CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – With Facebook’s initial public offering last week, the social networking giant can look ahead to a potentially huge new source of revenue from “social advertising,” according to new research by MIT Sloan School of Management Associate Professor of Marketing Catherine Tucker. Tucker says that Facebook itself is only beginning to recognize the “untapped potential” of this kind of advertising fueled by its own technology.

Tucker’s research counters the prevailing view of recent years that social network websites are unfruitful venues for paid advertising. Instead, she finds that social advertising has been under-valued and underrated as a revenue stream and as an effective way to deliver messages, though only if those messages are delivered the right way.

“Facebook has only recently figured out what is unique about all the data they collect,” says Tucker. “Facebook knows who peoples’ friends are, which can be hugely valuable to marketers. Feeding that social network into the Facebook algorithm creates huge and under-exploited profit potential.”

In social advertising, marketers use online social relationships to target and improve their ads. For her new research paper, Tucker examined data from an experiment in which a nonprofit charity used both traditional and social advertising on Facebook. Tucker found that the social ads, which were targeted to friends of `fans’ of the nonprofit on Facebook, attracted far more clicks than those that were not. “When you target ads based on who is friends with whom, you can double the number of click,” she says. “This is because advertisers can uncover consumers who could also get excited about their product.”

“Social advertising is not necessarily replacing display advertising,” adds Tucker. “Rather, it is a different and more effective form of targeted advertising that still remains unrefined, even on Facebook.” So far, Facebook’s algorithm appears to treat all Facebook friends equally, Tucker explains. “But among your friends, certain people have more influence; they are the `gatekeepers’ whom you tend to follow more closely. When Facebook refines its algorithm to incorporate such gatekeepers as part of social advertising, we will see ever greater improvements in advertising response.”

But Facebook must be careful about how it uses such powerful information, Tucker cautions. “There is a level of intrusiveness that no advertiser should cross. Advertisers must avoid being overt in their attempts to exploit social networks in their advertising. If Facebook too explicitly takes advantage of your friend, it could cross that line.” For example, in her study she finds that an ad that states explicitly, “Be like your friend” deters users, who could resent that Facebook or any other company is openly commercializing friendship. But if the consumer is simply informed that “Susan likes this,” it is not seen as a personal intrusion. “Speculatively, the results suggest that intrusive or highly personal advertising is more acceptable if done algorithmically by a faceless entity such as a computer than when it is the result of evident human agency,” Tucker writes.

These are the kinds of issues with which Facebook itself is grappling as it gets more deeply into social advertising. “Facebook is not giving much guidance to advertisers about how to use this new technology, partly because it is so new. But the results of my research suggest that social networks will be able to exploit their unique data on who is friends with whom to enlarge their share of advertising dollars.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Support for the latest Genesis release ­ – Genesis 3.0

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

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

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

About BrightEdge

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

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

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced the immediate availability of Adobe® AudienceResearch, a new audience measurement tool that provides publishers and digital marketers with certified metrics on the size and engagement of digital audiences for websites, mobile applications and digital magazine editions. These key metrics are captured by Adobe SiteCatalyst®, an industry leading online analytics application, and provide publishers with the information most critical to attract advertising dollars. AudienceResearch is available at no additional cost to SiteCatalyst customers. In conjunction with AudienceResearch, the company also announced the general availability of the Adobe Audience Certification Program. Under this program, publishers become Adobe Certified Publishers, meaning Adobe has certified that their digital audience data meets certain criteria regarding the accuracy of data collection and reporting. Adobe Certified Publishers can contribute their data to the AudienceResearch tool.

AudienceResearch provides census-based measurement of metrics, meaning that the metrics are generated by counting all relevant traffic, a method considered more accurate and representative of actual traffic and behavior than panel-based methods. Panel-based methods monitor the behavior of a small group of volunteer consumers (i.e. the panel) and then use statistics to generate estimate metrics. 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. Adobe Certified Publishers can arm their direct sales teams with these certified, census-based metrics, including metrics that have been accredited by the Media Ratings Council, and advertisers can rely on these metrics as they make media planning decisions.

“We count many of the world’s largest publishers as our customers. With this strong customer base and pent-up demand for census-based metrics, we anticipate strong adoption of AudienceResearch,” said Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Marketing Business Unit, Adobe. “AudienceResearch has the potential to provide the industry with a reliable, cross-channel currency for measuring digital audience size and engagement, bringing greater confidence into the digital advertising planning, buying and selling process.”

Today’s announcement builds on Adobe achieving MRC accreditation for key SiteCatalyst metrics. To achieve accreditation, Adobe has put in place innovative methods of auditing site implementations of SiteCatalyst as well as cleansing and certifying raw site traffic, giving advertisers and publishers the most accurate view of digital audience metrics. Additionally, publishers using the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to create digital magazine editions for tablet devices may elect to have their metrics automatically certified as analytics is natively built into the Digital Publishing Suite. This native integration ensures the integrity of data collection.

Become an Adobe Certified Publisher

Publishers currently using Adobe SiteCatalyst can become an Adobe Certified Publisher, which assures advertisers that the certified digital audience size and engagement metrics provided by the Adobe Certified Publisher have met certain requirements for data collection integrity and reporting accuracy. Adobe Certified Publishers can contribute these key metrics to AudienceResearch. Participation in the Adobe Audience Certification Program is complimentary for existing SiteCatalyst customers. To participate, contact an Adobe account manager.

Publisher Support for Census-based Measurement via AudienceResearch

Chris Reynolds, executive director of analytics, Condé Nast

“Condé Nast is leading the market by taking our world-class brands into the new digital age using the insights garnered from our long-standing relationship with Adobe SiteCatalyst and the technology from Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. We’re excited to see Adobe bringing together the content creation and delivery workflows with measurement and monetization solutions that will help us highlight the value of our brands to our advertising partners.”

Kim Vignola, vice president, research & analytics, E! & G4, NBC Universal

“Many online publishers feel that their traffic is underrepresented in panel-based services. The Adobe AudienceResearch tool is enabling advertisers to have confidence in the internal data that we know to be stable and accurate. The set-up is quick, and minimal traffic was filtered out through the accreditation process.”

Heather Idema, corporate research director, Bonnier Corporation

“As the digital landscape continues to rapidly advance, consumer’s expectations are revolutionizing the way publishers supply the demand for quality content. Publishers and media buyers are constantly seeking measurement solutions that provide our digital mediums with an ‘apples to apples’ comparison that is credible and simplifies audience measurement. The certification of Adobe’s syndicated platform offers us a stage to help better represent our digital venues, ultimately opening the flood gates to more business.”

Ryan Whittington, senior vice president, digital revenue at The Business Journals

“With the rapid increase in the consumption of digital content across mediums and on many devices, publishers face the difficult challenges of providing a unified view of the audience. We need content and measurement solutions that meet the needs of the audience however they choose to consume, which is why we’re excited to see Adobe stepping up to the challenge of simplifying digital audience measurement..”

About the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite

The Adobe Digital 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.

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.

AUSTIN, Texas – Seth Weisfeld, a co-founder of AdRevolution, a leading provider of digital marketing software solutions, has returned to the organization as vice president of Products and Solutions. Weisfeld will lead AdRevolution’s expansion in the software as a service (SaaS) business efforts.

“We are very pleased to have Seth back on our executive team,” said Andrew Westmoreland, CEO and co-founder of AdRevolution. “Seth has an impressive track record of developing solutions that create results for our clients. I know our success will continue to grow under his leadership.”

Weisfeld’s key focus will be driving the company’s SaaS solutions. He will work closely with AdRevolution’s executive team to align growth activities and cultivate new opportunities.

“What drew me back is the simple truth that AdReolvoution’s software platform is distinctive,” Weisfeld said. “Our software consistently builds our client’s businesses. I’m thrilled to be joining AdRevolution’s exceptionally talented and passionate team.”

Weisfeld most recently served as general manager of Email Solutions at Market Leverage Interactive, an advertising and marketing company that provides performance-based online marketing services. While there, Seth increased revenue over 65% and profits by more than 100% through software development and technology re-architecture.

About AdRevolution

AdRevolution is the market leader in highly-targeted interactive marketing with the powerful algorithms of its Natural Intelligence Marketing Engine (NIME). Using NIME’s one-to-one targeting capabilities, AdRevolution presents relevant advertisements to consumers, increasing revenues for advertisers, publishers and e-tailers on any digital channel. AdRevolution clients typically see a 50-400% increase in revenue. Learn more at www.adrevolution.com.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. – Sheraton Hotels & Resorts unveiled its $20 million “Meet You There” advertisement campaign created to highlight the success of the brand’s recently completed three-year, multi-billion dollar rebranding effort. Starwood spent the last few years renovating and rebuilding one of the hotel industry’s most iconic brands and now Sheraton stands better than ever with the strongest portfolio in its history. Sheraton is gaining market share, RevPAR continues to rise and guest satisfaction scores are highest in the brand’s history signaling that guests are taking notice and rediscovering the new Sheraton.

As part of the rebranding effort, every aspect of the new Sheraton guest experience was designed to promote social interaction and bringing people together. As a result, the “Meet You There” campaign uses playful taglines and imagery to showcase key elements of the recent makeover that have already struck a chord with guests, including the Link@SheratonSM experienced with Microsoft®, Sheraton Fitness Programmed by Core Performance® and the enhanced Club Lounge.

The creative vision for the campaign was driven by the growing demand from travelers for socially designed spaces and amenities. The “Meet You There” tagline acts as an invitation to experience key brand elements through clever headlines and energetic images of people gathering in different settings. “Wi-Fi, Mai-Tai, Say Hi” shows guests coming together, seamlessly blending business and leisure – also known as “bleisure.” Whereas “Body for Business” reflects the importance of health and fitness while on the road and “How to Hotel” highlights how road warriors seek the benefits of the brand’s signature Club Lounge experience during their travels. The campaign leverages these communal elements to promote an emotional connection with consumer and Sheraton’s new social experiences.

One of the highlights of the new campaign is the use of out-of-home, motion activated digital touch screens that allows consumers to experience the brand’s signature offerings digitally. Travelers that walk by the out-of-home executions will be prompted to engage with the digital billboard – the screen will react to their specific movements and with just one touch are invited to experience the new Sheraton.

Sheraton worked with Publicis Groupe agencies—Razorfish and the Kaplan Thaler Group—to develop the campaign’s strategy, digital and traditional creative elements. The $20 million campaign’s six unique executions are currently running in newspapers and will appear in magazines and online by July. Traditional and digital out-of-home advertisements will be seen in airports throughout the country. The campaign will also feature mobile rich media ads as well as custom partnerships with Xbox and CBS Sports.

“As part of Sheraton’s successful brand overhaul and the introduction of ‘Meet You There,’ every aspect of this new advertisement campaign is designed to promote social interaction and bring people together,” said Hoyt Harper, Global Brand Leader, Sheraton Hotels & Resorts. “We are thrilled to introduce Sheraton’s new voice through these clever ads that blur the boundaries between business and leisure travel.”

“This digitally-led campaign aligns with Sheraton’s brand promise of providing ‘connections’ to its guests,” said Pete Stein, President of Razorfish East. “Razorfish is very proud of the high-quality work that has always resulted from our collaboration with Sheraton, and this campaign is no exception. I am confident it will meet its goal of offering consumers a new impression of Sheraton hotels and resorts.”

Sheraton’s “Meet You There” campaign breaks on newspaper print ads today, including USA Today and The New York Times. Online digital ads will appear on July 11 in top news and lifestyle websites such as NYTimes.com, CNN.com, Frommers, BlogHer and TripAdvisor, and in major magazines like Conde Nast Traveler, Wired and Time Magazine in August.

About Sheraton Hotels & Resorts

Sheraton helps guests make connections at more than 400 hotels in 70 countries around the world and recently completed a $6 billion global revitalization and is now in the midst of a $5 billion global expansion over the next three years. Sheraton is owned by and is the largest and most global brand of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc., (NYSE: HOT) one of the leading hotel and leisure companies in the world with 1,051 properties in 100 countries and territories with 145,000 employees at its owned and managed properties. Starwood Hotels is a fully integrated owner, operator and franchisor of hotels, resorts and residences with the following internationally renowned brands: St. Regis®, The Luxury Collection®, W®, Westin®, Le Méridien®, Sheraton®, Four Points® by Sheraton, and the recently launched Aloft®, and Element SM. The company boasts one of the industry’s leading loyalty programs, Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG), allowing members to earn and redeem points for room stays, room upgrades and flights, with no blackout dates. Starwood Hotels also owns Starwood Vacation Ownership, Inc., one of the premier developers and operators of high quality vacation interval ownership resorts. For more information, please visit www.starwoodhotels.com.

About Razorfish

Razorfish creates experiences that build businesses. As one of the largest interactive marketing and technology companies in the world, Razorfish helps its clients build better brands by delivering business results through customer experiences. Razorfish combines the best thought leadership of the consulting world with the leading capabilities of the marketing services industry to support our clients’ business needs, such as launching new products, repositioning a brand or participating in the social world. With a demonstrated commitment to innovation, Razorfish continues to cultivate our expertise in Social Influence Marketing, emerging media, creative design, analytics, technology and user experience. Razorfish has offices in markets across the United States, and in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Singapore and the United Kingdom. Clients include Carnival Cruise Lines, MillerCoors, Levi Strauss & Co., McDonald’s and Starwood Hotels. With sister agencies Starcom MediaVest, ZenithOptimedia, Denuo and Digitas, Razorfish is part of Publicis Groupe’s (Euronext Paris: FR0000130577) VivaKi, a global digital knowledge and resource center. Visit www.razorfish.com for more information. Follow Razorfish on Twitter at @razorfish.

About the Kaplan Thaler Group

The Kaplan Thaler Group has been ranked by industry publications as one of the fastest-growing advertising agencies in the U.S. and is touted for its breakthrough creative and immediate results. The Agency’s blue-chip client roster includes Procter & Gamble’s Dawn, Swiffer, Cascade and Aussie brands, Aflac Incorporated, Champion, Pfizer, U.S. Bank and Wendy’s. The Kaplan Thaler Group is part of the Publicis Groupe, one of the world’s largest communications holding companies. For more information, visit: www.kaplanthaler.com. Follow the Kaplan Thaler Group on Twitter: @ktgtweets.

NEW YORK – Millward Brown’s Dynamic Logic, the world leader in digital insights, announced the launch of AdRadar™, a new technology linking digital ad exposure to the industry’s largest panels. AdRadar allows real-time identification of panelist exposure to digital assets, which can include display ads, online videos, Web sites and online CRM initiatives, and the ability to understand how digital marketing activities impact brand equity, consumer behavior and the bottom line.

“With access to more than 10 million people globally through AdRadar linkages, Dynamic Logic is broadening online sampling options, simplifying data integration and empowering clients to better understand the lasting effects of their digital and cross-media campaigns,” said Jean Robinson, President of Dynamic Logic. “The result is deep insights about campaign performance, benefiting advertisers, agencies and publishers.”

AdRadar currently enables linkages to third-party databases (i.e. consumer packaged goods, retail, travel, lodging, dining, entertainment, services), a client’s own proprietary databases, financial databases, as well as data from existing industry partners such as Compete, Cymfony, Federated Sample, Kantar Shopcom, Lightspeed Research, SymphonyIRI, and uSamp.

The strength of the AdRadar technology can be seen in the insight it provides to clients.

- An Auto brand that is running multiple ad campaigns throughout the year can not only test each campaign’s individual effect on search, site visitation, and sales, but also track the longitudinal impact of these campaigns and other digital assets on overall brand health.
- A Consumer Packaged Goods company can assess how their digital ads shifted consumers’ attitudes of the brand, influenced people to voice their opinions through social media, and drove in-store sales.
- A Pharmaceutical company can understand how their ad campaign raised awareness of a new drug by surveying doctors through an AdRadar-linked panel. Ad exposure among opted-in panelists can also be tied directly to script writing, enabling a measure of pharmaceutical sales.

“AdRadar is a powerful technology that complements BrightRoll’s online video technology, and helps our advertisers determine the overall impact of individual digital marketing initiatives,” said Daryl McNutt, SVP Research and Marketing for BrightRoll, a Dynamic Logic AdRadar client. “The technology’s flexible solution adds value to our clients’ video campaigns through its multi-sample option, and offers great linkage to other third-party data.”

“We’re excited about testing Dynamic Logic’s panel-based platform as a possible means to reach our niche target audiences,” says Lucy Kon, Director, Portfolio Strategy and Research at Marriott International.

AdRadar can also serve as an effective solution for campaigns that may not lend themselves to standard online intercept methodologies due to site and placement restrictions. In a recent project with Google to measure the impact of a client’s advertising campaign, Dynamic Logic leveraged an AdRadar-enabled approach to find the sample needed for a thorough research analysis.

AdRadar advantages include:

- Multiple panel linkages, which provide more flexibility in analysis and pricing
- Quicker turnaround for hard-to-recruit demographic groups
- Continuous measurement of digital ad exposure for brand health tracking
- Easier implementation for publishers and agencies
- Ability to define a control sample based on campaign footprint by identifying consumers who have visited the sites within the campaign, but were not exposed to the campaign itself. This provides the best match possible, resulting in a more accurate read of the campaign’s brand impact.
- Campaign profiling that explores whether a campaign hit intended target groups on select sites

To learn more about how you can leverage AdRadar, contact Ken Greenberg, vice president of product development, at keng@dynamiclogic.com or 212-844-3700.

About Dynamic Logic

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

About Millward Brown

Millward Brown is one of the world’s leading research agencies and is expert in effective advertising, marketing communications, media and brand equity research. Through the use of an integrated suite of validated research solutions — both qualitative and quantitative — Millward Brown helps clients build strong brands and services. Millward Brown has more than 78 offices in 54 countries. Additional practices include Millward Brown’s Global Media Practice (media effectiveness unit), The Neuroscience Practice (using neuroscience to enhance traditional research techniques), Millward Brown Optimor (focused on helping clients maximize the returns on their brand and marketing investments), Dynamic Logic (the world leader in digital insights) and Firefly Millward Brown (a global qualitative research business). Millward Brown is part of Kantar, WPP’s insight, information and consultancy group.

SAN FRANCISCO – NetShelter Technology Media, the largest tech influencer network with over 150 million readers globally*, announced that it has won two awards in the Web Marketing Association’s 2011 Interactive Advertising Competition. NetShelter was the recipient of “Outstanding Online Campaign” and “Best Retail Online Campaign.” This prestigious accolade is awarded by the Web Marketing Association to honor excellence in online advertising, recognize the individuals and organizations responsible, and showcase the best in award winning Internet advertising.

NetShelter won for its work on the “LG Optimus S Influential Stories” campaign, which was created to help the technology giant launch their latest smartphone during the 2010 holiday season. NetShelter created a highly interactive social experience, which brought together brand messaging and video around the LG Optimus S smartphone with the most influential and engaging editorial articles from NetShelter’s mobile and consumer electronics publishers.

In addition, NetShelter was awarded for its innovative “RadioShack Gift Guide” campaign, which helped position the retailer as the preferred consumer electronics shopping destination for gifts during the 2011 holiday season. NetShelter created the “Gift Guide Review,” a customized, interactive ad experience that aligned RadioShack’s featured mobile and consumer electronics products with objective editorial content and expert product reviews. At the campaign’s conclusion, NetShelter delivered a 200% lift in CTR compared to standard IAB units.

“We are honored to be recognized by our peers with this year’s IAC award win,” said Peyman Nilforoush, CEO and co-founder of NetShelter Technology Media. “NetShelter’s success with the LG and RadioShack campaigns demonstrates the power that integrating engaging and objective editorial from influential publishers delivers to digital marketing campaigns. We look forward to helping even more tech-related brands realize the performance benefits that NetShelter’s unique influencer marketing approach brings to their marketing initiatives.”

The Internet Advertising Competition (IAC) Awards are produced by the Web Marketing Association to honor excellence in online advertising and to recognize the individuals and organizations responsible for the best in Internet marketing. The IAC Awards are the first and only industry-based advertising award competition dedicated exclusively to online advertising. The Competition web site with a complete list of winners is located at www.IACAward.org.

*comScore Media Metrix January 2011

About NetShelter Technology Media:

NetShelter is the leader in technology media, generating over 150 million global unique visitors monthly across nearly 300 independently published partner sites in the CE, IT, mobile and sustainability categories. NetShelter empowers brands with powerful marketing opportunities designed to align their communications with engaging content from highly influential topical experts. These influencer marketing programs yield higher levels of quality engagement that amplifies the impact of a single marketing message many times over.

NetShelter is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Toronto and the United Kingdom. NetShelter Technology Media is backed by venture funding from Rho Ventures, Rho Canada and JLA Ventures. http://www.netshelter.com.

NEW YORK & PALO ALTO, Calif. – WPP (NASDAQ: WPPGY), the world’s largest communications services group, and nPario, a leading provider of technology solutions and applications designed to analyze extremely large volumes of online and offline consumer data (“Big Data”) for monetization and marketing optimization, announced a strategic alliance that will enable the two companies to work together and continue to drive digital media and marketing innovation. WPP Digital is also making a strategic investment in nPario and will assume seats on the nPario board.

Under the terms of the new partnership, WPP and nPario will integrate online and offline data from WPP companies into the nPario platform and jointly develop solutions that help marketers and publishers gain faster access to audience insights drawing from multiple systems and research partners.

“The application of technology to the management, mining and actioning of information has always been a core competency for direct marketers and their agencies, but over the past several years the data have become exponentially more diverse, faster-moving and higher volume,” said Mark Read, CEO of WPP Digital. “We are pleased to be partnering with nPario to help us scale marketing analytics for the new era.”

“In today’s digital world and proliferation of consumer channels, data is the single, most important asset in the tool box of marketers. The strategic relationship with WPP allows us to collaborate and deliver better products to advertising agencies and marketers,” said Bassel Ojjeh, president and CEO of nPario.

About WPP

WPP is the world’s largest communications services group with billings of $66 billion and revenues of approximately $15 billion. Through its operating companies, the Group provides a comprehensive range of advertising and marketing services including advertising; media investment management; consumer insight; public relations and public affairs; branding and identity; healthcare communications; direct, digital, promotion and relationship marketing and specialist communications. The company employs over 146,000 people (including associates) in 2,400 offices in 107 countries. For more information, visit www.wpp.com.

About nPario Inc.

With operations in North America and the EMEA region, nPario offers data products and services that enable organizations to understand and target consumer intent. Led by CEO and co-founder Bassel Ojjeh, nPario’s team has worked on the largest data sets in the world for companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Adobe, Oracle and SAS. Today, we are channeling our expertise into nPario. For additional information visit www.npario.com

INDIANAPOLIS – Global interactive marketing provider ExactTarget launched a new guide that offers practical advice on how to transform consumer research into effective marketing campaigns across email, Facebook and Twitter.

Entitled Top 5 Things Consumers Want from Marketers, the guide pairs findings from ExactTarget’s consumer research with clear step-by-step advice on how to create engaging interactive marketing campaigns that deliver on consumers’ expectations and drive new business.

“Consumers’ expectations of brands have never been higher,” said Tim Kopp, ExactTarget chief marketing officer. “Our new guide brings together the best of our research with real-world ‘how-to’ recommendations designed to help marketers create powerful interactive marketing campaigns that build brand loyalty and increase customer lifetime value.”

Featuring insights from ExactTarget’s consumer research, including its acclaimed Subscribers, Fans and Followers series, the new guide includes practical advice on how to:

- Expand an email marketing program to include Twitter and Facebook;
- Coordinate interactions across all online channels to create a seamless customer experience;
- Allow customers to select the best channel and frequency for brand interaction; and
- Optimize campaigns to increase engagement and overall performance.

“As consumers continue to evolve into digital media multitaskers, the rules of marketing will be irreversibly changed,” states the Nov. 2010 report by Forrester Research Inc. entitled “CMO Mandate: Adapt or Perish”. “In this new world, there is greater demand to consume media across multiple platforms, causing exponential growth of content — both branded and user-generated — but unfortunately consumers will become more difficult to engage.”

The Top 5 Things Consumers Want from Marketers briefing is available for free download at www.ExactTarget.com/ConsumersWant.

The launch of the new guide follows news that ExactTarget’s next generation of interactive marketing technology – the Interactive Marketing HubTM – has been named the “Innovation of the Year.” Awarded by technology trade association TechPoint, the honor recognized the Interactive Marketing Hub’s unique strength and ability to enable marketers to plan, monitor and track real-time interactive marketing programs from a single dashboard. By aggregating all customer interaction data as it happens, the Interactive Marketing Hub allows marketers to instantly take action on data across all online channels in real time.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing Hub technology provides organizations a single solution to connect with customers via email, integrated text messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget powers permission-based multichannel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Best Buy, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, visit www.exacttarget.com.

The April 2011 qSearch data reflect the impact of Yahoo! Search Direct, Yahoo!’s new feature that delivers search results in real-time while users type their query. Yahoo! Search Direct was available only on Yahoo! U.S. Web Search for the month of April.

U.S. Explicit Core Search

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in April with 65.4 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 15.9 percent (up 0.2 percentage points) and Microsoft Sites with 14.1 percent (up 0.2 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 3.0 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.5 percent.

*“Explicit Core Search” excludes contextually driven searches that do not
reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.

More than 16.2 billion explicit core searches were conducted in April. Google Sites ranked first with 10.7 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.6 billion, Microsoft Sites with 2.3 billion, Ask Network with 491 million and AOL, Inc. with 248 million.

U.S. Total Core Search

Google Sites accounted for 64.2 percent of total core search queries conducted (up 0.1 percentage points), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 17.9 percent and Microsoft Sites with 13.8 percent (up 0.2 percentage points). Ask Network comprised 2.7 percent of total search queries, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.4 percent.

* “Total Core Search” is based on the five major search engines, including
partner searches, cross-channel searches and contextual searches. Searches
for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the
core domain of the five search engines are not included in these numbers.

Americans conducted more than 18.0 billion total core search queries in April. Google Sites ranked first with 11.6 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 3.2 billion and Microsoft Sites with 2.5 billion.

comScore Total Core Search Query Report
April 2011 vs. March 2011
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity    Total Core Search Queries (MM)
Mar-11    Apr-11    Percent Change
Total Core Search    18,886    18,089    -4%
Google Sites     12,113     11,609     -4%
Yahoo! Sites     3,405     3,239     -5%
Microsoft Sites     2,576     2,501     -3%
Ask Network     520     491     -6%
AOL, Inc.     272     248     -9%
“Powered By” Reporting

In order to accurately represent the continued evolution of the search landscape, comScore is providing insight into the share of algorithmic explicit searches that are powered by Google and Bing, and branded as such to the consumer. Google’s “powered by” share is composed of searches conducted at Google entities, as well as branded searches at AOL and Ask. Bing’s “powered by” share is composed of searches conducted at Microsoft entities as well as branded Yahoo! entities.

In April, 67.8 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google, while 26.5 percent of searches were powered by Bing organic results.

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.

LONDON – The Fournaise Marketing Group, one of the global leaders in Customer Acquisition through Marketing ROI, released its 2010 Global Marketing Effectiveness Report – to share with CEOs, management decision-makers and Marketers across the globe how ROI Marketers delivered 24% incremental customer demand in 2010 and generated business growth for their own organisation.

“CEOs around the world have always wanted their Marketers to deliver top-line growth for the business. But they have often been frustrated with their Marketers’ inability to quantify the effectiveness of their spending and the positive impact it has on the top line. ROI Marketers are the new breed of Marketers. They think business. They mean business. They track and maximise to grow the business. They focus on business-related KPIs. They speak the language of their management and stakeholders” said Jerome Fontaine, CEO & Chief Tracker of Fournaise.

Best known for its cloud-based Next Generation Marketing Effectiveness Tracking solutions, Fournaise analysed a wide pool of 2,000 cross-channel B2C and B2B ads it tracked for its ROI Marketer clients across 12 countries worldwide in 2010, to give a glimpse of how ROI Marketers operate to deliver measurable top-line business growth:

1) ROI Marketers are 100% pragmatic and take decisions based on effectiveness
They noticed last year that Traditional Ads beat Digital Ads by 5% in effectiveness, and adjusted their strategies and campaigns accordingly with proportionately greater focus on Traditional Ads.

2) ROI Marketers are not afraid to go against popular marketing trends if their tracking results say the contrary
Despite the consumption explosion of everything digital, they tracked that the overall effectiveness of the Digital Ad category fell for the first time in 2010 for them: by 4%. Unlike many Traditional Marketers, they reduced their Digital Ads spending and only focused on the formats where they saw acceptable ROI results in terms of customer demand generation.

3) ROI Marketers invest in the areas where they know they will get business results
Take social media for example: they saw excellent results for customer service, customer experience and overall buzz creation, but they did not see enough solid or consistent demand generation results to consider social media their new frontier or to make it the centre of their strategies.

“ROI Marketers focus on one single currency – incremental customer demand – and build their strategies and campaigns around that currency. Their CEOs know they are the very people they need to grow the business. And that sends a strong warning to Traditional Marketers: become ROI Marketers or run the risk of becoming obsolete” Mr Fontaine added.

The Fournaise 2010 Global Marketing Effectiveness Report (and Top 5 Marketing Effectiveness Tracking Results Fournaise tracked for its ROI Marketer clients) is available at www.fournaisegroup.com/2010-ROI-Marketers

NEW YORK – Yodle, a leader in local online marketing, announced the launch of its full-service Search Engine Optimization offering for the franchise industry, Yodle FranchiseSEO. Yodle FranchiseSEO was developed to deliver on a set of best practices for website development, maps optimization and custom content creation that are designed to drive prominent rankings for franchisees on top search engines. Yodle is also proud to announce that Meineke Car Care Centers has rolled out Yodle FranchiseSEO to 950 of its locations across the country.

“Yodle’s full service SEO solution has resulted in first page exposure for Meineke,” said Don Rauch, Director of Marketing for Meineke. “The type of results we continue to receive show great progress is being made in getting us ranked where we want to be and among the keywords we have targeted.”

Yodle FranchiseSEO, Yodle’s second custom solution for the Franchise community, optimizes for the most relevant local keywords at the Franchisee level while building on and reinforcing the ranking authority of the Franchisor web site. Features include:

- Franchisee Site Creation: Yodle creates professionally designed websites that showcase the franchise brand and are developed with SEO best practices.
- Link Building: Yodle builds links to franchisee sites from local, social, and video websites by creating and syndicating custom content tailored to the franchisee’s services.
- Maps Optimization: Yodle claims and builds out each franchisee’s map profiles on Google Place, Bing Maps and Yahoo! Local.
- Corporate Site Optimization: Yodle works with the Franchise corporate site to ensure it is optimized to pass along online ranking authority to franchisees.

These features, along with our advanced reporting and premium customer service, were designed to deliver relevant traffic to franchisee sites and generate new customers and positive ROI to the Franchise systems.

“The launch of Yodle FranchiseSEO represents yet another major investment in developing products that fulfill the unique needs of the Franchise community,” said Yodle CEO Court Cunningham. “We will continue to invest and build on our best-in-class suite of products to help Franchise systems solve complex marketing challenges in an ever-changing online marketing landscape.”

Yodle, a leader in local online advertising and named #35 on the INC 500 List of fastest growing private companies in the U.S., connects thousands of local businesses with consumers in a process so simple and cost-effective that business owners can’t imagine any other way to advertise. Yodle has developed an integrated approach to signing up and serving local businesses that are transitioning their marketing budgets online. Yodle is headquartered in New York, NY and serves a national customer base from six local offices across the United States.”

Meineke: Meineke Car Care Centers, based in Charlotte, N.C., is one of the nation’s largest car care franchise businesses, with approximately 950 locations in 146 markets.

New York, NY – Yodle, a leader in local online marketing, announced it has completed a transaction to acquire ProfitFuel, Inc.  ProfitFuel, based in Austin, TX, is the largest and fastest growing provider of local search engine optimization (SEO) services to small businesses across the United States.  With over 11,000 clients, ProfitFuel has achieved breakout growth serving small businesses that have a moderate marketing budget.  Outrank, the company’s main service, is designed to generate inbound phone calls and emails cost effectively by delivering prominent rankings on top search engines for clients.

Historically, Yodle has focused its local online marketing services on small business advertisers that typically spend larger budgets of $1,000+ monthly and national brand advertisers; Franchise, Multi-location, and Manufacturer/Dealer organizations that advertise locally across hundreds of locations.  With the acquisition of ProfitFuel, Yodle now adds a product and a sales force capable of serving a much broader set of clients who have smaller marketing budgets, but who still want the accountability of measuring their marketing performance.

“With ProfitFuel, Yodle is doubling down on its approach of providing a clear ROI to the local advertiser, delivered through a combined 450 person sales and client service team,” said Yodle CEO Court Cunningham.  “ProfitFuel’s dedication to customer results and sales excellence made it a natural fit with Yodle.  I look forward to bringing Yodle’s expanded suite of SEM, SEO, Social and Display marketing products to market more quickly in collaboration with ProfitFuel’s world class team.”

David Rubin, previously CEO of ProfitFuel, will join Yodle as SVP of Sales. Mr. Rubin has a proven 20 year track record as a successful CEO and sales leader in the technology space.   Prior to ProfitFuel, Mr. Rubin was founder and CEO of HomeCity, an online real estate brokerage that pioneered utilizing web-based content to acquire clients. Before founding HomeCity, David held leadership positions at various companies including Intraware as Vice President of New Services Development, BITSource as founder and CEO and Computize as National Sales Director.

“We felt Yodle was the perfect choice to maximize our future potential for our clients, employees and shareholders,” said Mr. Rubin.  “We spoke to many companies in the industry and felt that Yodle offered the best set of products, highest caliber talent and the most comprehensive vision to outperform the competition and transform this industry for many years to come.”

Founded in 2000, ProfitFuel has 220 employees and is consistently recognized as one of the best places to work by multiple sources, including Austin Business Journal and Texas Monthly.  Yodle will now boast a 300-person sales force and many more talented staffers across marketing operations, client services and corporate departments.

Yodle plans to grow ProfitFuel’s Austin, TX office, making it a major hub, and to fully integrate the company’s infrastructure and technology by year’s end.

About Yodle: Yodle, a leader in local online marketing and named #35 on the INC 500 List of fastest growing private companies in the U.S., connects thousands of local businesses with consumers in a process so simple and cost-effective that business owners can’t imagine any other way to advertise. Yodle has developed an integrated approach to signing up and serving local businesses that are transitioning their marketing budgets online. Yodle is headquartered in New York, NY.

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, announced the global launch of comScore Digital Analytix™, an evolutionary solution in web analytics that enables digital marketers and analytics professionals to conduct in-depth forensic research on site-level activity through this highly agile and flexible data analysis architecture. Powered by the proprietary comScore Atomix™ technology, Digital Analytix utilizes unaggregated data that gives users the ability to run the reports they want, to deliver the insights they need.

“We are very excited to announce the launch of comScore Digital Analytix, the evolution of web analytics,” said Dr. Magid Abraham, comScore President & CEO. “This groundbreaking solution solves two of the most prevalent issues with web analytics today. While many web analytics tools use aggregated data sets that frequently handcuff the user from running the forensic analysis they desire, our Atomix technology maintains an unaggregated data set that can be manipulated from its raw form to address any business question. Secondly, we are introducing a new dimension to the web analytics universe with audience demographics so that users can understand site-level activity within the context of a broader marketing strategy. We believe these advantages combine for a truly unique offering that will deliver cross-organizational insights that help businesses optimize their digital strategies.”

comScore Digital Analytix offers the following benefits:

Flexible reporting architecture
Fast reporting and granular insights
Easy to implement for publishers (with the ability to leverage their existing Media Metrix UDM tag for Digital Analytix reporting)
Campaign-level insights
Cross-platform measurement
Sleek, new, user-friendly interface
The Evolution of Web Analytics into a More Unified View of Behavior

comScore Digital Analytix leverages the product architecture and expertise of Nedstat, a leading European web analytics company acquired by comScore in 2010, and its award-winning flagship product Sitestat. Both the Nedstat and Sitestat brands will immediately be absorbed into the comScore brand architecture.

comScore is also bringing its unique expertise in audience measurement to the web analytics universe in developing a breakthrough technology that combines deep analytics insight with audience profiling. This advancement will enable digital marketers to map the behaviors occurring across their sites to the audience demographics of the people engaging in these activities. This link will enhance publishers’ abilities to tie higher level marketing strategies to actual conversion, providing a truly unified view of digital consumer behavior.

Clients Voice Support
The following Nedstat Sitestat clients, who are migrating to the new Digital Analytix platform, voiced their support for the evolutionary product:

“The evolution in web analytics introduced today in the Digital Analytix platform by comScore is an example of why we selected them as our web-analytics partner early last year,” says Shorful Islam, Head of Business Information and Customer Data Strategy of ITV Online. “Their flexible design and advanced video tracking capabilities were a key criteria for ITV and their continued innovations integrating audience insights will enable us to create even more compelling advertising opportunities for our leading entertainment content.”

“Future prides itself on reaching and engaging prosumers, customers who are truly passionate about their interests. comScore’s new Digital Analytix platform allows us to more easily identify these enthusiasts online and enables us to build international communities for a loyal, committed audience,” says Andrew White, Head of Marketing Services for Future Publishing Ltd. “Fast access to data and behavioural insights allow us to more effectively manage our large portfolio of sites by fine tuning our content to maximize its commercial potential. The innovation of aligning web analytics and audience demographics announced today by comScore is a vital next step for cross-platform leaders like Future to capture the potential of the digital economy.”

“The launch of comScore Digital Analytix marks an important step in the evolution of web analytics. International media groups like Eurosport need to have quick access to reliable site-level customer behaviour data to fully monetise premium content across the multitude of platforms used by today’s digital consumers. With access to granular data and consumer insight we can successfully build efficient content creation and monetisation strategies. This is fundamental and profitable to both publishers and advertisers.” – Arnaud Maillard, New Media Director, Eurosport.

“The speed and flexibility of the comScore Digital Analytix platform has enabled our organization to more easily understand the rapidly changing digital audience that consumes media across a multitude of devices. The innovation to integrate audience insight into the platform is a unique capability and is of interest to euronews looking to better monetize its premium content. We applaud comScore’s initiative.” – Olivier de Montchenu, Managing Director euronews Sales.

”The comScore Digital Analytix platform gives us the insights to improve our customer experience. Their cross media capabilities help us to understand changing consumer behaviours, adapt our digital strategies and ultimately to achieve our business goals.” – Erik de Gruijter, Manager Cross Media Intelligence, Wegener Media BV (part of Mecom Group, a European content and consumer business with over 300 titles and 200 websites)

“The new features of the Digital Analytix platform are very fast. I love the fact that you can quickly edit report items in report builder with one click and that data retrieval happens even while you are in another tab. Good job on the whole.” – Daniel Froud, Customer Insight & Business Intelligence Manager, HostelBookers

“The changes you’ve introduced in the new Digital Analytix platform are simply fantastic.” – Jagjeet Mann, Web Analytics Manager, Ladbrokes eGaming

“The new user interface introduced with the launch of Digital Analytix is fast and easy to use – overall, a very positive move.” – Kelly McClean, Senior Web Analyst, Cantos Communications (UK) LLP

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.

SAN FRANCISCO – iPost, a leading provider of on-demand email and cross-channel marketing solutions, announced that it has integrated the ability to spark conversations and cross-promote campaigns on Facebook and Twitter into its iPost Mailing Manager (iMM) connected digital marketing platform. The company’s vision to evolve its iMM beyond an email and web marketing tool into a connected multi-channel platform began in October 2010 when it added mobile marketing (SMS) capabilities. With advanced new Facebook and Twitter functionality, the iMM now unifies email, social, mobile and web marketing in a single platform, allowing digital marketers to cross promote campaigns, manage subscribers, fans, and followers, analyze and understand their customers’ behavior across multiple channels, and engage in customer conversations where they occur.

The new features in iMM allow marketers to automate, optimize and analyze highly dynamic campaigns. For example, when scheduling an email offer, marketers can also schedule a post to the company’s Facebook wall including the relevant link that will automatically notify fans when that email campaign launches. Similarly, on Twitter, they can schedule tweets with links to offers that go live when the corresponding email campaigns do.

In the creative department, the iMM now enables easy transformation of email copy into Facebook notes. In the analytics department, a set of reports allows companies to analyze the engagement and sharing behavior of their fans and followers.

The iMM already included the basic capabilities to cross-pollinate email and social media with follow us, share-with-your-network (SWYN), and forward-to-a-friend (FTAF) links.

John Janetos, iPost’s vice president of business development and marketing, believes that email marketing remains the backbone of digital outreach due to its ubiquity and ROI. “However, in today’s multi-connected world, marketers need to forge deeper and more relevant relationships by conversing with their customers in multiple ways wherever they are.”

About iPost

iPost provides an on-demand connected digital marketing platform and professional services that let marketers manage, execute, analyze, and optimize customer conversations where they occur, including email, mobile, social, and web. Customers include O’Reilly Media, Ogden Publications, and Kimpton Hotels. To contact iPost: 899 Northgate Drive, Suite 200, San Rafael, CA 94903; 877-934-7678; 415-382-4000; info@ipost.com; www.ipost.com.

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, released The comScore 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review. This annual report recaps key trends in the U.S. digital media landscape, including e-commerce, social networking, online video, search, online advertising and mobile, with an emphasis on how digital marketers can capitalize on these trends in 2011.

“2010 was a very positive year for the digital media industry, highlighted by a strong rebound in e-commerce spending , significant innovation and increased demand for online advertising, and an explosion in digital content consumption across multiple platforms,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “As we embark on a promising 2011, marketers must have a sound understanding of the digital media landscape and how it is changing if they hope to capitalize on key trends that can drive their business into the future.”

To download a complimentary copy of The comScore 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review report, please visit: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/2010_US_Digital_Year_in_Review

2010 Marked Resurgence for Digital Media Industry in the Wake of the Recession
As the economic environment showed signs of improvement in 2010, the digital media industry responded with significant growth across various media platforms. Industry innovations brought an unprecedented number of options to consumers as digital media continued to weave itself even tighter into the fabric of Americans’ daily lives.

The report provides a comprehensive view across the fixed Internet and mobile sectors to uncover this past year’s important consumer trends. Key findings highlighted in the report include:

Following 2 years of depressed consumer discretionary spending, the economy showed signs of improvement, leading to positive growth for the e-commerce market. Total U.S. e-commerce spending reached $227.6 billion in 2010, up 9 percent versus the previous year. Travel e-commerce spending grew 6 percent to $85.2 billion, while retail (non-travel) e-commerce spending jumped 10 percent to $142.5 billion for the year.
·         Social networking continued to gain momentum throughout 2010, with 9 out of every 10 U.S. Internet users now visiting a social networking site in a month, and the average Internet user spending more than 4 hours on these sites each month. Nearly 1 out of every 8 minutes online is spent on Facebook.
·         The U.S. core search market grew 12 percent overall in 2010, driven by a 4-percent increase in unique searchers and an 8-percent increase in the number of search queries per searcher.
·         U.S. Internet users received a total of 4.9 trillion display ads in 2010 with display ad impressions growing 23 percent in December 2010 versus December 2009. Social networking sites, which now account for more than one-third of all display ad impressions, were a significant driver of growth in the display ad market in 2010.
·         In December 2010, the average American spent more than 14 hours watching online video, a 12-percent increase from the prior year, and streamed a record 201 videos, an 8-percent increase.
·         Major milestones in mobile were crossed during the year as smartphones reached 1 in 4 mobile subscribers and 3G penetration crossed the 50 percent threshold. Approximately 47 percent of mobile subscribers are now connected Internet media users (via browsers, applications or downloaded content), up 8 percentage points from the previous year.

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.

IRVINE, Calif. – Kofax plc (LSE: KFX), the leading provider of document driven business process automation solutions, announced the creation of a new industry solutions marketing program to better target key vertical markets on a global basis.

The industry solutions marketing program will focus on expanding opportunities for vertical market solutions utilizing Kofax software to meet the needs of banking, insurance and government customers worldwide. The team will be led by Denise Rueb, Senior Director of Industry Solutions Marketing at Kofax.

Rueb joins the company with more than 25 years of leadership experience in software and solutions marketing. Prior to Kofax, Rueb worked for IBM for a number of years where she served as the executive responsible for creating and leading several global industry specific marketing solutions programs, including one of the initial enterprise content management programs. Such programs resulted in more than $150 million in annual revenues. Along with her wealth of marketing expertise, she brings extensive business process development expertise having managed multiple Fortune 1000 client accounts in government, insurance, utilities and manufacturing. Additionally, Rueb has worked in marketing and business development leadership roles for professional services provider Ernst & Young and information technology services firm James Martin & Company.

“Denise is a proven software solutions executive with unmatched expertise in industry marketing, further proving Kofax’s ability to attract the best talent in the information technology industry,” said Martyn Christian, Chief Marketing Officer at Kofax. “Backed by Kofax’s dominance in the information capture market, as well our global reach and financial strength, our industry solutions marketing team is primed to achieve positive results very quickly.”

About Kofax

Kofax plc (LSE: KFX) is the leading provider of document driven business process automation solutions. For more than 20 years, Kofax has provided award winning solutions that streamline the flow of information throughout an organization by managing the capture, transformation and exchange of business critical information arising in paper, fax and electronic formats in a more accurate, timely and cost effective manner. These solutions provide a rapid return on investment to thousands of customers in financial services, government, business process outsourcing, healthcare, supply chain and other markets. Kofax delivers these solutions through its own sales and service organizations, and a global network of more than 700 authorized partners in more than 60 countries throughout the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific. For more information, visit www.kofax.com.

AMERICAN FORK, Utah – OrangeSoda, a leader in localized online marketing (search, mobile, social), announced the official launch of CitrusBlast, a solution designed to help Internet users find small and multi-location businesses. CitrusBlast optimizes recent changes to Google Places, the feature set in Google that presents maps, listings, locations, addresses and contact information based on a user’s search.

CitrusBlast helps businesses increase their prominence in Google Search and supports similar feature sets in Bing and Yahoo! that organize search results by clustering around specific locations. CitrusBlast combines a customized website, mobile microsite and maps to quickly and effectively place businesses in front of potential customers looking online for their products and services.

“Google’s recent changes in displaying localized searches are having a profound impact on locally-focused businesses and CitrusBlast is helping them to leverage these changes to build their bottom line. This is especially significant as more Internet connections are coming from mobile devices”

“When you consider that 80% of consumers search online before buying within a 10-20 mile radius, it becomes clear that the Internet is the single most important avenue for every business to market themselves locally,” said Jay Bean, OrangeSoda founder and CEO. “Google’s recent changes in displaying localized searches are having a profound impact on locally-focused businesses and CitrusBlast is helping them to leverage these changes to build their bottom line. This is especially significant as more Internet connections are coming from mobile devices,” Bean continued.

OrangeSoda partners with many leading small business aggregators and large media companies which resell their services under their own brands. The San Diego Union-Tribune will be the first of their partners to launch CitrusBlast with rollout in February 2011.

“We have worked with OrangeSoda for a number of years on our SEM efforts, and they have proven to be one of our strongest partners. We believe that CitrusBlast will create new revenue streams for the San Diego Union-Tribune,” said Mike Hodges, Vice President Interactive, San Diego Union-Tribune.

About OrangeSoda

Founded in 2006, OrangeSoda offers online marketing to local businesses with a unique blend of intelligent service and simple technology. OrangeSoda provides the best return on marketing investment, by blending social, mobile and search with insider analytics on how consumers use the Internet to find local business offerings. With its proprietary advertising technology and service platform, OrangeSoda enables its partners including CityGrid Media, YPG, and Freedom Communications Inc., to provide the best social, mobile and search services to their customers.

IRVINE, Calif. – Small businesses achieved more in search in the fourth quarter of 2010 by increasing their keyword portfolios and diversifying ad spending across the major search engines, according to a report released by WebVisible (www.WebVisible.com), which tracks small business search advertising trends.

“Looking ahead, we believe successful campaigns will be those that combine the best creative, most dynamic media buying strategies, and smartest use of keyword targeting all working together, which is what WebVisible does best.”

The average small business advertiser spent $2,126 in the fourth quarter of 2010, while average keyword counts reached an all-time high of 87 root keywords, a 30 percent year-over-year increase from the last quarter of 2009. Small-business advertisers also took advantage of the slow migration in October of Yahoo advertisers to the new Bing adCenter platform and shifted their spending away from Google – a strategy that appears to have at least temporarily bolstered both click-through rates and clicks leading to phone calls.

Costs-per-click were 23 percent lower on Yahoo-Bing than on Google in November and 29 percent lower in December. At the same time, click-through rates for advertisers with ad programs on the Yahoo-Bing platform were 10 percent higher than those on Google during December, according to the report, while the percentage of clicks resulting in phone calls rose from 3.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 to 6.1 percent in the final quarter of 2010 – a dramatic 56 percent increase.

“We’re pleased to see that our robust technology and years of experience are clearly helping small business advertisers achieve greater efficiency and conversion rates, and they’re achieving these results with manageable ad budgets,” said WebVisible CEO Ron Burr. “Looking ahead, we believe successful campaigns will be those that combine the best creative, most dynamic media buying strategies, and smartest use of keyword targeting all working together, which is what WebVisible does best.”

These results and others are included in The WebVisible Report: State of Small Business Online Advertising, which examines trends among WebVisible advertisers from Q4 2009 through Q4 2010 and represents more than $54 million in U.S. small business advertiser spending by more than 10,000 individual advertisers during that period.

The report, which each quarter provides the definitive snapshot of how small businesses are deploying search and online marketing tools, revealed that Google’s share of total search ad spending among WebVisible clients dropped from 56 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 to less than 38 percent of total spending in November before climbing back to 52 percent in December.

Home Page Video Usage Continues to Grow

The fourth quarter results continued to show that small business advertisers consider video to be an important component of their online advertising presence. Twenty-six percent of advertisers used video on their landing pages in the fourth quarter, up from 19 percent in the previous year’s fourth quarter. Video views increased 85 percent year over year, rising from 3.7 percent of landing page actions a year ago to 6.7 percent in the final quarter of 2010.

The Q4 2010 report, as well as reports from previous quarters, is available by request here: http://www.webvisible.com/wvreport. Members of the media may also contact info@edgecommunications.com or call (818) 990-5001.

About WebVisible, Inc.

WebVisible has been the leading provider of local online marketing software and services since 2001. WebVisible was among the first to pioneer the use of search as a reliable, measurable avenue to connect directly with a buyer’s needs, providing solutions through some of the world’s largest Interactive Yellow Page companies, directories and other media vendors. The company has served over 100,000 customers from 4,000 industries in 14 countries. The company also delivers solutions directly to small businesses throughout the United States. WebVisible is based in Irvine, California with offices in Los Angeles, Charlotte and Mumbai. For more information, visit www.webvisible.com or call 949-255-9677.

When Facebook introduced its newest iteration of “social advertising” in 2007, it had already tried and failed with a number of interest-based targeting products. But the company kept upgrading its ad platform, and its ad revenue reached nearly $1.9 billion in 2010 — double what it earned in 2009. The SocialTimes Pro report reveals trends and best practices for optimizing Facebook’s targeting platform and creating effective Facebook ad campaigns. SocialTimes Pro also announced a new virtual goods report entitled ‘Virtual Goods in Free-To-Play MMOs: Opportunities and Advice on Monetization.’

SocialTimes Pro offers monthly reports on topics related to Facebook and Virtual Goods. SocialTimes Pro is associated with Mediabistro’s AllFacebook.com and SocialTimes.com. For more information, visit www.socialtimespro.com.

About WebMediaBrands Inc.

WebMediaBrands Inc. is an Internet media company that provides content, education, trade shows, and online job board services to media and business professionals. The Company’s online business includes: (i) mediabistro.com, a leading blog network providing content, career and educational resources about major media markets and industry verticals including new media, social media, Facebook, TV news, advertising, public relations, publishing, design, and mobile; (ii) SemanticWeb.com, providing industry leading content on Semantic Web technology; (iii) Brands of the World, Ads of the World and other related websites, providing industry leading content for creative, advertising, and design professionals; and (iv) e-commerce websites including Freelance Marketplace and StockLogos.com. The Company’s trade show and educational offerings include conferences, online and in-person courses, and video subscription libraries on topics covered by the Company’s online business.

SAN FRANCISCO – Global interactive marketing provider ExactTarget announced an agreement with Japan-based global ICT solution provider NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com) to bring CoTweet, ExactTarget’s social media management platform, to the Japanese market by end of first quarter 2011.

“By partnering with CoTweet and ExactTarget, we can provide NTT Com customers the scalable technology and global expertise they need create, manage and measure social media engagement with customers around the world.”

The partnership will make CoTweet’s enterprise Twitter and Facebook management, engagement and measurement application available in Japanese and will rely on NTT Com’s existing Online Marketing Group sales team to sell the localized application.

“Consumers around the world are interacting with brands in real-time via social media, and corporations need an enterprise solution to authentically and efficiently manage the growing number of online conversations,” said Peter McCormick, general manager of ExactTarget Global and company co-founder. “Through our partnership with NTT Com, we can bring the power of CoTweet to the Japanese market and help organizations across the region better serve their fans and followers online.”

Trusted by thousands of enterprise customers around the globe including Coca-Cola, Ford, McDonald’s, Microsoft, SunTrust and Whole Foods, ExactTarget’s CoTweet application gives companies the power to publish updates from multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, collaborate on responses, track and measure engagement and analyze campaign results.

“Social media is rapidly growing in Japan, and enterprises need a solution to help their teams manage the online conversation with consumers,” said Yoshie Tsukamoto, head of the marketing solution office, NTT Com. “By partnering with CoTweet and ExactTarget, we can provide NTT Com customers the scalable technology and global expertise they need create, manage and measure social media engagement with customers around the world.”

A September 2010 report from Forrester Research Inc. entitled “A Global Update of Social Technographics” found 36 percent of Japanese adults are active creators on social networking sites and 75 percent of online Japanese adults view content on social sites as spectators.

The news of the partnership between NTT Com and ExactTarget comes less than a year after ExactTarget acquired San Francisco-based CoTweet to create the industry’s first complete solution for managing communications across all interactive marketing channels including social media, email, mobile and the Web.

About NTT Communications Corporation

NTT Communications provides a broad range of global networks, management solutions and IT services to customers worldwide. The company is renowned for reliable, high-quality security, hosting, voice, data and IP services, as well as expertise in managed networks and leadership in IPv6 transit technology. NTT Communications’ extensive infrastructure includes Arcstar™ Global IP-VPN and Global e-VLAN, as well as a Tier-1 IP backbone reaching more than 150 countries in partnership with major Internet service providers, and secure data centers in Asia, North America and Europe. NTT Communications is the wholly-owned subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, one of the world’s largest telecoms with listings on the Tokyo, London and New York stock exchanges. Please visit www.ntt.com/index-e.html.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing Hub TM technology provides organizations a single solution to connect with customers via email, integrated text messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget powers permission-based multichannel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Best Buy, Aurora Fashions, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, visit www.exacttarget.com or call 1-866-EMAILET.

Keynote speakers include social media trailblazers Brian Solis (author of Engage!), Kara Swisher (co-executive editor of AllThingsD), and Mari Smith (author of Facebook Marketing).

The event bridges the best of conferences and online learning. Talks by world-class social media pioneers will be followed by interactive Q&A sessions. Practical how-to sessions show participants how to put big ideas into immediate practice. Working closely with a small group, they’ll get feedback from an advisor and make meaningful connections with the entire attendee roster.

Mediabistro runs about 20 national and international conferences per year on media and technology; its continuing education program serves 10,000 media professionals per year.

For more information, visit http://www.mediabistro.com/socialmediamarketingbootcamp.

About WebMediaBrands Inc.

WebMediaBrands Inc. is an Internet media company that provides content, education, trade shows, and online job board services to media and business professionals. The Company’s online business includes: (i) mediabistro.com, a leading blog network providing content, career and educational resources about major media markets and industry verticals including new media, social media, Facebook, TV news, advertising, public relations, publishing, design, and mobile; (ii) SemanticWeb.com, providing industry leading content on Semantic Web technology; (iii) Brands of the World, Ads of the World and other related websites, providing industry leading content for creative, advertising, and design professionals; and (iv) e-commerce websites including Freelance Marketplace and StockLogos.com. The Company’s trade show and educational offerings include conferences, online and in-person courses, and video subscription libraries on topics covered by the Company’s online business.

“2011 promises to be another exciting year in the evolution of the digital home,” says David Mercer, Principal Analyst. “Many of the key elements of the next generation home are now in place, such as connected devices, high speed broadband and advanced user interfaces; it’s up to key players to pull these together to create compelling experiences and drive added value.”

He continued: “The battles between content owners, technology vendors and service providers for access to consumer revenues will continue. The field is still wide open for any of these players to take a leadership position in the emerging ecosystem. And there will always be opportunities for new players like Facebook to appear from nowhere and threaten established positions.”

The report, “Digital Home Predictions for 2011: The Year of Facebook TV, CloudTunes and Wii2?” is available for complimentary download at www.strategyanalytics.com.

Analyst Blog: http://blogs.strategyanalytics.com/blogs

About Strategy Analytics

Strategy Analytics, Inc. provides timely and actionable market intelligence focused on opportunities and disruptive forces in the areas of Automotive Electronics and Entertainment, Broadband Connected Home, Mobile & Wireless Intelligent Systems and Virtual Worlds. Headquartered in Boston, MA, with offices in the UK, France, Germany, Japan, S. Korea and China, Strategy Analytics works with clients through annual multi-client services, management team workshops and custom consulting engagements. For more information, please visit http://www.strategyanalytics.com/

NEW YORK & RESTON, Va. – Epic Media Group (www.theepicmediagroup.com), the preeminent privately-held global digital marketing solutions company and the operator of Traffic Marketplace, announced that it has finalized a strategic technology partnership with LucidMedia (www.lucidmedia.com), a leading digital advertising management platform, that will allow Epic Media Group to deploy interactive advertising campaigns leveraging the LucidMedia demand-side digital advertising management platform. This announcement comes on the heels of months of collaboration between the two companies.

The new partnership will allow Epic to add LucidMedia’s Real Time Bidding (RTB) technology and advanced semantic contextual targeting to its suite of services and capabilities. Leveraging LucidMedia’s proven platform, Epic will immediately bolster its ability to help agencies and advertisers more intelligently and cost effectively reach consumers across multiple pools of inventory via Real Time Bidding. Epic will also utilize RTB and semantic contextual targeting capabilities both within its own network of premium inventory, as well as across every major exchange and Supply-Side Optimizer such as AdMeld, PubMatic and Rubicon, in a fully integrated approach to campaign delivery. Combining LucidMedia’s capabilities with Epic’s existing ad platform, sophisticated campaign analytics, and integrity assurance capabilities will allow Epic to continue to solidify its position as the market leader in offering the most advanced integrated digital marketing services available today.

“Epic’s deep expertise in managing a full spectrum of advertising services, combined with LucidMedia’s transparent and comprehensive demand-side RTB management platform as well as its advanced semantic-based contextual targeting engine, is a powerful combination,” said Don Mathis, President and Co-CEO of Epic Media Group. “This technology partnership will further unlock massive scale, allowing Epic to enhance our suite of services and improve the performance and efficiency of our interactive solutions on behalf of our clients.”

“After extensive testing on both sides, Epic has recognized that the depth and breadth of LucidMedia’s platform capabilities can significantly advance their ability to get maximum value for their clients. Epic has confirmed that our platform will not only complement but also enhance its existing platform,” said Ajay Sravanapudi, President and CEO of LucidMedia Networks, Inc. “We have spent a decade building and fine-tuning our demand-side platform for scalable ad operations and we have been working closely with Epic to integrate our capabilities in a way that will give their clients the flexibility and access they need to succeed online.”

About Epic Media Group

Epic Media Group (www.theepicmediagroup.com) is the preeminent privately-held global digital marketing solutions company, with deep expertise in managing a full spectrum of advertising services, from brand-building and engagement to performance-based customer acquisition solutions. The company relentlessly focuses on delivering the most comprehensive and cost-effective strategic digital marketing campaigns for advertisers of all sizes, across all industries and around the world. Epic Media Group intelligently and cost effectively accesses consumers across multiple traffic distribution channels through integrated campaigns which include display, search, social media, rich media, mobile, video and more.

About LucidMedia

LucidMedia (www.lucidmedia.com) is the most comprehensive and transparent digital advertising management platform for targeting and optimizing display campaigns. The LucidMedia demand-side platform (DSP) with ClickSense® page-level contextual analysis and intelligent real-time bidding (RTB) is available as both self-service and managed service to interactive agencies and brand advertisers. LucidMedia’s platform employs an easy-to-use interface to deliver proprietary optimization, consolidated buying across the Internet’s largest repositories, unique insight into real-time inventory availability, preemptive brand safety, universal frequency capping, and reach into 95% of the online population. Founded in 1999, LucidMedia processes more than one billion impressions daily for hundreds of major brand advertisers.

The report discusses the impact of new technologies, social changes and the developments in online marketing channels on the planning, execution and measurement of marketing campaigns next year. Strange has looked at what the future holds for search, social media, mobile and tablets, data protection and email as well as what the launch of web TV could mean for brands and the future of paid news content.

The report also looks what custom typography and new browser developments means for web design next year. Each topic is explained with tips on how to optimise each of these to retain a competitive edge.

To incorporate some Christmas spirit into the launch, Strange as also designed and built an online advent calendar (www.strangecorp.com/xmas) which reveals a new trend each day. This will be supported by a social media strategy to drive more visitors to the site.

Paul Honey, Managing Director at Strange comments, “In these challenging economic times, we are seeing more brands investing in digital channels to make their campaigns work harder and smarter. Following the success of our ‘Online Marketing Trends for 2009’ article, we decided to expand this year’s piece and integrate it into our Christmas campaign.”

Visit www.strangecorp.com/xmas throughout December, to view the calendar or download the full report from http://www.strangecorp.com/news/view/online-marketing-trends-in-2011.

About Strange

Strange is a creative digital marketing agency. We deliver exceptional performance by developing outstanding websites and online campaign strategies. Our services cover digital strategy, creative, technology and online marketing.

Specialising in travel, fashion, media, consumer goods and ecommerce, Strange works for local, national and international clients from a wide range of sectors. The agency works with, MTV, Google, Friends of the Earth, Universal Music, Brittany Ferries, Climate Week and Animal clothing.

To find out more about Strange, please visit www.strangecorp.com

NEW YORK – Millward Brown’s Dynamic Logic, the leader in measuring digital advertising effectiveness, released new insights for retail marketers to get the most out of their online ads this holiday season.

“In looking closely at retail ad effectiveness in aggregate, it became apparent that retail ads are a different animal than the average online ad,” said Aaron Katz, Director of Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms. “In fact, retail online advertising tends to perform slightly under the online average in its ability to shift most key brand impact metrics, with the exception of message association.”

Based on research from its MarketNorms® ad effectiveness database, Dynamic Logic offers the following tips for improving online retail campaigns’ effectiveness this holiday season:

1.           Men are just as important as women when targeting holiday ads. Although women have higher baseline awareness of retailers and higher baseline likelihood to visit, men’s ability to associate a brand’s message with its advertising after exposure increases more than women’s.

2.         While rich media helps achieve ad awareness, its ability to persuade retail store or site visitation is not significantly different from static ads.

3.         Retail “intent to visit” does not vary much as frequency increases. Even at exposure frequencies of 10+, there is only a 1.3 percentage-point improvement in likelihood to visit vs. a 1.0 point improvement at 4-9 exposures. The benefit of a high number of exposures is in awareness, not store or site visits. If visits are the objective and budget is a concern, consider static images vs. rich media, and put less emphasis on frequency.

4.         Celebrities and rich media help improve brand favorability for retailers. A celebrity or child in an ad can generate a 3.0 point increase in brand favorability. Compare this to only a 1.5 point boost for celebrities in CPG ads or 2.3 point gains in entertainment ads. As a bonus, kids generate a healthy 1.7 point improvement in likelihood to visit a retailer compared to a statistically insignificant 0.7 percentage-point increase for adults.

For more on online advertising effectiveness, please view a sample of Dynamic Logic’s Retail Industry Normative Report at http://www.dynamiclogic.com/na/research/DL_MarketNorms_Retail_Dec2010.pdf. In addition, a recent Millward Brown study reveals top reasons why people continue to shop in stores despite the convenience of online shopping.

About this Research

This research is based on more than 120 online advertising campaigns by retailers over the past three years from Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms® database, the most extensive benchmarking database for online advertising in the industry with data from over 6,000 online campaigns.

The results cited have not been adjusted for exposure frequency, demographics, ad size, Web sites, advertiser industry and other factors that may contribute to brand lift. These findings are aggregate in nature, reflect past results and are not a guarantee of future results for individual campaigns.

About Dynamic Logic

Dynamic Logic (www.dynamiclogic.com) is a leader in providing advertising effectiveness insights across all digital platforms and the broader media mix. As a Millward Brown company, Dynamic Logic offers advertisers, agencies and publishers the unique combination of world-class expertise on brand building and media coupled with normative insights from its database of thousands of digital campaigns, the largest in the industry. Founded in 1999, Dynamic Logic pioneered online branding measurement and has grown with the digital age, developing innovations across 27 digital platforms and establishing specialty practices in cross-media, social media, mobile, gaming and custom solutions.

NEW YORK – To go beyond expectations in driving traffic and exceeding their online marketing goals, advertisers need to complement their buys on Google and other large engines. Advertise.com announces the launch of its Keyword Marketplace; the world’s largest privately-held network of high quality organic search, contextual, domain parking, browser toolbar, semantic keyword hot spots and email pay per click (PPC) publishers. Marketers can tap into the Keyword Marketplace’s value-added traffic on a keyword level to reach internet users beyond conventional search traffic providing exposure to over 700 million additional impressions daily. These exclusive publisher partnerships deliver the additional high performing traffic that online businesses need to succeed in today’s competitive online marketplace.

The resultant benefit of these publisher relationships within the Keyword Marketplace is a significantly lower average Cost Per Click (CPC) and effective Cost Per Action (CPA) for advertisers when compared to other conventional search networks. Advertise.com’s superior traffic network and patented ClickShield® technology work together to deliver an increase in customers.

Vigilant about sending its advertisers high-performing traffic, Advertise.com has added significant upgrades to its patented fraud prevention ClickShield technology. Advertisers can now expect the traffic quality within the Keyword Marketplace to be on par with the top pay per click sources but at a lower cost. Traffic received from the Keyword Marketplace is high in performance because ClickShield monitors what performs best for the Advertise.com network of thousands of advertisers, then dynamically removes any low-performing sources. In this way, advertisers benefit from each other’s success. High standards are met through advanced layers of technological checks and balances for each and every publisher channel, placing advertiser’s ads on custom traffic mixes that are most likely to produce the best result.

Additionally, marketers have greater command over their ad visibility on the Keyword Marketplace without dealing with complex ranking algorithms or “black box” quality scoring. Advertise.com’s real-time keyword auction lets advertisers simply bid to win the top position.

“Advertise.com keyword marketing delivers high quality and affordable traffic. Our average number of page views per visitor from Advertise.com is higher than most PPC traffic sources,” said Chris Spore the Director of Online Marketing at Myspace.com. “Additionally, our average cost per click is five times less than that of our other high performing networks. Online marketers dream about tapping into results like this.”

“Advertisers are hungry to find high-performing traffic,” said Daniel Yomtobian, Founder and CEO of Advertise.com. “Budgets are still tight and advertisers need to deliver results with fewer dollars. Our Keyword Marketplace is a surefire way to start driving more high quality traffic to websites.”

To learn more, visit www.advertise.com.

About Advertise.com

Advertise.com is a premier platform for search and display marketing that enables advertisers to reach a wider audience through our exclusive network of search engines and publisher properties. Leading the charge in online advertising since 2001, Advertise.com connects thousands of advertisers with millions of consumers every day – now delivering more than 20 billion ad impressions each month.

SEATTLE – BlueKai, the world’s largest data auction marketplace for all audience data and online marketing’s largest source of user intent data, announced a partnership with Efficient Frontier, a leading global performance marketing company with an integrated optimization platform across search, display and social.  Under the agreement, Efficient Frontier will participate in a beta program where client keyword lists will be submitted to BlueKai and matched against intent data segments.  Efficient Frontier will then use this set of intent data to drive targeting for display advertising against the qualified audience.  Buying BlueKai Intent™ by keywords will enable search marketers to identify in-market audiences – defined by existing search keyword lists – and reach them outside the walls of search engines with any media partner and at significant scale.

“This new keyword based intent offering from BlueKai will give us a simple and effective way to reach consumers with display ads using relevant search data,” says David Karnstedt, President and CEO of Efficient Frontier.  “BlueKai data has always been associated with high quality in-market shoppers and we are excited to partner with them to help our clients take the depth, accuracy and successes of keyword targeting and apply it to the world of display.”

BlueKai Intent™ is the largest source of audience data revealing auto, retail, travel and financial intenders at scale. BlueKai provides access to 160 million unique consumers who are ready to buy, by aggregating real-time in-market actions such as product comparison, loan calculations, auto configuration and keyword searches on vertical and commercial sites.  By processing billions of data points daily, BlueKai has classified hundreds of thousands of keywords into organized, hierarchical categories and offered intent data to advertisers at large scale. This has enabled the display and video ecosystem to unleash unprecedented targeting capabilities.  Through the Beta program, marketers can now access these behaviors through keyword lists that reach beyond the walls of search engines.  Efficient Frontier is the first of beta participants to make this new offering available to select search marketing clients.

“It’s indisputable that intent data drives performance and keyword search is a clear indicator of someone’s intent to purchase.  That’s why we’re taking that additional step by making it easy for a marketer to use their well crafted keyword lists in their display buys,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai.  “This really starts to break down the wall between search and display and we’re excited to partner with Efficient Frontier, a market leader in search and now display and social media advertising, to bring this innovative capability to their clients.”

With BlueKai Intent™, search marketers can utilize their existing search keyword lists and create a BlueKai data audience based on those keywords.  BlueKai’s data-centric approach gives advertisers the flexibility to transport their search intelligence and reach their audience across their preferred media partners.  Furthermore, BlueKai analytics provide valuable intelligence on additional in-market attributes on any search audience; giving marketers actionable data segments for audience.

At the center of the digital data economy, BlueKai (www.bluekai.com) created the world’s largest data auction marketplace for all audience data.  BlueKai aggregates valuable shopping and research activities across the Internet to build the largest source of intent data on over 160M shoppers across 7 key verticals including auto, travel, finance and retail.  BlueKai now sees 200 million unique consumers each month and manages over 750 million data events per day.  In strategic partnerships with top data aggregators, the BlueKai Exchange collectively offers over 30,000 data attributes across in-market, demographic, geographic, lifestyle, and B2B categories to increase performance and scale for direct response and branding campaigns.

BlueKai is designed with consumer transparency and control in mind. The BlueKai Registry enables consumers to see what marketers know about them, edit their online preferences and gain rewards in charitable donations. The privately-held company is based in Bellevue, WA and is a recipient of the AlwaysOn 2009 OnMedia 100 award as a Technology Innovator in Advertising.

RESTON, VA (November 4, 2010) – Resonate Networks, the Attitudinal Targeting™ company, today announced 81 percent of their client campaigns defeated their opponents in Tuesday’s historical ‘earthquake’ election. 43 winning candidates leveraged Resonate’s unique, research-based targeting and audience delivery solution, and there is the potential for another seven winning campaigns currently too close to call.

Political and advocacy strategists have embraced Resonate’s Attitudinal Targeting offering because of its unique ability to deliver audiences based on their values, beliefs and attitudes – the most consistent and enduring reasons voters support a candidate or issue. With Resonate’s proprietary methodology and patent-pending technology, advertisers can define rich audience profiles from a combination of over a thousand traditional and attitudinal attributes including basic demographics and geographic, as well as their research-based voting behavior, issue positions, etc.

One of the most significant differentiators Resonate offers political campaigns is the ability to reach not only Republican, Democrat and Independent voters, but also swing voters – one of the most difficult segments to identify and reach online. Resonate is able to do this by conducting its own extensive ongoing research, part of which includes asking and capturing voters’ actual past voting behavior and patterns. Resonate is the only advertising company who knows if voters have voted for multiple parties, how often and during which elections. In addition Resonate knows the issues that are most important to a voter when determining which candidate to vote for. Other online advertising companies make assumptions based on purchased voter data and cookies but this approach isn’t as efficient or effective as Resonate’s more precise, research-based targeting.

“It is more important than ever for politicians to gain a deeper understanding of the electorate and what is at the heart of Americans’ decisions – whether to vote for a candidate or support an issue,” said Bryan Gernert, CEO, Resonate. “The next two years will require politicians to truly listen to the American public and govern accordingly. This includes the need to reach the electorate with education and awareness campaigns to ensure their accomplishments and messages are heard and understood.”

Resonate’s client campaigns spanned the country and included candidates and ballot initiatives leveraging display and video ads. This is Resonate’s first election cycle since the company launched in May of 2009.

Precision targeting and understanding the importance of message specific advertising based on voter issues priorities, actual voting behavior and other significant decision drivers, as well as voter values and beliefs, will help politicians and advocacy organizations reach, engage and mobilize the electorate more effectively, especially over the next two years.

About Resonate Networks
Resonate is the first online ad technology company offering advertisers an entirely new approach to targeted audience delivery. Resonate’s  Attitudinal Targeting™ is based on values, beliefs and attitudes, and enables advertisers to define rich audience profiles from a combination of more than one thousand attitudinal and traditional attributes including demographic and behavior data. The result: ad campaigns that deepen convictions and change minds in a way that traditional online advertising can’t. For more information please visit www.resonatenetworks.com.

INDIANAPOLIS – A new study released by ExactTarget and CoTweet finds that consumers’ increased usage of social media directly corresponds to more face-to-face interactions.

Featured in Social Mythbusting, the seventh report in the Subscribers, Fans and Followers research series from ExactTarget and CoTweet, the finding is one of many new insights into commonly held misconceptions about interactive marketing on email, Facebook and Twitter.

“Social media is not a zero sum game where an increase or decrease of activity in one channel only happens when there’s a corresponding increase or decrease in activity in another channel,” said Jeff Rohrs, principal, ExactTarget’s Marketing Research and Education Group. “Far from making people less social in the physical world, social media seems to encourage more in-person contacts.”

Key findings of the research include:

- While only 17% of consumers are more likely to purchase after becoming a fan of brand on Facebook, the greater value comes from consumers serving as brand advocates.
- Celebrities’ hiatus from Twitter is not affecting the success of the channel.
- Despite reports of email usage declining, consumers’ mobile use of email and desktop clients are increasing.

“Marketers must change the lens through which they view new data, findings and reports in the interactive industry to get an accurate view of what, when and how their consumers are using online channels,” said Tim Kopp, ExactTarget’s chief marketing officer. “The Social Mythbusting report provides marketers a comprehensive look at the latest data and offers new insight into how to make the most of online interactions.”

Social Mythbusting is the seventh research brief in ExactTarget’s and CoTweet’s Subscribers, Fans & Followers research series. The series provides marketers exclusive insight into how U.S. consumers interact with brands online based on a series of focus groups, interviews and surveys conducted in March and April. For more information about the study and to access an interactive application of the Subscribers, Fans & Followers data, visit www.ExactTarget.com/sff.

About ExactTarget
ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing Hub TM technology provides organizations a single solution to connect with customers via email, integrated text messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget powers permission-based multichannel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Best Buy, Aurora Fashions, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, visit www.exacttarget.com or call 1-866-EMAILET.

NEW YORK, NY – Advertisers may be missing a key opportunity to engage holiday shoppers, according to a PointRoll study of retailers’ online advertising campaigns from 2006 – 2009. The study analyzed performance of online advertising campaigns and consumers’ interactions with the ads and found that shoppers begin engaging with holiday-related retail advertisements now, in late October and early November.

These findings indicate that retail marketers can take advantage of this early-season consumer interest and a lack of competitive advertising by starting advertising efforts earlier.

“Because fewer advertisers are in market with their ads early in the holiday season, marketers who begin their media efforts earlier stand to increase revenues disproportionately to their competitors during the fourth quarter,” said Max Mead, vice president of business development and analytics, PointRoll. ”Savvy retail marketers looking for an edge during the holiday season should begin their online campaigns early to capitalize on user interest and to distance themselves from their peers.”

Weekly Retail Circulars to Exceed Expectations This Season:
ShopLocal, PointRoll’s retail division, found that deals distributed in weekly online retail circulars are on pace for a record holiday season. According to data from ShopLocal on the online circulars of top U.S. retailers, the 2009 holiday season set a record for the number of deals advertised as retailers worked hard to convince shoppers to buy in a down economy. The number of deals in this year’s circulars is already running at or slightly ahead of 2009 levels. Specifically, there were 18 percent more weekly retailer offers during the holiday season of 2009 than in 2008, and so far 2010 is running 1 percent ahead of 2009’s record pace.

“We’ve also seen industry-wide data that indicates that while consumer confidence is growing, particularly with small ticket items, consumer loyalty to brands has decreased in favor of finding the best deal,” said Vikram Sharma, CEO of ShopLocal. “As a result, retailers will be very aggressive with their promotions this season and will need to grab consumers’ attention early.”

Early Opportunities for Retail Advertisers

The PointRoll study also found that:

- Interaction Rates Hit Lower Points in Early December: The retail ads evaluated showed average interaction rates range from 4 percent to 6 percent during Q4, beginning in November at 6 percent, and hitting their low points in early December. Interaction rates are measured when a user takes a desired action to interact with the ad, such as clicking on a feature or watching a video within the ad.  This decrease is most likely due in part to heavy levels of advertisements. Interaction rates then increase 25 percent up to 5 percent during the final weeks of December. Most marketers are still preparing their campaigns in late October, but consumers are eager to interact with ads as indicated by these solid interaction rates.

- Time Spent Peaks in Early November: The study found that brand time, or the average time users spend interacting with an ad, peaks in the first two weeks of November at an average of 18 seconds spent with marketers’ advertisements, indicating significant levels of user interest. Brand time tapers 22 percent throughout the remainder of the quarter reaching a low point of 14 seconds during the last week of December.

- High Levels of Click-through Rates in Early November: Although PointRoll does not utilize click-through rates (CTR) as an ideal measure of consumer interest, the study found high CTRs in early November at 0.5 percent, with irregular activity during the remainder of the quarter.

- Impressions Double Mid-November and Early December: Many retailers regard Black Friday as the start of the holiday shopping season. While average weekly retail sector impression volumes doubled from 253 million to 531 million between the third week of November and the first week of December, many measures of consumer engagement (as measured by consumers’ interactivity with PointRoll’s rich media advertisements) indicate that consumers are interested in learning about advertisers’ offerings well in advance of Black Friday.

Study details:
PointRoll’s Holiday Consumer Interactions study examined consumer interest (e.g. impressions, interactions, rate, time spent, etc.) related to manufacturers and retailers during the holiday season. The study looked at advertising activity, such as campaign size and timing, consumer engagement and retailer site activity, measured by best-performing features used in advertisers’ ads and publishers’ sites. Specifically, the study evaluated data gathered from ShopLocal- hosted online Circular Sites and billions of PointRoll holiday campaign impressions from2006 through 2009.

About PointRoll
PointRoll, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI), is the leading provider of digital marketing services and technology enabling advertisers, agencies and Web publishers to create, deliver and measure interactive and action-inspiring online video, rich media display, mobile, social, and search campaigns. Understanding both the art and science of the digital medium, PointRoll provides the creative tools, analytics, distributed content, and expertise marketers need to effectively engage consumers and make a memorable and measurable impression. Evolving beyond the banner, PointRoll allows marketers to find consumers wherever they are across any digital platform or social channel and deliver a relevant and engaging experience, dramatically improving marketing effectiveness. Serving more than 350 billion impressions for more than two-thirds of the Fortune 500 brands, PointRoll delivers measurable campaign results. For more information, please visit www.pointroll.com <http://www.pointroll.com> .

About ShopLocal, the Retail Division of PointRoll
ShopLocal (www.AboutShopLocal.com), leader in multi-channel marketing services, offers a complete suite of innovative digital solutions that connect advertisers and consumers – online and in-store. ShopLocal’s industry-leading SmartProduct business solutions (SmartCircular, SmartCatalog and SmartDelivery) enable more than one hundred of the nation’s top retailers, including Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, CVS, Albertsons and Sears, to deliver highly interactive, targeted and localized promotions to shoppers through online circulars, display advertising, search, social media, digital out of home and mobile. ShopLocal is the retail division of PointRoll, a wholly owned subsidiary of Gannett Company.

The future of lead generation lies in finding ways for a business to optimally manage prospects and customers. The Lead Management Excellence Award is bestowed upon a company that exemplifies innovation in the evolving lead generation industry. “EDMC is pushing the future of the lead generation business,” said McArdle. “The EDMC team looks to maximize the value of their leads, but does so in a way that also provides a superior customer experience for their prospective students. While their vision is to look beyond quantity to quality, they believe that these measures are not mutually exclusive.”

For the first time, TARGUSinfo presented the Best in Audience Targeting Award for the display advertising industry. This most recent honor acknowledges the remarkable change and growth in the display advertising ecosystem over the past 18 to 24 months where various new business models have emerged. “VivaKi is consistently ahead of the curve,” said McLenaghan. “In such a fast moving, multi-faceted environment, Audience On Demand establishes harmony between creative, data and media in order to identify, target and analyze audiences. VivaKi provides tremendous value for the Publicis Groupe media and digital agencies and their clients.”

In addition to this year’s keynote speakers — Greg Stuart, former CEO of IAB and Co-author of “What Sticks”, and Joanna O’Connell, Senior Analyst of Interactive Markets at Forrester Research Inc. — IIS attendees heard from more than 45 industry experts over the two day conference. Afterwards, they were able to meet face-to-face with the speakers in a special networking session.

Attendees participated in other valuable networking and partnering opportunities during a number of strategically planned functions. The TARGUSinfo Interactive Insights Summit was held Wednesday, October 13 and, Thursday, October 14, 2010, at the Wynn Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nev.

Formerly known as the Online Lead Quality Summit, IIS hosts a unique blend of leaders from national advertisers, agencies, lead generators, lead exchanges, interactive agencies, ad networks and ad exchanges from around the digital world. The Interactive Insights Summit fosters networking, education and business opportunities among senior industry professionals, and explores emerging trends to help fuel business across the online marketing and advertising ecosystem.

For more information about the Interactive Insights Summit, visit: www.TARGUSinfo.com/Summit, and follow the summit on Twitter at www.twitter.com/iisummit.

About TARGUSinfo

TARGUSinfo, the trusted provider of On-Demand Insight® to the most recognized brands, links and delivers more than 90 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, Fortune 500 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.

NEW YORK – SAY Media, a modern media company, announced the results of a research project aimed at better understanding consumer media consumption and advertising effectiveness. In addition to uncovering key behavioral changes, the study strove to better understand the implications for marketers trying to reach this desirable, growing audience.

Consumers who’ve shifted the majority of their video viewing to non-live video content make up a significant portion of the adult, online population in the United States. This desirable consumer group is spending more time online and while they continue to spend their entertainment hours with professional quality video, they expect to watch on their own schedule and to have the option of skipping commercials when they choose.

- Online consumers are increasingly more difficult to reach through live television.
- This Off the Grid group represents nearly one third of the adult, online population in the United States – according to comScore, nearly 56 million people and growing.
- They are driven by the desire to make their media consumption more efficient through choice and control – it is no longer the question of “what’s on” but “what’s available.”
- With the increasing ease of skipping commercials, they are constantly making a mental calculation as to whether it is easier to avoid interruptive ads or tolerate them.
- They are educated, digitally focused, connected, engaged and influential.
- Within the Off the Grid segment, consumers can be further categorized into two sub-groups:
- On Demander: 20 percent of online consumers fall into this segment. All of them watch less live TV than they did one year ago. On Demanders access video through a variety of devices that allows them to time and location shift to meet their busy schedule.
- They own an average of 5.4 devices for watching video, including their TV and PC.
- Almost half of them subscribe to Netflix.
- 40 percent own video-enabled mobile devices like smartphones or iPads.
- Time and device shifting allows this group to consume 30 hours of video each week – compared to the Internet average of 25 hours per week.
- This group is the most turned off by intrusive, repetitive advertising.
- Opt Out: 13 percent of online consumers have completely opted out of live television and get their content by streaming across devices, through their DVR or on DVD.
90 percent of this group actually does own a TV.
- This group skews even younger, with 30 percent falling into the 18-24 demographic.
- 41 percent live in urban areas.
- They consume 21 hours of video content in a typical week – half of which is online.

It is too early to declare the death of the interruptive ad model, but the long expected demise is starting to accelerate. The existence and growth of this desirable cohort of consumers has serious implications for advertisers and for the way that publishers try to reach them. For these audiences, the desire to consume media efficiently has elevated choice and control as the two deciding factors on how they obtain their online content. But as choice and control improve, so does the Off the Gridder’s ability to avoid advertising.

“Getting people to engage in an on-demand world with so much fragmentation is the biggest challenge marketers face today,” said Matt Rosenberg, vice president of Solutions, SAY Media. “We’ve been delivering engagement for years and this study reconfirms that the best way to reach this audience of approximately 56 million is with respectful, content-driven advertising that lets the user be in control.”

Marketers are still highly devoted to the ideas of frequency and interruption, but as consumer behavior changes, so must advertiser behavior. The increased ability of consumers to easily avoid advertising messages means that the modern marketer must develop ads that are more content-rich and compelling in order for them to remain effective. Advertisers need to respectfully connect with these consumers in their own language and build scale from targeted communities rather than down from broad demographics, thus optimizing for attentive reach.

“Optimizing for effective frequency is expensive for advertisers and repetitive for consumers,” said Brian Monahan, executive vice president of Mediabrands’ IPG Media Lab. “We need new ways to speak to these consumers that provide them with a more meaningful, valuable brand experience.”

METHODOLOGY

The two-part study, conducted in conjunction with TRU and comScore, included both qualitative and quantitative results. TRU conducted eight in-home interviews with Off the Grid households in San Francisco and Chicago to better understand their technology usage, video watching trends and feelings about online advertising.

Additionally, comScore featured a carefully controlled, online survey with 1159 consumers. Those who took the survey were asked a variety of questions to help better identify themselves based on how they consume their media content.

The Opt Out group was defined as not owning a television or not watching live television in the past week and streaming more than 4 hours per week. The On Demander group was defined as streaming content more than 4 hours each week and spending more time streaming video than watching live television. All On Demanders watch less live TV than they did one year ago.

CONSUMER QUOTES:

“I can’t imagine a time when I don’t have access to media because I am online all the time. As long as you have the Internet, you can cherry pick what you want to see, when you want to see it.” – Clarissa

“My time is more precious now that we have a one year old daughter and using Roku or Netflix provides us with easier access to our entertainment. In fact, we got rid of almost all of our premium channels.” – Kate

To view our white paper or to watch a video highlighting this study, please visit: www.saymedia.com/research.php

ABOUT SAY MEDIA

SAY Media is a modern media company, the evolution of VideoEgg as it continues its mission to make online advertising better. SAY Media helps advertisers engage today’s social consumer through rich content experiences while helping creators monetize their work and grow their audiences. The company connects paid and earned media to deliver brand messages to an online audience of 345 million across display and mobile. For more information on SAY Media: www.saymedia.com

ABOUT IPG MEDIA LAB

Launched in 2006, the Lab helps IPG Clients identify media technologies that can drive business results. In addition to digital ad effectiveness testing, the Lab does Consumer research to determine how emerging media influences decision-making. The Lab has a 4,000 square foot facility in Los Angeles that showcases all types of media technology. www.ipglab.com

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.

ABOUT TRU

TRU is the global leader in youth research, having surveyed more than two million tweens, teens, and twenty-somethings worldwide. TRU is part of TNS, the world’s largest custom-research firm, as well as a subsidiary of Kantar (the insights and consultancy arm of WPP). More information at http://www.tru-insight.com

ATLANTA – The U.S. paid search market continued to heat up in Q3, with spend on paid search advertisements increasing nearly 6% year-over-year as marketers again turned to search marketing to fuel online growth. Among the engines, Google took an even more dominant lead, picking up two percentage points to garner more than 80% of all U.S. PPC ad spend in the third quarter. But early data coming out of the Bing and Yahoo! alliance reveals that the partnership is showing strong results for advertisers thus far, boding well for Bing to become a viable competitor to Google in the future.

These findings come from a report released by SearchIgnite, a leading provider of paid search optimization and online media solutions managing more than $600 million in PPC spend annually.

Detailed findings in the report include:

- Google Continues to Seize Significant Market Share: Google now stands at more than 80% of PPC ad spend, up nearly two percentage points from just last quarter, and taking the most dominant market share lead since SearchIgnite began tracking spend share among the engines (2007).

- Strong Quarter for Paid Search with Solid Momentum for Q4: Paid search spend in Q3 increased 5.8% year-over-year compared with flat growth a year ago and exhibited positive momentum month-over-month, with July growing 4.9%, August 5.8% and September 6.7%. The growth throughout the quarter bodes well for a strong Q4.

- Early Results from Bing-Yahoo! Alliance Positive for Advertisers: Despite widespread speculation that CPCs for the new search alliance will hyper-inflate, PPC ads delivered by Bing show little CPC inflation thus far and SearchIgnite does not anticipate that they will be markedly inflated in the future. In addition, click-through rates (CTRs) have increased for advertising served on the combined Bing-Yahoo! search inventory, revealing that Bing’s ad serving algorithm delivers more relevant advertising than Yahoo!, positive news for advertisers.

“Google continued to increase its dominance in the paid search market in the third quarter,” said Roger Barnette, CEO of SearchIgnite. “However, the Bing/Yahoo! alliance is performing well for advertisers thus far, and marketers want to see a viable competitor to Google in the market. We feel that there is a real opportunity for Bing to capture significant market share in the near term if these early results continue to play out in the fourth quarter.”

The complete Q3 report can be downloaded at: http://about.searchignite.com/en/research/early-results-bing-yahoo-alliance-positive-signs-advertisers

This report is the latest in a series of SearchIgnite white papers reviewing trends across the search landscape. Previous quarterly reports can be downloaded at http://bit.ly/searchigniteresearch.

About SearchIgnite

SearchIgnite is the leading provider of search optimization and digital media attribution solutions that help major marketers achieve their search marketing goals quicker and spend their advertising budgets smarter. The company’s media management technology offers an advanced suite of tools to manage, optimize and report on paid search campaigns in one central dashboard, as well as gather insights into the relationship between media channels including PPC, SEO and display. Some of the world’s leading brands and advertising agencies depend on SearchIgnite to power their search campaigns and improve their online media ROI.

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

Scott Kurnit, Successful Media Entrepreneur, Launches Company With Backing of Top-Tier Venture Capital Firms; Advisory Board Filled With Industry Luminaries; Charter Advertisers Include Fortune 500’s

NEW YORK – AdKeeper™ announced a transformative online advertising service that will forever change the way consumers interact with the Internet. With one simple click of a button, consumers can place ads of their choice into their personal ‘Keeper™,’ offering them absolute control to save, sort, sift, share, rank, review, click, print and buy online from ads they have specifically selected. Part of AdKeeper’s revolutionary approach is that no software, no downloads, no browser extensions, no plug-ins and no pre-registration are required. One Click. Kept. Period.

AdKeeper is founded by Scott Kurnit, one of the nation’s most successful online media entrepreneurs and founder of About.com, and funded by top-tier investors including: True Ventures, DCM, Spark Capital, First Round Capital, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures, David Cowan, Stan Shuman and The New York Times Company.

AdKeeper has been embraced by the largest group of charter advertisers for any new media launch. This prestigious group includes many of the nation’s largest and most innovative companies, from a wide variety of industries, including members of the Fortune 500: Allstate, Ally Bank, AT&T, Best Buy, CBS, Ford, Gap, General Mills, InterContinental Hotels Group, JetBlue, Kmart, Kraft Foods, Macy’s, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Sara Lee, Sears, Showtime, The Advertising Council, Unilever and Warner Bros.

The company’s Advisory Board boasts industry luminaries including Bob Greenberg (R/GA), Janet Robinson (The New York Times Company), John Battelle (Federated Media), Jeremy Allaire (Brightcove), Ken Lerer (Huffington Post), Bijan Sabet (Spark Capital), John Borthwick (Betaworks), Wenda Harris Millard (MediaLink), David Rosenblatt (Former DoubleClick), Peggy Conlon (The Advertising Council), David Cowan (Bessemer Ventures), and George Schweitzer (CBS).

”Until now, the consumer could control every aspect of the Internet experience – except one. Not anymore. AdKeeper delivers the ability for consumers to finally save online ads for use on their own terms and time. Without leaving their current page or interrupting their online experience, consumers have the unprecedented ability to click and keep ads of their choice,” said founder Scott Kurnit.

“AdKeeper enables active engagement with online advertising – establishing a dialogue in which the brand and consumer are both willing participants and giving consumers absolute control of what, how and when they engage with marketing communications,” added Kurnit. “And in the process, it also creates a more seamless relationship between consumers and marketers as initial ad impressions are followed up with additional permission-based product information, brand experiences and unique offers.”

How does AdKeeper work?

The business is as simple as a Keep Button™ and a Keeper™. Here’s how it works.

When consumers see a “K” button on an ad that interests them, they click the K button, and continue their reading or viewing experience uninterrupted. The ad is copied into their Keeper where it can be visited later, at the consumer’s convenience. Once in the Keeper, consumers can sort and organize their ads, click through to get more information, make their purchase or print a coupon. They can also rank, review and share ads they think their friends would find helpful or entertaining.

Ads are intended to help consumers save money, make buying decisions, research products and services and at times, entertain. With the help of AdKeeper, consumers can exercise even more control over their online browsing experience. Instead of ads being a distraction or something to be ignored, consumers can now feel safe to ‘click and keep’ knowing their time and attention are respected.

Save. Sort. Sift. Share. Rank. Review. Click. Print. Buy.

These are just some of the capabilities AdKeeper offers – all within a dynamic, live consumer interface that is both private and personalized. The Keeper is the consumer’s own place where only the ads they have invited have a right to exist. The ‘click to keep’ will not trigger any other ad or intrusive actions. A consumer-first business, AdKeeper respects consumers’ security and right to privacy. The ads will be held confidentially in each consumer’s Keeper, waiting for them to interact as they wish.

“Internet advertising was modeled after TV advertising – where the consumer views content, then interruptive ads, then more content. But the web is a totally dynamic environment that places consumers in the driver’s seat,” said Kurnit. “It’s time for the advertising experience to catch up with the rest of the web experience. AdKeeper affords consumers the opportunity to engage with the advertising that interests them most, at the time and place of their choosing. It’s ‘on my time advertising.’ It’s invitational, not interruptive. It’s for brands that respect their consumers. And it’s for consumers who want to take charge.”

AdKeeper was launched today in beta and is currently available by invitation. The service will be widely available in the first quarter of 2011.

Who’s Talking About AdKeeper?

Jeremy Allaire, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Brightcove, said: “Saving fun and useful video ads for repeat viewing, sharing and engaging on my schedule takes the medium to a whole new level.”

John Battelle, Chairman, CEO and Founder of Federated Media, said: “When people start keeping their ads, advertisers, publishers, and consumers will win. This is an idea whose time has come.”

John Borthwick, CEO, Betaworks; Former SVP Technology and Alliances, Time Warner, said: “My focus on the real time web triggered my interest in AdKeeper. As the rate of sharing information increases, users want to have a way to hold on to things — be it ads or content — and remain in control. A service like AdKeeper is long overdue.”

Jon Callaghan, AdKeeper Board Member; Founder, True Ventures; Former AOL Greenhouse, CMGI, said: “Our entire partnership has worked with Scott in one way or another – so funding him on the spot was pretty easy – especially when we started thinking about the elegance and scale of the AdKeeper opportunity.”

Lisa Cochrane, Vice President, Integrated Marketing Communications, Allstate Insurance Company, said: “Allstate is always seeking new and innovative ways to communicate with consumers and ensure they have the insurance protection they need. Our business is built entirely on trust and we like the idea of empowering consumers to engage with our products and services on their terms and in their trusted Keeper environment. AdKeeper is an exciting new way for us to communicate with our customers how, when and where they choose. It helps keep them in ‘Good Hands®’.”

Peggy Conlon, President and CEO of The Advertising Council said: “For nearly seven decades the Ad Council has utilized emerging media to reach our audiences with important and life-saving messages. Partnering with AdKeeper will allow us to continue to ensure that Ad Council campaigns are remembered, acted upon and continue to improve the lives of all Americans.”

David Cowan, AdKeeper Angel Investor; Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners; Co-Founder, Verisign, said: “I’m excited to see Scott put his energy and intellect at work on something so potentially game changing as AdKeeper. AdKeeper promises immortality for Internet ads — a compelling value proposition!”

Dixon Doll, AdKeeper Board Member; Co-Founder and General Partner of DCM, said: “Scott is one of the most creative and successful entrepreneurs DCM has ever backed. We are very proud sponsors of AdKeeper and look forward to participating in the improvement of Internet advertising that Scott and his phenomenal team know so well.”

Esther Dyson, Angel Investor and former host of PC Forum, said: “AdKeeper is so simple, and so useful. It does just one thing…well. And it has a business model to die for.”

Bob Greenberg, Chairman/CEO, R/GA, said: “AdKeeper’s core proposition of putting users in control of when and how they consume advertising breaks serious new ground for creative execution. Making ads Keepable – and getting feedback through Keep metrics – will have a big impact on digital advertising.”

Josh Kopelman, Founder, First Round Capital; Founder Half.com; Co-Founder, Infonautics, said: “I love the scale and simplicity of the AdKeeper platform. This is an audacious move, but so was About.com, and the industry’s stars are neatly aligned for this kind of dramatic change to Internet advertising.”

Kenneth Lerer, Chairman and Co-Founder of The Huffington Post, Manager of Lerer Ventures, Chairman of Betaworks and Chairman of BuzzFeed, said: “AdKeeper is a core piece of Internet functionality that simply hasn’t existed. I’m glad we’ll finally have the ability to save, revisit, organize and engage with ads online and I’m excited to help bring Scott’s vision to the marketplace.”

Wenda Harris Millard, President of MediaLink LLC., said: “Scott and I have been having a good natured debate about behavioral vs. adjacency advertising for as long as I can remember. I’m pleased to support his quest to bring them both together for the first time. Everything in the Keeper is 100% ‘behaviorally’ opt in. I can’t think of a better adjacency environment.”

Janet Robinson, President and CEO of The New York Times Company said, “We’re so pleased with the platform that Scott and his team pioneered at About.com that there was little question about supporting him in his next major effort. I’m excited to see the inventive advertising that is being created for the AdKeeper system.”

David Rosenblatt, Former President of Google Global Display Advertising; Former CEO of DoubleClick; Board Member IAC, said: “I instantly loved AdKeeper. This should have been done a long time ago.”

Bijan Sabet, Partner, Spark Capital; Board Member, Twitter, Boxee, SendMe, said: “I especially like the blend of personal utility and community of AdKeeper, not to mention the true platform scale that’s inherent in benefiting every Internet advertiser.”

Shiv Singh, Head of Digital, PepsiCo Americas Beverages said: “Here at Pepsi we believe that a groundbreaking solution like AdKeeper can help us engage consumers in deeper, more relevant ways over time by providing real value. AdKeeper is an innovative service that will further help us shift our digital strategy from impressions to experiences.”

Marty St. George, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Commercial Strategy, JetBlue Airways, said: “At JetBlue, online marketing is crucial to our brand. AdKeeper is an exciting new service that allows our customers to improve their online purchasing experience through ‘Keeps’ and helps us strengthen our brand story on a one-to-one basis in the customer’s private Keeper.”

Matt VanDyke, Director Marketing Communications – U.S. Ford & Lincoln Mercury, Ford Motor Company, said: “At Ford we believe advertising should be useful and not interrupt natural online activities. The introduction of ‘Keeping’ aligns with our strategy to provide our customers with useful information that they can use when it’s most convenient for them. The AdKeeper MoreSpot will be a valuable tool for us to guide highly engaged consumers as they consider Ford products.”

The Who’s Who of AdKeeper

“AdKeeper’s leadership team is one of superior management skills, experience, creativity and maturity. MaryAnn Bekkedahl, Todd Sloan, Steve Neiker, and Bruce Winterton are the most talented group of individuals I’ve ever worked with. Many thanks to James & Co. for the early support as our virtual HR team and to Marshall Cohen Associates for their initial research,” said Scott Kurnit, Founder.

Scott Kurnit, Founder, Chairman, CEO

Scott’s responsibility at AdKeeper is to make it wildly successful. He also serves on the Boards of Appssavvy, Brightcove, Dotomi, Goodmail, Mashlogic, OpenSky, SendMe Mobile, and The Paley Center for Media. He is an advisor to About, Black Arrow, Mashery and SmartBrief.

Scott founded and served as chairman and CEO of About, Inc. as it grew to a public market value of $1.7 billion and was the 5th largest of all Web properties. About invented the forerunner to Google’s AdSense in Sprinks (purchased by Google in 2003) and the first family of ad networks in Luna. About Japan (separate company) had its IPO in 2005 reaching a value of $1.5 billion. Kurnit sold About U.S. to Primedia in 2001 for $724 million. About is now owned by the New York Times Company.

Scott has founded four companies, all of which continue operating today. He’s a holder of four patents, led the team that embedded the first web browser into an online service, started the first Pay Per View cable network and co-led the team that implemented the first use of national caller ID. He was also the youngest program director in the PBS system and served as program director for Qube, the world’s first fully interactive cable system. He was president of Showtime Event Television when it generated the largest one night gross in the entertainment business and aired the first rock concert (broadcast in 70 countries) from the former Soviet Union.

Scott has been a Filmmaker, TV Director, Station Program Manager, Marketer and CEO. He has worked at the highest levels of Warner, Viacom, News Corp., PBS, IBM, and MCI companies.

Todd Sloan, COO/CFO

Todd is responsible for making sure everything runs great day in and day out. He has spent 25 years as a senior financial and operations executive in the media and digital media industries. He has extensive experience in the public markets, mergers and acquisition activities and operations and was CFO during the sale of two public companies, each selling for north of $700 million. Previously, Todd was Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Nielsen NetRatings, Inc. where he led the company through six successful years in the public markets.

Prior to Nielsen, Todd was Chief Financial Officer of About Inc., where he led the company through its initial public and secondary offerings. Todd also served as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Sony Worldwide Networks and prior to that spent ten years in the media practice at Ernst & Young. Todd holds a B.B.A. in finance and accounting from the University of Wisconsin / Madison.

MaryAnn Bekkedahl, Chief Revenue Officer

MaryAnn is responsible for all relationships with AdKeeper’s advertising partners. She is a proven media executive with 18 years experience in consumer magazine and website publishing. Prior to joining AdKeeper, she was EVP, Group Publisher at Rodale, a global content company in health and wellness, and the publisher of the Men’s Health, Women’s Health and Prevention properties amongst others. MaryAnn led the advertising sales and trade marketing efforts for all Rodale print and digital properties, integrated marketing programs, corporate ad sales and custom publishing.

MaryAnn was named Adweek Media’s “Publishing Executive of the Year” in 2009. She has earned spots for her brands on the prestigious and highly coveted trade lists including AdWeek’s Hot List, and Advertising Age’s A-List. min magazine named her one of the “Most Intriguing People” of 2004, Gotham magazine named her one of its “40 under 40” in 2003, and Advertising Age named her a “Woman to Watch” in 2003. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan.

Bruce Winterton, Chief Marketing Officer

Bruce is responsible for marketing the AdKeeper service to consumers and helping the advertising industry invent award-winning Keepable advertising. He brings to AdKeeper more than 20 years of marketing and advertising experience in digital and traditional media. Most recently, Bruce was President of The Barbarian Group, a digital services firm and one of FastCompany’s Top 50 Most Innovative Companies. Bruce has also worked at Ogilvy & Mather, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Miller Brewing Company and Kraft Foods and helped develop HelloMoto, Johnnie Walker’s Keep Walking, the Axe launch and Miller’s High Life Man campaigns.

Bruce has been named to the AdAge 100 and Creativity Magazine’s Creative Top 50. A fourth generation Californian, he has an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and an undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

Steve Nieker, Chief Technology Officer

Steve is responsible for the technology that makes every ad on the Internet Keepable and for making sure millions and millions of private Keepers™ run like a charm. His prior technology effort was the co-founding of Sphere, the leader for generating related content between the blogosphere and mainstream media using highly scaled infrastructure. Sphere was acquired by AOL in 2008 and continues to operate today as Surphace.

Steve founded his first successful media-technology company at the age of 23, and he has consulted to Fortune 500 corporations including AT&T Wireless, Corporate Express, and Quantum. As a founder of Think Tank 23, which he operated prior to Sphere, he built the first Web-wide blog crawling and text extraction engine, and pioneered the adaptive page-analytics system that powers Surphace, for which he holds a patent.

Steve has pioneered building decentralized engineering organizations for more than 15 years. He continues that practice at AdKeeper, virtually bringing together the most talented, collaborative, and entrepreneurial engineers from across the Internet.

The AdKeeper Advisory Board

Jeremy Allaire is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Brightcove, the leading Online Video Platform. Prior to founding Brightcove, Mr. Allaire was technologist and entrepreneur-in-residence for venture capital firm General Catalyst, where he worked on companies and investments in broadband media, mobile content, e-commerce software and digital identity. Mr. Allaire was previously CTO of Macromedia, where he helped define and launch the Macromedia MX platform for Rich Internet Applications, helping to evolve Macromedia Flash into a dominant platform on the Internet. He joined Macromedia with its merger with Allaire Corporation, where Allaire was a co-founder and CTO.

John Battelle is Chairman, CEO and Founder of Federated Media Publishing, as well as a journalist. He has been a visiting professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and also maintains Searchblog, a weblog covering search, technology, and media. Battelle is one of the original founders of Wired magazine, the founder of The Industry Standard magazine and website, and “band manager” of the collaborative weblog Boing Boing. He studied at Polytechnic School and the University of California, Berkeley, earning both a B.A. in Anthropology, and a Masters in Journalism. Since 2004, Battelle has been the program chair and co-moderator, along with Tim O’Reilly, of the annual Web 2.0 Summit, originally known as the “Web 2.0 Conference.” In 2005, he published The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, chronicling the rise of online search engines and, specifically, Google. He was named 2009 Publisher of the Year by Razorfish, was named to Adweek’s 2009 Digital Hotlist and received the 2010 Sales Excellence Award from IAB.

John Borthwick, is CEO, Betaworks and former SVP Technology and Alliances at Time Warner, Inc. He is also the past CEO of Fotolog. Borthwick’s company, WP-Studio, founded in 1994, was one of the first content studios in New York’s Silicon Alley. He holds an MBA from Wharton and an undergraduate degree in Economics from Wesleyan University.

Peggy Conlon President and Chief Executive Officer of The Advertising Council, an organization that mobilizes more than $1.5 billion of advertising time and space yearly, the creative services of over 50 major advertising agencies, and related financial support from hundreds of corporations. Ms. Conlon serves on the Board of Trustees of the United Way Worldwide. She also served on the Board of Directors for C-Change (formerly the National Dialogue on Cancer), as an appointee of President George Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush and continues to direct C-Change’s communications efforts. Ms. Conlon was previously Vice President, Group Publisher of the Broadcasting & Cable Group at Cahners Business Information. She also served as a public affairs officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve for seven years. Ms. Conlon was awarded the New York Women in Communications Matrix Award for Advertising in 2002 and was named Advertising Woman of the Year by Advertising Women of New York in 2006.

David Cowan has been a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners since 1992 funding internet startups like Blue Nile, Hotjobs, LinkedIn, Playdom and Postini. In 1995 he cofounded Verisign as a Bessemer-funded spinout of RSA and served as VeriSign’s initial Chairman. With more than 20 IPOs in his portfolio, the first Forbes Midas List ranked David among the world’s top 10 venture investors. David’s current portfolio includes Delivery Agent, GetInsured, Lifelock, LinkedIn, Nominum, Reputation Defender, Smule, Skybox and Zoosk. David received both his A.B. in math and computer science and his M.B.A. degrees from Harvard, and he now blogs at WhoHasTimeForThis.com.

Esther Dyson began her education shortly after graduating from Harvard with a degree in economics. Since then she has been a fact-checker for Forbes Magazine, a Wall Street equity analyst, editor of the newsletter Release 1.0, author of the book “Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age,” host of the annual PC Forum (1983-2007), a cosmonaut in training and an active angel investor in the US and Europe including Russia. Currently she sits on a few too many boards, including 23andMe, Airship Ventures, Eventful, Evernote, Meetup, WPP Group, Voxiva and Yandex, as well as the Long Now Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation.

Bob Greenberg is the Chairman, CEO and Global Chief Creative Officer at R/GA. He also serves on the Boards of the 4A’s and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dean’s Council Advisory Board of Tisch School of the Arts, NYU ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program), Parsons School, the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, and VCU Brandcenter. Mr. Greenberg, and his brother Richard, founded R/Greenberg Associates (R/GA) in 1977 with the idea of creating a company that values design, while focusing on developing leading-edge motion graphics and live-action film and video production. The company created groundbreaking visual effects for movies, including Alien, Predator, Seven, and Zelig. R/GA’s body of work spans 400 feature films and 4,000 television commercials. Today, he leads the vision for an agency that serves as the digital partner for Fortune 500 companies and world-renowned brands, including Barnes & Noble, Johnson & Johnson, L’Oréal Paris, MasterCard, Hewlett-Packard, Nike, Nokia, Taco Bell, and Wal-Mart. R/GA was recently recognized by Adweek as the “Digital Agency of the Decade.”

Kenneth Lerer is the Chairman and Co-Founder of the Huffington Post. He is also Manager of Lerer Ventures and Chairman of Betaworks and BuzzFeed. Previously, Mr. Lerer was an EVP of AOL Time Warner and was a founding partner of New York based Robinson, Lerer, and Montgomery. He teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University.

Wenda Harris Millard is the President of MediaLink LLC. Before joining MediaLink, Ms. Millard was Co-CEO and President of Media for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. and previously served on its Board of Directors. Her previous experience includes serving as Chief Sales Officer at Yahoo! where she led the team that drove revenue from $700 million to over $6 billion in six years, was Chief Internet Officer at Ziff Davis Media and President of Ziff Davis Internet. Earlier, Ms. Millard was a founding member of the executive team at DoubleClick, where she served as Executive Vice President responsible for establishing the DoubleClick brand and overseeing the operations of DoubleClick Media. She also served as President and Group Publisher of SRDS, Senior Vice President and Publisher of Family Circle and Executive Vice President/Group Publisher of Adweek, Mediaweek and Brandweek magazines.

Janet Robinson is the President and CEO of The New York Times Company, with primary responsibility for overseeing and coordinating all of the Company’s operations and business units and for working closely with the chairman to chart the future direction of the Company. Previously, she had served as COO and Executive Vice President. Ms. Robinson previously served as SVP of newspaper operations for all of the Company’s newspaper properties, which include The New York Times, Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune and regional newspapers. Earlier, Ms. Robinson served as group senior vice president for the advertising sales and marketing unit of The New York Times Company Women’s Magazine Group. She previously held several sales management positions with Golf Digest and Tennis Magazine that were formerly owned by The New York Times Company.

David Rosenblatt is a director of IAC and the former CEO of DoubleClick and former President of Global Display Advertising at Google, where he was responsible for display advertising sales and product strategy globally. Before his promotion to CEO of DoubleClick Mr. Rosenblatt was President of the company. Earlier, Mr. Rosenblatt spent several years at S.G. Warburg & Co, in Hong Kong, London and New York and served as its Investment Banker, and was responsible for advising on mergers, divestitures, IPOs and other strategic transactions for international and domestic clients. In 2007, he was named #15 on the Silicon Alley Insider’s list of the 100 most influential people in New York digital business. In 2003, he was recognized as one of New York’s rising stars by Crain’s New York Business, on their (40 Under 40) list.

Bijan Sabet has been a General Partner at Spark Capital since its inception in 2005. It is fitting that his bio would be so closely linked to the personality of the firm. Bijan is not an observer of the confluence. He lives in it. In fact, he is probably Twittering as you read this. Bijan led Spark’s investments in Boxee, Bug Labs, ExtensionFM, OMGPOP, SendMe, thePlatform (acquired by Comcast), Tumblr and Twitter. Prior to joining Spark, Bijan was Senior Vice President, Corporate Development of GameLogic after serving as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Charles River Ventures (CRV). Before his work at CRV, Bijan was Vice President, Business Development and Product Management at Moxi Digital, where he was responsible for establishing and managing strategic relationships with cable and satellite operators as well as driving product strategy. In this role, Bijan was part of the early team that introduced the MoxiMedia Center, a low-cost replacement for a digital cable or satellite set-top box that integrates digital video recording, a music jukebox, a DVD player, and an Internet gateway into one device that wirelessly networks video, audio and broadband connectivity throughout the home. Moxi later merged with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Digeo and is currently deployed by Charter, Comcast and Adelphia Cable.

George F. Schweitzer is President of the CBS Marketing Group. He was previously Executive Vice President, Marketing and Communications, CBS. Mr. Schweitzer was honored with the PROMAX Brand Builder Award and the PROMAX Pinnacle Award for his leadership in television marketing and promotion. He was named Entertainment Marketer of the Year by Entertainment Weekly and EPM Communications, named a Marketer of the Year by Brandweek magazine and twice named to the Advertising Age Marketing 100. In addition, he was honored with Entertainment Weekly’s first Marketing Executive of the Year Award. Mr. Schweitzer first joined CBS in 1972 and held several positions in radio and television production, including production supervisor of many CBS Television Network, CBS News and CBS Sports broadcasts.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – Move over, Yellow Pages. Good riddance pricey online marketing. Go Daddy introduces AdSpace, a marketing product designed to help small businesses conquer online advertising without huge investments in time, money or technology. Instead of spending hours to create an effective online ad campaign, users can now hand over a few key pieces of information to Go Daddy’s Search Marketing Experts and be advertising on the Web’s largest stage within 24 hours.

According to a study by The Kelsey Group and ConStat, Inc., more than 70 percent of consumers today start with search engines when looking for a local business. One of the most coveted spots on the Internet is prominent placement on Google, but the “do it yourself” method of getting there can be somewhat overwhelming.

AdSpace offers the “do it for me” approach, and it’s easy. All business owners need to do is provide basic data about their services, then Go Daddy creates a website specifically designed to drive phone calls and generate e-mail inquiries from potential customers. Go Daddy’s team of search marketing experts then create a keyword-based local advertising campaign on Google’s search results page, linking back to the site.

Phone calls are literally recorded and e-mails captured in the AdSpace dashboard – to help users organize new contacts and measure their sales performance.

Just like most of Go Daddy’s services, AdSpace is available to customers for a fraction of what other providers charge. There are no set-up fees, and AdSpace can be used on a month-to-month basis.

“Building a business, in this economy, can be tough,” said Go Daddy CEO and Founder Bob Parsons. “AdSpace was designed for small businesses wanting to leverage the power of the Internet – businesses that know they need to advertise online, but don’t have big budgets or tech experts to feel comfortable taking financial risks.”

Frank Yaconis, owner of the Scottsdale Discover Hyundai dealership, is familiar with the ease and performance of AdSpace firsthand. While testing the product during its pilot phase, Yaconis saw a return on investment almost immediately.

“AdSpace is providing results for our dealership,” said Yaconis. “Within minutes of our ad campaign going live we were getting sales calls and emails from prospective buyers – the third call turned into a sale!”

The product can also be used to improve customer service. The AdSpace phone call-recording feature provided Yaconis the data he needed to conduct additional training with his employees.

“We can listen to our calls online, which has helped us improve the sales process for our staff,” Yaconis said. “Based on a review of our very first call, I improved our standard telephone greeting when we answer the phones.”

Raymond Boggs, a senior analyst with International Data Corporation (IDC) specializing in SMB research, identified the benefits of the ease of use and pricing structure of AdSpace.

“Many small businesses are still missing the boat when it comes to online promotion,” said Raymond Boggs, vice president of small/medium business research at IDC. “It can be complicated to establish and manage an effective online marketing effort, and also to measure results, but a resource like Go Daddy’s AdSpace brings advanced but affordable capabilities to even the smallest firms.”

AdSpace is backed by Go Daddy’s world-class 24/7 customer support.

To get started with an online advertising campaign for local business, visit http://www.GoDaddy.com/Business/Local-Advertising.aspx.

To learn how to build and grow your business online, visit www.GoDaddy.com.

Follow & Friend Go Daddy on Twitter & Facebook.

About The Go Daddy Group, Inc.

Go Daddy is a leading provider of services that enable individuals and businesses to establish, maintain and evolve an online presence. Go Daddy provides a variety of domain name registration plans and website design and hosting packages, as well as a broad array of on-demand services. These include products such as SSL Certificates, Domains by Proxy private registration, ecommerce website hosting, blog templates and blog software, podcast packages and online photo hosting. The Go Daddy Group has more than 43 million domain names under management. Go Daddy registers, renews or transfers a domain name every second. GoDaddy.com is the world’s largest Web hosting provider and is the world’s No. 1 domain name registrar according to Name Intelligence, Inc. During the first half of 2010, The Go Daddy Group registered more than one-third of all new domain names created in the top six generic top-level domains, or gTLDs, including .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .mobi.

Search Marketing Expo East 2010
NEW YORK – Search Marketing Expo East 2010 – Yield Software, a leading provider of next-generation Web marketing technology, introduced advanced pay-per-click (PPC) campaign management and new custom search engine marketing (SEM) reporting features in its flagship Yield Web Marketing Suite for Advertisers and for Agencies.

Power Editing is a new part of the Paid Search Optimizer module in the Yield Web Marketing Suite. It enables managers of PPC campaigns to quickly and efficiently establish and then edit very large, complex campaigns of up to thousands of ad groups, with multiple ads in each group targeting many thousands of keywords or more across Google, Yahoo and Bing.

“As our customer base has grown from mainly smaller business to larger and more complex enterprises and agencies conducting equally complex search marketing campaigns, we responded with the creation of Power Editing to better meet their needs,” said Matt Malden, founder and CEO of Yield Software. “Now, sophisticated campaign managers are able to leverage the many features and options already available to them in the Yield Web Marketing Suite, but with even greater speed and efficiency.”

New Custom Reporting expands on the already robust tracking and reporting infrastructure in the Yield Web Marketing Suite. Search engine marketers can now customize reports to display exactly the data and analytics they need to be successful in every aspect of their search marketing and search engine optimization efforts.

Yield Software Custom Reporting enables users of the Yield Web Marketing Suite to design reports; save those report definitions; share reports; generate reports; and schedule reports to be delivered via email on a periodic basis.

About Yield Software

Yield Software (www.yieldsoftware.com) delivers next-generation Web marketing technology. Its flagship product, the Yield Web Marketing Suite, is a fully automated, totally integrated search marketing system that optimizes paid search, natural search and landing pages from a single, easy-to-use cloud-based interface.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) introduced new Search enhancements that will help millions of people be entertained, productive, and informed anywhere they are across Yahoo!. Leveraging Yahoo!’s rich content and robust technology platforms, these new Yahoo! Search features will help people get to the entertainment and news content they care about on all connected devices — and do more with the things they find.

“Our goal is to understand what people care about and to make it fun for them to explore the most personally relevant, interesting, and informative content so that they can get things done faster and stay in the know,” said Shashi Seth, senior vice president, Yahoo! Search and Marketplaces. “Yahoo!’s new immersive Search is a cornerstone of the overall Yahoo! experience, creating more ways to connect people with whatever and whoever interests them.”

To start using the new enhancements, go to Yahoo.com and search for topics such as “Lady Gaga” or “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” The features include 3D multifaceted results and tools that let people:

- Cut to the chase – Intelligent shortcuts for movies, musical artists, celebrities and news topics conveniently organize the most important details such as images, articles, videos, tweets, event listings, and ratings. They also provide quick and easy ways to purchase movie or concert tickets while searching.
- Find favorite movies and TV shows – The first in a series of unique “quick apps” from Yahoo! Search, a new Web app for Netflix provides an easy way for Netflix members to add DVDs to their Queue right from the Search results page. Additionally, members can start to instantly watch movies and TV shows with one click on the app’s “play” button.
- Watch what’s happening now – Continuing to bring Search to more people in more places across Yahoo!, the company is helping people feed their curiosity by displaying image slideshows right above the standard results for interesting topics from Yahoo!’s Trending Now lists on Yahoo.com and elsewhere.
- Lean back and browse more pictures – An immersive new Yahoo! Image Search delivers engaging slideshows with public photos from Flickr and Yahoo!’s leading content sites, as well as the ability for people to view personally meaningful public Facebook albums from friends when they sign-in and connect their Yahoo! accounts to Facebook.
- Search on the go – Android and iPhone users can now get faster, more sophisticated Search results, thanks to the latest HTML5 technology. Rich content on entertainment, finance, and local topics is surfaced in more unique and compelling ways for high-end mobile devices.

Working toward its vision to be the center of people’s online lives, Yahoo! is dedicated to re-imagining Search by creating new ways to bring people closer to what they need and want on the Web. Today’s visually stunning new Search experiences throughout the Yahoo! network, along with innovative technology enhancements and quality improvements for rich local and shopping searches, all supplement organic algorithmic Search listings from the recently transitioned Microsoft search platform. Yahoo! expects current and future innovations to redefine Yahoo! Search and drive greater consumer engagement and loyalty.

New features began rolling out to Search users across the U.S. today, and Yahoo! expects to launch them for additional global markets in 2011.

About Yahoo!

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

Search Marketing Expo East 2010
CHICAGO – AdGooroo (www.adgooroo.com), a leading provider of online marketing competitive intelligence and keyword tools, and Experian® Hitwise® (www.hitwise.com) unveiled findings from “Successful Paid Search Tactics The Top CPG Brands Use To Grow Market Share And Build Loyalty.”

“In paid search, advertisers need to consider both pre-click and post-click data,” said AdGooroo Founder and CEO Rich Stokes. “This first of its kind study examines impressions, coverage, share of advertising and other pre-click data, as well as post-click or downstream data which highlights actual traffic originating from the engines.”

Some key findings of the study include:

- The Top Ten CPG Websites receive 25 percent of their traffic from search engines, more than any other source
- Most Top Ten CPG Websites receive more than 80 percent of their search traffic from organic search or search engine optimization (SEO), not paid search
- Virtually all CPG brands struggle to grow scalable paid search campaigns and capture more share than competitors; budgeting is not their primary challenge

“Nearly every CPG brand studied is leaving a sizable amount of paid search traffic on the table,” said Heather Dougherty, Director of Research for Hitwise. “Most performed well in at least one paid search tactic, but the best CPG search marketers do well in multiple areas.”

The white paper also provides campaign highlights, top keywords, key traffic statistics and competitive comparisons for each of the Top Ten CPG marketers included in the study: Betty Crocker, Kraft Foods USA, Pillsbury, Pampers, M&Ms, Kellogg’s Special K, L’Oréal Paris USA, Cover Girl, Tylenol and Enfamil.

For more information, contact Kraig Smith at ksmith@preturn.com or visit AdGooroo’s Web site to download a complimentary copy of this report.

About AdGooroo

AdGooroo (www.adgooroo.com) provides online marketers and agencies actionable, on demand competitive intelligence tools that proactively monitor an industry’s advertising landscape to help them build a long-term competitive advantage.

About Experian Hitwise

Experian Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Experian Hitwise gives marketers a competitive advantage by providing daily insights on how 25 million Internet users around the world interact with more than 1 million Web sites. This external view helps companies grow and protect their businesses by identifying threats and opportunities as they develop. Experian Hitwise has more than 1,500 clients across numerous sectors, including financial services, media, travel and retail.

Experian Hitwise (FTS:EXPN), www.experianplc.com, operates in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada and Brazil. More information about Experian Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up-to-date analysis of online trends, please visit the Hitwise Research Blog and Hitwise Data Center.

MUMBAI, India – Komli Media (http://komli.com), Asia Pacific’s leading digital media network platform, announced that it has acquired Indoor Media, the UK’s leading online ethnic marketing media company, further strengthening its position and operations in international markets. This is Komli’s second acquisition since June, as it aggressively expands its international operations.

Founded in 2007 by Murly Tiwari and Jay Rai, and headquartered in London, Indoor Media has established itself in the UK market as the leader in online ethnic marketing with a focus on South Asians. It has built a strong reputation by providing unique and effective solutions to brand marketers helping them reach out to the UK’s ethnic minority consumers through its proprietary ad network, AdMasala. Covering more than 400 websites across verticals like News, Business, Entertainment and Women it offers an aggregate UK reach of 2.6 million ethnic minority unique users, primarily comprised of South Asians. South Asians are the largest ethnic minority group in the United Kingdom, representing around half of all of ethnic minorities according to the latest national census. Indoor’s clients include marketers such as Mercedes, the UK Government, O2, Vodafone and Western Union among others.

Komli Media has built strong relationships with marketers and publishers and partners exclusively with top global and local publishers including Facebook, SanjeevKapoor and Babycenter amongst others in India, and Bloomberg and Hotfrog amongst others in Australia. With this acquisition Komli Media is now the leader in offering ethnic marketing solutions for Asian audiences in the four largest English speaking economies in the western world – Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, and the United States, a total population base of nearly 15 million.

Commenting on the acquisition, Murly Tiwari, Founder of Indoor Media said, “We are very excited to be part of the Komli Media team. We have grown year on year, every year, since we started by ensuring that everything we did was about adding value, accountability and expertise to both clients and publishers business. Now we see a significant opportunity to expand our UK business by bringing the best of breed platforms and solutions that Komli has to our advertisers, agencies, and publishers partners.”

“Ethnic marketing for Asian audiences is very important to our vision of being the leading digital media network platform across the APAC region. We are extremely excited to partner with leaders like Indoor Media. Murly and Jay are true innovators, and we are proud to work with them. As ethnic audiences continue to grow in size and importance, we believe that it is necessary to create digital solutions targeted to this audience,” said Amar Goel, Komli Media’s Founder and CEO.

The acquisition of Indoor will allow Komli Media to significantly accelerate the pace of innovation in ethnic advertising for its advertiser and publisher partners across several markets. Together with Indoor, Komli Media will be the clear leader in offering ethnic marketing solutions for the Asian community in the four major western economies of the US, Canada, Australia and UK with strong brand and performance products across video, custom creative, mobile, brand impact measurement and performance optimization.

Prashant Mehta, COO of Komli Media added, “Komli Media has established itself as a leader in ethnic marketing in the US and Canada over the last several years. Working with the Indoor Media team allows us to expand to the UK market, as well as add a great team to the Komli family. We are most excited about that and look forward to learning from them.”

About Komli Media:

Komli Media is Asia Pacific’s leading digital media network platform. Its digital advertising technologies enable marketers to reach and acquire their audiences and publishers to maximize their revenues. Komli Media powers Asia Pacific’s leading ad network platform with solutions across performance marketing, social media, video advertising, audience targeting, rich media, online audience measurement and brand impact measurement. ViziSense, India’s leading online audience measurement and ad spends benchmarking platform is powered by Komli Media. Australia’s leading site representation firm, PostClick, is a subsidiary of Komli Media. Headquartered in Mumbai, Komli Media is also present in Melbourne, New Delhi, New York, Palo Alto, Singapore, Sydney, and Toronto. Learn more at http://komli.com.

About Indoor Media:

Indoor Media, is the UK’s first industry compliant and comScore rated online specialist to bridge the gap between advertisers looking to reach out to the UK’s increasingly diverse population and international publishers with high quality inventory that provide access to this audience. Starting with South Asian websites, Indoor’s portfolio today encompasses Chinese, Eastern European and Black African audiences. Today, Indoor is recognized in the UK as the leading online sales house specializing in brand focused campaigns targeting all of the UK’s main ethnic minority communities. Learn more at http://indoormedia.co.uk.

Acxiom executives and leaders are slated to participate in nine different keynotes and panels on topics ranging from marketing database measurement and digital/direct marketing data integration to customer retention/loyalty and cost-effective multichannel campaigns. Acxiom Chief Executive Officer and DMA board member John Meyer will participate on a leadership panel, “Perspectives from the Boardroom,” in the event’s Global Leader’s Forum, which provides senior executives with insights on how to drive successful direct marketing strategies in a challenging economy.

“This year’s DMA2010 conference is the perfect forum for Acxiom to showcase our expertise in topics that are aligned with our offering as the market migrates from broadcasting to narrowcasting and multiple data sources integrate to drive multidimensional consumer insight,” said Tim Suther, Acxiom’s chief marketing officer. “We are thrilled to have such a large presence at the event.”

“DMA2010 will feature hundreds of education sessions, roundtables, forums and case studies led by the best and brightest in the marketing and media communities,” said Paul A. McDonnough, DMA vice president, Conferences and Events. “We’re proud to have Acxiom be a part of such an important event.”

In addition to John Meyer’s panel discussion, Acxiom speakers/panelists and their topics include:

“Deliverability, Compliance and Trust – Your Brand Equity, Consumer Commitment and the Law” – David Baker – Sunday, Oct. 10, 1 p.m. – David Baker, Acxiom’s vice president, Global Multichannel Marketing Services, will close out this session which is part of the E-mail Bootcamp. David will touch on how to make a case for e-mail marketing to leadership.
“Today’s Media Mix Optimization” – J. P. Bewley – Sunday, Oct. 10, 1 p.m. – J.P. Bewley, Acxiom’s vice president, Global Marketing Strategy, and MediaWhiz’s Mitch Tuch share their secrets on how smart CMOs are effectively utilizing social marketing channels and mediums through the use of cutting-edge Media Mix Optimization solutions.
“Extending the Value of Your Marketing Database – TV, Mobile, Email, Online, DM” – Josh Herman – Monday, Oct. 11, 11:15 a.m. – Josh Herman, Acxiom’s vice president, Multichannel Marketing, discusses the opportunities, hurdles and rationale for extending the value of the database marketing investment using a consistent data framework.
“Integrating Online and Offline Data for Digital and Direct Marketing” – Todd Greer – Tuesday, Oct. 12, 8:45 a.m. – Todd Greer, Acxiom’s senior vice president, Product Management, joins a panel that discusses how the collection, integration and utilization of marketing data across offline and online channels have changed – becoming simultaneously more predictive and complicated.
“Teaching Elephants to Dance – Making Branded Time-Share Marketing Nimble” – Jim Koppenhaver – Wednesday, Oct. 13, 8:45 a.m. – Jim Koppenhaver, a consultant in Acxiom’s Analytics and Consumer Insights group, joins Marriott Vacation Club’s Urcil Peters in describing how Marriott Vacation Club mitigated the 2009 downturn in the vacation time-share market by stabilizing response rates and better managing acquisition costs.
“Pull Back on Product Focus and Put Customers in the Crosshairs” – Bruce Purple – Wednesday, Oct. 13, 8:45 a.m. – Bruce Purple, senior strategist in Acxiom’s Retail Banking Global Consulting group, partners with Comerica’s Jim Weber to share how companies like Comerica balance product silos with household relationship profitability through practical examples of how to deploy customer segment continuity marketing strategies for transformational organic growth.
“Riding the Real-Time Data Wave – How Marketers Can Drive Enhanced Performance by Recognizing Consumer Life Events” – Todd Greer and Jon Cohn – Wednesday, Oct. 13, 10 a.m. – Todd Greer and Jon Cohn, director, Acxiom’s Consumer Insight Products, discuss how life-changing events affect consumer purchase patterns and ways companies can react quickly to execute more timely, relevant and profitable marketing activities with real-time data (RTD).
“Increase Response Amid Shrinking Budgets – A Multichannel Success Story” – Steve Merritt – Wednesday, Oct. 13, 10 a.m. – Steve Merritt, Acxiom senior manager, Product Marketing, joins Savings Bank Life Insurance on stage to share how SBLI used advanced multichannel targeting to market smarter and cheaper, resulting in a decreased direct mail budget while increasing response.

About Acxiom
Acxiom is a recognized leader in marketing services and technology that enable marketers to successfully manage audiences personalize consumer experiences and create profitable customer relationships. Our superior industry-focused, consultative approach combines consumer data and analytics, databases, data integration and consulting solutions for personalized, multichannel marketing strategies. Acxiom leverages over 40 years of experience in data management to deliver high-performance, highly secure, reliable information management services. Founded in 1969, Acxiom is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, USA, and serves clients around the world from locations in the United States, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and South America. For more information about Acxiom, visit www.acxiom.com.

NEW YORK – Online targeting platform leader [x+1] and Tumri, the leading provider of dynamic creative optimization solutions for display advertisers and agencies, have joined forces to introduce a retail retargeting solution, available now, that significantly boosts digital marketing performance and customer engagement.

The new retail-focused solution, Shopper Retargeting, combines Tumri’s dynamic creative technology platform with [x+1]’s digital media optimization capabilities to deliver personalized ad retargeting. Retailers and e-tailers can use Shopper Retargeting to engage customers with relevant messages that are driven by their interactions on a website, down to the category or even SKU (individual item) level.

Extremely fast and easy to implement, retailers and e-tail marketers and agencies can use Shopper Retargeting to boost sales figures in Q4 and the critical holiday shopping season by reaching out to site visitors with attractive and relevant “right offer, right time, right price” messaging.

This type of retargeting has been shown to generate up to +300% in conversion lift vs. untargeted media, said Perianne Grignon, Chief Marketing Officer of [x+1].

“The real strength of Shopper Retargeting lies in the fact that retailers and e-tailers now have a deeply scalable, long-range planning tool to set up campaigns for success at the SKU level, while also taking advantage of lucrative, near-term sales opportunities, for instance during the all-important holiday season,” said Grignon, former Vice President of Media Strategy & Digital Innovation at Sears Holdings Corporation.

“The ability to take vast catalogs of retail product and offer data, integrate it into the [x+1] targeting platform, and combine it with enhanced creative messaging templates from Tumri, is unmatched in the industry,” she added.

“With [x+1] we have found a partner that delivers best-in-class, full-service, demand-side retargeting solutions, while we focus our efforts on providing a technology platform that preserves brand integrity for retailers through relevant consumer engagement and dynamic creative optimization,” said David Kim, President, Tumri. “This new offering puts us front and center in the demand-side retargeting arena, and we look forward to helping [x+1] convert more browsers to buyers this holiday shopping season and throughout the year.”

With Shopper Retargeting, retailers and e-tailers can:

Retarget ready-to-buy consumers who have visited a site based on product interactions and other relevant data
Acquire new prospects via display media efficiently, in real time and at scale using [x+1]’s Predictive Optimization Engine POE™
Brand with Tumri’s high-quality, market-proven creative templates built specifically for retail

STAMFORD, Conn. – InsightExpress, a leading digital marketing research firm, announced the promotion of Molly Elmore to Vice President of Research within the company’s Digital Media Measurement team, effective immediately. As Vice President of Research, she will be responsible for setting the analytical direction for InsightExpress within the digital media measurement space. In addition to overseeing the development and execution of analytic products and services for the AdInsights® solution, Cross Media Symphony® research and InsightNorms™ data analysis, she will lead client communications regarding the analysis and reporting of advertising effectiveness research results.

As InsightExpress’ lead digital media measurement researcher, Elmore joined InsightExpress in 2006. Since then she has been instrumental in helping build and refine the company’s approach to advertising effectiveness research. Her focus on creating efficiencies across the Digital Media Measurement analytics organization has increased her team’s productivity, further enhanced quality, and continues to result in highly satisfied clients.

Elmore joined InsightExpress from Aspen Analytic in Atlanta, GA, where she held the position of Statistical Consultant. During her tenure there, she built statistical models to predict consumer and business behavior. In this role Elmore also consulted with clients to develop analysis and modeling-driven marketing programs, and analyzed customer data to help clients understand buyer behavior.

Before joining Aspen Analytic, Elmore worked at Dynamic Logic, where she held the position of Vice President, Research Services. While at Dynamic Logic she managed the Research Department, and was responsible for developing, executing and analyzing marketing and advertising-related research projects. Elmore significantly expanded the company’s research offerings, establishing a range of innovative analysis techniques and methodologies. Prior to Dynamic Logic, she worked as an Analyst at Digitas in New York, NY.

Elmore has spoken at a number of industry events, including the ARF Week of Workshops, the ARF Main conference (convention and expo) and ESOMAR, the European arm of the ARF. She has also been a guest lecturer at Baruch (CUNY) Graduate School’s Department of Information Systems.

Elmore holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Statistics and Biometry from Cornell University. She currently resides in Atlanta, GA.

Marc Ryan, Senior Vice President, Chief Research Officer at InsightExpress commented, “Molly has made tremendous contributions to the Market Research team at InsightExpress since she joined the company four years ago. Her passion for the industry, analytic expertise, and dedication to excellence have earned the respect of clients and colleagues alike. I am thrilled to announce Molly’s promotion to Vice President, and look forward to her continued success here at InsightExpress.”

About InsightExpress

InsightExpress is a leading provider of digital marketing research solutions, specializing in the measurement of advertising and brand communications. The company’s proven approaches include message evaluation, advertising effectiveness, creative development and cross-media optimization. With vast industry expertise, proprietary methodologies and an exclusive platform, InsightExpress helps agencies, media and marketers optimize marketing initiatives across online, mobile and other media. Founded in 1999, InsightExpress is headquartered in Stamford, CT, with offices in San Francisco and New York. For more information, please call 203.406.3233.

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, announced the introduction of comScore Social Analytix™, a social media intelligence service for comScore clients, powered by the Radian6 social media monitoring and engagement platform.

The service will provide clients with detailed, real-time insights based on what consumers are saying about their brands and products on the web. The Radian6 technology, which operates independent of the comScore global consumer panel, captures mentions across more than 150 million social media sources worldwide including blogs, discussion boards, video and image sharing sites and popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn Answers.

“The emergence of social media in the past few years has helped usher in the era of the digital consumer, where one’s brand equity increasingly relies on what people are saying about it in the digital environment,” said Steve Dennen, comScore Vice President. “comScore Social Analytix leverages Radian6’s leading social monitoring technology to help us provide our clients with enhanced insights into an increasingly critical variable in the marketing mix equation: consumer word-of-mouth.”

comScore Social Analytix will enable clients to:

·         Monitor consumer-generated word-of-mouth brand mentions and gauge consumer sentiment toward their brands, products and/or competitors
·         Listen and respond quickly to potential customer service issues as they arise
·         Help identify key social media influencers, reach out to them and form strong relationships with their customers
·         Engage with social media users and scale listening and response across their organization
·         Track the lifecycle of campaigns, announcements and communication efforts
“At Radian6, we built our platform to analyze not only social media conversations, but also the metrics of the social web. We are excited to team up with comScore, a recognized global leader in measuring the digital world,” said David Alston, Vice President of Marketing & Community, Radian6. “Both companies share a common view around the value of measurement and are leaders in their respective markets. We look forward to providing customers with industry-leading solutions leveraging the unique strengths of each company.”

For more information about comScore Social Analytix, please email learnmore@comscore.com.
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.

INDIANAPOLIS – Global email marketing and interactive marketing provider ExactTarget released a new executive briefing, giving marketers exclusive insight from the world’s top technology providers on how integrating marketing technologies can boost customer engagement, save time and money and drive additional revenue.

Featuring advice from 10 industry experts including Microsoft, Omniture, ATG, SAP, Bazaarvoice, Razorfish and others, the briefing provides best practices on integrating email marketing and interactive marketing with other online technologies such as customer relationship management (CRM), Web analytics and ecommerce platforms.

“Marketers continue to waste time and resources managing data in multiple locations,” said Scott Roth, ExactTarget’s senior director of partner marketing and alliances. “Software integrations provide organizations a way to look at the complete picture when it comes to customer data by streamlining processes and reallocating precious time to understanding customers’ wants and needs.”

The 10 Ideas to Turn Data into Results briefing offers marketers practical tips on how to use data from all online systems to create more effective and targeted marketing campaigns. Key topics in the briefing include:

- Proven advice for increasing customer engagement with more personalized, timely and relevant marketing.
- How integrating marketing technologies allows for quicker identification of trends and opportunities.
- Why consumer adoption of social media, mobile marketing and online shopping makes systems integration more important than ever before.

“Software integration is much more than just fitting pieces of technology together,” said Sam Decker, chief marketing officer, Bazaarvoice. “It’s about creating seamless, meaningful, and impactful interactions with your customers—and generating conversations that help shoppers buy more and come back more often.”

“Integration is about bringing your marketing infrastructure together in a way that’s not in silos and separate like so many customer records today,” said Scott Rhodes, Razorfish group director of operations for global CRM/eCRM Solutions. “In order for brands to be successful and create an informed experience, marketers must have the data to enable, the technology to deliver, the processes to connect, and the intelligence to learn and evolve.”

The 10 Ideas to Turn Your Data into Results briefing is available for free download at www.ExactTarget.com/integrations.

The launch of the briefing follows the release of ExactTarget’s Facebook X-Factor report, a study of how consumers interact with brands online based on a series of focus groups, interviews and surveys conducted in March and April. The report is the fifth in the six-part Subscribers, Fans & Followers research series set for release through September designed to provide marketers exclusive insight into how U.S. consumers’ interact with organizations online.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s software as a service technology provides organizations a single platform to connect with customers via triggered and transactional email, integrated text messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget’s software powers permission-based multi-channel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Aurora Fashions, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, visit www.exacttarget.com or call 1-866-EMAILET.

BURLINGTON, Mass. – e-Dialog, a proven provider of advanced e-mail and multichannel marketing solutions within the GSI Commerce (Nasdaq: GSIC) Global Marketing Services division, announced the launch of the Centre for Digital Marketing Excellence at www.DigitalMarketingExcellence.com. The Centre will serve as a resource for marketers, providing primary research and analysis of global online marketing trends and consumer attitudes, while fostering discussion and sharing e-Dialog’s expertise in creating relevant, results-driven marketing communications.

“The ability to customize content across marketing media has changed the way consumers expect marketers to communicate with them,” shared John Rizzi, e-Dialog president and CEO. “We developed the Centre for Digital Marketing Excellence to help marketers understand consumer expectations for relevant messaging across channels and to enable an exchange of information that will have a positive impact on their programs.”

With the launch of the Centre, two new reports are now available exclusively at www.DigitalMarketingExcellence.com. The first is Mainstream Your Mobile Marketing: Five Tactics to Advance Mobile E-mail Marketing Success, a summary of findings from a recent survey of more than 2,000 consumers in the U.S. and U.K. conducted on behalf of e-Dialog by Forrester Consulting. The report advises marketers on effective ways to optimize their e-mail practices for mobile opportunities. In this report, marketers will gain valuable information on the amount of e-mail that is read on a mobile device by different age groups, what consumers look for in relevant communications, and in what industries mobile e-mail optimization matters most.

The second report is Social Influence: Extending E-mail’s Reach through Social Media, which reveals the ways in which consumers prefer to socially interact with brands and gives advice on how marketers can utilize that information to drive profitable subscriber growth and new customer acquisition, while increasing the reach of their e-mail marketing programs.

In addition to these reports, the Centre is also home to additional original research from e-Dialog, including the Manifesto for E-mail Marketers: Consumers Demand Relevance and the Global E-mail Attitudes Survey. The Centre will also feature important e-commerce findings from GSI Commerce’s Center for Online Retail Excellence, or CORE, which provides advice and resources for online retailers.

About e-Dialog

Established in 1997, e-Dialog empowers marketers to meaningfully connect with customers by engaging in relevant conversations through e-mail, mobile devices, social networks, e-commerce and at the point of sale. e-Dialog’s technology and services give marketers direct access to timely customer insight that drives targeted and opportunity-rich consumer dialogs. With e-Dialog, marketers quickly transform conversations into conversions and evolve customer relationships from the newly acquired to the highly engaged.

Consistently recognized by top analyst firms for both outstanding service and first-class technology, e-Dialog is a global provider to some of the world’s most recognized brands, including AirTran Airways, Avis Budget Group, Boots, British Airways, CVS/pharmacy, Nintendo, the NFL, PETCO, Reuters, the Royal Bank of Scotland group of companies, and The TJX Companies. With offices in Boston, London, New York, Seattle and Singapore, e-Dialog is a wholly owned subsidiary of GSI Commerce Inc. (Nasdaq: GSIC). For more information, visit http://www.e-dialog.com.

MENLO PARK, Calif. – Crescendo Networks, the recognized performance leader for accelerating and optimizing application delivery for web properties, announced that Adchemy selected its AppBeat DC application delivery controller to scale their ad optimization platform.

Adchemy is a digital marketing technology company with roots in algorithm-based performance marketing. Using their search engine marketing software, interactive marketers can deliver highly relevant advertising experiences to online audiences across search, display, social and mobile channels at an unprecedented scale. Adchemy offers an enterprise-scale technology platform combined with best-practice methodologies and a range of digital consulting services. Adchemy’s more than 300 customers include: Hotels.com, Nationwide Insurance, Protection One, TransUnion Interactive, and University of Phoenix.

“Crescendo Networks is the only solution we tested that can handle our expected threshold of traffic — and then some. This replacement of our current solution allows us to provide the SSL support needed to process over a billion hits per day. We have high expectations and we’re confident that AppBeat DC will exceed them. Crescendo is a key component in my plan to build our next generation IT infrastructure,” said Otieno Ododa, Sr. Manager, Technical Operations for Adchemy. “In addition, AppBeat DC easily integrates into our environment and is easy to manage. That makes my life a bit easier.”

AppBeat DC delivers optimal application performance while increasing server efficiency. Deployed on a purpose-built platform using dedicated hardware engines with parallel processors, AppBeat DC offloads processing-intensive tasks from servers and combines multiple acceleration features in one highly scalable appliance. Its unique distributed architecture outperforms other solutions that experience performance degradation and resource contention when multiple features are enabled.

“To support and optimize the traffic levels Adchemy reaches each day, you really need an appliance that doesn’t require a babysitter,” said Adoram Gaash, CEO for Crescendo Networks. “Adchemy selected AppBeat DC for the ability to accelerate traffic during growth and provide the reliability they need to support their sophisticated science and data models, and deliver customer expectations. Adchemy is our sweet spot of customers – where revenue ties directly to performance and predictability.”

About Crescendo Networks

Crescendo Networks offers the industry’s only “future-proof” application delivery solution to support business growth in today’s volatile online world. Our unified application delivery solution offers innovative HyperScale technology, cloud intelligence, and massively scalable processing for performance that knows no boundaries. The company’s products are used by many of the world’s most sophisticated and fastest-growing Web properties to ensure usability, facilitate rapid business growth, lower IT costs and capture additional revenue. For more information, visit www.crescendonetworks.com.

Crescendo Networks, the Crescendo Networks Logo and AppBeat are trademarks or registered trademarks of Crescendo Networks in the U.S. and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

SAN DIEGO – Tweeting and Facebooking may be the rage among the YouTube generation, but many corporate leaders are reluctant to change their marketing approaches for the sake of social networking, according to a new national survey. Most corporate brand executives believe they are better served by effectively utilizing online communications and traditional public relations activities in order to build brand awareness among consumers — their key objective.

Seventy percent of brand experts say they cannot successfully manage their brands without an effective online strategy and more than two-thirds (68 percent) characterize online communications as the most valuable vehicle for generating awareness and brand loyalty among consumers. Most feel their own Web sites are the key vehicle for reaching consumers and building loyalty.

Opinions are split on the marketing effect of social media, however, according to a survey of brand executives commissioned by MiresBall, a West Coast-based brand design firm, and conducted by Washington, D.C.-based KRC Research.

While approximately half (52 percent) of those surveyed see social media as a way to build brand awareness among consumers who were previously unreachable, and more than a third (35 percent) believe that social media is making it easier to create customer loyalty, nearly as many (30 percent) disagree that building customer loyalty has become easier because of social networking.

At the same time, four in 10 (41 percent) of those surveyed feel the impact of social media is not serious enough to lead to a change in brand strategy, while roughly the same number believe that social media presents new challenges for protecting a brand’s integrity, challenges that necessitate a change in strategy.

“It may indeed be hip to tweet and make Facebook friends for companies with newer brands looking to build awareness quickly, but many owners of established brands are not convinced that social networking on its own is the magic bullet for building customer loyalty,” said Scott Mires, Principal and Creative Director, MiresBall. “Simply building awareness is not enough today. What consumers are told — and how they respond — are most important.”

“Social media could be the next frontier for brand communications since nearly 80 percent of brand leaders expect to use it in their brand building activities in the next two years, but for now, marketers are struggling to figure it out,” said John Ball, Principal and Creative Director, MiresBall. “In the meantime, brands that continue to share authentic and relevant stories with their audiences — regardless of the vehicle — will continue to connect more successfully with their audiences.”

Other survey highlights:

- The top three challenges facing brands today are pricing pressures, lack of brand awareness and rise of strong competitors;
- Traditional public relations activities provide the best value for time (48 percent strongly agree) and money (35 percent strongly agree) invested for brand building, while fewer respondents said advertising produces the best value for time (31 percent) and budget (24 percent) dedicated to brand building;
- Respondents said that online communications provide the best return on the money spent managing their brand (68 percent), followed by public relations/promotional events (56 percent) and social media (40 percent).

Nearly half of marketers surveyed agreed that the economic downturn made it more difficult to create brand loyalty (48 percent), while just over a third (35 percent) used the downturn to their advantage.
“The research shows that brand managers are still trying to navigate through enormous challenges in the marketplace while simultaneously building a new foundation for brand growth, mixing both old and new strategies in hopes of strengthening their brand,” said Peter Shafer, Chief Executive Officer, KRC Research.

For the full report and a 60-second video, go to: http://www.miresball.com/Think/Survey

The 2010 State of the Brand Report included interviews with 189 company owners, senior executives and brand managers, among others. Survey participants represented small, medium and large companies with revenues ranging from $10 million or less a year (37 percent) to more than $1 billion annually (22 percent). Sixty-one percent represented corporate or institutional brands while 39 percent represented product brands. Those surveyed were drawn from firms in two dozen industries including manufacturing, technology, healthcare, energy, entertainment, travel & hospitality.

About MiresBall

MiresBall is a West Coast brand design firm that develops the strategy, narrative, and visuals to help companies from innovative start-ups to established global leaders communicate with clarity and authenticity. For more information visit www.miresball.com.

About KRC Research

KRC Research is a leader in communications research. Our ability to use research to improve communications outcomes — from public relations to public affairs to advertising — sets us apart from traditional research firms, as does our approach, which is creative, practical and fast. Our specialties include research among hard-to-reach audiences, research to drive media attention, branding and reputation research, and public policy research. KRC’s clients include Fortune 500 corporations, trade associations, and non-profits.

Overall, UK advertising spending suffered a double-digit drop in 2009, according to several sources. But the Internet defied this downward trend. UK advertisers spent 3.54 billion ($5.56 billion) online in 2009, 5.7% more than in 2008.

Internet advertising will gain momentum in 2010 as the economy inches into recovery, reaching 3.79 billion ($5.95 billion). Slower growth is expected in 2011, but the London Olympics and greater financial stability should bring higher rises in 2012. By 2014, online ad spending will approach 4.84 billion ($7.60 billion).

Search accounted for 60.7% of Internet ad spending in 2009. Display claimed 20% and classified ads 19%, while less than 1% was spent on e-mail sent to purchased lists. Search will increase its share of the pie in 2010 and beyond, as classified ads lose ground. Spending on video and mobile ads will boost the display category.

Telecoms, finance, technology, and media and entertainment firms topped the UK’s Internet spending league in 2009. On mobile devices, however, entertainment companies led with roughly 60% of all ad spending.

Key questions this report answers:

How did UK online ad spending compare with total media ad spending in 2009?
How will spending on Internet advertising develop between 2010 and 2014?
Which online ad spending formats are gaining market share, and which are declining?
Which UK industries spent most to advertise on the Web in 2009?
How do UK consumers react to Internet advertising and marketing?

Some Key Topics Covered:

Executive Summary
Key Questions
The Emarketer View
Total Media Ad Spending
Online Ad Spending
Online Spending Vs. Spending In Other Media
Online As A Share Of Total Ad Spending
Online Ad Spending Estimates
Online Ad Spending By Format
Mobile Ad Spending
Online Ad Spending By Industry
Consumer Attitudes Toward Online Advertising
Conclusions
Endnotes

Sources/Contributors:

ADTECH
Advertising Association (AA) – UK
Carat Insight
comScore Inc.
Cowen and Co.
Credit Suisse
Econsultancy
Efficient Frontier
eMarketer
Enders Analysis
GroupM
Guava
Hitwise
Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA)
Internet Advertising Bureau UK (IAB UK)
JPMorgan
Lightspeed Research
MAGNA
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)
Screen Digest
Tamar
The Nielsen Company
Tickbox.net
UBS
World Advertising Research Center (WARC)

ZenithOptimedia

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/988e8c/uk_online_advertis