Traffiliate for Mobile now provides more accurate measurement of mobile ad effectiveness

When mobile advertisers pay per click, curbing click fraud is vital in delivering cost-effective campaigns

Leading ad network claims industry leading anti-fraud tool

Ra’anana, Israel – DMG (DSNR Media Group) – a leading provider of digital advertising solutions for online, mobile, and video, announced today that Traffiliate for Mobile, DMG’s platform that provides comprehensive real-time visibility of mobile campaigns,
now includes an anti click fraud solution for more accurate measurement of mobile ad effectiveness. Based on DMG’s extensive
experience in mobile advertising, serving over 10 billion impressions monthly, this anti click fraud capability identifies unwanted clicks that can result in savings of tens of thousands of dollars every month for mobile advertisers. In addition to reducing costs, this software provides a more accurate assessment of clicks, leading to better planning and more effective campaign results.

Click fraud, when a click is generated without having actual interest in the target of the ad’s link, has become a growing concern for
mobile advertisers. A Harris Interactive survey conducted last year reported that 47% of mobile application users clicked on mobile ads by mistake. Detecting accidental and fraudulent clicks for mobile advertising is more complex due to the variety of devices and browsers and the difficulty identifying unique IP addresses for each user. DMG utilizes a sophisticated system to detect suspicious patterns that can work around these technical complexities.

According to Shalom Berkovitz, CEO of DMG, “In today’s emerging mobile realm, advertisers are more likely to pay per click, and are
demanding a high level of accuracy for meeting their target audience. We are leading the industry by providing tools that can enforce a high level of integrity and trust enabling advertisers to more effectively use mobile advertising as part of their marketing mix.”

ABOUT DMG

DMG is a global digital advertising network serving advertisers, agencies and publishers.
Utilizing its unique optimization methodologies and technologies, DMG offers a full cross-platform solution for online, mobile and video. DMG delivers 40 billion impressions and over 7 million conversions each month, to over 350 clients worldwide. For more information, visit www.dsnrmg.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interested in more?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Availability

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

About BrightTag

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

About TRUSTe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research Methodology & Approach

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

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

Research Findings Show Ad Hover Most Highly Correlated with Conversion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LONDON & NEW YORK - The latest in a series of exclusive insider webinars on the EU ePrivacy Directive is to be hosted 22 March by Evidon, the world leader in empowering consumers and businesses to see, understand and control data online. This 90-minute session will specifically address the issues facing sell-side companies – ad networks, DSPs, trading desks, publishers and others – as businesses look to demonstrate compliance and increased tracking transparency in accordance with the often ambiguous guidance provided by regulators.

This practical open session will include anecdotal evidence from the sell-side itself on what companies are already doing to comply with the EU ePrivacy Directive before the 26-May deadline in the UK, and how they’re communicating the issue to consumers. In addition, there will be an in-depth exploration of third party responsibilities, workable consent mechanisms and other examples of best practice.

Taking part will be IAB’s Director of Regulatory Affairs, Nick Stringer; Daniel de Sybel, Director of Technology and Operations at Infectious Media; Zuzanna Gierlinska, Global Agency Director of Microsoft Advertising; Jonathan Harris, Digital Associate Director, Starcom MediaVest Group; and Evidon CEO Scott Meyer and CSO Colin O’Malley.

“There’s mounting pressure on the sell-side from government officials, legal experts and trade bodies to show they understand the Directive and can demonstrate progress towards the transparency mandate,” said Scott Meyer, Founder and CEO of Evidon. “But many questions remain and sticking our heads in the sand is just not an option anymore. This webinar will help clarify the rudimentary elements of the law, and help businesses operating within the EU and who have yet to formulate a strategy to get on the right track.”

The session takes place 10am ET/2pm GMT, 22 March 2012 and will last one hour and 30 minutes. To register attendance, please visit http://tinyurl.com/6nbaev3.

ABOUT EVIDON

Evidon empowers consumers and businesses to see, understand and control data online.

With insights fueled by its Ghostery browser extension and rich, 800+ company privacy database, Evidon enables businesses to assess the cookies and other tracking activity on their websites, helping them to protect their audience data and improve performance.

As the first and largest dedicated provider of privacy and compliance solutions for digital media, Evidon also enables leading brands, agencies, publishers, advertising networks and others to comply easily with privacy laws and self-regulatory programs across North America and Europe. Evidon serves over a billion “Ad Choices” notices daily on behalf of these businesses – in the U.S. and in local languages across Europe – giving consumers transparency into and control over how their information is used online.

By protecting themselves and empowering consumers, businesses build their brands and improve results.

For more information, please visit: www.evidon.com.

Sometimes it is lonely to be the CEO of the biggest independent advertising technology partner for publishers. The long view: my belief in standing behind the high quality publishers to make Internet advertising work at least as well as the best TV advertising – is a position not often shared. Yet I believe that we can make Internet advertising work brilliantly for high quality product launches and brand building. We won’t be stuck with text based CPC ads. We will show that the best sites can run fantastic graphical and video ads that sell great products.

I’ve been saying for months that the distinction between above and below the fold should go away, and I finally have company for my perspective. Good company: Comscore, Inc.

A week ago I attended an event in New York City at which Comscore unveiled its new Validated GRP(TM) tool that rates the effectiveness of digital ads. Validated GRP takes the rating standards advertisers apply to TV advertising (Gross Rating Points) and establishes a similar metric that will apply to digital advertising. For advertisers, this is a metric to judge online campaign effectiveness–to make an apples to apples comparison between the effectiveness of TV and the effectiveness of online display and video ads.

In the development of its Validated GRP tool, Comscore conducted a  major study on the quality of campaign delivery  that allowed it to investigate discrepancies between expectations and reality when it comes to ad delivery. The full study, the results of which will be released in March, included twelve major brands with household names like Ford, Sprint, Kimberly Clark, and Kellogg’s.

To conduct the study, Comscore used the AdXPose technology it acquired earlier last year. The AdXPose team tipped us off in advance because we were already partnered with them. We got a sneak preview of the study’s highlights, which we are now free to share here.

In December 2011, Comscore measured 2,975 placements on 380,898 site domains — totaling over 1.7 million impressions, all delivered in iframes.

The conclusion? Something we, as an ad server and a advertising technology partner for publishers, have already observed: many ads are served, but not seen. That’s because web pages are no longer mostly short pages with static user experiences; they’re long pages with dynamic usage. Many use the increasingly popular “infinite scroll”. By the time an ad at the top of the page is served, the reader may have already scrolled by. Yet many ads further down may be very visible to the user. In Comscore’s own words:

“It’s not just an ‘above the fold versus below the fold’ issue. Sometimes people scroll down quickly to get to the content they want, and miss home page ads. In those cases, the action might be below the fold. Compelling ads can work in both places – but only if they’re visible.” Comscore found that 24% of ads above the fold were not visible.

While this is not great news for the advertisers who paid for those campaigns, It is great to see Comscore measure this for advertisers. And it’s why we developed the InView slider formats. Web pages, like the Huffington Post and Daily Mail are getting longer. And they are increasingly optimized for tablets where users are quick to scroll and therefore quick to skip past the top of the page to get to the content they want to read.

Comscore’s findings become very important, especially as online advertising moves from simple banner display ads to on-page video. And I believe it will move to great video ads for cars, cosmetics and movies etc right on the page. Right now, we’re selling the InView Slider ad unit with great confidence that it works for advertisers wherever you place it. It only appears if the reader is going to see it. The InView slider gives publishers a way to boost revenue, and gives advertisers a great way to guarantee to catch scrolling readers.

We’re also launching an in page video ad that will appear when the viewer is guaranteed to see it.

The InView slider has been quickly adopted by publishers since the summer because all the revenue for the publisher is additional and yet there’s no additional work involved.

We look forward to Comscore publicly presenting the full results of its study in March, and of course we are proud to be their partner in making advertising on the web as good as the best advertising on national TV.

About ZEDO

ZEDO, Inc. is a digital ad solutions company that offers products and services for a publisher’s premium, self service, and remnant inventory. Products include ad network optimization, innovative rich media formats for publishers’ direct sales teams, full featured ad serving, behavioral targeting data built into the ad server, an exchange-like platform for publishers to sell behavioral and DMA targeted inventory at high CPMs (see: www.zedoadnetwork.com), a self service platform to allow advertisers to buy directly from a publisher, outsourced ad ops and more. These products are integrated into one technology platform for publishers to choose from, or use seamlessly together. ZEDO has been in the internet advertising industry for over 10 years, and is the most successful independent ad server in the US. The company provides innovative solutions that boost revenues for Internet publishers. ZEDO is headquartered in San Francisco and has four development centers in Russia and India.

Reach out to ZEDO at http://www.zedo.com, or follow the company on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/ZEDOadsolutions) and Twitter (http://twitter.com/zedoinc).

New York – LiveIntent, the platform for buying and selling email ad inventory exactly like display, is now supporting the Digital Advertising Alliance’s (DAA) consumer notification offering, AdChoices. This self-regulatory service is being deployed by LiveIntent to support consumer awareness and choice in online advertising. Consumer privacy and control is a top concern for LiveIntent, and complying with the Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA) is a priority.

LiveIntent’s technology serves ads into a publisher’s email newsletters. When the user opens an email sent by any standard email service provider (ESP) that contains a LiveIntent ad tag, LiveIntent’s server delivers that reader the most relevant ad in real-time, right to their inbox, based on the user’s device, location, time of day and more. LiveIntent allows publishers to extend their premium display inventory into email and achieve 100 percent sell-through, all while maintaining full control of their inventory.

Now, all ads served by LiveIntent technology may contain the AdChoices logo. Clicking on the logo will bring users to the LiveIntent AdChoices page that explains why that ad was served to them and how they can opt-out of future ads from LiveIntent. There, users will also be able to read about LiveIntent’s privacy policy as well as visit the Network Advertising Initiative and the Digital Advertising Alliance to see their opt-out choices from other participating companies.

“At LiveIntent, we’re committed to being fully transparent and notifying users of their choices,” said Matt Keiser, CEO, LiveIntent. “Consumers have the right to know they are being targeted for ads and making them aware of this trackingwill strengthen advertiser-consumer trust in the long term.”

LiveIntent for Publishers (LFP) enables publishers to insert LiveTags into their newsletter templates to serve direct sold and LiveIntent exchange campaigns into emails newsletters, to monetize and maximize the yield of their newsletter inventory. LiveIntent for Advertisers (LFA) give marketers the ability to target and deliver ads to relevant audiences, on email open while optimizing results.

“We strive to be fully transparent to our readers and all consumers,” said Brian Riback, E-Marketing Strategist for The New York Daily News. “As our readership grows, we want to continue to protect consumer privacy and remain completely supportive to our readers, whether we reach them on the desktop, tablet or mobile.”

“Maintaining a rock-solid relationship with our customers is paramount as we look to keep the highest standards of choice in how they consume ads every day,” said Paul Rostkowski, President of Varick Media Management (VMM).  “Having LiveIntent be AdChoices-compliant gives us the assurance and confidence in their process of delivering our ads to the people who want to see them.”

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.

Early adopters leverage cutting-edge opportunities in marketing data, but barriers remain to broader use of new practices.

Survey of Nearly 200 Advertising and Marketing Industry Thought Leaders Showcases Emerging Data Approaches & Identifies Key Challenges to Widespread Adoption

NEW YORK – Continuing to demystify the myriad of digital data now available to marketers and online publishers, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) teamed with strategic consulting firm Winterberry Group to create a new study titled “From Information to Audiences: The Emerging Marketing Data Use Cases.” The white paper reveals new practices in data aggregation, management and deployment and spotlights barriers to widespread adoption. Its findings are based on research results from a survey of nearly 200 industry thought leaders and influencers, as well as Winterberry Group’s own quantitative and qualitative research.

The study found that forward-thinking marketers have begun shifting from traditional data focused on products, channels and campaigns to the real-time identification and optimization of consumer audiences. The long-established use of personally identifiable information (like names and postal addresses) for targeted marketing purposes is increasingly being complemented by aggregated and anonymyzed “digital data”—with a focus on improving ad effectiveness (through better targeting) as well as efficiency (through more economical media buying).

“The plethora of new data sources, targeted technologies and advertising delivery platforms enable marketers to amass more intelligence from varied sources,” said Patrick Dolan, Executive Vice President and COO, IAB. “This promising resource can only bear fruit if marketers can take that raw data and harness it effectively, going beyond traditional usage. This study shows us that there are some hurdles we need to address before we can expect widespread adoption—and the ability for ‘big data’ to deliver big result.”

Currently, the data-driven marketing use cases with the most potential are still in the early adoption stage, and the white paper scrutinizes four of them in greater detail:

Audience Optimization – At a low maturity level. Early adopters include digital advertisers and ecommerce players who use resulting audience profiles to find “look-alike audiences” across channels–-from tablets and laptops to smartphones and other mobile devices.

Channel Optimization – At a low maturity level. Early adopters include publishers and e-commerce players who integrate data on customer preferences and intent across the various media channels to deliver more relevant advertising in real time.

Ad Sales/Yield Optimization – At a low maturity level. Early adopters are primarily publishers, who use such tactics as third-party data overlays, enterprise data management platforms and data exchanges to create richer audience data sets designed to maximize rates and improve the attraction of remnant inventory.

Media Buying/Ad Targeting – At an intermediate maturity level. Early adopters include digital ad agencies and demand-side platforms that enable advertisers to identify and target high-value customers across channels by using real-time bidding and more efficient bidding prices.

The study also identified several challenges to widespread optimization of marketing data, including the need for:

Aggregation and Anonymization – While traditional data management practices were built largely around “personally identifiable information” elements—usually consumer names and postal addresses—the collection, analysis and segmentation of online data now requires the aggregation and anonymization of virtually all data sets.

Improved Operating Infrastructures – The primary barrier to widespread marketing data optimization is legacy operating infrastructures—characterized by rigid organizational “silos” and a lack of data-savvy expertise in marketing, IT and sales operations.

Strong Service- and Technology-Enabled Partners – The fastest, most efficient “big data” aggregation, analysis and throughput solutions require strong service- and technology-enabled partners. The burgeoning data supply chain is proving to be extremely agile in streamlining and processing data for marketing performance—supported by of a new class of open-source tools, as well as maturing advertising optimization that offer new solutions for managing and redeploying large quantities of disparate data sources.

Marketing Data Governance – Data governance has emerged as a critical priority for everyone in the data ecosystem. But whereas organizations have long employed policy experts to advise on the regulatory ramifications of data utilization, many are coming to see marketing data governance—defining the “rules of the road” for assigning distinct data sources to different promotional tasks—as equally important.

“The digital marketplace has been growing by leaps and bounds, with data collection and usage representing a very complex and integral part of the puzzle,” said Jonathan Margulies, Managing Director, Winterberry Group. “Early adopters are making strides in pointing the ecosystem in the right direction, but a substantial ‘data divide’ continues to distinguish a small group of early adopters from those who have yet to explore the real potential impact that data may have on their advertising effectiveness.”

“From Information to Audiences: The Emerging Marketing Data Use Cases” represents the latest addition to the IAB’s efforts to demystify data and bolster dialogue between media planners, publishers and data providers. It builds upon last year’s “Data Segments & Techniques Lexicon” and an earlier “Data Usage & Control Primer” The former provided media planners with a framework for clearer communication with publishers and data partners, while the latter addressed and helped resolve the contractual and competitive challenges that surround data usage and collection within the interactive advertising landscape. Both of those industry efforts were developed by the IAB Data Council, which is dedicated to enabling revenue growth through the establishment of quality, transparency, accountability, and consumer protection in data usage.

Supporting sponsors for the study include BlueKai, eXelate, Janrain, ShareThis and V12 Group.

Complete findings are available for download at www.iab.net/marketingdatause.

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.

About Winterberry Group

Winterberry Group is a unique research and strategic consulting firm that helps advertising, marketing, media and information companies grow value. Affiliated with Petsky Prunier LLC (“PPLLC”)—a leading investment bank providing merger and acquisition advisory services to companies in the same industries—the Firm offers its clients strategic perspective that is unparalleled in its addressable industries, while PPLLC maintains exceptional relationships with industry executives and business owners. This combination of market intelligence, research and strategic operating experience (as well as the ongoing dialogue among buyers and sellers of marketing businesses) provides an educated outside perspective that we bring to each engagement. For more information, please visit www.winterberrygroup.com.

With a variety of digital marketing tools at their disposal, 73 percent of search marketing decision makers still plan to increase their focus on search engine marketing in the coming year

SAN MATEO, Calif. – BrightEdge, the leading site, search and social management platform for global enterprises, today issued the findings from their annual search marketers survey. Assessing the priorities for more than 300 leading brand search marketers and retailers, the 2012 survey found that marketers plan to invest more in search engine marketing (73 percent), and need both better tools to interpret social signals/data (83 percent) and an enterprise-grade infrastructure with redundant data centers, ISO certification and an EU Safe Harbor (84 percent).

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.

Interclick, Aggregate Knowledge, Turn & Marin Software Among the First Partners to Connect to BrightTag ONETM, Eliminating Legacy Browser-Based Tracking Code

CHICAGO – BrightTag, Inc., today announced the first wave of partners for its BrightTag ONE digital marketing integration platform. BrightTag is the first company to link site owners with the large and expanding ecosystem of digital service providers in real time through a server-to-server direct connection rather than through third-party code delivered through the browser. The BrightTag ONE platform replaces obstructive layers of third-party data collection code – or “tags” – on websites with a single, integrated cloud-based data server.

BrightTag ONE is predicated on the company’s belief that the current method of collecting valuable first-party website data, built on individual pixels and complex JavaScript tags loaded through the browser, has become slow, unstable and unscalable.  BrightTag’s new approach tackles these issues by eliminating legacy browser-based tracking code while ensuring complete data collection.

“BrightTag’s data integration model can address a major problem in digital marketing,” said Bruce Biegel, Managing Director, Winterberry Group. “There’s a large and rapidly increasing landscape of companies bringing innovation to the marketplace, but that innovation has come at a growing price as data needs to move between first and third parties. Server-to-server integration is a solution that promises to make digital marketing faster, cleaner, more transparent and more valuable for all parties.”

The initial members of the BrightTag ONE Partner Program being announced today – all of which have connected to the ONE platform – represent a wide cross-section of third-party digital marketing and analytics companies. The ONE platform gives BrightTag’s outstanding client roster of global brand leaders in retail, travel, consumer packaged goods, financial services and education immediate access to BrightTag Partners and the services they provide, promoting innovation and delivering richer ROI for marketers and advertisers.

“Overburdening pages with pixels has created performance problems for site owners and advertisers,” said Bill Demas, chief executive officer of Turn. “By replacing third-party tags and disseminating the data advertisers need, BrightTag offers an effective approach to addressing this problem. This partnership is perfectly aligned with Turn’s open ecosystem approach, and we are excited to show our joint customers how this technical integration can improve their digital advertising campaigns through data.”

BrightTag site owner and marketer clients can “see” what is happening to their data in real time, putting them in control over what is collected and shared.  BrightTag ONE’s integrated, server-to-server platform allows site owners to eliminate the clutter and overhead of third-party tracking code to serve clean data directly from the cloud.  BrightTag ONE is compatible with the most complex configurations and is fully backwards-compatible with legacy tracking tags when clients need a hybrid approach.

“BrightTag has set out to modernize our industry’s underlying data connectivity infrastructure. The BrightTag ONE platform provides clients with transparency around data collection and tools for controlling how their proprietary and valuable data is shared amongst their many partners,” said Marc Kiven, BrightTag’s founder. “Our clients are not asking us for ways to better ‘manage’ all of the tracking tags that litter their sites; rather, they want help removing these tags from their sites in order to deliver a better user experience and respect the privacy choices of their customers. The partners mentioned here today have joined us in improving how the digital marketing industry works.”

Michael Katz, CEO of interclick commented: “As our industry grows and develops new capabilities, so does the complexity and the problems complexity brings. The BrightTag ONE platform mitigates complexity by allowing marketers to remove tracking tags from the browser and decide what to do with data generated on their sites. Server-to-server data integration is the best approach we’ve seen to improve the customer experience and benefit every entity along the digital marketing value chain.”

“We see a great upside when we activate the Aggregate Knowledge Media Intelligence Platform with BrightTag clients,” said David Jakubowski, CEO of Aggregate Knowledge.  “BrightTag clients can leverage their BrightTag implementation to avoid the time-consuming site tagging process and get immediate access to AK for accurate and actionable audience insights. Everyone wins.”

The BrightTag ONE Partner Program
BrightTag’s ONE Partner Program, whose first members are being announced today, is designed to benefit digital marketing services providers by expediting activation of new clients, enhancing data collection capabilities and providing meaningful performance benefits for members’ clients. ONE Partner companies represent a broad set of capabilities across the entire digital marketing industry including ad networks, data management platforms (DMP), demand side platforms, search, retargeting, attribution, social targeting, and analytics.

The following outstanding organizations – listed alphabetically – are among the many BrightTag ONE Partners providing clients with the full benefits of server-to-server integration through the BrightTag ONE platform:
●      Adometry – leads the industry in online ad verification and Ad Analytics™ attribution management, delivering actionable insight to improve the performance of online advertising.
●      Aggregate Knowledge – a leading (Software as a Service) SaaS audience and campaign analytics company
●      Buysight – a leading retargeting and customer acquisition performance marketing company
●      Chango – the leading provider of search retargeting, combining the power of search with the scale of display
●      CPX Interactive – one of the largest global online ad networks serving more than 1 billion daily ad impressions across more than 60 countries
●      DataXu – the leading multi-channel demand side platform (DSP) for digital marketing management
●      HookLogic – powers e-commerce media, a revolutionary way for brands and shoppers to connect in and around the e-commerce environment
●      interclick (NASDAQ: ICLK) –  a leading provider of digital advertising technology and services
●      Legolas Media – an innovative digital advertising marketplace for premium advertisers and publishers to trade audiences in a guaranteed and transparent manner
●      LucidMedia – the most comprehensive and transparent digital advertising management platform for targeting and optimizing display campaigns
●      Marin Software – provider of the leading online advertising management platform for advertisers and agencies
●      mediaFORGE – a leader in digital display advertising that embraces qualitative, not quantitative, performance measurement, instilling unparalleled confidence in ROI
●      MediaMath – the leading provider of digital media trading technology and services
●      Specific Media – a digital media company driving viewership for content owners, engagement for brands and relevance for consumers
●      Turn – the digital advertising industry’s only open, enterprise-level marketing platform that delivers exceptional campaign performance and real-time audience insight for cross-channel engagement
●      XGraph – the first social targeting platform to use multi-graph data analysis to target Connected Audiences™ for optimal ad performance, at scale.
●      [x+1] – helps marketers connect with consumers in more meaningful, actionable ways, delivering content and offers where they’re most relevant

The BrightTag ONE Partner Program is open to providers of digital marketing and analytics services on a global basis. For more information about the program, contact Scott Grossman, BrightTag SVP of Business Development, at partners@brighttag.com or visit www.brighttag.com/partners.

About BrightTag
BrightTag is redefining the way data is collected and shared across the digital marketing ecosystem. With the BrightTag ONE integration platform, marketers have complete ownership and control of data gathered on their websites combined with freedom and flexibility to innovate by working with any third-party digital service provider. ONE, the company’s cloud-based integration platform, provides a connectivity layer between first-party data and the marketing and analytics services supporting the site.  BrightTag’s clients include many of the world’s top brands and hundreds of online marketing and analytics providers continue to integrate their technology with the BrightTag ONE platform. Headquartered in Chicago, BrightTag is funded by New World Ventures, TomorrowVentures, EPIC Ventures and I2A Fund. BrightTag was named by VentureWire and an independent board of review at Dow Jones as one of the 50 most innovative technology companies of 2011 and a member of the FASTech50. For more information, visit www.brighttag.com.

DUBLIN – Research and Markets has announced the addition of the “The UK Online Advertising Industry Growth and Forecast to 2016” report to their offering.

In 2010, the advertising industry accounted for around 34.40% of the total service sector revenues and this sector is characterized as being fragmented in nature, with various sub-sectors, including online/ digital advertising. Increasing broadband penetration, education, income, rising number of internet users as well as popularity of social networking websites is behind the growth of online advertising globally. The online advertising industry is of various forms, but the most popular are digital search advertising, followed by display and classified advertising.

In the UK, more than 30% of all advertising budgets are spent online, making the UK internet industry the one with the highest share of national ad expenditure, when compared to any other European market. In 2010 the UK internet advertising market grew 8.80%, the reason behind the growth was the retail sector. Finance, consumer goods and entertainment & media sectors contributed the highest percentage in the overall online advertisement revenues. In the UK, the reason behind the investment in online advertising is faster broadband services and expanding user base. By end of December 2010 the UK’s active online user base increased to 40.30 million.

Key Questions Answered:

What is the size of the Online advertising industry in the UK and factors accounting for change in its segments (Search, Digital, and Mobile)?
What are the industries contributing in online advertising demand in the country?
Who are the leading international and domestic players, business and recent developments?
What is the future prediction of the European and UK online advertising industry?
How change in the European macro economy environment and online ad spending may lead to change in the UK online advertising industry?

Companies Mentioned:

Google Inc,
Yahoo Inc,
AOL LLC

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/20866f/the_uk_online_adve.

Public Comment Periods Opens for ‘Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions’—MRAID—Which Standardizes Communication Between Ads and Apps To Increase Efficiency

NEW YORK – The IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence (http://www.iab.net/mmcoe) released “Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions,” or MRAID (http://www.iab.net/mraid), for public comment. This initiative defines a common API (Application Programming Interface) for mobile rich media advertisements, establishing a framework of principles and guidelines to help the mobile marketplace reach new levels of consistency, efficiency and effectiveness.

The growth, versatility and potential of in-application advertising have drawn strong interest from agencies, publishers, vendors and ad designers. However, accompanying this industry enthusiasm has been a surge of disparate APIs from numerous rich media vendors working with publishers to enable these dynamic ads. Multiple, incompatible APIs force advertisers to re-write the programming behind their ad creative several times for a single campaign, creating complexity and adversely impacting their resources.

“Standardizing the development of mobile rich media creative will be a strong benefit for both the mobile and the ad industry overall,” said Anna Bager, Vice President & General Manager of the IAB’s Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence. “MRAID provides creative developers with opportunities to achieve reach and scale efficiently.”

“As the premier digital media company, Yahoo! works with many different advertisers and rich media vendors,” said Alex Linde, Director, Mobile & Tablet Advertising, Yahoo! and IAB MRAID working group member. “We know first hand how challenging it would be to bring scale to mobile advertising without a standard for in-application mobile rich media ad serving and a single set of industry-accepted guidelines for agencies and designers. We believe that MRAID is essential to sustain momentum in this rapidly growing industry.”

Under the IAB’s draft MRAID guidelines, if a mobile app is “MRAID compliant,” it will read, understand and correctly display ads developed using the MRAID instruction specification. At the same time, MRAID-compliant mobile rich media ads will operate within MRAID compliant applications from any publisher – allowing agencies to quickly and easily run rich, interactive mobile creative across apps from various publishers.

The public comment period for the IAB’s release of MRAID will run through September 30, 2011. Once the public comment period closes, the MRAID working group will meet to evaluate comments received, make any needed changes to the draft MRAID spec, and release final version of MRAID 1.0. Comments are being accepted by email at mobile@iab.net.

For a copy of the public comment version of MRAID 1.0 and more information about MRAID, the working group and its members, please visit: http://www.iab.net/mraid

About the IAB

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) [www.iab.net] is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies who 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.

NEEDHAM, Mass. – In4mation Insights (www.in4ins.com) announced that its co-founders and partners Mark Garratt and Steve Cohen, along with Dr. Rafael Alcaraz, Vice President, Global Analytics, The Hershey Company (www.thehersheycompany.com), will be presenting at the ESOMAR World Congress, taking place in Amsterdam from September 18-21, 2011.

Messrs. Garratt, Cohen and Alcaraz are participating in the “Achieving ROI through Superior Modeling” track and will be presenting “From brilliant to actionable – it takes technical brilliance and constant questioning to achieve the truly actionable in Marketing ROI”.

This presentation will describe the collaboration between The Hershey Company and In4mation Insights to revolutionize how marketing ROI is modeled and how its results are spread throughout an organization. This is an ongoing engagement where optimization requires that we constantly adapt to changes in the marketplace, macroeconomics and internal priorities.

The development of new-to-the-world Bayesian statistical methods, coupled with scalable and speedy software run using parallel processing on the “cloud”, will be addressed. Results have then been placed in a marketing enterprise-wide simulation model, where the findings have been pressure-tested by senior executives. The presentation will document how a close relationship between a savvy client and advanced modelers led to groundbreaking results.

“We continue to be inspired by the possibilities of integrating Bayesian analytics and the optimization of marketing mix on the largest possible scale, and against an increasing awareness of understanding of the interdependencies in data,” said Mark Garratt.

About In4mation Insights

In4mation Insights is an internationally recognized firm in the marketing research and analytics field and is known for its industry-leading theoretical and practical leadership and advanced technology. The firm’s practice leaders each have more than 30 years experience in consumer research, data analytics, modeling and technology to deliver answers related to Pricing, Marketing ROI, New Product Development, Market Structure and Consumer & Market Segmentation. One of the firm’s key differentiating capabilities is the use of Bayesian techniques, which enhance the potential value of consumer and market data. The firm has a global footprint and has worked with a number of Fortune 200 companies; their experience includes industries such as consumer goods, IT, Telecom, Financial Services, and Media.

For more information, please visit www.in4ins.com.

Partnership with OptiMine Enables Search Marketers to Significantly Increase Paid Search Performance

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:ADBE) today announced that Adobe® SearchCenter+, a comprehensive search marketing management system within the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, has added keyword performance predictive analytics through a partnering agreement with OptiMine Software, Inc. This agreement will enable search marketers to achieve significant increases in paid search performance (i.e. higher return on ad spend, increased leads, higher conversion rates, increased revenue, greater profit per keyword, etc.). Tests done with search marketers using OptiMine’s keyword modeling have shown improved performance of 25 percent or more.

“Digital marketers are examining their paid search spend in the context of many other digital channels, like social, display and email,” said John Mellor, vice president of business development, Omniture Business Unit, Adobe. “Having the ability to predict the return on paid search becomes critically important when deciding on marketing mix and budget allocation. SearchCenter+ helps our customers spend their paid search budget on keywords that will impact the metrics most important to their business.”

The addition of OptiMine predictive keyword analytics to SearchCenter+ is particularly powerful for Adobe customers because SearchCenter+ captures the actual performance of each keyword in every one of the customer’s paid search campaigns. The OptiMine algorithms will now leverage SearchCenter+ keyword performance data, giving these algorithms a highly valuable data source to more accurately predict keyword performance and automatically generate optimal bids accordingly. Adobe customers can begin adding this new feature to their SearchCenter+ contracts immediately.

“We are delighted to partner with Adobe SearchCenter+ and believe the relationship validates the significant customer returns generated through our unique ability to automatically model every keyword,” said Jim Moar, chief executive officer, OptiMine. “The integration of our automated bid optimization coupled with SearchCenter+’s robust data will enable Adobe’s Online Marketing Suite customers to be even more successful.”

About the Adobe Online Marketing Suite

The Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture®, offers an integrated and open platform for online business optimization, a strategy for using customer insight to drive innovation throughout the business and enhance marketing efficiency. The Suite consists of integrated applications to collect and unleash the power of customer insight to optimize customer acquisition, conversion and retention efforts as well as the creation and distribution of content. For example, using the Suite, marketers can identify the most effective marketing strategies and ad placements as well as create relevant, personalized and consistent customer experiences across digital marketing channels, such as onsite, display, email, social, video and mobile. The Suite enables marketers to make quick adjustments, automate certain customer interactions and better maximize marketing ROI, which, ultimately, can positively impact the bottom line.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

NEW YORK – interclick, inc. (Nasdaq:ICLK) announced that the sole remaining federal claim alleging violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the state law claims for breach of implied contract and tortious interference have all been dismissed with prejudice by the United States District Court after determining the plaintiff had no legal basis to support her claim. The plaintiff and her counsel may not re-file those claims.

In December of 2010, Sonal Bose filed a lawsuit, seeking class action status, against interclick, Inc. alleging that interclick’s online advertising practices violated numerous state and federal acts. On August 17, 2011, ruling on interclick’s motion to dismiss, the Court granted the dismissal of the above claims with prejudice. This follows the March 21, 2011 decision by the plaintiff to voluntarily withdraw her claim that interclick had violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

The Court also dismissed all claims against the advertiser defendants with prejudice.

“As we have said from the beginning, interclick has always taken consumer privacy very seriously and these claims were brought without merit. We are pleased that the central claims in the litigation have been dismissed by The United States District Court,” said Michael Katz, CEO of interclick.

About interclick

Powered by OSM, interclick, inc. (Nasdaq:ICLK) offers proprietary data-valuation capabilities combining analytical expertise and media fulfillment to help marketers navigate the complex data ecosystem to drive successful online display and video campaigns.  OSM is a powerful solution which aggregates and organizes billions of data points from 3rd party providers – delivering actionable consumer insights, scalable audiences and the most effective campaign execution.

For more information, visit http://www.interclick.com.

New Report on Trends in Behavioral and Contextual-Based Advertising Shows Consumers Accepting of Targeted Advertising

DALLAS – Creation of the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) is an important step for the $26 billion U.S. online advertising industry, according to Parks Associates’ new report Trends in Behavioral and Contextual-based Advertising.

The international research firm reports 17% of U.S. broadband households are willing to provide personal information for relevant online ads and 10% with a mobile phone service are willing to submit for relevant mobile ads. Parks Associates analysts say to foster continued consumer interest in targeted advertising, the market needs self-regulatory programs that provide transparency and give consumers a choice to opt-out of targeted online advertising.

“While current data show online consumers are amenable to advanced advertising practices, privacy concerns, if not properly addressed, could negatively impact future growth in this market,” said Heather Way, Research Analyst, Parks Associates. “Our research shows formation of organizations such as the DAA is the right approach for online publishers, ad networks, and industry trade organizations to show their commitment to full transparency and consumer empowerment.”

Young broadband users are willing to provide personal information to receive customized Internet ads. Over 50% of adults 18-34 and approximately 40% of adults 25-54 are positive or indifferent to advanced advertising practices. These targeting tactics stoke privacy concerns by delivering ads to specific consumers based on individual online behavior, but these concerns are less intense when consumers are given opt-out management tools.

“The keys to assuaging consumer privacy fears are in providing education, transparency, and control,” Way said.

For information on Trends in Behavioral and Contextual-based Advertising, visit http://www.parksassociates.com or contact 972-490-1113, sales@parksassociates.com.

About Parks Associates

Parks Associates is an internationally recognized market research and consulting company specializing in emerging consumer technology products and services. Founded in 1986, Parks Associates creates research capital for companies ranging from Fortune 500 to small start-ups through market reports, primary studies, consumer research, custom research, workshops, executive conferences, and annual service subscriptions.

Each year, Parks Associates hosts executive thought leadership conferences CONNECTIONS™, with support from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)®, CONNECTIONS™ Europe, and Smart Energy Summit.

Tremendous Growth of Companies utilizing the “Ad Choices” Icon via Evidon Continues as Opt-Out Rates Remain; More than 80 million US internet users served ads with Ad Choices Icon delivered by Evidon each day

Greenlight Program Ensures Exponential Spike at IAB Deadline in Late August

NEW YORK – Evidon, the leading provider of compliance services for the Digital Advertising Alliance’s (DAA) Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA), announced that it has served the 50 billionth impression of the Advertising Choices Icon on behalf of licensees of the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) and its industry self-regulatory program, The company announced that more than 80 million unique users are served ads with the Ad Choices Icon delivered by Evidon each day. The specific 50 billionth creative unit was served on the morning of Friday, July 29. Even as the program’s growth and the number of companies working with Evidon have both accelerated, the opt-out rate on impressions served by Evidon remains extremely low.

“We’ve been operating at scale for nearly a year now, so this number – which is largely comprised of brands and agencies who are just getting started – is about to get a whole lot bigger,” said Scott Meyer, Founder and CEO of Evidon. “With more than 130 brands, agencies, publishers, networks, and technology providers as clients, and with so many of them having joined our Greenlight program and having pledged to be fully compliant by the IAB deadline of August 28, we expect to see this number go through the roof by Labor Day.”

Evidon Data

Below is a snapshot of aggregate data from the more than 80 million unique users who see the icon every day, thanks to the scale of delivery provided by Evidon, which routinely exceeds 500M impressions/day and is growing:

In aggregate, there have been roughly 2.3 million interactions with Ad Choices Icon served by Evidon across more than 50 billion advertising impressions.

Evidon has handled roughly 500,000 opt out requests for these 50 billion impressions

“The industry self-regulatory program is designed to give users as much transparency as possible as simply as possible,” said Stu Ingis, Partner at Washington, DC law firm Venable, and Counsel to the DAA. “We’re watching this very closely as the program scales with specific focus on consumer awareness of and interaction with the icon.”

Research

Additionally Evidon announced that it has selected Knowledge Networks (KN), a leader in innovative online research that represents the full U.S. population, to examine consumer perceptions of the Evidon InForm experience for consumers. Multiple studies, beginning with Evidon’s own baseline research last November, (http://blog.evidon.com/tag/better-advertising/), have suggested that consumers overwhelmingly favor the new transparency that the industry self-regulatory program provides. Knowledge Networks will enhance and enlarge this research with far more granularity and depth.

About Evidon

Selected by the Digital Advertising Alliance to power its online behavioral advertising self-regulatory program, Evidon (formerly Better Advertising) enables a more trusted environment for everyone in the online ecosystem. It gives businesses an easy, standard way of providing evidence of compliance with industry guidelines, and consumers more transparency into and control over how their information is used online. By empowering consumers and earning their trust, businesses build their brands, participate in OBA with confidence and generate results. For more information, please visit: www.evidon.com.

The widespread adoption of audience targeting by Madison Avenue has prompted the Federal Trade Commission to call for more oversight of the industry through a proposed solution named Do Not Track (DNT). While the government’s intention is noble, DNT has become somewhat of a misnomer by adding more confusion than clarity. It’s time that we set the record straight.

The conversations taking place about behavioral targeting is occurring between the wrong parties. As DNT stands today, the dialogue is happening between consumers and monetization platforms, which are providing a universal opt-out feature at the browser level. Rather, this conversation should be between consumers and publishers.

Publishers need the ability to monetize their content either through subscriptions or ad-supported content, while users need to know how their information is being used. Therefore, what’s needed is a more balanced approach that acknowledges the benefits of subsidized content and illustrates trade-offs in a non-advertising world. What is not being discussed is how DNT in its current form is a mechanism for shutting down this process that otherwise funds content that provides value to both consumers and publishers.

Much has been made of the similarities between DNT and the Do-Not-Call list introduced by lawmakers in the 1990s to address the rising concern of telemarketers. This comparison is misplaced and points people in the wrong direction. Since phone bills have always been paid by the consumer, there is no value for them to take telemarketing calls. So Do-Not-Call was created to give the ultimate choice to the paying consumer. Sounds fair to me. But let’s be clear that there is no parallel to DNT where consumers are getting free content. Would consumers have agreed to get telemarketing calls if their phone service was free? Maybe. Does it make sense to offer free phone service if there is no value to the provider? That’s the question we need to address with DNT. Otherwise, DNT should be named the “Do Not Pay – let someone else pay for me” feature.

What is needed is not less or more regulation, but a revision to the current DNT proposals that preserves the interests of both consumers and publishers by giving them control over DNT. So what would that revision look like? Here’s an example:

- Users would have the ability to select DNT settings in their browser.
- This preference would be recognized by the publisher site the user navigates to.
- The Publisher site presents the user with a message that acknowledges their DNT setting and asks if the Publisher can override that setting to give them a better site experience, more free content, etc.
- Users choose! (Their DNT preference is applicable for this publisher site only.)

This model would open the lines of communication between consumers and publishers on the application of DNT while preserving the benefits of monetization for publishers and the service (aka free content) provided to consumers. It is also vitally important that DNT not erase cookies as this would still be counterproductive in the disruption of the monetization process for ad-supported content (e-commerce would be severely impacted). What it should ensure is that the state of the cookie be intact while DNT is present.

We would be supportive of a revision of DNT to include the above consumer-publisher dialogue. However, we also want to make clear that the principles being adopted by the DAA and NAI, where consumers get global and local opt-out capabilities and transparency through the about ads icon offers another viable implementation of this same goal. This self-regulatory approach (we have heard industry estimates of over a trillion ads being served with this icon enabled) is already receiving wide adoption and aims to deliver on the goals of transparency and simplicity for the consumer.

DNT promises to alter the way advertising is served and needs to be transparent in its impact on both consumers and publishers. Let’s be clear and upfront on what exactly DNT is designed to do. We can start by bringing the right parties together to have a fruitful and productive conversation about the pros and cons of sponsored or free content.

LONDON – As a result of the recent “locationgate” controversy (centering on Apple’s and others’ logging of the location of mobile devices as they are used by consumers) the location-based services (LBS) and advertising (LBA) markets have come under intense scrutiny, with privacy legislation a major focus.

But according to ABI Research senior analyst Patrick Connolly, “ABI Research believes that this temporary debate will not prevent the future success of location-based services, marketing and advertising, all of which will be based on location analytics – the aggregation and analysis of location information to identify trends that will enable new services and more effective advertising.”

The firm forecasts size of the location analytics market to reach $9 billion in 2016.

At the moment, the initial LBA trials are largely focused on geofencing, with impressive results. However, the real power of LBA will come through social, geographic, physical and emotional indicators to filter advertisements to a specific user. The best way to combine these indicators and target them to individuals in a non-intrusive, anonymous way is through location analytics.

Practice director Dominique Bonte adds, “While the location analytics market is relatively new, it has been evolving for a number of years and has been the major driver for recent location-related acquisitions by the likes of Apple, Google, Nokia, Facebook and Microsoft. Eventually, location will become commoditized and will be treated as just another piece of demographic information. Consequently, location analytics will become the core provider of value in location-based advertising.”

A number of companies are already involved in this space, including PlaceIQ, Placecast, Sense networks and Skyhook Wireless/SimpleGEO, as well as the industry behemoths mentioned above.

ABI Research’s new study, “Location Analytics and Privacy” (http://www.abiresearch.com/research/1007751), investigates how privacy is controlled across the ecosystem, what will be the result of recent investigations, and how companies are adapting to the future.

It is part of the firm’s Location Platforms and Enablers Research Service (http://www.abiresearch.com/products/service/Location_Based_Services) which also includes other Research Reports, Market Data products, ABI Insights, Surveys, ABI Vendor Matrices, and analyst inquiry support.

ABI Research provides in-depth analysis and quantitative forecasting of trends in global connectivity and other emerging technologies. From offices in North America, Europe and Asia, ABI Research’s worldwide team of experts advises thousands of decision makers through 40+ research and advisory services. Est. 1990. For more information visit www.abiresearch.com, or call +1.516.624.2500.

SANTA MONICA, Calif. –Adconion Direct (www.adconiondirect.com), the standalone performance solutions business unit of Adconion Media Group, announced it will use TRUSTe’s OBA compliance platform to ensure brand safety and adherence to the ad privacy self-regulatory requirements. This will be done via TRUSTe’s partnership with AdXpose to deliver a best-in-class OBA compliance solution for ads in the U.S.

By partnering with TRUSTe’s TRUSTed Ads compliance platform, Adconion Direct actively seeks and employs industry best practices regarding online advertising and tracking in its quest to adhere to the high standards as outlined in the OBA self-regulatory guidelines. As the largest provider of OBA compliance services, TRUSTe offers the most recognized privacy brand, 14 years of deep privacy expertise and the most comprehensive compliance monitoring platform. This combination of capabilities will allow Adconion Direct to deliver accurate privacy notices reliably across billions of ad impressions while at the same time offering easy-to-understand privacy information and choices to consumers.

“Ad verification and delivery are an integral aspect of our business” said Brian Baumgart, President of Adconion Direct. “We are pleased to leverage TRUSTe’s OBA solution so that we can provide our advertisers and consumers alike with enhanced campaign transparency, choice and accountability.”

“We are excited to work with Adconion Direct to enable OBA compliance capabilities across their diversified and global media footprint,” said Chris Babel, CEO TRUSTe. “Our research has shown that transparency and choice can serve as powerful tools to help advertisers build deeper trust with their consumers. Through our partnership with AdXpose, we can uniquely position Adconion Direct to deliver this trust to advertisers through a blend of high quality media and the most advanced compliance and brand safety technologies.”

“We are extremely pleased that our partnership to date with Adconion Direct has blossomed,” said Ryan Polley, COO of AdXpose. “Continuing the relationship with our OBA solution further demonstrates Adconion Direct’s commitment to providing its customers with the industry’s leading technology for the verification and delivery of ad campaigns across its network.”

Adconion Direct’s partnership with AdXpose has improved the safety and performance of digital ad campaigns. AdXpose helps block suggestive keywords and prevents ads from appearing on inappropriate sites. It also provides insights and analytics that help the advertisers and agencies who work with Adconion Direct to make more informed media buying and campaign planning decisions.

About Adconion Direct
Adconion Direct (www.adconiondirect.com) is a multi-channel digital distribution platform spanning Display, Email and Social Media, for agencies and advertisers looking for quality and scalable results, backed by a global media company with significant worldwide reach. Committed to continuously deliver results, deep insights and innovative distribution options to market, Adconion Direct is an ideal performance partner of choice for agencies and advertisers alike.

Adconion Direct is the standalone performance solutions business within Adconion Media Group, (www.adconion.com), one of the largest independent global audience and video content networks, reaching nearly 325 million unique users worldwide – one-quarter of the total global Internet population. Currently, Adconion has 16 offices in 8 countries around the world. It is a member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), is one of the first companies to be IAB certified with its first ever Ad Networks & Exchanges Quality Assurance program and is a founding member of IASH Europe.

About TRUSTe
TRUSTe is the largest provider of OBA compliance services, serving notices on more than 10 billion ad impressions per month and the leading provider of online privacy solutions with a broad suite of privacy services to help businesses build trust and increase engagement across all of their online channels – including websites, mobile applications, advertising, cloud services, business analytics and email marketing. Over 4,000 web properties including those from top companies like Apple, AT&T, Disney, eBay, Facebook, HP, Microsoft, Nationwide, Pfizer and Yelp rely on TRUSTe to ensure compliance with evolving and complex privacy requirements. TRUSTe’s mission, based on a “Truth in Privacy” framework, is built on a solid foundation of transparency, choice and accountability regarding the collection and use of personal information. TRUSTe’s privacy seal is recognized and trusted by millions of consumers as a sign of responsible privacy practices. For additional information on TRUSTe and its offerings, please visit http://www.truste.com/ads.

About AdXpose
AdXpose is the leader in digital advertising analytics solutions. The company’s SaaS technology provides advertisers and publishers with greater transparency and confidence in the quality, safety, and performance of their digital advertising campaigns. The actionable optimization metrics captured by AdXpose solutions help its customers realize increased ROI, more profitable margins, and measurable ad effectiveness. AdXpose is headquartered in Seattle, WA, with offices in New York City, and is backed by Draper Fischer Jurvetson and Ignition Partners. For more information, visit www.adxpose.com.

IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence Releases ‘Marketer Perspectives on Mobile Advertising’

Study Finds Nearly Three-Quarters of Top Marketing Executives Look to Increase Their Mobile Spend Over Next Two Years

New York, NY — Though mobile interactive advertising platforms are still considered a complex landscape of constant innovation by many brands and agencies, they are nonetheless being adopted at increasing speed, according to results from a new survey by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). “Marketer Perspectives on Mobile Advertising” found that 63 percent of respondents stated that their companies’ mobile advertising spend over the past two years has increased to some degree, with 29 percent reporting an increase of over 50 percent. The outlook for an uptick in the next two years is even more striking, with most of these key ad spend decision-makers (72%) saying that they are looking to increase their mobile advertising budget; 35 percent of respondents expect to increase spend by over 50 percent.

The study of 300 top-level brand marketing executives currently using mobile in their media mix was commissioned by the IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence and conducted by Ovum, and unveiled during the IAB “Mobile in the Mainstream…and as the New Main Screen” in New York City.

“Given the current economic climate, these overwhelmingly positive ad spend numbers are telling. They truly underscore what those of us working in the mobile space have always recognized – that the remarkable evolution and progression of mobile interactive advertising has only begun to deliver on its extraordinary promise,” said Anna Bager, Vice President and General Manager of the IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence

Additional results revealed that half (51%) of the brand marketers surveyed already treat mobile platforms as an integral element of their overall advertising strategy. The other half of the survey’s respondents are also intrigued by mobile advertising’s benefits, but are currently exploring how best to leverage mobile platforms within their marketing plans: more than a third (35%) stated they are “experimenting” with mobile, while another 14 percent are tapping into mobile on an ad hoc basis.

Several of mobile advertising’s benefits received strong endorsements from respondents:
Immediacy (considered of high importance by 57% of respondents)
- Cost-effectiveness (54%)
- Increased engagement (52%)

The research study also asked marketers about which types of mobile devices they are presently reaching with their mobile ad campaigns. Ranked in order of highest priority, they are:
- Smartphones (a high priority for 60% of respondents)
- Tablets (31%)
- Feature phones (22%)
- Ebooks (10%)
- Connected games consoles (3%)

Beyond being asked about interest and engagement in the mobile space, respondents were also queried about challenges. They cited several key hurdles in deciding whether to make larger mobile ad buys:
- Device fragmentation (cited by 72% of respondents as a challenge of medium or high importance)
- Privacy issues (70%)
- Lack of standardized metrics (69%)

A significant number (60%) also ranked a limited opportunity for creative as a mobile challenge, which could in part be a reflection that most of those surveyed (62%) do not use creative agencies for mobile advertising. However, a majority (85%) of those marketers who are working with a creative agency on their mobile advertising objectives said that these partnerships produced good results.

“Mobile advertising is advancing rapidly and many of the issues that slowed progress in earlier years have been overcome, for example constraints imposed by networks and mobile phone limitations have radically improved through developments in, respectively, mobile broadband and smartphones,” said Eden Zoller, Principal Analyst with Ovum and author of the report. “I am confident that the industry and the IAB will successfully address the newer challenges marketers identified.”

UK-based Ovum Consulting (www.ovumkc.com) conducted the survey (April-June 2011) on behalf of IAB, consulting U.S. organizations currently engaged in mobile advertising, from seven distinct verticals (travel, financial services, FMCG, retail, media and entertainment, hospitality & restaurants and automotive) across four size-of-business bands (revenue less than $100m annual revenues, $100m-$500m annual revenues, $500m-$2 billion, and over $2 billion annual revenues) with local, regional and national advertising focus. Interviews were conducted with key marketer decision makers and budget holders (Executive Vice Presidents, Senior Vice Presidents and Vice Presidents in Marketing).

To review the entire “Marketer Perspectives on Mobile Advertising” study, visit: www.iab.net/CMO_Mobile

Next Step in Ongoing Effort to Provide Marketplace Guidance Across a Range of Methodologies

NEW YORK – With the online advertising industry in need of more rigorous tools and systems for understanding campaign performance, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has unveiled “Best Practices for Conducting Online Ad Effectiveness Research.” Written by Marissa Gluck of Radar Research (www.radarresearch.com) and prepared in collaboration with the IAB Research Advisory Board, it provides online ad market stakeholders with a practical set of recommendations for standard operating procedures with respect to the use of ad effectiveness studies.

This new document is a follow-up to the groundbreaking 2010 IAB report “An Evaluation of Methods Used to Assess the Effectiveness of Advertising on the Internet” by Dr. Paul J. Lavrakas. That study examined the strengths and weaknesses of online ad effectiveness research methodologies.

The new report looks across the widely available methodologies to assess best practices in each phase of online ad effectiveness research and examines the challenges the industry faces within each phase, as originally outlined by Dr. Lavrakas, and proposes prescriptive remedies to each.

“Marketers are always looking to understand how their campaigns perform, and ad effectiveness research is one of the key tools in doing so,” said Sherrill Mane, Senior Vice President, Industry Services, IAB. “But there are still so many questions about the methodology itself that hamstring the validity of this research and undermine the industry as a whole. For our industry to continue to grow and realize its full potential, it is essential that we invest in the necessary advancements described by Dr. Lavrakas. In the interim, the ‘Best Practices’ document illuminates the planning, thresholds and decision parameters for working the existing tools.”

Some of the recommended IAB Best Practices for agencies and advertisers, as well as publishers, include:

Planning:

- To use online ad effectiveness surveys appropriately to make optimization decisions on an individual site, a study will optimally include at least 200 respondents.
- A 15-million impressions campaign should be the minimum before a site should consider running a study on behalf of advertisers, while a suggested “rule of thumb” is that the cost of an effectiveness study should be less than 10 percent of the overall buy.
- Agencies should include training and education for their media staffers not just on the mechanics and math of planning and buying, but also on the basics of research methodologies and implementation.

Recruitment:

- While the use of panels to recruit respondents may be an attractive alternative to live intercept recruitment, provided that the panels are validated, there are certain types of campaigns and circumstances that lend themselves more easily to the use of panels: high volume campaigns, multi-platform campaigns and customized ad placements.
- Publishers need to take some responsibility for declining response rates, and publishers should try to limit the frequency of survey invitations to protect the user experience and reduce clutter.
- Agencies and publishers should pressure vendors to undergo independent, third-party evaluations of their statistical methods and recruitment methodologies.
- Vendors should weigh results to actual campaign delivery, using third-party audience verification companies as a benchmark.

Deployment:

- All survey questions should be asked in an environment where the measured brand ads are not visible.
- Surveys aimed at business professionals should take less than 10 minutes to complete; four minutes or less is ideal and will improve completion rates.
- For consumer-targeted products, a longer survey may be possible, though advertisers should be wary of exceeding seven minutes; the “sweet spot” for survey length seems to be five to seven minutes, or approximately 20 to 25 questions.

Optimization & Analysis:

- When feasible, marketers should marry their campaign effectiveness research to salient online and offline metrics to get a more comprehensive view of their advertising efficacy.
- Even as optimization has been trending towards real time, brand marketers should be wary of making optimization decisions based on real-time ad effectiveness data.

“Online ad effectiveness research is challenged by serious methodological limitations and irresponsible study management,” said Marissa Gluck, Founder and Managing Partner, Radar Research. “By examining each phase in the delivery of online ad effectiveness research, we hope to not only understand the complexities and challenges inherent in this research but also remedy the industry’s most vexing problems.”

Origins of IAB Evaluation Study

Multiple interviews with key stakeholders were conducted in February and March 2011. Executives on both the publisher and agency side were interviewed, as well as vendor executives. Both larger and smaller agencies were interviewed, and both research and analytics executives were represented to get a more comprehensive view of the landscape as well as how data from these studies is incorporated into the overall value chain.

To view the Best Practices for Conducting Online Ad Effectiveness Research please visit: www.iab.net/ad_effectiveness_best_practices.

To view the 2010 “An Evaluation of Methods Used to Assess the Effectiveness of Advertising on the Internet” please go to: www.iab.net/media/file/Evaluation_of_Internet_Ad_Effectiveness_Research_Methods.pdf

About the IAB’s Research Council

The Research Council provides a forum for interactive research practitioners to share findings that support the growth of the industry; it encourages strong methodologies and best practices for research and measurement, and it works with the IAB to design and field important industry research projects and share these findings with key stakeholders.

A complete list of Research Council member companies can be found at

http://www.iab.net/member_center/councils_committees_working_groups/councils/research_council

About the IAB

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies who 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.

New Methodological Approach to Attribute Credit for Display Ad Campaign Performance to the Specific Publishers, Data Providers and Creative that Generate Lift

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, announced the launch of the comScore Smart Lift Attribution Model™, a breakthrough methodology that brings the science of attribution to brand measurement. This advancement in attribution modeling, based on validated and time-test marketing mix modeling techniques, accurately allocates display ad campaign performance by publisher or publisher type, demographic groups, interest segments, audience segments from third-party data providers, advertising creative, creative placements and client-defined segments. The model is currently being applied to comScore AdEffx Brand Survey Lift™ studies in the United States.

Unlike the more commonly used ‘last exposure’ approach, which attributes all of the branding effect to the publisher or creative associated with a survey research respondent’s last exposure to the ad prior to taking the survey, the comScore model accounts for all of a respondent’s exposures to ads across all publishers, including those that occur prior to and following the survey experience. This approach means that lift results reflect the composite effects of the entire campaign rather than a survey-only view. Being able to capture this complete view of ad exposures allows for proper attribution by publisher and advertising creative as well as accurate, holistic campaign measurement.

“comScore is excited to introduce our Smart Lift Attribution Model, a breakthrough method for evaluating the branding impact of online display ad campaigns,” said Dr. Magid Abraham, comScore President & CEO. “A few years ago, when our industry grappled with the issue of last-click attribution, comScore pioneered research that demonstrated the view-through impact of display advertising even without a click and helped change the way we think about which ads get credit for driving sales. More recently, the challenge has been determining which ads within a particular display campaign deserve credit for driving the greatest branding impact. Based on years of R&D, comScore has once again pioneered a solution that delivers this insight, based on the total lift generated by every impression delivered in the campaign, putting an end – once and for all – to arbitrary and erroneous methods of attribution that have plagued this field. Through the use of this proprietary model, advertisers and media planners will be equipped with the intelligence needed to optimize campaigns according to placement, data provider and creative, and media sellers are assured of getting a fair and proper credit for all the impressions they deliver, regardless of where and when the branding survey research occurs.”

How comScore’s Smart Lift Attribution Model Works

The Smart Lift Attribution Model works by relating the probability of achieving a particular performance criterion – for example, ad awareness, brand preference or likelihood to purchase – as a function of advertising exposures delivered by each variable, such as by publisher or creative. It controls for the effects of key respondent attributes, such as age, gender, income, usage pattern and consumer segment, to ensure such variables do not bias the results. comScore is uniquely able to assess the composite impact of all exposures to advertising because it incorporates survey results, the census measurement of all ad impressions and data from the comScore panel to provide representative demographics of the campaign viewers rather than just the survey takers. Ultimately this model provides a more realistic and complete view of the branding effect of digital campaigns, offering a much-needed solution for the digital advertising industry seeking granular, actionable insight into the individual effects of specific publishers and advertising creative.

Industry Leaders Support New Attribution Model

“The correct attribution of the effects of online advertising has been a passion of mine since I launched the first attribution models at the Atlas Institute five years ago. The current standard of associating conversions to the last ad clicked or viewed creates a myopic view of campaigns because consumers are exposed to a variety of ads, across channels and over extended periods of time. Conversion attribution models that go beyond the last ad have advanced over the years, but they largely focus on direct response metrics such as sales, leads, and registrations. comScore’s Smart Lift Attribution is the first to bring the science of attribution to brand measurement. This is a major step forward for the industry.”

- Young Bean Song, Principal and Founder of AnalyticsDNA

“comScore’s Smart Lift Attribution Model might just be the major game changer the industry has needed in the war against the ‘last click’ mindset. When a company as trusted as comScore enters a measurement conversation, people listen. This new tool will provide marketers with a level of transparency into their campaigns that most haven’t been able to reach until now.”

- Josh Dreller, VP, Media Technology & Analytics, Fuor Digital

“While this may not spell the end of ‘last-click’ attribution, it will certainly give brand-focused marketers a robust alternative to accurately assess and properly attribute the success of their digital campaigns. This is a much-needed measurement system and an exciting innovation for the digital marketing industry.”

- Joe Plummer, Adjunct Professor of Marketing at Columbia University

For more information, please visit the comScore Voices blog: www.comscore.com/SMART.

You can also request additional information by visiting the following link:    http://www2.comscore.com/Contact_Smart.

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.

TagMan Survey Shows Significant Opportunity for Online Marketers to Optimize Third Party Tags without Losing Attribution Benefits by Reducing Them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Survey Methodology and Highlights

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

The findings include the following:

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

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

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

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

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

Download the full survey results by clicking here.

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

New Capability Offers Insight on Traffic by Device and Connection Type for Operators, OEMs, Publisher and App Developers

LONDON, UK – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, announced the launch of Device Essentials™, a new service reporting on digital traffic by device, which includes computers and other devices, defined as mobile phones, tablets, music players, e-readers, gaming devices, and other web-enabled devices. Based on comScore’s global Unified Digital Measurement™ (UDM) data, which utilises census-level information from tagged web page content, Device Essentials includes comScore’s first publicly available data showing device activity globally by connection type and device category.

“comScore is excited to announce the availability of Device Essentials to provide critical insight into traffic patterns sourcing from the wide array of devices today,” said Serge Matta, comScore Executive Vice President of Telecom and Wireless. “Using comScore’s proprietary global UDM data set, we have been able to develop an expansive profile of traffic patterns across device type, connection type and geography which delivers the critical insight needed by wireless carriers, OEMs, publishers and app developers to optimize their marketing strategies and customer experience.”

comScore Device Essentials will initially report exclusively on page view activity and is immediately available across all of comScore’s reporting geographies. The number of different reporting dimensions available in this service provides answers to a variety of digital business questions. Reporting capabilities include, but are not limited to, the following:

Share of smartphone and feature phone usage by OS

- Carrier share of smartphone traffic
- OS share of carrier traffic
- Traffic to site content categories by carrier, OS and device type
- Mobile HTML vs. standard HTML traffic by content by device type
- Wifi vs. Non-Wifi traffic

iPad and Other Device Traffic Contribution by Country

comScore Device Essentials sheds light on traffic patterns by device across geographies. One of the most rapidly emerging digital traffic trends occurring across many countries is the impact of the Apple iPad and other tablets. In the analysis below of thirteen countries covering five continents, we can see how traffic is sourced from various devices.

The iPad is currently the dominant tablet device across all geographies, contributing more than 89 percent of tablet traffic across all markets. The iPad’s contribution to total non-computer device traffic is highest in Canada (33.5 percent). Brazil has the second highest non-computer device share of traffic coming from the iPad at 31.8 percent, although non-computer devices account for less than 1 percent of total traffic in the country. In Singapore, where non-computer devices comprise nearly 6 percent of total traffic, the iPad accounts for 26.2 percent of this traffic.

Interestingly, we can see that while Android tablets significantly lag behind Apple in the U.S. tablet market, the platform actually bests Apple in the Smartphone space (35.6 percent vs. 23.5 percent). iPod Touches contribute a notable percentage of non-computer device traffic across most countries, while other devices such as e-readers and gaming systems contribute only a very modest percentage.

Newspaper Content Skews Towards Mobile and Tablet Access Across Geographies

Device Essentials also provides visibility into site content category traffic by geography and device type. In the analysis below, comScore examined traffic patterns to the online newspaper category to understand how much each device type contributes to total category traffic and relative to total content consumption. Among the markets studied, the UK had the greatest share of non-computer device traffic to newspaper sites at 9.8 percent, followed by Singapore (8.8 percent), and Japan (7.0 percent).

*Non-Computer Device Traffic Newspaper Category Index = Share of Non-PC Traffic for Newspaper Category / Share of Non-PC Traffic for Total Internet x 100. Index of 100 indicates average representation.

comScore also analysed the extent to which non-computer device traffic to the newspaper category was overrepresented relative to the category’s share of total Internet traffic. The results indicated that across all countries studied, with the exception of India, the newspaper category was significantly more likely than average to be accessed via non-computer devices. Brazil exhibited the highest relative skew in newspaper category traffic (Index of 316), followed by Chile (Index of 226) and the UK (Index of 184).

Non-Computer Device Contribution for Select European Markets
Among the European markets surveyed in this analysis, the UK has the highest share of traffic coming from non-computer devices at 5.3 percent, followed by Spain (2.3 percent), Germany (1.6 percent), and France (1.5 percent). The UK also has the highest share of mobile devices contributing to non-computer device traffic share with 68.1 percent coming from mobile phones. In contrast, Germany boasts the highest share coming from tablets (30.3 percent) and other devices (10.9 percent). 5.5 percent of non-computer device traffic in France comes from gaming consoles – the highest for the European countries surveyed.

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.

Shamrock Capital Advisors Leads Series C Funding Round; Mojiva Inc. Adds John Breeman as CFO to Help Drive the Company’s Hyper Growth

NEW YORK — Mojiva Inc. (www.mojivainc.com) today announced the closing of a $25 million Series C round of funding. The round was led by Shamrock Capital Advisors, a leading investment firm focused on the media, entertainment and communications sectors, with additional participation from Mojiva Inc.’s previous investors Pelion Venture Partners and Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments.

The company also announced that global financial veteran John Breeman joined as Chief Financial Officer, further adding to its talented executive team. Breeman brings more than 30 years of experience in mergers & acquisitions, financial management and developing and executing strategies at global conglomerates such as IDT, AT&T and Siemens. He will play an integral role in managing the company’s fast growth due to global demand for its Mojiva mobile ad network and industry leading Mocean Mobile ad serving platform.

“Shamrock Capital has been one of the most successful private equity firms in the media segment and are backing top companies across all forms of media,” said Dave Gwozdz, CEO of Mojiva Inc. “Having investors with such a deep knowledge of the media space will be a huge benefit to us as we expand the business to meet the needs of brands who are increasingly relying on mobile as a critical advertising medium.”

During the first half of 2011, Mojiva Inc has seen demand for its two business units, Mojiva and Mocean Mobile, rise dramatically. The Mojiva mobile advertising network now represents 3,000 mobile web publishers and apps. It reaches more than 100 million monthly unique users in the United States and 400 million monthly unique users globally, making it one of the largest mobile ad networks in the industry. The Mocean Mobile ad serving platform serves display ads to all mobile devices including smartphones, tablets and netbooks. Its industry leading platform currently powers more than a dozen mobile ad networks and dozens of top media partners’ mobile properties, including MSNBC, Intel and others.

“We have witnessed the impressive growth of Mojiva Inc over the past several months and are confident that it has all the pieces in place to push the boundaries of the industry,” said Mike LaSalle, Partner at Shamrock Capital Advisors, who will join the board of directors at Mojiva Inc. “In addition to the fact that their technology and execution are attracting top customers, its management team boasts an unrivaled amount of experience in the mobile display ad space.”

A recent research report by Gartner Research estimated worldwide spending on mobile advertising will reach $3.3 billion in 2011 and will top $20 billion by 2015. This is Mojiva Inc’s opportunity, as internationally, the company has had significant success moving the mobile advertising marketplace forward through advertisers and publishers in locations such as Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom. The additional funding enables Mojiva Inc to add more presence internationally and put a greater focus on the large and untapped mobile advertising markets in North America and Europe.

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

Double digit growth for online advertising as Display drives European growth rate to 15.3% year-on-year

Display advertising is back! That’s according to figures just released by IAB Europe that show a revival in digital Display in 2010. With an average growth rate of 21.3%, Display overtook Search advertising as the fastest growing online ad format in Europe. Search, which has been the catalyst of online advertising growth in recent years, increased 15.1% in the same period across the 25 markets measured. Video, mobile and social media all contributed to the powerful performance of Display.

IAB Europe’s annual AdEx survey is the definitive guide to the state of the European advertising market. Released at IAB Europe’s Interact Congress in Barcelona, it shows the online advertising market accelerating at a growth rate of 15.3% in 2010 – outperforming the overall European advertising market which grew 5.0% in the same period. Total online adspend was €17.7bn in 2010, compared to €15.3bn in 2009. Market growth ranged from 37% in Russia and 24% in the Czech Republic, to 14% in Denmark and 7% in France.

Compiled by IHS Screen Digest, the research covers the entire European region, from the mature markets of Western and Northern Europe to the emerging markets in Eastern and Southern Europe for the calendar year 2010. New to the report is the Czech Republic.

The markets with the highest online adspend in the report are UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Italy and Spain (in that order). Together they account for almost three quarters (74%) of the total online advertising market. Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) markets now represent almost a tenth (9.8%) of the total.

Display’s Brand Boost

Display* advertising enjoyed growth rates of 20% or more in many markets – both emerging and mature – during 2010.  Above average growth rates were experienced in Ireland (31%), Spain (30%) and Russia (27%).

The continued growth of online TV inventory, and long-form video consumption, pushed up spend while simultaneously maintaining high CPM (cost per thousand). Online video adspend has doubled in most markets. In Spain online video grew 125% to a value of €13m; growth in the UK was 90%, to a market value of €63m.

Super Search

Paid search continued to grow double-digit at an average of 15.1%. It remains the biggest category in online advertising, with 45% of total advertising spend compared with 33% for Display and 22% for Classifieds and Directories. Whilst some of the more established markets experienced smaller increases (UK +8% like-for-like, France +10%) many saw explosive growth (Hungary +44%, Poland +31%).

Mobile Advertising Gets Carried Away

Mobile search and mobile display are included in the AdEx survey for the first time this year. Although mobile adspend figures are available for only 12 of the 25 markets, they confirm that the long-awaited take-off of mobile advertising has been realised thanks to the advent of the smartphone/3G/apps ecosystem. In those markets, mobile adspend already accounts for 2% to 3% of total online adspend.

The Big Picture

With €17.7bn of adspend last year, online now accounts for 18% of the entire European advertising market. It is now beyond 20% in some markets (UK 29%, Denmark 28%) whilst it’s only 5% in Greece and 4% in Romania. European market value is smaller than the US which also experienced a 15% growth rate last year and is now worth $26bn/€19.6bn.

According to Vincent Létang, Senior Analyst at IHS Screen Digest says “Back in 2009, video was the only growth engine in an otherwise flat Display market. In 2010 by contrast, three pillars – mobile, video and social – attracted new advertising investment. On top of fast-growing new formats, let’s not forget that traditional PC-based, banner-style formats have retained their appeal thanks to innovations in design and targeting and a rise in mainstream brands using Display for branding campaigns.”

Alain Heureux, President and CEO of IAB Europe, concludes “The IAB network has worked tirelessly to showcase how effective online Display advertising can be at supporting brand advertising campaigns. I am delighted to see that message has been getting through and the innovative ways brands are incorporating online in their advertising campaigns.  At IAB Europe’s Interact Congress this week we’ll be recognising the best of online advertising creative at with the MIXX Awards. We will also be celebrating with the winners of the Research Awards – without this valuable insight, we would not be able to prove the contribution online makes to advertising campaigns.”

Note:

*Display includes PC-based and mobile banners, rich media and video formats

The data has been compiled by IAB Europe based on information provided by the national IAB offices around Europe. It is then processed and analyzed by IHS Screen Digest. The report includes market size and value information for the full membership of the IAB Europe in 2010 including Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Romania, Russia, Spain, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. The data represents the calendar year 2010 January-December. This is the fifth edition of AdEx which began in the calendar year 2006

About IAB Europe

IAB Europe is a federation of national Interactive Advertising Bureaux (IAB) across Europe. Its mission is to promote the growth of the interactive advertising markets on behalf of its clients and national members. Supported by every major media group, advertisers, agency, portal, technology and service provider, its voice represents the interest of more than 5000 company members. IAB Europe coordinates activities across the region including public affairs, benchmarking, research, setting standards and best practices. The member countries are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and the UK. Our corporate members include Adconion, Adobe, ADTECH, Alcatel-Lucent, Aol, AudienceScience, BBC, CNN, comScore Europe, CPX Interactive, Criteo, e-Bay, Ernst & Young, Expedia Inc, Fox Interactive Media, Gemius, Goldbach Media Group, Google, GroupM, Hi-media, InSites Consulting, Koan, Microsoft Europe, Millward Brown, MTV, Netlog, News Corporation, nugg.ad, Nielsen Online, Orange Advertising Network, Prisa, Publicitas Europe, Sanoma Digital, Selligent, Specific Media, The Walt Disney Company, Tradedoubler, Truvo, United Internet Media, ValueClick, White&Case, Yahoo! and zanox.

About IHS Screen Digest

IHS Screen Digest is the pre-eminent firm of industry analysts covering global media markets. Headquartered in London, with offices in the US and Australia, we employ a team of 50 specialist analysts covering film, television, broadband media, mobile media, cinema, home entertainment, gaming and advertising. Our online services and reports provide the information and analysis that hundreds of media companies worldwide base their decisions on. Screen Digest was acquired by iSuppli Corporation in November 2010 and the combined entity was acquired immediately after by IHS. Screen Digest and iSuppli will together be the base around which IHS builds out its coverage of the TMT sector. To find out more, contact Screen Digest sales@screendigest.com Tel: +44 (0) 20 7424 2820. www.screendigest.com

Explanatory note on IAB Europe/IHS Screen Digest AdEx figures

Each national IAB in Europe runs its own annual online advertising spending study and the IAB Europe AdEx figures are based on these results. As the methodology of the studies varies country by country, IAB Europe and IHS Screen Digest have defined methodology rules to represent the figures in such a way as to make them realistically comparable. This involves:

·         Readjusting local figures to allow for harmonised representation. Readjustment rates are supplied by groups of local market experts
·         Estimating/harmonising adspend data for certain formats or segments in certain countries where local IAB studies do not include data or the definition or scope of a format is substantially different from IAB Europe standardised segments
·         Where local data is collected in a currency other than euros, the average exchange rate in 2010 has been used to convert this to euros. To provide data for prior year growth rates, the prior year figures have also been re-calculated using the 2010 exchange rate in order to give transparency over the growth rate
·         AdEx focuses on four normalised segments: ‘Display’ (including mobile Display, rich media and video), ‘classifieds and directories’, ‘paid search’ and ‘other’ (including email but excluding email marketing).
·         Figures quoted are gross figures (i.e. net invoiced value of the media, plus agency commission if any).

Sophisticated Attacks Target Video, Display, and Search Campaigns to Commit Fraud

AUSTIN, Texas – Adometry, Inc. (formerly Click Forensics) announced that the Adometry Malware Lab has discovered a new highly sophisticated advertising fraud scheme targeting online video, display and search advertisements. The coordinated attack, called “ad hijacking,” uses similar malware and infection delivery methods to create a network of computers aimed at committing advertising fraud through different kinds of advertisements and channels. The ad hijacking attack affects online advertisers, ad networks, and publishers. More details of the Lab’s findings can be found at: http://blog.adometry.com/.

“In the past, advertising fraudsters have mainly set their sights on the search advertising industry,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Adometry. “This is the first attack we’ve seen that coordinates advertising fraud across many different online ad channels.”

The Adometry Malware Lab first identified the new ad hijacking scheme and malware delivery method in November 2010. Rather than requiring a user to download malware via a fake anti-virus program, the malware injects itself into the rootkit of a user’s computer through an advertisement on a popular web site or simply when a browser visits a particular web site. Once it successfully infects the computer, the malware receives instructions from a host to perform multiple kinds of advertising fraud, including search hijacking, display advertising impression inflation, and video advertising fraud. The attacks are conducted in the following ways:

Search Hijacking – when a user enters an organic search term, the malware program re-directs the browser through different ad networks and arbitrage companies. Visitors can end up on sites they had no intention of visiting, and advertisers pay for unintentional and invalid clicks. Alternatively, visitors can reach their intended destination after being rerouted through several arbitrage networks, resulting in advertisers paying for audiences they would otherwise have for free. In addition, the malware program can be instructed to auto-click on specific ads on certain publisher sites and networks even when a browser session is inactive.

Video Ad Fraud – the malware hijacks an organic search and redirects the user’s browser to a web page that displays a video ad. The video plays and the advertiser is charged for the impression, which can command premiums of $30-$50 per thousand impressions (CPM).

Display Impression Inflation – hidden in the background from the user, the malware can direct the computer’s browser to various publisher pages that show display ads in order to generate fraudulent ad impressions. The user never sees these impressions, but advertisers pay full price for seemingly valid impressions because a “real” visitor generated the traffic.

Between November 2010 and May 2011, the Adometry Malware Lab has tracked the advertising scheme across many online ad networks and publishers. While difficult to quantify, the frequency with which Lab machines were infected indicates that tens or hundreds of thousands of computers are likely infected, generating millions of invalid clicks and advertising impressions per month. The Lab has found only one antivirus program capable of identifying and preventing the ad hijacking scheme’s malicious malware program from being installed.

For more information on Adometry, visit www.adometry.com or follow on Twitter: @Adometry.

About Adometry

Adometry, formerly Click Forensics, provides scoring, auditing, verification, and attribution metrics to optimize results for online advertisers, agencies, publishers, and ad networks. Tracking billions of impressions in real-time, reporting on where they appeared, for how long, and to what effect; the Adometry mission is to bring greater levels of transparency and accountability to the online advertising industry. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Adometry is privately held and backed by Sierra Ventures, Austin Ventures, Shasta Ventures and Stanford University. For more information visit www.adometry.com.

Adometry is a trademark of Adometry, Inc. Click Forensics is a registered trademark of Click Forensics, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

New York – DoubleVerify, the pioneer and worldwide leader in online media verification and compliance, announced BrandShield 2.0, a real-time page-level and geo-level blocking solution. Advertisers and agencies can now ensure that ads are served to pages with approved and safe content. A vital tool to protecting a brand’s reputation, BrandShield identifies undesirable and unwanted web pages to prevent incidents before they occur. The solution can be customized based on black list sites, white list sites, inappropriate page content categories and targeted geographies. These features also can be utilized by ad networks, demand side platforms and ad exchanges through the BrandShield Connect API.

DoubleVerify’s ability to accurately see through multiple layers of i-frames enables it to identify the placement of an ad 96% of the time, making its technology superior to competitors who can only verify an ad about 30% to 60% of the time. In a six-week test DoubleVerify conducted this year with three Fortune 500 brand advertisers, it analyzed campaigns across 244 million impressions and found that:

- Precise identification of content allowed for more ads to be served on brand-safe pages. Publishers added 25% more inventory when page-level blocking was used versus domain-level blocking. One entertainment site served 600,000 more impressions that would have been blocked with domain-level restrictions.

- Geo-blocking was effectively applied to every continent according to each advertiser’s criteria, with impressions blocked from Canada (35%), European countries (26%), Australia (5%), Asian countries (5%) and Africa and other regions (29%). This is an effective feature for pharmaceutical marketers who may be restricted from advertising in some countries. Research published in DoubleVerify’s Trust Index found that unintended international impressions can reach as high as 40 percent of total ads served on every campaign.

“Page level ad blocking will provide advertisers with the highest level of brand safety and compliance, even on sites that contain a mix of different content types, while allowing ad networks and publishers to better monetize ad inventory,” said Oren Netzer, CEO of DoubleVerify. “To boost transparency and accountability in the industry, we’ve built our solution to specifically address this problem. With DoubleVerify delivering a 96% see-through rate, the rate at which ad impressions can be accurately located and verified, we can evaluate site and page content and make the best real-time judgment to protect an advertiser’s brand. The precision in the technology protects the interests of all companies in the online ad ecosystem.”

BrandShield enables marketers and agencies to control where their brand appears. Before an ad is served to a page, DoubleVerify analyzes the site content with a proprietary crawling technology and compares it with the agency campaign guidelines to ensure that the page meets certain criteria. DoubleVerify identifies for more than 75 possible inappropriate content categories. With BrandShield 2.0, DoubleVerify added more granular categories such as natural disasters, aviation accidents and financial crisis, among others. This is an advantage for some of the most active online marketers such as finance and airline companies whose ads are continually served on negative content pages because of unsophisticated contextual targeting methods. Marketers have three ways to block undesirable content:

Domain-level – block ads from appearing on certain domains
Page-level – instead of blocking an entire domain, marketers may allow only appropriate pages to display the ad within a domain
Geo-level – block ads from being served to unintended international audiences
By working with DoubleVerify, ad networks and publishers can ensure that impressions are qualified before campaigns are served. This boosts monetization for publishers with frequently changing content such as news, user-generated content and blogs. Page-level blocking gives advertisers the precision and control they need to serve ads on these sites, while keeping with the brands’ compliance standards. DoubleVerify ensures that no impressions are wasted and that every appropriate page and ad unit is monetized.

“Our partnership with DoubleVerify continues to provide our clients with a truly best in class solution,” said Michael Katz, CEO, interclick. “With interclick, they know that they are reaching only the most desirable consumers while DoubleVerify ensures they are reached exclusively in the most coveted environments.”

“In online advertising there is still some uncertainty around whether specific websites or web content add value to an advertiser’s brand, or in fact hurt the brand. BrandShield 2.0 helps alleviate that uncertainty by verifying ad placement based on every page,” says Mitch Weinstein, vice president and director of Digital Ad Operations at UM. This type of protection makes sure that our clients are showing up on premium, relevant content that is brand safe.”

About DoubleVerify
DoubleVerify (www.doubleverify.com) is the worldwide leader in online advertising verification and the top choice of marketers, agencies, ad networks and publishers looking to ensure brand safety, campaign transparency and regulatory compliance. DoubleVerify verifies over 35 billion advertising impressions per month for hundreds of leading Fortune 500 marketers. DoubleVerify is headquartered in New York City, with sales offices in London and engineering offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. Investors in DoubleVerify include Blumberg Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, First Round Capital and Genacast Ventures.

Highest First-Quarter Revenue Level on Record According to IAB and PwC

23% Year-Over-Year Increase Demonstrates Growing Importance of Digital Marketing & Advertising

NEW YORK -Internet advertising revenues in the U.S. hit $7.3 billion for the first quarter of 2011, representing a 23 percent increase over the same period in 2010, according to figures released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). This marks the highest first-quarter revenue level ever for the industry and a significant increase over last year’s first-quarter revenue level, which had been the highest on record to date.

“The consistent and considerable year-over-year growth we’re seeing demonstrates that digital media is an increasingly popular destination for ad dollars, and for good reason,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. “As Americans spend more time online for information and entertainment purposes, digital advertising and marketing has emerged as one of the most effective tools businesses have to attract and retain customers.”

“The year-on-year 23 percent increase in first quarter revenues is not just impressive in its own right, but especially so when you take into account the fact that 2010 was a record-breaking year itself for Internet advertising revenue,” said David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. “These numbers indicate that the interactive advertising field hasn’t simply bounced back since the recession; it’s growing with dynamic energy.”

The IAB sponsors the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, which is conducted independently by the New Media Group of PwC. The results are considered the most accurate measurement of interactive advertising revenues because the data is compiled directly from information supplied by companies selling advertising on the Internet. The survey includes data concerning online advertising revenues from Web sites, commercial online services, free e-mail providers, and all other companies selling online advertising.

The full report is issued twice yearly for full and half-year data, and top-line quarterly estimates are issued for the first and third quarters. PwC does not audit the information and provides no opinion or other form of assurance with respect to the information. Past reports are available at www.iab.net/AdRevenueReport.

About the IAB:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies who 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.

About the PwC Network:

PwC firms provide industry-focused assurance, tax and advisory services to enhance value for their clients. More than 161,000 people in 154 countries in firms across the PwC network share their thinking, experience and solutions to develop fresh perspectives and practical advice. See www.pwc.com for more information.

London, UK – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, announced that it has been awarded a three-year contract by the Czech Association for Internet Advertising (SPIR) to be the official source of record for Internet Audience Measurement for both online and mobile media.

“One of the key criteria in choosing comScore as the official currency was their international measurement expertise and flexibility in addressing our local requirements. Furthermore the quality of comScore´s analytical tools and their experience in inclusion of new technologies into the measurement placed comScore well above any other supplier in the tender process“, says Ján Simkanič, chairman of the SPIR Executive Board.

“We are very pleased to be selected by SPIR in the Czech Republic and it is as a reflection of our commitment to providing local solutions that will build the online advertising ecosystem in Central Europe.” said Wolf Allisat, Executive Vice President and General Manager, International at comScore. “We look forward to delivering mission critical insights and competitive intelligence not only for the burgeoning digital media industry in the Czech Republic, but also to our international clients at large who want a deeper understanding of the Czech consumer.”

comScore expects to deliver inaugural data for the Czech market in early 2012. The new NetMonitor wave will last for three years and the core services of the internet audience measurement will include socio-demographic profiles, measurement of online video viewing behaviour and insights into the mobile internet market.

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

About SPIR

SPIR is a professional association engaged in the area of internet advertising since the year 2000. At the present time the membership base consists of 63 members. In addition to conducting individual, widely respected research of visitation and the socio-demographic profile of internet visitors through NetMonitor, it is also conducting the AdMonitoring project of internet advertising, the professional internet marketing conference IAC, provides expert analyses of the development of the internet market, and is a self-regulator of audiovisual content. www.spir.cz

New York – DoubleVerify, the pioneer and worldwide leader in online media verification and compliance, and AudienceScience, the largest audience aggregator in the world and early innovator of online advertising technology, announced a partnership to offer verified and compliant online ads to AudienceScience advertisers. AudienceScience’s Audience Delivery System, a comprehensive global media solution, comprises the AudienceScience Gateway, the premier audience targeting and data management platform, delivering efficient and effective online advertising, and AudienceScience Connect, the industry’s first media transaction platform enabling streamlined and transparent premium media buying and selling, including state-of-the-industry Real Time Bidding support, will integrate with DoubleVerify’s BrandAssure solution for online media verification. DoubleVerify ad tags used for verification seamlessly integrates the company’s Advertising Option Icon for self-regulation, which has been approved by the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA).

Looking to further its vigilant efforts to ensure trust, compliance and accountability to the industry, and provide superior performance for clients, AudienceScience conducted a rigorous vetting process to select DoubleVerify as a preferred partner. DoubleVerify was chosen for its solution that seamlessly integrates media verification and Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA) compliance with the DAA’s Self-Regulatory Program. This is in keeping with AudienceScience’s Quality Data Guarantee and its insistence on the strictest privacy compliance measures in the industry. DoubleVerify, with the 2-in-1 solution, was a clear choice for AudienceScience and its clients.

“Through our partnership with DoubleVerify, our clients have yet another reason to trust that their brands are in the right hands with AudienceScience,” said Jeff Hirsch, president of AudienceScience. “Our advanced technology and superior data ensure campaigns are targeted to the right audience and adhere to the Self-Regulation Program guidelines. Our partnership with DoubleVerify will only heighten the integrity of the already quality campaigns we’re running for the biggest advertisers in the world.”

DoubleVerify is the only company that offers a robust, all-encompassing solution for marketers, ad networks, DSPs and publishers to ensure media verification, as well as OBA compliance mandated by the DAA’s Self-Regulatory Program. DoubleVerify’s verification technology, which is applied to more than 35 billion online ad impressions per month, continuously monitors the complex digital advertising ecosystem to ensure that ads appear where and how advertisers paid for them to appear. Its OBA compliance solution protects consumer privacy and boosts advertising accountability through the Advertising Option Icon in online advertisements and on web pages where data is collected and used for behavioral advertising. The icon informs consumers of the nature of ads and opt-out choices.

“Transparency and accountability are increasingly important in online advertising. Campaign tracking is now more complex as agencies, ad networks and DSPs run ads in mass quantities. Furthermore, self-regulation is now a mandate from the industry and government regulators. Third-party media verification and consumer disclosure through the Ad Options Icon are positive steps towards building trust all around with the consumer and with the companies working in the ecosystem,” said Oren Netzer, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of DoubleVerify. “We’re thrilled to have an early innovator and industry leader like AudienceScience as a media partner and look forward to providing our services to their advertisers and agency partners.”

About DoubleVerify
DoubleVerify (www.doubleverify.com) is the worldwide leader in online media verification and compliance, and the top choice of marketers, agencies, ad networks and publishers looking to ensure brand safety, campaign transparency and regulatory compliance. DoubleVerify verifies over 35 billion advertising impressions per month for hundreds of leading Fortune 500 marketers. DoubleVerify is headquartered in New York City, with sales offices in London and engineering offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. Investors in DoubleVerify include Blumberg Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, First Round Capital and Genacast Ventures.

About AudienceScience:
AudienceScience is the largest and most trusted audience aggregator in the world. As an early innovator of online advertising technology, AudienceScience continues to revolutionize the industry, enabling universal access to audiences and driving digital marketing success. The Audience Delivery System, a comprehensive global media solution, comprises the AudienceScience Gateway, the premier audience targeting and data management platform, delivering efficient and effective online advertising, and AudienceScience Connect™, the industry’s first media transaction platform enabling streamlined and transparent premium media buying and selling, including state-of-the-industry Real Time Bidding support. With 300 billion data insights daily into over 386 million people worldwide, AudienceScience makes it simple to find, reach and achieve one-to-one marketing at scale. Since 2003, AudienceScience has delivered over 250,000 targeted campaigns for clients including American Airlines, Financial Times, Gannett, New York Times Digital, Nikkei.com, T-Com, Orange, Terra, Telecom Italia and Wall Street Journal Digital. For more information, please visit http://www.AudienceScience.com and follow @AudienceScience on Twitter.

Study Finds that Without Proper Adjustments, Site-Server Estimates can Overstate Audience Size by Factor of up to 2.5x

Santiago, Chile – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, released its white paper, The Impact of Cookie Deletion on Site-Server and Ad-Server Metrics in Latin America: An Empirical comScore Study. The study addresses the key sources of discrepancy between server-based and panel-based data and reveals that cookie deletion can lead to large overstatements in server logs’ measurement of the size of online audiences. Without appropriate adjustments, server-based audience reports can be inflated up to 2.5 times the actual number of unique visitors. The study analyzes behaviors in Latin America, including individual market analysis for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela.

The report revealed the following key findings for the Latin America market:

- Approximately 33 percent of Internet users delete their first-party (i.e. web site) cookies in a month. Third-party (i.e. ad server) cookie deletion rates are even higher than first-party deletion rates, with nearly 43 percent of Internet users deleting their third-party cookies in a month.

- “Serial cookie deleters” have a profound impact on inflating site-server logs because they represent a small percentage of computers, but a very large share of observed cookies.

- Because of the high rate of cookie deletion, a server-centric measurement system which uses cookies to measure the size of a site’s visitor base will typically overstate the true number of monthly unique visitors by a factor of up to 2.5x in Latin America.

- Similarly, the study found that an ad-server system which uses cookies to track the reach and frequency of an online campaign will overstate monthly reach by a factor of up to 5.2x and understate frequency to the same degree.

- Comparing cookie deletion rates across individual Latin America markets, the study reported third-party cookies being deleted by 42-45 percent of computers per month, with first-party deletion rates in excess of 30 percent in each country. Argentina exhibited the highest rates of cookie deletion for both first-party and third-party cookies at 36 percent and 45 percent of Internet users, respectively.

To download the full report, The Impact of Cookie Deletion on Site-Server and Ad-Server Metrics in Latin America: An Empirical comScore Study, please visit: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/Impact_of_Cookie_Deletion_on_Site-Server_and_Ad-Server_Metrics_in_Latin_America

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.

Company’s cross-media measurement solutions bridge gaps in traditional ad performance measurement to deliver faster, more accurate consumer insights

SAN FRANCISCO – Symphony Advanced Media, part of the Symphony Technology Group (STG), has announced their recent company launch. Symphony Advanced Media (SymphonyAM) provides cross-media advertising performance analytics and consumer insights to empower brand advertisers to make more efficient media allocation and segmentation decisions and track the performance of their live campaigns for a higher return on investment (ROI) on their media spend.

“As new media platforms emerge, brand leaders must navigate an increasingly complex array of options to engage and influence consumers. It’s more imperative than ever for marketers to fully understand how their media investments—strategically and down to the campaign level—are impacting their brand value and bottom line,” said SymphonyAM CEO Manish Bhatia. “SymphonyAM enables advertisers to get the full value out of their media investments with the right set of fast, actionable, granular insights.”

SymphonyAM recently expanded with the acquisition of San Francisco-based Factor Technology Group, a leading provider of advertising effectiveness measurement. Founded in 1999, FactorTG has executed more than 5,000,000 brand effectiveness surveys for global clients across the media, agency, automotive, CPG, financial services and pharmaceutical categories.

“Over the last two years, we have developed a great partnership with FactorTG to help our clients measure and optimize their advertising effectiveness,” noted Paul A. Pereira, vice president of analytics & search engine marketing at Hill Holiday. “We look forward to expanding this relationship and leveraging SymphonyAM’s access to even more consumer insights data.”

“SymphonyAM provides us with critical insights to help us understand the delivery and accountability of our direct-to-consumer media mix,“ said Pamela Stewart, director of consumer market research at Shire Pharmaceuticals. “We are pleased that FactorTG is now part of the larger Symphony Advanced Media organization and we are looking forward to a strengthened partnership.”

SymphonyAM’s advertising effectiveness measurement solutions utilize a unique methodological approach to combine qualitative consumer data with robust quantitative data. The result provides relevant and comprehensive insights about cross-media campaign performance—even on very short, live campaigns. This methodology enables SymphonyAM to address key shortcomings commonly found in traditional advertising measurement approaches, such as slow reporting and the inability to measure low-weight media.

SymphonyAM’s leadership team is comprised of seasoned executives from television, Internet, mobile, social media and consumer research organizations. SymphonyAM is headquartered in Palo Alto and San Francisco, CA, with offices in Princeton, New Jersey and New York City.

About Symphony Advanced Media

Symphony Advanced Media helps clients optimize their integrated channel strategies and media options to rapidly improve campaign performance, increase efficiency and drive more consumer response.

SymphonyAM’s analytics solutions combine behavioral data and survey-based solutions to provide actionable strategic insights on advertising performance across all media, including online, TV and mobile. Clients include leading global brand advertisers in the media, automotive, financial services, pharmaceutical, consumer packaged goods and telecom industries. Learn more about SymphonyAM at www.symphonyam.com.

SymphonyAM is part of part of Symphony Technology Group (STG), the global leader in marketing intelligence whose portfolio of companies include Symphony IRI, Teleca, and EYC.

Buyers Want RTB Directly Sold by Publisher to Combine Powerful Audience Targeting with Guaranteed Brand Safe Environments

Palo Alto, CA – PubMatic (http://www.PubMatic.com), which provides premium online publishers one holistic selling platform with high-touch service to increase their online and mobile ad sales, revealed the results of an online study showing that Real-Time Bidding (RTB) campaigns sold directly by publishers are in very high demand. Facilitated by a third party company, Digiday, the PubMatic study was conducted in March, 2011 and included over 640 online advertising executives – 71% online media buyers, 29% publishers.

The findings of the study indicate that publishers that open up Private Marketplaces – which provide advertisers private access to premium RTB inventory and give publishers much greater transparency, control, and revenue – have a unique opportunity to capitalize on high market demand for RTB inventory sold directly by publishers.

Study Findings, which can be found at http://www.PubMatic.com/Private_Marketplaces, include:

- Audience Targeting continues to grow:  97% of advertisers will leverage anonymous audience targeting in 2011, and 47% will have more than half of their online advertising budgets dedicated to campaigns that include audience targeting with user level attributes

- Demand for RTB is greater than the supply:  Only 20% of publishers have opened up inventory to RTB, while 62% of advertisers have leveraged RTB for their campaigns

- Private Marketplaces will increase RTB budgets for Brands:  74% of brand advertisers would likely increase their RTB budgets if they could buy directly from a publisher

“Advertisers and agencies were very clear about wanting the ability to buy RTB campaigns directly from premium publishers because they get a guaranteed brand safe environment with the targeting sophistication of RTB,” said Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO of PubMatic. “Private Marketplaces are changing the way that display advertising is purchased – the precision targeting of RTB coupled with the transparency of direct publisher sales will significantly increase the size of the display advertising market.”

Results of the study can be found at http://www.PubMatic.com/Private_Marketplaces.

PubMatic: (http://www.pubmatic.com) PubMatic’s Sell-Side Platform provides premium publishers one platform with the technology and services needed to earn the most ad revenue possible while protecting their brands online. Some of the world’s most respected publishers have chosen to work with PubMatic, including The Huffington Post, eBay, United Online, MSNBC, TV Guide, and the majority of the comScore Top 10.

PubMatic is privately held, backed by funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Nexus Venture Partners, and Helion Ventures, and has seven offices around the world in the US, Europe, and Asia.

- Mpire Officially Changes Corporate Name to AdXpose, Reflecting the Success of its Flagship Analytics Solution
- Raises $3 Million toSupportAdXpose’s Continued Growth
- Kirby Winfield Elevated to CEO;Ryan Polley Assumes New COO Position
- AdXpose Revenue and Impressions Grew 150% Each Quarter in 2010

Seattle, WA – Mpire, the market-leading verification and optimization technology company, announced that it has changed the company name to AdXpose, officially assuming the brand name of its highly successful flagship ad analytics offering, and hasraised $3 million in capital to support the company’s growth.  The funding round was led by existing investor Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

In addition, the company announced that it has elevated President and Chief Revenue Officer Kirby Winfield to the position of CEO, and that Senior Vice President of Strategic Development Ryan Polley will assume the newly created position of COO.As part of the move, Winfield will join the company’s board of directors.

“We are very excited about our company’s rapid growth over the past 12 months – it is a clear testament to the efficacy of our AdXpose solution and the success that it has generated for our customers’ campaigns,” said Winfield.  “With such strong industry demand for AdXpose from major brands, ad agencies and publishers, we now need to scale up our operations, including hiring staff and opening new offices.This new round of funding will give us more than enough capital to meet our customers’ needs.”

Today’s changes come after a year of strong growth for AdXpose. As the ad verification and optimization space continues to flourish,AdXpose saw an average 150% quarter-by-quarter increase last year in terms of revenue and impressions optimized.In other 2010 accomplishments, AdXpose:

- Signed more than 100 new customers, including top ad networks Adconion and interclick; leading platforms AdMeld, ContextWeb and MediaMath; major publishers United Online and Cox; and subsidiaries of all 5 major agency holding companies
- Increased InView® impression rates of its customers’ online ad campaigns by more than35%
- Increased ad engagement rates of its customers’ online ad campaigns by more than106%
- Reduced  non-compliance of its customers’ online ad campaigns by more than 78% within the first 30 days
- Became the only ad verification provider to natively integrate into all leading global ad serving platforms
- Developed a substantial OEM reseller footprint within major ad servers including AOL’s ADTECH
- Created the industry’s first mobile ad verification solution
- Expanded its international presence in the European Union and Asia Pacific regions
- Filed for three additional patents addressing its unique event capture and analytics technologies
- Increased headcount by more than 50%

“As the ad verification and optimization industry grows, AdXpose will continue to advance this new online ad paradigm,” added Winfield.  “Today’s announcement reflects our commitment to helping ad buyers and sellers together become more efficient in safely and accurately valuing and delivering digital media.”

About AdXpose
AdXpose is the leader in digital advertising analytics solutions. The company’s SaaS technology provides advertisers and publishers with greater transparency and confidence in the quality, safety, and performance of their digital advertising campaigns. The actionable optimization metrics captured by AdXpose solutions help its customers realize increased ROI, more profitable margins, and measurable ad effectiveness. AdXpose is headquartered in Seattle, WA, with offices in New York City, and is backed by Draper Fischer Jurvetson and Ignition Partners. For more information, visit www.adxpose.com.

Adds Platform Support For Do-Not-Track Standard To Help Advertisers Adhere To New Regulations If And When They Come

NEW YORK – TagMan, the Tag Management System, has promoted Angus Glover Wilson from Director of Operations to the newly created position of Chief Privacy Officer. This, as concerns grow in the digital marketing industry about the threat of draconic measures to restrict the tracking of user preferences and behavior online.

The company, which acts as a system to house the third-party tags used to implement, manage and track online marketing campaigns, said Mr. Wilson will take the lead on helping advertisers adhere to new regulations if and when they come into force.

“Legislators in both the US and Europe are fast approaching the introduction of measures to address consumer concerns about online tracking. In Europe, a new Privacy Directive comes into force in May requiring that consumers opt in to having their online behavior tracked, though it is not yet clear how individual EU states will interpret and enact the legislation, “says Paul Cook, TagMan’s CEO. “In the US, the digital industry is working hard to head off several competing privacy initiatives by gathering together to press the cause of self-regulation. Measures on the table include all-encompassing opt-out options in web browsers and an icon on relevant campaigns offering clear information, guidelines and opt-out options for consumers.”

As VP Operations for TagMan US, a title he held since July 2010, Mr. Wilson was primarily responsible for client services activities, corporate logistics and of course privacy-related matters. Before he joined TagMan, Mr. Wilson was General Manager, UK at iVillage (including through NBC’s $600 million acquisition of iVillage Inc), and President of boutique NY digital agency dComm.

TagMan already offers its clients the ability to enable users to opt-out of all tracking and should be able to use the same technology to help them comply with new restrictions.

“The issue at the moment is about a lack of clarity. In neither the US nor Europe is it yet clear what, precisely, any new legislation will require. One interpretation of incoming legislation would be entirely unworkable while another would mean little or no change,” says Mr. Wilson. “The key for us at the moment is to gain this clarity through professional legal counsel and to ensure that we are up to date as possible so we can develop systems to help our clients and the industry as a whole comply.”

TagMan is working with several industry self-regulation initiatives and was keen to impress on legislators the realities of online tracking.

“The digital industry has done itself few favors in communicating with consumers about precisely what we do and why. That has meant we are playing catch-up in terms of the information that’s out there and the understanding that consumers and legislators have about how online tracking works, concludes Mr. Wilson. “For example, for any business to be able to record the privacy preferences of any user is, in itself, a form of online tracking that can only be enabled by cookies. Somehow we need to address consumers’ concerns in a way that doesn’t completely undermine the way the web functions.”

TagMan (www.TagMan.com) is the smart container tag for enterprise e-commerce that offers real-time attribution. By acting as a single, universal tag and interface through which tracking tags and pixels can be deployed, online marketers can save time and money in the way they implement, manage and track campaigns. TagMan goes beyond last-click by capturing the complete path to conversion of online customers and providing real-time attribution reports that alleviate discrepancies between display, CPA and PPC online advertising channels.

TagMan was founded in November 2007  with offices in New York & London. Clients include Ancestry.com, Virgin Atlantic, Subaru, Allianz & Air New Zealand.  TagMan recently won the DPAC Award as the Best Advertising Analytics company as determined by peers in digital media and marketing.

Allows Site Owners to Tailor User Experiences to Their Brands & Streamline the Privacy Process

NEW YORK, NY – DoubleVerify, the pioneer and worldwide leader in online media verification and compliance, introduced a new version of its Privacy Manager as part of its OBA Compliance solution. The Privacy Manager allows consumers to set preferences for behaviorally targeted ads and lets DoubleVerify customers customize a user’s experience to match their sites’ look and feel. When consumers are served behaviorally targeted ads from DoubleVerify’s OBA Compliance solution, the Digital Advertising Alliance’s (DAA) Advertising Option Icon appears. Once users click on the Icon, the Privacy Manager launches and empowers them to either opt-out of behavioral targeting or set preferences for what information can be used for targeting. The Privacy Manager includes hundreds of companies and provides additional information on their privacy practices, in addition to an opt-out where available.

Consumers also encounter the Privacy Manager when visiting a website that uses DoubleVerify’s OBA Compliance solution. The Privacy Manager can either be linked to the DAA’s Icon on a site or through a publisher’s privacy policy. DoubleVerify’s Privacy Manager allows websites to control the appearance of the user-facing experience to match their brand and site appearance.

“The Privacy Manager feature in our OBA product exemplifies how we support of the DAA’s Self-Regulatory program. We’re making it very simple for companies across the board — advertisers, intermediaries and publishers — to adhere to industry privacy standards for behavioral advertising so we can prove to government agencies that the online advertising industry can self regulate,” said Oren Netzer, CEO of DoubleVerify. “Because of its ease of implementation, DoubleVerify’s OBA solution helps advertisers and publishers comply with the DAA’s standards with a click of a button. It is our responsibility to provide this service to consumers and imperative that the online advertising industry increases the transparency and accountability around its practices.”

DoubleVerify’s OBA compliance solution is a one-tag technology which, for customers of verification, uses the same ad tag it uses for its suite of verification solutions, enabling advertisers and publishers to comply with industry standards simply by checking a box on the system’s interface. The solution includes the placement of the Icon, the management of the disclosure information, the link to the user privacy manager and opt-out mechanism, as well as detailed evidence and reporting on compliance.

Since being certified by the DAA to provide OBA compliance services, DoubleVerify has placed it on more than 5 billion impressions per month across numerous ad campaigns. The company is offering its OBA solution at no charge until June 2011 to speed the adoption of the DAA’s Self-Regulatory program before potential regulatory legislation from the government is passed.

Meanwhile, individual industry organizations are beginning to enforce compliance with the self-regulatory program. The DMA’s deadline for compliance was January 31, 2011. The Better Business Bureau’s March 31, 2011 deadline is fast approaching and the Interactive Advertising Bureau set a date of August 29, 2011 as part of its recent Code of Conduct initiative for members. Because of DoubleVerify’s wide reach and hassle-free implementation, its OBA Compliance solution is the fastest and easiest method of compliance with the self-regulatory program.

For more information on DoubleVerify’s OBA Compliance solution, visit: http://www.doubleverify.com/solutions/regulatory-compliance/

About DoubleVerify
DoubleVerify (www.doubleverify.com) is the worldwide leader in online advertising verification and the top choice of marketers, agencies, ad networks and publishers looking to ensure brand safety, campaign transparency and regulatory compliance. DoubleVerify verifies over 35 billion advertising impressions per month for hundreds of leading Fortune 500 marketers. DoubleVerify is headquartered in New York City, with engineering offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. Investors in DoubleVerify include Blumberg Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, First Round Capital and Genacast Ventures.

DSP Opts for Evidon InForm – Industry’s Top Assurance Platform

NEW YORK – As yet further indication of its commitment to privacy, enterprise-class DSP MediaMath has chosen Evidon as its preferred provider of compliance services for management of the Digital Advertising Alliance’s (DAA) Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA). The agreement brings Evidon’s Assurance Platform – Evidon InForm – to MediaMath’s TerminalOne® to simplify and speed compliance with OBA principles.

Evidon InForm enables simple and scalable implementation of the Advertising Option Icon into display ads and Web sites, and gives consumers access to and control over how information is collected and used – while providing the option of opting out altogether.

“MediaMath has and continues to far exceed the industry standards for self-regulation and this partnership is deeper indication of our unwavering commitment to protecting consumer privacy,” said Tom Craig, MediaMath’s chief privacy officer. “Evidon’s platform gives our clients an additional crucial element in the privacy value chain – compliance with the industry’s latest privacy guidelines – and because our clients take privacy seriously, we take it seriously too.”

Evidon is the first company designated by the DAA as an approved provider of compliance services for the Self-Regulatory Principles for OBA. This includes the ability to deliver the Advertising Option icon on behalf of companies that are participating in the self-regulatory program. The company’s Assurance Platform is operating at scale, delivering the Advertising Option Icon and corresponding notice in more than five billion monthly advertising impressions for leading brands.

“MediaMath’s decision to work with Evidon reinforces its understanding of the importance of transparency and trust,” said Scott Meyer, founder and CEO of Evidon. “DSPs are one of the fastest growing segments of the interactive media industry and having these companies advocate for industry self-regulation is a major coup for advancing the cause and preserving industry growth.”

Evidon is the leading technology company enabling online advertising transparency, in no small part through its leadership role in the Open Data Partnership (ODP). An alliance of online behavioral advertising companies, the ODP gives consumers access to and control over the information those companies have collected about their interests directly from an ad impression or publisher site that uses Evidon’s platform.

About Evidon

Selected by the Digital Advertising Alliance to power its online behavioral advertising self-regulatory program, Evidon (formerly Better Advertising) enables a more trusted environment for everyone in the online ecosystem. It gives businesses an easy, standard way of providing evidence of compliance with industry guidelines, and consumers more transparency into and control over how their information is used online. By empowering consumers and earning their trust, businesses build their brands, participate in OBA with confidence and generate results. For more information, please visit: www.evidon.com.

About MediaMath

Headquartered in New York City with offices in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Washington, DC in the US, and in both Canada and the UK serving EMEA, MediaMath was founded in 2007 by a seasoned team of entrepreneurs, marketers, technologists and quants. The company’s industry-leading TerminalOne® platform is the first and only enterprise-class DSP – providing an unmatched combination of supply, data, analytics, workflow automation and optimization to return focus to marketing strategy rather than media execution. MediaMath drives breakthrough results for dozens of agencies representing the world’s leading brands – including units within all 7 global agency holding companies – on thousands of worldwide campaigns. For more information visit http://www.mediamath.com/.

“BuzzPlanner” helps advertisers instantly improve brand metrics and ROI at scale, leveraging online conversations with custom, rich and standard media placements

Enhanced input – system upgrades include the ability to analyze specific brand goals and translate them into conversation targets that deliver greater ROI
Improved output – plans not only define the best URLs to advertise on, but now includes the ability to scale, as well as to identify the opportunity size and additional conversation target opportunities

SAN FRANCISCO – BuzzLogic, an online media company that improves brand metrics and ROI through its scaleable media index and analytics platform, has upgraded BuzzPlanner, its conversational media planner and key buying component of its online advertising platform. Updates to BuzzPlanner include the ability to: 1) input specific brand goals which generate hundreds of URLs that can be targeted with ads, 2) optimize the placements according to conversation change metrics, and 3) scale the media plan to maximize return.

After inputting a query based around specific audience and campaign objectives, the planning module intelligently ranks and outputs hundreds of URLs for targeted ad placement, which the company then places on behalf of the brand. BuzzPlanner also allows the company’s media team to optimize during the campaign as it uncovers more dense, relevant and higher reach conversations to greatly improve ROI.

For example, a consumer package goods (CPG) company looked to target a seasonal product to audiences nostalgic about autumn. After utilizing BuzzLogic’s index and analytics module to identify the genesis of relevant discussions around autumn, the BuzzPlanner then generated a customized media plan to reach millions of potential customers across several hundred URLs. Specifically, BuzzPlanner found both traditional autumn sites around holidays, as well as those pointed toward Fall TV show premieres, football and leaf peeping. Once the plan was implemented, the campaign was optimized. The BuzzLogic program was the highest performing element of the brand’s buy based around this campaign.

“We did business with more than 70 of the Fortune 1000 companies last year providing them the ability to improve ROI through our integrated solution using conversational metrics as our levers of optimization,” said Dave Hills, BuzzLogic’s CEO. “In a world where all content is social and conversations take place throughout the visible Web, the improvements to BuzzPlanner help scale and optimize media plans and buys for the highest return.”

BuzzLogic can uniquely produce and place a customized, horizontal media plan across the visible web reaching 208 million people, according to Comscore. The company’s proprietary tech platform utilizes indexing and ranking, versus cookies or other user targeting techniques.

About BuzzLogic

BuzzLogic’s proprietary index of content, unique analytics and scalable media capabilities enables brands to identify, impact and measure increases to their online brand persuasion. The company’s all-in-one technology platform combines indexing and analytics to determine which conversations are most critical to advertisers; it allows for scaleable media placements using standard rich media and custom ad units, and ensures the greatest return via optimization and reporting.

BuzzLogic’s clientele includes Proctor & Gamble, Toyota, Best Buy, PlayStation, Microsoft, and Starbucks. BuzzLogic is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. For more information, visit www.buzzlogic.com.

IRVINE, Calif. – Specific Media, a next generation media company, further demonstrated its commitment to protecting consumer privacy by becoming the first digital media company to be certified under TRUSTed Data Collection, a new certification program for third-party data collection from TRUSTe.

Unveiled on Tuesday at the OMMA Behavioral conference in New York, the TRUSTe program is expected to become a key tool for building and maintaining consumer trust in targeted advertising. The certification, which applies to Specific Media’s global network, indicates that the company’s internal privacy controls are fully compliant with TRUSTe’s standards of transparency, choice and accountability.

To achieve certification, an in-depth audit was conducted of Specific Media’s processes, including data collection, data retention, user choice options, privacy statement and use of third-party data. According to TRUSTe research, most consumers are receptive to relevant, targeted advertising, as long as they are informed of their choices and can be sure that their personal data is being respected.

Specific Media is a signatory to the IAB Good Practice Principles, and a member of NAI and IASH. The media company is an early-adopter of the DAA’s Ad Choices program, being the first to implement the Advertising Option Icon across its entire network to empower consumers with greater control over the advertising that they receive. Specific Media is also a member of the IAB Leadership Council who, in conjunction with the EASA, is working toward introducing the Ad Choices program in Europe — a further testament to Specific Media’s proactive approach toward privacy.

“TRUSTe compliance is a continuation of our efforts to develop and embody best practices for the industry, enabling us to provide an even higher level of transparency to both consumers and advertisers,” said Tim Vanderhook, co-founder and CEO, Specific Media. “By becoming the first digital media company to be certified through TRUSTed Data Collection, we are strengthening our commitment to consumer privacy protection and helping drive forward industry standards in privacy compliance.”

About Specific Media

Specific Media is a next generation media platform company that enables brands to seamlessly connect with consumers no matter where they are. Working across formats and screens, Specific Media makes addressable advertising a reality. Specific Media’s suite of products inspire brands to think differently about their marketing initiatives – combining formats such as video and display and incorporating creative original programming to drive deep engagement and loyalty. As consumers discover new ways to consume content in the digital era, Specific Media will make sure your brand reaches them in the ways they desire. Get – and stay – connected at Specific Media.

About TRUSTe

Thousands of companies rely on TRUSTe’s leading privacy trustmark to enhance consumer trust, drive increased registrations and transactions, and comply with complex privacy requirements. Consumers know that when they see the TRUSTe seal, they can “Click with Confidence” because the certified website is responsible with their personal information. TRUSTe has certified more than 40 percent of the top fifty websites, including Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, AOL, Adobe, AT&T, Comcast, Disney, Weather.com, Apple, LinkedIn, Web MD, and Yelp. TRUSTe also certifies many of the top advertising and technology service providers for websites. For additional information on TRUSTe and its services, please visit http://www.truste.com.

Offers a Scalable and Privacy-Compliant Solution for Audience Engagement

Scalable, transparent DMP solution helps marketers identify consumers with relevant brand affinities through multiple offerings in a privacy-friendly process

SAN MATEO, Calif. – Aggregate Knowledge, the leading data management platform (DMP) on which the world’s largest advertisers make their digital data and media decisions, and TARGUSinfo, the trusted leader in on-demand insight to the most recognized brands, announced a multi-level partnership that includes integration of TARGUSinfo AdAdvisor data and advertiser’s data assets within the patent-pending AK Platform. The pre-packaged, scalable, and privacy-compliant solution is designed to improve consumer targeting, audience analytics, media buying, and dynamic creative decisioning.

Analytical Targeting of Verified Audiences

Through AdAdvisor, marketers have the opportunity to unlock the power of predictive brand and product affinities and reach consumers most likely to be responsive to their message. The highly scalable AK Platform makes it easy to develop rich performance insights by testing the full spectrum of AdAdvisor elements to identify top performers for the media channel. As a result, marketers can transparently target the best AdAdvisor elements based on how they index to a set of desired responses and how they effectively perform within a particular media context.

“AK is a leading independent data management platform trusted by TARGUSinfo with its AdAdvisor element data,” said David Jakubowski, CEO of Aggregate Knowledge.

“Given its neutral position in the ecosystem, we see AK as a powerful channel for TARGUSinfo to give agencies a transparent and actionable view into the full AdAdvisor data spectrum, including AdAdvisor elements which are not available through data exchanges,” said Ingrid Sanders, Managing Director, Digital Strategy & Partnerships.

Activating Advertiser Assets Online

TARGUSinfo has built the industry’s leading platform to convert a brand’s offline data into anonymous targeting attributes. By using the AK Platform, advertisers can develop greater efficiencies in their digital media spend through a number of key tactics. Together, TARGUSinfo and AK have led clients through planning for a number of different execution tactics, including:

- A telecommunications brand that can exclude an anonymized set of current customers from online advertising campaigns intended to drive new customer acquisition.
- A CPG brand that can translate their anonymous offline segmentation models into targeting criteria to engage with consumers most likely to become customers.
- A financial services brand that can develop rich lookalike audience pools with profitability models based on anonymized customer data.

“This partnership is a win-win-win for AK, TARGUSinfo, and our mutual clients, who can now create custom audience segments based on the offline data assets they own. This data can be applied across ad networks and DSPs without having to worry about data leakage,” said Jakubowski. “With this partnership, mutual clients also get a proven solution that is safe, secure, and extremely scalable.”

“TARGUSinfo and AK have highly complementary offerings, which together provide marketers a powerful opportunity to feel more confident in transitioning brand advertising budgets to audience buying strategies,” said Sanders.

About Aggregate Knowledge

Aggregate Knowledge is an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) company delivering the data management platform (DMP) on which the world’s largest advertisers make their digital media decisions. The patent-pending AK™ Platform combines data management and multi-touch attribution to make media accountable and help advertisers, agencies, DSPs, ad networks, SSPs, and publishers manage and exploit all of their data around a single view of the user. The platform automates “trading desk” like features for our customers by bundling hardware, software, tools, training, and science into a single, highly scalable offering.

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

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

About TARGUSinfo

TARGUSinfo, the trusted provider of On-Demand Insight® to the most recognized brands, links and delivers 100 billion real-time attributes a year to drive smarter and more profitable customer interactions on the web, over the phone, and at the point of sale. For more than a decade, America’s top brands and most respected companies have turned to TARGUSinfo to enable improved audience targeting, better customer experiences, higher conversion rates, and increased customer lifetime values by using TARGUSinfo identification, verification, scoring, and location solutions. TARGUSinfo offers a complete range of solutions to help organizations make better real-time decisions leveraging patented processes built on a proprietary network of hundreds of data feeds and its unique predictive analytics capabilities. A profitable and privately held company, TARGUSinfo is headquartered in Vienna, Va. with offices in San Diego, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. For more information, visit www.TARGUSinfo.com.

An Integrated Part of the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, Adobe SocialAnalytics Adds a Social Dimension to the Entire Suite, Turning Data and Sentiment from the Social Web into Actionable Insight to Guide Media Strategy Across Channels and Positively Impact ROI

Adobe Omniture Summit 2011
SALT LAKE CITY – Adobe Omniture Summit 2011 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) introduced Adobe® SocialAnalytics, a new product within the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture®, enabling marketers to monitor, measure and monetize social media. Adobe customers now have a single application that aggregates all relevant activity from social networks and online communities and identifies how that activity impacts key business metrics and brand perception, ultimately guiding social activity across channels and driving ROI. Adobe SocialAnalytics has been previewed at Adobe Omniture Summit 2011.

“The social Web is the largest focus group on the planet and marketers are striving to figure out how best to listen and participate,” said Brad Rencher, vice president and general manager, Omniture Business Unit, Adobe. “What marketers have been missing is a solution that helps them identify the most relevant voices and activities, tie social activity to brand and business impact and then take action to optimize that impact. Adobe SocialAnalytics can inform how a company participates on the social Web, removing guesswork and replacing it with strategies or experimentation built on insight.”

With Adobe SocialAnalytics, customers can monitor and measure popular platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, forums and any place where social conversations are occurring to see their valuable social data in context with all of their online initiatives. This helps marketers get quick answers to business questions such as: What is social media’s impact on my business? How are our social initiatives and conversations driving conversion of revenue? Who are the social influencers for my business? When positive social sentiment peaks, does our Web traffic peak or are our conversion metrics positively impacted?

Adobe SocialAnalytics augments the company’s existing, innovative social measurement and optimization capabilities, including:

Facebook Measurement

Marketers can utilize Adobe SocialAnalytics to understand the effectiveness for some of the unique elements of Facebook such as Facebook Pages, fan demographics, likes and shares, etc. Seeing this data in context with the actual conversations occurring on Facebook can deliver insights into how best to engage your customers on Facebook.

Facebook App Measurement and Mobile App Measurement

Using Adobe SocialAnalytics, marketers can view their app usage data in context with other social activity. This helps marketers further identify the effectiveness of their social and mobile app strategy and how this strategy affects or is affected by other social activities.

Viral Video Measurement

With viral video measurement, customers get insight into the performance of viral video campaigns across video sharing sites and are able to further refine how they use video across the social Web.

Twitter Measurement

This capability allows online marketers to measure brand activity on the popular microblogging site. Within the context of Adobe SocialAnalytics, marketers can see how spikes in Twitter activity affect other channels, including site visits and other onsite behavior.

Availability

Adobe SocialAnalytics is currently in beta and will be generally available in Q3 of 2011. For more information, please contact your account manager.

About the Adobe Online Marketing Suite

The Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture, offers an integrated and open platform for online business optimization, a strategy for using customer insight to drive innovation throughout the business and enhance marketing efficiency. The Suite consists of integrated applications to collect and unleash the power of customer insight to optimize customer acquisition, conversion and retention efforts as well as the creation and distribution of content. For example, using the Suite, marketers can identify the most effective marketing strategies and ad placements as well as create relevant, personalized and consistent customer experiences across digital marketing channels, such as onsite, display, e-mail, social, video and mobile. The Suite enables marketers to make quick adjustments, automate certain customer interactions and better maximize marketing ROI, which, ultimately, can positively impact the bottom line.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

Independent Accreditation Ensures Full Disclosure and that Four Key Adobe SiteCatalyst Metrics Comply with MRC Standards and Applicable IAB Guidelines; This Certified Data Can Inform the Online Ad Buying and Selling Process; SiteCatalyst Customers Can Have Their Audience Size and Engagement Metrics Certified by Adobe

Adobe Omniture Summit 2011
SALT LAKE CITY – Adobe Omniture Summit 2011 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that it has received Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for a new report within Adobe® SiteCatalyst®, powered by Omniture®. The following Adobe SiteCatalyst metrics are now accredited: Page Views, Visits, Daily Unique Cookies and Time Spent on Site. These metrics measure digital audience size and engagement.

The MRC was formed at the request of the U.S. Congress and audits and accredits audience measurement services on a voluntary basis, helping to ensure that the advertising industry has valid, reliable and effective advertising metrics. The MRC’s digital audience measurement accreditation encompasses the Audience Reach Measurement Guidelines established by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). As a result, these four SiteCatalyst metrics are also IAB compliant.

“Our customers rely heavily on Adobe to give them insight into their online businesses and have asked us to certify these SiteCatalyst metrics,” said Brad Rencher, vice president and general manager, Omniture Business Unit, Adobe. “Meeting standards backed by the MRC and the IAB means that publishers and advertisers can rely on these metrics to accurately measure and discuss digital audience size and engagement throughout the media planning, buying and selling process.”

To ensure a high level of data integrity, Adobe has put in place innovative methods of cleansing raw site traffic from events that could compromise the accuracy of the accredited metrics. Events filtered from raw site traffic include spider and robot activity. Adobe also provides facilities to remove traffic generated from customers’ internal employees.

Receiving MRC accreditation gives advertisers and publishers census-based measurement of key site metrics, meaning the metrics are generated by counting all relevant traffic to the site. These metrics can be relied upon as a more complete measurement of actual traffic and behavior since they are not based on statistically projected panel-based estimates. The statistically generated results from panel-based estimates often differ significantly from census-based results and have been a point of controversy in the advertising industry.

MRC’s Executive Director, George Ivie, said, “We congratulate Adobe for achieving accreditation of its SiteCatalyst metrics, which required implementation of several important new data filtration and accumulation practices. This commitment to quality and transparency is admirable and will serve Adobe customers well by informing them of traffic counts and other metrics more accurately.”

“Having reliable metrics that report digital audience size and engagement is critical to the growth of the interactive advertising industry,” said Sherrill Mane, senior vice president, Industry Services, IAB. “The IAB applauds Adobe for its commitment to transparency. Adobe’s completion of an audit by the Media Rating Council brings greater clarity and consistency to digital audience measurement.”

SiteCatalyst is Adobe’s flagship online analytics solution within the Adobe Online Marketing Suite.

Availability of Certification from Adobe

Adobe customers can have their digital audience size and engagement metrics (Page Views, Visits, Daily Unique Cookies and Time Spent on Site) certified by Adobe. The Adobe Audience Certification Program will be initiated via an opt-in process in the next few months. For more information, please contact an account manager.

“Scripps Networks has been a long time customer of Omniture and has depended on our Adobe SiteCatalyst numbers to give us insight into the size and engagement of our online audiences,” says Cheryl Brink, VP Interactive Research & Analytics, Scripps Networks. “Becoming an Adobe Certified Publisher will give our advertisers an added level of confidence that Scripps Networks can help them reach a highly engaged audience in a quality lifestyle environment. We’re pleased that Adobe is helping the industry evolve toward a more comprehensive approach to measurement.”

About the Adobe Online Marketing Suite

The Adobe® Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture®, offers an integrated and open platform for online business optimization, a strategy for using customer insight to drive innovation throughout the business and enhance marketing efficiency. The Suite consists of integrated applications to collect and unleash the power of customer insight to optimize customer acquisition, conversion and retention efforts as well as the creation and distribution of content. For example, using the Suite, marketers can identify the most effective marketing strategies and ad placements as well as create relevant, personalized and consistent customer experiences across digital marketing channels, such as onsite, display, e-mail, social, video and mobile. The Suite enables marketers to make quick adjustments, automate certain customer interactions and better maximize marketing ROI, which, ultimately, can positively impact the bottom line.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

Expert Publishers, Advertisers and Members of the Agency Community Come Together to Discuss Best Practices and Latest Trends

SES New York 2011
NEW YORK – The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)’s Local Committee and Ad Networks and Exchanges Committee are programming a forum and track at SES New York, which takes place March 21-25, 2011 at the Hilton New York. SES New York, which is expected to attract more than 5,000 industry professionals, is the industry’s leading search and social marketing conference and expo. To attend SES New York and the IAB forum and session track, register before March 21 and receive the pre-show discount of up to $200.

The IAB Forum, scheduled for Monday, March 21, is a full day of sessions on Local Advertising, including a keynote speech by Warren Webster, President of Patch by AOL. The forum is a perfect guide for brands and agencies who are building a local advertising program.

Scheduled for Tuesday, March 22, the IAB track features the leading voices in the advertising industry who will be examining the latest trends and opportunities in ad networks and ad exchanges.

“We love partnering with the IAB’s industry gurus to present the latest developments and best practices to our attendees,” said Matthew McGowan, Managing Director of Americas for Incisive Media. “There are so many critical changes taking place in the advertising industry that it’s hard to keep up. The specialized networks and exchanges track will save anyone working in this arena a lot of time and effort, and the forum is perfect for local advertising professionals.”

“We’re particularly interested in participating in SES New York at this juncture of our committee because we will only be days away from certification against the new IAB Quality Assurance Guidelines,” said Jay Sears, General Manager of CONTEXTWEB, Inc. and co-chair of the IAB Networks and Exchanges Committee. “It will give us a great opportunity to hear from our constituents in the ad networks and exchanges community.”

Following the Webster keynote, the five sessions of the IAB Forum are:

“Geofences make good customers: Mobile targeting and local results” presents ideas on how to drive the right local audience to commercial opportunities.
“When it rains, it pours: Using apps to drive mobile and iPad engagement” lets attendees in on the first industry-wide study on the intersection between mobile and tablet devices and user engagement in the away-from-home market.
“Back at the wheel: How big auto drives sales” delivers information about how to use display, local and onsite-search to drive local sales.
“Clip and save: Group buying, digital couponing and content that works” addresses the group-buying craze and how marketers can incorporate it into their marketing campaigns.
“In El Barrio: Reaching US Hispanics where they live and shop” presents ideas for going after the $1 trillion purchasing power of the US Hispanic market.

The four sessions within the IAB Ad Networks and Exchanges Track focus are:

“Meet the Buyers: Defining Quality in the Buying Experience”
Chuck Moran, CMO of BURST Media, will moderate a discussion among leading New York City digital buyers about what they are looking for in an ad network or ad exchange.
“The QAGies Are Coming: The Movement for Quality in Display Advertising”
Rob Rasko, President and COO of CPX Interactive and co-chair of the Quality Assurance Guidelines Go-To-Market Working Group, will moderate a discussion about what it will mean to certify against the IAB Quality Assurance Guidelines starting in April 2011.
“The AAAA Digital Committee Speaks About Quality”
David Jacobs, Senior VP of Publisher Services, Advertising.com and Jay Sears, co-chairs of the IAB Networks and Exchanges Committee, will moderate a discussion among representatives from the 4As Digital Committee: Agency.com, Digitas, Kirshenbaum, MEC, MediaSmith, Moxie, Neo, OMD, and Starcom about the relative importance of transparency, control and simplicity in partnering with ad networks and exchanges.
“RTB, DSP, ATD, WTF: Finding Quality in a Sea of Solutions”
Jay Sears will moderate a discussion with demand side platform leaders about the role demand side platforms play in the digital media supply chain.

Through March 21, marketers can register to receive the SES New York pre-show discount of up to $200. For the first time at SES New York, Incisive Media has designed an attractively-priced All Access Passport, which includes access to all conference sessions, keynotes, the expo hall, training sessions and partnered events.

About SES

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

Incisive Media is a leading global provider of specialized business news and information, in print, in person and online. 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

About the IAB

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies who 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.

NEW YORK – Online targeting platform leader [x+1], www.xplusone.com, announced it has promoted Leon Zemel to the position of Chief Analytics Officer and Greg Pier, to that of Senior Vice President, Platform Implementation and Production Support. Zemel had been Executive Vice President, Analytics, and Pier had been Vice President, Product Management.

Zemel, who came to [x+1] in 2004 from Digitas, has led the company’s analytics practice and been the innovator of [x+1]’s analytic offerings for site personalization and media optimization, including the development of its patented Predictive Optimization Engine (POE™). In this expanded role, Zemel is charged with leading the expansion and enhancement of the company’s multi-touchpoint analytics offerings, including cross-channel attribution (search, display, e-mail, etc.), audience targeting and optimization in emerging digital channels (e.g., social, mobile, video), and leveraging the Open Data Bridge for integrated third-party and first-party data.

Pier, a former Doubleclick executive who also came to [x+1] in 2004, will oversee development of the Media Platform for both pre-purchased and exchange-based digital media. The Platform enables a single point of management for all campaign buys and allows one-click access to bidding on exchange-based inventory. It also connects to all available biddable inventory, ensuring that ads are shown to a company’s target audience and purchased at the right price to deliver the most efficient media buy possible.

“Because we recognize the critical importance of our robust analytics and our Media Platform, we will continue to grow our teams around the ways that will best help clients expand their business,” said John Nardone, Chairman and CEO of [x+1]. “Given their deep expertise and service focus, as well as their industry savvy, no two people are more suited to lead this charge than Leon and Greg. We look for great things as they help [x+1] continue to set the standard in shaping a more personalized Internet as the leading online targeting platform.”

About [x+1]

[x+1], the online targeting platform leader, maximizes the return on marketing investment (ROI) of websites and digital media using its patented targeting technology. Providing the first end-to-end digital marketing platform for advertisers and agencies, it optimizes engagement rates and lift conversion in both media and on websites. Its predictive marketing solutions enable automated, real-time decision making and personalization so the right advertisement and content is delivered to the right person at the right time. Top companies in financial services, telecommunications, online services and travel have significantly increased the performance of their digital marketing using the services of [x+1]. The company is headquartered in New York City. For more information, please visit www.xplusone.com; follow us on twitter @xplusone.

Expandable Rich Media and Contextual Targeting Features Available

NEW YORK – CONTEXTWEB Inc., the ad technology and services company, announced that audience targeting platform provider [x+1] and Demand-Side Platform (DSP) MediaMath are now integrated with the Real-Time Bidding (RTB) platform of CONTEXTWEB, giving both companies access to unique publisher inventory and new impression attributes.

By integrating with the CONTEXTWEB Real-Time Bidding Platform, clients of MediaMath’s TerminalOne and [x+1]’s multichannel targeting platform have access to 200 million daily impressions from more than 11,000 direct publisher relationships. Of the 200 million daily impressions available, an industry high, 90% provide the referring URL, with 40% being rich media-enabled.

“MediaMath boasts the industry’s deepest reach of RTB inventory, and integrating the fully transparent and data-rich supply of CONTEXTWEB into TerminalOne lets us provide partners a key source of high quality, brand-safe impressions on which to deploy winning campaigns,” said Marta Martinez, MediaMath’s CMO. “And by leveraging the powerful contextual technology of CONTEXTWEB, we’re able to offer an additional important layer of depth and value to help marketers make better decisions on how to value media.”

CONTEXTWEB, which specializes in RTB, provides 23 impression-level data attributes including full-page URL, referrer URL, fold count position and rich media acceptance coding.

“The CONTEXTWEB Real-Time Bidding Platform is a perfect complement to [x+1]’s powerful multichannel capabilities, which integrate multiple internal and third-party data sources to enable audience targeting precision and campaign lift across the digital media spectrum,” said Ted Shergalis, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of [x+1]. “CONTEXTWEB has demonstrated its market leadership by enabling over 40% of its RTB impressions to serve rich media expandable ads.”

“[x+1] and MediaMath are both recognized leaders in optimizing digital media and reaching targeted audiences across online channels,” said Jay Sears, General Manager of the CONTEXTWEB Ad Exchange. “Couple that with the CONTEXTWEB RTB platform, and you have a brand safe, highly targeted audience reach that helps clients reach their intended audience at scale.”

For more information about CONTEXTWEB and Real-Time Bidding, please submit a request.

About CONTEXTWEB

CONTEXTWEB is a leading integrated digital media services company that delivers consistent, measurable online ad performance on hundreds of millions of real-time impressions every day. CONTEXTWEB layers online and offline audience data with highly relevant content to deliver unique audiences at scale. Its proprietary page-level contextual technology delivers brand-safe environments and ranks among the top 20 ad-supported properties, according to comScore. CONTEXTWEB counts among its clients Fortune 500 companies in pharmaceuticals, automotive and consumer goods, among others. Investors in CONTEXTWEB include leading venture capital firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson (“DFJ”), DFJ Gotham Ventures, DFJ New England, Updata Partners and Investor Growth Capital. CONTEXTWEB is headquartered in New York with offices across the country and in the UK. For more information, please visit: contextweb.com; follow us on Twitter @contextweb.

About [x+1]

[x+1], the online targeting platform leader, maximizes the return on marketing investment (ROI) of websites and digital media using its patented targeting technology. Providing the first end-to-end Digital Marketing Hub for advertisers and agencies, it optimizes engagement rates and lift conversion in both media and on websites. Its predictive marketing solutions enable automated, real-time decision making and personalization so the right advertisement and content is delivered to the right person at the right time. Top companies in financial services, telecommunications, online services and travel have significantly increased the performance of their digital marketing using the services of [x+1]. The company is headquartered in New York City. For more information, please visit www.xplusone.com; follow us on twitter @xplusone.

About MediaMath

Headquartered in New York City with offices in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Washington, DC in the US, and in both Canada and the UK/EMEA, MediaMath was founded in 2007 by a seasoned team of entrepreneurs, marketers, technologists and quants. The company’s industry-leading TerminalOne® platform is the first and only enterprise-class DSP – providing an unmatched combination of supply, data, analytics, workflow automation and optimization to return focus to marketing strategy rather than media execution. MediaMath drives breakthrough results for dozens of agencies representing the world’s leading brands – including units within all 7 global agency holding companies – on thousands of worldwide campaigns. For more information visit http://www.mediamath.com/.