ST. LOUIS – GMS Local, a service of GroupM and provider of local online services for national brands, announced research revealing a gap in the perceived local digital media activity expressed by national brands with brick and mortar locations versus what is actually being implemented. While 69 percent of marketers surveyed indicate they spend greater than the national average of 25 percent of budgets allocated to local marketing, 33 percent have yet to implement basic local digital efforts that positively impact business performance, such as online business directory listings. An exploration of the research is detailed in the white paper “Perception vs. Execution: Examination of Brands’ Local Business Strategies Reveals Gaps to Act On.”

As the Internet speeds to the forefront of local advertising, marketers are bullish about their current and future investments in local advertising – particularly in local digital media, the research revealed. Eighty-three percent of marketers surveyed expect their local online spending to increase at a greater rate than the projected national growth (25 percent) over the next three years. Such growth supports the expansive consumer activity happening in the local digital marketplace, where up to 20 percent of searches conducted have local intent (jumping to 40 percent on mobile devices), and the adoption of location-based check-in services is happening in the masses, with companies such as Foursquare topping 1 billion check-ins. According to Borrell Associates, local digital advertising is expected to grow 18 percent in 2012, with local online spend projected to surpass all other channels by 2015. This growth, compared to the gap in what marketing executives perceive their brands are doing at the local level and the reality of their execution over the past 12 months – and into 2012 – shows national advertisers are missing the opportunity for sizeable gains.

“Every single data point we see shows consumers becoming more mobile and reliant on digital for their local information. This rapid consumer shift has created challenges for brands as they attempt to keep up, and we are seeing a willingness to invest, as validated in this research,” said Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search. “The research also shows a clear disconnect between what brands believe they are doing with those investments and what is actually being done. We speak to advertisers daily that have enormous blind spots in local digital coverage, and who welcome the education and strategy needed to resolve their willingness to spend and target which is hindered by the inability to determine what to do first and next.”

Additional insights from the research include:

- One of three national brands has yet to invest in the basic local digital effort of online business directory listings.

- Only 55 percent of national brands surveyed have initiated geo-modified paid search campaigns.

- While half of all consumers are making business selections off consumer ratings and reviews, less than 50 percent of national advertisers invest in local online review sites.

- Thirty-two percent of marketers attribute their insufficient engagement to a lack of awareness, with respondents specifically stating they are unaware of offerings, don’t understand them or believe them to be unnecessary.

- Fifty-eight percent indicate that funding prevents them from engaging more in the local digital space.

Brands will continue placing big bets on the online local space given the consumer shift to this space for their discovery efforts, with 70 percent of marketing executives for national brands reporting their local online investments as a percent of total local advertising outpace current national averages. As detailed in the whitepaper, national advertisers can overcome these challenges with deeper education around opportunity in the local digital space and self-assessment of the reality of their allocation and programs.

Additionally, following a three-step action plan will help advertisers reach optimal performance and local digital success:

- Conduct an online local listing business audit

- Diagnose the ‘local storefront’ for your brand by applying social media tools that listen to consumer sentiment at the local store level

- Practice education, innovation and experimentation

“Technology and mobility have opened the gateway for national brands to be able to create personalized experiences with consumers at the local level,” said Steve Scherfy, Local and Mobile Manager for GMS Local. “From business location listings to local social intelligence, managing the entire digital storefront is key.”

For the study, marketing executives and managers of national brands with a minimum of 500 physical locations were surveyed. The comparative study, conducted between September and November 2011, set forth to investigate the challenges that brands within the digital marketplace face, including the ability to understand emerging technology, analyze what is relevant and act on these tools based on their business needs. It also explored how engaged each national brand is with local marketing. Survey questions with local digital marketing averages and best practices from national data were utilized to gain reaction and comparative “self-assessments” against those averages by participating respondents and brands.

About GMS Local

GMS Local is a service of GroupM, and comprehensive digital solution focused on creating meaningful connections between brands and consumers at the local level. Using paid, earned and owned media solutions, GMS Local maximizes local consumer engagement opportunities for national advertisers with an extensive local footprint. Local digital marketing perspective can be found at www.gmslocal.com, or on the GMS Local blog.

New York, NY – When guests attend fashion shows or presentations at MADE Fashion Week with the MADE app on their mobile device, they will instantly receive images of looks as the models walk the runway. Further, users can make notes, tweet images and curate a custom look-book that can be e-mailed in real-time, enabling designers to instantly extend the reach of their designs beyond the runway. This app enables designers’ looks to stand the test of time and fosters commerce into buying season – and beyond.

Viewers watching MADE shows over Livestream on MilkMade.com can also enjoy the same benefits and features, since Sonic Notifyʼs technology, which is triggered by soundless audio signals, will also send content of the app through the userʼs home computer.

The MADE app will also include a show schedule, bios, contact and sales information for each MADE Designer. The app will be available for download on MilkMade.com, the Apple store and the Android Market Site on February 6th 2012.

About MADE
MADE was born from the successful Fashion Week collaboration that started in 2009. Now in its sixth season, MADE FASHION WEEK continues to showcase outstanding design talent and harness the energy of New York’s creative communities. The compelling program of events – over 50 fashion shows and presentations, parties, concerts, panel discussions and an unrivaled online presence (MILKMADE.COM) – has translated to success at a retail level and in the press, as well as in the highly coveted digital arena. MADE is a year-round, dynamic platform for connecting ascending talent in fashion, music, art and popculture with visionary brands to create new cultural platforms and communities.

Its vibrant atmosphere encourages creativity, fosters growth and challenges convention and MADE’s innovators are a powerful voice in the international dialogue who have initiated shifts in their collective industries.

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.

NEW YORK — Mojiva (www.mojiva.com), the mobile ad network that specializes in making “big idea,” cross-platform mobile strategies come to life at scale, today announced a multi-execution ad campaign with American Family Insurance (www.amfam.com) that emphasizes engagement and awareness with mobile audiences. The leading insurance provider offers auto, homeowners, life, health, business and farm/ranch insurance in 19 states. The campaign, which will run through February and is facilitated by Mindshare, includes mobile web and app buys on the Mojiva network and is highlighted by a sponsorship with a leading social gaming application.

The innovative American Family Insurance mobile campaign has three key executions for targeting all consumers 21+ who are on-the-go and looking for insurance:

· In-App Sponsorship – Through the highly integrated in-app sponsorship between AmericanFamily Insurance and a major social gaming application, players are alerted to a “word of the day” through Facebook and twitter profiles along with text and interstitial advertising in-app. Once the word is played, they are awarded with tips and tricks to help raise their scores when playing the game. American Family Insurance selected relevant words to elevate brand awareness while encouraging interaction.

· Request a Quote – With consumer convenience in mind, American Family Insurance provided consumers with the ability create a calendar reminder to contact agents to request a quote at a later date. This execution encapsulates the focus on making insurance easy and accessible while also leveraging the multi-function capabilities of mobile.

· Survival Guide – With recent extreme weather events, the survival guide execution provides consumers with tips on what to do during a natural disaster, which can be captured by using the phone’s screen shot functionalities, to save for later. The ad unit gives consumers the ability to contact an agent for additional assistance. The intent of this rich media piece was to add value to the user experience and make it easy for them to take the next step in buying insurance.

“With this campaign, we worked with American Family Insurance to identify mobile as a key medium for engaging in-market consumers, because thinking about insurance and actively pursuing a quote can happen almost anywhere,” said Christophe Dilworth of Mindshare.

“Mobile expands our campaign’s reach and influence, while offering an effective way to target appropriate audiences,” said Stephanie Oslie of American Family Insurance. “Because of mobile marketing’s strong demographic and geographic targeting capabilities, we can identify consumers in need of insurance products and services with ease.”

“We are seeing more and more companies from vertical markets such as insurance allocating a higher percentage of their media mix towards mobile as they begin to understand the potential reach, value and brand benefits of influencing target audiences on mobile devices,” said Tony Nethercutt, General Manager of North America for Mojiva. “American Family Insurance and Mindshare are making mobile an important component of their campaign and being extraordinarily creative in both executions and strategy.”

Crisp Media and Theorem Creations, who are members of the Mojiva Mobile Creative Alliance (mojivamca.com), were selected to develop the three different rich media creative executions.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compelling Features of Successful Brand Websites

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

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

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

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

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

Research Study Design

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

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

Additional Information

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

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

- www.comscore.com/cpg_brands_maximizing_return_digital_investment

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

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

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

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

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

Deadline to participate is March 31, 2012.

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

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

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

- Mobile Advertising & Marketing was Fastest Growing Sector in 2011, Expanding 53.7%, Led by Advertising Segment’s 60.9% Growth

- Online Social Media Was Smallest Industry Sector at $2.83 billion, with Social Networks the Largest and Fastest Growing Segment

STAMFORD, Conn. – Total U.S. mobile & social media revenue – including consumer and business access, content, advertising and marketing – increased 30.2% to $45.38 billion in 2011, according to new data released by PQ Media (www.pqmedia.com), the leading provider of media econometrics. Mobile & social media revenue rose at a compound annual growth rate of 28.7% from 2006-2011, and is expected to grow at an accelerating 30.8% annual rate in 2012, according to the PQ Media U.S. Mobile & Social Media Forecast 2012-16.

PQ Media released the new U.S. Mobile & Social Media Forecast 2012-16 last week at MediaPost’s Mobile Insider Summit in Key Largo, FL, where CEO Patrick Quinn provided attendees with an exclusive State of the Industry presentation. A free executive summary and table of contents, as well as the full report for purchase, are available here. PQ Media’s new Forecast goes well beyond other mobile & social media research reports, most of which track only advertising spending. PQ Media for the first time collected, analyzed, defined, segmented and forecast the entire mobile & social media landscape, providing the most comprehensive and detailed perspective on the fastest-growing communications industry segment.

PQ Media identified 3 broad sectors of mobile & social media – mobile advertising & marketing, mobile content & access, and online social media. Within the three sectors, there are seven segments – mobile advertising, mobile marketing, consumer mobile content & access, business mobile content & access, social networks, blogs, and podcasts. Further, PQ Media identified 44 distinct revenue streams, such as mobile search advertising, mobile coupon marketing, paid mobile video downloads, business data access fees, social network advertising, blog marketing, and podcast business content, among many others.

Mobile content & access was by far the largest industry sector in 2011 with revenue of $39.17 billion, up 27.8%, as the business segment accounted for 58% of the total and the consumer segment, 42%. Mobile advertising & marketing was fastest growing sector in 2011, expanding 53.7% to $3.39 billion, as the advertising segment soared 60.9% and marketing surged 46.2%. Among the fastest growing mobile ad revenue streams were in-game, search and video. The marketing segment will grow faster than advertising from 2012-16, fueled by the location-based, coupons and marketing apps revenue streams, according to the PQ Media U.S. Mobile & Social Media Forecast 2012-16.

“The mobile media sector alone reached the $1 billion revenue mark faster than any communications industry in history in 2008, taking only five years compared with 16 for the internet,” said PQ Media’s Quinn. “Mobile will also reach the $100 billion mark in 2015 faster than any other communications industry, driven by several key growth drivers, including strong growth in overall mobile device penetration, the transition to smartphones and tablets, the torrent of new mobile content launches and the continued growth of consumer and business time spent with mobile media.”

Meanwhile, online social media was the smallest sector of mobile & social media in 2011, with $2.83 billion in revenues, but grew at a very strong 42.1%. Social networks was the largest and fastest growing segment by far, increasing 45.9% to $2.28 billion in 2011, according to PQ Media.

Together, mobile & social media accounted for 4.1% of overall communications industry revenue in 2011, up from only 1.3% in 2006. Eleven of the 44 mobile & social media revenue streams exceeded $1 billion in 2011, and 23 will do so by the end of 2016, according to the PQ Media U.S. Mobile & Social Media Forecast 2012-16.

About PQ Media

PQ Media (www.pqmedia.com) is the leading provider of global media econometrics and pioneer of emerging media research. PQ Media’s proprietary econometric research methodology and custom consulting services deliver actionable strategic intelligence to help its clients grow their media, entertainment and communications businesses. PQ Media partners with private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson on the VSS Communications Industry Forecast, the U.S. industry’s benchmark for spending, consumption and growth data for 25 years. For more information, contact Gabriella Kallay at gkallay@pqmedia.com, Tabor Ames at tames@pqmedia.com, or call 921-0368.

BALTIMORE – Millennial Media, the independent leader in mobile advertising, announced a new solution for advertisers to drive usage and engagement within their branded apps. The new “App Engagement Program” will allow brands to re-engage users who have previously downloaded their app, and use mobile display ads to drive them back to specific destinations inside the app. Advertisers who use the new solution will also gain unique conversion metrics, and the ability to retarget consumers with relevant messaging.

With the App Engagement Program, advertisers can anonymously identify consumers who have already downloaded their app, and use mobile display creative to deep-link these users back into the app. The deep-linking process will drive usage, and brands can leverage the initial interest that led to the app download to re-engage users and drive further interaction. As users are driven to different locations inside the app, advertisers will also gain unique intelligence on consumer behavior and will be able to track in-app transactions.

“Consumers now expect brand name companies to have a mobile app, yet it still takes a concerted effort from the brands to drive adoption,” said Jamie Fellows, SVP of Product at Millennial Media. “Brands need to make sure the experience is good, they need to make sure users are finding the app, and perhaps most importantly, they need to take steps to drive sustained consumer usage.”

For brands looking to drive initial adoption of their app, Millennial Media also offers the ability to run App Discovery campaigns and drive downloads via paid media. The Millennial Media platform reaches over 200M monthly unique users globally, providing advertisers an opportunity to efficiently drive downloads in a crowded market.

“Millennial Media has once again demonstrated its ability to both identify a major unmet need for mobile marketers and create a sound client-ready solution,” said Paul Gelb, VP, Mobile Practice Lead, Razorfish. “Improvements to retention and usage exponentially increase the value of an application and each new user. Advancement in this area opens up new opportunities for brands to generate unprecedented ROI from their investment in applications.”

For more information on the App Engagement Program and Millennial Media’s suite of advertiser solutions, visit http://www.millennialmedia.com/advertise/targeting/.

About Millennial Media

Millennial Media is the leading independent mobile advertising platform company. Our technology, tools and services help app developers and mobile website publishers to maximize their advertising revenue, acquire users for their apps and gain insight about their users. We offer advertisers significant audience reach, sophisticated targeting capabilities and the ability to deliver rich and engaging ad experiences to consumers on their mobile connected devices. Visit www.millennialmedia.com for more information.

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, released the report Next-Generation Strategies for Advertising to Millennials, highlighting the results from a recent comScore study that identifies the unique characteristics of the Millennial generation, commonly defined as persons born between 1981 and 2000. The study examined Millennials’ responses to different types of advertising, including TV and digital, compared to older generations, and how marketers can most effectively target this large and important segment. To download a complimentary copy of the report, please visit: http://www.comscore.com/Millennials.

“The 79 million Millennials in the U.S. have an estimated purchasing power of $170 billion dollars per year, making them a highly attractive segment for brands to target” said comScore vice president Bert Miklosi. “Their comfort-level with the Internet and technology in general makes the digital medium an ideal platform for reaching these individuals. But as is typical with younger people when compared their older counterparts, Millennials are generally more difficult to persuade via advertising, amplifying the importance of creative and messaging optimization in driving worthwhile returns from an investment in advertising to this segment. ”

Key findings highlighted in the report include:

- The defining characteristics of Millennials include their comfort-level with new technologies and cultural diversity, as well as being accustomed to on-demand access to entertainment, continual stimulation and extreme multitasking.

- Ad breakthrough via television advertising for Millennials was substantially lower than for older generations. However, Millennials demonstrated a higher propensity than other generations to retain a lasting impression of a television advertisement.

- Millennials tend to be less interested and more difficult to connect with, capture attention, impress, convince and entertain. Millennials also appear to be more price-sensitive, perhaps due to lower disposable incomes.

- Digital advertising performs better in relative terms among Millennials than does television advertising.

- Across generations including Millennials, the presence of key creative elements in advertising, coined by comScore as the Validated Drivers, were shown to relate strongly to successful advertising.

- Millennials are highly engaged with the content that they choose to view, within both television and digital environments. Engagement has been shown to amplify the effectiveness of advertising, so when targeting Millennials, it is important to utilize engaging content to help boost returns from investments in advertising.

To download a complimentary copy of the full report, Next-Generation Strategies for Advertising to Millennials, please visit: http://www.comscore.com/Millennials.

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

Apple held the top two spots with their iPhone 4G commercial touting new camera features (Ace Score: 659) and Siri ad (Ace Score: 658). Cadillac zoomed alongside Siri with its ad demonstrating its braking systems, achieving an Ace Score of 658. Nissan’s Vision ad was the 4th most effective playoff ad (Ace Score 652), followed by Google’s Muppet ad (Ace Score 644).

Only 14 percent of ads to air during the 10 playoff games were new. Leading the new ads were Applebee’s “Under 550 Calorie” ad for steak, achieving an Ace Score of 640, and Chevrolet’s new “Happy Grad” ad for Camaro, which debuted during the NFC Championship to an estimated audience of more than 50 million with an Ace Score of 618.

“We expect to see many of these same advertisers in the Super Bowl, and it will be interesting to see how they adapt their playoff strategies to television’s biggest stage,” said Peter Daboll, CEO of Ace Metrix. “We are looking forward to seeing what General Motors introduces – they are hitting on all cylinders right now from an advertising perspective with strong scoring creative from their entire brand portfolio.”

Automotive ads represented the greatest share of playoff advertising at 27 percent. Restaurants accounted for 19 percent of playoff ads, followed by Telecommunications at 15 percent.

Ace Metrix will reveal the Top Ads of the Super Bowl on February 8th.

About Ace Metrix

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

Follow Ace Metrix on Twitter for additional insight: Ace_Metrix.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW YORK – Social media has dramatically altered the way that agencies and their clients approach consumer engagement campaigns, and in most cases, changed the way in which businesses connect with their target audiences. WORLDCOM Public Relations Group (Worldcom), the world’s leading partnership of independently owned public relations counseling firms, recently asked its Consumer Practice Group partners to share insights on the evolving role of social media as a consumer engagement tool, as well as trends that will potentially change the way in which social media is incorporated into consumer outreach campaigns in 2012.

“Consumer PR, like all forms of public relations and marketing, is fundamentally changing as a direct result of social media and other disruptive online communications channels,” said Will Ostedt, chair of the Worldcom Consumer Practice Group and vice president at The Pollack PR Marketing Group in Los Angeles. “Consumers are expecting to receive and acknowledge communication that is only relevant to them — anything else is ignored or disregarded. The future of consumer PR is to find ways to make messages relevant to consumers and to reach them using the right channels.”

The discussion revealed five emerging trends partners from the (EMEA) European Middle East Africa, Asian Pacific and America’s regions all agree will dramatically effect their approach to consumer engagement campaigns on behalf of their clients.

Location, Location, Location: Worldcom’s Consumer Practice Group is seeing a shift to more localized social media programs that are better able to target consumers and key into their unique values and cultural circumstances. These programs are not only aimed at engaging consumers and encouraging them to share their “brand love” with others, but also encouraging them to share their dollars with their local retailer.

Filtering the Noise: Consumers are learning how to maximize social media tools to fit their personal needs, first and foremost, by eliminating noise. A fundamental need to filter information combined with emerging filtration systems such as Google+ in which the information one sees is increasingly determined by past behavior and/or personal desire, means organizations will have to continually find new ways to permeate permission-based news streams in order to be seen and heard. More importantly, organizations will need to make themselves and their content relevant to a more defined audience.

Depth Over Breadth: The onset of social media has sent most consumers scrambling to widen their social networks, in an effort to secure the most friends and followers in complete disregard of boundaries, privacy and relevancy to their interests and belief systems. Beginning in 2011, a noticeable shift occurred where the depth of consumer networks became more important than their breadth. As consumers increasingly look to better meet their thirst for information that is relevant to their interests and lifestyle, the Worldcom Consumer Practice Group sees consumers limiting their engagement to the people and brands that best connect with their personal lifestyle in the confines of niche social networks, customized specifically for their interests.

Mobile is the New PC: The dramatic and disruptive rise of smart phones, tablets, eReaders and computerized mobile devices over the past two years has fundamentally changed how consumers interact. The result of this disruption is that the modern consumer is always connected, interacting in real time and vetting the relevance of bite-sized information on an ongoing basis. The Worldcom Consumer Practice Group identifies that due to this dramatically upward trend of mobile computing, brands and products will also need to be connected at all times and deliver real-time response and interaction with their consumers.

Twitter Surge: The launch of Apples’ iOS 5 in 2011 was met with much fanfare as the new operating system’s “bells and whistles” delighted current Apple mobile users and served as the impetus for others to make the switch to devices running iOS 5. But, buried in all of the “Cloud” talk, is the fact that iOS 5 provides consumers with direct Twitter integration. Having the social network woven into the fabric of mobile OS’s should lead to a broadened acceptance of Twitter as a part of everyday functionality, and increase users’ activity on the service.

“As social media continues to evolve in 2012, communication pros have the best opportunity and the most relevant skill set to guide organizations to build meaningful consumer engagement versus being purely content pushers,” added Dawn Doty, co-chair of the Worldcom Consumer Practice Group and vice president/partner of Denver-based Linhart Public Relations. “As the new year begins, we encourage all communication pros to continue to muscle into the discussions that matter within their organizations to maximize the channels that now allow this authentic consumer engagement.”

About the Worldcom Consumer Practice Group

The Worldcom Public Relations Consumer Practice Group is a multi-national partnership of PR firms who cumulatively have the broadest experiences and expertise across the spectrum of consumer products and services. Partner agencies create a powerful professional entity, affording clients a local, national, and international industry perspective, resulting in a competitive advantage for clients.

About Worldcom Public Relations Group

Established in 1988, Worldcom Public Relations Group is the world’s leading partnership of independently owned public relations counseling firms, with 107 partner agencies worldwide, in 91 markets, in 46 countries, across six continents. With more than 2,100 employees, and revenue of more than US $260 million, partners collectively serve national, international and multi-national clients seamlessly, while retaining the flexibility and client-service focus inherent in independent local agencies. Through Worldcom, clients have on-demand access to in-depth communications expertise from professionals who understand the language, culture and customs of the geographic arenas in which they do business.

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

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

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

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

About Bizo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobile World Congress 2012
KIRKLAND, Wash. – Hipcricket, the one-stop mobile marketing and advertising brand owned by Augme Technologies, Inc. (OTCBB: AUGT or “Augme”), announced that it has been named a finalist in the GSM Association’s (GSMA) 17th Annual Global Mobile Awards. Hipcricket was selected as a finalist in the “Mobile Marketing & Advertising Agency of the Year” category from a pool of more than 600 entries. It honors firms that are “spearheading the growth, adoption and evolution of mobile advertising”.

The award will be announced during Mobile World Congress to be held in Barcelona, Spain on February 28, 2012.

For seventeen years, the GSMA Global Mobile Awards have showcased cutting-edge mobile products, services and initiatives around the world. The “Mobile Marketing & Advertising Agency of the Year” category is new to this year’s competition.

“This news comes at an exciting time for our company, as we recently surpassed the 150,000 mobile campaign milestone and recorded a 76 percent increase in campaigns year-over-year,” commented Eric Harber, Chief Operating Officer of Hipcricket. “We’re honored to be named a finalist in such a prestigious competition where we are recognized for such accomplishments.

“Mobile advertising is a rapidly growing and important part of Hipcricket’s business. Key to our offering is our post-click engagement platform. Rather than looking at mobile advertising as a one-off, an increasing number of Hipcricket clients use our mobile advertising solutions as a means to move product and build awareness, but also to re-engage the user. Several have employed our Software as a Service (SaaS) platform and advertising solutions to grow their opt-in databases. An opted-in consumer is extremely important to our customers and commands higher premiums.”

As a full service mobile marketer, Hipcricket offers its technology platform and leverages all mobile channels to help brands engage with consumers anywhere at any time. The company creates multi-channel SMS and MMS campaigns, mobile websites, QR codes, and branded apps for its clients, which include Nestle, Macy’s, Miller Coors and The American Cancer Society.

“Reflecting the intensity of competition and innovation across the mobile ecosystem, we saw a record 600 entries and an exceptionally high quality field of contenders vying for this year’s Global Mobile Awards,” said Michael O’Hara, Chief Marketing Officer, GSMA. “It is a significant achievement to have made the shortlist, and our warmest congratulations go to all the nominees announced today. We look forward to the unveiling of the winners at the Mobile World Congress next month.”

About Hipcricket

Hipcricket, a brand of Augme Technologies (OTCBB: AUGT), is the one-stop mobile marketing and advertising solution for brands, agencies and media properties to engage customers, drive loyalty and increase sales. Hipcricket’s customers connect with consumers across every mobile channel, including SMS, 2D/QR codes, mobile websites, advertising networks, social media and branded apps. Its proven technology, strategic and marketing services and experienced account management teams have provided measurable successes across an industry-leading 150,000 campaigns for such clients as Macy’s, MillerCoors, Nestle, KFC, and Clear Channel. Hipcricket has also created the first comprehensive permission-based mobile ad network that taps into the buying power of the mass market with industry-leading capabilities to target customers via location and highly-specific demographic information across SMS, display, rich media and video.

Hipcricket is based in Seattle, Washington, with operations in New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Tucson. For more mobile marketing and mobile advertising information, please visit www.hipcricket.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Balihoo

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

NEW YORK – Solve Media, the TYPE-IN advertising company, today announced it has added Ian Schafer to its Board of Directors. Mr. Schafer is the founder and CEO of Deep Focus, a full-service digital engagement agency. Formerly a vice president of new media at Miramax Films, he is one of the most influential voices in the industry, and a recognized leader in interactive marketing and social media. He will provide senior counsel to Solve Media executives as the company continues to change how brands and publishers advertise online.

“The future of advertising lies with innovative and creative approaches like Solve Media’s TYPE-IN that can capture a user’s attention in a powerful yet unobtrusive way, and deliver measurable results in lift, recall and participation rates,” said Mr. Schafer. “Solve Media has grown quickly because they are addressing a critical market need. I look forward to helping Solve Media reach its next stage of growth.”

Mr. Schafer has received a number of industry recognitions including being named a ‘Media Maven’ by Advertising Age and one of Adweek’s“Young Ones.” He also serves on the executive board of the Social Media Advertising Consortium. He joins Chris Fralic and Scott Johnson on Solve Media’s board.

“As one of the industry’s foremost experts, Ian has an uncanny ability to anticipate trends in the creative and media agency landscape,” said Ari Jacoby, CEO of Solve Media. “His leadership, knowledge and strategic insight will be invaluable as Solve Media continues to seek innovative and impactful ways to drive true engagement for brands.”

Since its launch in 2010, Solve Media’s TYPE-IN platform has been delivering performance-based campaigns for leading brand advertisers seeking superior engagement, awareness and recall. Unlike traditional engagement metrics that essentially measure ad exposure, TYPE-IN ads create lasting memories that benefit brands beyond clicks and drive loyalty and sales. The company’s approach has attracted more than 3,000 publishers and leading advertisers, including Toyota, Microsoft, Universal Pictures and AOL.

ABOUT SOLVE MEDIA

Solve Media was founded by veteran entrepreneurs and technologists focused on innovative Internet advertising solutions. The Company’s proprietary online advertising system, the TYPE-IN™ was designed to create new and highly effective opportunities for brands to advertise online. The platform leverages CAPTCHA authentication for brand messaging to bring unprecedented consumer engagement. With the platform, Solve Media: guarantees brand message delivery and increases recall rates and return on investment for advertisers; creates new revenue opportunities for publishers; and simplifies the authentication process for consumers. Backed by First Round Capital, New Atlantic Ventures, AOL Ventures and prominent angel investors, Solve Media is based in New York City and Philadelphia. http://www.solvemedia.com

Dozens of clients and partners have adopted Krux technology, including leading media companies such as The Wall Street Journal Digital Network and NBCUniversal.  Further, the company continues to expand its global footprint, with additions to its client roster including major European media companies, such as Financial Times and Sanoma, and the Japanese publisher Recruit.  Krux is also driving key partner relationships outside the US, such as the recent integration of its technology with the leading European Supply-Side Platform, Improve Digital.

One of the key drivers of the rapid adoption of Krux solutions is the increased focus on transparency and control when it comes to how companies manage consumer web data.  A number of Krux clients have recently reported on their success with the company’s data protection technology, Krux Data Sentry.  As Peter Naylor, EVP Digital Media at NBCU explained, “With a network as broad and diverse as NBCU, combined with the partnership complexity that comes with running the Universal Ad Platform, I sleep much better at night knowing we have Krux in our corner and a solution like Data Sentry protecting our most critical asset: our audience data.”

Most important, as of January 2012, the company saw its global reach grow more than 300% over the course of the previous year.  Through widespread adoption of Krux’s solutions by leading premium publishers around the globe, such as The New York Times, Recruit, Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal, Krux has rapidly become the Internet standard for web data protection.  Having developed durable reach of more than 200 million Internet users worldwide, Krux is ideally positioned to drive further adoption of its end-to-end services for consumer data management.  Today, anyone with a website can put data to work making every content, commerce, and advertising interaction feel more personal and more relevant.  Through its growing client, partner, and user reach, Krux supports this shift to a more personal web.

“I’m thrilled to see 2011 investments in our team, our technology, and our US and EU market presence catapult us into 2012,” said Tom Chavez, co-founder and CEO of Krux Digital.  “We’re deepening partner relationships and adding to our client roster almost daily, all while continuing to advance our technology lead, delivering cloud-scale Big Data solutions for some of the consumer web’s most pressing challenges.”

About Krux:
Founded in 2010, Krux delivers data fabric for the consumer web.  The company’s platform helps websites capture, control, and connect data across screens and sources.  With Krux, companies deliver cooler, safer, faster, smarter web experiences.  With Krux, consumers gain confidence that their favorite websites are operating under the plain light of day.  Dozens of website operators in the US, Europe, and Asia have adopted Krux technology, including companies like NBC Universal, Sanoma, Recruit, Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal Digital Network.  Find out more at www.kruxdigital.com.

- golfers and owners of full-size vehicles are highly likely to watch the game;

- sales professionals, husbands of single family households and sci-fi movie lovers are very likely to watch the game;

- those on the market for an Amazon Kindle are likely to watch the game.

Another interesting observation is that, although the Super Bowl ad spending has been decreasing in the past years, the percentage allocated to the Super Bowl from the advertisers’ annual budget is climbing steeply.

See below the infographic put together by BlueKai.

San Mateo, Calif – BrightEdge, the leading global SEO platform, today released analysis showing that brands in the Retail, Financial Services and Technology verticals are leaving upwards of $112 Million in unrealized sales on the table, that could be secured by more aggressive or effective search optimization activities.

BrightEdge analyzed terabytes of page rank, social signals, keyword, backlinks, ranking and CPC data from their cloud database to identify the real dollar opportunity available to specific vertical market segments. BrightEdge found that on average, Retail companies could drive more than $51 Million in potential revenue, followed by Financial Services at $51 Million. Hardware and software solutions are coming closer to the mark with leaving more than $5.4 Million in potential annual revenue.

“Search marketers are a part of the revenue generating organization, but they have lacked a forecasting tool to define the revenue opportunity for their company. Our research shows that there is a tremendous opportunity for brands to grow their revenue through search engine optimization,” said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. “With the unveiling of these findings BrightEdge is excited to announce that we are also introducing the ability to accurately forecast the business opportunity for SEO as part of our S3 platform.”

BrightEdge’s search opportunity forecasting, which is currently available in limited release to BrightEdge clients and agency partners provides a complete solution to allow search marketers to build a solid forecast for themselves.

To join the discussion about BrightEdge’s data, please visit www.facebook.com/seoplatform, or follow BrightEdge on Twitter at www.twitter.com/brightedge.

About BrightEdge
BrightEdge is the leading global SEO platform helping more than 1,100 of the world’s largest brands stay ahead in the rapidly evolving Internet landscape. BrightEdge S3 drives more than $4 billion in organic search across industries, harnessing the power of analytics to drive revenue from web sites, search engines and social networks across the globe in a measurable, predictable way. BrightEdge is based in San Mateo, CA and is privately held with financing from Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures and Illuminate Ventures.

For more information, please visit www.brightedge.com, friend BrightEdge on Facebook at www.facebook.com/seoplatform or follow them on Twitter at www.twitter.com/brightedge.

LONDON, UK – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released an overview of Internet usage in Europe, showing that 379.4 million Europeans went online in November 2011 for an average of 27.8 hours per person. This release highlights Internet usage in 49 European markets aggregated into the European region and provides individual reporting on 18 markets. Amongst its findings, the study also showed that 47.8 percent of Europeans visit Newspaper sites, with a notable percentage of visits to the top 5 Newspaper sites preceded by a visit to Facebook.

Nearly 1 in 2 Europeans Visit Newspaper Sites
In November 2011, 181.5 million unique people in Europe visited Newspaper sites, an increase of 9 percent from the previous year. The Daily Mail continued to attract the largest audience at 20.1 million unique visitors, followed by the Guardian at 15.7 million unique visitors. Turkish newspapers Hürriyet and Milliyet and German newspaper Bild rounded out the top five Newspaper properties, with each attracting approximately 10 million unique visitors.

An analysis of the sites visited by Europeans prior to visiting the top 5 Newspaper sites shows that Google Sites preceded at least 12 percent of visits to the top 5 Newspaper sites, with a significantly higher percentage seen for the Daily Mail and the Guardian (more than 23 percent of inbound site traffic). At least 10 percent of visits are preceded by a visit to Facebook, second only to Google Sites. (This data includes both direct referrals from Facebook links and visits initiated by direct user navigation following a visit to Facebook.)

Interestingly, the percentage of traffic to these sites preceded by a visit to Facebook has significantly increased in each case, highlighting both Facebook’s growing prominence in the European web landscape and its increasing ability to drive referral traffic. The percentage of inbound site traffic preceded by a Facebook visit was highest at Turkish site Milliyet, where it accounted for nearly a fifth of traffic (18.9 percent). Facebook visitation also preceded a significant percentage of inbound traffic to the Daily Mail and the Guardian, with both sites at approximately 13 percent, while German newspaper site Bild.de saw an even higher share (14.8 percent). Milliyet, the fifth largest European Newspaper site, demonstrated the highest point change in such traffic (9-percentage point increase), followed closely by the Guardian (8-percentage point increase).

Google Sites continued to rank as the top European web property in November with 347.3 million unique visitors, reaching 91.5 percent of the total European Internet audience. Meanwhile, Russian social network VKontakte continued to display the highest average engagement amongst the top properties, with European visitors spending 438.9 minutes (7.3 hours) on the site. Amongst the fastest growing properties in Europe from October to November were the home improvement retailer Kingfisher (up 21 percent), followed by French film property AlloCiné Sites (up 19 percent). Social networking site LinkedIn.com and daily deals site Groupon also ranked amongst the fastest growing properties, exhibiting a 6-percent month-on-month increase and a 4-percent increase, respectively.

* Amongst the Top 100 online properties

European Internet Usage by Country
Below is a snapshot of European internet usage in the 18 reportable markets for which comScore provides individual reporting. The Russian Internet audience continued to grow and surpass Germany as the largest online market in Europe. The UK continued to show the highest engagement, with users spending an average of 38.2 hours online during the month.

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

NEW YORK – VINDICO, the leading online video ad management platform, has commenced operations in London, Paris and Madrid. VINDICO now offers European advertisers a video ad platform to seamlessly serve, track and measure all of their online video advertising. VINDICO announced the company’s launch into the UK in September and also announced that it had appointed Sonia Fernandez as general manager of European operations at that time.  Since then, VINDICO has launched operations in France and Spain to address the rapidly growing needs of the broader region.

VINDICO’s European expansion comes as IAB Europe’s AdEx reports that digital display, which is inclusive of online video, has recently overtaken search as the fastest growing online ad format in all of Europe, with an average growth rate of 21.3 percent. In the UK specifically, eMarketer predicts video will see the most growth in online advertising, with ad spend forecasted to reach $850 million by 2015, compared with $150 million in 2011. In Spain, the online video market will reach 33 million euros in 2012, accounting for 3.7 percent of total online display ad spending, according to the IAB Europe.

“Demand for online video advertising is surging in many European markets, and we expect this explosive growth to continue in 2012,” says Matt Timothy, president of VINDICO. “The growth that VINDICO is experiencing in both the US and abroad is representative of marketers’ increasing investment in digital video. With operations in the UK, France and Spain, VINDICO is well positioned to meet the needs of advertisers to reach European consumers through the powerful medium of online video.”

VINDICO has deep market penetration, serving almost forty percent of all online video ads in the United States. The company provides video advertising management solutions to over 200 brands through their leading agency groups such as GroupM, Havas, IPG, Publicis and Omnicom.

About VINDICO:
As the first ad management platform dedicated exclusively to video, VINDICO allows advertisers to serve, track and measure all of their online video ad activity. Since 2006, VINDICO has been the gold standard in online video platforms, providing standardized reporting and analytics for the online video industry. The power of online video isn’t just the audiences it reaches and how it reaches them. Its strength also derives from its ability to track an ad campaign and precisely measure the campaign’s effectiveness. For more information, please visit http://www.vindicogroup.com or follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/VINDICO_Group.

See the infographic below and find out which ads were seen and shared the most; there are many interesting findings but perhaps the most important one is that conceptual advertising appears to be significantly more palatable than the usual platitudes and assumptions that surround big brands sports advertisements.

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.

NRF 101st Annual Convention & Expo
AUSTIN, Texas & NEW YORK – Digby, the leaders in multi-channel mobile engagement and commerce, announced today the launch of Digby Localpoint, a revolutionary new mobile platform that enables location-based marketing, analytics and commerce for top brands. Through powerful web-style analytics into shopping activities at a brand’s physical locations and effective, targeted location-aware mobile messaging tools, Digby Localpoint enables brands to attract, influence, understand and own the relationship with their loyal customers across all channels.

How it works – Digby Localpoint enables brands to create geo-fences around their stores and other points of interest and embed those geo-fences into the brand’s app. Digby then leverages its patent pending technology to measure app engagement and events such as geo-fence entries/exits, store visits, UPC/QR Code scans and other key shopping-oriented events triggered through the app as the consumer visits the store and uses their smartphone to find and research products to enhance their in-store shopping experience. The brand can then deliver rich, targeted messages in real-time for these various events directly to the branded app through a robust marketing campaign creation and management system. Consumers can then buy through the commerce functionality of the app or in the store, enabling brands to take a significant leap forward in understanding and influencing the consumer’s multi-channel buying experience.

Localpoint can be added to a current branded app through a Software Developer Kit (SDK) or in a rich application developed by Digby. Digby will showcase Localpoint at the National Retail Federation (NRF) Big Show in New York City, booth #653.

“Multichannel retailers in particular should recognize that they need a twofold objective with their smartphone presences: enabling sales, but also serving store shoppers,”¹ stated report author Sucharita Mulpuru, VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc. “Because the primary use cases of mobile devices are to support multi-channel experiences (e.g., finding more product information in stores, identifying store locations), it is imperative to include multichannel sales influence in any mobile ROI estimates.”²

Key components of the Digby Localpoint Platform include:

• Analytics – Localpoint Analytics deepens the understanding of mobile consumer behavior around and within specific locations. It provides web-style analytics on brand and consumer engagement within the store so brands can, for the first time, gain valuable insight into these in-store behaviors to serve their customers better in the future.

• Outreach – Localpoint Outreach enables brands to directly communicate through their app to drive loyal customers to specific locations with regional or local promotions. Brands can send unique “Deal of the Day” offers that are time and location sensitive where it is most logical for consumers to receive them – close to where they work, live and play.

• Venue – Localpoint Venue influences consumers with triggered promotional offers and messages on entry, exit, and during their visit. Brand campaigns can be sent upon using the app when locating a store, checking in, scanning a UPC/QR code, searching for a product, rating a product, and even watching a product video.

• Storefront – Localpoint Storefront is based on Digby’s long and successful history of providing the best-in-class mobile shopping experience for more than 50 top brands so consumers can easily search browse and buy when at home, mobile, and in the store.

“The ability for marketers to connect with customers locally is rapidly becoming an indispensable part of effective, contextually relevant, consumer engagement,” said Michael Becker, Mobile Marketing Association Managing Director, North America. “Innovation that improves the flexibility and effectiveness of mobile commerce and helps educate marketers on how to better engage consumers responsibly and sustainably, delivers value to the entire marketplace.”

Digby Localpoint helps brands:

- Effectively engage with consumers through their own branded app, based on their preferences and buying habits

- Understand when their most loyal customers visit their locations

- Uncover conversion rates for products purchased in retail stores

- Drive traffic to their places of business with location-sensitive marketing programs

- Influence buying decisions

- Enable consumers to search, browse and buy products from their smartphones whether they are at home, on the go or in the store.

“Digby Localpoint provides brands with the ultimate opportunity – the power to know where their consumers are and the ability to personally engage with them based on their individual preferences and desires,” said Dave Sikora, President and CEO of Digby. “We are extremely excited about the positive feedback we have received from our current retail customers and new prospects about Digby Localpoint and look forward to helping brands implement it as a part of their overall multi-channel strategy.”

To learn more about Digby Localpoint, visit www.digby.com

1)”The State Of Retailing Online 2011: Marketing, Social, And Mobile,” Forrester Research, June 3, 2011

2)”Mobile Commerce Forecast: 2011 To 2016,” Forrester Research, June 17, 2011

About Digby

Digby helps brands achieve their strategic multi-channel goals – to drive store traffic, engage with consumers in the store, enable mobile commerce and provide web-style analytics to the physical retail store – all through their own branded mobile experience. Powered by the Digby Localpoint Mobile Platform, Digby delivers mobile websites, applications and SDKs designed for smartphones that empower brands to optimize their mobile strategy across all channels. Solely focused on enabling top brands since 2006 and with more than 50 top retailers already enabled including Bed Bath and Beyond, Cabela’s, Toys “R” Us, The Home Depot, Wet Seal, Brooks Brothers, Golfsmith, Orvis and many more, Digby is the leading provider of multi-channel mobile engagement and commerce for brands. Learn more about us at www.digby.com.

INDIANAPOLIS – Are you thinking to yourself, “another social network in 2012? Why should I consider using it for my business?” The short answer: Google+ is tied to Google search, so by using it skillfully, you can improve your website’s findability. Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything, new from Que Publishing, helps business professionals leverage this new social network for promotion, customer service, community building, referrals, and collaboration.

Launched in July 2011, Google+ is currently adding 625,000 new users a day, and may reach a total of 400 million members by the end of 2012.* In Google+ for Business, author Chris Brogan explains why Google+ is the next big thing, how he sees Google’s popular applications linking together for stronger business appeal, and how Google+ is built to make sharing content and information easy and effective.

Brogan shows readers the ins and outs of this social network in order to:

- Take advantage of links between Google+ and Google search

- Design a business page that attracts new paying customers

- Integrate Google+ into current online/digital strategies

- Learn how customers are using Google+–and give them what they’re looking for

- Master Google+ tools such as Circle and Hangouts

-Create Google+ posts that draw attention and spark conversations

- Google+ for Business is part of Que’s Biz-Tech series, designed for executives and marketers to gain skills in emerging technologies for their business needs. The title is available in print and eBook formats (for Kindle, NOOK, iPad and other e-readers) through book retailers, Safari Books Online subscription (http://safari.informit.com), and Que Publishing (http://www.quepublishing.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0789749149).

About the Author

Chris Brogan is the New York Times bestselling co-author of Trust Agents, a professional speaker, and president of Human Business Works. He has been involved with social networks since the BBSes of the 1980s, and began blogging in 1998, when it was still called journaling. Brogan co-founded the international unconference experience, PodCamp, which teaches media making to individuals worldwide, and has keynoted many major corporate, technology, and web culture events. Featured monthly columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine, Brogan consults with Fortune® 100 companies such as PepsiCo, GM, and Microsoft on the future of business communications and social technologies.

About Pearson

The world’s leading learning company, Pearson is home to such respected brands as Addison-Wesley Professional, Cisco Press, Exam Cram, IBM Press, Prentice Hall Professional, Que Publishing, Sams Publishing, and VMWare Press, which have as their online publishing arm, InformIT (www.informit.com) -The Trusted Technology Learning Source. In addition, Berkeley-based Peachpit (www.peachpit.com), the publishing partner for Adobe Press, Apple Certified, and others, publishes best-selling books for creative design professionals. Pearson is also co-founder, with O’Reilly Media Inc., of Safari Books Online (http://safari.informit.com), the premier on-demand digital library providing thousands of expert reference materials through a single point of contact, including expert technology, creative and design, business and management resources in video and text formats. Que is part of Pearson (NYSE: PSO), the world’s leading learning company.

San Francisco – In a recent survey of more than 450 advertising executives, marketers said that they will be allocating nearly 60% of their online budgets to brand advertising in 2012, indicating that spending on online branding may surpass spending on direct response advertising for the first time in the coming year. Some other top line findings from the report:

- 64% of marketers plan to increase their online brand advertising budgets in 2012, with 22% saying they will increase spending by more than 20%.

- In contrast, only 56% of marketers plan to increase their online direct response advertising budgets in 2012, with only 15% saying they will increase spending by more than 20%.

- Additionally, 60% of marketers responding indicated that they are allocating dollars away from direct response to brand advertising initiatives.

“These growth predictions are clearly optimistic, but very encouraging nonetheless,” says Dan Beltramo, CEO of Vizu, an online ad technology company that enables advertisers and publishers to measure and optimize Brand Lift in real-time. “There’s still more that needs to be done in order to realize those numbers and make online the medium of choice for brand advertisers. I believe that when brand advertisers understand that their online ads can now be measured and optimized using classic offline brand metrics such as awareness and purchase intent, we will see a further growth in their online ad budgets.”

Marketers agreed with Mr. Beltramo. When asked what would lead them to increase spending on online brand advertising:

·       Nearly 7 in 10 (68%) said “Improved clarity around the actual return on brand advertising investment.”

·       A majority (56%) also cited the “Ability to verify my brand advertising created the desired result (e.g. increased awareness of my product).”

·       In addition, a majority of respondents (53%) indicated the “Ability to use the same metrics to evaluate brand advertising effectiveness online as are used offline.”

“These issues are all indicative of a ‘metrics morass’ in the online medium, which often leads to information overload for brand marketers when trying to determine the efficacy of their advertising,” adds Mr. Beltramo. “In fact, 34% of respondents described themselves as ‘drowning in data’ when it comes to the online channel.”

Brands and agencies are in agreement on which metrics they would like to use to determine the effectiveness of online brand advertising:

- In the top spot, 8 in 10 of both agency and brand respondents said: “Brand Lift generated as a result of the advertising.”

- A majority (over 50%) of both also agree on “Sales generated as a result of the advertising.”

The survey also identified several opportunities to improve collaboration between brands and their partners in the digital media ecosystem, and maximize the value of online brand advertising initiatives:

Alignment around objectives:

- A vast majority (85%) of brands said it was “very important” to establish the primary marketing objective for a brand advertising campaign, and the metric used to measure performance against that objective, in advance of their campaign.

- Three quarters (73%) of media sellers also highlight the importance of this alignment, saying agreement around “what constitutes success” for the campaign was the number one thing that would help them improve results for advertisers.

- Unfortunately, only 18 percent of agencies said they are able to establish a single objective against which ROI will be measured with their clients in advance of a campaign.

Alignment around metrics used to measure performance against objectives:

- Brand marketers clearly indicate by a wide margin (55%) that they’d prefer to use “the exact same metrics used in the offline medium, and a few additional metrics specific to the online medium.”

- Media sellers, however, by a large margin (77%), say that they’re most likely to report only metrics related specifically to the online medium.

Alignment around metrics used to optimize performance against objectives:

- Nearly all brand marketers ranked “in-market optimization of campaigns against brand metrics” as “very important.”

- Agencies, however, said they are primarily optimizing against various measures of engagement (58% of the time) or even click-through rates (19%), as opposed to Brand Lift (16%).

- Not surprisingly, media sellers’ answers mirrored those of the agencies with whom they work.

“There are obviously opportunities to improve online brand advertising outcomes by ensuring everyone’s on the same page,” says Mr. Beltramo, “and our customers leverage Vizu’s technology to do just that. The last 10 years was the decade of direct response marketing online, but this will be the decade of online branding, and we’re excited to be a part of that.”

This study, conducted in November and December of 2011, was executed by Digiday and sponsored by Vizu Corporation. Download the full report here: http://brandlift.vizu.com/knowledge-resources/research/2012-industry-outlook/

You can also benchmark your organization’s brand advertising practices against industry best practices identified in this report here: http://brandlift.vizu.com/knowledge-resources/brand-ad-iq/

Digiday (www.digiday.com) is a media company and community for professionals who work in the digital media, marketing and advertising industry. Its mission is to connect the industry with insightful analysis and perspective, as well as each other. They provide key insights and information through their online publications and conferences that cover the changes, trends — and why they matter. They cover the industry with an expertise, depth and tone not find anywhere else. See Digiday.com to read or subscribe to their publications or for information on events; join Digiday LinkedIn or Facebook groups; follow them on Twitter @Digiday or their show commentary with #Digiday; or tune into live-streamed and archived video coverage of their events on their Livestream channel.

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

New York – MediaBrix (www.mediabrix.com), the leading social media advertising platform offering the most powerful way to simplify and optimize brand advertising across the social web, today announced that it has hired Manny Berrios as its Chief Technical Officer and Sandro Camarao as Vice President of Product Management. Both are newly created positions based in the rapidly-growing company’s New York headquarters.

In an online technology career that spans 16 years, Mr. Berrios was the Co-founder and Chief Technology Evangelist at Axle Digital, where he helped online retailers take advantage of advancements in social shopping; Chief Technology Officer for Adgregate Markets; and Co-founjayer and CTO at AdFast Media LLC, an agnostic data delivery platform that could be used for high traffic/high volume distributive rich internet applications. Earlier in his career Mr. Berrios held senior technology positions with Palisades Holdings; InTRUST Technologies; ICON CMT Corporation; UGO Networks; Lehman Brothers and Videograf @ctive Media.

Mr. Camarao comes to MediaBrix from Kenzan Media where as a Vice President, he worked on various interactive advertising and video products with leading MSOs. Before that he was VP Product Development & Co-founder at JOGO Media and before that was Senior Product Manager at FalkAG. His 13 year career in Product Developments also includes senior level positions with  Cablevison, Gist Communications, Inc,  and 24/7 Real Media.

“MediaBrix is thrilled to be adding the technical expertise that Manny and Sandro bring says, Jay Drago, COO of MediaBrix. “Their depth of knowledge and experience will allow us to dramatically accelerate the development of our pivotal social products, furthering the company’s position a the leading social advertising platform for brands.”

MediaBrix (www.mediabrix.com) simplifies the creation, buying, optimization and measurement of social media advertising.  It provides agencies and advertisers a single solution for all of their social advertising objectives to an audience of over 500 million both online and via mobile devices.  MediaBrix’s effective and comprehensive suite of social media advertising products, including Social Flex, Social Views and Social Pulse enables marketers to deploy, monitor and optimize campaigns across apps, games and major social venues including Facebook and LinkedIn.

For application and game developers, wanting to monetize the majority of users who do not purchase virtual goods, MediaBrix has built Social Flex as an easy to use monetization platform that can be delivered through any browser based application and giving developers access to growing agency and advertiser social media spend.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Ace Metrix, the authority of television advertising effectiveness, announced the most effective ads overall and across 23 different categories for 2011, a list that represents the top one-half of one percent of all television ads to break in 2011. KitchenAid’s minute-long ad demonstrating its innovative food processor is the Ace Metrix Ad of the Year, achieving the highest Ace Score (699) of all ads in 2011. The Ace Metrix 2011 Top Ads list is the only list that represents the effectiveness of the top television creative by category as derived from a ranking of every new ad to air nationally in the year.

“Storytelling was a powerful creative tool for advertisers in 2011, as we saw from KitchenAid’s Ad of the Year and ads from Google that have put them on the map as a true brand marketer,” said Peter Daboll, CEO of Ace Metrix. “But to be a top ad, you need to deliver more than just ‘likeability,’ which is just one of the many criteria that go into an Ace Score. The highly effective ads on this list need to score well with consumers on multiple dimensions, such as relevance and information. It is an extremely high bar to be on the Ace Metrix ‘Ad of the Year’ list, which represents the best of the best. Our hats go off to the agencies, brand teams, and production teams that achieved this honor.”

In addition to storytelling, product innovation was a dominant theme for 10 of the 23 top category ads.

“Ads that demonstrated product innovation clearly knocked the socks off of consumers,” Daboll said. “The KitchenAid ad did this, as well as ads for Apple’s iPhone, Microsoft Kinect, BMW, and Kindle—which replaced Apple’s iPad as the top tablet ad this year. But what was interesting is that brands that you don’t immediately associate with innovation—like Lysol, Sears, and Columbia—used this kind of messaging very effectively too.”

Many of the top ads of 2011 also included messaging that demonstrated:

- Philanthropy, like Coca-Cola’s top-ranked “Arctic Home” ad that benefits the World Wildlife Fund or MasterCard’s “Stand Up to Cancer” Ad featuring Ray Romano.

- Value for money, like Olive Garden’s top-ranked “Something New for Lunch” ad, which also portrays appealing food imagery and achieved the second highest combination of relevance and desire of all ads in 2011 – a key sweet spot for restaurant advertisers.

- Environmental themes, like BMW’s top-ranked “Ch-Ch-Changes” ad that broke during the 2011 Super Bowl and promotes the company’s “advanced diesel” technology.

- Humor, like Snickers’ top-ranked ad portraying sharks participating in a focus group, which drove high “watchability” scores.

- Patriotism, like Budweiser and State Farm’s September 11th Tribute ads, the top ads of the year in the alcoholic beverage and insurance categories, respectively. These ads’ persuasion, likeability, and attention scores were instrumental in distancing them from other ads in their categories.

The Ace Metrix Ads of the Year, by Category (All ads can be viewed here)

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

Ace Metrix will reveal the Brand of the Year 2011 on Monday, January 9, 2012.

About Ace Metrix

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

NEW YORK – [x+1], www.xplusone.com, the leading digital marketing platform provider, announced the release of the newest version of its digital marketing hub, [x+1] Origin 3.0. The new release adds enhanced capabilities and user interface improvements that allow marketers to realize the vision of real-time multi-channel decisioning – the intelligent execution of a company’s offers and messages.

With [x+1] Origin, the decisioning of customer and prospect experiences occurs across websites, landing pages, display media, email, mobile apps and devices and offline direct marketing.

[x+1] Origin 3.0 is the only platform that integrates an industry-leading Data Management Platform (DMP) with a patented decision engine to enable individual, data-driven user experiences across consumer touchpoints. Origin seamlessly integrates the data and decisioning modules with the Media+1 Demand Side Platform (DSP), the Site+1 website personalization solution and Funnel R/F attribution analytics and reporting capabilities to enable unprecedented control of complex decision logic for reaching customers and prospects. [x+1] is the only company offering this level of real-time marketing integration.

The new version of [x+1] Origin also includes enhanced data synchronization, at-a-glance dashboard-based reporting and data visualizations that deliver improved performance and greater efficiency.

Here is an example of how it works:

A customer of a cable company visits the website as she considers a premium movie package. [x+1] Origin’s DMP captures this behavior, which places the user in an interest segment. The decision engine then determines the best offer for the user, based on potential lifetime value and any eligibility restrictions. That offer is then automatically provisioned in the next email drop, echoed in display ads, on her iPad when accessing the cable company’s mobile app, and delivered again on the next visit to the website. If the user does not respond after several exposures to the offer, the next best eligible offer is presented. If the user reaches the call center, the agent can be informed of the current offer being presented online.

The advanced, customizable dashboard views in [x+1] Origin also allow marketers to see at a glance how customer and prospect segments are performing against campaign objectives. Based on these insights, they can make critical determinations like whether “purchase intender” data is performing better than a control group, while honing and refining audience selection by building more “look-alike” segments of those responding to an offer.

With its web services Application Programming Interface (API), [x+1] Origin’s DMP also gives marketers added data security and the flexibility to determine a single customer attribute or multiple attributes in a single database query, allowing for more complex decision logic and more precise targeting.

While other DMPs only syndicate data or audience segments to partners that execute display media, [x+1] Origin is a fully integrated hub that manages data and makes decisions that can be executed across channels, with advanced analytics, reporting and optimization.

“Fortune 500 marketers are seeking to accelerate the speed, flexibility, performance and multi-channel integration of their customer acquisition and retention plans,” said John Nardone, Chairman and CEO of [x+1]. “With version 3.0 of [x+1] Origin, we’ve met all those goals with a system architected from the ground up to deliver the kind of synchronized message personalization and coordination that enhances customer experiences and drives repeatable, measurable results.”

For more information on [x+1] and digital marketing integration, visit www.xplusone.com; follow us on twitter @xplusone.

RESTON, VA  – comScore (NASDAQ : SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, reported that retail e-commerce spending for the entire November – December 2011 holiday season reached $37.2 billion, marking a 15-percent increase versus last year and an all-time record for the season. Ten individual shopping days this season surpassed $1 billion in spending, led by Cyber Monday – which ranked #1 for the second consecutive year – at $1.25 billion.

* 2010 data incorporates seasonal adjustment factor to account for different number of weekdays and weekends in 2010 and 2011. Actual (i.e. non-seasonally adjusted) 2010 number was $32.589 billion.

“The 2011 online holiday shopping finished with slightly more than $37 billion in spending, up about 15 percent versus year ago,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “With brick-and-mortar holiday retail estimated to have grown about4 percent this year, it’s clear that e-commerce continues to gain market share from traditional retail due to the attractiveness of the Internet’s convenience and lower prices. Consumers were especially attracted to the deals and discounts available through digital channels – particularly free shipping, which occurred on well over half of transactions this season. Despite their continuing price sensitivity, consumers felt a bit more comfortable opening up their wallets this year, although this appears to have occurred as a result of a decline in the savings rate. Nonetheless, it’s clear that, at least on the basis of top line growth, this was a Merry Christmas for many online retailers. What will remain unknown until retailers report their financial year end results is whether the aggressive pricing and free shipping offers came at the cost of lower margins.”

Top 10 Online Spending Days of 2011 Holiday Season

Cyber Monday (Monday, Nov. 28) ranked as the heaviest online spending day of the year at $1.251 billion, the second consecutive year it has ranked #1 for the season. The 2011 holiday season was highlighted by ten individual spending days surpassing $1 billion in sales, as compared to just one day reaching that mark in 2010. The second heaviest spending day this season was Monday, Dec. 5 at $1.178 billion, followed by Green Monday (Monday, Dec. 12) at $1.133 billion. Tuesday, Nov. 29 ($1.116 billion) and Tuesday, Dec. 6 ($1.107 billion) rounded out the top five.

Weekly Online Holiday Retail Sales

About comScore

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

When it comes to top SEO priorities, digital brand executives are making sure that they understand the impact on search marketing and optimize for social signals including Likes, tweets and Google +1s, indicating that they have an increasing need for tools to leverage these insights in the coming year. In the past year it has become widely recognized that social signals are a new form of backlinks that drive search rankings, and leaders are committed to succeeding in this new arena.

The report also uncovered that brands are expecting their search marketing systems to have the enterprise-grade technology championed by cloud pioneers like salesforce.com. This includes security and associated certifications like ISO 27001, reliability and proven strategies for disaster recovery, and scalability to support customer needs.

The need for global support increased by more than 55 percent, with more than 70 percent indicating that their search programs are being run in multiple countries.

“The fact that so many executives are looking for things like enterprise-grade infrastructure, social signal measurement and global reach means that brands are focused on leveraging this technology for mission critical operations,” said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. “At BrightEdge we have focused our technology team to be sure that we have what leading search marketers need in 2012.”

For more on BrightEdge’s annual search marketers survey, please visit www.brightedge.com/2012-search-marketers-survey-results. To join the discussion about the findings, please visit us at www.facebook.com/seoplatform, or follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/brightedge.

About BrightEdge
BrightEdge is the leading site, search, and social management solution for global enterprises, helping more than 1,100 of the world’s largest brands stay ahead in the rapidly evolving Internet landscape. BrightEdge S3 drives more than $4 billion in organic search across industries, harnessing the power of analytics to drive revenue from web sites, search engines and social networks across the globe in a measurable, predictable way. BrightEdge is based in San Mateo, CA and is privately held with financing from Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures and Illuminate Ventures.

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

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

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

About Guohe

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

Boyle expects to see more marketing dollars spent to maximize the ROI while brand image spending will take a back seat to moving product. The winners in 2012 will be those brands that can capitalize on innovative experiential marketing opportunities and treat each prospect as a unique customer.

“We are convinced that brands that are able to create programs that effectively engage consumers and then utilize social media to amplify their impact will have a distinct edge on their competition,” Boyle reported. “We are seeing brand managers demanding us to move them to the forefront of today’s event-driven digital social media environment. And these same brand managers are continuing to demand that their marketing partners to do even more than before,” he added.

Since 2008, brand managers have been forced to operate with minimal internal staff resources. Experiential marketing firms are becoming a key strategic resource and partner in high demand by brand managers. Even as the economy improves they don’t anticipate staff growth but instead see their marketing partners take on an even greater role to pick up the slack.

UNDER THE RADAR is recognized for creating brand experiences that “fly beneath” today’s conventional marketing clutter. UNDER THE RADAR believes brand managers are seeking ways to effectively combine social media with event driven consumer experiences. As a result, the firm is developing programs for brands that range from street theater to dramatic musical and theatrical events all with a social media interaction.

“When creating an experience we try everything, we optimize everything today. Our clients demand that brand events entertain, communicate, motivate and exceed their result goals,” Boyle added.

Boyle joined UNDER THE RADAR earlier this year and is responsible for leading marketing strategy, client service and business development. Boyle has 30 years of consumer brand building experience and has held leadership positions.

About UNDER THE RADAR

UNDER THE RADAR is a Chicago-based experiential marketing agency dedicated to designing and executing marketing campaigns that connect consumers digitally and with real world live experiences to brands. As a result, UNDER THE RADAR creates authentic and relevant experiences that “fly beneath” conventional marketing clutter and engage consumers where they live, work, shop and play. The UNDER THE RADAR teams also work on projects in both the corporate and product event arenas. Their approach to projects keeps them sharp and ensures that leading-edge, highly pollinated creative styles enhance every client engagement. By today’s pop culture definition, if something is under the radar, it isn’t detected or noticed but yet it can be special and have a very significant impact. For more information about UNDER THE RADAR, visit: www.utrexp.com.

EMERYVILLE, Calif. – Lyris, Inc. (OTCBB: LYRI.OB), the global digital marketing expert, released “The Lyris Email Report: Five Strategies to Jumpstart 2012.” Crafted from market research surveying more than 500 marketing professionals, this report identifies the top concerns and challenges marketers face and offers recommendations to overcome these challenges and plan for an effective 2012. In this report, Lyris reveals actionable and practical solutions for connecting with customers, achieving better deliverability and leveraging customer intelligence to make online communications count.

As 2011 comes to a close, Lyris asked marketers what was on their minds looking ahead to 2012. The responses show that metrics and reporting, smart segmentation, analytics, customizable tools and engaging with full service partners and vendors top the list of concerns for marketing leaders. In fact these challenges remain top of mind throughout the marketing organization.

The Lyris Email Report: Five Strategies to Jumpstart 2012 addresses these concerns with practical steps to achieve success in the following:

- Understanding advanced algorithms that link your customers and products

- Executing smart segmentation for relevant, targeted content

- Leveraging metrics and reporting to drive business results

- Implementing an integrated solution approach that makes it easier to do more

- Using full-suite email marketing solutions to maximize your email program

“Marketers need to move quickly and make sophisticated connections with their customers to make an impact. And they need to do it in a simple, meaningful way,” said Tina Stewart, senior vice president of marketing at Lyris. “We wanted to provide marketers with actionable strategies to achieve success and profitability in the New Year. Utilizing the tactics outlined in the Lyris report, email marketers can learn how to gain better customer insight, make sense of data and stay up-to-speed with the digital world in 2012.”

About Lyris, Inc.

Lyris, Inc. is the global digital marketing expert, delivering the perfect blend of technology and industry knowledge to help businesses achieve value with their email marketing campaigns. Lyris’ high-performance, secure and flexible email marketing platforms, Lyris HQ and Lyris ListManager (Lyris LM), optimize email efficiency by providing automated email delivery, robust segmentation and integrated social, mobile, search and analytics. The Lyris solutions portfolio is comprised of both in-the-cloud and on-premises email marketing solutions – Lyris HQ, Lyris LM – combined with customer-focused services and support. We understand the unique needs of companies and build solutions for marketers that deliver quantifiable ROI and true business value. www.lyris.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the other findings explored in this report include:

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

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

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

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

Methodology

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

About the IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence

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

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

About the IAB

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

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – StrongMail, a leading provider of interactive marketing solutions for email marketing and social media, today announced the results of its “2012 Marketing Trends” survey, which provides unique insight into how businesses plan to budget and prioritize marketing dollars in the New Year. Conducted in November 2011, 939 business leaders participated in the global survey.

Survey Highlights

- 92% plan to increase or maintain marketing spend in 2012

- 60% plan to increase email marketing budget; 55% social media; 37% mobile/search (tied)

- 45% cite data integration as primary email marketing challenge in 2012; 43% lack of resources/staff; 40% content management

- 48% cite increasing subscriber engagement as top 2012 email marketing initiative; 44% improving segmentation/targeting; 32% growing opt-in email list

- 68% plan to integrate email marketing with social media; 44% with mobile; 17% with search
Marketing Budgets Remain Healthy; Email and Social Media Attract Increased Investment

Email marketing (60%) and social media (55%) were cited as the top two areas for increased marketing spend. According to the survey, 51% of businesses plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2012, and another 41% plan to maintain current levels. Only 8% of respondents plan to decrease marketing budgets, which is a slight increase over the 7% reported in last year’s survey. Other areas of increased spend included mobile and search, which are tied at 37%. Direct mail (28%) and tradeshows (23%) are top targets for decreased spend.

Subscriber Engagement is Top Email Marketing Priority; Data Integration is Top Challenge

The top email marketing initiatives for 2012 are increasing subscriber engagement (48%), improving segmentation and targeting (44%) and growing opt-in email lists (32%). Data integration is key to achieving these top priorities, but it is also identified as the primary email marketing challenge in 2012 (45%), followed by lack of resources (43%) and content management (40%). These opposing data points represent an opportunity for email service providers to fill the gap with relevant services.

Marketers Focus on Integrating Email Marketing and Social Media

More than two-thirds of businesses plan to integrate social media and email in 2012, versus 44% integrating mobile and email. The strong ties between email marketing and social media are also emphasized by the 47% of businesses that plan to increase investment in using email to drive growth in their social media channels, such as corporate Facebook and Twitter pages. The next popular areas of investment are batch promotional (44%) and newsletter (39%) programs, followed by real-time lifecycle marketing programs (35%), with an emphasis on winback (68%) and welcome (59%) programs.

Marketers Unclear on Value of Mobile Marketing

More than a third of businesses plan to increase their investment in mobile marketing programs such as mobile apps (29%) and SMS alerts (20%), but there is a lack of consensus on the primary value of this emerging channel. Building customer and loyalty (35%) was identified as the top benefit, followed by expanded reach (29%) and awareness building (28%). However, this is offset by a similar percentage still trying to figure it out (24%) and a smaller percentage citing no value at all (7%).

“While email marketing leads the pack in terms of increased investment in 2012, the data also reveals that marketers need to overcome key challenges around data integration and resource constraints,” said Christopher Marriott, vice president of agency services at StrongMail. “Whether managing and optimizing existing email marketing programs or enabling integration with social media and mobile, there is a real opportunity for full-service email marketing providers like StrongMail to help companies get the most out of their interactive marketing investments in 2012.”

Survey Data

Full survey data is available at: www.strongmail.com/2012marketsurvey

About the Survey

The StrongMail “2012 Marketing Trends Survey” was conducted in conjunction with Zoomerang. The poll, which gathered feedback from 939 business executives in a wide range of industries, was conducted from November 16 – 29, 2011.

For more information on email marketing trends, tips and best practices, visit our Email Marketing Insights blog.

About StrongMail Systems, Inc.

Every day, StrongMail is empowering leading brands to engage and grow their customer base through email marketing and social media. From the world’s largest enterprises to the hottest daily deal sites, StrongMail is helping smart marketers boost the performance of their programs with cutting-edge lifecycle email marketing capabilities and the ability to deliver millions of highly personalized messages in minutes. Our products and services provide end-to-end solutions for such notable brands as Travelocity, Macy’s, McAfee, Viacom and T. Rowe Price. Learn more at www.strongmail.com, or follow us online at www.twitter.com/StrongMail or www.facebook.com/StrongMail.

NEW YORK – Two leading mobile advertising organizations, Crisp Media and Smart Device Media today announced that they have combined to create a full-service mobile advertising powerhouse. The combined company will continue doing business under the name – Crisp Media. Jason Young, Smart Device Media co-founder and former Ziff Davis CEO, will assume the role of CEO of Crisp Media.

This combination brings together Crisp’s market leading, rich media advertising platform with Smart Device Media’s unparalleled media marketplace of targeted, brand safe, premium inventory. As a combined business, Crisp Media will offer brands, agencies, and publishers a unique set of product solutions to enable high quality brand advertising to successfully extend to mobile and other emerging device platforms.

With the mobile ad market in the US expected to grow to over $4 Billion by 2013 according to Forrester Research, the activity level of larger brand marketers is ramping quickly. “We are seeing the inflection point of major brand marketers starting to embrace mobile platforms as an important part of their marketing mix,” said Tim Bajarin, President of Creative Strategies, a leading technology and mobile research firm.

Crisp Media expects to offer significant and unrivaled benefits to publishers and advertisers, including:

- Crisp’s industry leading HTML5 based rich media platform and Crisp Engage, the self service mobile ad management framework, which together enable the building, serving, and measurement of high impact rich media advertising on mobile and other emerging device types using open, industry ad formats (ORMMA, MRAID).

- The combined scale of the Smart Device Media and Crisp Select media marketplaces, matching premium brand advertisers with premium mobile inventory.

- An experienced services organization capable of executing award winning creative campaigns globally.

“As our clients look to extend their advertising activities into mobile environments we need partners that can offer turnkey solutions delivering best of breed capabilities in ad formats, ad targeting, and ad measurement,” said Michael Collins, CEO of Joule, a mobile marketing agency that is part of the WPP Group. Crisp Media will be uniquely positioned to offer open, scalable, and efficient solutions to meet these needs.

Crisp Media will provide publishers with a comprehensive solution set to help them create compelling advertising experiences that will provide high levels of reader engagement and maximum yield for their inventory. “As our audiences interact more frequently with our content brands via mobile based platforms, we are focused on creating the very best advertising solutions for our marketing partners,” said Cameron Clayton, EVP Digital, The Weather Channel.

“The mobile ad market is at the critical stage where premium brands are starting to play significantly,” said newly appointed Crisp Media CEO Young. “Yet because barriers to buy still exist, the premium market demands an integrated set of solutions optimized for its unique needs. Crisp Media will be a catalyst for the industry, by bringing together an unrivaled combination of platform, products, services, and team expertise.”

Boris Fridman, the outgoing CEO of Crisp Media, will continue to serve as a board member. “The combination of these two perfectly complementary businesses fulfills the vision Crisp Media has been working toward. The new Crisp Media will be an even stronger partner for the brands, publishers, and agencies we serve today,” added Fridman.

About Crisp Media

Crisp Media is a pioneer of mobile ad products that make HTML5 advertising scalable across device platforms for native apps and browsers. Crisp Engage, an interactive ad platform designed to deliver the slickest ads to multiple screens, enables agencies to easily build, manage and measure rich media advertising campaigns on connected devices. Crisp is also a founding member of the Open Rich Media for Mobile Advertising (ORMMA) standard API, an Open Source project for letting agencies deliver HTML ads to native applications. Leading brands — including GM, Ford, Toyota, VW, IBM, Intel, HP, Procter and Gamble, Unilever, Coca-Cola, HBO and Paramount Pictures — have run Crisp ads. For more information visit www.crispmedia.com

About Smart Device Media

Smart Device Media is a leading provider of mobile, premium display, special interest advertising channels. Smart Device Media offers brand marketers the ability to reach premium, targeted audiences at scale within high-quality editorial environments, and publishers an unparalleled ability to monetize their premium ad inventory with transparency.

Company web site: www.smartdevicemedia.com

NEW YORK — PointRoll, a Gannett Company and the leading provider of digital marketing technology, reports record growth in online shopping this year as consumers dive into Black Friday deals early. PointRoll reported a 14 percent increase in retailers’ digital circular offers powered by ShopLocal technology from 2010 to 2011 and an overall 15 percent increase in page views across the top ten retailers. As a result, consumers drove double-digit percentage increases over 2010 in website traffic (49 percent) and page views (65 percent) for the Sunday before Thanksgiving (November 20, 2011). Early offers and Black Friday promotions encouraged early action by consumers.

As technology continues to change consumer shopping behavior, retailers responded in full force this season. PointRoll’s multiple marketing and advertising distribution platforms saw increases, year over year, in traffic and offers for pre-Black Friday shopping. Mobile device usage was up five percent and consumers accessing offers via iPads grew by 85 percent over 2010 figures with most of this increased use and access taking place the Sunday preceding Black Friday. On that day mobile and iPad access increased by 234 and 223 percent respectively compared to 2010 levels.

“Online holiday shopping continues to happen earlier and consumers are now preparing on Sunday rather than waiting until after Thanksgiving dinner to identify the best offers,” said Rob Gatto, CEO of PointRoll. “Additionally, consumers are expanding where and how they shop online and in-store while retailers are looking to capitalize with more localized and dynamic, audience targeted offers and advertisements delivered across multiple platforms.”

Even procrastinators did not delay as long as usual – possibly motivated by an increase in midnight Black Friday sales. Historically, PointRoll reports that 10pm EST is the highest traffic hour for Thursday, as consumers look for that final offer before beginning their shopping. This year, 9pm EST was the peak hour, with traffic still remaining strong at 10pm.

About PointRoll
PointRoll, a Gannett Company (NYSE: GCI), is the leading provider of digital marketing services and technology. PointRoll enables advertisers, agencies and Web publishers to create, deliver and measure interactive and action-inspiring online video, rich media display, digital circulars, mobile, and social campaigns. Delivering both the art and science of the digital engagement, PointRoll provides the creative tools, analytics, distributed content, and expertise marketers need to effectively engage consumers and make a memorable and measurable impression. PointRoll’s ShopLocal technology enables brands to distribute local marketing promotions to any digital format including online circulars, display advertising, Facebook, digital out of home, mobile, and more – with added intelligence. Powering 46 of the top 50 retailers’ circulars, PointRoll’s ShopLocal product suite utilizes advanced localization and learning to deliver more relevant and optimized product and promotion content to any digital platform. For more information, visit http://www.pointroll.com or follow us @pointroll.

SAN MATEO, Calif. – BrightEdge, the leading site, search and social management platform for global enterprises, today announced release of its BrightEdge Adobe®Genesis™ integration with the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite. Through Adobe Genesis integration with BrightEdge, customers will now get side-by-side views and deeper insights into critical marketing information including BrightEdge SEO performance metrics, Adobe web analytics, and both organic and paid search results across both companies. The solution is Adobe Genesis Accredited on the latest Adobe Genesis 3.0 release.

The BrightEdge and Adobe Genesis partnership gives customers integration across BrightEdge SEO and both Adobe® SiteCatalyst® and Adobe® SearchCenter+. BrightEdge-Genesis combines global enterprise BrightEdge SEO technology & breakthrough social media tools with Adobe’s industry-leading Digital Marketing Suite in a streamlined integration to deliver maximum impact and higher ROI. This collaboration will allow customers insight into competitor traffic volume and enable them to successfully stay at the forefront of SEO, web analytics, and paid search.

“Digital marketers can seamlessly integrate site traffic, conversion and paid search marketing data with organic search marketing tools,” says Christopher Parkin, Strategic Alliances and Genesis Solutions at Adobe. “By combining the comprehensive search engine coverage and international support BrightEdge S3 offers with the Adobe SiteCatalyst, marketers can easily align organic search traffic data with other key business metrics. This value is further amplified for search marketers using the integration between the BrightEdge S3 platform and Adobe SearchCenter+, as they can now easily create bid strategies based on both paid and organic keyword activity as well as deliver unified reports and rich keyword expansion opportunities.

“We commend BrightEdge on its Adobe Genesis Accreditation, which is a rigorous process that has become the industry ‘gold standard’, ensuring the joint solution is technologically sound, repeatable, and proven to deliver tangible ROI to our mutual customers,” added Parkin.  “The BrightEdge team was great to work with throughout the joint development and successful, multi-customer beta.”

“We are excited to work with Adobe, as this partnership and integration will make it easy for marketers to gain global insights into their site, as well as paid and organic search marketing,” says Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. “Additionally, it will also yield improved site and search performance and help customers gain a competitive edge in the long run.”

Feedback from customers has been very positive. Jason Price, Executive Vice President at Hospitality E-Business Strategies who has been testing the integration for a leading hospitality industry client said, “The integration of organic and paid search plus web analytics delivers a complete picture of what the data really means.  With this integration, SearchCenter bid rules can return higher ROI because we better understand the true value of a keyword, rather than just its paid search value.”  And for Nathan Janitz at Resolution Media “Genesis’ integration of BrightEdge S3 into the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite allows us to have one interface to manage our clients SEO and analytic performance.”

The BrightEdge and Adobe Genesis collaboration will provide customers new capabilities, including:

- 2-way integration of web analytics and SEO, combining Adobe SiteCatalyst and BrightEdge SEO so users can see paid and organic rank, onsite engagement or conversions metrics in one report

- Paid and Organic results integrated so users can better optimize Adobe SearchCenter+ paid search bidding rules

- Support for the latest Genesis release ­ – Genesis 3.0

- Support for unlimited numbers of SEO keywords, keyword groups, and business units

- SEO results for over 40 countries and major search engines from the ISO-security-certified BrightEdge platform

The integration is available today for all customers. For more information, please visit the Adobe Genesis Showcase, go to www.brightedge.com, or contact your BrightEdge sales representative.

About BrightEdge

BrightEdge is the leading site, search, and social management solution for global enterprises, helping more than 1,100 of the world’s largest brands stay ahead in the rapidly evolving Internet landscape. BrightEdge S3 drives more than $4 billion in organic search across industries, harnessing the power of analytics to drive revenue from web sites, search engines and social networks across the globe in a measurable, predictable way. BrightEdge is based in San Mateo, CA and is privately held with financing from Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures and Illuminate Ventures.

For more information, please visit www.brightedge.com, friend us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/seoplatform or follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/brightedge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Millennial Media

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

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

LOS ANGELES – Encore Media Partners’ managing partner, Cristopher Levy, will present a session entitled “Leveraging Mobile Marketing to Drive Attendance, Engagement and Value” at the International Association of Exhibitions and Events (IAEE) Annual Meeting & Exhibition, Dec. 6 – 8, 2011, in Las Vegas.

“The explosive growth of the mobile platform is creating exciting, new marketing opportunities, which are clearly being embraced by show organizers,” said Cristopher Levy, Managing Partner, Encore Media Partners. “We look forward to sharing our ideas on mobile marketing at this major industry event, and are confident participants will leave this fast-moving, information packed session with takeaways they can apply to their shows immediately.”

The session, scheduled for Thur., Dec. 8, 11:00am – 12:15pm, will focus on key mobile trends, capabilities and best practices, and how event marketers can benefit from mobile marketing. Participants will hear live examples of how some of the world’s leading events are using mobile media and technologies, including SMS, MMS, QR codes, RFID, mobile apps, mobile web sites, mobile email and mobile social networking. The session will also look at the implications of HTML5, and the marketing possibilities offered by an NFC-enabled future.

“For those of us who believed in the future of mobile marketing, Steve Jobs gave us the device that would forever change our industry and our world,” said Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) CEO Greg Stuart in an October 5, 2011 statement on the passing of Steve Jobs. In a tribute to this visionary icon, Encore is pleased to offer the first 100 attendees at the session a complimentary copy of the new book “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson.

About Encore Media Partners

Encore is an audience strategy, marketing and media buying agency, which specializes in local, national and global trade and consumer shows and other types of events. Encore collaborates with leading show producers on “live” audience acquisition across multiple industries, domestic and foreign markets and traditional, digital and mobile media platforms. More information is available at www.EncoreMediaPartners.com.

BOSTON, MA – DataXu (www.dataxu.com) today announced the launch of DX3.  DX3 is the only fully-integrated digital marketing management platform.  DX3 enables marketers to acquire and retain more customers by optimizing across the most profitable audience segments, media channels, and creative messages. Using DX3, marketers can improve campaign performance by up to 2X and save millions of dollars on media, technology and service fees.

The deluge of consumer behavioral data created by ubiquitous computing presents an historic opportunity and challenge for the CMO.  The rapid evolution of digital media, and the accompanying proliferation of hard-to-implement point solutions, has made it difficult to formulate and act on enterprise-wide decisions driven by the effective use of real-time customer intelligence.

Industry experts are taking notice.  In the September 2011 Forrester Research Inc. report, “The Future of Digital Media Buying,” report author and senior analyst Joanna O’Connell observed that the demand-side platform (DSP) model would evolve, alongside data management and analytics capabilities, into an integrated enterprise solution. “DMP/analytics platforms and centralized media buying platforms will increasingly merge into a unified stack.” That vision is now a reality with the launch of DX3.

DX3 provides users with an easy-to-use console, powered by industry-leading machine learning technology, that enables marketers to use Big Data to make fast, intelligent decisions that drive sales. This unique approach to digital marketing helps organizations gain a better understanding of their customers and achieve the most profitable conversion rates in the industry. And because DataXu does not own media or data, it is a neutral “referee” that creates brand-specific algorithms to continuously optimize marketing investments against unique business objectives.  Additionally, for marketers who need more “hands on” help, DataXu provides expert advice and custom solutions that have come to define data-driven innovation and competitve advantage.

“Today’s way of working with digital media is broken and everyone knows it,” said Mike Baker, Co-Founder and CEO of DataXu. “The biggest challenge for CMOs is creating value from the flood of consumer data as everything goes digital.  DX3 is a game changer  because it allows marketers to use their existing digital investments to discover real-time consumer insights that drive sales.”

DX3 provides marketers with a simple console that enables continuous testing and learning to improve key business decisions. DX3 brings together:

·         Programmatic buying of a Demand Side Platform (DSP) across  display, social, mobile, and video, and premium private, guaranteed, and exchange-traded media.

·         Active analytics™ – scalable, multivariate automated decision-making – that  converts consumer and campaign insights into actions in real time to  generate better results and save marketers time and money.

·         Unified audience management capabilities combining both 1st-party data and more than 20,000 3rd-party segments to create custom audience segments that drive higher customer acquisition and retention.

·         Multitouch attribution-aware buying that allocates spending to the best-performing media channels, partners, and data, across all digital channels.

“We need a way to capitalize on vast amounts of data – enterprise to digital marketing – in real time,” said Jonah Spegman, Director of Digital Media/Marketing for Scripps Networks. “DataXu has accomplished something unique with DX3 – managing the lifecycle of digital marketing in one centralized platform. By taking full control of our data and cutting out middlemen, we can now make decisions quickly and work with a clearer understanding of how best to reach lucrative digital audiences.”

About DataXu

DataXu has developed the industry’s only fully-integrated digital marketing management (DMM) platform – DX3. DX3 defines a new class of enterprise solutions that manage, optimize, and automate digital marketing initiatives to turn Big Data into profitable actions. DataXu’s executive team unites leading executives in digital media with MIT technologists. The private company is backed by Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners and Menlo Ventures. For more information, visit www.dataxu.com or follow us on Twitter at @dataxu.

ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, NJ  – Already a leader in Smart TV products, LG Electronics has expanded its offerings for television application developers, content distributors and advertisers with the world’s first integrated advertising platform for Smart TV applications. The company’s complete ad solution includes in-app advertising support incorporated into LG’s app development SDK, management and optimization of the publisher’s ad inventory, and ad monetization through LG’s alliance with YuMe.

LG Electronics developed the LG advertising platform to strengthen the ecosystem of developers, publishers and users, creating a mutually beneficial platform in which developers can maximize revenues and users receive targeted, relevant and engaging advertisements. The global, multi-device platform offers advertisers the immersive engagement of the TV’s large-screen experience combined with the interactive engagement of digital media.

YuMe and LG announced today that Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc., the U.S. arm of global automotive manufacturer Toyota, is the charter advertiser on LG Smart TVs.

“For advertisers like Toyota, the LG ad platform can be the third screen complementing on-line and mobile digital campaigns with an in-home shared viewing experience. As users discover the expanding content and application offerings on LG’s Smart TVs and connected devices, usage is growing rapidly which will provide advertisers with the audience and reach for both broad and targeted campaigns,” said Sam Chang, general manager of LG’s Smart TV Innovation Development Group based in San Jose.

“Toyota customers are watching video online, on their mobile phones and on TV, and we are excited to be able to reach this previously unreachable audience on Smart TVs,” said Dionne Colvin, national marketing media manager, Toyota.  “At Toyota, we pride ourselves on our innovative approach to advertising, and as media consumption habits change, we see a real opportunity to further engage consumers through YuMe and LG.”

Publishers will be able to make use of the accessible, real-time reporting system and a host of other features. The LG ad platform, powered by YuMe’s ACE Relevance Engine, is a turnkey solution for publishers, which manages publisher ad inventory to optimize ad CPMs and supports a variety of ad sales models including YuMe’s Connected Audience Network.  Because the LG ad platform is integrated into LG Smart TV HDTVs, Blu-ray Disc™ players, Smart TV Upgraders and other LG Smart TV platforms, advertisers can run their campaigns on these devices as well as other connected CE devices participating in YuMe’s Connected Audience Network.

“The LG ad platform will enable several common digital ad formats such as interactive display banners, in-banner video and in-stream video as well as some new ad units such as click to sponsored applications and search related ad units,” Chang said. “This combination of LG’s innovative Magic Motion remote control allowing for point and click control of applications and YuMe’s advertising technology opens the way for developers, publishers and content owners  to develop new content and ad models on one of TV’s most intuitive systems.”

LG and YuMe will be running pilot ad campaigns in the United States with several leading advertisers starting in November with broader advertiser participation planned for the spring of 2012.

For more information on the LG Smart TV Solution, please visit: www.lgad.lgappstv.com

ORLANDO, Fla. – Gartner, Inc. highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2012. The analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through October 20.

Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. These technologies impact the organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives.

“These top 10 technologies will be strategic for most organizations, and IT leaders should use this list in their strategic planning process by reviewing the technologies and how they fit into their expected needs,” said David Cearley, vice president and Gartner fellow.

“Organizations should start exploratory projects to look at promised candidate technology and kick off a search for combinations of information sources, including social sites and unstructured data that may be mined for insights,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2012 include:

Media Tablets and Beyond. Users can choose between various form factors when it comes to mobile computing. No single platform, form factor or technology will dominate and companies should expect to manage a diverse environment with two to four intelligent clients through 2015. IT leaders need a managed diversity program to address multiple form factors, as well as employees bringing their own smartphones and tablet devices into the workplace.

Enterprises will have to come up with two mobile strategies – one to address the business to employee (B2E) scenario and one to address the business to consumer (B2C) scenario. On the B2E front, IT must consider social goals, business goals, financial goals, and risk management goals. On the B2C front, which includes business to business (B2B) activities to support consumers, IT needs to address a number of additional issues such as surfacing and managing APIs to access enterprise information and systems, integration with third-party applications, integration with various partners for capabilities such as search and social networking, and delivery through app stores.

Mobile-Centric Applications and Interfaces. The user interface (IU) paradigm in place for more than 20 years is changing. UIs with windows, icons, menus, and pointers will be replaced by mobile-centric interfaces emphasizing touch, gesture, search, voice and video. Applications themselves are likely to shift to more focused and simple apps that can be assembled into more complex solutions. These changes will drive the need for new user interface design skills.

Building application user interfaces that span a variety of device types, potentially from many vendors, requires an understanding of fragmented building blocks and an adaptable programming structure that assembles them into optimized content for each device. Mobile consumer application platform tools and mobile enterprise platform tools are emerging to make it easier to develop in this cross-platform environment. HTML5 will also provide a long term model to address some of the cross-platform issues. By 2015, mobile Web technologies will have advanced sufficiently, so that half the applications that would be written as native apps in 2011 will instead be delivered as Web apps.

Contextual and Social User Experience. Context-aware computing uses information about an end-user or objects environment, activities, connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end-user or object. A contextually aware system anticipates the user’s needs and proactively serves up the most appropriate and customized content, product or service. Context can be used to link mobile, social, location, payment and commerce. It can help build skills in augmented reality, model-driven security and ensemble applications. Through 2013, context aware applications will appear in targeted areas such as location-based services, augmented reality on mobile devices, and mobile commerce.

On the social front, the interfaces for applications are taking on the characteristics of social networks. Social information is also becoming a key source of contextual information to enhance delivery of search results or the operation of applications.

Internet of Things. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that describes how the Internet will expand as sensors and intelligence are added to physical items such as consumer devices or physical assets and these objects are connected to the Internet. The vision and concept have existed for years, however, there has been an acceleration in the number and types of things that are being connected and in the technologies for identifying, sensing and communicating. These technologies are reaching critical mass and an economic tipping point over the next few years. Key elements of the IoT include:

- Embedded sensors: Sensors that detect and communicate changes are being embedded, not just in mobile devices, but in an increasing number of places and objects.
- Image Recognition: Image recognition technologies strive to identify objects, people, buildings, places logos, and anything else that has value to consumers and enterprises. Smartphones and tablets equipped with cameras have pushed this technology from mainly industrial applications to broad consumer and enterprise applications.
- Near Field Communication (NFC) payment: NFC allows users to make payments by waving their mobile phone in front of a compatible reader. Once NFC is embedded in a critical mass of phones for payment, industries such as public transportation, airlines, retail and healthcare can explore other areas in which NFC technology can improve efficiency and customer service.

App Stores and Marketplaces. Application stores by Apple and Android provide marketplaces where hundreds of thousands of applications are available to mobile users. Gartner forecasts that by 2014, there will be more than 70 billion mobile application downloads from app stores every year. This will grow from a consumer-only phenomena to an enterprise focus. With enterprise app stores, the role of IT shifts from that of a centralized planner to a market manager providing governance and brokerage services to users and potentially an ecosystem to support entrepreneurs. Enterprises should use a managed diversity approach to focus on app store efforts and segment apps by risk and value.

Next-Generation Analytics. Analytics is growing along three key dimensions:

1. From traditional offline analytics to in-line embedded analytics. This has been the focus for many efforts in the past and will continue to be an important focus for analytics.

2. From analyzing historical data to explain what happened to analyzing historical and real-time data from multiple systems to simulate and predict the future.

3. Over the next three years, analytics will mature along a third dimension, from structured and simple data analyzed by individuals to analysis of complex information of many types (text, video, etc…) from many systems supporting a collaborative decision process that brings multiple people together to analyze, brainstorm and make decisions.

Analytics is also beginning to shift to the cloud and exploit cloud resources for high performance and grid computing.

In 2011 and 2012, analytics will increasingly focus on decisions and collaboration. The new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action.

Big Data. The size, complexity of formats and speed of delivery exceeds the capabilities of traditional data management technologies; it requires the use of new or exotic technologies simply to manage the volume alone. Many new technologies are emerging, with the potential to be disruptive (e.g., in-memory DBMS). Analytics has become a major driving application for data warehousing, with the use of MapReduce outside and inside the DBMS, and the use of self-service data marts. One major implication of big data is that in the future users will not be able to put all useful information into a single data warehouse. Logical data warehouses bringing together information from multiple sources as needed will replace the single data warehouse model.

In-Memory Computing. Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. In addition, it offers a new layer of the memory hierarchy in servers that has key advantages — space, heat, performance and ruggedness among them. Besides delivering a new storage tier, the availability of large amounts of memory is driving new application models. In-memory applications platforms include in-memory analytics, event processing platforms, in-memory application servers, in-memory data management and in-memory messaging.

Running existing applications in-memory or refactoring these applications to exploit in-memory approaches can result in improved transactional application performance and scalability, lower latency (less than one microsecond) application messaging, dramatically faster batch execution and faster response time in analytical applications. As cost and availability of memory intensive hardware platforms reach tipping points in 2012 and 2013, the in-memory approach will enter the mainstream.

Extreme Low-Energy Servers. The adoption of low-energy servers — the radical new systems being proposed, announced and marketed by mostly new entrants to the server business —will take the buyer on a trip backward in time. These systems are built on low-power processors typically used in mobile devices. The potential advantage is delivering 30 times or more processors in a particular server unit with lower power consumption vs. current server approaches. The new approach is well suited for certain non-compute intensive tasks such as map/reduce workloads or delivery of static objects to a website. However, most applications will require more processing power, and the low-energy server model potentially increases management costs, undercutting broader use of the approach.

Cloud Computing. Cloud is a disruptive force and has the potential for broad long-term impact in most industries. While the market remains in its early stages in 2011 and 2012, it will see the full range of large enterprise providers fully engaged in delivering a range of offerings to build cloud environments and deliver cloud services. Oracle, IBM and SAP all have major initiatives to deliver a broader range of cloud services over the next two years. As Microsoft continues to expand its cloud offering, and these traditional enterprise players expand offerings, users will see competition heat up and enterprise-level cloud services increase.

Enterprises are moving from trying to understand the cloud to making decisions on selected workloads to implement on cloud services and where they need to build out private clouds. Hybrid cloud computing which brings together external public cloud services and internal private cloud services, as well as the capabilities to secure, manage and govern the entire cloud spectrum will be a major focus for 2012. From a security perspective new certification programs including FedRAMP and CAMM will be ready for initial trial, setting the stage for more secure cloud computing. On the private cloud front, IT will be challenged to bring operations and development groups closer together using “DevOps” concepts in order to approach the speed and efficiencies of public cloud service providers.

About Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the world’s most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives. This event delivers independent and objective content with the authority and weight of the world’s leading IT research and advisory organization, and provides access to the latest solutions from key technology providers. Gartner’s annual Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of attendees’ annual planning efforts. IT executives rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organizations can use IT to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency.

More exclusive content, expanding multi-media coverage, including Twitter feeds and comments from the Gartner Blog Network are available Gartner’s SymLive at www.gartner.com/us/symposium.

Follow Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

Follow news, photos and video coming from Gartner Symposium/ITxpo on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/GartnerSym, on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Gartner_inc and using #GartnerSym, on flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/27772229@N07/.

Upcoming dates and locations for Gartner Symposium/ITxpo include:
October 25-27, Sao Paulo, Brazil: www.gartner.com/br/symposium
November 7-10, Barcelona, Spain: www.gartner.com/eu/symposium
November 14-17, Gold Coast, Australia: www.gartner.com/au/symposium
November 21-23, Mumbai, India: www.gartner.com/in/symposium

About Gartner

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company. Gartner delivers the technology-related insight necessary for its clients to make the right decisions, every day. From CIOs and senior IT leaders in corporations and government agencies, to business leaders in high-tech and telecom enterprises and professional services firms, to technology investors, Gartner is a valuable partner to 60,000 clients in 11,500 distinct organizations. Through the resources of Gartner Research, Gartner Executive Programs, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events, Gartner works with every client to research, analyze and interpret the business of IT within the context of their individual role. Founded in 1979, Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.A., and has 4,500 associates, including 1,250 research analysts and consultants, and clients in 85 countries. For more information, visit www.gartner.com.

SES Chicago 2011
CHICAGO – Incisive Media announced the addition of two mobile marketing panels at SES Chicago, taking place November 14-18, 2011 at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. Scheduled for Thursday, November 17, “Smart Mobile Marketing” and “Search on Mobile Devices: The Next Frontier” go beyond current mobile marketing strategies being implemented by search and social media marketers, and inspire new tactics to gain the competitive advantage.

“Smart Mobile Marketing” will focus on actionable mobile best practices that convert to leads and sales. Speakers will cover how to incorporate the latest local and universal SEO tactics into a company’s online marketing mix and how to measure results.

“Search on Mobile Devices” addresses the lack of good search capabilities in mobile, particularly the problems with desktop search. The most pressing question will be tackled: Who will step up to the plate and develop a truly sophisticated user interface for mobile search?

Incisive Media is offering a special savings of up to $400 for those who register for SES Chicago prior to October 21.

Joining the mobile revolution, SES launched its free mobile app at SES San Francisco in August with much success. With more than 5,000 people in attendance, there were 6,000 downloads with an average of each download being accessed five times per day. Using the SES mobile app, conference attendees could review the conference agenda and events calendar to create their own personal schedule. It also provided up-to-the-minute news from ClickZ and Search Engine Watch. It can be downloaded through Apple iTunes at http://bit.ly/raxPxg. It is also available for Blackberry and Android devices at http://bit.ly/omc4zC.

“Like everyone these days, we are on the mobile bandwagon, but we wanted to take it a bit further with our mobile marketing curriculum at SES Chicago,” said Matt McGowan, Managing Director of Americas at Incisive Media. “I’m sure attendees will agree with our selection of the two – one to fully integrate mobile into their marketing strategies and one to put a little pressure on the industry to come up with more streamlined mobile search capabilities.”

“We’re really excited that we got the SES mobile app up and running, too. It’s a great vehicle for expanding the reach of our conferences. Attendees can connect with each other, find out what companies are exhibiting, determine which speakers they don’t want to miss, and decide which special events to attend,” continued McGowan.

Incisive Media is offering a special savings of up to $400 for those who register for SES Chicago prior to October 21.

About SES

Incisive Media’s SES Conference & Expo is a leading global conference and training series focused on search engine marketing. Other Incisive resources include ClickZ, which provides digital marketing news, information, commentary, advice, opinion, and research and Search Engine Watch, which covers news and information about search, analysis of the search engine industry, and offers tools for improving search marketing effectiveness.

Incisive Media is a leading global provider of specialized business news and information in print, online, and in person. The company’s principal markets include financial services, legal services, commercial real estate, marketing services, and risk management. Incisive Media’s market-leading brands include Accountancy Age, Computing, Investment Week, Legal Week, Post, Risk, and SES Conference and Expo. For more information, visit www.incisivemedia.com.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. & SYDNEY – Efficient Frontier today announced that it has extended its international footprint with the acquisition of Downstream Marketing, the largest provider of digital marketing technology and services in Australia. The acquisition provides an opportunity to accelerate growth internationally as well as across emerging mediums such as social and mobile. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“The acquisition of Downstream Marketing represents a key milestone for Efficient Frontier as we capitalize on the huge market opportunity that exists outside of the U.S.,” said David Karnstedt, CEO and President of Efficient Frontier. “By acquiring a market leader in a key growth region, we will be able to provide new opportunities for our global customer base.”

Downstream Marketing has been a partner of Efficient Frontier since 2006, licensing its platform and providing search and display marketing for its clients. Downstream Marketing has captured significant market share, having grown twice as fast as the general market. They serve many of the leading digital marketers in the region including American Express, Avis, Sun Corporation, Vodafone, Westpac and Weight Watchers.

“For the past five years, Downstream Marketing has successfully deployed Efficient Frontier’s platform to manage digital marketing for our name-brand clients,” said Steve Knowles, CEO of Downstream Marketing. “We’re excited to officially join forces with them to expand our product offerings in our market as well as provide additional global reach to Efficient Frontier’s existing client base.”

Per the Australian Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), online advertising expenditure in Australia reached $2.45 billion, up 20% YOY in the 12 months ending June 30, 2011. Search was up 23% YOY, and Display was up 12% YOY. The online advertising business is on track to surpass $3 billion in 2012.

About Efficient Frontier

Efficient Frontier is a leader in online digital marketing, managing search, display and social media campaigns for advertisers and agencies around the world. Efficient Frontier currently manages more than $1 billion in annual digital marketing spend on behalf of its clients globally.

In May 2011, Efficient Frontier acquired Context Optional, the leading provider of social marketing management solutions for global brands on the leading social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Context Optional’s Social Marketing Suite enables global enterprises to build, manage and measure their brand presence, and engage their fans to increase mindshare, word of mouth, customer loyalty and website traffic. Together, Efficient Frontier and Context Optional offer a complete solution for brands to acquire, activate and drive value from fans and followers.

Efficient Frontier is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in New York, Chicago the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and India, and technology licensing partnerships in Japan and Hong Kong. Context Optional is headquartered in San Francisco. Efficient Frontier is a privately held company with funding from Redpoint Ventures and Cambrian Ventures. For more information on Efficient Frontier, visit http://www.efrontier.com and for Context Optional visit http://www.contextoptional.com.

About Downstream Marketing

Downstream Marketing is Australia’s leading provider of digital performance marketing solutions, managing search, social and display advertising for a range of clients across the financial services, travel, technology, telecommunications and online retail sectors. Utilizing market-leading optimization technologies developed by Efficient Frontier, Downstream Marketing maximizes performance from digital marketing investment by household brands in Australia & New Zealand. Headquartered in Sydney, Downstream Marketing services clients located across Australia and New Zealand.

NEW YORK – Online targeting platform leader [x+1], www.xplusone.com, announced the availability of Media-Aware Home Pages, a new solution that connects display media experiences with personalized website messaging by going beyond clicks to leverage user interactions across the entire Internet. The launch follows a three-month joint development beta period with a consumer subscription services client.

Media-Aware Home Pages know what online media consumers have been exposed to even if they didn’t click on a display ad. It then uses this information to empower marketers to provide more relevant and consistent website messages to improve campaign engagement and performance. With a focus on quality at scale, Media-Aware Home Pages don’t retarget publisher audiences.

“This solution distinguishes [x+1] from ad technology providers who require clicks in order to capture and leverage customer experience data,” said Toby Korner, Vice President of Client Solutions for [x+1]. “With click-through rates (CTR) for online ads averaging only about 0.2% to 0.3%, this process is very limited in reach. Media-Aware Home Pages open up vast new opportunities for marketers to tailor messages to audiences they couldn’t before, going beyond the click to deliver greater content and message relevance and results.”

Media-Aware Home Pages work with [x+1]’s Media+1 and Site+1 products, and are fully integrated with Origin, [x+1]’s Digital Marketing Hub. Benefits include:

- The integration of display ads with website content personalization for a consistent consumer experience
- Better-performing websites
- More insight and understanding of online behavior

For example, a man visits a sports-themed website and is exposed to a company’s ad. Later, if he searches for the company or its product, or visits the company’s site, the Media-Aware Home Page creates a consistent site experience specifically geared to him and his interest in sports – even though he never clicked on an ad.

“The more personalized someone’s online experience and interaction with a brand, the more likely they’ll be to take a desired action – a registration, a purchase,” said Korner.

Using a tracking pixel, Media-Aware Home Pages record who was served which ad and where. When a user later visits a company’s activated Media-Aware Home Page, either through search or typing in a URL, [x+1]’s patented Predictive Optimization Engine (POE) leverages sophisticated mathematical models to determine the optimal messaging for the webpage based on the user’s previous site and ad exposure.

The process happens automatically and in milliseconds, eliminating any manual creation of landing pages by the marketer.

About [x+1]

For more information on [x+1] and digital marketing integration, visit www.xplusone.com; follow on twitter @xplusone.

ad:tech London 2011
LONDON – Research results from global marketing technology and solutions company Upstream, have found that despite three quarters (78 per cent) of marketers believing that customers are more likely to respond to game-based marketing mechanics, only a quarter (27%) have actually used gamification tactics in their campaigns.

The research, conducted at digital marketing conference ad:tech London 2011, questioned delegates about their understanding and use of game mechanics and dynamics in marketing strategies and found that two thirds of marketers (66%) did not fully comprehend the term gamification. Once respondents had been briefed on its definition, 64 per cent of marketers stated they felt game mechanics would improve relationships with their customers.

The findings also revealed that the jury is out over which rewards prompt the best response from gamified marketing campaigns. The most popular response from marketers was free products, which 34 per cent said would be most engaging. This was followed by cash (25 per cent), a high value single prize (24 per cent) and points (11 per cent).

The research also highlighted a rise in budgets available to marketers to innovate campaigns, with 87 per cent stating that they would be increasing investment in marketing technologies over the next twelve months.

Guy Krief, Senior Vice President of Innovation, Upstream, who gave the seminar ‘Gamification and Mobile: Press Start’ at Adtech said: “With customers being bombarded with promotional messages from brands on a daily basis, we need to help marketers make intelligent use of real-time gamification – moving it from the latest buzz word to the reality of influencing consumer behaviour. Gamification can make the key difference to any marketing campaign, making it more interactive, engaging and exciting for the consumer and more profitable for the brand.

“Although the concept is increasingly on marketers’ radar, the majority of marketers are stuck on the first level and not yet confident about incorporating gamification into their communications strategies, resulting in many millions of individual responses to marketing campaigns being lost.”

Upstream launched real-time personalisation features to its gamification engine earlier this year, to deliver key insights into interactions as they happen, enabling its Marketing Communications Suite

platform to tailor campaigns so that their frequency, progress and content are driven by highly targeted mobile consumer segments, making for a more rewarding and personalised experience. Upstream’s MCS has driven campaigns in more than 40 countries, in 22 languages, for companies such as Vodafone, Telecom Italia, Telefónica and Nestlé.

Methodology

The research was carried out at ad:tech London where 100 marketers were polled about their views, understanding and use of game mechanics and dynamics in marketing strategies.

About Upstream

Upstream is one of the largest mobile marketing solutions providers in the world and a pioneer and innovator in the industry. www.upstreamsystems.com

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – SumTotal® Systems, Inc., the innovator in strategic Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions, today announced that Young & Rubicam Brands (Y&R) has selected SumTotal to build core business disciplines and drive learning strategy at Y&R Advertising and Wunderman, two of Young & Rubicam Brands’ preeminent global marketing communications companies. Leveraging SumTotal’s HR software platform, Young & Rubicam can now better support their diverse employees across the globe and improve customer achievement with a centralized approach to managing their talent.

Young & Rubicam Brands earned their elite reputation for building the world’s largest brand database and management tool. This year the organization earned numerous global accolades. In 2011 Young & Rubicam was named Network of the Year by the Art Directors Club, and also Agency and Network of the Year at Dubai Lynx. They also won numerous Cannes Lions across all regions, including Y&R Thailand’s first gold lion. Additionally at Cannes, Y&R Santiago was the number one awarded agency in Chile and Y&R Dubai was the number one awarded agency in the Middle East.

With a corporate spirit of excellence, the company had a long “wish list” of requirements for their HR technology solution, according to Cindy Zimmerer, Senior Vice President & Director of Learning at Y&R Brands. “We wanted strong core functionality to house, manage, assign, track and measure learning. But, the front end was just as important, particularly because of the creative nature of our business,” Zimmerer said. “We needed a positive user experience, as well as the flexibility to organize and design the site that would reflect our companies’ values, belief and branding. SumTotal met all of these needs.”

With over 13,000 employees at more than 360 offices globally between the two subsidiaries, SumTotal will enable Y&R Brands to provide streamlined learning opportunities to targeted groups by region, office, company and discipline.

“By standardizing employee orientation, building knowledge and experience in core business disciplines, and supporting global client teams, we envision this solution as integral to driving, promoting and supporting each company’s learning and development strategy,” Zimmerer added.

SumTotal provides the industry’s most comprehensive strategic Human Capital Management solution for managing an organization’s learning, performance, compensation, succession, career development, 360 feedback, recruiting & hiring, social collaboration, workforce management, expense management, payroll & benefits, planning & analytics, and core HR management (HRMS) – all from a single vendor.

For more information about SumTotal, visit the company’s website at www.sumtotalsystems.com.

About SumTotal Systems

SumTotal Systems, Inc. is the global leader in strategic Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions that provides organizations with a new level of visibility to help make more informed business decisions and accelerate growth. Recognized by industry analysts as the most complete solution, SumTotal provides full employee lifecycle management, including a core system of record, from a single provider for improved business intelligence. The company offers customers of all sizes and industries the most flexibility and choice with multiple purchase, configuration, and deployment options. We have increased the performance of the world’s largest organizations including Sony Electronics (NYSE: SNE), AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN [ADR]; London: AZN), Amway (KUL:AMWAY), Seagate (NYSE: STX), Dell (NASDAQ:DELL), and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG).

For more information, or to request a demo, please call +1 (866) 768-6825 (US / Canada), +1 (352) 264-2800 (international) or visit www.sumtotalsystems.com.

NEW YORK – Mobile display advertising broadly outperforms online display advertising, according to a new study revealed by Millward Brown’s Dynamic Logic at Advertising Week’s Mobile Media Summit on Wednesday. The study, which offers important “do’s and don’ts” for effective mobile advertising, warned against the repurposing of online creative for mobile and stressed the importance of creative quality, an attribute that has become more necessary as mobile advertising’s novelty erodes.

“Similar to other new advertising mediums, consumers were overwhelmingly receptive to mobile display advertising in its nascency but now that its novelty is wearing out, creative quality matters more than ever,” said Ali Rana, senior vice president and head of Dynamic Logic’s Emerging Media Lab. “Today, poor creative can even have a negative impact on a brand, compared to the past three years when creative quality did not matter as much within mobile display advertising.”

Dynamic Logic revealed three important factors that drive a successful mobile campaign:

1.          The location of a brand name or logo within a mobile ad matters: Left-side brand placement is generally most effective and has a strong impact on advertising recall
2.         Clear and persistent branding is important for brand awareness
3.         A strong call-to-action encourages interactivity and engagement to help drive purchase intent

The three biggest mistakes mobile advertisers make are:

1.          Repurposing online creative by cropping it for a mobile environment
2.         Showing one’s brand only through a product shot
3.         Cluttering ads with too much text or too many logos

These best practices mirror those which Dynamic Logic has established for online creative.

“With only a brief window to capture a consumer’s attention, both mobile and online campaigns need to be well-branded and clear to build awareness,” says Rana.

Why is Mobile Advertising so Effective?

The average mobile campaign has a positive impact on the five traditional brand metrics, especially ad awareness, and significantly outpaces online brand metrics.

While mobile advertising effectiveness is still driven by novelty, it also benefits from the larger proportion of the mobile screen devoted to the advertisement compared to online. In addition, the copy and content are typically more focused due to size and technology constraints. Finally, as consumers become more acceptant of mobile ads, the medium offers better targeting than most media.

Mobile works well at communicating messages for high-involvement categories like financial services; however, some of the best campaigns are found in low-involvement categories like CPG, where ads are more effective in moving persuasion metrics such as favorability and purchase intent.

Picking the Right Mobile Creative

Based on their growing body of evidence that supports the power of strong mobile creative, Dynamic Logic is developing a new copy testing system optimized for the mobile display advertising landscape. In beta now and coming to market later this year, this groundbreaking solution allows agencies and advertisers to optimize their mobile creative and get the most out of their mobile media spend.

Follow Dynamic Logic’s Emerging Media Lab on Twitter @emergist. For more information on mobile measurement solutions, please contact sales@dynamiclogic.com.

About Dynamic Logic

Millward Brown’s Dynamic Logic (www.dynamiclogic.com) is the world leader in digital insights. Founded in 1999 as a pioneer of the digital revolution, Dynamic Logic helped establish the Internet’s true marketing value to businesses by developing solutions that measure beyond click-through to quantify the full brand impact of online advertising. Now, as Millward Brown’s Digital Practice, Dynamic Logic continues to lead the industry — developing innovations to optimize and track digital ad impact, specializing in emerging media platforms, and integrating insights across all digital and non-digital media. For marketers, agencies, and publishers alike, Dynamic Logic offers the most cutting-edge and adaptable solutions to make the most of every digital marketing dollar.

This announcement comes on the heels of the appointments of Nielsen’s Rob Holland as General Manager, DLX CPG and comScore’s Ashley Grace as head of CPG, Client Solutions, as Datalogix continues to build out its talent base to address the growth in demand for its industry leading cross-channel data products.

In his new role, Faldi brings nearly 20 years of senior management experience in both start-ups and public technology companies. Most recently, Faldi held P&L and operational responsibilities in excess of $1 billion of Yahoo!’s global revenues, with specific ownership of its ISP, Mobile and Search Affiliate, and Toolbar businesses. At Datalogix, he will assume responsibility for operations, analytics, product, and marketing, as well as the Datalogix digital network.

“Datalogix’ business requires a blend of enterprise and media savvy that is seldom found in the same individual,” said Eric Roza, President, Datalogix. “Following a year-long search, we met Finn and knew he was the perfect fit to serve as our COO. He has been recognized as one of Yahoo’s most successful senior executives in each of the past four years, and has repeatedly shown an ability to add value in dynamic, highly-competitive environments across both start-ups and public companies. His deep domain knowledge and network within the digital media industry were the icing on the cake for us.”

Faldi joined Yahoo! As Vice President Global Broadband in 2007 and, within a relatively short time, was promoted to manage a number of other product lines, most recently mobile. Prior to Yahoo!, he was a senior executive for start-up Solidus Networks (SN), where he was instrumental in adding more than 100,000 small to mid-sized merchants. Before Solidus, he co-led the business development and sales teams for United Online, Inc. (UOL) – at the time, the third-largest ISP in North America – and was credited as instrumental in their business turnaround in 2002. Finn is also an active investor and advisor to a number of leading digital media companies, including The Search Agency.

“Finn is an exceptional executive and has been a trusted partner to our organization” said Mandy Ginsberg, President, Match.com. “This is an exciting time for the online advertising industry and Datalogix, and I have no doubt with Finn’s leadership and passion for delivering results, he will play a critical role in shaping its future”.

“With the inflow of brand dollars, digital advertisers are becoming more demanding,” said Faldi. “More than any other organization, Datalogix truly understands how to bridge the gap between consumer purchasing and media consumption, a critical link in the chain. I’m looking forward to bringing my operations expertise to a company that’s setting the new standard for how the digital advertising industry will create audiences and measure results moving forward.”

About Datalogix™

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