NEW YORK & SUNNYVALE, Calif. – WPP’s (NASDAQ:WPPGY) GroupM Entertainment and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) announced a partnership to help marketers creatively incorporate their brands into original online programming. The programs will appear exclusively throughout Yahoo!’s network of leading media properties including News, Sports, Finance and Entertainment.

“Marketers need big, ground-breaking ideas that engage and delight consumers, and this partnership with Yahoo! will enable them to create unique high value relationships,” said GroupM Entertainment Worldwide CEO Peter Tortorici, who will administer the partnership for GroupM.

GroupM Entertainment and Yahoo! will work together to identify advertisers, develop creative concepts that map media content with an advertiser’s messaging, and produce the content for each program. Yahoo! will also promote these branded programs to targeted audiences in channels across its network.

“Yahoo! has a keen understanding of what makes our audience click, and this partnership will help advertisers develop deeper connections with our users,” said Joanne Bradford, Yahoo!’s senior vice president, North American revenue and market development. “Furthermore, Yahoo! can continue to build on its successful portfolio of the Internet’s most-watched original programming by tapping into GroupM’s incredible creative development talent.”

Margaret Clerkin, GroupM’s director of digital assets, will assist Tortorici in overseeing the company’s involvement, and Erika Nardini, Yahoo!’s vice president of packaging, will be the representative from Yahoo!.

Both GroupM Entertainment and Yahoo! have extensive experience creating and distributing successful, award-winning programming that provides proven return on investment for their clients.

For example, Yahoo’s TechTicker (http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker), with Scottrade as the advertiser, is the most-viewed business and investing program online averaging more than 350,000 streams per day. Another popular Yahoo! show, Sports Minute (http://sports.yahoo.com/sportsminute), was developed for client Dunkin’ Donuts and averages 175,000 streams per day.

GroupM Entertainment unit Mindshare Entertainment, meanwhile, created In the Motherhood, a series of original webisodes for Mindshare clients Sprint and Unilever’s Suave that was later picked up by ABC Television and developed into the first ever prime time situation comedy to be spun off from an online series developed by a media services agency.

ABOUT GROUPM

GroupM is the leading global media investment management operation. It serves as the parent company to WPP media agencies including Maxus, MediaCom, Mediaedge:cia and MindShare. Our primary purpose is to maximize the performance of WPP’s media communications agencies on behalf of our clients, our shareholders and our people by operating as a parent and collaborator in performance-enhancing activities such as trading, content creation, sports, digital, finance, proprietary tool development and other business-critical capabilities. The agencies that comprise GroupM are all global operations in their own right with leading market positions. The focus of GroupM is the intelligent application of physical and intellectual scale to benefit trading, innovation, and new communication services, to bring competitive advantage to our clients and our companies.

ABOUT YAHOO!

Yahoo! attracts hundreds of millions of users every month through its innovative technology and engaging content and services, making it one of the most trafficked Internet destinations and a world class online media company. Yahoo!’s vision is to be the center of people’s online lives by delivering personally relevant, meaningful Internet experiences. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. For more information, visit http://pressroom.yahoo.com or the company’s blog, Yodel Anecdotal (http://yodel.yahoo.com).

NEW YORK – ad pepper media, the international online advertising network, announced the expansion to the U.S. of the iSense™ Network, the only ad network offering true semantic placement of display media across more than 3,000 content categories. With its award-winning technology and linguistic approach to online advertising, iSense solves the prolific problem of misplaced or out of context online display ads.

iSense Network combines ad pepper’s 10 years of ad network best practice with proprietary cutting edge technology. Underpinning iSense is a patented technology that provides real-time semantic analysis of web pages to identify their true meanings and serve relevant display ads. The result of 11 years of research and development by Professor David Crystal, one of the world’s leading linguists, iSense leverages an extensive semantic ontology in order to derive the subject matter of a page with unprecedented accuracy. Unlike other so-called semantic technologies that use a mathematical approach, iSense benefits from a deeper analysis of each and every word on a page. As a result, publishers profit from targeted ad monetization opportunities on every webpage, while advertisers benefit from more precise ad placement that eliminates wasted impressions whilst increasing contextual relevance and ROI.

“Every word in the English language has nearly three meanings, making sense disambiguation key to adequate and relevant contextual ad placement,” said Sacha Carton, President of iSense and Director of the Board for ad pepper media. “Our semantic approach to the analysis and classification of all the content on a webpage makes contextually relevant page-level targeting of display ads across a broad range of structured and unstructured online media a very effective process.”

Initially launched in the U.K. in January 2008, iSense is already successfully used by more than 200 clients including global brands 3M, EMI, Fujitsu Siemens, HSBC, Microsoft and T-Mobile, and agencies including Mediacom, Universal McCann, Mindshare, OMD and Media Planning.

“The tried and true iSense Network enables advertisers to put to more effective use, the near $5 billion projected to be spent on display ad campaigns in 2009,” said Carton.

iSense is the recipient of the Internet Advertising Bureau UK and E-Consultancy’s Digital Innovator award. Interested publishers and advertisers can visit http://www.isense.net for details on the network.

About ad pepper media

Ad pepper media is a leading independent international online advertising marketers, offering media agencies, advertisers and websites effective online advertising solutions in the areas of branding, performance marketing, affiliate marketing and ad serving.

With 16 branches throughout the U.S. and Europe, ad pepper media manages campaigns for thousands of national and international advertising clients in more than 50 countries worldwide. ad pepper media successfully sets itself apart with an extensive range of efficient marketing solutions, innovative proprietary technology system, and powerful ability to operate internationally so that transnational advertising campaigns can be conducted efficiently. For more information, visit http://www.adpepper.com/.

Seeking market share gains in France

This year Smart AdServer has reinforced its position as a benchmark ad server on the French market, with the signing of 26 new contracts, including Elsevier Masson, SeLogerNeuf, Reader’s Digest selection…

Very strong international growth

With the signing of 30 new contracts for this year and 484% growth in international turnover compared with 2007, Smart AdServer is really speeding up its development in the major European countries and North America.

Smart AdServer is continuing to develop its customer portfolio in Germany and the Netherlands.

Also, this year also saw the beginning of business in Spain, with the signing of almost 10 new contracts in one year, as well as in Great Britain and emerging economies such as Hungary, Poland and Slovenia.

Finally, Smart AdServer has consolidated its positions in Canada (Radio Canada, Trader.ca…).

In 2008, 139% of the French ad server’s business was carried out abroad, compared with 3.5% in 2007. These excellent results confirm Smart AdServer’s considerable potential for development abroad.

2009 OUTLOOK

Smart AdServer plans to strengthen its organisation to best exploit market opportunities and maintain optimum service quality. Investment will be made in the areas of customer monitoring, commercial development in the different geographical areas targeted, as well as in technical innovations to the advertising campaign management and distribution tool.

About Smart AdServer (www.smartadserver.com)

Smart AdServer SAS develops and markets one of the main adserving technologies for the management of online campaigns for media agencies and publishers. Created in 2001, the company Smart AdServer has soon become a key player in France, posting the fastest growth in Europe in terms of customers compared with its competitors, thanks to the innovative and unique functionalities offered by its product, and its ease of use. Smart AdServer has 150 customers for 1200 sites spanning four continents.

Among its clients are large media agencies such as Zed digital, Starcom, Mindshare, Mediacom, Mediaedge:cia, Universal McCann, Brilliant Media … as well as a large number of sites and companies, including PIXmania, Toms’s Hardware (Bestof media US), Reed Business, Axel Springer Hungary & Poland, Radio Canada, MSD Global, Wolters Kluwer, La Vanguardia, Canal+, Curse Gaming, Amiado…

NEW YORK – Eyeblaster announced Channel Connect for Search, a new tool that allows agencies and advertisers to look beyond the last click to fully understand the consumer; where they’re going, how they got there and why. Leading agency Mindshare New York and major brand LG Electronics are among those already using Channel Connect for Search, to get an in-depth look at the consumer’s path to conversion across search, standard banners and rich media.

“Using Channel Connect for Search and Display, Mindshare was able to pinpoint crucial campaign data and draw important insights about the interaction of our search and display ads,” says Harry Case, Director of Media Analytics and Technology at Mindshare. “In the end, it provided us with a more comprehensive overview of user behavior.”

In extensive beta testing with leading brands worldwide, Channel Connect for Search demonstrated a substantial lift in search keyword performance by display advertising. It also showed the contribution of different publishers to cross channel conversions. Channel Connect for Search offers advertisers the flexibility to integrate any search marketing tool, revealing important information about the user’s path to conversion and the consumer experience.

“Last click, single channel methodologies are a misrepresentation of the consumer experience,” said Gal Trifon, CEO and Co-founder of Eyeblaster. “The need for better touch points between various digital elements makes Channel Connect for Search a vital solution for marketers.”

About Channel Connect for Search

Channel Connect for Search produces a clear picture for advertisers, agencies and brands that show how one channel affects another. The path to conversion analysis takes into account all publishers in the user’s path, looking way beyond the last click and allowing marketers to diagnose how different digital channels influence each other. Channel Connect for Search supports the existing SEM tools and native search engines, proving to be easily adoptable for customers using different vendors and quick and simple to use.

About Eyeblaster

In 1999, Eyeblaster was among the pioneers in rich media communication. Today, Eyeblaster extends its inventive heritage in digital advertising through Ad Campaign Manager (ACM). ACM enables interactive agencies, advertisers and publishers to manage campaigns across digital media channels, including online, mobile and in-game, and a variety of formats, including rich media, in-stream video, display and search. ACM is a robust, integrated and easy-to-use platform that allows customers to focus on campaign strategy, creativity and media efficiency without having to worry about the technical complexities associated with managing global advertising campaigns online.

In 2007, Eyeblaster delivered campaigns for nearly 7,000 brand advertisers serving approximately 2,500 ad agencies across over 2,700 global web publishers in over 40 countries worldwide throughout North America, South America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa and the Middle East. Learn more at http://www.eyeblaster.com.

As part of a multi-faceted campaign that crosses multiple borders, the widgets leverage Eyeblaster’s digital expertise and technology to enhance user experience and brand integration for one of the most well-known brands on the planet.

“We’re excited to launch one of the largest global video widget campaigns ever,” said Mike Cookson, content and media director at Nike EMEA. “AKQA’s creative ability, MindShare’s leading distribution strategy and Eyeblaster’s targeting technology is enabling Nike to distribute content in ever-smarter ways.”
NIKE’s new campaign uses ad-unit content distribution (ACD) to extend the reach of NIKE branded football films found on its groundbreaking NIKEFootball website. AKQA designed the NIKE widget to showcase video using well known sporting and media celebrities to deliver NIKE branded content directly from a video banner ad to social networks, homepages, blogs, etc.

“NIKE’s new campaign breaks the traditional online advertising model,” said Chris Hancock of AKQA. “We wanted to invent a way to push content out to users. Using Eyeblaster, we designed a campaign that uses advertising space on websites as a channel to distribute video from a site in conjunction with the added ability for consumers to ‘grab’ the content.”

“The widget represents fresh thinking that adds value to consumers’ experiences of the brand. It allows us to sustain a 3-way dialogue between Nike and consumers and amongst themselves, throughout the campaign and beyond, by continually refreshing our messaging and the functionality of the widget,” added Hani Mahdi, account director at MindShare WorldWide.
To maximize ad spend and add a viral aspect to the campaign, AKQA integrated seeding technology with the video widget. The seeding technology is powered by Gigya in cooperation with Eyeblaster. Users can “grab” the widget from the website they are looking at and install it on their social networking page. This opens a direct, permanent communication channel with users where NIKE can update video content at anytime.

“NIKEFootball’s new widget campaign revolutionizes the way any brand has ever used ad serving technology,” said Gal Trifon, CEO and co-founder of Eyeblaster. “Eyeblaster makes it possible to fully execute MindShare’s and AKQA’s creative strategy and we are confident that the campaign will generate great results.”

The campaign is being served and measured using Eyeblaster’s Ad Campaign Manager (ACM) platform. With ACM, AKQA and Nike can access data consolidation and manage geo targeting, dynamic content and global distribution from one platform.

You can get the widget at: http://demo.eyeblaster.com/AKQA/NIKE/NIKEFOOTBALL_Widget.html

About Eyeblaster

In 1999, Eyeblaster was among the pioneers in rich media communication. Today, Eyeblaster extends its inventive heritage in digital advertising through Ad Campaign Manager (ACM). ACM enables interactive agencies, advertisers and publishers to manage campaigns across digital media channels, including online, mobile and in-game, and a variety of formats, including rich media, in-stream video, display and search. ACM is a robust, integrated and easy-to-use platform that allows customers to focus on campaign strategy, creativity and media efficiency without having to worry about the technical complexities associated with managing global advertising campaigns online.
In 2007, Eyeblaster delivered campaigns for nearly 7,000 brand advertisers serving approximately 2,500 ad agencies across over 2,700 global web publishers in over 40 countries worldwide throughout North America, South America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa and the Middle East. Learn more at http://www.eyeblaster.com.

Media Contact:
Jamie Fishler
Mortar
T: 415.772.9907 ext. 117
C: 727.492.5548
jamie@mortarpr.com