream publisher inventory on which to run brand-safe campaigns and engage target customers. Advertisers and agencies can select the specific premium inventory appropriate for their campaign objectives. 24/7 Connect helps advertisers and agencies to achieve brand engagement with limited expenditure through advanced technological automation.

With advanced opportunities to understand and optimize performance, 24/7 Connect closes the gap between online publishers and advertising dollars.

To learn more about 24/7 Connect, please visit http://www.247realmedia.com.

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.

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif. – ValueClick Media, a division of ValueClick Inc. (Nasdaq:VCLK), is pleased to announce the opening of two new offices in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Phoenix, Arizona. The Minneapolis office will be led by Jeff Zoss, formerly of MyPoints and CoolSavings; the Phoenix office will be led by Brenda Sitzman, formerly of AZFamily.com.

“We are excited to expand ValueClick’s presence into these important markets in the Midwest and Southwest,” said Greg Seyller, vice president of Midwest sales for ValueClick Media. “There are top tier clients and agencies in these markets, and we are excited to have excellent teams in place in these cities to build partnerships and serve their needs.”

According to eMarketer, Minneapolis’ online advertising spend is expected to reach $1 billion and $300 million in mobile marketing by the end of 2011. The region ranked among the top 20 U.S. cities for online marketing spend in 2010. Retail giants such Target and Best Buy are both headquartered in Minneapolis.

Jeff Zoss will be heading up the Minneapolis front. Zoss has been in the digital advertising space for 11 years, first at CoolSavings (Q Interactive) where he served as a sales director, and later at North American Membership Group, where he helped build the interactive sales group and MyPoints.

“Minneapolis is a key market for interactive media with a wealth of retail clients and a strong interactive agency presence,” said Zoss. “I look forward to servicing the Minneapolis marketplace by providing innovative performance advertising solutions to this region.”

Zoss’ experience includes creating, coordinating, managing and selling marketing solutions for clients and agencies in a variety of industries including retail, CPG, travel, education, financial services and media.

ValueClick’s expansion will also take them into the Southwest, settling in Phoenix. eMarketer predicts Phoenix will reach $800 million in online advertising spend and will continue to be ranked among the top 20 U.S. cities for online marketing spend in 2011. Fortune 500 companies in Phoenix include US Airways, Petsmart and University of Phoenix.

The Phoenix location will be led by Brenda Sitzman, a Phoenix native. Prior to her coming on board with ValueClick this year, Sitzman served as a digital account executive with Belo Corp, servicing the Phoenix market through AZfamily.com.

“I am thrilled to be a part of ValueClick Media,” said Sitzman. “Arizona is a continually growing digital market and I am so happy that ValueClick has recognized this and placed a dedicated in-market rep here in Phoenix.”

For more information, please contact Jeff Zoss at Jzoss@valueclick.com or Brenda Sitzman at Bsitzman@valueclick.com, or call 612-605-6107 (Minneapolis) or 480-219-4208 (Phoenix).

About ValueClick Media

Thirteen years of experience and access to the global data resources of ValueClick, Inc. make ValueClick Media the largest and most robust audience network of its kind. Proprietary consumer behavioral data, direct relationships with 8,500 publishers and access to additional inventory via real-time bidding, advanced behavioral targeting and optimization technology, strict network quality controls and superior service make ValueClick Media the network leading marketers and agencies rely on to reach their performance objectives. For more information, visit www.valueclickmedia.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 www.valueclick.com.

NEW YORK – 24/7 Real Media announced today the appointment of Peter Jurew and Sandy Drayton to newly-created leadership positions within 24/7 Real Media’s expanded global marketing organization.

As the company’s first Senior Vice President of Marketing, Jurew will oversee global marketing initiatives across the company. Drayton, as 24/7 Real Media’s first Director of Communications, North America, will lead all public relations and communications efforts to enhance the company’s brand. Together, they will develop a marketing strategy to support the revenue and growth goals of the company.

Jurew is an established digital marketing and brand development strategist with a 25-year record of working with iconic media brands. Most recently, he was Vice President of Marketing for Meredith Corporation’s Digital Media division. Jurew will report to David J. Moore, Chairman, Founder & CEO of 24/7 Real Media.

“The addition of Peter Jurew to 24/7 Real Media not only enhances our ability to market products and services, but also expands our ability to seize strategic opportunities and grow our brand globally,” said Moore.

“I am so excited to join the 24/7 Real Media team at a time when the demand for digital technology solutions is exploding,” said Jurew. “Compared to a few of the brands I’ve helped to develop, 24/7 is a new company and yet, at the same, it’s a legendary brand in the digital space Everyone here is ready to take it to the next level.”

Jurew’s experience includes senior marketing executive roles for a number of blue chip media brands including People magazine, where he served as Associate Publisher, Marketing; and The New Yorker, where he helped lead the iconic brand’s return to profitability after decades of losses. He also developed the business plan for the launch of Every Day With Rachael Ray for the Readers Digest Association, and worked on the successful development of SmartMoney and smartmoney.com for the Hearst/Dow Jones joint venture. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and Political Science from Boston College.

Sandy Drayton brings more than 20 years of experience in public relations and communications to this new role at 24/7 Real Media. Most recently she was a senior member of the Corporate Communications team at AOL and previously led Communications at The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research; Rodale’s Women’s Health and Time Inc.’s Entertainment Weekly and LIFE. She helped transition EW from a newcomer in the industry to one of the most trusted and quoted sources of entertainment news. Drayton graduated from Bowdoin College with a BA in Government.

Both Jurew and Drayton are based in 24/7 Real Media’s global headquarters in New York.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The AdJuggler solution is both comprehensive and intuitive compared to the many digital advertising platforms I have used throughout my career,” said Chris Weiss. “Between the early success of EMP and our strong customer base, AdJuggler has a great opportunity to be the engine behind forward-thinking networks and leading publisher groups.”

Mr. Weiss will oversee AdJuggler’s platform roadmap, customer advocacy program, product marketing, and the company’s Exchange Media Program (EMP). He brings more than 15 years of product management and product marketing experience across several software segments, and is PMC-certified in enterprise product management.
Prior to joining AdJuggler, Chris was responsible for marketing and product management at LucidMedia, a leading demand-side platform (DSP) and digital advertising management solution based on sophisticated real-time bidding (RTB) and analytic targeting.

AdJuggler is also pleased to announce that Dan Swanson has been promoted to Director, Engineering.

About AdJuggler
AdJuggler provides a leading SaaS-based digital ad serving platform for publishers, content networks, ad networks, and digital marketers across the world. The company enables full-featured campaign targeting and ad management across video, rich media, and mobile display formats, along with its Exchange Media Program, which monetizes non-guaranteed inventory from numerous RTB traffic sources to optimize CPM. Custom development services and a robust API are also available to tailor AdJuggler to customers’ specific business needs. The company is headquartered in Alexandria, VA and can be reached at www.adjuggler.com.

NEW YORK, NY and LONDON – Mocean Mobile, the standard in mobile ad serving, today announced the launch of the Publisher Annex, the first global industry group focused on helping publishers extend their revenue opportunities into mobile. The group’s members include AirKast, Applico, FreeRange Communications, Golden Gekko, The Hyperfactory, Polar Mobile, Trilibis Mobile, Wapple and ZuMobi. They all exemplify the deepest expertise in mobile web and app development and will collaborate on regular initiatives such as white papers, regional presentations and direct consultations to large-scale publishers looking to improve their current mobile web or app presence, or to enter into the space for the first time. The group is scheduled to present a workshop at IAB MIXX on Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2011.

“Mobile publishing and application development is one of the biggest opportunities the industry can embrace right now — the better the mobile sites and apps, the better the audience engagement and opportunity to monetize,” said Dave Gwozdz, CEO of Mocean Mobile. “The Publisher Annex will provide the guidance that large-scale publishers need to fully capitalize on the mobile opportunity worldwide.”
The Publisher Annex, which is best equipped to develop solutions for publishers experiencing more than 10 million page views per month from wireless devices, offers a group of the most innovative mobile web and app developers, along with experts in mobile monetization. The launch members comment on the impact this initiative will have on the industry below:

“As one of the largest mobile app networks with over 900 customers made up of Fortune 1000′s media companies, AirKast is excited to be part of Mocen Mobile’s Publisher Annex. We see this as a great initiative to bridge the gap between the world of mobile publishers and advertisers.” — Larry Leung, CEO

“Applico is glad to be working with Mocean Mobile. The Publisher Annex will provide a much needed resource to many companies and it goes hand-in-hand with Applico’s mission to bring our clients into mobile with ease and efficiency.” — Alex Moazed, President and CEO of Applico

“FreeRange360 is pleased to be partnered with Mocean for this shared opportunity to engage our potential audience and further contribute to the overall impact on traditional advertising, marketing, and media streams.” — Jon Maroney, CEO

“Mobile is the world’s fastest growing industry, with new technologies, solutions and companies appearing every day. In such a landscape, finding and working with the best partners is crucial for success. Golden Gekko, as the global leading mobile web and app developer, is very excited to be part of the Publisher Annex network. Mobile is a huge opportunity for the publishing industry, and to offer easy access to best of breed partners for mobile initiatives will be a great advantage for everyone involved.” — Miguel Banuelos, Director of Accounts – US, Golden Gekko

“It’s great to see a company like Mocean Mobile pulling together various parties across the ecosystem to help make publishers’ lives easier. As we know, consumers need great mobile destinations with great content, and Mocean Mobile is helping make this happen by providing a seamless process to publishers.” — Geoffrey Handley, co-founder and CEO, The Hyperfactory

“Polar is excited to work with Mocean Mobile on the Publisher Annex. As a long-standing partner, we look forward to evangelizing great mobile technology for content producers.” — Marlon Rodrigues, Director of Alliances at Polar Mobile

“Today’s consumers are incredibly mobile-savvy. Marketers and content providers who’ve launched mobile programs have seen their customer engagement and retention rates improve, thus resulting in increased revenues. With Publisher Annex, those new to mobile can also take advantage of this emerging, high-impact channel.” — Ted Verani, SVP of Sales and Marketing at Trilibis Mobile

“Mobile web publishing is going to the next level and the Mocean Mobile initiative is key to the ongoing growth of the industry. We are delighted to be part of Publisher Annex, which we believe will be hugely successful.” — Rich Holdsworth, Wapple, CEO

Publishers who are interested in being part of the group or learning about mobile monetization from the Publisher Annex can contact: avale@moceanmobile.com or visit www.publisherannex.com

About Mocean Mobile
Mocean Mobile created the first technology platform that streamlines publishers’, developers’ and app stores’ mobile revenue opportunities by giving them the ability to serve display ads to all mobile devices including smart phones, tablets and netbooks. Mocean Mobile integrates with the top rich media providers to ensure that publishers have capabilities to run the most engaging and comprehensive creative ad units on their mobile sites. By integrating with the majority of 3rd party networks and agency side ad servers like DART and Atlas, Mocean Mobile combines state of the art direct sales campaign management with ad network mediation for the mobile world. Created in 2009, Mocean Mobile is led by a team of advertising and media veterans from Google, DoubleClick, Yahoo, and AdMob, with more than 100 years of collective experience in online and mobile advertising and technology. It operates under parent company Mojiva Inc., which has a total of $35 million venture funding from Pelion Venture Partners, Shamrock Capital and Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments.

Otilia Otlacan: First of all, congratulations for a very successful series C! Can you share with us what will be your main focus area for the coming quarters?
Dave Gwozdz: Thanks, we’re really pleased with the series C and what it will do for the company.  Our main focus is for Mojiva Inc. to continue being the premiere mobile display advertising technology company operating the most premium ad network in the industry and the ad serving platform which powers the mobile advertising of some of the largest publishers. So, first and foremost, we want to provide the best service to our clients and publishers and continue developing our platforms based on their needs, whether it’s executing large rich media campaigns or utilizing the unique targeting methods on mobile devices.

Otilia Otlacan: Industry experts keep talking of a resurgence of display advertising. How does mobile advertising fall into this trend?
Dave Gwozdz: With all of the advanced rich media available to create impressive and functional ad units and the technology that marketers now have to measure their ad spend, it makes sense to make it a large part of the media mix. Combine that with the personal nature of the mobile device, and that equated to an undeniably attractive outlet for marketers to lean on.

Otilia Otlacan: Mojiva Inc. has a very impressive client roster. In your experience, what hurdles are most challenging to overcome when convincing an advertiser to shift budgets from traditional display advertising to mobile?
Dave Gwozdz: Most marketers understand that most or all of their actions should be considered through the prism of ROI. This industry is still in its early stages, so one of the major hurdles is justifying their ad spend, going from an online ad market that is extremely measurable (relatively speaking, although there has been much debate about impressions and such), to a mobile ad market that does not have a truly standardized way of understanding how effective campaigns are. But, we as an industry are slowly moving toward that; as a premiere member of the Mobile Marketing Association, Mojiva Inc. is a company that is dedicated to standardizing the measurement methods in mobile, helping advertisers understand their mobile efforts through better analytics and helping publishers/app developers more effectively monetize their mobile content.

Otilia Otlacan: Mobile ad serving has been a darling of the tech geeks for quite some time, with many companies developing mobile-oriented ad servers, or adding a mobile component to traditional ones. How does Mojiva Inc.’s mobile ad serving solution position itself on the market?
Dave Gwozdz: It’s a fact that basic ad serving is not too difficult and there are many companies that offer the ability to serve an ad. However, it’s the much more complex functionalities that our Mocean Mobile platform incorporates that really allows a publisher to not just serve ads, but take control of their entire mobile content landscape and organize it as a business. The problem with retrofitting any online solution for mobile is that there will be issues with implementation. We see some of the advertising conglomerate players offering a mobile component to their ad server, but, on the ground, we’ve heard the complaints from publishers about how they don’t feel as if they have all the tools at their disposal. Because we built Mocean Mobile from the ground up for mobile devices (smartphones, tablets and netbooks), we have provided the necessary tools that our clients expect, from supporting the latest in rich media creative to campaign reporting and forecasting. And, because our staff works so closely with our partners, that high-touch relationship allows them to provide input into future developments of the platform. That’s flexibility you can’t find with other offerings.

Otilia Otlacan: Last but not least, do you think that mobile display advertising can finally be regarded as mainstream, and not the ever-awkward channel that nobody dares to throw very large budgets at?
Dave Gwozdz: Considering that more than 230 million Americans used a mobile device in June 2011 (according to comScore) and a day doesn’t go by without the introduction of a newer, better, less expensive and more functional smartphone or tablet, we may be there already. Heck, Amazon alone has been forecast to sell three to five million tablets just in Q4 2011!  Clearly the install base for the mobile industry has certainly gone mainstream. This is just massive. Why? Because these devices are now a critical, can’t-be-without appendage of our everyday lives, and that true on a global basis. No big brands will miss this anymore, its just to big.  As the technology begins to further streamline the process (i.e. HTML5 development, etc.), we will see more and more marketers understanding how effective and ROI-friendly mobile actually is. It’s unstoppable!

About Dave Gwozdz – Chief Executive Officer, Mojiva
Dave Gwozdz has spent much of his career in the emerging media space and since 2008, has been leading the team at Mojiva Inc to develop some of the most cutting-edge mobile advertising solutions in the industry.

Earlier in his career, Gwozdz served as a member of the founding team of DoubleClick, the internet advertising company acquired by Google for $3 billion in March2008. Throughout his time as VP of Sales, he was tasked with developing and implementing their media sales product and sales strategies. In 1995, Dave also founded one of the first online ad networks, Hot Link Media.

Dave previously held various management positions at McGraw-Hill, Ziff Davis and CMP.

Dave regularly shares his experiences in new media at various events and conferences, some of which include: ad:tech, MMA Global’s CEO Summit, Intel Elements and AlwaysOn.

About Mojiva Inc
Mojiva Inc. is the parent company of the mobile ad network, Mojiva, and the mobile ad serving platform, Mocean Mobile. Mojiva Inc. has a total of $35 million venture funding from Shamrock Capital Advisors, Pelion Venture Partners and Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments. Founded in May 2008 and based in New York City, Mojiva Inc. is lead by a team of advertising and media veterans from Google, DoubleClick, Yahoo, and AdMob, with more than 100 years of collective experience in mobile marketing and technology.

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif. – ValueClick (Nasdaq: VCLK) announced that it has closed its acquisition of Dotomi, the leading provider of data-driven, intelligent display media for major retailers. The Company also announced an update on its share repurchase program, including the repurchase of 3.4 million shares since August 5 and an increase in its total repurchase authorization to $100 million.

“We are thrilled to formally welcome Dotomi to ValueClick, as their expertise and scale complement our strengths in performance-based display and affiliate marketing,” said James Zarley, chief executive officer of ValueClick. “As illustrated by our recent share repurchase activity and our board’s increased share repurchase authorization, we remain confident in our ability to gain market share as our Media division expands further into branding, mobile and video and capitalizes on cross-selling opportunities with our affiliate marketing advertisers. We are committed to offsetting the shares issued in the Dotomi transaction with continued share repurchase activity.”

Dotomi Acquisition Closed

ValueClick has acquired all of the outstanding equity interests in Dotomi for upfront consideration consisting of: (a) 7.1 million shares of ValueClick common stock; (b) the assumption of 0.5 million fully vested stock options; and (c) $148 million in cash (net of cash acquired). In addition, ValueClick has assumed 0.4 million shares of unvested restricted stock which will vest over a one year period and 0.5 million unvested stock options which will vest over a period ranging from one to three years.

A portion of the acquisition was funded by the Company’s Amended and Restated Credit Agreement, as described in the Company’s Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 24. This credit agreement provides the Company with $200 million of total available credit with a five year term, including a senior secured revolving credit facility of $150 million and a $50 million term loan.

John Giuliani will continue to lead Dotomi and will report directly to ValueClick chief executive officer, James Zarley. Additionally, Mr. Giuliani has joined ValueClick’s board of directors.

Dotomi’s results of operations will be included in ValueClick’s consolidated and Media segment results beginning on August 31, 2011. For the one month period ended September 30, 2011, ValueClick anticipates that Dotomi will contribute approximately $8.5 million in revenue. The acquisition is expected to add approximately $2 million in amortization expense and approximately $1 million in stock-based compensation expense to ValueClick’s third quarter results. Dotomi was not included in the Company’s third quarter 2011 guidance provided on August 2.

Share Repurchase Program Update

Today, ValueClick also provided an update on its share repurchase program. Since August 5, the Company has repurchased 3.4 million shares of its common stock for a total cost of $49.5 million. These repurchases represent over 44 percent of the shares issued upon closing of the Dotomi acquisition. Year to date, ValueClick has repurchased 6.0 million shares of its common stock for a total cost of $87.2 million.

Additionally, the Company announced that its board of directors has increased the share repurchase program authorization by $86 million, bringing the current share repurchase program authorization to $100 million. The Company intends to continue to use its share repurchase program to offset the shares issued in the Dotomi acquisition.

About ValueClick

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 www.valueclick.com.

Magnify Platform Services will offer managed services to advertising agencies, networks and publishers in Asia, Australia, Europe and the U.S. who want effective solutions for ad operations, optimization, media acquisition services and consolidated performance reporting. Leveraging the foundational technology and work flow systems of Adconion, Magnify Platform Services will offer its customers end-to-end operational solutions with more ease and simplicity.

In addition to offering enterprise level software, the division also provides its customers with an in-market managed services team. Services include the successful launch and monitoring of campaigns by experienced Ad Operations specialists, 24/7 support and access to in-depth reports and analysis.

Magnify Platform Services is led by Ben Fox as executive vice president. As a seasoned media veteran, Fox was previously at Yahoo!/Overture where he worked on search and content products. He has also co-founded and worked with several angel and venture-funded start-ups across the country. As vice president, Kristian Wilson will join Fox to lead media buying efforts.

“The online advertising industry has become and will continue to become highly complex and intricate,” said Fox. “With our enterprise services, we will enable our customers and partners to better execute their online campaigns while providing in-depth insights and understandings of their performances.”

The newly created Magnify Platform Services website (www.magnifyps.com) includes a dynamic resource section aptly named “Think Tank” to help clients and partners understand today’s complex online advertising market. The resource includes originally produced videos that can be shared and embedded across the Web, digital ad marketplace analysis and a comprehensive market statistics section.

As a digital media holding company, Adconion Media Group manages a portfolio of brand and performance solution businesses worldwide. Along with Magnify Platform Services, Adconion wholly owns Adconion Direct, a multi-channel distribution platform spanning display, email and social media; Joost, a digital media company devoted to connecting brands and advertisers; and RedLever, a global studio specializing in developing and producing brand-integrated and associated content.

About Magnify Platform Services:

Magnify Platform Services (www.magnifyps.com) empowers advertising agencies, networks and publishers by delivering end-to-end, solution-focused services and technology. Magnify Platform Services enables partners to achieve their advertising campaign objectives by using its proprietary ad serving technology and its dedicated in-market managed services teams.

Magnify Platform Services is a standalone business unit within Adconion Media Group, one of the largest independent global audience and content networks, reaching nearly 325 million unique users – or one-quarter of the total global Internet population – every month. Dedicated to true partnerships with agencies and marketers, Adconion provides technology platform licensing and products designed in-house while delivering significant global reach across multiple platforms through a single network. Currently, Adconion has 16 offices in 8 countries around the world, is a member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and is a founding member of IASH Europe.

ZEDO CEO Roy De Souza said, “As more and more major publishers are seeking a truly independent and strong partner in advertising technology, ZEDO has decided to expand its presence in New York. As a true partner for publishers, we care about being present for our customers, and we place highly competent and experienced people near our customers to help them with any and all the advertising technology they need.”

Ben Cohen, ZEDO VP of Regional Sales, now heads ZEDO’s New York office and will expand it further to include sales, support and account management personnel.

To learn more about ZEDO visit: http://www.zedo.com/product/for-Publishers.htm ZEDO offers publishers multiple products and services. To get started with one or many of ZEDO’s products and services, contact them at: http://www.zedo.com/technology/learnMore.htm

About ZEDO
ZEDO, Inc. is an Advertising Technology company that offers products and services for a publisher’s premium, self service, and remnant inventory. The company provides innovative solutions that boost revenue for Internet publishers. Products include a full featured ad server, a self service platform to allow advertisers to buy directly from a publisher, yield optimization, outsourced ad ops and ZINC, a new premium CPM ad exchange. These products are integrated into one technology platform for publishers to choose from, or use seamlessly together. ZEDO has been at the forefront the internet advertising industry for over 11 years, and is one of the four major advertising technology companies worldwide. It is the largest independent ad technology player and so focuses exclusively on the customer’s needs.

ZEDO is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in New York and Phoenix, as well as five development centers and offices in Russia and India.

NEW YORK – Tremor Video, the largest independent online video technology company, announced that it has hired Bill Condon as Director of Mobile Sales. Condon, a 15-year veteran of on- and offline advertising, will lead all national sales efforts for Tremor Video’s mobile products while educating brand marketers about the potential in the emerging mobile video segment.

Condon joins Tremor Video with a wealth of knowledge in the growing field of mobile video ad sales. He most recently served as Sales Director at Rhythm NewMedia, a leading mobile video ad network. His marketing experience also includes contributions as an account director at both Yahoo and AOL, where he worked with major brands including Coca-Cola and AT&T. Condon was also an early employee at PointRoll, a leading digital advertising technology company.

“The branding power of online video advertising is just coming into its own, and the explosion of mobile video viewing will certainly pave the way for greater mobile advertising adoption,” said Condon. “Consumers say they can’t leave home without their mobile device, and we’ve already seen major adoption of devices like the iPad. My goal is to translate Tremor Video’s expertise in online video into the growing mobile space.”

“Bill knows how brand marketers think about digital, and he also knows what works on the mobile platform,” said Randy Kilgore, Tremor Video’s Chief Revenue Officer. “Tremor Video owns the opportunity to show brand advertisers the power of engaging mobile video. Bill will serve as our mobile evangelist as we grow to help advertisers reach audiences on their computers, mobile devices, and connected TVs.”

As smartphone adoption increases in the coming years, mobile advertising will accelerate as well. Mobile video impressions are expected to account for 7.9 percent of total video ad inventory and roughly 18 percent of total billed mobile media in 2011, according to AccuStream Research. Tremor Video has the ability to serve video ads across multiple mobile platforms, including the iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry. The company purchased the Transpera mobile video ad platform in February.

About Tremor Video

Founded in 2005, Tremor Video (formerly Tremor Media) (www.tremorvideo.com) provides in-stream video advertising solutions to Fortune 1000 brand advertisers and top tier publishers and is widely regarded as the leading video company online. Leveraging 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.

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif. – ValueClick Media, a division of ValueClick Inc. (Nasdaq:VCLK), is pleased to announce the opening of a new office in Atlanta, Georgia, located at 1200 Abernathy Road, near Perimeter Mall. The new office will be led by David Braswell, formerly of BlueLithium and Undertone Networks, and Andrew Davis, formerly of NetWorld Alliance and The New Yorker.

“Atlanta is a major hub for a myriad of businesses and advertisers in the United States, and is in advantageous proximity to other prime Southern markets,” said Lynn D’Alessandro, vice president of sales for ValueClick Media. “Our new office location represents our dedication and investment to service those clients and agencies locally.”

According to eMarketer, Atlanta’s online advertising spending will reach $1.2 billion in 2011 and the metropolis ranked among the top 20 U.S. cities for online marketing spending in 2009 and 2010. Many Fortune 500 companies, including Delta Airlines, Coca-Cola and UPS are headquartered in Atlanta.

David Braswell has been in the digital space for more than a decade, first at Yellowpages.com where he finished his tenure as vice president of sales & business development, and later at BlueLithium (sold to Yahoo) and Undertone Networks, where he opened and grew the Southeast market for both companies.

“As advertisers and agencies in the Southeast continue to work with a smaller group of ad networks, it’s great to see that ValueClick is a part of that core group,” said Mr. Braswell. “ValueClick’s ability to scale while delivering aggressive back-end metrics across a variety of platforms—display, mobile, video and rich media—enables us to be well-positioned to maximize growth in Atlanta.”

Andrew Davis is a seasoned advertising sales veteran, focusing on the Southeast territory for the last 15 years. During his career, Mr. Davis opened the first dedicated offices for Entertainment Weekly and The New Yorker, was the launch publisher of The Atlantan magazine and most recently held the position of senior vice president of sales and marketing for NetWorld Alliance, a publisher of nine B2B websites.

“Having worked for single titles in the past, I am eager to help my clients reach a multitude of publishers through efficient and targeted online advertising solutions,” said Andrew Davis. “ValueClick has dominated online advertising since 1998. I know we have the scale and solutions to provide real value to the agencies and advertisers of Atlanta.”

For more information, please contact David Braswell at dbraswell@valueclick.com or Andrew Davis at adavis@valueclick.com, or call 770-551-8100.

ValueClick Media is now hiring in Atlanta. For employment opportunities, please contact Marcia Needels, Talent Acquisition Manager, at mneedels@valueclick.com, or call 818-575-4641.

About ValueClick Media

Twelve years of experience and access to the global data resources of ValueClick, Inc. make ValueClick Media the largest and most robust audience network of its kind. Proprietary consumer behavioral data, direct relationships with 8,500 publishers and access to additional inventory via real-time bidding, advanced behavioral targeting and optimization technology, strict network quality controls and superior service make ValueClick Media the network leading marketers and agencies rely on to reach their performance objectives. For more information, visit www.valueclickmedia.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, 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 www.valueclick.com.

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif. – ValueClick (Nasdaq: VCLK) and Dotomi announced that they have signed a definitive merger agreement whereby Dotomi will become a wholly owned subsidiary of ValueClick. Privately held Dotomi is the leading provider of data-driven, intelligent display media for major retailers.

Dotomi creates and delivers display advertising where the ad creatives and media placements are dynamically adapted in real time at the user and impression level. The Company works directly with clients to integrate anonymous data and then surrounds each client with technology enabled marketing services. Dotomi manages everything from brand strategy and dynamic creative development to message delivery and decisioning. This data-driven, end-to-end approach results in display advertising that improves consumer brand engagement and generates measurable sales lift both online and offline for its clients.

Through its unique set of capabilities, Dotomi has developed strategic, direct relationships with over 100 retail brands, including over forty brands from the Internet Retailer Top 100. Led by Chief Executive Officer John Giuliani, Dotomi is based in Chicago and has 160 employees.

“Dotomi’s end-to-end offering attracts large brands because of its ‘simple sophistication.’ John and his team have built a great business integrating the technical and consultative points in the display value chain,” said Jim Zarley, chief executive officer of ValueClick. “Together with ValueClick’s portfolio of products, we will be in a position to meet the needs of marketers with a single relationship that will create marketing and analytic consistency. Our combined scale and expertise should accelerate their adoption of digital media. Together we believe we will create a new powerhouse in branding and performance-based advertising.”

“We are excited to join ValueClick and contribute our expertise to their enviable portfolio of digital marketing services,” said John Giuliani, chief executive officer of Dotomi. “There is a strong cultural fit between the two companies and a shared idea to make it easier and more reliable for clients to adopt digital marketing that makes a big impact. We look forward to joining forces with ValueClick to bring the scale that marketers are looking for across the consumer purchase funnel.”

Deal Terms

Under the terms of the agreement, ValueClick will acquire all outstanding equity interests in Dotomi for a total up-front consideration of approximately $295 million, consisting of approximately 55 percent in cash and 45 percent in ValueClick common stock. In addition, ValueClick will assume unvested Dotomi restricted stock and options which will vest over a period ranging from one to three years. Dotomi management will receive the majority of their consideration in ValueClick common stock, which will have a twelve-month lock-up, while the outside investor base will receive either cash or a combination of cash and ValueClick common stock. ValueClick anticipates receiving approximately $15 million in working capital from Dotomi at closing.

To fund the cash consideration, ValueClick will utilize a combination of cash from its balance sheet and availability under its existing line of credit.

This transaction has been approved by the board of directors of each respective company and the majority of stockholders of Dotomi. ValueClick anticipates the acquisition will close near the end of August, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.

John Giuliani will continue to lead Dotomi and will report directly to ValueClick Chief Executive Officer James Zarley. Additionally, Mr. Giuliani will be nominated to join ValueClick’s board of directors.

For calendar year 2011, Dotomi expects to generate over $80 million in revenue. ValueClick anticipates that this transaction will be accretive on an adjusted-EBITDA1 multiple basis in 2012.

Jefferies & Company, Inc. acted as exclusive financial advisor to Dotomi on this transaction.

About ValueClick

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, 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 www.valueclick.com.

NEW YORK – Epic Marketplace (www.epicmarketplace.com), one of the world’s leading integrated multichannel digital marketing solutions providers leveraging the social media, mobile, display, and video channels, announced the completion of its migration to a comprehensive new cross-channel ad serving Platform. The new Platform provides for a seamless integration between all of Epic Marketplace’s distribution channels, and the ability to acquire inventory on either a real-time bidding (RTB) or direct basis, all with a universal frequency cap. An enhanced attribution analytics engine is a key component of the new Platform.

The new Platform represents a substantial transformation of the Epic Marketplace ad serving paradigm. Among the changes, the company has decommissioned its segment verification program, which was a component of its legacy ad server. The new Platform was architected and built with an enhanced suite of consumer privacy protections, positioning the company to further enhance its world-class status as a leader in digital marketing consumer protection best practices.

The new Epic Marketplace Platform is driven by a proprietary Optimization Engine (OE) that is built around advanced polynomial statistical analysis. The OE, as the “brain” of the new platform, is data-type agnostic and analyzes data input on a non-PII basis from multiple sources – e.g., social media data, cookie data, mobile data – and then renders targeting solutions applicable across all of Epic’s distribution channels. Among the critical targeting solution sets are strong core competencies in audience aggregation, keyword bidding and contextual analytics, the latter via a real time semantic contextual engine.

“This new Platform is a culmination of a vision we set forth several years ago,” said Don Mathis, President and CEO of Epic Marketplace. “With its launch, we are fully positioned for the next five years of growth in our sector – which will be all about the integrated campaign and the opportunity to provide our clients with cross-channel digital marketing solutions, not just a stand-alone display media buy or a social fan campaign, for example. With the new Platform, we can help clients achieve their marketing objectives across the critical digital traffic channels and throughout the marketing funnel.”

Epic Marketplace has strongly leveraged its deep partnership with LucidMedia in the development of certain components of the new Platform’s infrastructure. In particular, the new Platform utilizes key components of LucidMedia’s comprehensive demand-side, real-time bidding (RTB) management platform and its patented semantic contextual targeting engine as integral pieces of the infrastructure of the new Platform.

Through the new Platform, Epic Marketplace is confident that it will provide even greater value for its clients. The company’s enhanced capabilities will allow it to scale campaigns with a universal frequency cap and in a fully integrated approach across social, mobile, display and video, across its own network of premium inventory, and across major exchanges and supply-side platforms such as AdMeld, PubMatic and Rubicon.

“We’re very pleased that after such a long process, this important work for Epic Marketplace has been completed so effectively – and on-time,” said Mathis. “Our new Platform solidifies our market leadership position and allows us to leverage data and enhanced statistical targeting across all critical digital marketing channels. Moreover, the new Platform has been built with an enhanced suite of consumer privacy protections, further ensuring our compliance leadership position as well.”

For more information on Epic Marketplace, please log onto http://www.epicmarketplace.com.

About Epic Marketplace:

Epic Marketplace (www.epicmarketplace.com) is the leading integrated multichannel digital marketing solutions provider leveraging social media, mobile, display, and video. Through Epic Marketplace, the top brands and agencies can engage, persuade, influence and communicate with their best consumers and prospects helping to grow and enhance their brand while boosting sales and creating sustainable relationships.

About LucidMedia

LucidMedia (www.lucidmedia.com) is the most comprehensive and transparent digital advertising management platform for targeting and optimizing display campaigns. The LucidMedia demand-side platform (DSP) with ClickSense® page-level contextual analysis and intelligent real-time bidding (RTB) is available as both self-service and managed service to interactive agencies and brand advertisers. LucidMedia’s platform employs an easy-to-use interface to deliver proprietary optimization, consolidated buying across the Internet’s largest repositories, unique insight into real-time inventory availability, preemptive brand safety, universal frequency capping, and reach into 95% of the online population. Founded in 1999, LucidMedia processes more than one billion impressions daily for hundreds of major brand advertisers.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – YuMe, the leading relevant video advertising technology company, announced that Slacker, Inc., a top digital radio service that offers a diverse and highly personalized digital music experience, is using the ACE for Publishers (AFP) ad serving and management platform to bring high-value, engaging video advertising across the Slacker online website and its smartphone and tablet applications. YuMe’s AFP platform will help Slacker to capitalize on video ad sales opportunities across multiple connected devices from a variety of video monetization sources, including YuMe’s own video advertising network, which today delivers well over 1.5B video ad impressions monthly.

Slacker Radio is available on the Web, Apple’s iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad), Android devices, Blackberry smartphones and more. Slacker provides music lovers with access to the Slacker music library, which includes over 150 curated genre stations, individual songs, albums, top charts, station playlists, and single-artist radio stations via three tiers of service. In addition to its own website and mobile applications, Slacker recently announced that they will be powering AOL Radio content and ad operations in order to significantly increase reach for advertisers on the Slacker properties.

“At Slacker, we are committed to providing music lovers with highly personalized music online, via connected home devices or on-the-go with easy-to-use Slacker Personal Radio mobile applications,” said Jonathan Sasse, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Slacker. “We believe that YuMe’s AFP platform, combined with our world class radio service, is a winning combination that enables us to monetize content and consumer relationships across every platform.”

“As video advertising continues to explode not only online but across mobile and connected TV, it is crucial for advertisers to adapt to the rapidly evolving industry in order to continue to reach and engage consumers,” said Bryan Everett, Executive Vice President of Business Development for YuMe. “AFP is designed to help content providers, such as Slacker Radio, monetize their content through high-value, engaging video advertising across any platform and device from a variety of monetization sources.”

Slacker will leverage the YuMe ACE for Publishers platform for emerging direct sales efforts and utilize its ad source mediation technology to simply and efficiently maximize video advertising revenue. AFP mediation maximizes CPMs and fill rates by managing campaign delivery, multiple ad networks, and changes in impression supply—such as viral inventory spikes—according to business priorities across all inventory and ad sources. In particular, AFP monitors fill rates and adjusts eCPM for each ad network in real-time to ensure that customers deliver their unsold inventory to the highest-paying ad network. AFP supports all the major advertising networks, including YuMe’s Connected Audience Network.

About YuMe

YuMe is the leading, relevant video advertising technology company. It enables top-tier publishers to maximize profits on their professional video content while safely delivering the most effective advertising campaigns for major brands and their agencies. YuMe’s patent-pending Relevance Engine powers both 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. As a result, YuMe gives publishers and advertisers unprecedented reach, brand safety, contextual relevance, controlled syndication, and consistent delivery across all digital media platforms. YuMe is a privately held company headquartered in Redwood City, CA and backed by Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Intel Capital.

For more information, visit www.YuMe.com, follow @YuMevideo on Twitter www.twitter.com/YuMevideo, or become a fan of YuMe on Facebook at www.facebook.com/YuMevideo.

About Slacker, Inc.

Slacker offers the world’s most complete range of radio services. Whether it’s the award-winning free Slacker Basic Radio, or the fully-loaded subscription services Slacker Radio Plus and Slacker Premium Radio, listeners enjoy a unique, custom listening experience. Slacker enables music lovers to play highly personalized music online at the Slacker web site, on connected home devices or on-the-go with Slacker Personal Radio applications. Slacker mobile applications are available for Windows Phone 7, Windows Mobile, Palm webOS, Nokia, Android, iPhone and BlackBerry smartphones. For more information visit: http://www.Slacker.com/everywhere.

For regular Slacker updates follow us on Twitter @SlackerRadio, become a Fan on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/SlackerRadio, view video content at www.YouTube.com/Slacker or visit www.Slacker.com.

NEW YORK & PHILADELPHIA – Comcast and NBCUniversal announced that they are partnering to use dynamic ad insertion in On Demand programming, further leveraging the On Demand service as an advertising platform. Dynamic ad insertion, which is a service that allows for advertisements to be easily changed at any time, has begun rolling out in several Comcast markets, with plans to expand to the majority of Comcast markets in the coming year. Chrysler and Kraft are the premiere advertisers.

Content from USA Network, E!, Syfy, Bravo Media and Oxygen Media that airs On Demand on Comcast Cable systems will be part of the rollout, which will initially focus on advertisements that run prior to and after a show (pre-roll and post-roll ads) and include dynamic ad insertion for advertisements throughout the show (mid-roll ads) later this year. Content from additional NBCUniversal networks is expected to be added to the service in the coming months.

“On Demand programming is a key way to reach today’s consumers and an important part of an advertiser’s marketing mix,” said Ed Swindler, EVP and Chief Operating Officer, NBCUniversal Advertising Sales. “This capability helps make the service more advertiser-friendly, giving clients greater flexibility to ensure their ads remain timely and relevant.”

“With more than 20 billion views On Demand since we launched the service in 2003, and an average of 350 million views per month, the service is a proven platform to reach consumers,” said Marcien Jenckes, SVP and General Manager of Video Services, Comcast. “Enabling dynamic ad insertion will create more value for advertisers, content owners and Comcast, and allow us to further monetize the VOD platform while presenting more relevant advertising to our customers.”

Traditionally, ads are inserted manually into On Demand programming and remain in place throughout a show’s full window of availability. Technology from Black Arrow’s Advanced Advertising System allows ads to be easily changed or revised when necessary, allowing clients to more effectively target their marketing messages. Comcast will make this capability available to other programming networks on its systems in coordination with Canoe Ventures, which will also enable this capability to a broader footprint covering multiple operators by early 2012.

Comcast Spotlight, the advertising sales division of Comcast Cable, is bringing dynamic ad insertion to local advertising clients as well. Local advertisers utilizing the technology include South Florida McDonald’s, Richmond’s nTelos, Virginia Credit Union, NBC12/WBBT-TV and Batteries Plus.

“Our business is all about delivering the impressions our local clients need, across multiple platforms,” said Kevin Smith, Group Vice President, Spotlight Integrated Media Sales. “Dynamic ad insertion offers clients the opportunity to reach a highly engaged audience, with the accountability and efficiency they’ve come to expect from Comcast Spotlight.”

About Comcast Corporation:

Comcast Corporation (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) (www.comcast.com) is one of the nation’s leading providers of entertainment, information and communications products and services. Comcast is principally involved in the operation of cable systems through Comcast Cable and in the development, production and distribution of entertainment, news, sports and other content for global audiences through NBCUniversal. Comcast Cable is one of the nation’s largest video, high-speed Internet and phone providers to residential and business customers. Comcast is the majority owner and manager of NBCUniversal, which owns and operates entertainment and news cable networks, the NBC and Telemundo broadcast networks, local television station groups, television production operations, a major motion picture company and theme parks.

About NBCUniversal:

NBCUniversal is one of the world’s leading media and entertainment companies in the development, production and marketing of entertainment, news and information to a global audience. NBCUniversal owns and operates a valuable portfolio of news and entertainment television networks, a premier motion picture company, significant television production operations, a leading television stations group and world-renowned theme parks. Comcast Corporation owns a controlling 51% interest in NBCUniversal, with GE holding a 49% stake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Tremor Video

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

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif. – ValueClick, Inc. (Nasdaq: VCLK) announced plans to increase its workforce by over 10 percent as part of its global organic growth strategy. Over 100 positions in the areas of sales, business development and technology are available in primary markets such as New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles, as well as additional positions in secondary markets across North America.

“As evidenced by our published financial results, all of ValueClick’s digital marketing products are growing well. With our recent expansion of video and most recent acquisition of Greystripe mobile advertising, we are serving a much broader market,” said Jim Zarley, chief executive officer of ValueClick. “It’s exciting to be a part of this organization and we need additional intelligent, motivated go-getters to keep up with our momentum.”

eMarketer reports that online advertising is expected to generate $31 billion in revenue in 2011, a 20% increase from 2010. Additionally, with the increasing popularity of smartphones and tablets, mobile advertising revenue is expected to top $2 billion by 2013. With its innovative technology, over 12 years of industry savvy and the acquisition of Greystripe, ValueClick is in a great position to benefit from these trends.

“ValueClick has the expertise and products to offer our advertisers; now we need more resources to accommodate the demand for them,” said Bill Todd, president of ValueClick’s Media division. “We are dedicated to building the best sales team and customer support group in the business. I challenge anyone who is looking for the opportunity for career advancement in a fun and creative environment to apply.”

ValueClick has an extensive portfolio of offerings ranging from direct response to high-end brand campaigns. Many of these offerings include new and interactive solutions such as mobile immersion ads for the iPad, pre-roll video ads and other rich media alternatives.

“We are constantly improving upon our existing cutting-edge technology and to do so requires a top-notch engineering team,” said Peter Wolfert, chief technology officer of ValueClick. “We are always looking for outstanding analysts, developers, programmers and designers to maintain our current level of excellent performance and to create new ways to meet and exceed our customers’ marketing objectives.”

ValueClick is now hiring in 13 locations in North America with additional openings in Europe and Asia. For more information and to apply please visit our careers page.

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, 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 www.valueclick.com.

LONDON – OpenX Technologies, Inc. (OpenX), the world’s leading independent provider of digital advertising technology, today announced a major expansion into the European market as part of the company’s mission to help publishers generate and maximize their revenue. The company also announced the appointment of online advertising industry executive Vincent Pelillo as Managing Director, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), to grow the company’s business in those regions. In the newly created role, Pelillo will be responsible for rapidly increasing adoption of new OpenX ad technology products designed to deliver superior monetization for publishers, including the breakthrough OpenX Enterprise (Enterprise) revenue serving platform, and the OpenX Market ad exchange platform. Pelillo will head up the company’s EMEA efforts from its European headquarters in London.

Launched in February 2011, OpenX Enterprise is the company’s SaaS 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, Enterprise solves some of the most fundamental challenges facing publishers.

“We’re extremely pleased that Vincent is joining us to lead our EMEA efforts,” said Tim Cadogan, chief executive officer, OpenX. “With his extensive experience in building digital advertising businesses of all sizes, Vincent is uniquely suited to introduce OpenX’s innovative products in new markets. In particular, Vincent is especially well qualified to quickly build and expand OpenX Enterprise’s publisher base while also driving the growth of OpenX Market. Vincent’s arrival and the expansion of our London base are important steps in OpenX’s international strategy.”

Prior to joining OpenX, Pelillo was at Orange-France Telecom Group (Orange) where he served in a number of roles during his tenure. Most recently he was Head of Networks at the Group level and also Head of Ad Exchange. Among his accomplishments at the company, Pelillo was instrumental in growing the networks business and making Orange a force in the display advertising business. He also played a key role in bringing Orange into the online ad exchange space.

“I’m thrilled to join OpenX and have the opportunity to bring the unique benefits of OpenX Enterprise’s revenue serving capabilities to the EMEA markets,” said Vincent Pelillo, managing director, OpenX EMEA. “Just as it has in the U.S, the Enterprise platform will become a paradigm-shifting product for publishers and advertisers here. I look forward to rapidly growing the business and quickly assembling a world class team to help us execute our vision across the various regions.”

Pelillo’s prior experience in online advertising includes work at AOL/Ad.com where he managed European sales operations and was responsible for the company’s launch in France, Italy and Spain. He also was a senior executive at AdLINK Media where he created, consolidated and managed the AdLINK Group.

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., a wholly owned subsidiary of OpenX Limited, 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 – Collective, a full service provider of media and technology solutions for display and video advertising, announced that it has acquired Tumri, the leading provider of dynamic creative optimization and personalization solutions for advertisers and agencies. The deal closed for an undisclosed amount.

Just months after the acquisition of video ad platform and services company Oggifinogi, the transaction further empowers Collective’s end-to-end audience buying solutions for brand advertisers by enabling the delivery of massively customized creative content at scale.

“A lot of companies can deliver impressions. At Collective, we help brand advertisers turn that impression into an expression,” said Joe Apprendi, CEO, Collective. “Tumri gives us the capability to target the right audience with the right messaging and ad format, dynamically based on data intelligence.”

Apprendi maintains that most optimization to date has focused on the ‘who’, which represents the data piece, and the ‘where’ –the ad environment– while not enough emphasis has been placed on optimization of the creative, the ‘what’. Further, the delivery of creative content leads to interaction rates that are over ten times the interaction rates of the campaign control group.

The acquisition strengthens Collective’s ability to manage the entire ad delivery process, enhancing audience buying, optimization and overall ad efficacy while adding much greater cost efficiencies for advertisers.

“DCO has been largely relegated to the direct and ecommerce channels, but its application can have spectacular results for brand advertisers as well. The combination of Tumri and Oggifinogi provides a rich, video-enabled canvas through which brands can connect with consumers across the entire spectrum of online display advertising,” Apprendi added.

Tumri powers dynamic marketing campaigns for many of the world’s most prominent brands including Nike, HP and Travelocity among others, who leverage the platform to cross-sell and up-sell a catalog of products and services based on a user’s actual site browse or action, driving maximum relevancy and ROI.

“Collective’s evolution as a business has brought incredible market opportunities across the entire display ecosystem,” said Hari Menon, CEO, Tumri. “Combining Collective’s AMP audience buying platform with intelligent ad versioning has created a powerful tool for advertisers, allowing them to engage with consumers with exact using the right creative.” Luma Partners advised Tumri on the transaction.

Continued Platform Development

Tumri’s deep engineering expertise in data-driven marketing platforms, ad serving optimization and analytics will be applied to Collective’s own AMP® Data and Media Management Platform technology roadmap. The combined engineering operation will greatly enhance and accelerate AMP product development, enabling Collective to release new features and functionality to both buy-side and sell-side customers using AMP.

About Collective

Collective helps brand advertisers connect and engage with target audiences across display, video and social media. Collective’s industry expertise provides a strategic advantage to its clients by leveraging proprietary audience modeling, insights and ad effectiveness metrics. Our flagship products, Collective Display and Collective Video®, are powered by AMP®, our market-proven data and media management platform. Collective is headquartered in New York with offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco and London. Collective’s investors include Accel Partners®, Greycroft Partners and iNovia Capital. For more information, please visit www.collective.com.

About Tumri

Tumri is the leading provider of dynamic creative optimization and personalization solutions for advertisers and agencies. The Tumri Ensemble platform combines next-generation ad-serving with dynamic creative production to enable real-time 1:1 personalized marketing at scale. With Tumri, marketers can effectively cross-sell and up-sell a catalog of products or services to their consumers based on a user’s actual site browse or action, driving maximum relevancy and ROI. Marketers also benefit from a powerful auto-optimization engine and dynamic creative reports that allows for a more accurate and timely view of campaign metrics. Tumri powers dynamic marketing campaigns for many of the world’s most prominent brands including Nike, HP and Travelocity among others. To date, Tumri has executed more campaigns, served more impressions and created more distinct dynamic creative experiences than anyone in the space.

New York, NY – TagMan, the global leader in tag management, announced today the immediate availability of TagMan 3 with new Smart Tag Loading capabilities to dramatically improve website performance.

TagMan’s new Smart Tag Loading is the first of its kind to address tag storage and loading issues that often cause slower loading web pages, providing substantially accelerated website performance.

The new Smart Tag Loading features are particularly important for ecommerce, where every second counts. Research by Forrester shows that online shoppers are incredibly impatient, with 40% abandoning sites after waiting a mere three seconds.  Even a one second delay can cost millions in lost revenue, according to Aberdeen Group .

Recognizing this, online retailers have been actively seeking new ways to accelerate site performance, but until now have been unable to appropriately address issues with third party tags.

“We chose TagMan as our global tag management provider because site performance and flexibility really matter to us,” noted William Beckler, Marketing Analytics Manager for Travelocity. “The tag acceleration promise is certainly compelling and we look forwarded to seeing how we can leverage these new techniques, along with the other new TagMan 3 features, across our global properties.”

The issues with slow site performance are highlighted in the results of a recent survey conducted by TagMan,  which shows that 81% of respondents are concerned or very concerned about page load times, while 60% say they’ve taken some steps to improve site speed but feel they could do more. Additionally, nearly three-quarters (71%) are aware that optimization of third party marketing pixels/tags can hasten page load times, while 35% have actually reduced or removed tags to improve site performance. (See separate press release titled “Ecommerce Page Speed Survey Reveals Most Site Owners are Concerned about Page Load Times; 35% Remove Third Party Tags to Improve Performance”, 7/18/11.)

TagMan 3: Revolutionizing how tags load
Tags, or pixels, are tiny bits of code that marketers use to track performance of their online campaigns. Most ecommerce sites incorporate five to seven tags per page with each tag taking up to ¼ of a second to load . As a result, tags can easily add 1.5 seconds to the load time, costing a 10% loss in potential sales.
TagMan 3 incorporates revolutionary script load techniques, for the first time giving online retailers complete control over how tags are loaded to deliver faster loading page times.

TagMan 3 features include:
- Parallel Tag Loading – Tag Management can be done fully asynchronously so that tags load independently to the rest of the page, rather than sequentially. TagMan can even deliver synchronous tags while running in asynchronous mode.
- Synchronous Tag Acceleration – TagMan can preload dependent third party script resources so the page does not have to wait to fetch it when executing a synchronous tag.
- Tag Killing – Tags that are taking an unacceptable time to load can be timed out from within the browser to ensure the page completes and the user experience is protected.

“Our v3 platform addresses a clear market need that is top of mind for every internet retailer in America. Nobody has been able to address this fully until now,” said Paul Cook, CEO and Founder of TagMan. “We have completely rethought how we load scripts based on extensive research and over four years of experience deploying over 180 technologies across our global client-base. Better data collection and faster loading websites is the new paradigm for Tag Management.”
TagMan 3 is available immediately. For more information about Smart Tag Loading visit www.tagman.com/index/smart-tag-loading.html.

About TagMan
TagMan is the global leader in tag management, with the industry’s most mature and proven platform for the enterprise. Since launching the first, independent tag management platform in 2007, TagMan has been helping over 100 customers solve tagging, site performance and attribution-related challenges. With over 180 vendor tags currently implemented, the award-winning TagMan platform provides customers complete agility in managing existing partners and working with new technologies without the burden of costly implementation projects and resources. Continuing to lead the market in innovation, TagMan is the only enterprise-level tag management platform with robust solutions for improving site performance, optimizing data collection and addressing privacy at a global level. Learn more how customers like Ancestry.com, Virgin Atlantic, Subaru and others are seeing significant ROI from using TagMan, at www.tagman.com.

NEW YORK, NY – Amidst growing concerns about slow loading web pages and the resulting loss in sales and conversions to ecommerce businesses, a new survey by global tag management leader TagMan (www.tagman.com) reveals that a majority of respondents (81%) are concerned or very concerned about page load speeds on their sites. At the same time, nearly 60% say they’ve taken some steps to improve site speed but feel they could do more.

The survey also shows that nearly three-quarters (71%) are aware that optimization of third party marketing pixels/tags can hasten page load times, while 35% have actually reduced or removed tags to improve site performance.

Numerous studies show that slow loading pages can have a negative impact on ecommerce conversion rates. According to an Aberdeen Group report, every extra second a page takes to load can result in approximately a seven percent loss of conversions . Additionally, a Forrester Research report indicates that 40 percent of shoppers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a retail or travel site .

Third party marketing tags, or pixels, can be a key contributor to slow loading pages, as they’re often stored and loaded inefficiently. Most ecommerce sites incorporate five to seven tags per page, with each tag taking up to 1/4 of a second to load  which can mean approximately 1.25 seconds for the site’s pages to load, or a 10-15% loss in potential sales.

According to Paul Cook, CEO and founder of TagMan, the survey findings reveal an opportunity for more companies to optimize third party tags to increase page performance without losing the benefits of these tags by removing them altogether.

“Most marketers are aware that vendor tags are a key contributor to latency, yet a majority haven’t taken measures in this area. Those that have, have gone to the extreme measure of taking tags off their site, which also takes away their tracking and reporting benefits,” said Cook. “Until now, there haven’t really been tools available to effectively improve how tags are loaded without compromising their reporting value.”

TagMan also announced today the availability of TagMan 3 with Smart Tag Loading techniques that speed up third party tag and overall page loading times (see separate release, “TagMan Announces TagMan 3 with Smart Tag Loading,” July 18, 2011).

Survey Methodology and Highlights

The “TagMan Ecommerce Page Load Speed” survey was conducted in June 2011 through an online questionnaire powered by SurveyMonkey. It was completed by more than 60 digital marketers across brand retailers and advertisers, marketing agencies and technology providers chiefly in the US and Europe.

The findings include the following:

Concerns about page load speeds:
o    50% said they’re concerned about page load speeds on their sites;
o    31% said they’re somewhat concerned;
o    17% said they’re neutral;
o    2% said they’re not concerned.

Ranking of how slow loading sites impact an organization (1 most impact, 5 least impact):
o    reduced conversions (51% ranked this first in importance);
o    visitor abandonment (46% ranked this second);
o    perceived negative brand experience (47% ranked this third);
o    reduced repeat visits (49% ranked this fourth);
o    switching to competitive sites (40% ranked this fifth);
o    other mentions: negative impact on search engine optimization (SEO).

Whether or not actively taking steps to improve speed and performance:
o    59.4% have taken some steps but feel they could do more;
o    14.1% are not taking steps but are investigating options;
o    14.1% believe they’re optimizing to the fullest extent;
o    12.5% are not actively taking steps to improve speed.

Measures being taken to improve site speed:
o    optimize page code (63%);
o    performance monitoring (56%);
o    reduce page weight (55%);
o    reducing or removing 3rd party tags (35%);
o    more web servers/locations (22%);
o    site acceleration (22%);
o    unsure (9%);
o    Other (3%).

Awareness that optimization of marketing tags/pixels can improve performance:
o    71.9% are aware;
o    28.1% are not aware.

Download the full survey results by clicking here.

About TagMan
TagMan is the global leader in tag management, with the industry’s most mature and proven platform for the enterprise. Since launching the first, independent tag management platform in 2007, TagMan has been helping over 100 customers solve tagging, site performance and attribution-related challenges. With over 180 vendor tags currently implemented, the award-winning TagMan platform provides customers complete agility in managing existing partners and working with new technologies without the burden of costly implementation projects and resources. Continuing to lead the market in innovation, TagMan is the only enterprise-level tag management platform with robust solutions for improving site performance, optimizing data collection and addressing privacy at a global level. Learn more how customers like Ancestry.com, Virgin Atlantic, Subaru and others are seeing significant ROI from using TagMan, at www.tagman.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About aiMatch

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

Otilia Otlacan: Ad exchanges are a hot topic these days, and, as you so clearly explained ¹, they may overtake ad networks in terms of agency buys. Still, there are many in the online media arena who aren’t too sure on the difference between the two. To start with, could you give our readers a clarification on what distinguishes an ad exchange from an ad network?
Roy de Souza: An advertiser can think of an exchange as an Amazon.com type site that sells advertising space. Agencies go there, see what ad space is available and buy it.

Otilia Otlacan: There is a gap – at least a perceived one – between technologies employed by ad exchanges and those commonly seen in ad networks. Do you think this is indeed the case, and if so, what could be the driver for the discrepancy?
Roy de Souza: Ad networks were usually started by great sales teams. They are very good at selling to agencies. That is their strength. Ad Exchanges like DoubleClick Exchange, ZINC Exchange and OpenX Exchange were started by ad serving companies. Ad serving companies are sophisticated and technology companies with huge scale. An exchange is sophisticated technology that also offers the ability to buy ad space – so even more complex technology. As the the industry started seeing advantages from exchanges, it was far easier for the ad serving companies to build an exchange than for the excellent sales reps to start writing software.

Otilia Otlacan: We have seen how beneficial ad exchanges could be for large media buyers. What about publishers, what’s in the store for them?
Roy de Souza: Publishers can and should benefit too. And they will. Currently most ad exchanges sell only remnant space. They don’t pay the publishers much more than remnant ad networks so publishers don’t benefit much. However new premium exchanges such as ZINC Ad Exchange sell premium not remnant. They get high prices for the publishers and the publishers will benefit. Because there are so many advertisers across the world the premium exchanges will find them and bring new advertisers and money to publishers.

Otilia Otlacan: While still in the publishers’ zone, what is your take on yield optimization companies vs. ad exchanges? Are yield optimizers morphing into ad exchanges?
Roy de Souza: Yes. Yield optimization companies are good at optimizing remnant space. They are morphing into remnant exchanges that sell remnant space on an auction basis.

Otilia Otlacan: You have launched ZINC – Zedo’s own ad exchange – three months ago. What differentiates ZINC form other ad exchanges? Could you share with us what’s on ZINC’s roadmap for this year?
Roy de Souza: ZINC has been launched in private beta. It is for advertisers and agencies that want 100% transparency and guaranteed impression delivery. It sells only professionally created content sites in the news vertical. It also sells new ad types that are noticed by users. Agencies love the UI and the efficiencies from automating their media planning and buying. They are impressed that before buying they can see full availability data, prices and unique users their media plan will reach. This type of inventory  is very attractive to agencies that are launching a new product or service or trying to make a big impact. The ad space is a little more expensive than remnant but agencies find that their clients are very happy with the results. Later this year we will add more high quality sites, add further innovative ad types (one on the iPad) and more targeting options like day parting. We will also launch ZINC internationally as we are seeing demand from agencies outside the US.

About Roy de Souza:
Roy leads ZEDO’s team and heads up its strategy and vision, sales & marketing, and product management efforts. Prior to ZEDO, he was in product management at Zip2.com, an Internet city guide company. Zip2 was acquired by Compaq/Altavista and is now part of CMGI’s My Way. He supervised the project to implement transaction ability for thousands of merchants, including site design, user testing and pricing, as well as selecting software vendors. Previously, he was a consultant at The COBA Group, a Marketing/Strategy Consulting boutique in the UK.

Roy has extensive experience in marketing strategies, consumer goods marketing and advertising with such companies as: Avon, Hewlett Packard, and Schwab. Roy has also evaluated market positioning of numerous potential investments for venture capitalists. Before COBA, Roy worked for Rover Group Cars and Imperial Chemical Industries. He started his career at the advanced technology division of Ove Arup & Partners Consulting Engineers. Roy received his MBA from Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University where he was elected Vice President of Technology. He co-founded the now popular Kellogg TechVenture class. Roy received his Masters in Engineering and Economics from St. Anne’s College, Oxford University.

About ZEDO:
The ZEDO fully-featured publisher ad server can handle everything that a publisher needs for mobile ad serving. The ZEDO development teams are focused on online advertising and innovating for publisher’s web and mobile business. Using the mobile features are easier than ever for ZEDO customers, who can reach mobile users in the same ZEDO platform that they use to manage their digital adverting business.
ZEDO also understands that readers are spending more time on their tablet than on mobile devices, and that browsers get more impressions than apps. In response to these market trends, ZEDO works with their publishers to develop rich, high-impact new ad units that make sense on a tablet. Reach out to ZEDO online at: http://www.zedo.com/technology/learnMore.htm

NEW YORK, NY and CALGARY, AB – Mocean Mobile (www.moceanmobile.com), the standard in mobile ad serving, and Poynt Corporation (“Poynt Corp.”), (TSX-V: PYN), a leading provider of mobile local search services, announced a multi-year agreement to create a complete advertising solution for direct local marketing campaigns targeted to smartphone users when and where the consumer is searching for specific goods and services.

The Poynt application (“Poynt”) is a convenient and timesaving GPS-enabled mobile application that connects consumers to local businesses, events, restaurants, movie theaters, gas prices and weather information at the moment they are looking to buy or acquire products. Poynt provides consumers the ability to move beyond discovery of their local area to view movie trailers and reviews, buy movie tickets, click-to-call businesses, get directions, browse listing websites and read reviews and book dining reservations. Poynt Corp. has content partnerships with Citysearch, Yellow Pages, Superpages, OpenTable, Movietickets.com and many more.

“We drive revenue and conversions for established global media operators by helping them reach the right audience,” said Andrew Osis, CEO of Poynt Corp. “Our implementation through the Mocean Mobile service will give us the much-needed infrastructure to easily and effectively run our advertisers’ campaigns from soup to nuts, ultimately driving revenue and conversions for individual advertisers.”

The Mocean Mobile platform is used by some of the largest publishers and content providers in the world to streamline their mobile revenue opportunities on all mobile devices. Poynt Corp.’s implementation of the platform will give their advertisers the ability to engage with users most relevant to the advertiser’s needs through dynamic and rich media creative campaigns on mobile. Poynt Corp.’s mobile marketing partners will also have the best available tools at their disposal for executing direct campaigns, as well as conducting mediation where needed through Mocean Mobile’s fully-integrated capabilities.

“Poynt is an exciting and incredibly useful application. We are pleased to be chosen as the solution that can best help Poynt Corp. effectively serve relevant ads to their users and as their monetization platform,” said Tony Nethercutt, GM North America for Mocean Mobile. “Given the level of due diligence Poynt Corp. put into selecting their ad serving partner, it makes us all proud that our technology came out on top. We look forward to a fantastic and lasting relationship.”

Poynt is available as a free download for iPhone and iPod Touch, Android, Nokia QT, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry smartphone and BlackBerry PlayBook tablet users in Canada, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Spain and Australia from the respective App Stores. Poynt is also available via over-the-air download at m.poynt.com.

About Mocean Mobile
Mocean Mobile created the first technology platform that streamlines publishers’, developers’ and app stores’ mobile revenue opportunities by giving them the ability to serve display ads to all mobile devices including smart phones, tablets and netbooks. Mocean Mobile integrates with the top rich media technology platforms to ensure that publishers have capabilities to run the most engaging and comprehensive creative ad units on their mobile sites. By integrating with the majority of 3rd party networks and agency side ad servers like DART and Atlas, Mocean Mobile combines state of the art direct sales campaign management with ad network mediation for the mobile world. Created in 2009, Mocean Mobile is led by a team of advertising and media veterans from Google, DoubleClick, Yahoo, Nokia and AdMob, with more than 100 years of collective experience in mobile marketing and technology. It operates under parent company Mojiva Inc., which has a total of $10 million venture funding from Pelion VP and Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments.

About Poynt Corporation
Poynt Corp. (about.poynt.com) is a global leader in the mobile local advertising space. Their Location Based Search application, Poynt (www.poynt.com), enhances the consumers’ ability to connect with the people, businesses and events most important to them. Poynt is available on BlackBerry smartphones, BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet, iPhone and iPod Touch, Android, Nokia QT devices and Windows Phone 7 in Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia. Poynt Corp. entered the mobile publishing space with the recent acquisition of an advertising publishing platform. Key contracts on both the supply and demand sides are in place to provide inventory into the platform and publishers to display the inventory. Whether through the Poynt App or the ad publishing platform, Poynt Corp. simplifies connecting consumers with businesses, retailers and events. Headquartered in Calgary, AB, Canada, Poynt Corp. trades on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol PYN.

NEW YORK, NY – Mocean Mobile (www.moceanmobile.com), the standard in mobile ad serving, today announced a multi-year agreement with the Newspaper National Network LP (NNN) to give national brand advertisers unlimited potential to reach and engage with consumers on the leading national network of local media.

After conducting a lengthy vetting process, the NNN selected Mocean Mobile as its solution to serve local media across all mobile platforms, including smartphones, tablets, in-application or mobile Web. Mocean Mobile provides NNN with the state of the art infrastructure required to execute the rich media campaigns advertisers want at a national scale, capitalizing on mobile’s unique ability to target local audiences.

“We are confident that Mocean Mobile’s robust technology platform and enhanced targeting capabilities, coupled with NNN’s innovative sales solutions, will enable national advertisers to maximize the local benefits of mobile, with scale,” said Doug MacDonald, Vice President, Digital for the NNN.

Working with national blue-chip advertisers who want to fully engage with mobile users, the NNN will utilize the Mocean ad serving platform’s full support of all types of rich media campaigns to offer marketing partners custom ad solutions that are both unique and of high value. To that end, Mocean Mobile boasts deep integration with all of the major rich media providers in mobile advertising.

“The NNN has been leading the way making local newspapers national through marketing campaigns that speak to their audiences in print and digital — and now they’ll extend that to mobile,” said Tony Nethercutt, GM North America for Mocean Mobile. “We’re excited to have the NNN’s national advertising partners and publisher affiliates take advantage of Mocean Mobile’s flexible, turnkey solution.”

About Mocean Mobile
Mocean Mobile created the first technology platform that streamlines publishers’, developers’ and app stores’ mobile revenue opportunities by giving them the ability to serve display ads to all mobile devices including smart phones, tablets and netbooks. Mocean Mobile integrates with the top rich media technology platforms to ensure that publishers have capabilities to run the most engaging and comprehensive creative ad units on their mobile sites. By integrating with the majority of 3rd party networks and agency side ad servers like DART and Atlas, Mocean Mobile combines state of the art direct sales campaign management with ad network mediation for the mobile world. Created in 2009, Mocean Mobile is led by a team of advertising and media veterans from Google, DoubleClick, Yahoo, and AdMob, with more than 100 years of collective experience in online and mobile advertising. It operates under parent company Mojiva Inc., which has a total of $10 million venture funding from Pelion VP and Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments.

About NNN
Newspaper National Network LP (NNN) is the leading national network of local media. NNN encompasses 9,000 print newspapers, local online, mobile, tablets, free-standing inserts, Hispanic/other niche publications, weekly and suburban papers. As a “one-stop point of contact” for national advertisers, NNN creates and delivers innovative, scalable advertiser solutions. NNN is dedicated to strengthening brands, improving efficiencies, and increasing advertiser return on investment. With over 15 years of experience, NNN maximizes the local market connection, on a national scale, at no cost to advertisers.

NNN is a private partnership owned by 25 of the largest U.S. newspaper companies: Tribune, Advance, Gannett, New York Times Company, McClatchy, Hearst, MediaNews, Washington Post, Philadelphia Media Networks, Chicago Sun Times, Belo, Cox, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Newsday, Journal Sentinel, Freedom, Lee Enterprises, E.W. Scripps, The St. Petersburg Times, The Buffalo News, Media General, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Omaha World-Herald and the Newspaper Association of America.
NNN is headquartered in New York, with offices in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. More information about NNN can be found at www.nnnlp.com.

SINGAPORE – Vdopia Inc., the pioneer in mobile and online video advertising technology, marked the second anniversary of its entry into mobile advertising and its 4 billionth mobile video ad served.

In 2009, Vdopia established the mobile video ad category with the launch of its pre-app and in-app ads for iPhone. The company now serves multiple smartphone and tablet platforms, across mobile web and apps. Among its “firsts” in that time:

• First company to launch mobile video ads, with pre-app / in-app video ads for iPhone and then Android
• Introduced video ads to the mobile Web, for iPhone and Android
• Introduced Talk2Me social media ad overlays for iPhone and Android
• Launched the first HTML5 ad authoring solution, Future5

“Delivering four billion video ads in two years is a significant achievement which speaks to our early entry and constant innovation in the mobile space,” said Vdopia co-founder and CEO Srikanth Kakani.

Vdopia’s customer base represents a who’s who of the world’s most recognized brands, including Bausch+Lomb, Disney, Ikea, McDonald’s, Microsoft, MillerCoors, Nokia, Samsung, Scion, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios, Vodafone, and Wrigley, among others.

In its commitment to future growth, Vdopia has also announced two strategic alliances — with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Horn Group — to further support its top position in mobile video advertising.

Vdopia joined the IAB’s Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence to take an active role in helping shape the ad industry’s adoption of mobile video and provide important perspective on industry issues such as standards, formats and measurement.

“The IAB is recognized as a critical assurance of digital advertising quality, reliability and accountability,” said Saurabh Bhatia, Vdopia co-founder and Chief Business Officer. “As the pioneer in mobile video advertising, we look forward to collaborating with the IAB and our fellow council members to grow industry adoption of mobile video as the next wave of brand media for smart marketers everywhere.”

Vdopia has also retained Horn Group as its digital communications agency of record for its mobile business. Horn Group has been recognized as a best mid-sized agency for five consecutive years in PRSourceCode’s annual Top Tech Communicators survey and was recently named the 2011 Technology Agency of the Year by The Holmes Report.

About Vdopia

Vdopia Inc., a pioneer in the mobile and online video advertising space, enables major brands to engage their desired audiences in premium content environments. Its mobile advertising solutions deliver hundreds of millions of mobile video and rich media ad impressions each month for clients including McDonald’s, Scion, Universal Studios, Microsoft, Sony Pictures, Wrigley and MillerCoors – making Vdopia the largest mobile video advertising network.

Vdopia is headquartered in Silicon Valley, with offices across the U.S. and in India.

Learn more about Vdopia at www.vdopia.com.

Learn more about Vdopia’s mobile video advertising solutions at http://mobile.vdopia.com.

LOS ANGELES & TOKYO – cyber communications inc. (“cci”), Japan’s leading media representative company, and OpenX Technologies, Inc. (OpenX), the world’s leading independent provider of digital advertising technology, announced the launch of OpenX Market Japan, a new online advertising exchange model designed to lead the evolution of online exchanges in Japan. The new exchange, which is now available to online publishers and advertisers, is the first exchange in Japan to offer Real-Time Bidding (RTB) functionality.

OpenX Market Japan increases the value of display advertising and maximizes publishers’ revenue by helping advertisers much more easily reach their target audiences across large numbers of websites. By offering RTB capabilities for the first time in Japan, the exchange enables publishers to maximize their ad revenue by selling their inventory to buyers who compete for each impression in a real-time auction. The auction runs for every single impression in real-time with a minimum “floor price” set by the publishers.

The exchange is a powerful combination of cci’s market expertise, supply and demand relationships in the Japanese market, as well as OpenX’s global technology platform and innovative marketplace design. OpenX Market Japan is part of OpenX’s new global approach to online advertising marketplaces that allows major online media companies in key regions, such as cci in Japan, to participate directly in building exchange value chains.

The Market features a number of key and unique benefits:

Benefits for publishers

Revenue maximization: In addition to their own direct (guaranteed) ad sales, publishers can increase revenue by selling their non-guaranteed inventory in a real-time auction market in which all classes of buyers compete on an impression by impression basis.
Price Protection: OpenX Market Japan allows publishers to set the floor or reserve price for each impression, ensuring price protection.
Control: The platform features enable publishers to keep control over their inventory, the ads actually displayed on their inventory and the floor price set for their inventory.
Simple user experience: OpenX Market Japan’s design allows publishers to participate with just one click of a button. Sales are consolidated into one monthly check.
Excellent support: All tools are in the local language, pricing and billing are in local currencies and all technical and customer support is provided by local teams.
Global access: Publishers have access to a larger range of advertisers at the international, national and local levels.

Benefits for advertisers and agencies

Return on investment: Enables advertisers to increase their performance by reaching their target audience at scale.
Simplicity: OpenX Market Japan provides advertisers with simple and powerful ways to buy across a potentially enormous pool of diverse, primary inventory. Advertisers can immediately access and participate on 100% of ad inventory, while making just one consolidated payment even when buying across multiple currencies.
Efficiency: Advertisers can define and buy ad inventory based on their unique criteria across a combination of large and niche publishers and a large pool of targeting criteria.
Transparency: Advertisers and agencies maintain complete control over where their ads are displayed.
Global access: Advertisers and agencies can buy from anywhere and consolidate their purchases at a regional level.
Real-Time Bidding: RTB on both the client and server side and immediate access to auctions ensure an instant and fair bidding process.

The Japanese online advertising market was worth an estimated $7.4 billion in 2009 and is projected to grow to more than $10 billion by 2014*, a growth rate of more than 42%. It is the second largest online advertising market in the world.

OpenX powers OpenX Market Japan by providing the regionally specific toolset required for success in Japan alongside the core technology and market design of the global OpenX Market, which already reaches more than 400 million unique users monthly. cci is the first Asian partner in a global, interconnected alliance of regional partners driving participation into OpenX Market.

“We’re excited to launch OpenX Market Japan and to be the first to bring RTB functionality to Japan,” said Tim Cadogan, chief executive officer, OpenX. “We’re particularly pleased to be working with cci as our partner in the exchange and look forward to rapid acceleration of the market’s growth as we bring the benefits of our unique revenue serving platform to this important region.”

“We’re delighted to work with OpenX to introduce the ad exchange model into Japan,” said Hideyuki Nagasawa, chief executive officer, cyber communications inc. “Given the powerful combination of OpenX’s best of class global media trading platform, and cci’s deep relationships with the publisher and advertiser markets in Japan, we are confident that we will achieve rapid adoption of the OpenX Market ad exchange in Japan, which will be good for the entire digital economy.”

For more information and how to participate in OpenX Market Japan please visit: www.openxmarket.jp

* Source: Nomura Research Institute, Ltd.

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.

OpenX is a trademark of OpenX Limited.

About cyber communications inc.

cci, established in 1996 as a subsidiary of Dentsu Inc. [Tokyo Stock Exchange (Code 4324)] in the early stages of the online advertising market in Japan, has led the market’s growth. cci established the business model whereby, as a media representative, it makes connections between thousands of online media and advertising agencies in Japan. cci describes itself as a total interactive, one-stop marketing service company that provides various services regarding internet advertising such as media planning, ad serving technology, ad creative service and market analysis. For more information, please visit: www.cci.co.jp/en/overview.

Four years after TagMan created the first Tag Management System, Joe Stanhope, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research produced a terrific white paper called “How Tag Management Improves Web Intelligence” a few months back. Now through the “magic” of licensing, TagMan is making this available to the industry as a free download, here: http://bit.ly/WhitepaperDownload

Just in case you can’t be bothered to read the whole thing or need a little more convincing to read it, here is a scintillating synopsis of Stanhope’s insights.

Tags are a growing problem that shouldn’t be ignored Stanhope’s points out that JavaScript tags are “omnipresent on Web sites, supporting a wide variety of analytics, marketing and technical services.” Unfortunately, with the ubiquity of tags comes a myriad of new problems:

• Adding and changing tags is a growing burden on the IT department
• The current process for changing tags is highly inefficient
• High probability of duplicate and outdated tags
• If the tags are wrong, so is the data they are supposed to provide

You need to determine the full extent of your tagging problem
In the white paper, Stanhope provides a relatively simple web site tagging audit that makes it easy for you to determine how tags currently impact your website. Using a 1-3 point system, the audit asks the reader to consider six key categories:

• Number of JavaScript tags
• Time required to add/change tags
• Frequency of additions/changes
• Number of parties involved in tag management
• Overall site complexity
• Impact of tags on page load time

Forrester sites a number of benefits of tag management systems Not surprisingly, for those that do the audit and end up with a high score, Forrester recommends investing in a tag management system. (Thank you Forrester—we couldn’t agree with you more!) Here are some of the benefits of deploying a tag management system sited in the white paper:

• Increased accuracy of analytical data
• Increased efficiency when changing/managing tags
• Reduced reliance on any one supplier for data
• Puts tag management in the hands of those that need the data
• Enhanced page load performance since unmanaged tags slow pages down

Forrester includes TagMan among leading Tag Management System vendors Forrester lists five tag management system vendors including TagMan without showing preference to any of us. We appreciate their unbiased approach since this makes their white paper that much more credible.
And as the global leader in tag management, TagMan hope you’ll enjoy your free copy, do the audit and then give us a shout.

http://bit.ly/WhitepaperDownload

NEW YORK – Undertone, which delivers quality display, high impact and video solutions for online advertisers, today announced the addition of PageSkin™ to its high impact product suite. Built on technology developed by Undertone, PageSkin surrounds web content, turning page borders into a large canvas for advertising creative. Undertone is the first company to enable brands to run high impact advertising skins across guaranteed brand-safe sites from a single IO.

PageSkin is being offered as part of a package that also includes prominent ad units displayed on the same page as the skin creative. This integrated package enables brand advertisers to fully own the consumer experience on a particular webpage.

The technology underpinning PageSkin is a turnkey solution for both advertisers and publishers. PageSkin automatically scales advertising creative, ensuring campaigns are displayed effectively across multiple site formats and different screen resolutions. PageSkin advertisers can also leverage the full range of targeting capabilities available through Undertone Ad Server™ (UAS).

“Undertone is committed to innovating beyond traditional banner ads with high impact solutions,” said Eric Franchi, Co-Founder, Undertone. “With PageSkin, our objective is to ensure brands can ‘Be Seen and Be Heard’ online. Not only does PageSkin provide incredible brand awareness for advertisers but it also helps drive incremental revenue for online publishers.”

Publishers benefit from PageSkin by having the ability to monetize more of their online properties and deliver enhanced advertising solutions to major brand advertisers.

“Undertone is continuing to innovate with the launch of PageSkin. The new ad format is a no-brainer for publishers who are looking to attract big brand advertisers and maximize the revenue they generate from their online properties,” said Suzette Cabildo, National Director, Digital Ad Sales & Ad Operations, Arthur Frommer’s BudgetTravel.com. “The combination of PageSkin with display ads allows brands a new, more powerful way to really engage customers online.”

PageSkin is the latest innovation in Undertone’s high impact product suite. In September 2010, Undertone introduced PageGrabber™, an interactive ad unit that takes over a webpage, using it in real time as the backdrop for advertising creative, and providing advertisers with a unique and compelling way to engage consumers at scale. Since launch, PageGrabber has delivered interaction rates up to 88 percent higher than industry standards (based on campaign performance benchmarks from DoubleClick).

About Undertone

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

LOS ANGELES – OpenX Technologies, Inc. (OpenX), the world’s leading independent provider of digital advertising technology, today announced it has completed a $20 million Series D funding round that brings the total investment in OpenX to more than $50 million. SAP Ventures led the round with the participation of additional new investors AOL Ventures, Mitsui & Co. Global Investment, Inc., and Presidio Ventures, the wholly owned investment vehicle of Sumitomo Corporation. Existing investors Accel Partners, Index Ventures and DAG Ventures also participated in the round. As a result of its investment, SAP Ventures will take a seat on the company’s board of directors. OpenX will use the additional funds to accelerate growth, including international expansion, and to drive further adoption of OpenX Enterprise, the company’s Software as a Service revenue serving product for large publishers.

With the recent launch of the new OpenX Enterprise platform, OpenX offered the online advertising market the first true total revenue serving platform. Since OpenX Enterprise combines an ad server and an ad exchange, it enables publishers to manage exclusive, guaranteed, non-guaranteed and real-time revenue sources all in one unified platform. As a result, for the first time publishers can maximize yield across all their ad revenue channels in real-time.

OpenX has made significant progress over the last year in terms of both product adoption and revenue. Adoption of OpenX Enterprise by major publishers has grown rapidly and the platform is now used by hundreds of customers around the world, including Groupon, Excite Japan and Business Insider. Over the past year, OpenX Market revenue has grown nearly 600%. The company has struck international partnerships for the exchange with Dentsu-cci in Japan and Orange-France Telecom in Europe.

“We think the OpenX real-time revenue serving technology platform has enormous potential to be a major force in online advertising,” said Nino Marakovic, managing director, SAP Ventures. “We see digital advertising rapidly becoming an integral part of the enterprise ecosystem as it becomes more and more core to businesses. We believe that OpenX will become an industry-defining platform in this rapidly growing sector. In addition to our investment, we also plan to leverage our relationships to help OpenX expand its reach.”

“The online advertising technology space has needed a robust alternative for many years and we believe OpenX, with its innovative technology, provides a platform that is both an alternative and a paradigm shift for the industry,” said Hiro Yoshikawa, principal, Mitsui Global Investment. “We’re also particularly impressed with the company’s execution of its global-local OpenX Market strategy that is typified by the impressive OpenX Market Japan partnership with Dentsu-cci. We think this model will also work well throughout the APAC region and we’re pleased to begin our involvement with the company,” said Sanjay Pichaiah, principal, Mitsui Global Investment.

“We’re extremely pleased with the rapid progress OpenX has made and we’re delighted by the funding and support of our investor base,” said Tim Cadogan, chief executive officer, OpenX. “Having new investors representing one of the world’s largest enterprise companies (SAP), one of the world’s largest internet pure-plays (AOL) and two of the most important global Asian trading firms (Mitsui and Sumitomo) all coming together to invest in the global technology platform company we are creating is – we believe – a compelling and powerful mix.”

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.

OpenX is a trademark of OpenX Limited.

About SAP Ventures

SAP Ventures partners with outstanding entrepreneurs worldwide to build industry-leading businesses. We are funded by SAP AG (NYSE: SAP), the market leader in enterprise application software, and we leverage the relationship with SAP and its ecosystem for the benefit of portfolio companies. SAP Ventures invests in technology businesses that serve enterprises as customers or have enterprises as go-to market partners as well as companies that service consumers in their professional lives. Over the last 15 years, SAP Ventures has supported more than 100 companies on five continents. Past investments include Commerce One, Greenplum, MySQL, Red Hat, and WebEx. Current portfolio companies include Alfresco, Alteryx, Control4, Endeca, iYogi, LinkedIn, OnDeck, OpenX, Spring Wireless, Tealeaf, Tremor Media, and Zend. For more information, visit www.sapventures.com.

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif. – ValueClick Media, a division of ValueClick Inc. (Nasdaq:VCLK), is pleased to announce the opening of a new office in Toronto, Canada. The new office will be managed by Jay Mitchell, formerly the Director of Sales for Suite 66 and AOL Canada’s Advertising.com.

“Toronto, known as Canada’s economic engine, is a focal point of North American on-and-offline advertising,” said Jay Mitchell, senior account executive for ValueClick Media. “We want our Canadian clients to know that we can fulfill their global business here at home. It’s a great honour to have been chosen by ValueClick Media to head up their Canadian office.”

The IAB Canada reported in its 2009 CMUST (Canadian Media Usage Studies) Report that the Internet is the third highest weekly reach medium among Canadian adults of all ages, after television and radio. ValueClick Media will now have a local presence to help Canadian businesses advertise to their specific target audiences online. In his new role, Mitchell will increase awareness of ValueClick’s products and services to Canadian advertisers while helping assess their needs to achieve their online objectives. Mitchell brings over 18 years of sales and business development experience in Toronto to ValueClick Media. An avid Hockey fan, Mitchell is well-established in the local and national digital marketing industry.

“ValueClick Media is focused on having a strong, local presence to provide personalized service and support for our advertisers. Our Toronto office will be our 8th international office, with 6 additional locations in the United States,” said Lynn D’Alessandro, vice president of sales for ValueClick Media. “Jay has already experienced several major client wins for ValueClick Media and we look forward to watching our Canadian team grow in the coming months.”

According to comScore, ValueClick is the 6th largest ad network in Canada, reaching approximately 20 million unique visitors each month, nearly 80% of the entire Canadian online audience.

For more information, please contact Jay Mitchell toll-free at 866-317-7880, jmitchell@valueclick.com or reach him via LinkedIn.

ValueClick Media is now hiring in Canada. For employment opportunities, please contact Marcia Needels, Talent Acquisition Manager, at mneedels@valueclick.com, or call 818-575-4641.

About ValueClick Media

Twelve years of experience and access to the global data resources of ValueClick, Inc. make ValueClick Media the largest and most robust audience network of its kind. Proprietary consumer behavioral data, direct relationships with 8,000 publishers and access to additional inventory via real-time bidding, advanced behavioral targeting and optimization technology, strict network quality controls and superior service make ValueClick Media the network leading marketers and agencies rely on to reach their performance objectives. For more information, visit www.valueclickmedia.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, 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 www.valueclick.com.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – YuMe, the leading relevant video advertising technology company, announced that it is providing video advertising for content partners on Roku’s best-selling and award-winning streaming player. Roku and YuMe collaborated to create a straight forward template for a simple integration of channel partners, speeding time to monetization. Starting today, YuMe will serve dynamic video advertising to the proprietary Roku Internet TV platform. Among the first Roku publishers to use YuMe are DreamTV and Blastro Networks.

“With an Internet connection, a new breed of streaming players enables consumers to access the content they want, when they want it. We’re excited to extend our network and build on our TV technology footprint by enabling content providers to monetize their videos on Roku,” said Jayant Kadambi, president and co-founder of YuMe.

Roku is the market leader in streaming entertainment devices for the TV with more than 1 million units sold. Roku streaming players are renowned for their simplicity, variety of entertainment choices, and exceptional value. Roku will leverage YuMe’s ACE video ad management platform to provide a feature-rich experience for advertisers and publishers alike.

“YuMe is a leader in the video advertising space and together we can now provide a comprehensive advertising monetization solution for our partners,” said Jim Funk, vice president of business development at Roku. “The integration of Roku’s open SDK for creating channels and YuMe’s ACE video ad management system gives content owners great flexibility in how they extend their business to the Roku user base.”

“YuMe has been a great partner for our genre specific music sites Blastro, Roxwel and Yallwire across other platforms and we are excited to leverage their network and technology on Roku,” said Rob Campanell, co-founder of Blastro Networks. “YuMe offers a robust and easy-to-use service that matches relevant advertising to content, which is crucial for success.”

YuMe’s ACE technology platform, which serves more than 1 billion ad impressions per month, powers both its premium video ad network and its industry-leading advertising management solutions. YuMe recently announced the 3.0 version of its ACE for Publishers (AFP) platform, which enables publishers to streamline operations and better monetize online video content. By leveraging the YuMe Relevance Engine, AFP helps video distributors deliver advertising to targeted audiences in the most relevant context on multiple screens— computers and connected TVs as well as Apple iOS, RIM, Symbian and Android operating systems— enabling campaigns to be optimized across all desktop and mobile devices.

About YuMe

YuMe is the leading, relevant video advertising technology company. It enables top-tier publishers to maximize profits on their professional video content while safely delivering the most effective advertising campaigns for major brands and their agencies. YuMe’s patent-pending Relevance Engine powers both 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. As a result, YuMe gives publishers and advertisers unprecedented reach, brand safety, contextual relevance, controlled syndication, and consistent delivery across all digital media platforms. YuMe is a privately held company headquartered in Redwood City, CA and backed by Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Intel Capital. For more information, visit www.YuMe.com, follow @YuMevideo on Twitter (www.twitter.com/YuMevideo), or become a fan of YuMe on Facebook at www.facebook.com/YuMevideo.