Announces Initiative to Benchmark the Brand Building Efficacy of Different Social Media Tactics and Channels

San Francisco – Vizu Corporation, an online ad technology company that enables advertisers and publishers to measure and optimize Brand Lift in real-time, today announced the availability of a series of case studies developed to evaluate the effectiveness of different approaches to social media advertising. In recent weeks, the company has partnered with 33Across, BuzzFeed, BlogHer, and others to benchmark the effectiveness of brand advertising using social media tactics ranging from blogging to leveraging the social graph, from marketers such as Jones New York, GE, and Mary Kay Inc.

“In a recent study we conducted, 63 percent of brands told us they plan to increase their spending in social media this year,” says Dan Beltramo, CEO of Vizu.  “Faced with such a wide range of potential social media tactics and outlets, however, they don’t necessarily know where to place their bets. In response, we’ve instituted a new initiative to help ensure they know where to spend those dollars to maximize Brand Lift.”

Vizu’s partners used the company’s Ad Catalyst solution to measure and optimize  brand advertising in a variety of social channels. Examples include:

•    33Across built a custom Brand Graph™ that predicts large sets of new users for Jones New York by interpreting social habits and attributes across the retail category. 33Across and Jones New York used Vizu’s Ad Catalyst solution to get a real-time understanding of the brand-building effectiveness of their Brand Graph™ to drive purchase intent among women in or looking to enter the workforce. Ad Catalyst allowed both parties to access campaign performance data in real-time, facilitating communication and collaboration to identify the best-performing creative executions,  reallocate impressions to these executions (increasing purchase intent by 19 percentage points) and finally, to drive an overall 56.2% lift in purchase intent among 33Across’s Brand Graph™ consumers who had been exposed to the campaign.

•    GE partnered with BuzzFeed to create branded content through custom editorial posts and enlisted Vizu’s Ad Catalyst solution to analyze the impact on users’ perceptions. They found that branded content creates significant lifts in brand perception. Furthermore, these lifts are greatly amplified when the content is discovered through social media and sharing. Bottom line: branded content via trusted referrers leads to significant increases in brand affinity exceeding the bounds of a simple display ad.

•    Mary Kay Inc. teamed up with BlogHer, a network of the most influential women in social media, to create a branded blog outreach campaign to drive purchase intent. Mary Kay Inc. and BlogHer used Ad Catalyst to review the brand impact of the blog content, as well as the campaign’s frequency and lifetime performance in real-time. They found that the branded blog campaign drove an overall 259.6% lift in purchase intent, performing above average in comparison to branded ad campaigns and other beauty and purchase intent campaigns measured by Vizu.

“In light of the Facebook IPO and the demand from brands advertisers for more meaningful ad success metrics, social media is a hot topic these days,” adds Mr. Beltramo. “Determining what actually works, however, can be challenging. In addition to the various channels and tactics to choose from, the proliferation of performance metrics in the online medium further confuses the situation. In allowing our customers to measure and optimize their social media efforts using classic offline metrics such as Brand Lift, and in providing these benchmarks for the efficacy of different approaches to social media advertising, we’re helping marketers ensure they get the most from their social media investment.”

All of Vizu’s case studies can be found here: http://brandlift.vizu.com/knowledge-resources/case-studies/

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.

When we launched BrightTag ONE-Click Privacy last year, we gave site owners the tools to provide meaningful choices to consumers while responding to privacy regulations that vary by country. By integrating our site-level privacy controls with consumer choice tools, brands can offer clear “one-click” privacy options that stop sending data to third-parties when users opt out.

Today, we are announcing enhancements to our privacy toolkit that have been built in partnership with clients who are taking immediate action to comply with new privacy laws in Europe. With the UK’s looming May 26th deadline for the EU Cookie Directive, many companies are faced with the daunting prospect of potentially rearchitecting their websites to comply with the cookie consent requirement.

Specifically, sites need granular-level control over the tag code that sets non-essential cookies on every page of their sites. BrightTag ONE-Click Privacy simplifies compliance by leveraging the power of our BrightTag ONE integration platform to dynamically manage which tags and cookies are delivered to a computer or device based on a user’s consent preferences.

Because the EU regulations are new, though, it’s up to the website owner’s privacy team to build its own policies and make judgment calls about which cookies are essential and how to best gain cookie consent. Because regulations differ, the approach taken in the UK may not be the approach that’s needed in other countries, even though the user may be visiting the exact same website.

In partnering with the privacy teams at our global clients, we have learned that the ability to implement privacy governance now – and adapt quickly to changes as EU regulations evolve in the future – are critical to the success of compliance programs. As a result, we have added the following enhancements to BrightTag ONE:

• Flexible Policy Setup and Management – Simultaneous support for opt-in/opt-out privacy choices in multiple countries
• Intelligent Defaults – BrightTag ONE Partner tags now include a default privacy classification that serves as a starting point for privacy policies
• Granular Controls – Simple interface for categorizing individual tags and setting up custom privacy policies

We recognize that the privacy landscape is confusing which is why we have set out to design a flexible set of privacy tools that allow brands to easily implement what can often be a complex set of requirements across the globe.

Turnkey EU Privacy Solution Through Integration with TRUSTe
Also today, we are announcing a partnership with TRUSTe, the leading global privacy management solution provider. TRUSTe has a full suite of solutions for EU Privacy including their real-time preference management platform, TRUSTed Consent Manager.

Our integration with TRUSTed Consent Manager extends the capabilities of TRUSTe’s product for indicating “express” or “implied” consent to place cookies on a site. BrightTag’s enabling technology ensures that when a user opts out, the tags that place cookies are suppressed and no tracking code is placed on the end user’s computer or device.

You can read more about our integration with TRUSTe on the TRUSTed Consent Manager product page as well as in the press release.

Interested in more?

• Learn the difference between tags and cookies in our Tag 101 FAQ
• Read more about the BrightTag ONE-Click Privacy feature.
• Request a demo of BrightTag ONE by clicking the “Get a Demo” button at the top of this page.
• Contact us to learn more about BrightTag’s views on privacy

Joint Solution Combines Industry-Leading Privacy and Tag Management Platforms to Provide Businesses With an Integrated Solution to Address the EU Cookie Directive

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – TRUSTe, the leading global privacy management solutions provider, and BrightTag, a technology platform provider for the digital marketing industry, today announced a technology partnership to expand the TRUSTe EU Privacy Management Suite. The technology partnership will integrate TRUSTe’s comprehensive EU privacy solutions with BrightTag’s industry-leading tag management and integration platform, helping companies to quickly and easily address the EU Cookie Directive.

With this turnkey solution, businesses can seamlessly combine their tag and privacy management services, delivering on-site notice for informed consent, as well as assuring consumer consent choices.

“Our collaboration with BrightTag allows us to deliver TRUSTe’s EU privacy solutions at the source of data collection,” said Chris Babel, CEO for TRUSTe. “This deep integration benefits companies by enabling them to address the EU Cookie Directive and also benefits consumers by providing additional assurance that their privacy choices are being honored.”

“As an established leader creating privacy tools for consumers, TRUSTe provides website operators with a comprehensive out-of-the-box privacy solution to simplify cookie auditing and address the EU Cookie Directive’s requirement for informed consent,” said Mike Sands, CEO for BrightTag. “BrightTag’s enabling technology helps TRUSTe deliver a robust cookie consent solution that can be simply and quickly implemented.”

TRUSTe and BrightTag Integration Delivers Turnkey Solution for the EU Cookie Directive Through integration with the BrightTag ONE(TM) platform, TRUSTe has extended the capabilities of its EU Privacy Management Suite. TRUSTe’s flagship high-performance, real-time preference management platform, TRUSTed Consent Manager, is now linked with the unique capabilities of the BrightTag ONE integration platform that controls when and where tags and cookies are placed on a site-by-site basis. Consent Manager allows companies to:

– Quickly and easily implement a full suite of EU privacy and tag management controls that address the EU Cookie Directive, including:
– auditing,
– notice and consent, and
– centralized and simplified tag management and cookie controls;
– Deliver control over how third-party marketing and analytics tags collect and distribute data on their sites; and
– Classify tracking technologies on their sites in order to adhere to different levels of data collection standards required by the EU
Cookie Directive.

The TRUSTe-BrightTag solution also ensures the very highest privacy standards by leveraging TRUSTe’s more than 14 years of online privacy expertise and recognized leadership as the leading global privacy management solutions provider.

The EU Cookie Directive requires that websites provide consumers with simple and easy-to-understand information regarding their choices for consent*, yet most websites were not designed for cookie control. Featuring the TRUSTed Consent Manager, the TRUSTe-BrightTag solution gives consumers clear transparency and choice regarding the collection and use of their personal data and can be easily implemented by website operators.

TRUSTed Consent Manager supports the informed consent requirement of the EU Cookie Directive and allows websites to implement either express or implied consent notices. As website operators determine the best way to communicate informed consent to their end users, they can leverage BrightTag’s highly flexible platform to only allow cookies to be set that the consumer has approved.

Availability

TRUSTed Consent Manager and the privacy features within BrightTag ONE are available separately now, and are also available as an integrated solution. For additional information, contact TRUSTe at eu_sales@truste.com or 1-888-878-7830 or visit http://www.truste.com/eu-consent-manager .

About BrightTag

BrightTag provides industry-leading tag management and data distribution solutions that help companies make their online data instantly useful in any web or mobile application, while solving fundamental privacy, data quality and site performance challenges. The BrightTag ONE(TM) integration platform moves beyond tags by directly connecting sites to services in real time, eliminating barriers and speeding innovation. BrightTag’s clients include many of the world’s top brands and hundreds of online marketing and analytics providers continue to integrate their technology with BrightTag ONE. BrightTag was named by VentureWire and an independent board of review at Dow Jones as one of the 50 most innovative technology companies of 2011 and a member of the FASTech50.

About TRUSTe

TRUSTe is the leading global privacy management solutions provider and offers a broad suite of solutions that enable multinational companies to safely and efficiently handle the customer data powering their online businesses — including advertising, cloud services, mobile applications, and websites. Over 5,000 web properties from top companies like Apple, Disney, eBay, Forbes, HP, Microsoft, and rely on TRUSTe to ensure compliance with evolving and complex international privacy requirements. TRUSTe’s mission, based on a “Truth in Privacy” framework, is built on a solid foundation of transparency, choice and accountability regarding the collection and use of personal information. TRUSTe’s privacy seal is recognized and trusted by millions of consumers worldwide as a sign of responsible privacy practices. For additional information on TRUSTe and its offerings, please visit http://www.truste.com .

*It is therefore of paramount importance that users be provided with clear and comprehensive information when engaging in any activity which could result in such storage or gaining of access. The methods of providing information and offering the right to refuse should be as user-friendly as possible.

comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni to Present Update on Q1 2012 E-Commerce Trends in Upcoming Webinar

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its Q1 2012 U.S. retail e-commerce sales estimates, showing that online retail spending reached $44.3 billion for the quarter, up 17 percent versus year ago. This represents the tenth consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth and sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth.

“The first quarter of this year was especially strong for retail e-commerce as we returned to year-over-year growth rates in the high teens, numbers we haven’t seen since 2007,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “While the economic recovery continues to be painfully slow, the channel shift to e-commerce appears to be accelerating. This presents opportunities but also challenges for brick-and-mortar retailers if they can’t hold onto their offline market share in the digital world. E-commerce has reached critical mass in several product categories, and it will be important to monitor these sales trends by category in order to correctly gauge the impact e-commerce is having on overall retailer performance.”

Other highlights from Q1 2012 include:

• The top-performing online product categories were: Digital Content & Subscriptions, Computer Software, Consumer Electronics, Jewelry & Watches and Event Tickets. Each category grew at least 17 percent vs. year ago.
• 48.8 percent of e-commerce transactions included free shipping, the highest percentage for a quarter on record outside of the holiday season. Only Q4 2011 (51.8 percent) and Q4 2010 (49.3 percent) have been higher overall.
• According to comScore’s Q1 2012 Retail survey, 38 percent of tablet owners have made a purchase on their devices within the past month. Apparel was the most popular category for purchase among tablet shoppers.

Webinar Series: State of the U.S. Online Retail Economy through Q1 2012

Join Gian Fulgoni and Andrew Lipsman, VP of Industry Analysis, as they present an update of the state of the U.S. online retail economy through Q1 2012 in a live webinar on Thursday, May 17 from 2-3 p.m. EST / 1-2 p.m. CST / 11-12 p.m. PST. New topics being covered include retail “showrooming” and shopping behavior on tablets.

To register for the webinar, please visit: www.comscore.com/SOR_Q1_2012_Webinar

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

Program to Provide One Stop Shop for Marketers Seeking and Evaluating Data-Powered Media Solutions and Apps

Cupertino, Calif. – BlueKai, the world’s most connected customer data cloud for data management, analysis and activation, today announced the launch of a new partner program.  The BlueKai Partner Program is designed to give marketers an easy way to evaluate all of BlueKai’s over 110 (and growing) partners, offering a range of solutions for media execution, analytics, attribution, site and creative optimization and more.

The BlueKai Partner Program (www.bluekai.com/partner), further positions BlueKai as the category leader in the burgeoning data management space as widespread adoption of data-driven marketing strategies continues to grow.  The partnerships reflected in the program represent three major trends that are currently taking place:

• ·         Marketers and agencies continue to have a myriad of options when it comes to data-powered media.  As a result, real-time data access through seamless integration with other media buying processes are key to deciding which partners to choose

• ·         Data Management Platforms (DMPs) are no longer just tools for marketers.  Rather, the marketplace is witnessing quick adoption within the publishing community as well as data aggregators who are looking to better manage and monetize their data assets.

• ·         Data utilization is getting more mature and is extending beyond just ad targeting.  A whole new realm of app partners are now plugging in data as a service to help inform and power their own solutions, from audience analytics, modeling, attribution, site optimization and dynamic creative optimization, to name just a few.

“BlueKai’s mission is to create seamless data connectivity, not just from an infrastructure standpoint but also from a partnership perspective,” said Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai.  “Our vast network of partners is an indication of the growth of data-driven choices that are now available to marketers and publishers to better realize the potential of data.  This new partner program was created to make this ecosystem more accessible to marketers who are evaluating these innovative services and to create partnership dialogue among various solution providers.”

As part of the program, BlueKai Partners will be segmented into the following areas where they will be assigned various badges that denote the level of integration, partnership or affiliation with BlueKai and its data program:

• ·         Media Partners – Partners (ad networks, exchanges, trading desks, publishers, etc.) who tap into BlueKai’s vast data assets to target ads more effectively and efficiently across online or video inventory.  Integration levels will be assigned based on data transfer methods, ability to ingest media data and integration into BlueKai’s interfaces.  Integration is key to maximizing data transfer and targetable audience size, building scale in the shortest time possible and gaining real-time and integrated access to BlueKai’s 3^rd party data.  Badges denote further partnership attributes including international coverage and incorporation of data for analytics.

• ·         Branded Data Providers – Includes data aggregator partners whose third party audience data is made available for acquisition in the BlueKai Exchange.  These badges showcase a variety of data types including Intent, Retail, CPG, Travel, Auto, Behavioral, Offline, B2B, Financial and Demographic.

• ·         App Partners – Partners who are tapping into BlueKai data as a service and building value-add solutions for Attribution Models, Video, Modeling, Survey, Social and Creative and Site Optimization and beyond.

• ·         DMP Partners – Marketer, publisher and data aggregator partners who leverage BlueKai’s data management platform to manage, monetize, analyze and take action on first party data assets.

• ·         Privacy Partners – BlueKai is affiliated with these partners to drive initiatives around self-regulation, data certification as well as consumer transparency and privacy.

“It’s become increasingly important for marketers and publishers to connect their data given the rapid adoption of integrated marketing,” said Bruce Beigel, Senior Managing Director at Winterberry Group.  “This partner program will help to simplify the the whole process of connecting the data sources to each other and making the data actionable across a variety of data use cases, campaign execution platforms  and marketing channels.”

BlueKai recently announced a partnership with Cognitive Match, who joins the BlueKai Partner Program as an app partner.  Cognitive Match, developer of market leading Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) solutions, is tapping into BlueKai’s platform for data intelligence to inform its dynamic creative offering to marketers.  For more information, see press release.

About BlueKai
BlueKai (www.bluekai.com) provides the leading data management platform (DMP) that connects, analyzes and activates proprietary data assets for marketers and publishers. By aggregating all the customer data assets within an organization, BlueKai’s platform provides an intelligent unified view of consumers allowing for more relevant interactions across all touch points. This enables BlueKai customers to achieve higher marketing performance, more customers and more revenue. The BlueKai platform is uniquely integrated with the world’s largest marketplace for anonymous 3rd party audience data providing unparalleled audience prospecting and analytics.

The BlueKai customer data grid is the most connected and most adopted data platform in the ad tech ecosystem. Trusted by 6 of the top Fortune 15 corporations and numerous global brands, the privately-held company is based in Cupertino, Calif., and is a recipient of the 2011 OnMedia B2B Company of the Year award.

The company that introduced attribution to the industry offers enhanced functionality to provide deeper insights into attribution models

NEW YORK – IgnitionOne, the global leader in digital marketing solutions, is launching major improvements to its Digital Marketing Suite (DMS), that will allow marketers to easily compare and contrast multiple attribution profiles from within the Analytics section of the DMS. The enhancement will open the door to more innovative and beneficial use of attribution and improve the valuation of marketing channels.

IgnitionOne first introduced attribution modeling with its DMS in 2009 and is unique in the industry by offering attribution as an integrated part of the DMS and the optimization process. This update to the platform will allow marketers to set up a secondary attribution profile that runs side-by-side with the primary profile that their media is being optimized against. This secondary profile will offer insights on how an alternate attribution profile would change how different channels are being credited and how that would affect optimization.

Key benefits to customers

- Allows customers to look at how different attribution settings will affect their online marketing data and goals without having to alter their current attribution profile being optimized against in the DMS.

- Allows customers to test attribution profiles that are not based on last click

- Opens the door to increased and more innovative use of attribution by allowing for testing new models

- When coupled with real-time, fully attributed data, IgnitionOne’s DMS gives marketers better insights to not only decide which attribution profile is best for them but also enables them to make it actionable with automated optimization

“Attribution is not a feature, tactic or a product — it is an integrated part of the digital marketing process,” said Will Margiloff, CEO of IgnitionOne. “There has been a lag in adoption due to marketers’ hesitance to migrate away from legacy last-click reporting metrics used for years. They all agree that it’s a flawed model, but lack the tools to evangelize acceptance of more accurate and sophisticated modeling. We solve this problem by providing the ability to see previews of alternate results.”

One of the first IgnitionOne clients to benefit from this update is CPO Commerce, America’s leading online tool retailer. “Having access to multiple attribution models will help us continually optimize our marketing investment, ensuring we are meeting our customer acquisition goals and our ROI targets,” said Dale Fujimoto, Director of Marketing at CPO Commerce.

I Spy Marketing, a digital marketing agency that works with brands including Radisson Edwardian, Harrods and Jobsite, will also be receiving the update. “Understanding how different attribution models will impact our optimisation gives us the data we need to find the optimal set up. This feature will allow us to see what attribution profile will give us best return for media spend, without any financial risk.” said Andy Siviter, Operations Manager for I Spy Marketing.

About IgnitionOne
IgnitionOne, the global leader in digital marketing solutions, enables companies to integrate and centralize cross-channel marketing efforts within one platform, allowing for deeper insights and greater online success. Managing over $1 billion of advertising annually across search, display and social, IgnitionOne provides the world’s top marketers with media optimization, cross-channel attribution and website conversion solutions. IgnitionOne’s solutions are powered by proprietary, integrated technology: IgnitionOne’s Digital Marketing Suite®.

IgnitionOne currently powers more than $30 billion in revenue each year for leading brands, including General Motors, Chico’s, Ann Taylor, La Quinta, Travel Guard and Fiat, as well as advertising agencies such as MRM Worldwide and CyberAgent.

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

Already more than 10,000 beta testers are creating digital social objects called “Strings” and sharing them with others in the gopogo community 

Businesses also exploring the power of Strings to extend their brands and deeply engage with customers

New York –  In today’s social-centric world where people continuously connect with others digitally to share experiences, gopogo (www.gopogo.com), a geo-location platform for recording, sharing and discovering connected experiences, announced its open beta test and launch of its community. More than 10,000 people in New York and Los Angeles are currently testing gopogo and creating “Strings” – sharable social objects consisting of any group of places that have relevance and context for the user.  gopogo is available now online and will soon be available for download to iOS mobile devices.

gopogo’s Strings let users capture and record multiple activities or experiences linked together in succession to form a complete thematic experience or story – such as “Sublime Times on the High Line” starting with hot coffee and cool tunes at Mojo Coffee; meeting friends at Cafe Cluny for fine French food and celebrity watching; walking it off via the High Line elevated park; then getting some culture at the Gagosian Art Gallery. Afterward, the Strings – complete with photos, videos and commentary – can be archived and shared on social networks and with the gopogo community. By browsing through gopogo’s library of user-generated Strings, users can also discover other experiences organized by location, theme, or areas of interest.

“There are plenty of individual apps that let you check in, write and read reviews, upload photos, publish interesting anecdotes, play location-based games, and even earn virtual and real social capital.  The problem is that they are all just fragmented collections of information, that can be time-consuming to manage individually and difficult to package and share with others as a complete, thematic experience,” said Jason Alan Snyder, founder and CTO, gopogo. “Only gopogo provides social media users with a single platform to record and save experiences, and then share them across all of the other social media platforms.”

gopogo’s Strings combine the best aspects of many top social media platforms, but it excels at providing context and giving people the tools to tell a complete story about the user’s inter-connected experiences. On one hand, Strings can be highly informational and filled with useful, practical and factual information.  At the same time, they can be a platform for storytelling and self-expression, by capturing personal anecdotes and sentiments that defined the experience and showcase how places connect. Together Strings create a complete, narrated experience that can be saved, shared and discovered by others looking to learn more about you, or simply to be inspired by the things you have done.

“Life is a series of connected experiences, and with social media we’re sharing more information about ourselves than ever before.  At the same time, we’re also losing most of what we’ve shared because there is no easy way to archive the information, or make it available for others to easily discover,” said Jason Alan Snyder, founder and CTO, gopogo. “We believe that people want a simpler way to chronicle their real-world experiences, and then archive and share them with others as digital social objects. gopogo gives them a simple way to do this, plus a built-in community of other people who like to share experiences and discover new ones.”

In addition to gopogo’s consumer application, the gopogo platform is currently being tested by businesses, brands and content creators as a new way to engage with their customers, build brand awareness and loyalty, drive traffic and sales, and create connections between the digital and physical worlds.  These businesses can create their own branded Strings to promote themselves, distribute coupons or capture valuable insights about their customers. Or, they can license gopogo’s technology via its white label program, enabling them to create, promote and manage special offers and events targeting their existing member base.

About gopogo

gopogo is a geo-location platform for recording, sharing and discovering connected experiences.  Its proprietary “String” technology lets users create a complete narrative story about their favorite places or outings – including photos, videos and personal commentary – and archive or share them with others as digital social objects.  Businesses, brands and content creators are also using Strings to engage with their customers, build brand awareness and loyalty, drive traffic and sales, and create connections between the digital and physical worlds. gopogo is headquartered in New York City, and will soon have Strings connecting people nationwide.  Find, follow or build your favorite Strings at www.gopogo.com, or visit us on Facebook, Twitter (@gopogoinc) and YouTube.

BlueKai Technology to Power Innovative Audience Targeting Management, Analytics and Seamless Media Activation for V12 Group Clients

Cupertino, CA and Red Bank, NJ – V12 Group, a leading provider of offline consumer data announced that it has selected BlueKai, the world’s most complete platform for data management, analysis and acquisition as their exclusive DMP provider. BlueKai’s platform technology will enable centralized management, analysis and activation of V12 Group’s third-party and advertiser data assets, enabling marketer clients the ability to achieve high-performing audience targeting strategies in one seamless solution.

Through BlueKai’s DMP platform capabilities, V12 Group’s marketer clients will get access to real-time data inventory, while creating their own custom audience segments, as well as gain a deeper understanding of their audience profiles with built-in analytics powered by BlueKai’s various data sources. The BlueKai DMP will enable immediate action on audience targets by activating data across pre-integrated media channels, offering a seamless and intuitive platform for reaching proven audiences fast.

“It was essential that we selected a DMP that included top-notch data management capabilities, an intuitive and real-time dashboard of our public and custom data assets, analytics capabilities and seamless media integration for our clients,” said Kelly Leger, VP of Digital Service, V12 Group. “BlueKai is the best choice for V12 Group and we are pleased to further our partnership as a platform customer.”

V12 Group has been on the forefront of delivering innovative audience targeting solutions to marketers that are backed by data for Fortune 500 brands. This partnership also further extends V12 Group’s existing partnership with BlueKai, where the company’s pre-packaged segments on 40 million consumers are available through the BlueKai Exchange, the world’s largest 3rd party data marketplace.

“We’re thrilled to offer V12 Group a data management platform that is both comprehensive in features and provides flexible controls for managing and monetizing their range of data assets for marketers,” said Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “We’ve seen adoption of our DMP grow from marketers to publishers to data aggregators, which supports our mission to build an interconnected infrastructure that makes data utilization as simple as turning on a light switch.”

About V12 Group
Utilizing a highly respected data warehouse and leading edge data technology, V12 Group increases marketing and operational ROI. V12 Group specializes in providing: Premium Consumer and Business Data, Database Management Technology, Data Appending, Data Licensing, Email Marketing, Modeling, Analytics and Online Audience Targeting to a wide range of industries and middle market clients.

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

New funding led by Baird Venture Partners to fuel triple-digit growth for the tag management and real-time data distribution provider

CHICAGO — BrightTag, a technology platform provider for the digital marketing industry, announced today it has closed $15 million in new financing. Baird Venture Partners led the round with participation from existing investors New World Ventures, TomorrowVentures, EPIC Ventures, I2A and Silicon Valley Bank.

BrightTag achieved 12x year-over-year growth in 2011 and is on pace to reach triple-digit growth in 2012. The company lists 1-800-Flowers.com, JetBlue Airways, Grainger and Chegg among its many enterprise clients. This latest round of financing will be used to accelerate development of BrightTag’s innovative technology platform and expand the company’s sales efforts in the US and overseas.

Benedict Rocchio, Partner at Baird Venture Partners, will join the BrightTag Board of Directors. He commented, “We are extremely excited to be backing a proven management team that is redefining how websites connect their digital marketing and analytics services.”

“We’ve been impressed with BrightTag’s approach to simplify how third-party tags and pixels are integrated across our global technology platform,” said Roger Liew, CTO of Orbitz Worldwide. “The BrightTag solution enables the global marketing and technology teams at Orbitz to innovate and rapidly manage changes to our marketing programs. We’ve found the BrightTag team to be highly skilled and exceptional partners.”

BrightTag is building a new technical foundation for the next generation of online marketing. The BrightTag ONE™ integration platform helps marketers and web analysts make online data instantly useful in any web or mobile application, while solving fundamental privacy, data quality and site performance challenges.

Mike Sands, CEO of BrightTag, commented, “We have been fortunate to count some of the world’s leading brands as clients. This financing will help BrightTag continue to execute on our vision to eliminate the unnecessary complexity that exists in online marketing today. We look forward to helping brands seamlessly connect to a vibrant digital marketing industry filled with opportunity.”

About BrightTag
BrightTag is building a new technical foundation for the next generation of online marketing. The company helps marketers and web analysts make online data instantly useful in any web or mobile application, while solving fundamental privacy, data quality and site performance challenges. Traditional methods of connecting websites to marketing and analytics services rely on individual tags and pixels that create silos of data. The BrightTag ONE™ integration platform moves beyond tags by directly connecting sites to services in real time, eliminating barriers and speeding innovation. BrightTag’s clients include many of the world’s top brands and hundreds of online marketing and analytics providers continue to integrate their technology with BrightTag ONE.

Headquartered in Chicago, BrightTag is funded by Baird Venture Partners, New World Ventures, TomorrowVentures, EPIC Ventures and I2A Fund. BrightTag was named by VentureWire and an independent board of review at Dow Jones as one of the 50 most innovative technology companies of 2011 and a member of the FASTech50.

New Research from Pretarget and comScore Suggests that Buyer Conversion is More Highly Correlated with Ad Viewability and Hover than with Clicks or Gross Impressions

SAN FRANCISCO and RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, and Pretarget, the intent targeting company, today released results of an online advertising study which found that ad viewability and hover time are more strongly correlated with conversions (defined as purchases and requests for information) than clicks or total impressions.

“Your ad being seen matters more than your ad being clicked – if you have a back-end conversion metric,” said Pretarget Founder Keith Pieper. “After all, what good is an ad that can’t be seen? It’s intuitive that an ad must be seen to make an impact, and it’s even more intuitive than someone hovering and engaging with an ad might convert, even absent a click.”

Research Methodology & Approach

To arrive at these initial findings, Pretarget analyzed 263 million impressions over nine months across 18 advertisers in numerous verticals. Pretarget used comScore validated Campaign Essentials™ (vCE) to collect viewability and hover data and a DSP to collect click and cookie-based conversion data. Pretarget then performed a Pearson correlation analysis of the data, including gross impressions, “views” (75 percent of ad within screen, either above the fold or after scrolling)*, time in-view, hover/engagements and total hover/engagement time, clicks and conversions.

Traditional display ad impression measurement and reporting simply verifies the number of ads that were sent by an ad server to a user’s browser. For a variety of reasons, this way of counting impressions does not ensure that the ad ever rendered within a browser. In addition, ads can load below the fold (requiring a user to scroll down), which means that most users will probably never see the ad unless they scroll down. In the worst cases, some ads load within 1×1 pixels and therefore never render as viewable impressions.

Research Findings Show Ad Hover Most Highly Correlated with Conversion

The research findings indicate that the traditional way of buying mass impressions and hoping for conversions (aka “spray and pray”) is not the most effective approach. The results showed that ad hover/interaction (correlation = 0.49) and viewable impressions (correlation = 0.35) had highest correlation with conversion, while gross impressions (correlation = 0.17) was significantly lower. Perhaps most interestingly, clicks (correlation = 0.01) had the lowest correlation with conversion, far under-performing all other metrics analyzed in the study. These findings suggest that advertisers and media planners ought to break their addiction to clicks and instead look to more meaningful metrics for evaluating campaign performance.

“The Pretarget study helps illuminate several critically important findings for the digital advertising community,” said Kirby Winfield, SVP of Corporate Development, comScore. “First, it once again demonstrates the perils of relying on click-throughs for measuring the performance of display ad campaigns, with this metric showing virtually zero correlation with total conversions. Secondly, it highlights why the viewable impression – which is now easily measurable through vCE – is significantly more meaningful than the unvalidated impression. Finally, this study shows why other non-click metrics of engagement, such as interaction or hovering, may be much more important in evaluating campaign performance than the click ever was. It’s time to start measuring the impact of campaigns using metrics that really matter, not just the ones that are most easily measured.”

The Pretarget analysis supports several third party studies with consistent conclusions. MediaMind “2009 Benchmark Report” released in July 2010 found that “on average, increasing Dwell [hover] from 5% to 15%, increases conversion rate by 45%, from 0.4% to 0.6%.” Casale Media’s 2011 “Ad Visibility Report,” found that “ads appearing above the fold were 6.7x more effective at generating conversions than those appearing below the fold.”

Pretarget previously found that approximately 89 percent of display ads on its network load above the fold or appear after a user scrolls down, creating an opportunity for a user to see the banner. Pretarget’s position paper is available for download at http://www.pretarget.com

To participate in additional research as part of a broader study, please contact info@pretarget.com

*The Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) defines “in-view” as 50%+ of the pixels of an ad being visible in the browser, and comScore vCE adheres to this definition for its typical definition of “in-view”. The Pretarget studies, however, used a more conservative in-view requirement of 75% visibility.

About Pretarget
Pretarget offers keyword based intent ad targeting using patented and patent-pending internet search and behavioral algorithms that reach users “ahead of the click”. Pretarget’s hybrid contextual-behavioral targeting complements existing search and retargeting campaigns with custom keyword based segmentation. No site tagging is needed. Pretarget is well suited for online advertisers who have maxed out search, find site retargeting offers little scale, are fiercely competitive and see the value of an ad impression.

About comScore validated Campaign Essentials (vCE)
vCE is a holistic solution for complete campaign delivery validation and in-flight optimization. Unlike existing single-point solutions, vCE provides an unduplicated accounting of impressions delivered across a variety of dimensions, such as ads delivered in-view, to the right audience, in the right geography, in a brand safe environment and absent of fraudulent delivery. vCE reports on reach and frequency, comprehensive demographics and behavioral segments. This measurement eliminates all impressions that never had a chance to make an impact, providing a more realistic and accurate picture of campaign delivery.

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

Nanigans Appoints David C. Parkes, Ph.D as Technical Advisor; Accelerates Development of Its Facebook® Advertising Platform

Nanigans, Inc., a leading Facebook advertising technology company, has appointed David C. Parkes, Ph.D as Technical Advisor. Dr. Parkes is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and a global authority on topics at the intersection of computer science and economics, including machine learning, auction theory, electronic commerce and artificial intelligence.

Dr. Parkes advises Nanigans’ engineering team on continued development of its automated bidding algorithms for the Facebook
advertising marketplace. These proprietary algorithms are core features of the Nanigans Ad Engine™, a software platform designed
for large-scale advertisers looking to maximize ROI on their Facebook ad spend.

Leveraging statistics and machine learning, Dr. Parkes also focuses his time at Nanigans on analyzing the cost and value of Facebook
audience segments as it relates to advertising.

“David is a world-renowned thought leader, and a welcomed addition to our engineering team,” shared Ric Calvillo, CEO of Nanigans.
“As the Facebook Ads marketplace becomes increasingly competitive, our Ad Engine’s optimization and bidding algorithms become more important in driving campaign performance and ROI. These algorithms, a layer of artificial intelligence on top of the Facebook Ads API, free campaign managers from the labor-intensive management of bidding, budgeting and optimization. We’re thrilled to have a global authority like David joining our team in such a meaningful capacity.”

At Harvard, Dr. Parkes founded the Economics and Computer Science research group, and teaches classes in artificial intelligence,
machine learning, optimization, and topics at the intersection between computer science and economics. Dr. Parkes serves as Editor of Games and Economic Behavior, the Chair of the ACM SIG on Electronic Commerce, and on the boards of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, the ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation, and the INFORMS Journal of Computing. Previously, Dr. Parkes served on the editorial board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.

Dr. Parkes received his Ph.D. degree in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, and a M. Eng.
(First Class) in Engineering and Computing Science from Oxford University in 1995. He is currently on sabbatical to revise a book on
economics and computation.

About Nanigans

Nanigans offers Facebook advertising software that maximizes ROI. Developed using the Facebook Ads API, the company’s Ad Engine™ platform automates the labor-intensive process of managing large-scale Facebook advertising campaigns, measuring beyond the initial click to meet specific performance goals: from driving Likes, app installs and registrations to word-of-mouth referrals, add-to-cart events and repeat purchases.

Delivering over 175 billion Facebook Ad impressions in 2011 alone, over 100 companies license the Ad Engine or leverage Nanigans’
managed service offering. Founded in 2010 and backed by Avalon Ventures, Nanigans is located in the heart of Boston, has 50 employees and is growing rapidly. To learn more visit: www.nanigans.com.

Delivering a satisfying online experience these days is no easy feat. On the one hand, consumers demand rich graphics, video, and a wealth of information – presented in a clean, non-cluttered way. On the other hand, with an ever-increasing shortage of time, website visitors want pages to load extremely fast. Yet all those rich graphics – as well as the popular social media plug-ins people like – contribute to latency. And just a one- or two-second delay means they may jump to a competitor’s site, possibly never to return.

One study by KISSMetrics estimates that 40% of visitors abandon a site if it takes more than three seconds for its pages to load (1). And site speed has an impact on SEO, as Google factors website speed into its ranking algorithm. It’s important to address page load speed to improve the customer experience while also ensuring your site isn’t dinged by the search engines. But it’s also important to include the types of multimedia and other content people expect.

So how do you find the right balance between a site that is sophisticated and visually appealing and one that loads ultra-fast?

In a recent survey we conducted, 80% of respondents admitted they are concerned or very concerned about page load times, yet only 14% feel they have optimized their site speed; and 25% of respondents said they have not taken any steps to improve site speed, while the majority have taken some steps but feel they could do more. The reasons most site owners and marketers haven’t taken adequate measures may include a deficit of time and resources, and budget constraints that prevent them from purchasing tools and technologies. Most likely a general lack of understanding about what corrective measures to take is also a contributor.

As you work toward addressing these issues, below are five considerations to keep in mind as you devise the right strategy.

1. Is speed important to my online conversion rate?

For some types of online businesses, like travel sites, a slower website may not have much impact on conversions. For example, if visitors are conducting a search involving lots of information, such as for planning a trip, they may understand the extra time needed to process information. But for industries like online retail, the impact on conversions can be significant.

In a recent study we did with our own customer and leading UK glasses e-tailer GlassesDirect, we saw a strong correlation between page-load time and conversions. When measuring the average page load speed for converters and non-converters, we discovered that page-load time for visitors who abandoned the site was three to four times higher than it was for those who made a purchase.

Since new visitors to your site will likely have higher expectations (since they aren’t familiar with the quality of your service and products), it’s important to make a good first impression. (Be sure to keep site speed in mind when launching new campaigns intended to generate new customers and lots of traffic to your site.)

2. Where are my customers and what browsers are they using?

Visitors in your backyard may have a much different experience than visitors from across the country or even overseas. You should use testing services that show site performance for various access nodes and paths, so you can tell if your site performs well for local traffic but is quite a bit slower for traffic coming from other, far-off places. This might tell you that you need to have platform servers in other locations to accommodate those visitors.

Also, look at how quickly pages load for different browsers and on different devices. You can work with your web designer to overcome some of those problems. Be sure to also look at the variations in traffic load that your site can accommodate, and when are you more likely to see peak traffic numbers. If you can pinpoint certain times of day when traffic volumes spike, you can enact temporary adjustments to improve performance just during those times – but keep your site intact during other, less busy periods.

3. How many 3rd party tags are on my site, and what is the impact on latency?

Every online marketing application or campaign includes a tiny piece of tracking code – or a “tag” – that sits on your site. There are tags for display ads, paid search, SEO, retargeting, and site analytics, as well as for social media plug-ins – like Facebook “likes” and Google “+1s” – that contribute to viral sharing of your products and content.

As marketers invest more in online marketing, their need to accurately track performance has increased the proliferation of tags, which contributes greatly to latency in site performance. The average e-commerce website has more than 20 different tags, and five to seven per page. Each individual tag can take up to 100 milliseconds to load.

Rather than reducing or removing tags altogether, which compromises the valuable tracking data they provide, a better approach is to optimize them.

There are several ways to optimize your tags; for example, you can set limits so that any tags exceeding a certain amount of time to load can be timed out, and set your system so that only tags relevant to particular visitors are loaded, rather than loading them all every single time. (You wouldn’t want to load a retargeting tag if the user has already been given a cookie.) Finally, you should make sure any old tags that are no longer in use are removed from your site. Often, tags get put on a site and are then forgotten about, and the accumulation of them can drag down performance.

4. Should I consider a tag management system?

As stated above, the average website has 15-20 marketing tags. When this is the case, a tag management system can provide significant performance benefits – in addition to better campaign management and tracking, reduced involvement from IT, and the ability to reduce costs on less effective marketing campaigns. Websites that have a high number of tags along with a high volume of traffic should consider tag management. Analyst firms Forrester and Gartner have more recently taken a closer look at tag management systems and vendors, validating the importance of this type of solution, and can also offer guidelines on how to determine if one is necessary for a particular site.

5. Does the web analytics supplier guarantee a certain speed, and if so, how do they ensure it?

In looking at your marketing tags, it’s important to ask your current and potential suppliers how long their tag takes to load and what guarantees they offer – as many do not. This applies to all your marketing tags, like: affiliates, display, email marketing, paid search, retargeting, shopping comparison engines, website optimization, web analytics, and more.

Also, when looking at adding a tag on your page, be sure to ask if the vendor provides “asynchronous tag loading,” which means tags load independently of other tags in order to avoid traffic jams. When tags load synchronously, if one tag is taking a long time to load, it holds up all the rest, which means the entire page loads much slower. Not only does the ability to offer asynchronous tag loading directly impact page load speed, it also can have an impact on how effective your other efforts are. In other words, if you’ve taken steps to remove the causes of latency on your site but your marketing tags still cause bottlenecks, then your efforts won’t amount to much.

If your suppliers don’t offer asynchronous tags, check whether your tag management system can help. We just signed an exclusive agreement with DigitalFulcrum so now we can load all vendor tags asynchronously – but not all tag management systems can do this.

As you work out your plan to speed up your site, be sure to measure your site’s performance regularly, particularly when you’re about to launch a new campaign – as well as for different browsers and different locations – so you’re able to ward off problems before they arise. This will ensure you’re optimizing performance of your site for everyone who comes to your site, and that as your campaigns drive new customers to your site, they’re more likely to become repeat visitors.

1. Source: KISSMetrics, “How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line,” April 2011

Automotive, CPG, Retail and Travel Advertisers Broaden Ability to Reach “Spend-a-Like” Audiences at Scale

Cupertino, CALIF and Westminster, COLO - Brand marketers have a new modeling resource as the result of an expanded partnership announced today between BlueKai and Datalogix. BlueKai provides the world’s most complete platform for data management, analysis and acquisition; Datalogix is the leader in building purchase-based digital audiences and predictive consumer data models. Together they will offer marketers in leading verticals such as Automotive, CPG, Retail and Travel reliable high-propensity audience reach at unmatched scale by marrying BlueKai’s valuable audience assets with Datalogix’s modeling capabilities.

Today’s announcement is important to brands seeking to bridge the gap between their digital marketing initiatives and the world of “big data.” Objective research released just last week from Columbia University Business School shows that 91% of respondents agreed that successful brands use customer data to drive marketing decisions, yet only 39% were satisfied with their own company’s ability to collect and disseminate that data. By combining audience data from the BlueKai Data Exchange with the customer purchase-based resources and models of Datalogix, brands can confidently access, reach and engage relevant audiences without having to rely solely on their own customer data.  The partnership will give marketers a proprietary data asset that expands on their own data in a way that is unique to each marketer.

“BlueKai is becoming the de-facto data platform,” said Omar Tawakol, BlueKai chief executive officer.  “We’re excited to partner with Datalogix, whose analytical chops and deep expertise in consumer purchasing behavior is unparalleled.  Through this partnership, marketers will no longer have to choose between big data and better algorithms, they can now have both.”

“Marketers are looking for high-performing audiences at scale,” said Eric Roza, Datalogix chief executive officer. “BlueKai pioneered the delivery of cross-vertical intent data in one integrated media-agnostic platform, and Datalogix pioneered the delivery of purchase-based digital audiences.  We are excited to leverage our experience building ‘spend-a-like’ models for over 1,000 direct marketers, to partner with BlueKai in advancing the state-of-the-art in delivering highly-relevant audiences at scale.”

Effective immediately, the partnership will provide marketers with the ability to select BlueKai audiences or their own first party data and then expand those universes based on Datalogix modeling, which is key to reaching beyond the declared buyers at the bottom of a purchase funnel.

About BlueKai

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

About Datalogix

Datalogix is the leader at integrating database marketing and digital media. Its mission is to leverage the power of purchase-based audiences to drive measurable online and offline sales. The company offers audience segmentation and integrated programs directly and through all leading digital media companies.  Datalogix is based in Westminster, CO, with offices in New York, Boston and Chicago.  For more information, visit www.datalogix.com.

validated Campaign Essentials™ (vCE) Enhances Transparency and Accountability for Digital Advertising Market

LONDON, UK  - comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, announced the UK launch of its validated Campaign Essentials™ (vCE) product, a new measurement solution for validating digital ad delivery. vCE is an innovation that enables the advertising industry to measure verified impressions across key areas such as visibility, targeting and brand safety.

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

“With nearly 800 billion display ad impressions delivered in the UK in 2011, it’s clear the online ad market today features a surplus of inventory, with many ads delivered on parts of a web page that are never viewed by the user. Ads that aren’t seen by the target audience can dilute the impact of campaigns for advertisers and drag down prices for publishers,” said Mike Read, SVP and managing director of comScore Europe. “The ability to measure validated impressions, which are delivered in-view to the right target audience, in a brand safe environment, will help increase transparency and accountability for online campaigns. As we help to enhance advertisers’ trust in the digital medium to deliver desired results, the flow of marketing expenditure is likely to follow.”

vCE Charter Study Findings 
To better understand the quality of ad delivery today and to start an informed discussion across markets, comScore conducted a European vCE Charter Study to measure if ads had an opportunity to be seen by the target consumer, in the right geography, next to appropriate ‘brand safe’ content and absent of fraudulent delivery.
The European charter study included 15 campaigns from advertisers such as Kellogg’s, Nivea, P&G, Ralph Lauren and Telefónica (O2) and analysed 640 million impressions, across 213,000 publisher sites without requiring publisher site pixels. Impressions across all delivery methods including iframes were measured.

The following results are the highlights from the first phase of our European study.

• Across the European charter campaigns measured, 67 percent of ad impressions were classified as being ‘in-view.’* The remaining 33 percent were delivered but never seen by a consumer, a likely result of a consumer scrolling past the ad before it loaded or a consumer never scrolling the ad into view. In-view percentages varied by site and ranged from 64 percent to 72 percent.
• An average of 7 percent of ad impressions were delivered outside the desired geography, but individual campaigns ran as high as 27 percent. In many cases, ads were served in markets where the advertised product is not sold, meaning wasted ad spend and sub-optimal effectiveness results.
• 67 percent of Charter Study campaigns had at least some ads running next to content deemed “not brand safe” by the advertiser, meaning that the content is deemed objectionable by the brand. This type of unsafe delivery has the potential to damage the brand, creating a difficult situation for all members of the digital advertising ecosystem.

The above is part of a global initiative to support industry discussions on validated impressions. The full results from the US-based vCE Charter Study involving online advertising campaigns for 12 premium advertisers, are available for download here:http://www.comscore.com/vce-charter-study.

*In the UK, a standard for ‘in-view’ hasn’t been defined yet. For this charter study the parameters recommended by the American initiative, ‘Making Measurement Make Sense’, consisting of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the American Association of National Advertisers (4A’s) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB.) have been used as a guideline. These parameters say that at least 50 percent of the advertisement must be viewable for at least 1 second in order to be considered in-view.

Industry Leaders on vCE and vGRP
“At Kellogg’s we have tripled our digital marketing spend over the past few years and are continually seeking ways to get the most return from the investment. One of the key factors justifying this shift is the ability of online to measure every impression – from visibility to targeting effectiveness. Our aim is to make sure media plans deliver the intended brand impact and vCE gives us the visibility we need to achieve this.”
––Matt Pritchard, European Digital Director at Kellogg’s

“In order for our clients to have the same confidence in the digital channel as they do in TV, they need reliable measurement that validates ad delivery. The insights from comScore’s vCE solution and the possibility to optimise campaigns in-flight, helps our clients to reach relevant audiences and improve the overall efficiency of online advertising.”
– Paul Silver, Head of Product for Audience on Demand (AOD), VivaKi

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

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

Study Conducted with EXPO Shows Persuasive Elements of User-Generated Product Videos Lift Brand Affinity When Used in Tandem with Professionally-Produced Content

NEW YORK, NY and RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, and EXPO, the first consumer network focused on creating and distributing high impact product videos to drive engagement and conversion, released the results of a study on the synergy of professionally-produced video content and user-generated product videos in marketing campaigns. The study evaluated an actual campaign that included a combination of a professionally-produced “how to” video and a user-generated product video that was created and submitted by an actual product user. The results of the study indicate that professionally-produced video content and user-generated product videos are highly synergistic, driving higher levels of sales effectiveness when used in tandem.

“This study aimed to answer a critical question for today’s digital advertisers: ‘how do user-generated videos complement professionally-produced content, if at all.’ What we found was strong evidence of incremental benefit with exposure to both forms of media,” said Frank Findley, Vice President, Research and Development at comScore. “In the campaign examined, professionally-produced content and product videos drove strikingly higher lifts when used together than when either was used individually. While marketers may already be familiar with the effectiveness of professional video content alone, these results suggest that even greater returns can be had by combining their use with authentic, user-generated content.”

Unique Combination Dramatically Increases Sales Effectiveness

The first group of consumers participated in a veiled exercise in order to determine the sales effectiveness of the professionally-produced content, the user-generated content, and both together. Professionally-produced content generated a 24.7 point lift in Share of Choice for the featured product and a 16 point lift for the brand’s total line. User-generated product videos drove an 18.7 point lift in Share of Choice for the featured product compared to a 10 point lift for the brand’s total line. When exposed to both professional content and user-generated product videos, lift in Share of Choice for the featured product jumped to 35.3 points for the featured product and 28 points for the brand’s total line. This demonstrates not only the value of each of these media individually, but also the powerful combination when used together.

Significant Lifts Seen in Favorable Perceptions of Advertising When Used Together

A second group of consumers participated in a cued exposure exercise and were surveyed after being directly exposed to the content. On its own, professionally-produced content resulted in a higher percentage of respondents understanding the importance of the key message presented than user-generated content, while the user-generated product videos were more successful at producing emotional intensity, key message communication, and ease of relating to. When consumers were exposed to both professionally-produced and user-generated content, the combined increases were greater than for either of the individual media exposures.

“It seems that professionally-produced content and user-generated product videos are each successful at delivering different key elements to a consumer through video ‘advertising’,” said Jessica Thorpe, Vice President of Marketing at EXPO. “We found that consumers perceived feature benefits as more believable when coming directly from the brand through professionally-produced content, while the unbiased user-gen videos were more believable in verifying specific product claims, such as superiority and convenience. When used together, all of the perceived gaps get filled in and consumers become more confident in their purchase decision, resulting in better sales effectiveness from the advertising.”

About Share of Choice
comScore’s Share of Choice metric is the most well-documented and independently-validated measure of advertising effectiveness in the world. Share of Choice quantifies the ability of an ad to influence brand preference and has been shown to be predictive of advertising-induced sales. The metric captures actual consumer preference for a brand among a competitive set. Therefore, lifts in Share of Choice have been proven to strongly correlate with in-market sales lifts.

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

About EXPO
EXPO (www.expotv.com) is the first consumer network focused on creating and distributing high impact product video to drive engagement and conversion. The company’s end-to-end solution captures, manages and publishes persuasive consumer video for leading manufacturers and retailers. Through EXPO’s platform, clients can harness their own brand enthusiasts and fans or rely on EXPO’s community of consumers to produce authentic video content, such as product reviews, how-to’s, demonstrations, recipes and other topics relevant to a client’s brand. EXPO guarantees the content’s quality and timeliness, allowing brands and agencies to use the video to support campaign messages, communicate new product benefits, capture video SEO, or simply spark engagement on social platforms. Clients can leverage EXPO’s proprietary distribution network to ensure the videos are placed on product pages of top retailers, social networks, and across all owned and mobile destinations.

New York – On the heels of a record Q4, the first quarter of 2012 generated continued, strong year-over-year growth for search advertising. Q1 2012 had a YoY growth in search spend of 30.3% — more than double the rate of both Q1 2011 and Q1 2010. During this time Yahoo!/Bing reasserted itself with the highest market share of their partnership.

Mobile search advertising continued strong growth YoY, with 67.4% of the mobile activity coming from tablets, showing the incredible adoption of these devices. Meanwhile, the global travel vertical had an unseasonably strong Q1 in search advertising with a 58.9% increase in expenditures.

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

Key findings in the report:

• Yahoo!/Bing have strongest showing since Q2 2010 – With a strong Q1 Yahoo!/Bing showed signs of a rebound with a 46.4% increase in US search advertising spend YoY compared to Google’s less expansive 26.6% growth YoY. And while Q1 search spend is normally down quarter over quarter due to the spike in holiday spending in Q4, Yahoo!/Bing posted a 14.3% increase in spend vs. Google’s decrease QoQ of 5.4%. The robust quarter may be attributed to Yahoo!/Bing’s push for increased utilization of broad match keywords, which leads to more competition in auctions. This growth also propelled Yahoo!/Bing to a 21.2% market share – their best quarter since before the two combined forces.
• Tablets drive usage as mobile stays strong in US – Mobile search accounted for 12.3% of total search advertising spend in Q1, holding steady following an amazing Q4. Mobile clicks were up 246.1% YoY, showing acceleration over the last quarter. Impressions were up 119.9% and ad spend was up 221.1% YoY, but both showed slower growth than the preceding quarter. Much of the mobile search activity can be attributed to tablet devices which accounted for 67.4% of total mobile search advertising budgets for the quarter. In addition, tablet click through rates of 3.1% were higher than those for PC of 2.5%
• Travel vertical has breakout quarter globally – In a time of the year that normally is soft for travel search advertising, there was impressive growth in activity and spend in Q1 compared to the same time period last year. Travel demand (impressions and clicks) was up by 34.6% and 34.1% respectively, and search spend among travel marketers increased 58.9% YoY. Revenue for travel grew by a large margin with a YoY increase of 32.3%

“This was a very successful Q1 on many fronts. The Yahoo!/Bing turnaround was arguably the most interesting with an uptick coming primarily from the adoption of broad match targeting by marketers,” said Roger Barnette, President of IgnitionOne. “And while the growth in mobile ad spend has been an ongoing trend, I am impressed by the level of activity and click-throughs on tablets. This should be a wakeup call for marketers who are not yet leveraging search advertising on these devices.”

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

About IgnitionOne

IgnitionOne, the global leader in digital marketing solutions, enables companies to integrate cross-channel marketing efforts within one platform, allowing for deeper insights and greater online success. Managing over $1 billion of advertising annually across search, display and social, IgnitionOne provides the world’s top marketers with media optimization, cross-channel attribution and website conversion solutions. IgnitionOne’s solutions are backed by proprietary, best of breed technology: IgnitionOne’s Digital Marketing Suite^SM.

IgnitionOne currently powers more than $30 billion in revenue each year for leading brands, including General Motors, Chico’s, Ann Taylor, La Quinta, Travel Guard and Fiat, as well as advertising agencies such as MRM Worldwide and CyberAgent.

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

Trust Index Shows that Ongoing Verification and Remediation Reduce Noncompliance and Increase Brand Safety

NEW YORK - DoubleVerify, the pioneer and worldwide leader in online media verification and real-time decisioning, today published its 2H 2011 Trust Index. The report highlights the positive impact that verification has had on the ad-serving industry in increasing accountability, transparency and insertion order compliance. It shows how campaign compliance is further strengthened when combined with blocking and remediation.

As part of the Trust Index research, DoubleVerify analyzed campaigns across more than 30 platforms and 150 networks and identified the most compliant ad networks from July to December 2011 as (alphabetically): 24/7 Real Media, aCerno, AudienceScience, Epic Marketplace, Microsoft Media Network, RocketFuel, Specific Media, ValueClick, and Yahoo! Network Plus and interclick from Yahoo!. Advertising platforms that were most compliant include (alphabetically): Cadreon, a part of the Mediabrands Audience Platform, MediaMath, and Xaxis.

“DoubleVerify is making a significant impact on the online-advertising industry,” said Oren Netzer, CEO of DoubleVerify.  “Verification and remediation continue to play a vital role in increasing industry transparency as well as driving displayadvertising compliance and campaign ROI.”

The Trust Index’s analysis of the second half of 2011 highlights the enormous improvements to noncompliance that comprehensive verification, combined with active remediation and blocking, brings to a campaign. Once remediation and verification take full effect, incident rates drop dramatically. Campaigns starting after July 1, 2011, saw a 25 percent drop in noncompliance rates after verification services started. By adding weekly remediation, campaigns showed a 46 percent improvement in average rate of noncompliance over campaigns using only verification. Blocking is another valuable way for providers to reduce noncompliance — one campaign saw 7 times higher average rates of compliance for the partners on which blocking was used.

In both 2H 2011 and 2H 2010, trends pointed to greater noncompliance at the end of the year, with 2H 2011 traffic increasing by more than 57 percent. The weeks surrounding Black Friday and Cyber Monday saw jumps in traffic up to 23 percent above the 2H 2011 average and noncompliance rates 12 percent above average. This increase in noncompliance was considerably larger on unverified traffic.

 Other highlights include:

• 44 percent of ads on verified campaigns were served below the fold (compared to 47 percent in 1H 2011)
• 13 percent of advertising pages included multiple ads for the same campaign (compared to 14 percent in 1H 2011)

DoubleVerify examined metrics from hundreds of advertisers, thousands of verified campaigns and more than 200 billion impressions to produce this bi-annual report, which can be downloaded at www.trustinadvertising.info and www.doubleverify.com/trustindex.

 About DoubleVerify

DoubleVerify (www.doubleverify.com) is the worldwide leader in online media verification and real-time decisioning. It is the top choice of marketers, agencies, ad networks, demand side platforms, exchanges and publishers looking to ensure quality advertising environments, campaign transparency and performance. DoubleVerify handles over 60 billion advertising impressions per month for hundreds of leading Fortune 500 marketers, advertising networks and platforms. A World Economic Forum 2012 Technology Pioneer, DoubleVerify is headquartered in New York City, with sales offices in London and engineering offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. Investors inDoubleVerify include JMI Equity, Institutional Venture Partners, Blumberg Capital, First Round Capital and Genacast Ventures.

Crosslink Capital joins existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Venrock to fuel continued expansion of Bizo’s business audience marketing leadership

 SAN FRANCISCO - Bizo, the global leader in business audience marketing, today announced that it has closed a $10 million Series B equity financing expansion round led by Crosslink Capital’s newest partner, David Silverman.  Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Venrock also participated in the round. Bizo will use the funding to further expand its sales and marketing efforts and continue to extend its platform to support a fast-growing customer base.

Bizo offers brand advertisers a precise way to reach and engage business professionals online – through deep audience analytics, social media engagement and precision display ad targeting.  Today, more than 400 leading brands use the Bizo platform to reach their target audiences online.  Bizo recently announced strong momentum for 2011, ending the year with an annual run rate of over $18 million and increasing its year-over-year Q4 run rate by 133 percent – it has also continued momentum into 2012 with 125 percent year-over-year Q1 revenue growth.  The company also grew its targetable audience of online business professionals to more than 100 million monthly unique users in 2011, through the addition of more than 800 new publisher partners including Crains BtoB, PC World, Cygnus Media, TechMediaNetwork and Thomson Reuters, bringing its current partner ecosystem to over 2,000 business publishers.

Bizo is also continuing to break new technology ground.  The Bizo Marketing Platform is now supporting over 45 billion monthly data requests, or approximately 35,000 requests per second at peak, which underscores not only the scalability of the platform the company has developed, but also the large ecosystem of customers and partners that use Bizo’s platform to power their online marketing efforts.

With this round of funding, Crosslink Capital’s David Silverman will join the Bizo board of directors.  Silverman’s previous investment experience includes BlueLithium (acquired by Yahoo!), Demand Media (DMD), Fotolog (acquired by Hi-Media), Omniture (OMTR; acquired by Adobe) and Speakeasy (acquired by Best Buy).  Bizo’s board also includes Russell Glass, Bizo co-founder and CEO; Yonatan Stern, Bizo co-founder and ZoomInfo CEO; Byron Deeter, Bessemer partner and former IBM executive; Steve Ricci, Flagship Ventures senior partner; and Mike Tyrrell, Venrock general partner.

“Bizo was an attractive opportunity for Crosslink because the team has built Bizo into a fast-growing category leader in the business marketing industry, and they’ve done so in an incredibly capital-efficient way,” said David Silverman, partner at Crosslink Capital. “I look forward to working with Russell and the Bizo team to build on these successes over the coming years.”

“Bizo has seen extraordinary growth over the past few years and has positioned itself at the center of the business audience marketing ecosystem. This latest round of expansion capital is strong validation of the company’s momentum and the opportunity ahead of us,” said Russell Glass, CEO of Bizo.  “We’re very pleased to have the support of David and the Crosslink Capital team as well as our existing investors as we accelerate our technology development and further solidify our leadership position in the market.”

Bizo was founded in 2008 by Russell Glass and Yonatan Stern and has raised $20 million of equity and debt financing to date.  The executive team is comprised of serial entrepreneurs and leaders who bring a wealth of business audience marketing and ad industry experience from companies such as Zoominfo, Monster, SuccessFactors, Conde Nast, AdMob and Coremetrics. The company was ranked the fourth fastest-growing private company in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times.

About Crosslink Capital

Crosslink Capital is a leading stage-independent venture capital and growth equity firm with over $1.5 billion in assets. Crosslink, which traces its roots back to 1989, was among the first and largest investment firms in the U.S. to integrate public and private growth investing in three families of funds: venture capital funds, long/short hedge funds and a unique hybrid crossover fund. This strategy allows Crosslink to partner with its portfolio companies on a long-term basis. With more than 20 years behind it, Crosslink Capital has invested in over 100 private equity portfolio companies, at the early, mid, and late stages including Pandora, Ancestry.com, Equinix, SeaMicro (acquired by AMD), Intematix, Synapsense, Datastax and Bleacher Report. For more information on Crosslink, visit http://www.crosslinkcapital.com.

About Bizo

Bizo gives marketers instant access to the people who sign the checks at work, and have the most to spend on life: business professionals. Fueled by proprietary demographic data, the Bizo Marketing Platform precisely targets more than 100 million professionals around the world, including more than 80 percent of the U.S. business population.  Bizo has won the confidence of more than 400 brands including AMEX, Mercedes Benz, Monster, Salesforce.com, Porsche, Microsoft, AT&T and UPS who use Bizo to exert inordinate influence and effectively target their online marketing programs to the business professional audience.

For more information on Bizo, or for a free look at the business demographics of your website audience, visit www.bizo.com.

SAN MATEO, Calif. - Dedicated Media, a customer acquisition platform listed among comScore’s Media Metrix Top 50 U.S. web properties, and Aggregate Knowledge, a media intelligence company delivering the predictive analytics on which the world’s largest advertisers make their digital media decisions, announced a partnership that includes integration of Dedicated’s SMARTstack technology with the patent-pending AK Media Intelligence Platform. As the media intelligence platform of record for Dedicated Media, the AK Platform will enhance targeting, audience analytics, media buying, and third-party data scorecarding.

The Dedicated Media SMARTstack ad delivery system processes millions of bits of data in milliseconds. SMARTstack will use the highly scalable AK Platform to collect, analyze, and optimize campaigns across thousands of attributes in real time to develop rich insights and to extract the maximum performance out of each impression in each campaign.

“Dedicated Media combines customized audience modeling with millions of primary and third-party behavioral data points, continuous real-time optimization, unparalleled reporting, and industry recognized brand safety to provide advertisers with unsurpassed results,” said Chris Berman, COO and co-founder of Dedicated Media. “This requires intelligent and predictive analytics across multiple channels packaged within a neutral platform to manage the data quickly and easily. The AK Platform is the perfect solution for us because of its sophistication. The easy-to-use dashboard gives us a powerful tool to buy media smarter every minute of every day.”

Dedicated Media uses seven unique distribution channels, including display, video, mobile, affiliate, lead generation, search, and social, to gain the reach needed to allow its advertisers to find their most valuable customers wherever they consume their digital media. The AK Platform processes billions of Internet events in real time, stitching together the data management, predictive analytics, and workflow across all channels.

“With their expansive range of capabilities, Dedicated can meet any advertiser’s needs at every stage of the purchase decision-making process,” said James Simon, senior vice president of business development, Aggregate Knowledge. “The AK Platform complements and enhances the Dedicated offering by providing a quick and easy way to gain actionable campaign and audience insights to answer not only what happened in a campaign, but also why did it happen and what should I do about it.”

About Aggregate Knowledge

Aggregate Knowledge is a media intelligence company delivering the predictive analytics on which the world’s largest advertisers make their digital media decisions. The patent-pending AK™ Media Intelligence Platform combines campaign analytics with audience data mining and multi-touch attribution to help advertisers, agencies, DSPs, ad networks, SSPs, and publishers with the actionable insights upon which to build their businesses.

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

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

About Dedicated Media

Dedicated Media is a customer acquisition platform that operates on every level of the intent funnel. Dedicated combines customized audience modeling with superior data analytics in a brand safe environment – delivering intelligent optimization across multiple channels, including: display, performance, lead generation, search, social, video, and mobile. Harnessing the power of Dedicated’s SMARTstack technology, advertisers gain increased engagement and smart, efficient delivery. Dedicated Media was recently named to comScore’s Media Metrix Top 50 U.S. Web properties list and DoubleVerify’s top 10 most compliant networks Trust Index for the second year in a row. More information can be found athttp://www.dedicatedmedia.com.

Biggest gains seen for brands with less than 1 million fans; “pinned” content such as photos and videos also shown to dramatically increase engagement

Redwood City, Calif. –  Wildfire, the global leader in social media marketing software, today shared results of an analysis of early brand adopters of Facebook’s Timeline, which launched on February 29, 2012. Wildfire’s research shows that for the majority of brands, the switch to Timeline had a very large, positive impact, with double-digit increases in metrics such as Likes Per Brand Post, Comments Per Brand Post and “People Talking about This” (PTAT). It also showed that the new layout boosted performance of rich-media content such as photos and videos.

Key findings include:

1. Brands with less than 1 million fans got a sizable boost from switching to Timelines.

For brands with less than one million fans, which represent about 85 percent of the company pages on Facebook, the effect on engagement of switching to Timelines was very positive. Likes Per Brand Post increased by 60 percent, Comments Per Brand Post increased by 40 percent and PTAT spiked by 67 percent.

A smaller increase in engagement was noted with brands sized between one to ten million fans. For these brands, Likes Per Brand Post increased by about 14 percent, and PTAT increased by nearly 29 percent. However, Comments Per Brand Post for this group actually decreased by about 17 percent.

The data showed that brands with more than 10 million fans actually saw decreases across all measures; however, the brands in this category were all participants in Facebook’s Timeline debut, which generated significant media attention and inflated engagement numbers for these brands at the time of the launch.

Despite the significant differences in engagement activity after the implementation of Timeline for brands, there was little change seen in Facebook Fan Growth Rate. Though Timeline is more engaging, the increased engagement doesn’t necessarily translate to an increase in fan count. People are interacting with pages without becoming fans, and continue to be very selective about which brands they will publicly like.

2. Photo and video posts perform better in the new Timeline layout.

Prior to Timeline, status updates were the best ways to generate likes and comments, outperforming the next best post type by about 22 percent and 17 percent respectively, while video posts were the best way to generate shares, outperforming the next-best type of post by nearly 70 percent.

With the new visual structure of the Timeline, performance of photo and video posts increased significantly. This visual media has more screen real estate and is displayed very prominently – videos and photos posted to the Timeline attract more attention from users, and the engagement numbers reflect this. Photos are now tops when it comes to generating comments, outperforming the next-best post type by more than 8 percent. Video posts in the new Timeline layout now outperform the next-best post type at generating shares by 90 percent.

3. Pinned posts may perform better than regular posts, with pinned photo posts performing best.

Brands can now opt to “pin” or “feature” content in their Timeline to give it more prominence, and since February 29, the brands Wildfire tracked generated 98 featured posts and 18 pinned posts, out of 2,228 posts analyzed. Although this is a small sample size, early indicators point to superior performance for pinned posts, but little change in performance for most types of featured posts. Wildfire’s preliminary findings suggest that brands could be more successful by pinning posts with greater frequency.

On a per-post basis, pinned posts performed better than regular posts, generating 39 percent more Likes, 6 percent more comments and 32 percent more shares than regular posts. Pinning a photo may boost engagement even more: on a per-post basis, pinned photo posts generated 44 percent more likes, 3 percent more comments and 63 percent more shares than regular photo posts.

Featured video posts were tops when it comes to generating shares – featured video posts outperformed any other type of featured or pinned content by 3.77x, and outperformed regular video posts by 2x.

“With the debut of Timelines for brands on February 29th, brands and marketers everywhere wondered whether the major changes to fan page functionality would cause noticeable differences in engagement activity,” said Jordan Drewitt, Director of Analytics at Wildfire. “Our analysis shows the new Timeline format offering significant opportunities for brands to boost engagement with their content and their pages.”

To download the report, please visit:

http://lp.wildfireapp.com/TimelinesEffect.html?utm_source=Press_Release&utm_medium=PR

About the Wildfire Timeline for Brand Pages Study

Wildfire compiled a statistically significant analysis of 43 early-adopter brands of Facebook’s Timeline, looking to understand engagement statistics such as People Talking about This (PTAT), Likes per Page Post, Comments per Page Post, and Fan Growth Rate for brand pages of all sizes of a representative cross-section of brands that switched on day one. The brands were tracked over Jan 18 – Mar 23, 2012. 45 percent of the brands tracked had less than 1 million fans, 40 percent had between 1 million and 10 million fans, and the remaining 15 percent had greater than 10 million fans.

About Wildfire

Wildfire is the global leader in social media marketing software, with over 13,000 paying customers worldwide, including 30 of the world’s 50 most valuable brands. Wildfire’s Social Marketing Suite combines best-of-breed social promotion and advertising software, robust mobile and desktop page management, messaging and sophisticated real-time analytics in one complete platform. Wildfire’s powerful and intuitive software allows creative marketers and non-technical managers alike to create social campaigns and pages, communicate with their social audience and measure social media performance. Brands and agencies such as Facebook, Virgin, Amazon, Target and Ogilvy as well as thousands of small businesses use the Wildfire platform to engage with audiences on major social networks, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. The only social media marketing company to receive an investment from Facebook’s fbFund, Wildfire has offices in California, Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Munich, and Singapore. For more information, please visit www.wildfireapp.com.

Study Reveals That Most Lack the Tools and Resources to Tap Data for Fast Decisions

BOSTON – Some 75% of enterprise decision makers polled in a recent survey believe that leveraging data will help their companies dramatically improve their business, yet more than half feel they currently lack the tools to mine true customer insights from the data generated by digital and offline efforts.

That was one conclusion of the 2012 Digital Marketing 2.0 Study, an online survey released today that was conducted between December 2011 and February 2012 among 350 enterprise decision makers. The survey, commissioned by DataXu (www.dataxu.com), was conducted by customer strategy firm Human 1.0 and the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), a non-profit think tank.  Respondents included decision makers in management, marketing, communications, digital, IT and social media functions.

The study demonstrates the disconnect between the tools currently available on the market and a company’s ability to aggregate and take action on the data generated by digital consumers. The result: a majority of those polled reported their organizations were unable to sufficiently leverage data to make intelligent business decisions for their marketing efforts due to the evolution of tools, necessary job skills, and business relationships.

“The study makes clear that marketers are grasping the importance of big data to game change, but they are still looking for a way to make business-impacting decisions from the wealth of digital and customer data,” said Mike Baker, CEO and co-founder of DataXu.  “Companies who learn to effectively analyze and make decisions using real-time data will outperform their competition.”

Other study highlights:

58% of respondents said they lacked the skills and technology to perform analytics on marketing data, and more than 70% said they aren’t able to leverage the value of customer data

Only 15% of marketers said they involve the IT department—whose personnel are ostensibly more comfortable with collecting, managing and analyzing data—in marketing technology purchase decisions

90% of respondents believe that digital marketing can reduce customer acquisition costs, but 46% of respondents also agree that they lack the information to communicate the benefits of digital marketing to management.

Respondents identified the lack of a single, cross-channel digital marketing platform as the number one obstacle to the growth of digital marketing.

DataXu and Human 1.0 will discuss the results of the study in a March 29 webinar, “Marketing in the Digital Age: Why Winning Companies Compete in Data & Analytics.” To register for the webinar and download the survey white paper, please visit: www.dataxu.com/download-marketing-in-the-digital-age-whitepaper.

Jeffrey Silverman to Assist C3 Metrics with Viewable Impressions Partner Program Launch

New York, NY — C3 Metrics, an advertising analytics company, today announced it has brought on Jeffrey Silverman as an advisor to advance development and sales strategy for the company’s Viewable Impressions Partner Program. C3 Metrics’ viewable impressions product (DVIZTM) provides an easily deployed solution for advertisers, networks, publishers and DSPs seeking to conform with the impending IAB, ANA and 4A’s “viewable impression” standard. Utilizing the powerful C3 Metrics platform, Silverman will build the Partner Program, which provides predictive technology to improve ROI for the advertising ecosystem.

In his five years at DoubleClick, Silverman held multiple senior level positions, including president of DoubleClick’s media division for North America and VP of global sales. Additionally, Silverman served as an executive board member of DoubleClick, Inc. and was also board member of the IAB. Today, Silverman is a partner in Laconia Ventures, an early stage venture firm investing in entrepreneurs who show the ability to build great teams and execute on their vision.

“Viewable impressions are the most important shift in display since ad serving itself, and they will become the new foundation of all display,” said Silverman. “CMOs don’t want to pay for impressions that were never viewable in the first place, and the new standard closes the gap of accuracy on the most basic metric, click-through rate, all the way to attribution. I’m excited to help C3 Metrics because they’ve got real-time technology, they’re privacy-safe, and via their API, they provide predictive services that are unheard of. With the impending IAB standards, we’ll see similar speed of market adoption that we enjoyed at DoubleClick when ad serving became the first foundation of display.”

This announcement immediately follows C3 Metrics’ addition of John Dimling, former Nielsen CEO, rounding out the company’s roster of strategic advisors associated with viewable impressions and attribution. Both of these key solutions are designed to increase transparency and performance of ad dollars.

Viewable impressions from C3 Metrics supply a more precise measurement of display advertising and a concrete picture of reach and performance, equipping advertisers with more accurate data. Utilizing proprietary technology built for the C3 Metrics’ award-winning platform, the DVIZ product works in all browsers, deploys instantly, is privacy compliant, is certified for all major networks and publishers, and is EU- safe, not requiring the use of cookies.

“Jeffrey has a wealth of experience and knowledge in the ad tech sector. We are humbled and grateful to have his experience both as an early pioneer of the Internet and an investor and advisor to early stage media companies,” says C3 Metrics CEO Mark Hughes. “With the wise efforts of the IAB, ANA and 4A’s, viewable impressions will indeed become the next foundation of display, which increases ROI for the entire industry coupled with CPMs justifiably rising for viewable impressions.”

For more information on DVIZ, please visit: http://c3metrics.com/viewable-impressions/.

About C3 Metrics:
C3 Metrics is an award-winning advertising analytics platform providing products to agencies, brands, publishers, networks, and DSPs. The C3 Metrics proprietary decision engine and AVSRTM metric allows marketers to measure the true value of offline and online media — taking big data and making complex advertising decisions simple. C3 Metrics also provides DVIZTM, an easily deployed solution to comply with the impending IAB, ANA and 4As standards for a “viewable impression.” A two+ year case study of C3 Metrics has demonstrated a 75 percent revenue increase with only a 12 percent increase in advertising spend. Headquartered in New York with offices in California, C3 Metrics is comprised of leading experts in the field of digital and television measurement from DoubleClick, eBay, PepsiCo, Yahoo! and Nielsen.

Social ad platform 140 Proof (www.140proof.com) announced, earlier this month, a new solution for political campaigns that allows candidates to reach large groups of targeted voters within the social stream. Co-founder and CTO John Manoogian III gave us further insights into how political campaigns can best leverage the opportunities offered by social media.

Otilia Otlacan: 140 Proof has just launched a social ad solution for political campaigns – congratulations! What made you look into building this type of platform?

John Manoogian III: [roaring applause] Thank you very much! No, but seriously, we saw the huge potential of social early on for brand marketers and we noticed very high engagement rates based on our interest graph targeting, so it was logical to keep expanding this into a potentially billion-dollar business. As you know, with all the presidential candidates active on Twitter as well as the majority of Congress, 140 Proof’s social relevance targeting is just a natural fit for politicians looking to reach key voting segments at scale

Otilia Otlacan: What is the reach potential of the new service, are you considering extending beyond Facebook and Twitter?

John Manoogian III: 140 Proof reaches nearly 200 million US uniques via Twitter and Facebook, and we’re constantly expanding both our audience network and our capabilities. So far in 2012 we’ve added a number of new social apps to expand the network, and we’ve launched a new ad product offering that enables shareable video in our social ads… and we’re just getting started.

Otilia Otlacan: How important is user engagement for a political campaign through social media? Is engagement the ultimate goal or should the focus be on reach?

John Manoogian III: General get-out-the-vote campaigns should focus on reach, but candidates have deep targeting options when it comes to social advertising and engagement. Candidates can target specific demographics with social ads to open conversations on topics near and dear to that demographic.

Otilia Otlacan: Tell us a little about how budgets can be managed on the 140 Proof platform. What kind of campaign optimization can be performed?

John Manoogian III: We’re extremely flexible. We run everything from the standard one-month brand promotion to multiple flights of different creative at different budgets. Our sales leads and account reps work with every advertiser to create customized programs. Our ad operations team then ensures that budget, targeting, flighting, and creative are managed throughout the campaign, both through our automated learning network as well as by careful oversight.

Otilia Otlacan: There’s a lot of earned media on the table, with both Facebook and Twitter. Can the levels of earned media be monitored through the 140 Proof platform?

John Manoogian III: Yes, our ad operations team monitors and reports on earned media response both during and after the campaign, which is important because these campaigns can have a very large effect quickly. Paid offerings like 140 Proof serve to bring predictable performance and scale to social campaigns, and these paid campaigns act as “firestarters” for earned media in a measurble way.

Otilia Otlacan: The U.S. elections are of great interest at a global scale and the candidates’ messages are always scrutinized worldwide. Do you anticipate an interest from the candidates in reaching international audiences as well?

John Manoogian III: As with most US brand advertisers, the biggest emphasis will be on spending budget to reach US voters. Interest in international awareness usually increases AFTER the election, when the President wants to maximize buy-in for international programs. That said, while US is still the hugest market for social advertising, social is truly global and we have customers from across the globe.

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

John Manoogian III: To make the most of social, candidates need to look for ways to extend their reach beyond their existing followers – otherwise they’re just preaching to the choir (and usually a pretty small one at that). If candidates are using Twitter as their mouthpiece, they should really also be using 140 Proof social ads as their megaphone.

About 140 Proof

140 Proof is the leading social stream media platform, providing brand advertisers a simple and effective way to reach millions of consumers primed to discover and share. The company delivers sharable ads to users above their information feeds from Twitter, Facebook and other socially connected services. 140 Proof’s stream-analysis technologies match ads to the target audience persona groups based on public social cues like who they follow and keywords in their feeds. Social and viral effects deliver unique benefits to brand advertisers, while maximizing revenue for partners, enabling them to provide compelling stream-based applications and services to consumers on their web and mobile devices. The stream is everywhere — 140 Proof is headquartered in San Francisco and has sales offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit. For more information, please visit: www.140proof.com

Forbes vBIG Program Leverages vCE to Validate In-View Ad Delivery and Offer Advertisers ‘Guaranteed Impressions’

NEW YORK and RESTON, VA – Forbes Media and comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) announced an agreement to implement viewable impression measurement across all display ad campaigns appearing on Forbes.com as part of its validated Brand Increase Guarantee (vBIG) program. This innovative offering from Forbes leverages comScore validated Campaign Essentials™ (vCE) to validate that ad impressions delivered as part of an advertiser’s vBIG program are in-view, providing the assurance that advertisers will only be charged for ads that have had an opportunity to deliver the desired advertising effect. This program is consistent with the principles addressed as part of Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS), an industry-wide initiative led by the ANA, IAB and 4A’s, which called for a set of standards across the industry and the need for a true measure of ‘viewable impressions’.

“Forbes is thrilled to be the first-to-market premium publisher using comScore vCE to guarantee viewable impressions to our advertisers as part of our vBIG program,” said Bruce Rogers, Chief Insights Officer, Forbes Media. “We see this as a game-changer for Forbes and a significant first step for the industry toward improved accountability for – and ultimately monetization of – digital ad inventory. For too long online ad pricing has involved significant guesswork, because while we knew that not all ads were delivered in-view, we weren’t always sure which ones. The comScore vCE technology provides much-needed transparency to accurately reflect the ads that are actually being seen. This knowledge is essential in proving that our highly engaging content delivers a higher percentage of validated impressions and that they are delivering outstanding performance for our advertiser clients.”

“Premium publishers that offer highly engaging content often do not get the credit they deserve for below-the-fold placements on their web page, which may actually deliver results that are every bit as strong as the above-the-fold placements,” said Erin Hunter, Executive Vice President, comScore. “comScore vCE is helping premium publishers like Forbes clearly illustrate the value of their inventory and prove to advertisers why placements throughout their site have the ability to deliver the desired effect on audiences. The result is greater transparency and accountability on both sides of the media equation, representing a win-win scenario for both advertisers and publishers.”

comScore vCE enables Forbes vBIG program to deliver enhanced value to advertisers by validating that an ad had the opportunity to be seen, a clear requirement for delivering desired performance. The vBIG program utilizes comScore AdEffx™ Brand Survey Lift to ensure campaigns appearing on Forbes sites are moving the needle in terms of traditional branding metrics. Importantly, by basing these ad effectiveness studies on validated impressions, advertisers can better evaluate their campaigns’ impact, because impressions generating a positive result are not dragged down by non-validated impressions, which by definition cannot deliver an impact.

About Forbes validated Brand Increase Guarantee (vBIG)
Using comScore vCE, Forbes will (1) guarantee that 100 percent of all paid ad impressions are viewable and (2) guarantee lift in brand metrics by conducting an ad effectiveness survey. If the advertiser does not see a statistically significant lift at the 90%+ confidence level for one of four brand metrics — Awareness, Message Association, Brand Favorability or Purchase Intent — Forbes will return the advertiser’s money. To qualify, advertisers must run a minimum of $250,000 on Forbes.com over a 90-day period.

About comScore validated Campaign Essentials (vCE)
vCE is a holistic solution for complete campaign delivery validation and in-flight optimization. Unlike existing single-point solutions, vCE provides an unduplicated accounting of impressions delivered across a variety of dimensions, such as ads delivered in-view, to the right audience, in the right geography, in a brand safe environment and absent of fraudulent delivery. vCE reports on reach and frequency, comprehensive demographics and behavioral segments. This measurement eliminates all impressions that never had a chance to make an impact, providing a more realistic and accurate picture of campaign delivery.

About Forbes Media
Forbes Media encompasses Forbes and Forbes.com ( www.forbes.com), the leading business site on the Web that reaches on average 27 million people monthly. The company publishes Forbes and Forbes Asia, which together reach a worldwide audience of more than 6 million readers. It also publishes ForbesLife magazine, in addition to licensee editions in Africa,Argentina, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Korea, Latvia, Middle East, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Turkey, and Ukraine.

Other Forbes Media Web sites are ForbesWoman.com; RealClearPolitics.com; RealClearMarkets.com; RealClearSports.com and RealClearWorld.com. Together with Forbes.com, these sites reach on average 33 million business decision makers each month.

Steve Forbes serves as Chairman and Editor in Chief. Mike Perlis is President and Chief Executive Officer. Lewis D’Vorkin is Chief Product Officer. Meredith Kopit Levien is Chief Revenue Officer.

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

Hulu Streams Record 1.5 Billion Videos Ads in February

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that 179 million U.S. Internet users watched nearly 38 billion videos of online video content in February.

Top 10 Video Content Properties by Unique Viewers

Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in February with 147.4 million unique viewers, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 60.9 million, VEVO with 52 million, Facebook.com with 43.6 million and Viacom Digital with 43.2 million. Nearly 38 billion video views occurred during the month, with Google Sites generating the highest number at 16.7 billion, followed by Hulu with 951 million and Yahoo! Sites with 721 million. The average viewer watched 21.8 hours of online video content, with Google Sites (7 hours) and Hulu (3.8 hours) demonstrating the highest average engagement among the top ten properties.

*A video is defined as any streamed segment of audiovisual content, including both progressive downloads and live streams. For long-form, segmented content, (e.g. television episodes with ad pods in the middle) each segment of the content is counted as a distinct video stream.

Top 10 Video Ad Properties by Video Ads Viewed

Americans viewed 7.5 billion video ads in February, with Hulu delivering a record-high number of video ad impressions at more than 1.5 billion. Google Sites ranked second with 1.1 billion video ads during the month, followed by Adap.tv with 706 million, BrightRoll Video Network with 683 million and Specific Media with 611 million. Time spent watching video ads totaled nearly 3.2 billion minutes, with Hulu delivering the highest duration of video ads at 650 million minutes. Video ads reached 50 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 49 times during the month. Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 48, while ESPN delivered an average of 26 ads per viewer.

Note: Google Sites’ video ad data includes a sizeable increase vs. previous months due to the recent inclusion of certain YouTube ad formats in our reporting. Any changes vs. previous months should not be treated as organic growth. In addition, Google Sites’ video ad data currently does not include promoted videos on YouTube or homepage ads. 
*Video ads include streaming-video advertising only and do not include other types of video monetization, such as overlays, branded players, matching banner ads, homepage ads, etc.
**Indicates video ad network
†Indicates video ad exchange

Top 10 YouTube Partner Channels by Unique Viewers

The February 2012 YouTube partner data revealed that video music channels VEVO (50.8 million viewers) and Warner Music (29.9 million viewers) maintained the top two positions. Gaming channel Machinima ranked third with 22.9 million viewers, followed by Maker Studios Inc. with 14.4 million, FullScreen with 12 million and Warner Bros (The Ellen Show) with 9 million. Among the top 10 YouTube partners, Machinima demonstrated the highest engagement (64 minutes per viewer) closely followed by VEVO (61 minutes per viewer), while VEVO streamed the most videos (674 million) followed by Machinima (344 million).

*YouTube Partner Reporting based on online video content viewing and does not include claimed user-generated content

Other notable findings from February 2012 include:

• 83.8 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The duration of the average online content video was 6.2 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.
• Video ads accounted for 16.6 percent of all videos viewed and 1.3 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

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

Social media agency co-founder reinforces need for social and advertising industry to lend resources to social good campaigns

Seattle, WA – Banyan Branch today announced that co-founder Dave Hanley has been honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, which each year recognizes distinguished leaders under the age of 40 from around the world. Hanley joins an exclusive group of top advertising industry professionals who have recently been honored with recognition as Young Global Leaders, including David Jones, global CEO of Havas and Euro RSCG; Tara Comonte, CFO of McCann Worldgroup; and Scott Spirit, chief strategy officer of WPP.

Hanley co-founded and is a Principal for Banyan Branch, a Seattle-based full-service social media agency that provides end-to-end marketing services for the world’s leading brands and non-profit organizations. The agency, with Hanley’s backing, is playing an instrumental role in the World Economic Forum Young Global Leader’s Thirst Global Water Awareness campaign, providing the organization with social media strategy and developing its website, http://thirst4water.org/. The goal of the organization is to raise awareness around individuals’ water footprint—or how much water they use and is needed to support their lives on a day-to-day basis, to help people make better informed purchasing decisions.

Banyan Branch also provides numerous other non-profit organizations with social media strategy, interactive, campaign execution and resulting analytics, including GetSchooled, a non-profit focused on encouraging high school students to graduate and continue on to college, and Vittana, a leader in providing education loans to young people in developing countries, where Hanley is an Advisory Board Member.

“Social media has the power to catapult driving forces for change onto the world stage and channels such as Facebook and Twitter have become powerful megaphones to help increase awareness around global development issues,” said Hanley. “As the world becomes increasingly digital, it has connected people and empowered them to change their world and the world of those around them. Social media facilitates gatherings and movements, and can be used for political, social, educational and health-related changes that increase the global standard of living.”

A Fulbright Scholar, Hanley studied in Bangladesh in 2001 under Nobel Laureate Professor Mohammed Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank. Grameen Bank, which won the Noble Peace Prize in 2006, is the largest microcredit bank in the world and the only business corporation to have won a Nobel Prize. Hanley received his Masters at Business Administration at Stanford University, and his Bachelor and Masters of Public Policy at Brigham Young University.

About The Forum of Young Global Leaders

Established in 2004 by Professor Klaus Schwab, The Forum of Young Global Leaders is a unique, multi-stakeholder community of the world’s most extraordinary young leaders who dedicate a part of their time to jointly address global challenges and who are committed to devote part of their knowledge and energy to collectively work towards a better future. Together the Young Global Leaders work to discover innovative solutions to today’s most pressing problems through various initiatives and workstreams, as well as catalyzing the next generation of leaders.

About Banyan Branch

Banyan Branch, based in Seattle, WA, is a full-service social media agency that provides end-to-end marketing services including strategy, creative, execution and analytics. With a holistic approach that integrates Strategy, Social Media Creative, Engagement and Research & Analytics, Banyan Branch delivers social media programs unmatched by smaller agencies, while providing more personalized service and quicker response than large-scale digital firms. Dozens of the world’s leading brands, including FOX, Viacom, Paramount, Hartz, Univision, Gilt Groupe, Microsoft and Windstar Cruises have partnered with Banyan Branch to implement a wide variety of social media campaigns. Any company ready to connect with its customers where they live and breathe, can contact Banyan Branch via www.BanyanBranch.com

With revenue growth of over 300 percent in 2011 and over 13,000 paying customers, including 30 of the top 50 global brands, Wildfire is now the largest social media marketing software company in the world 

Redwood City, Calif.  – Wildfire, the global leader in social media marketing software, announced that over 13,000 paying customers are using its Social Marketing Suite, making it the largest social media marketing platform in the world. The Wildfire Platform has powered over 200,000 social marketing campaigns. More than half of the world’s top 50 most valuable brands, including Facebook itself, use the Wildfire platform to engage with audiences across the mobile and social web.

2011 was a year of explosive growth for the company.  Last year, Wildfire grew its revenue by 300 percent, while maintaining strong margins, and expanded the team to over 300 employees worldwide by March of 2012. With new offices in London, Paris, Munich, and Singapore, the company also grew its international business by 500 percent, with more than 24 percent of the company’s revenue now coming from outside the U.S. Last year, Wildfire was named one of the Top 50 Best Startups by TiE and was also ranked as one of the top 250 global private companies by AlwaysOn.

The company’s growth has been fueled in large part by the exceptional results brands achieve with Wildfire, which has led to significant repeat business and strong organic customer growth. On average, Wildfire customers gain a 3x increase in fan growth rate while working with Wildfire. With 300 new subscription clients in the last 6 months of 2011, Wildfire is adding mid- and enterprise-level customers at a faster rate than any direct competitor.

Employee satisfaction and retention rates have also contributed to the company’s growth in today’s competitive tech hiring climate: in 2011 and 2012, Wildfire was named one of the top 10 best places to work by the San Francisco Business Times, and is currently ranked in the top 1% of best places to work in the U.S. by Glassdoor.com.

New technology innovations have also played a substantial role in the company’s growth over the past year. In July of 2011, the company introduced its Social Marketing Suite, integrating best-of-breed social promotion software, robust page management, messaging and sophisticated real-time analytics into one complete platform.  In early 2012, the company expanded its offerings to include mobile Facebook marketing, and most recently, through partnership with Adaptly, Wildfire integrated ad buying and ad optimization capabilities into its Social Marketing Suite, enabling organizations to drive greater return on their paid, owned and earned media. Last month, founder and CEO Victoria Ransom was named a TechFellow by the Founders Fund, NEA and TechCrunch, for outstanding technology leadership and innovation.

“Social media has evolved from a stand-alone channel to one that permeates every marketing program.  As brands continue to integrate social into all their marketing programs, they will need sophisticated, enterprise-grade software like Wildfire’s to successfully manage and optimize every customer interaction,” said Victoria Ransom, founder and CEO of Wildfire. “With our continued technology innovation, our strong customer base and our outstanding team, Wildfire is extremely well-positioned to further scale the business in the coming years.”

About Wildfire

Wildfire is the global leader in social media marketing software, with over 13,000 paying customers worldwide, including 30 of the world’s 50 most valuable brands. Wildfire’s Social Marketing Suite combines best-of-breed social promotion and advertising software, robust mobile and desktop page management, messaging and sophisticated real-time analytics in one complete platform. Wildfire’s powerful and intuitive software allows creative marketers and non-technical managers alike to create social campaigns and pages, communicate with their social audience and measure social media performance. Brands and agencies such as Facebook, Virgin, Amazon, Target and Ogilvy as well as thousands of small businesses use the Wildfire platform to engage with audiences on major social networks, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The only social media marketing company to receive an investment from Facebook’s fbFund, Wildfire has offices in California, Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Munich, and Singapore.  For more information, please visit www.wildfireapp.com.

New YieldMetrics AdRoutes™ Offers Critical Business Insights for Advertisers, Publishers, and Technology Providers

Santa Monica, CA – YieldMetrics, a leading provider of advertising market intelligence solutions, today announced the public launch and general availability of YieldMetrics AdRoutes™, the advertising industry’s most comprehensive analytics solution. YieldMetrics also announced the release of its first AdTrends report, a quarterly look at the current state of the advertising industry.

“We’re excited to bring the power of YieldMetrics AdRoutes’ insights to the market,” said Gabe Gottlieb, CEO of YieldMetrics. “For too long, publishers, advertisers, ad networks, and technology providers have had to make decisions based on incomplete and unreliable data. Using YieldMetrics AdRoutes, our customers can inform their strategies with real-time, accurate analytics.”

Driving Business Through Data-Driven Insights

YieldMetrics AdRoutes is a groundbreaking analytics solution designed to help publishers, advertisers, ad networks, and advertising technology providers optimize their business strategies and improve their operations. YieldMetrics AdRoutes provides insights available nowhere else for sales, marketing, and business development teams. For example, YieldMetrics customers can discover:

- A full listing of competitors’ customers

- Details on an advertiser’s media plan

- A breakdown of how a publisher is selling its inventory

- The channels an advertiser is using to reach its targeted audience

- An accurate view of an advertising network’s inventory

Unlike other analytics solutions that provide only monthly or quarterly data, YieldMetrics AdRoutes is updated daily to provide the most up-to-date view of market activity. Real-time alerting enables YieldMetrics customers to react quickly to changes in the market, such as a targeted customer beginning a trial of a competitive solution.

Breakthrough Technology

YieldMetrics AdRoutes is built on a breakthrough, patent-pending technology called PathSource™. Using a farm of cloud-based, intelligent crawlers, PathSource is able to capture detailed information about advertising operations across thousands of publisher websites. For example, PathSource can identify which specific advertising networks, exchanges, and data providers a publisher is using, along with a full catalog of the specific advertisers buying inventory on that site.

Additionally, through the unique ability to follow the “path” of an advertisement, PathSource can determine the specific channels being used in the buying and selling of advertising inventory. For example, PathSource can identify whether a given impression was served via reservation or via Real-Time Bidding (RTB).

Pricing and Availability

YieldMetrics AdRoutes is available today, with site license pricing starting at $25,000 per year. For more information, please visit http://www.yieldmetrics.com/adroutes

YieldMetrics AdTrends

YieldMetrics also today released its AdTrends report for Q1, 2012. YieldMetrics AdTrends leverages YieldMetrics’ data to provide a unique snapshot of the advertising industry. AdTrends reports include detailed analyses of advertising provider market share, advertiser activity, and overall industry trends. This first edition of YieldMetrics AdTrends examines the market penetration of Real-Time Bidding, looks at who’s winning among ad networks and exchanges, and dives into the advertising of a top advertiser.

YieldMetrics AdTrends is published quarterly and available at no charge at http://adtrends.yieldmetrics.com.

About YieldMetrics
YieldMetrics, an advertising technology company, provides breakthrough market intelligence solutions to publishers, advertisers, ad networks and technology providers. Using patent-pending PathSource technology, YieldMetrics products deliver critical business insights to supercharge sales, marketing, and business development efforts. YieldMetrics is headquartered in Santa Monica, CA, and is currently self-funded. To learn more about YieldMetrics, please visit http://www.yieldmetrics.com.