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

Earlier this week, digital media agency Exact Drive and display ad design platform Canned Banners announced a partnership to offer marketers a one-stop solution for launching and managing dynamic display ad campaigns. The service increases the performance and precision of display ad campaigns by personalizing ad creative in real time for each viewer. We’ve asked Myles Younger, Canned Banners Co-founder and Head of Marketing & Business Development, to give us more insights into the current display advertising market, the challenges and opportunities for SMBs and long tail advertisers.

 Otilia Otlacan: Recent news about the partnership between Canned Banners and Exact Drive have brought attention once again to the challenges in quickly sourcing display advertising creatives. Tell us a bit about Canned Banners and what drove you to create this company.

Myles Younger: We created Canned Banners with three goals/philosophies in mind:

1.) Good ad creative is important, but good creative shouldn’t be kept behind a high price barrier that marketers from launching display campaigns.

2.) There are many aspects of display ad design that are simple or repetitive, and which can be automated or delivered more efficiently through self-serve tools. This presents opportunities to streamline the creative workflow, reduce design costs, and offer the advertiser (or the agency or ad network) more flexibility in quickly making design updates or content changes.

3.) Most display ads are still created “the old fashioned way.” This stands in stark contrast to display media buying, which has seen an explosion of innovation in scalable, automated, and intelligent platforms. We’re developing a platform and tools that can add the same kinds of efficiency and economies of scale to the creative process.

Otilia Otlacan:  Last I checked, there were quite a number of DIY ad building services around. What’s different about Canned Banners, where does the company position itself on the market?

Myles Younger: There are several competing DIY solutions, but as we’ve learned first-hand, it’s not easy to build a simple self-serve interface for display ad design. Canned Banners is the best available (my unbaised opinion, of course) primarily because our team includes former ad and marketing guys as well as engineering talent; most of our competitors are lacking in one area or another, despite the fact that they’re both critical.

We’ll continue to position ourselves as a go-to resource for novice and SMB advertisers, but once we roll out our next wave of innovations, we’ll be marching “upstream” in terms of client size (this has already started), as well as expanding “horizontally” into new areas like performance advertising, search marketing, and marketing automation.

Our partnership with Exact Drive is one of these examples of horizontal expansion, where we’ve expanded from basic ad creative to dynamic creative. And supporting dynamic ads also puts us in a prime position to serve dozens of industry verticals that can benefit from display ads that are created in real time, such as e-commerce, real estate, and travel.

Otilia Otlacan: Let’s look a little into the display advertising market available to SMBs and the general small advertiser. The options for these buyers to access premium display ad placements used to be grim at best. Do you see any hope for them in the near future?

Myles Younger: Yes, absolutely. Why do I know this? Because SMBs have money to spend, and when you put them all together, they represent a massive market. But the barrier to providing SMBs with premium solutions lies in the fact that it’s historically been very expensive to aggregate hundreds of thousands of relatively tiny SMB marketing budgets into something meaningful.

However, with each passing month, more and more steps of the display ad workflow are being automated. Once the seesaw tips and it’s possible to serve SMBs without a staff of thousands and massive marketing expenditure (ex. Groupon), you’ll see a proliferation of more “premium” options become available to SMBs, either directly or through intermediary marketing platforms. Obviously Canned Banners wants to play a part in that transformation.

Otilia Otlacan:  You’ve recently partnered with digital media agency Exact Drive to create a real-time, dynamic display advertising platform. Can you explain us the mechanisms behind this offering and the requirements for advertisers to access it?

Myles Younger: The mechanisms fall into three categories:

1.) The Canned Banners API, which provides a programmatic interface to update ad creative on-the-fly.

2.) Creative rules and advertiser source content (e.g., XML, API, etc). These are the rules that define what content (e.g., product photos & prices) will be shown to which viewer segments. These rules will be unique for most campaigns, as every advertiser has different available content and different audience targeting strategies. This is where Canned Banners and Exact Drive overlap and come together to develop unique, performance-based targeting strategies. For example, we might develop a rule like this for a real estate company: “When prospects view the real estate ads, we’ll show nearby listings from the real estate company’s database, and we’ll only show listings that are in the viewer’s expected price range.”

3.) Media buying and targeting from Exact Drive. This is where they’re experts. When a client comes to us with campaign goals and target audiences, Exact Drive has a wide array of media buying strategies it can employ in very precisely defining those target audiences so that we can optimize the relevance of the ad content and achieve the goals of the campaign. Media buying strategies could include retargeting, geo-targeting, contextual targeting, etc.

As far as advertiser requirements, dynamic advertising becomes difficult to justify when you dip below a media spend of roughly $10K per month (the setup costs start to eat up the ROI). It’s also important that advertisers have a healthy variety of products, messages, offers, or content. More content variations means greater personalization of final dynamic ad content, which boosts performance. Within those two relatively simple criteria, we can work with any advertiser that wants to run a dynamic campaign.

Otilia Otlacan:  What’s next for Canned Banners, what are you working on?

Myles Younger: Canned Banners is all “next” right now! Things are moving very quickly. We’ll be relaunching our website in a few weeks to announce all our new solutions. We’ll keep improving upon our Basic Ad Builder, but we’ll be rolling out an API to allow ad networks, agencies, and brands to develop their own ad creation tools and dynamic ad solutions.

There’s always been a great deal of interest in the Canned Banners approach to automating display ad creation, but without an API, we’ve always had one hand tied behind our back when trying to meet our clients’ needs and integrate into their existing software and workflows. Look out for solutions for agencies, search marketers, and e-retailers, as well as more innovation with our partner Exact Drive (which won’t be limited to dynamic display ads, by the way).

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

Myles Younger: We’re just excited to see what people do with our next wave of products and tools. There’s a whole world of “mash-ups” to explore where you can leverage outside data and APIs to automate certain aspects of display ad creation.

To illustrate what I mean, here are two demo apps we’ve created recently (apologies in advance if they’re slow or perhaps even broken…they’re just informal demos):

1.) This demo creates display ads using photos and property descriptions from the UK real estate listing service Nestoria.co.uk: http://demo.cannedbanners.com/nestoria/

2. This app automatically generates multiple banner variations using images imported from the Getty Images stock photo API: http://demo.cannedbanners.com/getty-images/

These are just two rough examples of how, when you have the right tools, you can add a whole new dimension of flexibility and scalability to display ad design. It’s worth noting that all together, we only spent about 2 days developing and launching those apps (i.e., we created two working ad design apps in less time than most designers could turn around a single piece of basic ad creative).

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

Danish software company Adform (www.adform.com) has been seeing great growth following the launch of the first Pan-European demand side platform in November last year. Recent news around Adform’s expansion have put the company in the spotlight once again. CMO Martin Stockfleth Larsen shares with us some insights into the current state of display advertising and explains how the Adform platform is radically different.

Otilia Otlacan: We’ve been hearing a lot of good news from Adform lately and it seems that the past 6 months were very busy for you. Can you walk us a little through what Adform does and what differentiates it from similar ad serving platforms?

Martin Stockfleth Larsen: First of all we are beyond ad serving, so you don’t find similar platforms. Adform is Europe’s biggest technology and service provider within display advertising, which mission is “making display advertising simple, relevant, rewarding”. Our product strengths and strategic focus areas lie within our real time buying, rich media and dynamic creative optimization offerings, as these areas will create the most value for our clients going forward, we call it the Adform trilogy.

Supporting the offering we have developed an end-to-end ad serving platform offering comprehensive media planning, campaign optimization and reporting functionality. The platform supports various online channels, such as social media, search, mobile and video, enabling our clients to optimize display campaigns using data from all online channels.

On a historical note, Adform was established 10 years ago in Copenhagen, Denmark by three engineers from Denmark’s Technical University and today we have offices in 12 European countries including the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Eastern Europe and the Nordics. We work with leading media agencies and online advertisers and receive a great deal of praise for our unrivalled service, flexibility, data reporting and targeting capabilities. We serve more than 2,000 advertisers and 200 agencies across all our markets.

Otilia Otlacan: What is your view of the current state of the display advertising market? Many have touted its resurgence but does the growth live up to the hype created around it?

Martin Stockfleth Larsen: Hype is the wrong word. It’s not hype but simply a matter of huge potential for many years to come; the market is for real.
The reason behind the growth of display advertising is threefold.

1. Shift
Marketing spend is shifting from offline to online marketing. The reason behind that is digitalization. This makes people spend more and more time online, whether by using a computer, tablet, Smartphone or any other connected device.
Display is benefitting a lot from this shift.

2. Innovation
During the last couple of years, we have seen a good deal of innovation coming to life to help display advertising become a performance channel just like search engine marketing. Technologies such as retargeting, personalized ads, real-time bidding, cherry picking, etc., are legitimate and used across industries.

3. Branding
Branding is huge—not only with outdoor and TV ads, but, indeed, also online. Rich media, video and mobile give brand marketers some fantastic formats and creative opportunities to make the consumer engage with the brand through unlimited creativity, and deeply linked with social media platforms. The distance between branding and engagement in the outside world is far apart, but in the online world, it is happening in real time. This is another good reason for growth within display.

Otilia Otlacan: What type of publisher could benefit most from allowing the ad inventory to be sold through RTB? Are there any particular characteristics of publishers that can generate higher ROI?

Martin Stockfleth Larsen: We are on the demand side and not the supply side, so we help agencies and advertisers.

Otilia Otlacan: Do you ever receive requests for custom metrics through Adform? What metrics do you see as most relevant for display advertising nowadays?

Martin Stockfleth Larsen: Yes, although we have almost 100 metrics, the metrics still evolve. We have recently created a new metric that is a branding index score that is as close as possible to the true branding effect of a campaign or creative. This metric is called “The Branding Exposure Duration” and is the most relevant measure for branding campaigns.

Most relevant for performance-driven advertisers or campaigns, are actual sales, which are consolidated across channels and either de-duplicated or cross-attributed.

Otilia Otlacan: Can you share with us what’s in your pipeline for the rest of the year; what are you working on?

Martin Stockfleth Larsen: We don’t reveal our pipeline, but the market will be thrilled.

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

Martin Stockfleth Larsen: It’s a fantastic industry to work with; so much is happening in the U.S., EMEA and APAC —and it will continue for many years. Right now, though, Europe is on fire, for sure, so look out for the Adform Crusade!

About Adform
Adform close the loop by integrating media planning, buying, optimization, and reporting for all online display advertising in one place, thus saving an enormous amount of time, money and resources.

Adform’s unique platform incorporates display ad serving, rich media, video, mobile, dynamic ads, personalised targeting, and real-time bidding through integrations with major inventory players, making display advertising simple, relevant and rewarding for media agencies and online advertisers. Adform was established in Denmark in 2002 and now has offices in 12 countries including Nordics, UK, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Visit http://www.adform.com or www.twitter.com/adforminsider for more information.

Established in 2011, Poland, Epom Ltd. (www.epom.com) is a company with innovative vision, providing creative solutions for publishers, advertisers and networks, namely the integrated platform for fast and convenient digital ad-campaign management. Despite the fact that the enterprise is relatively new on the market, Epom has already got a lot of business partners, including major media companies from Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia.

We have spoken to Epom’s CEO, Adam Jablonski, about the current challenges on the ad servers market, about being an European tech startup, and the company’s plans for the future.

Otilia Otlacan: Thank you for putting Epom on our map, it is great to discover a new initiative on the ad serving scene! Can you give us a little background on what led you to create Epom?

A few years ago I was a Head of an advertising agency in Poland, where we were trying to use various ad serving solutions. Unfortunately, all of them either couldn’t fit our requirements, or were too bulky and sophisticated to use.

Much because of that we started working on our own project, and it gradually got far beyond the limits of an in-house solution. At one point I just understood that we could really offer something unique to the market, that a great number of users would appreciate simplicity and convenience of Epom. Having already acquired enough experience with numerous advertisers and publishers, we have put all knowledge we had into creation and development of our solution, clearly acknowledging what exactly each and every user needed. This is, perhaps, what can be named among our keys to success.

Otilia Otlacan: How do you see the current ad servers market, what are the biggest challenges for a new player?

Undoubtedly, the current market features a wide range of ad serving solutions, much due to the rapid development of digital marketing itself and the companies’ willingness to use more money from their budgets in online marketing niche. At the same time, the majority of services in the relative market segment, like OpenX, DoubleClick or Zedo, for instance, were initially introduced more, than 10 years ago, and managed to attract large audience at a certain point of their history. In this respect, I’m absolutely sure that we know what we can offer to the clients, who are searching for something new.

It’s really surprising, or better to say, fortunate for us, that even the largest sites with a great amount of traffic don’t frequently understand the importance of an ad server, all opportunities and benefits that the its usage presupposes. Therefore, we have got an incredibly wide array of options and possibilities for development.

Otilia Otlacan: Is the fact of being a European startup a hindrance when competing on a market that is heavily US-driven?

I would dare say that the actual geographical location of the company’s office is hardly very essential in online business nowadays. It’s possible to manage the enterprise in Asia or Europe, while being mostly focused on the US market and vice versa. Obviously, online business market in the USA is traditionally considered to be the most developed one, yet there’re many trend-setters in the industry that aren’t US-based companies. Let’s just take a simple example: many large networks at Epom Market, like InMobi, Aditic, Buzzcity, Inmobi, or Adsmobi aren’t US-based businesses. Despite having been founded in Asia and Europe, they have succeeded in becoming large-scale and popular projects.

Otilia Otlacan: Who is your typical publisher, who would benefit most from migrating onto Epom?

As for today, both large sites and the mid-sized businesses tend to use our solution. The service isn’t too bulky, on the contrary, it’s very simple, yet comprises all necessary features and peculiarities.

We are especially happy to welcome large publishers, since Epom is a massively-scalable platform and, thus, enables to spare considerable sums of money, in case there’re a lot of impressions served. Moreover, there aren’t any additional, hidden fees, like a set-up fee or a maintenance fee, or the separate payment for particular functions of the platform. Everything is crystal clear.

Epom has been developed as a unified platform to work with any type of traffic or type of ads. Therefore, publishers, advertisers and networks, working with mobile traffic, mobile applications and videos, will certainly enjoy all advantages of ad inventory management opportunities, being available at one place.

Much because of that, one of the largest file-sharing services with huge amounts of traffic 4shared has recently begun its partnership with Epom. The company currently uses the full package of Epom features, including a mobile app and a video solution. In this respect, Epom is really perfect for such clients, especially due to its reasonable pricing.

Otilia Otlacan: Can you tell us about the Epom exchange, what verticals are best represented? Is the exchange open to all publishers or are there minimum impressions requirements?

The launch of Epom ad exchange is a logical and natural way of our project development. In particular, having already got a considerable number (pool) of publishers and advertisers, we have managed to offer them our professional help in solution of tasks and problems.

Namely, as for publishers with high-quality traffic, it’s the access for expensive ads and additional opportunities of traffic monetization. We are cooperating with leading networks, and the system works in such a way that the publisher gets the largest possible profit.

Undoubtedly, Epom Market is beneficial for all participating players. Each and every publisher can apply for membership in it, and we do not determine the minimum impressions requirements.

Otilia Otlacan: What’s on your roadmap for the rest of the year?

Our professional ambitions can be revealed in numbers – we are planning to gain 40B monthly impressions till the end of this year. At the moment we are negotiating with several major publishers, who are ready to test and use our platform in their businesses.

Furthermore, paying much attention to the development of our mobile solution, we are planning to launch Mobile Ad Exchange this year. Besides, we will also be working on the expansion of Epom Market and are going to participate in various thematic exhibitions and seminars. These events are very useful in terms of real-life communication with target audience and can be considered a wonderful opportunity to hear your clients’ wishes, build and develop new valuable business relations.

As for the functionality of the platform, this year we will be working on the development of our mobile solution, SDK for Android and other platforms. We will also introduce the upgrades and modifications in network accounts, our video solution, not to mention our plans to add support of mobile rich-media ads and implement Behavioral targeting.

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

I would like to add, that while creating Epom we had a purpose to launch a unified massively-scalable platform with all needed tools for effective real-time ad inventory management, so that our users would be able to run ads from different advertising platforms, mobile advertising networks and direct ads at one place. I suppose, we’ve done a really great job, as today Epom is increasing the number of its fans, and hopefully the readers of your magazine will also become our clients.

About Epom

Epom is an ad-serving and ad-managing platform proposing publishers, advertisers and networks advanced solutions for running and optimizing ad campaigns. Epom enables its users to run display, video and mobile ads all in one place and hence saves time, resources and brings more profit. Epom is a 100% web-based, massively scalable, real-time platform with free targeting, advanced campaigns management, graphical reporting, mobile solution, and more.

Recent news from the CeBIT 2012 front have firmly put ADmantX (www.admantx.com) on the map of online advertising technologies. ADmantX allows companies to reach their online advertising targets more effectively by providing precise, real-time information about the content of a web page as well as blogs and social networks. Using semantic technology, ADmantX offers an increased visibility of web content and conveys the feelings they transmit to readers.

Luca Scagliarini, the company’s CEO, spoke to us about the current challenges in display advertising and about the ADmantX ad targeting solution works.

Otilia Otlacan: First of all, congratulations for the great news from CeBIT! ADmantX has received the European Seal of e-Excellence – what weighed the most in bringing you this award?
Luca Scagliarini: Thanks, we are proud that our solution for contextual advertising has been recognized. Our win confirms the importance of innovative technology products for advertising. The market has started to value deep content based targeting and I think that our semantic based web service offers the richest and most accurate data to drive effective online ad campaigns.

Otilia Otlacan:  What do you see as the biggest challenges in today’s display advertising?
Luca Scagliarini: Brands today are too often exposed to a less than optimal or even unsafe experience in being matched with online content. Comscore reports that $12.4 billion in online advertising is wasted each year when 31% of ads are never seen because consumers scroll past them, 4% of ads delivered to geography where the product is not available, and 72% of campaigns on sites are “not brand safe.” The risk is that brands will start thinking about whether the investment really provides a return.

Otilia Otlacan:  Where does ADmantX fit into the display advertising landscape, what are your strengths and where would you like to improve?
Luca Scagliarini: We focus on the content of the page without using any cookies or behavioral tracking. We analyze the content and return the richest set of data that forms the basis for accurate targeting. Our web service returns 4 channels of data including topics (based on an IAB compliant taxonomy), feelings, intentions, and entities (e.g. people, places and things). The granularity of our taxonomy together with our unique capability to identify the feelings and intentions expressed on a page are very valuable for brands. In addition, we offer the possibility to mix and merge these elements to create new matching algorithms (we call them “admants”) that are specifically designed for the brand who is running the campaign. For example, a new smartphone might want to target content related to feelings such as “modern” and “success”. ADmantX can return the content related to “success” independently whether the keyword is present or not because the semantic understanding of the content helps to really identify the mood of the page.
Today we work only on text but we are developing procedures to analyze all page elements including picture and video.

Otilia Otlacan: I’ve played a bit with the tool on ADmantX home page (www.admantx.com), that shows a real-time contextual analysis of URLs and found it eerily accurate. How do you do it, can you share with us some of what drives your semantic intelligence technology?
Luca Scagliarini: ADmantX leverages deep linguistic analysis and the vast knowledge embedded in its semantic network to analyze and arrive at the context. We perform the most accurate disambiguation of the meaning of words having more than one meaning (e.g. is jaguar an animal or car? Is Apple a fruit or a company?). The technology uses all the information in a sentence, paragraph or page to answer which of the alternatives is correct. What is interesting in the work is to recognize that words themselves do not contain context but the words around them determine or point to the context. As we like to say “You will know a word by the company it keeps”.

Otilia Otlacan: Could the ADmantX technology be used in conjunction with standard contextual advertising solutions, such as Google AdSense?
Luca Scagliarini: Yes, absolutely. The tags extracted by ADmantX can be passed to Google Adsense to increase accuracy and therefore CTR. We are now testing this feature with real publishers and the results are very encouraging. Soon we will be able to publish official metrics about it and I am sure that (publishers and Google will like them.)

Otilia Otlacan: What metrics does ADmantX use in determining the success of a campaign; do you think that the CTR is slowly but surely becoming obsolete?
Luca Scagliarini: I think that CTR will remain a metric that is valid for a certain set of campaigns. However, using CTR to measure a brand campaign is, in my opinion, wrong as it measures only one dimension of the impact of the campaign on the user.

Otilia Otlacan: Can you tell us what does your typical publisher look like? Are you open to the long tail or will you remain premium only?
Luca Scagliarini: We target all publishers. This is why we have invested in an open public interface (http://webservice.admantx.com) and from the interface publishers can easily sign up for the service.

Otilia Otlacan: Is there anything else that you would like to share with us?
Luca Scagliarini: I ask all the readers a favor; access www.admantx.com and start playing with the product and then please send us an email to let us know what you think.

Otilia Otlacan: We last spoke in August 2011, right after the launch of Navigator. What has happened for DoubleVerify since, any achievement that you are particularly proud of?

Since August of 2011, DoubleVerify has had several achievements. Since then, the World Economic Forum named DoubleVerify a 2012 Technology Pioneer — the award recognizes the work of young and innovative companies believed to significantly transform the way business and society operate. We are incredibly proud of the achievement as we continue to strive to bring greater accountability, brand safety and transparency to the online advertising industry. Additionally, we continued to expand in Europe — we opened a London office in 2011. Recently, we announced our partnership with AppNexus to enable ad buyers in the RTB world to use our data to proactively target brand-safe, compliant impressions. Considering the speed at which RTB is transacted every second of the day, our insight into ad impressions helps campaigns scale with maximum safety and accountability. In regards to our business vitality, we have more strategic partnerships and renewed contracts to announce, proving that we are the partner of choice to ensure brand safety, measurement and ROI in online advertising.

Otilia Otlacan: The ad verification space is getting tighter and tighter, with a number of big names competing vigorously. What is DoubleVerify’s position in this landscape?

DoubleVerify has remained a leader in verification and has become an industry standard. We work with all the major agencies to apply some level of verification on all major campaigns. Many advertisers rely on us for deeper reporting and measurement of online media and ad impressions. We verify over 60 billion ad impressions each month. Using this insight, we’ve been able to transition our offerings to deliver more than just verification and reporting. We are harnessing the insight into action, powering the targeting of impressions based on our data. We know what advertisers want to target and we know what impressions have performed the best – and we are linking the two sides closer together. This is an expansion into services and technology that help target and measure brand-safe impressions in the world of RTB and programmatic buying.

IAB’s news regarding guidelines for the conduct of ad verification reaffirms the need for verification and better measurement tools and methods in the industry. They’ve recognized that measurement technology has not matched the rate of innovation in ad buying. DoubleVerify has been the pioneer that is bringing measurement up to speed in the real-time advertising world and we are continuing to see enormous growth among advertisers, ad networks, platforms and publishers using our technology.

Otilia Otlacan: With buyers spending ad budgets over an increasing number of web properties, how can a platform like DoubleVerify assist on prevention on top of verification and auditing?

We have always offered a preventative ad blocking solution that keeps brands from appearing with unsavory, or non-compliant content. Keep in mind that content can be perfectly brand-safe or appropriate for a wide audience, but it may not comply with a brand’s requirements – such as international audiences, below-the-fold placement, placement next to competitors, etc. Additionally, our agreement with AppNexus shows we are turning insights into proactive solutions. Initially working with CPX Interactive and Dedicated Media on their AppNexus buys, we can help find the inventory they want, which results in less discrepancies and make-goods after the buy. The partnership with AppNexus is our first of several planned RTB environment integrations.

Otilia Otlacan: What type of content is most difficult to work with? Any news on the video formats getting any friendlier?

When DoubleVerify launched page-level classification to categorize content, we found that user generated content and news content changed very frequently. Considering the scale of these sites, advertisers need to have the system in place to adjust according to how these sites change content.

If you consider the Concordia cruise ship story – it’s general news that people are reading about — commentaries and reports were continually created. If you were a cruise company or a travel company, you may not want your brand to appear next to these stories. However, if you have a major campaign running with a lot of spend with many different ad networks and publishers, you need to be able to keep the campaign going while precisely identifying the content and pages you don’t want to be on. Considering the scale of the buy, only technology can handle the problem proactively. Our crawlers — used in our technology — are always on and are able to prioritize pages that change the most. With these advanced crawlers, we are able to verify 60 billion ad impressions a month.

DoubleVerify has a video solution that is similar to tracking ad impressions with our crawlers. We are able to locate where the video ad is playing, the content it is next to, etc. It will become even more useful as advertisers invest more with video this year — according to an eMarketer study, online video ad spend is expected to increase by 40% in 2012. Adoption of video ad impressions is growing, and is similar to tracking and verifying display impressions, as more advertisers, networks and platforms use this solution the more effective it becomes.

Otilia Otlacan: The DoubleVerify Trust Index for the second half of 2011 is expected later this quarter if I’m not mistaken. Can you give us a little preview; shall we expect significant movements from the previous issue?

In the Trust Index for the second half of 2011, which we will soon release, we have been closely monitoring the benefits of verification and how this technology contributes to a more trustworthy environment in the online advertising space. By comparing the difference between when campaigns use verification, when they stop verification, and what happens after, our data shows that non-compliance reemerges once verification is removed. This underscores the importance of verifying every impression throughout a campaign to make sure it is as effective as possible.

Otilia Otlacan: What are you working on at the moment?

We are focused on our real-time bidding environment solutions. With this integration, our clients have the ability to utilize our pre-bid decisioning solution. Additionally, we are developing a solution that will evaluate and tie many different measurement metrics to provide practical and actionable guidance for the ad buyer and seller.

DoubleVerify is also focused on continuing our international growth. We are growing the customer base in London and we want to bring verification standards and improved measurement in the region.

About Oren Netzer, Co-Founder and CEO of DoubleVerify

Oren Netzer founded DoubleVerify in 2008 determined to bring needed accountability and transparency to online advertising, believing revenue and profit would flow throughout the system once all players could be assured of its integrity.

A 10-year veteran at the executive level with leading online advertising technology firms, Oren was General Manager and Chief Operating Officer for CheckM8, an online ad serving and rich media technology provider, overseeing product development, operations and customer support, as well as managing its Israeli product development offices.

Oren graduated from the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel with a degree in computer science and studied electrical engineering at The Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

Pinterest is quickly establishing itself as a must-go destination for online marketers looking for a fresh approach to reaching the desired audiences. It has been around for two years but it is the very recent growth spur that caught the attention of users and marketers alike. With millions of consumers signing up, brands are scrambling to develop strategies for marketing on Pinterest and to efficiently engage with those who are pinning their interests.

Social media agency Banyan Branch (www.banyanbranch.com) is developing highly successful campaigns on Pinterest and we spoke with Blake Cahill, President of Banyan Branch, about the specifics of the platform and how brands can best utilize it.

Otilia Otlacan: We have recently noticed a number of high-profile campaigns developed by Banyan Branch on Pinterest. What made you consider adding a relatively new platform into the social media mix for your clients?

Blake Cahill: Pinterest demonstrates some of the strongest user engagement, retention, and virality metrics we’ve seen in an online business for sometime. It’s core demographic and the potential reach of its users lends itself to many of our fashion, home and beauty clients.

Otilia Otlacan: Was it difficult to get your clients excited about Pinterest? Why so?

Blake Cahill: No, not really as our clients are used to Banyan leading the way to bring them appropriately into new platforms and communities that can support their marketing or sales goals. We are always testing and executing programs, platforms and contests that can extend the reach and results of our clients.

Otilia Otlacan: Will budgets shift from other, already established social media platforms to Pinterest, or will Pinterest be able to entice brands to spend more on social media campaigns overall?

Blake Cahill: It’s early days, but for some clients Pinterest is revealing more user engagement and sharing with some demographics than investments on other platforms. So, we will shift time and resources from one to another but we are tying Pinerest and contests on Facebook together fairly closely as you can see in my example below for Gilt Home.

Otilia Otlacan: What makes a successful Pinterest campaign? Could you also share the pitfalls, if any?

Blake Cahill: Success varies depending on clients goals such as awareness verses sales, but reaching new people for you overall community efforts is a great measure of success. Additionally, many of the early adopters are very influential and attaching your brand to these folks can create a strong long tail of validation for the brand and for getting increased website traffic. From, a pitfall POV we see three areas: finding the right visual brand voice, balancing the level of investment, and naturally balancing self-promotion verses authenticity.

Otilia Otlacan: Targeting on Pinterest may not appear to a marketer as straightforward as targeting on Facebook or Twitter. How would one go about making sure that a brand’s message reaches the right audience?

Blake Cahill: Curation is key, establishing that visual brand voice and interacting with other Pinterest community members that align with your vertical/business is a key to success. No one wants to see a PIN of a dog or a paper clip from Office Depot on the Bergdorf Goodman Manolo Blahnik shoe page, keep it relevant.

Otilia Otlacan: Can you comment on the level of earned media through Pinterest versus Facebook? How would you measure it?

Blake Cahill: Earned media in general comes from having a very curated, compelling PIN board, and interesting campaigns or tie-ins to other branded platforms or properties. Again, at present we measure success in term of site traffic and if the clients is an e-commerce players we can track further to the shopping cart when web analytics tags can be embedded.

Otilia Otlacan: Tell us about attribution for to Pinterest campaigns; do you see the deep integration of Pinterest into Facebook and other platforms as a hindrance to accurate attribution?

Blake Cahill: I’d argue that there really isn’t deep integration and I don’t think it would be a hindrance. We leverage Facebook to host information on the campaign or content that we are running.

Otilia Otlacan: Is there any exciting campaign that you run on Pinterest at the moment and would like to share it with us?

Blake Cahill: We are presenting running a campaign for Gilt Home and Kids on Pinterest that attracts influencers to our weekly Facebook Q&A’s with notable design experts. So far the results are pulling in new and unique users that we were unable to connect with on other platforms.

http://pinterest.com/pin/241083386272184904/

Additionally, the following PIN demonstrates a promotion of a visual Facebook contest for Gilt:

http://pinterest.com/pin/241083386272183992/

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

Swoop has recently announced the launch of its service, which seamlessly integrates relevant information about products and services – at times in the form of sponsored content or advertising – into web content. We reached out to CEO Ron Elwell for more insights into what seems to be one of the most user-friendly and non-intrusive advertising solutions currently available.

Otilia Otlacan: Congratulations for Swoop launching its first vertical – food! Could you give us some insights into what made you work on a deep content integration solution for advertisements and information?

Ron Elwell: Over the past decade publishers and advertisers have seen declining engagement with display advertising. Engagement rates with display ads are now below 0.09% and less than 16% of users ever click on an ad. This has led to declining revenue for publishers, declining engagement for brands and consumers are faced with more disruptive and intrusive advertising. We believe that by focusing on enhancing the consumer’s experience, through providing information relevant to the content he or she is engaged with, we can address all those issues.

Otilia Otlacan: Can you explain a little how Swoop works and what differentiates it from traditional contextual advertising platforms such as Google AdSense?

Ron Elwell: Swoop is differentiated from these traditional contextual platforms in three ways. First, traditional contextual ad platforms gain an understanding of the content on the page. They are answering the question: “What is this page about?” So in the case of food they may know the page is about a Chicken Recipe. Second, they look at the ads they are paid to display and find the one that best matches “Chicken Recipe”. Finally, they put those ads into the standard ad units that users have learned to ignore. Now compare that to Swoop. First, while we understand the context on the page, we are seeking to discover moments of intent and interest at a much more elemental level. So rather than “Chicken Recipe” we may know that the chicken is on sale at your favorite market, that a coupon is available for the canned tomatoes and that greek yogurt is a healthy substitute for sour cream. Next, as we understand each of these things, we surface the best information we can find to enhance the user’s experience. Most of this content is not ads, it is simply useful information that we have discovered and surfaced for the consumer, and we optimize around the best possible user experience, rather than the most possible revenue. Finally, we inject our content into the content stream so that the information and offers flow in context with the user experience, rather then a traditional ad unit.

Otilia Otlacan: What pricing models and metrics should an advertiser expect to see in Swoop?

We operate on a pay for engagement model. We invite the user to engage with the brand and give them a “hint” of what it is we want to tell them. If the consumer accepts the invitation and engages with it, it is at that point that the advertiser pays. We work with the advertisers on engagement rates, time spent, and actions completed, things like video plays, e-mail captures, social media interaction and whatever best fits that particular interaction.

Otilia Otlacan: What ads are very well integrated into the web content, it is thought that they’d attract a higher amount of invalid clicks and engagements. What is your experience around this issue, and do advertisers raise such concerns?

Ron Elwell: We agree that in context ads that expand on rollover result in a significant number of unintended engagements, and even worse, detract from the overall user experience. Even if the user were interested he or she would have no way of knowing what the ad is going to be. In our model we provide the user with a “hint”, an icon or a brief description of the content we have for them, such as a healthy heart icon or “save locally”. In this way the consumer can make the educated decision of whether or not to engage. If they choose to engage, the marketer knows they have real engagement from a consumer who has accepted an invitation to learn more.

Otilia Otlacan: Tell us about your typical publisher, who would that be?

Ron Elwell: Our first vertical is food, so currently any site with a recipe section would immediately benefit. We have made the implementation so easy that a publisher can go to www.swoop.com/localoffers/ and sign up on our self- service portal. It takes less then a minute!

Otilia Otlacan: What’s next for Swoop?

Ron Elwell: We’ll continue to enhance our food offering, rolling out e-commerce offers and coupons in the short term, with more enhancements to follow. We will also begin to expand to other verticals where we believe we can bring information to consumers, in a way that improves their browsing experience.

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

Ron Elwell: We hope your readers will agree with us that advertising doesn’t have to be interruptive and invasive; that by working together with marketers and publishers, and by focusing on the overall user experience, we can bring engagement to marketers, content, better user experience and new revenue streams to publishers, and the serendipitous discovery of useful and timely content for consumers. Please visit us at www.swoop.com, or on Facebook and Twitter at swoop123.

About Swoop

Swoop is a service that seamlessly integrates relevant information about products and services – at times in the form of sponsored content or advertising – into the content that consumers are engaged with online.  Swoop is able to discover a consumer’s intent and interest based on a deep understanding of the content they are engaged with, providing advertisers with the opportunity to have deep and meaningful engagement with consumers.  Founded by a team with deep experience in web publishing, advertising technology and consumer marketing, Swoop is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Swoop is venture backed by US Venture Partners, Valhalla Partners, and General Catalyst.  For more information, please visit www.swoop.com. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Sharethrough has recently announced the hiring of Hanz Kurdi as senior director of publisher strategy and operations. Hanz will play an integral part in Sharethrough’s push this year to develop more native advertising inventory on media sites: placements that look and feel like the site’s actual content.

Otilia Otlacan: Congratulations for your new role at Sharethrough! Can you tell us what your priorities will be over the following months?

Hanz Kurdi: Thanks! I am really excited to be at Sharethrough. In the next few months our efforts are to grow our partner network via our native experience. We have had a tremendous response from large publishers as they continue to see the value of Sharethrough’s native monetization platform. We have numerous channel partnerships in the pipeline that will extend our reach and offer really unique video experiences for brands.

Otilia Otlacan: I understand that this year Sharethrough will focus on what is known as “native advertising inventory”. Would you mind explaining the basics beyond this concept and tell us why there is a need for this type of inventory?

Hanz Kurdi: The difficulty of advertising is trying to find new ways to engage users beyond the constant barrage of banner ads and interruptive pre-rolls. In many ways, consumers have been desensitized to the impact of such ad experiences. This is why Sharethrough has been successful in its approach. Advertisers can reach an engaged audience through our platform because it is comprised of native video placements. From the start, we’ve looked to create a platform that offered video placements that fit naturally with publisher’s content and are folded within the fabric of the site. This bodes well for the user experience and how the publisher content is consumed. The other side of this equation is that we are delivering the highest quality, engaging brand video content. We think that we can create a reality where ‘every day is like the Super Bowl’ — in the sense that brands create genuinely entertaining content, and people actively choose to watch and enjoy ads.

Otilia Otlacan: I imagine quite a few publishers will raise what may very well be a legitimate question: if the ads blend very well into the content, will this not lead to a negative user experience? Will the ads not run the risk of causing unintentional user engagement?

Hanz Kurdi: On the contrary, we think that brand content running through native placements enhances the overall experience of a site for consumers. We’ve run studies on the same videos placed in standard auto-play and interruptive placements vs user-initiated, native experiences and consistently found that brand metrics were lifted higher by the latter. All of our placements are always called out as being sponsored, so there is no concern about consumers being confused, but we make the effort to work with publishers to find sponsored placements that make sense within their individual site.

Otilia Otlacan: We see more and more signs that the industry tries to break away from the traditional metrics in measuring the success of an online ad campaign, particularly the click-through rate. What metrics and pricing models do you see as most relevant for campaigns running on native advertising inventory?

Hanz Kurdi: We are increasingly seeing the shift to CPV pricing, though we are always open to publisher needs. We have been very successful with our campaigns that our publisher partners fully understand the CPV pricing model very well and in fact prefer this method. There is a great value in the social aspect of what we do and how viral and engaging the content has been. Social engagement rates (SER) on our video placements have always been of paramount importance to advertisers, as it directly correlates to earned media. There is tremendous value for the advertisers based on post engagement and publishers enjoy the quality of content their users get to experience.

Otilia Otlacan: In your opinion, which one between the ad creative design and the ad placement on the page is more important in driving engagement?

Hanz Kurdi: I think this is equal parts creative and placement. You need great content in the right place to drive engagement. A step up would be what platform can deliver this seamlessly and that is why Sharethrough has been very successful.

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

Hanz Kurdi: A successful company is one that creates value and delivers on that value aggressively. One point that is hardly mentioned is what happens behind the scenes. I feel compelled to tell you how amazing the company culture has been in hiring a great team dedicated to delivering this value to our partners.

About Sharethrough

Sharethrough is the first advertising technology platform built exclusively for native advertising and brand video content. Fortune 1000 brands and their agencies work with Sharethrough to guarantee audiences and maximize social engagement for their original video content and social web publishers partner with Sharethrough to create native, non-interruptive brand video placements. Sharethrough is used by many of the world’s leading brands, including Sony, Microsoft, General Motors, Victoria’s Secret, Nestle and LEGO, as well as top agencies such as Pereira & O’Dell, Universal McCann, Evolution Bureau and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. Founded in 2008, Sharethrough is a privately held company based in San Francisco, Calif. For more information about Sharethrough, please visit www.sharethrough.com.

Recent news around the MADE Fashion Week app developed by Sonic Notify brought to our attention a very creative way to employ what is known as inaudible frequency technology. We have spoken with Jonathan Glanz, CEO of Sonic Notify (www.sonicnotify.com) about how this technology can be used by marketers who wish to target specific audiences via mobile devices.

Otilia Otlacan: Fashion and technology – who would’ve thought these two can blend so well in a smartphone / tablet app? Could you share with us the story behind the MADE Fashion Week app, what brought it to life?

Jonathan Glanz: Sonic Notify was just starting out a few months ago when we “activated” our first event, the Smartwater Smartlounge at the CMJ 2011 Music festival. It was a great starting point in which we delivered content about the live shows and DJ sessions.

During CMJ, one of our partners was MADE, which provided a video of the event. We met Mazdack Rassi, founder of Milk Studios, who immediately latched on to what we were doing and saw its potential. He convinced us that MADE Fashion Week would be a great use case; with tens of thousands of attendees and Livestream of the runway shows. But even more than numbers, Rassi convinced us that the technology was desperately needed at the event – the ability to take notes, email buyers, snap pictures, and keep track of looks had grown impossible for Fashion Week attendees to manage.

Otilia Otlacan: What was the most challenging step in developing MADE Fashion Week app?

Jonathan Glanz: The most challenging aspect was making sure we properly isolated the different rooms so that attendees at the show could move from presentation to presentation and see only what was happening immediately in front of them.

Otilia Otlacan: Apps like this and the technologies that power them are still largely unknown to the public. Can you give us an intro to what the inaudible frequency technology is and what are its current applications?

Jonathan Glanz: The technology is the sending of data through sound in a range that humans cannot hear. So in effect, what this allows for is messaging based on presence, whether in front of a TV, a store shelf or in a stadium. It is hyper-location awareness that has never before been capable with any technology. IN other words, your television can now communicate with your smartphone.

The applications are almost unlimited. Any place or device with a speaker can communicate data. We have isolated three primary applications, which are the Live space (events, concerts, conventions), Broadcast space (TV, Internet streaming, radio), and the Goods space (In-store marketing, direct-to-consumer product marketing). In each of the verticals, we aim to give agencies, broadcast networks, CPG brands or whomever the ability to send relevant content to peoples’ smartphones.

Otilia Otlacan: Would it be technically possible to apply targeting criteria to audiences using apps like MFW, or will a marketer’s message target the whole audience in the covered area?

Jonathan Glanz: It is definitely possible. The interesting thing about the way we have built the SDK is that the client application can apply another level of selection on top of the preliminary Sonic Notify trigger. So take for instance, a Sonic Notify beacon which was placed on a store shelf. If the client app could differentiate the user based on personal information, then different ads could be shown to different consumers. So that the NASCAR-loving dad gets a video by Dale Earnhardt Jr. while the soccer mom gets a different video by Ellen DeGeneres.

Otilia Otlacan: What’s on the roadmap for Sonic Notify, any plans that you can tell us about?

Jonathan Glanz: We are actively signing our first big deals in each of the three verticals I previously mentioned. We are also forming strategic partnerships with the application companies, marketers, and ad networks that are the heavy hitters in each of those three verticals.

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

Jonathan Glanz: Absolutely. More than anything else, this isn’t a tool for advertisers to SPAM people; rather it’s a tool that enables people to receive content that is directly targeted at a combination of who they are and what they are doing right this moment. For example, people at the MADE Fashion Week runway shows will receive up-to-the second pictures from the runway, while shoppers at Babies R’Us could be receiving diaper-based content – all on their smartphones.

About Jonathan Glanz
Jonathan Glanz, the Managing Partner, found the idea of Sonic Notify while building the multi-million dollar digital agency, Densebrain, servicing over 19 P&G brands. In a past life, Jon built set top boxes for Charter Communications, medical devices with Pfizer, and surf forecast systems for Swell.

About Sonic Notify
Sonic Notify enables consumer brands, event venues and broadcasters to reach individuals in real-time with highly-targeted content based on a user’s location and interests. Sonic Notify’s first-of-its-kind technology is integrated into a company’s existing mobile app, allowing the brand send multimedia content, like a song, coupon or advertisement, to any mobile device, or likewise, trigger an action on any mobile device. Launched in 2011, Sonic Notify’s technology uses advanced decoding algorithms and readily available, low-cost hardware to transmit imperceptible audio signals, opening up an array of new possibilities for brands, retailers, artists, broadcasters and large-scale event organizers to connect with their target audience using presence-based content. Sonic Notify is based in New York City, NY and was borne from the successful technology development firm Densebrain, as a collaboration between engineer Alex Morgan Bell and Densebrain founder Jonathan Glanz. For more information, visit www.sonicnotify.com.

The game may be over but the talk about the Super Bowl 2012 ads goes on. Social video ad company Sharethrough (www.sharethrough.com) has just released some interesting findings: the extended cuts and teaser videos for the Super Bowl actually generated nearly five times as many views as the actual ads themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bizo (www.bizo.com) has just announced a major new executive hire – Frannie Danzinger as Director of Market Development – and a fantastic growth of over 130%  in 2011. We have spoken to Russell Glass, Bizo’s CEO, about business audience targeting and how it supports Bizo’s recent growth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Mitchell Reichgut

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

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

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

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

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

Following YuMe’s recent launch of interactive ads for engagement across online, connected TV and mobile platforms, we have talked to Scot McLernon, YuMe’s Chief Revenue Officer, who explains further how brands can achieve superior audience engagement through video ads.

Otilia Otlacan: YuMe has just launched three ad units, all focused on increasing the brand engagement of video ads. Can you comment on what have been the drivers behind this launch, what has made you look into new ad formats?
Scot McLernon: This particular launch was primarily driven by findings from our brand advertiser clients and our Innovation Lab. Many YuMe advertisers want to run interactive ads on the YuMe Connected Audience Network as opposed to plain pre-rolls that lack opportunities for immediate, on-the-fly engagement. As a result, we now offer interactivity to all advertisers, particularly those seeking high brand engagement metrics.

Video ad innovation is not new to YuMe. This launch simply underscores our commitment to designing high-impact video ad experiences. We will continue to innovate and launch new ad units through our new ad framework and powerful video player technology. Moreover, we will continue to build and serve ad executions that reach audiences wherever they are watching video: at work, at home, and everywhere in between.

Otilia Otlacan: I have taken a look at the new YuMe Ads gallery and noticed there is quite a variety of social interaction that can be added to a previously standard video ad. Could you tell me a bit more on how the integration with various social media platforms works and whether there are any requirements for the publishers carrying these ads?
Scot McLernon: YuMe Ads allow for multiple hooks into social media integration such as driving brand followers and sharing brand videos on popular destinations like Facebook and Twitter. With that in mind, our brand advertisers utilize social interactions in three ways to build upon their social media presence and create a viral impact:
1.    Increasing fan base via follows or likes for opportunities to re-market or upsell.
2.    Sharing video ads or other video content, such as product demos and client testimonials to allow for further user engagement.
3.    Driving traffic to apps on social networks to drive brand consideration, improve recall, and [eventually] increase purchase intent.

YuMe publishers are not required to take further action in order to serve these ads as they are already equipped with this functionality. Also, new YuMe platform publishers and app developers can begin to serve socially rich, interactive video ads quickly and easily.

Otilia Otlacan: It is my understanding that these new interactive video ad formats can also be delivered on TV. What types of interaction and what engagement metrics are available in this case?
Scot McLernon: YuMe can report all interactions with our screen-agnostic video ad units. However, each connected TV environment into which we serve video ads varies in the level of interactivity support for video ads. Since some devices may not accept interactivity, Yume Ads can easily adopt to each manufacturer’s video ad environment. Whatever the case may be, YuMe tracks and reports on essential video ad metrics.

Otilia Otlacan: Of all new features offered by YuMe’s three new ad formats, which one is the most employed by advertisers so far?
Scot McLernon: While the Ready-Mades have proven to be quite popular among advertisers on cross-screen, integrated campaigns, the new YuMe Pre-Roll is the hottest new ad format, both on web-only and mobile/tablet video campaigns.

Otilia Otlacan: Earlier this summer, YuMe has strengthened its presence in Europe . Considering the differences in online privacy regulations between the EU and the US, do you have a different approach in working with your EU-based advertisers, as far as socially-enabled ads go?
Scot McLernon: YuMe complies with regional targeting and re-targeting regulations and does not map social media data to cookies. YuMe’s socially-enabled ads drive highly engaged users to brands’ various social campaigns to encourage interactions with advertisers’ landing pages, such as a Facebook fan page or official Twitter account. That is exactly what our brand advertisers want: to drive engagement within their already established social media channels.

Otilia Otlacan: Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers?
Scot McLernon: Brand marketers are increasingly looking to reach audiences via video ads across all screens and to obtain deeper insights into how viewers engage on those different delivery mediums. YuMe’s socially rich, interactive ad units help brand advertisers deliver a consistent video ad experience across any screen with the same interactive features, while sharing detailed analytics to provide insight into campaign performance on each platform. Moreover, allowing for sharing of video ads yields a greater reach of brands’ marketing messages, as impressions driven by a friend, colleague, and/or community recommendations on social networks can help a brand’s video ad campaign go viral.

About Scot McLernon, Chief Revenue Officer – YuMe

Scot brings over 15 years of interactive marketing experience to the YuMe team. He has built and led three successful web sales teams, including at CBS Marketwatch and CBS Interactive. Most recently, McLernon was President of Upstream Group, Inc. where he developed Habitat–the industry’s only combined training and networking event for sellers. McLernon was on the Board of Directors for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) for five years and co–founded the Bay Area Interactive Group (BIG) in 2004, which educates and helps network the Bay Area’s interactive marketing community.

Recognizing his accomplishments as an innovator and industry pioneer, McLernon received the ad:tech Industry Achievement Award in 2007.

Shiny Ads (www.shinyads.com) has just announced the launch of their audience targeting platform; Roy Pereira has kindly agreed to give us more insights into this breakthrough product that helps publishers make the most of of their ad inventory.

Otilia Otlacan: First of all, congratulations on the launch of the Shiny Ads Audience Targeting platform! What can you tell us about the drivers behind this launch, what has made you look into a self-serve audience targeting solution in addition to your existing display platform?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mobile advertising scene is rapidly changing and growing. Mojiva (www.mojivainc.com), one of the main players, has recently closed a $25 million Series C round of funding and is strenghtening its executive team. Dave Gwozdz, Mojiva’s CEO, talked to us about recent developments in mobile advertising, as well as some of its pain points.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two weeks ago, Casale Media launched casaleX, a premium ad exchange that grants select DSPs and agency trading desks exclusive access to brand-safe inventory. Following the launch, we have spoken to Andrew Casale, VP of Strategy at Casale Media, about how the ad exchange environment is re-shaping these days.

Otilia Otlacan: Congratulations for the launch of casaleX – could you share with us what were the main drivers behind this initiative?
Andrew Casale: Over the past eight years, Casale Media has focused its efforts on helping publishers maximize the yield coming from their indirect sales channel. When we started our efforts into this field over a year ago, real-time bidding represented exactly what publishers desired: a new demand channel to access their supply. But at the same time it came with a series of challenges that publishers were naturally very concerned about: sales channel conflict, data protection, ad quality, auction based buying driving prices down not up, etc. Here at Casale, we spent the time to look at each area of concern, speaking to publishers who were actively experimenting with the model and encountering these challenges, and we built a product that spoke to each concern. Our solution enables publishers to safely and seamlessly leverage this new demand channel without worry. Each DSP and trading desk is vetted before being allowed into our casaleX marketplace, and the draw for buy side is access to premium publishers and impressions they otherwise wouldn’t find on other exchanges. Our publishers, in turn, get access to quality brands and are given full control over the entire process. It’s a win-win for both stakeholders.

Otilia Otlacan: We witness a resurgence of display advertising and ad exchanges seem to be leading the way. How does a premium exchange fit into the rapidly re-shaping marketplace; what sets casaleX apart from its competitors?
Andrew Casale: No matter how the marketplace is re-shaping, advertisers and agencies will continue to seek the very best brand safe environments on the web, and no matter how the mechanism of buying changes, the end result is still the same, agencies want to place their client’s brands in front of the correct target audience, at the correct time, in an environment that is appropriate to the brand’s image. Because casaleX is a premium exchange of our carefully selected publisher partners, it sources the very best in possible online ad placements. This selection process drives ad spend where advertisers are getting the best audiences without compromising the brand value. A lot of what has fueled the growth of ad exchanges and RTB has been audience and data driven buying, and while this is an exciting and very valuable mechanism environment, context and quality have lagged to date. These three factors make casaleX stand out from other similar value propositions. At Casale we are looking to represent quality impressions, not just a quantity of impressions for which many exchange-based sources of supply are traditionally known.

Otilia Otlacan: News keeps coming through indicating there may be a trend in shifting agencies away from ad networks and onto exchanges, primarily for reasons of transparency and control. Do you think we may get to see the beginning of the end for ad networks?
Andrew Casale: The shift is more about buying value than anything else. The ad network category is incredibly crowded and it has just become far too difficult to sort through the ad networks that provide real value and those that don’t. Whether advertisers shift dollars from networks to exchanges to SSPs doesn’t really matter. Advertisers just need a solution that will generate the best value. We can’t predict the possible end of ad networks however, as long as the players in this market deliver the transparency and control that advertisers and publishers expect, they will be around a long time. The ad networks that can’t develop the technology to deliver on these needs are in the ones nearing their end.

Otilia Otlacan: Casale Media has recently published a comprehensive and long-awaited study correlating ad placement and ad performance. What prompted you to look deeper into this correlation, and how are these findings incorporated into casaleX?
Andrew Casale: The measurement of ad impressions needs work— for example no matter their placement, all impressions are generally given the same weight as each other. For instance, ad impressions that are above the fold are more than 7x more effective than ads that are below the fold, yet that is not clear to advertisers on ROI reports.

The report is designed to inform the advertising community and quantify the effect of various types of impressions on websites. From feedback we’ve heard from media and partners, it’s helped to uncover the need for a new measurement process much like the one outlined by the IAB to measure not just reach, but quality and “viewable” impressions. At Casale we’re all about quality and if we can in some small way help encourage more attention and oversight, the industry stands to benefit, and we stand to rise with it.

With casaleX and our media marketplace, ad placement and frequency are part of the measurement model we advise advertisers to consider when they look at how effective their campaigns are.

Otilia Otlacan: Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers?
Andrew Casale: Casale Media is here to help and is committed to innovation and the future of our industry. Traditionally labeled an ad network, there is sometimes a generalized assumption that both publishers and agencies tend to have about the stance Casale holds on topics like real time bidding, programmatic buying, trading desks and demand side platforms. While this may be true of many of the players in the category, we want the community to know that this is not true of our stance. Since we started the company we’ve always been about creating new technologies that generate real value. As we continue tomove ahead and grow we will remain just as committed to the future trends that come our way as we have those that now rest behind us. Since we flipped the switch on casaleX we have heard from publishers and advertisers on how much success they’ve been having with campaigns. Advertisers love the quality and publishers love the very granular controls. We are always looking to add more partners for casaleX, and we encourage any conversations we can have with potential partners.

About Andrew Casale
Andrew Casale has been with Casale Media as Vice President of Strategy since the company’s founding ten years ago. Son of the founder and CEO, Joe Casale, Andrew is responsible for overseeing the deployment and execution of Casale Media’s new products, as well as managing the needs of its thriving marketplace across the supply, demand and technology business units within the firm. Most recently, Andrew’s leadership has played a key role in developing and establishing Casale’s premium RTB exchange, casaleX.

Two days ago, adBrite announced the launch of their Real-Time Pricing™ solution that maximizes ad revenue for premium publishers by automatically optimizing the floor price for every page view on their properties. We spoke with Iggy Fanlo, adBrite’s President & CEO, about what this launch represents and how RTP can serve both publishers and advertisers.

Otilia Otlacan: Congratulations on the recent launch of adBrite’s Real-Time Pricing solution! Could you tell us what prompted you to look into offering RTP to adBrite’s premium publishers?

Iggy Fanlo: It was like a light bulb going off in our product team. They knew the great things we were doing for our advertisers and when we took a hard look at the ecosystem, there weren’t any companies applying that same data, intelligence and algorithms for the publishers. We felt that the dynamic aspect of our technology, when applied for publishers, could make it a win-win for the industry where our publishers will be on equal footing with advertisers.

Otilia Otlacan: You said that the digital media ecosystem is weighted against the sell-side. Would you mind explaining why that happens, would there be reasons beyond the simplistic explanation of offer – demand equilibrium?

Iggy Fanlo: In many ways, the customer is always right, and because the buyers control the spend, the ecosystem will naturally favor them. However, we all know that if we give more advantages to the seller, they will be more willing to provide the highest quality of inventory.

Here is an analogy to consider. If all the research and intelligence in the financial markets were only used by buyers and not by sellers, that wouldn’t make any sense and would leave the buy side with an unfair advantage.

adBrite aims to level the playing field. We want to give all the tools and capabilities that currently exist for buyers to sellers.

Otilia Otlacan: I understand that the adBrite RTP solution will be available for wide adoption later this year. Do you expect smaller publishers to see results comparable those of the largest publishers, or are they facing a different set of challenges in pricing their inventory?

Iggy Fanlo: The publishers with the best audiences should benefit the most regardless of size. Just like RTB, RTP will properly value the audience that any size publisher brings to the adBrite exchange.

Otilia Otlacan: There are numerous factors influencing ad inventory pricing. In your experience, what are the most important ones, and do you think they’re reflected well enough in today’s ad exchanges?

Iggy Fanlo: There are intuitive factors such as page depth (first impressions are valuable), position on the page and basic audience data such as demographics. These are already reflected in exchanges. We think it’s technology like real-time pricing that can give publishers the boost they need and help them differentiate exchanges from one another.

Otilia Otlacan: Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers? What will adBrite be focusing on next?

Iggy Fanlo: RTP is a big breakthrough. Like RTB, this will play out over the next couple of years and you’ll see us applying it to all formats — video, mobile, etc. We’re hopeful that it will demonstrate to publishers that digital media can deliver effective monetization that supports their business.

Iggy Fanlo – President & CEO, adBrite (www.adbrite.com)
Iggy Fanlo joined adBrite in May 2006 as its CEO. Prior to joining adBrite, Iggy was President and Chief Revenue Officer at Shopping.com. His tenure (1999-2006) ran from the pre-revenue days to over $200 million a year. The company completed an IPO in October 2004 and was acquired by eBay for over $650 million in August 2005.  Prior to his technology career, Iggy spent 15 years on Wall Street with Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan. As a Managing Director at both firms, Iggy held various positions, ending as the head of all US Dollar Securitized Debt Trading and Capital Markets. During his final fiscal year, Iggy’s department generated over $300 million in gross profits. Iggy received a degree in Chemical Engineering in 1983 from Princeton University.

It’s been nearly half a year since the winners of the IAB Rising Star competition have been announced, and Pictela’s pushdown ad format was one of them. It looks like the format is a real success and not just an ephemeral wonder, which is why we wanted to find out some more insights right from the source. Below is a Q&A with Greg Rogers (Co-founder and CEO of Pictela), discussing the IAB pushdown format and how it fits into the larger picture.

Otilia Otlacan: First of all, congratulations for Pictela’s pushdown ad becoming one of IAB’s rising star formats earlier this year. Could you walk us through the specifics of this ad format and tell us why would advertisers and publishers adopt it?

Greg Rogers: Thank you. The IAB Pushdown is a 970×90 ad unit positioned at the top of the page.  When a consumer rolls over it, the creative expands. The ad is made up of various applications, many of which offer social media sharing capabilities. Publishers and advertisers may appreciate this ad unit because it’s less intrusive than standard rich media, allows the same brand building capabilities as the IAB Portrait with the various applications, and places great brand content next to great publisher content.

Otilia Otlacan: We witness a phenomenon of display advertising getting hot and trendy again. Do you think it’s the resurgence of display advertising driving the creation of new ad formats, or the other way around?

Greg Rogers: I do think the creation of new ad formats is helping to cause a resurgence in display advertising. New formats like the 300×1050 IAB Portrait, which is a larger canvas for advertisers (along with the other IAB Rising Stars), is setting the stage for a revitalization of display.  The innovation in formats, unit functionality and the impact on the consumer experience, is changing online advertising.

Otilia Otlacan: I understand that one of IAB’s main criteria is evaluating new ad formats was branding power, namely how much brand creativity is supported by the ad format. How about direct response and the new display advertising, is it utopic to think they may go hand in hand?

Greg Rogers: Online has long been seen as the answer to direct response for advertising, but this has been somewhat limiting to the growth of digital advertising. Online advertising needs to be seen as a medium for storytelling and brand building as well.  It’s not utopic to believe they may go hand in hand because it is very possible to keep brand integrity – even build a brand – and drive a response. For example, AOL’s research with IPG Media Labs proves the IAB Portrait ad can impact the entire purchase funnel by attracting attention 35% faster than competing units, resulting in 7x more interaction than standard banner ads, and a 263% increase in purchase intent.

Otilia Otlacan: For the techies among our readers, can you tell us how do complex ads like the Pictela pushdown unit work with traditional ad servers? Are there any challenges in implementing these ads on the publisher side?

Greg Rogers: Pictela ads have to be served through our platform because of the large amounts of brand content and assets flowing through them.  We can easily implement 3rd party impression and click trackers to integrate with client reporting systems as needed.

Otilia Otlacan: Pictela is young, clearly innovative, and has AOL’s backup. What are your plans for the future, anything exciting on the horizon that you can share with us?

Greg Rogers: Right now we support 10 standard applications (video gallery, photo gallery, product showcase, etc) within our ad units that serve and display rich branded content to the consumer.  We are constantly thinking about and planning for the next 10 applications specific to vertical industries – encouraging additional brand dollars to flow online.

About Greg Rogers, Co-founder and CEO Pictela
Greg drives strategy for Pictela (www.pictela.com). His goal is to revolutionize display advertising for brand marketers by delivering high-definition brand content across the web.
Previously, Greg was Vice President, Sales Strategy for TACODA, a behavioral targeting online ad network acquired by AOL in 2007. His inspiration for start-ups came from working with Professor Clay Christensen on theories of disruptive technologies following Greg’s undergraduate years at Harvard.

Following DoubleVerify’s launch of Navigator earlier this week, I had a Q&A session with Oren Netzer, the company’s CEO, who explained the product in more detail.

Otilia Otlacan: You have just announced the launch of Navigator, an end-to-end monitoring and reporting solution for ad networks and platforms. What would you say was the #1 driver behind the launch, what in the current landscape has made it a necessity?

Oren Netzer: Ad networks and ad platforms operate at tremendous scale. They serve billions of impressions every month, and they can do this by continually adding valuable online media inventory for advertisers to buy. However, when operating at this scale, it’s virtually impossible to monitor for compliance of every single impression you serve ads to, while also reviewing new sites and publishers you may want to ad to your network or platform. Navigator is a technology solution necessary to maintain the hi-growth of these types of businesses while minimizing costs.  Networks and platforms can use it to maintain the quality of publishers they work with.

Otilia Otlacan: We’re seeing a trend in switching advertisers / agencies from networks to exchanges. Do you think ad networks could catch up with exchanges in terms of transparency, with the help of Navigator or similar solutions?

Oren Netzer: I think advertisers are pushing for more transparency on all fronts, from both networks and exchanges. Navigator provides the best solution for this issue. For DoubleVerify, it’s not about networks catching up to exchanges. It is about the whole industry catching up to agency and advertiser expectations. We can help these companies boost transparency by monitoring for fraud, review existing inventory and generally ensuring that ads are where they are supposed to be.

Otilia Otlacan: Navigator’s benefits for ad networks and exchanges are quite straightforward. What’s in it for publishers, can they also leverage Navigator?

Oren Netzer: Navigator ensures that quality publishers and web pages (brand-safe, above the fold, etc.) are monetized at the highest level. Navigator offers ad networks and exchanges transparency and insight into each publisher through in depth analyses and categorization.  When publishers are classified at premium or acceptable tiers for advertisers, demand, monetization and CPMs for those publishers increases as well as the overall revenue opportunity for all involved.

The reality is that advertisers and agencies, which are employing ad networks and exchanges, value transparent and quality impressions. Additionally, ad networks and exchanges are more inclined to onboard publishers that are classified within the premium or acceptable tiers, because Navigator makes it easier and faster to sell inventory via networks and platforms.

On a secondary level, because we carefully classify the nature of content, we can discern, down to the page-level, if certain impressions within a publisher are compliant or not. Even if a publisher has non-compliant content on certain pages, we can ensure that the brand-safe pages get ads and are fully monetized. This is a boon for news, entertainment and UGC publishers, whose content will vary greatly.

Otilia Otlacan: I understand that DoubleVerify Navigator is tracking the ad placement (i.e. above the fold) as part of the publisher screening process. What other factors should we look at when deciding if a publisher is trustworthy?

Oren Netzer: Sometimes, ads are delivered in undesirable environments so the nature of the content has to be considered – is it unsavory or illegal? Does the publisher condone bad activity? Another factor is the method of serving ads. Do publishers stack ads on top of each other to get multiple impressions with the same space? Do they minimize the size of the ad to hide it, essentially, but still get credit for the ad serve? Do they put competitive brands on the same page because they both pay high CPMs? It is important to see if all of these parts are taken into consideration.

Otilia Otlacan: The demand for ad and media verification services appears to accelerate day by day. Can you share with us how does DoubleVerify fit in and what’s in the pipeline for the remainder of the year?

Oren Netzer: DoubleVerify is the worldwide leader in online media verification and compliance verifying over 35 billion advertising impressions per month for hundreds of the leading Fortune 500 marketers.  With the opening of our UK office in June, we are expanding our business there. Our clients in the UK currently employ our solutions to narrow non-compliance due to inappropriate content and irrelevant international audiences.

Later this year, you can expect updated industry-wide reports that measure how industry players are handling trust and compliance for advertisers. Additionally, we will continue to offer the Ad Options Icon as the industry’s easiest solution for adopting consumer protection and privacy on behaviorally targeted ads.

Find out more about DoubleVerify Navigator here: http://www.doubleverify.com/solutions/ad-networks/.

About Oren Netzer, Co-Founder and CEO of DoubleVerify

Oren Netzer founded DoubleVerify in 2008 determined to bring needed accountability and transparency to online advertising, believing revenue and profit would flow throughout the system once all players could be assured of its integrity.

A 10-year veteran at the executive level with leading online advertising technology firms, Oren was General Manager and Chief Operating Officer for CheckM8, an online ad serving and rich media technology provider, overseeing product development, operations and customer support, as well as managing its Israeli product development offices.

Oren graduated from the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel with a degree in computer science and studied electrical engineering at The Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

In light of recent trends indicating a resurgence of online display advertising, industry veteran Jeff Weitzman gave us some valuable insights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Following on yesterday’s announcement from Local Yokel Media on the launch of the first hyperlocal online ad marketplace, we had a Q&A session with Dick O’Hare, CEO and Founder of Local Yokel Media.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As part of our “Experts Talk” series of interviews, we have asked Roy de Souza, co-founder and CEO of Zedo, to clarify a few aspects on how ad exchanges work and where they are heading to nowadays.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spongecell, the interactive display advertising company that is leading the creative resurgence of online display, has completed a new round of financing led by Eric Schmidt, Google’s Executive Chairman, and Jim Pallotta, Chairman and Managing Director of Raptor Group.
Following these recent news, we have interviewed Spongecell CEO Ben Kartzman, who gave us some useful insights into display advertising and its current trends.

Otilia Otlacan: We keep hearing of a resurgence of online display ads – if anything, it is one of the hot topics these days in the world of online advertising. In your opinion, what went wrong with display ads in the first place?
Ben Kartzman: It’s not that anything went wrong with Display Ads, it was just a little slow to catch up with technology.  Screen resolutions are much higher now and yet display ads stayed pretty much the same size for a long time.   For too many years the industry dumbed down the display space by introducing expandables that interrupted users and running heavy DR ads that let you “punch the monkey.”  Another issue is the way we have been valuing display ads.  For brand advertisers, as an example, it’s not about the “click” anymore and hasn’t been for some time now. it’s about brands and brands care about metrics that are meaningful to them–in fact, eMarketer just released a study last week that said consumers who viewed a display advertisement were 24% more likely to recommend a product–that’s the type of measurement that a brand cares about, not a click.

OO: Can you give our readers some background as to what has triggered the revival trend?
BK: New technologies, better infrastructure, APIs.  Just smarter utilization of the medium.

OO: How does Spongecell address the current challenges in display advertising?
BK: Spongecell places a lot of focus on speed.  More and more we are finding clients who need to get campaigns live in a matter of hours and days…  We also put a lot of time and energy into engineering the right solutions for brands. Why have a consumer looking to find the nearest store, click out to another map and have to enter more information? That’s not what they want to do.  If the banner ad attracts them enough to draw their interest in, then let’s let them complete the entire action right in there – self contained within the unit.  It’s a combination of a host of little things like that which make perfect sense to us as consumers.

OO: Rich media creatives running on standard ad placements – could you share with us some details as to how this technology works and what it entails for publishers with display ads inventory?
BK: Since Spongecell units don’t expand they’re considered to be very publisher friendly.  As such our polite ads can run in any inventory – exchange, network, premium, etc.

OO: Do new models in display advertising push for new ad metrics? What metrics do you consider to be relevant for display campaigns nowadays?
BK: The metrics must match the objective, but ultimately it’s engagement metrics.  Time spent viewing the ad.  If there is a video, how many times was it viewed?  That is data that brands can really extrapolate from.

OO: Can you share with us some of Spongecell’s plans for the future?
BK: More engaging media across different platforms is certainly something we are planning.  Short term it’s more about further refining our platform and continuing to evolve and push the limits of display.

About Ben Kartzman, CEO Spongecell
Ben Kartzman is the CEO and co-founder of Spongecell, a New York based advertising technology company that transforms standard banner ads into dynamic flash ads with rich-media-like functionality.  Mr. Kartzman is responsible for managing the growth of the business and overseeing its sales and marketing efforts. Previously, he has lead teams and managed software products at Accenture, Morgan Stanley, Intel and several venture-backed Internet start-ups.  Mr. Kartzman graduated with honors from Carnegie Mellon University with a double major in Information & Decision Systems and Human-Computer Interaction.  He has been tapped to speak to audiences all over the U.S., Europe and China on the do’s and don’ts in online advertising.

About Spongecell
Spongecell (https://Spongecell.com/) is leading the creative resurgence of online display advertising by combining speed, innovation and advanced engineering to transform standard banner ads into rich-media-like interactive ads that can run in any ad placement on the web.  The company works with creative and media agencies to serve thousands of engaging campaigns across billions of impressions for global brand advertisers every year. Spongecell is an independent company founded in 2006 with headquarters in New York and offices throughout the United States and Europe.

Below are two examples of display ads using the Spongecell technology. Click any of them to access the full Spongecell gallery.

As part of our coverage of the Search Engine Strategies 2008 event in Chicago (SES Chicago 2008), we have interviewed Mark Lassoff, a noted entrepreneur and founder of the Internet Broadcasting Group. Mark was very kind and patient (thank you Mark!), and agreed to address a few of the questions you have submitted.

Otilia Otlacan: Online streaming media – audio or visual – is perceived to be really taking off, eating away audience from traditionally broadcast media. Is that a reality, or a myth? What is the growth rate of audio and video consumption online?

Mark Lassoff: Reality.

This is a great question. There have been many published studies which have show two simultaneous trends: The growth of online media consumption and the decline of traditional media consumption. The big question remains is one causing the other. I would say, in part, yes. However traditional media is often being its own worst enemy.

Much of my expertise is in radio, so I’ll use the radio industry to illustrate the larger trends, as I interpret them. In the 90’s and early 2000’s there was tremendous consolidation in the terrestrial radio industry. Companies like Clear Channel, Emmis Communications and other purchased hundreds—even thousands—of free air broadcast radio stations. With the consolidation in radio ownership efficiency were found. Instead of one program director programming a station, programming directors would find themselves programming several stations, sometimes across wide geographic territories in communities with complete dispirit needs. Air personalities were “beamed in” or edited in from elsewhere, but tried to sound local. The quality of content on radio suffered deeply to the point where radio became homogenous and uninteresting. Classic Rock stations in Peoria were identical to Rock stations in Bangor. The content became stale and boring quickly—all in the name of efficiency and cost savings for the radio conglomerates.

While this was occurring new forms of audio entertainment media started to appear on the scene. The iPod, internet radio, podcasts, satellite, etc., all made their presence known at the same time radio was pulling back on quality content. New alternatives appeared and consumers made choices.

Had radio not become a total content wasteland, would things have been different? I guess, we’ll never know.

Regarding growth and adoption rate—I would point you towards resources like Edison/Arbitron’s excellent annual report. However, it’s my feeling that the growth has been exponential and will continue to sustain.

Otilia Otlacan: Monetizing streaming media is certainly a challenge and not many players seem to have gone beyond a traditional subscription-based model. What would be, in your opinion, the best way to monetize such content?

Mark Lassoff: With all due respect, I think this is the wrong question. Online media is a business—not some bastard step-child of real media where business rules don’t apply.

The days are over where you can build an audience and figure out how to make money later. Streaming media businesses need to grow up and realize that how to monetize is the first question, not an after-thought once their audience is established. I’m sure that in these economic times we’re going to see a paucity of speculative funding—which means investors are going to look for business models that can better insure monetization and return.

Additionally, monetization hasn’t happened in most areas because the audiences are too broad and diffuse. Most “music” doesn’t draw a specific audience demographic that is easily sold to advertisers looking for efficient targeted CPM’s.

However, for those who produce content that is specific and consumed by a well defined, desirable, specific demographic success is possible.

That having been said, I disagree that not many players have gone to a traditional subscription based model. I’m seeing more pre-roll and post-roll ads for both audio and video, banner and other display advertising in players and interesting things happening in combining audio advertising within a stream with visual display advertising.

There is tremendous opportunity here to go beyond traditional advertising models. What other media besides the internet can immediately deliver targeted qualified prospects at a single click? There is huge opportunity here that we are only now beginning to harness.

Advertising is moving to where the people are—online. The models will continue to develop.

Otilia Otlacan: Staying in the monetization area, can you share some success stories? What makes them a success?

Mark Lassoff: Unfortunately I think direct success with strict monetization of content is still a few years off. There are enough streaming media monetization failures to fill a good sized grave yard. However I think there have been a number of successes in streaming media becoming a critical part of a larger brand building effort.

Aside from the success I’ve seen in monetizing content about monetizing content, I’d site National Association of Photoshop Professionals and their highly regarded and ranked PhotoshopUsertv.com video content. NAPP has done a great job of using their video content as a means to supporting other monetization efforts.

Otilia Otlacan: From a technical perspective, what platforms are most suitable today to carry out advertising within streaming media?

Mark Lassoff: Sorry, I’m not a tech guy.

Otilia Otlacan: Can you tell us more about the branded online radio solution from IBG – what is the most popular use of it? Are there any monetizing options available and if so, what would they be?

Mark Lassoff: We are a branded audio entertainment company. There are two target customers for Internet Broadcasting Group.

The first is consumer brands that are looking for a logical brand extension online. With our clients we flip the traditional advertising model upside-down. Instead of advertising on a radio station, minutes away from a competitive advertisement to an audience of mostly uninterested, passive listeners, IBG allows our clients to become content creators. In partnership with our clients we develop stations geared to attract the very demographics our clients seek. The content is musical, or talk, but all of it is entertaining.

The second focus is on existing publications. We all know that newspapers are in a heap of trouble right now, and are gradually making the transition online. Just this week the venerable Christian Science Monitor announced that it would cease its print publication. We provide a conduit with our publisher partners to move them online with a radio style product and interface that provides the consumer with both on-demand and streaming content.

There are literally dozens of monetization options available, that—especially for our newspaper and magazine clients—provide them with virtually unlimited opportunities to sell advertising to a growing online audience.

About Mark Lassoff:

Mark Lassoff is currently the vice president of media and marketing at NLI Media Group in Austin, Texas (www.nlimediagroup.com). Mark’s team provides full online marketing services from web site design and development to search engine optimization to e-commerce. Mark’s team has won multiple awards for design and is currently one of the fastest growing media firms in Texas. Mark is also the vice-president of the Internet Broadcasting Group (www.internetboadcastinggroup), a start-up which specializes in creating private label radio stations that are lead generators for clients.

The Search Engine Strategies event returns to Chicago in a month (December 8-12) and features a really impressive lineup of speakers and sessions. We’ve interviewed Cindy Krum, Director of New Media Strategies for Blue Moon Works, who was very kind to talk us through the latest developments in the mobile search and advertising industry.

Otilia Otlacan: SES Chicago and Mobile Search – what topics will you be covering, can you give us the highlights?

Cindy Krum: I am honored to be speaking on the Mobile Search Battle Update panel with Bryson Meunier, Rachel Pasqua and Phyllis Reuther. I have spoken with Bryson and Rachel before, but I this is my first time speaking on a panel with Phyllis. The session will be just before lunch on the first day of the show, and it has a lot of insightful mobile search experts.

I will be giving a lot of statistics about where and what people are searching for from their mobile phones. I’ll specifically spend time talking about on-deck search options, off-deck search engines and downloadable mobile search applications. I will also talk about how true web-browsing phones like the iPhone and the gPhone are changing mobile search behavior, and what that means to us as mobile marketers preparing for the future.

O.O.: Surely the economic recession is an over-discussed subject by now, but can you comment if there is an impact on mobile internet usage, search in particular? Are people more conscious these days of the higher costs of mobile search?

C.K.: Many of the US mobile phone carriers have begun offering flat-rate data packages, so the people who have opted into those flat-rate packages will not be affected by the recession. Cost will be a deterrent to mobile search for the rest of the mobile subscribers, but this has always been the case. Some carriers are also testing programs that allow users to decrease their phone bill by watching ads, and we may see programs like this expand or grow in the future.

The economic turmoil may increase the length of time people will wait to replace their mobile phones, and since much of the growth in mobile web search has been driven by the newer, more web-capable phones, a delay in phone replacement is a concern. I don’t think it will be enough to turn the trend; it may just slow or delay the growth slightly.

O.O.: The AdOperationsOnline.com readers are keen to discuss mobile advertising as the next big thing for 2009. What are your views on the mobile advertising growth, what can we expect?

C.K.: Companies like AdMob who have been operating in the red for some time are finally cash-positive, so I think it is fair to say that mobile advertising is coming of age. I have been speaking for a long time about making one website work well in both a traditional and a mobile setting, and that will be true for mobile advertising too. It has to be seamless, and we can’t rely on the user to get to the right website or remember two domains.

It will be important for mobile advertising companies to offer a service where ads are intelligently served, based on the device accessing them. Not only do we want mobile ads to go to mobile devices, and traditional ads to go to traditional devices; but we want ad networks to recognize the type of device that is doing the searching, and serve ads that are relevant to that device demographic. It is no secret that the demographic buying BlackBerries is different than the one buying SideKicks; Mobile ad networks need to do a better job leveraging that type of information.

UK mobile carriers are already using this type of ad targeting on their networks, because everyone in their ‘on-deck’ portal is a subscriber, and I believe this kind of targeting will soon make it to the United States. Google AdWords is also allowing marketers to target ads based on carriers, and this type of innovation will be vital for mobile ad networks to maintain their superior click through and conversion rates.

O.O.: Staying in the mobile advertising area, what solutions do you see to ensure that ads are unobtrusive on such small screens? What about measurability of mobile ad campaigns – any technologies you’re particularly fond of?

C.K.: In addition to making mobile advertising as targeted as possible, it will be more important for advertisers to be subtle in mobile advertising. Mobile devices are considered much more personal than traditional computers so advertising can feel like much more invasive on a mobile phone. I think branded games and downloadable applications will be a great way to advertise to your mobile audience, without being too pushy.

Mobile tracking and analytics is still quite difficult because most web tracking is based on JavaScript, which is not executed by a number of mobile browsers. While most of the major ad networks offer technology that will allow you to track performance of your entire mobile website, (instead of just your ads,) there are no great mobile-specific analytics platforms available yet. Your best bet is always to use a combination of analytics programs, but when you are working with mobile data, understand that you may not be getting the complete picture.

O.O.: Your company, Blue Moon Works Inc., how does it fit in the relatively new and chaotic landscape of mobile marketing and advertising? Any service or product highlights for 2009 that you would like to present to our readers?

C.K.: Blue Moon Works, Inc. is a new media marketing agency, and mobile website optimization is just one of our specialties. (We also offer consulting for traditional SEO, PPC, email and analytics.) Blue Moon Works is a resource for agencies, development companies and content owners who want to create a mobile website that will rank well in mobile search without compromising their existing search engine rankings.

There are a lot of companies that can build you a mobile website, but not many of them understand the full impact that the mobile site can have. Mobile sites can provide a bad user experience for your audience, or create duplicate content issues and indexing problems with the search engines, which can hurt your brand and your traffic. At Blue Moon Works, we offer expert consulting; we will help you determine how the mobile website should be structured and coded to create the best mobile user experience, rank well in mobile search results, and not create problems for your traditional search results.

About Cindy Krum
Cindy Krum is the Director of New Media Strategies for Blue Moon Works, Inc. (www.bluemoonworks.com) She brings fresh and creative ideas to the Blue Moon Works team, speaking at national and international trade events about mobile web marketing, social network marketing and international SEO. Cindy also writes for industry publications, and has been published in Website Magazine, Advertising & Marketing Review, Search Engine Land, ODG Intelligence, and quoted by many respected publications including PC World, Internet Retailer, TechWorld, Direct Magazine and Search Marketing Standard. Cindy also currently serves as the co-chair of the SEMPO Mobile Search Committee, and is an active member of the search community. Cindy is passionate about bringing creative online marketing solutions to clients, and working with clients to develop high level mobile and international marketing strategies.

About Incisive Interactive Marketing LLC — A Division of Incisive Media PLC
Incisive Media PLC is a specialist business information provider, based in the UK with offices in North America, Hong Kong, India and Mainland China. The company’s activities are currently built around ten core industry sectors – mortgages; marketing services; financial technology; retail investment; capital markets; risk management; insurance; legal services; private equity and photography. Information is provided via a wide range of channels–in print, in person and online. Funds advised by Apax Partners, a leading global private equity group, recently completed the successful de-listing of Incisive Media from the London Stock Exchange alongside the existing management.
Incisive Interactive Marketing LLC is the marketing services division of the company and incorporates leading websites Search Engine Watch, the ClickZ Network and their associated events series including Search Engine Strategies. These properties were acquired in 2005.

For more information on SES Chicago and other shows in the series, see http://searchenginestrategies.com/chicago.