While 30% of users between ages 18 and 24 like Timeline, only 10% of those over 65 were happy with the new design. When broken down by gender, men and women had exactly the same opinion – 77% dislike Timeline, while 23% like it.

Full poll results can be seen at: http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/public-opinion-rejects-facebook-timeline-infographic/question-2429779/

About SodaHead
SodaHead (www.SodaHead.com) is the premier opinion-based discussion community where visitors discover, debate, and discuss today’s hottest issues.  Millions of SodaHeads share their unique views on hot topics, breaking news, and controversial issues and a diverse panel of staff writers provide original and exclusive content daily.  Users create personal profiles and engage with fellow members around shared interests.  Our site offers a wide variety of interactive features including slide shows, profile creation, groups, message boards, and original content.  SodaHead is also the best in class poll widget provider powering the polls for ABC News, Good Morning America, Shepard Smith at Fox News and many others. For more information on SodaHead, visit http://www.SodaHead.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COLUMBIA, Md. – Merkle (www.merkleinc.com), a leading customer relationship marketing (CRM) firm and the nation’s largest privately-held agency, announced it has been named in Ad Age’s Agency A-List Issue (January 2012) as one of the Ten Agencies to Watch. The special annual issue honors the best shops in several categories, based on the quality and effectiveness of their work – regardless of discipline or specialty.

The rankings are reported in several categories, using evidence of business success for the agency as conveyed by revenue growth, income growth and new business wins. In selecting the rankings, Advertising Age assessed factors like channel innovation, intellectual property ownership, product influence or creation, solution creativity and measurable results. Heavily considered was how effectively the agency has delivered strong results for its consumer-marketing clients. As the only CRM agency highlighted in the “Agencies to Watch” category, Merkle was cited for its advances in collecting and optimizing consumer behavioral data to increase customer loyalty and lifetime value; and for its digital intelligence and innovation.

“It is a tremendous honor to be recognized by Ad Age,” said Merkle president and CEO, David Williams. “We have been working hard to create a leadership position in the CRM agency space. Our ranking as an agency to watch validates the belief that by developing customer strategy as a business strategy, we help our clients build sustainable competitive advantage.”

Merkle’s systematic evolution from database marketing firm to full-service CRM agency has been chronicled over the last several years with consistent 20%+ revenue increases and employee expansion. Today, the company is comprised of more than 1500 employees, with 2011 revenue of $304 million and growing. More than 150 leading brands employ Merkle’s solutions to drive their integrated CRM strategies and maximize the value of their customer portfolios.

About Merkle

Merkle, a customer relationship marketing (CRM) firm, is the nation’s largest privately-held agency. For more than 20 years, Fortune 1000 companies and leading nonprofit organizations have partnered with Merkle to maximize the value of their customer portfolios. By combining a complete range of marketing, technical, analytical and creative disciplines, Merkle works with clients to design, execute and evaluate integrated customer marketing programs through a connected CRM strategy. With more than 1,500 employees, the privately held corporation is headquartered near Baltimore in Columbia, Maryland with additional offices in Boston; Chicago; Denver; Little Rock; Minneapolis; New York; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Seattle; San Francisco; Hagerstown, MD and Shanghai. For more information, contact Merkle at 1-877-9-Merkle or visit www.merkleinc.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Millennial Media

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

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

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

Key findings highlighted in the report include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAN FRANCISCO – LiveRail for Advertisers Gives Agencies One Platform to Target, Deliver and Track Video Advertising

LiveRail, provider of the world’s largest real-time online video ad platform, today announced the launch of LiveRail For Advertisers, a new ad serving product that makes video campaigns easier to execute, more effective, and more measurable.

LiveRail For Advertisers (LFA) is a brand new platform designed from the ground up for online video and eliminates many of the complexities associated with traditional, legacy technology. LFA streamlines workflows with its video-native tools and interface, dramatically reducing the workload and time associated in trafficking, launching and managing large, multi-publisher video campaigns. Agencies can now leverage LiveRail technology for consistent campaign delivery at scale across their entire media plan; including major broadcasters, portals, ad networks and exchanges.

Advertisers and agencies can also take advantage of LiveRail’s native data integrations (with partners like Affine) to target their video ads to the appropriate audience, content or domain within the publishers they buy from. LFA’s “zero wasted impressions” technology enables agencies to control and pace their campaign’s delivery, reducing wasted spend and ensuring that publishers only deliver within the plan. For the first time, agencies can now dynamically analyze media environments for every impression request, ensuring brand safety and appropriateness of the content/media, and restricting delivery in real-time where needed.

LiveRail for Advertiser’s MRC-accredited reporting and analytics give video ad buyers insight into how their ads are performing through a multitude of filters, dimensions, and video-specific performance metrics. LFA empowers marketers with the data to truly understand the impact and ROI of their video ads, across all the placements, on all publishers, networks and platforms they buy from, helping demonstrate the value of media spend and inform future media purchasing decisions.

“Because we sit at the hub of the online video ad ecosystem, we understand the needs of all parties involved,” said Mark Trefgarne, LiveRail CEO. “Our full- and self-service options let advertisers and agencies select the level of support they need so they can leverage our video expertise. By combining the world’s best video ad technology with the consultative support of industry experts, we believe that LFA will become an indispensible tool for all agencies serious about video.”

LiveRail For Advertisers is a third-party ad server for video. Advertisers and agencies utilizing LFA must maintain their own direct media relationships, as LFA cannot be natively used to access or purchase inventory. For more information about LiveRail For Advertisers, visit http://www.liverail.com/LFAPR.php

About LiveRail

LiveRail is the core technology at the heart of the online video advertising ecosystem. LiveRail solutions enable and enhance the monetization of internet-distributed video and handle over 2 billion video ad impressions per month for many of the world’s largest media and advertising clients. Founded in 2007, LiveRail’s senior team is led by its founders, Mark Trefgarne (CEO) and Andrei Dunca (CTO). LiveRail Inc is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with offices in New York, NY and Cluj-Napoca, Romania. LiveRail is backed by Pond Ventures.

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

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

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

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

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

About Ace Metrix

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

Follow Ace Metrix on Twitter for additional insight: Ace_Metrix.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Mitchell Reichgut

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

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

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

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

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

By enlisting the very consumers that advertisers hope to attract, this type of software could result in a new generation of less intrusive, more engaging online advertising that pays consumers.

OBJE is making plans to help spur this evolution in advertising along by acquiring and joint venturing with innovative startups, getting them funded and leveraging their expertise to develop all-new platforms.

For more information on the company’s social media analytics initiative, please visit www.obsceneinteractive.com/investors.

Obscene Interactive is a division of Obscene Jeans Corp. that develops innovative technology tools to service the fast-growing social media and online content production sectors alongside companies such as Monster Worldwide (NYSE: MWW), LinkedIn Corp. (NYSE: LNKD), Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX), and Groupon, Inc. (NASDAQ: GRPN).

About Obscene Interactive

Obscene Interactive (OTCBB:OBJE) is an emerging global developer of social media tools and applications. OBJE’s cutting-edge technology platform enables its titles to be accessible to a broad audience of consumers all over the world, supporting multiple platforms for universal appeal. Obscene Interactive is focused on delivering the best in social media solutions to the mass market. For investment information and performance data, please visit www.ObsceneInteractive.com/investors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Worldcom Consumer Practice Group

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

About Worldcom Public Relations Group

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

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

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

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

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

About Bizo

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

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

Infographic:
-          Top: Summarizes mention of players names

-          2nd Down: Compares stats with twitter volume by player (yardage/points attained)

-          3rd Down: Volume of mentions of the team vs. the coach

-          Bottom: Word cloud of conversation for each team

Insights:
-          Quarterbacks captured the majority of the conversation buzz – most of which was football related (though Tom Brady also has some conversation around his personal life mixed in)

-          Tom Brady generated the most conversation and yielded more yards than Eli Manning

-          Receivers for both teams also generated a fair amount of buzz primarily due to their own activity on the channel and we did not see any correlation between the volume of Twitter traffic and statistical performance on the field

-          People like to talk about the Giants, but the Patriot players individually get more attention, including the coaches.

About Banyan Branch
Banyan Branch, based in Seattle, WA, is a full-service social media agency that provides end-to-end marketing services including strategy, creative, execution and analytics. With a holistic approach that integrates Strategy, Social Media Creative, Engagement and Research & Analytics, Banyan Branch delivers social media programs unmatched by smaller agencies, while providing more personalized service and quicker response than large-scale digital firms. Dozens of the world’s leading brands, including FOX, Viacom, Paramount, Hartz, Univision, Gilt Groupe, Microsoft and Windstar Cruises have partnered with Banyan Branch to implement a wide variety of social media campaigns. Any company ready to connect with its customers where they live and breathe, can contact Banyan Branch via www.BanyanBranch.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jun Group defines earned media as a series of actions that users initiate after watching a social video. These post-view actions include Facebook page visits, brand page visits, store locator usage, coupon and recipe downloads, Tweets, e-mail shares, replays, and clicks to watch more videos – all of which are measured by Jun Group’s Voyeur analytics dashboard.

Jun Group’s study placed a monetary value on each action based on conservative industry data. A visit to a brand’s Facebook page, for instance, is valued at $1.00 in the study, which is on the low end of pricing for cost-per-click advertising.

Once the values were assigned, Jun Group analyzed 7.9 million social video views for brands across a number of vertical categories, such as CPG, health and beauty, sports, technology and luxury goods. Videos ranged from 15 seconds to 3 minutes-long and users opted-in to see them in exchange for virtual goods or currency.

Importantly, all of the earned media activity measured by the study was generated after users received their virtual rewards. “When you respect people, don’t interrupt them, and put them in control, they respond in a positive way,” Reichgut said. “It’s that simple.”

According to the study, Jun Group’s average social video campaign delivered 30.1 percent of additional media value above-and-beyond the media spend. In other words, clients that spent $100,000 with Jun Group in 2011 received over $130,000 of value on average.

Facebook page visits were by far the most popular earned media action, representing 62 percent of all post-view activity in the Jun Group study. Brand-specific actions, such as store locator usage, brand page visits, etc., were the next-most popular actions, accounting for 15 percent of the post-view activity. Surprisingly, Tweets were the least popular action, representing approximately one percent of the post-view activity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About ZEDO

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

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

Advertising: Global Industry Guide is an essential resource from MarketLine for top-level data and analysis covering the advertising industry. It includes detailed data on market size and segmentation, textual analysis of the key trends and competitive landscape, and profiles of the leading companies. This incisive report provides expert analysis on a global, regional and country basis.

Scope of the Report:

- Contains an executive summary and data on value, volume and segmentation
- Provides textual analysis of the industry’s prospects, competitive landscape and profiles of the leading companies
- Incorporates in-depth five forces competitive environment analysis and scorecards
- Covers the Global, European and Asia-Pacific markets as well as individual chapters on 5 major markets (France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US).
- Includes a five-year forecast of the industry

Highlights:

- The global advertising industry grew by 5.9% in 2010 to reach a value of $86,758.2 million.
- In 2015, the global advertising industry is forecast to have a value of $113,424.8 million, an increase of 30.7% since 2010.
- Food, Beverage & Personal/Healthcare is the largest segment of the global advertising industry, accounting for 25.4% of the industry’s total value.
- Americas accounts for 42.1% of the global advertising industry value.

Why you should buy this report:

- Spot future trends and developments
- Inform your business decisions
- Add weight to presentations and marketing materials
- Save time carrying out entry-level research

Key Topics Covered:

Global advertising
Advertising in Asia-pacific
Advertising in Europe
Advertising in France
Advertising in Germany
Advertising in Japan
Advertising in the United Kingdom
Advertising in the United States

Companies Profiled:

WPP Group plc
Omnicom Group Inc.
Publicis Groupe SA
The Interpublic Group of Companies, Inc.
For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/cbcfe5/advertising_globa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Hipcricket

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Balihoo

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

NEW YORK – E*TRADE Financial Corp. (NASDAQ: ETFC) announced that E*TRADE Securities LLC will return to the biggest advertising event of the year with a new Talking Baby commercial slated to debut during the NBC television network broadcast of Super Bowl XLVI on February 5, 2012. This marks the fifth anniversary of the iconic E*TRADE Baby campaign. An additional new Baby spot will be debuted this weekend during the AFC and NFC conference championships.

The new Baby ad is part of an integrated multi-channel campaign that highlights the full range of products and services E*TRADE offers to help investors plan their financial future, available both online at etrade.com and through the firm’s growing network of financial consultants and retail branches.

“We’re thrilled to announce the E*TRADE Baby is back to make his fifth consecutive appearance in the big game,” said Nick Utton, Chief Marketing Officer at E*TRADE. “The Baby has become an iconic brand ambassador that has enabled us to capture the imaginations of investors and effectively showcase the benefits of our investment solutions in a memorable and entertaining way.”

The Super Bowl spot, one of a series of new ads planned for 2012, features the E*TRADE Baby interacting with people facing special life events that trigger a need to consider financial planning.

“As E*TRADE continues to evolve its strategy and service offering beyond trading to serve investors’ full range of financial needs both near- and long-term, so too has our marketing strategy,” said Mr. Utton. “Our evolved approach keeps our campaign fresh and engaging by featuring meaningful life events that people can easily relate to, and providing a unique Baby perspective on the E*TRADE investing solutions available to help them.”

According to a recent survey commissioned by E*TRADE, approximately one-in-three (32%) of those who plan to watch this year’s Super Bowl expect to communicate with others during the game via Facebook® and/or Twitter®. To maximize the investment and reach of the Super Bowl ad before, during and after the game, the campaign’s online presence will include:

A new viral video featuring “Top Ten Baby Moments”
Real-time updates from the Talking Baby on Facebook and Twitter
Redesigned YouTube® Brand Channel featuring E*TRADE’s most popular commercials and videos
In addition to the new Super Bowl spot, E*TRADE will launch a new series of Investing Solutions television spots in February, showcasing products, people and tools in a unique demo format that presents a compelling case for choosing E*TRADE.

The campaign was created by Grey New York, E*TRADE’s advertising agency of record since 2007.

“Super Bowl” is a registered trademark of the NFL and is used here for factual purposes only. NFC and AFC are registered trademarks of The National Football League. E*TRADE Financial Corporation and its affiliates are not affiliated with the Super Bowl or the National Football League.

About E*TRADE Financial

The E*TRADE Financial family of companies provides financial services including online brokerage and related banking products and services to retail investors. Specific business segments include Trading and Investing and Balance Sheet Management. Securities products and services are offered by E*TRADE Securities LLC (Member FINRA/SIPC). Bank products and services are offered by E*TRADE Bank, a Federal savings bank, Member FDIC, or its subsidiaries. More information is available at www.etrade.com.

NEW YORK – Tremor Video, the largest independent online video advertising technology company, and TubeMogul, the fastest-growing media buying platform for video advertising, announced that Tremor Video has purchased InPlay, TubeMogul’s industry-leading video analytics for publishers. Tremor Video will integrate InPlay directly into VideoHub, its enterprise video platform, enabling a complete end-to-end video analytics solution for publishers.

InPlay helps publishers understand real-time engagement, viewership and performance data, and is relied on daily by hundreds of top media companies, video platforms and content creators. The transfer of ownership gives Tremor Video an industry-best set of publisher video analytics, allowing the company to give publishers and their partners the ability to measure, track, report and deliver on the signals driving the performance of video content.

TubeMogul, which started as a video measurement company for publishers, shifted its focus in the past year after launching the industry’s first demand side platform for video advertising. Although TubeMogul is divesting its publisher analytics, the real-time reporting tools developed for TubeMogul’s video advertising platform will be unaffected, giving clients uninterrupted access to audience, engagement and brand impact data by site and by ad.

The deal continues to enhance Tremor Video’s VideoHub suite of products, making insights gathered from more than 1 billion video streams available to help publishers understand how their videos are discovered, what drives engagement and much more. InPlay will be available to all publishers as part of VideoHub for Publishers, launching in Q1 2012.

“Publishers are demanding an analytics suite that provides a clear picture of how viewers are interacting with content in order to determine what creates the most value for advertisers,” said Bill Day, CEO of Tremor Video. “InPlay gives us industry-leading technology and a sound product that meets this market demand. By integrating with our existing VideoHub technology, Tremor Video can now offer our partners a view across the entire video landscape.”

“TubeMogul InPlay was built to help publishers better understand their viewers to drive deeper engagement, and it has largely delivered on that promise,” said Brett Wilson, Co-founder and CEO of TubeMogul. “As we shift our focus from publishers to brand advertisers, this deal helps us align our capabilities with the needs of marketers, while ensuring they get the transparency and reporting they have come to expect.”

The InPlay acquisition is the latest in a series of deals for Tremor Video. The company’s other recent purchases include ScanScout in November, 2010 and mobile ad platform Transpera in February of this year. Tremor Video plans to continue to be acquisitive, fueled by $37 million in funding raised earlier this year.

TubeMogul is also seeing tremendous growth, with recent partnerships in the connected TV, mobile and social space as well as new contracts with major agency trading desks worldwide. The company was recently named the seventh-fastest growing independent company in the San Francisco Bay Area, spanning Silicon Valley and beyond.

About Tremor Video

Tremor Video (www.tremorvideo.com) provides in-stream video advertising solutions to Fortune 1000 brand advertisers and top tier publishers. Widely regarded as the leader in online video advertising technology, the company leverages its award-winning decisioning engine, innovative video ad formats and publisher technology to deliver the campaign results and scale advertisers should expect from digital video. Tremor Video is the only video ad platform that can provide 100% brand safety by scanning and categorizing every single video stream before an ad is ever served. In addition, Tremor Video’s award-winning SE2 technology gets smarter at finding and engaging viewers with every ad served, enabling the company to welcome and encourage pay-per-engagement pricing. Founded in 2005, Tremor Video is backed by top-tier investors, including Canaan Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth, General Catalyst, Keating Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, Time Warner Investments, and W Capital Partners.

VideoHub, a division of Tremor Video, is a first of its kind analytics console that helps marketers and agencies monitor the complex video ecosystem to dynamically match ads with content and viewers, deliver upon marketing goals, and maximize brand impact. Unlike traditional video management platforms, VideoHub focuses on effectiveness and delivers real-time analytics for deep transparency across ads, content, viewers, and performance. To request a demo, visit videohub.tv.

About TubeMogul

TubeMogul is the only video marketing company built for branding. As a demand side platform for video, TubeMogul integrates real-time media buying, ad serving, targeting optimization and brand measurement into its PlayTime platform. Over half of the Fortune 500 use TubeMogul to simplify the delivery of video ads in any format, optimize the impact of their brand message and maximize the effect of every dollar they spend.

Founded in 2006, TubeMogul is based in Emeryville, CA with offices in New York, London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto and Sydney.

Emeryville, CA – Tribal Fusion, the global online advertising provider owned by Exponential, is the world’s second largest source of display advertising, according to comScore’s December 2011 rankings of the leading global display networks. The measurement service reported that Tribal Fusion’s premium publisher network reached more than 490 million unique users globally, behind only Google (1.2 billion) and just head of AOL Advertising (477 million), which includes its Advertising.com ad network subsidiary.

Tribal Fusion says the new ranking reflects its growing global presence and increased demand from brand advertisers for campaigns that take advantage of its rich-media capabilities to offer more engaging creative executions at scale

“Brand advertisers across the globe are increasingly looking for new ways to leverage digital media to connect with their prospective customers and are looking for the same kind of high-impact and emotionally engaging creative messaging that they get from traditional TV advertising,” says Dilip DaSilva, founder and CEO of Tribal Fusion and parent company Exponential.

“Online advertising has primarily been focused on bottom-of-the-funnel acquisition and conversion of customers. But as brands are realizing that their potential customers are spending an increasing amount of time on digital media relative to traditional channels such as television, they are looking for opportunities to drive brand awareness and perception via digital media.

“Our premium publisher network is an essential part of our Advertising Intelligence Platform, and is critical for driving audience insight and large-scale reach that helps brand advertisers learn about and reach their prospective customers. And beyond just reaching their prospective customers, our tight integration with our publishing partners, allows brands to connect at scale with prospective customers using high-impact, engaging messaging,” adds Mr. DaSilva.

Founded in 2001, Tribal Fusion has expanded across the globe and now operates offices in 37 locations worldwide including the United States, Canada,  Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, South Africa, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand.

“Digital media can be accessed by visitors in any country, as a result most premium publishers attract a global audience,” concludes Mr. DaSilva. “Through our ability to monetize publisher inventory in so many countries, we have now become the partner of choice for premium publishers in every country.”

Tribal Fusion (www.tribalfusion.com) is a global online advertising provider that drives sales for the world’s top brands by helping them learn about, reach and engage their online audiences more effectively.

We combine our premium publisher network, advanced online ad technology and integrated audience data on a single platform to deliver audience insights, targeting and creative solutions that transform the way brands connect with their prospective customers.

Tribal Fusion reaches almost 500 million monthly unique users, was founded in 2001 and is part of the Exponential Group of online businesses – a technology-enabled media services company headquartered in Emeryville, California with operations in 37 locations worldwide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW YORK – VINDICO, the leading online video ad management platform, announced the renewal of their Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation, which was initially granted in June 2010. Through this MRC accreditation renewal, VINDICO continues to demonstrate its commitment to building trust in online video advertising.  The accreditation will continue to benefit the global brands that work with VINDICO, as well as institute a benchmark for success in the industry.

Established to ensure audience measurement research is valid, reliable and effective, the MRC accreditation process requires companies to undergo rigorous third-party audits to guarantee compliance with industry standards. VINDICO’s accreditation indicates its video advertising platform is compliant with the MRC’s standards for Media Rating Research and the applicable guidelines published by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. MRC members include leading media and technology companies, such as AOL, Microsoft, CBS and FOX, among others.

“VINDICO has taken strides to make online video as trusted and easy to work with as any other measured media,” said George Ivie, CEO and Executive Director of the Media Rating Council. “Renewal of its MRC accreditation further solidifies VINDICO as a quality leader in the industry.”

VINDICO has deep market penetration, serving almost forty percent of all online video ads in the United States. The company provides video advertising management solutions to over 200 brands through their leading agency groups such as GroupM, Havas, IPG, Publicis and Omnicom. The VINDICO solution reduces complexity for advertisers by providing an efficient and reliable way to serve video ads across multiple networks.

“Video advertising is one of the advertising industry’s fastest growing categories, with eMarketer estimating that online video ad spending in the U.S. will reach more than $7 billion in 2015,” said Matt Timothy, president of VINDICO. “Renewal of MRC accreditation reinforces our commitment of giving advertisers the confidence they need to make larger investments in online video and demonstrates our data remains up to the MRC’s rigorous standards.”

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

About MRC
The MRC is a non-profit Industry association established in 1964 composed of leading television, radio, print and internet companies, as well as advertisers, advertising agencies and trade associations whose goal is to ensure measurement services that are valid, reliable and effective. Measurement services desiring MRC accreditation are required to disclose to their customers all methodological aspects of their service; comply with the MRC Minimum Standards for Media Rating Research; and submit to MRC-designed audits to authenticate and illuminate their procedures. In addition, the MRC membership actively pursues research issues they consider priorities in an effort to improve the quality of research in the marketplace. Currently approximately 70 research products are audited by the MRC. Additional information about MRC can be found at www.mediaratingcouncil.org.

LOS ANGELES – the Rubicon Project, the online advertising technology company, reveals details for its Real Time Trading Summit (#RTTS12) in New York City. On February 15th at 8:00 a.m. EST at the Hudson Hotel, the Real Time Trading Summit will convene leaders from across the advertising ecosystem to discuss and reveal the opportunity of automated ad trading for comScore 500 publishers and their advertisers.

Attendees will include executives from top media companies, agencies and leaders in the advertising technology ecosystem. With a stellar speaker lineup delivering actionable insights, the Real Time Trading Summit will bring attendees and their business into the new world of Real Time Trading. The Summit will feature “The End of Advertising,” a conversation between Michael Wolff, contributing editor for Vanity Fair, Wired and British GQ and Jay Sears of Rubicon Project.

The Real Time Trading Summit will feature visionaries, industry experts and advertising leaders including:

Michael Wolff, author of Burn Rate & contributing editor, Vanity Fair, Wired and British GQ
Joanna O’Connell, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
Tim Gentry, Head of Optimisation & Effectiveness, Guardian News & Media
Frank Addante, CEO & Founder, Rubicon Project
Randall Rothenberg, President & CEO, IAB
Vikram Somaya, VP, Global Operations and Audience at Thomas Reuters
Roland Cozzolino, CTO, MediaMath
JT Batson, President, DDS Digital
And more to be announced.

Real Time Trading Summit is an invite-only event. The content will be focused on helping educate and facilitate conversations among the comScore 500 publishers. To request an invitation or find out more information, please visit: http://www.regonline.com/realtimetradingsummit

About the Rubicon Project

the Rubicon Project launched in 2007 with a mission to automate buying and selling across the $80 billion global online advertising industry. REVV, the company’s real-time trading platform, has executed nearly two trillion trades for more than 450 of the largest properties on the Internet. REVV helps Comscore 500 publishers like Time Inc., News International and CareerBuilder make more money by optimizing their ad revenue, eliminating unnecessary ad operations costs, protecting and growing their direct sales channel and ensuring their sites’ visitors are safe. Today, REVV analyzes more than 1 trillion bids resulting in more than 100 billion successful and protected trades each month from more than 52,000 advertisers using 700 buying channels (ad networks, exchanges and DSPs). Ad buyers turn to REVV for single point real-time access to the #1 network reach of users (650 million uniques as ranked by Quantcast) across premium inventory and audiences. Headquartered in Los Angeles, with offices in New York, Seattle, London, Paris, Hamburg and Sydney, the company is backed by $60 million in funding from Clearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, IDG Ventures Asia, Comcast Ventures and News Corporation.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Jumptap, the leader in targeted mobile advertising, announced that Bob Hammond has joined the company as Chief Technology Officer. Hammond will oversee engineering and technology efforts for the company, with a focus on scaling all aspects of Jumptap’s platform and extending the company’s lead in mobile audience targeting.

Hammond is a well-known digital media technology leader and brings more than 24 years of experience in the advertising, technology and media industries. He comes to Jumptap from Vibrant Media, a NY-based online ad network. There, Hammond served as SVP of Technology and oversaw more than 50 engineers and led all aspects of technology for the more than $100M ad network.

“Bob has been a trail blazer in the ad network and technology areas for years, and has witnessed the development of supply/demand management, Real Time Bidding and algorithmic buying in display and video ad networks alike,” said George Bell, CEO, Jumptap. “His experience guiding ad networks at all stages – start-up, hyper-growth, and scaling for stability – will provide great insight for Jumptap. Bob is a born leader with enthusiasm to burn, and we’re delighted to have him join the team.”

Prior to Vibrant Media, Hammond served as VP of Engineering at Yahoo! following the company’s acquisition of Maven, a video ad network where Hammond was SVP of Engineering for three years. In his role at Yahoo!, Hammond managed and oversaw engineering for the company’s Video Platform and Syndication Group, including management of core development teams, product QA, product UI design, and technical documentation for the Maven product line. Before Maven, Hammond spent more than six years at Mirror Image, serving as Chief Technology Officer for the final three.

“It’s clear that mobile is the frontier of advertising innovation,” said Bob Hammond, CTO, Jumptap. “Jumptap is a leader with superior targeting that creates the relevancy needed to make mobile advertising successful. I’m thrilled to be joining such a high growth and technology driven environment.”

About Jumptap

Jumptap is the leader in targeted mobile advertising. Reaching 95 million mobile users in the U.S. and 142 million mobile users worldwide, Jumptap uses its extensive technology portfolio, as well as industry-first partnerships with third- party data providers, to understand mobile audiences better than any other ad network and provide intelligent targeting with scale. Through its large network of premium publishers and apps, and constant campaign optimization, Jumptap delivers the best ROI for advertisers and highest yield for publishers and developers. Jumptap has pioneered mobile advertising privacy standards and is committed to unlocking mobile opportunities for all parties through its ongoing industry research, such as its Understanding Mobile Audience series and monthly MobileSTAT reports. Visit http://www.jumptap.com and http://www.jumptap.com/blog for more information; join our Facebook community, follow us on Twitter at @Jumptap and check out our latest ads at the Jumptap Ad Gallery http://www.jumptap.com/gallery.

SAN FRANCISCO – Greystripe, a division of ValueClick Inc. (Nasdaq: VCLK), is announcing impressive expansion within the company, strengthening its position as the go-to mobile ad network for brand advertisers in North America and Europe. Since May, the company has doubled its team and opened four new offices in the U.S. while expanding its presence in Europe.

The largest brand-focused mobile ad network has doubled the size of its sales, engineering and operations staff, allowing it to offer innovative new products to its base of thousands of brand advertisers, agencies and mobile publishers.

As part of the expansion of its team, Greystripe has opened new sales offices in Atlanta, Seattle, Minneapolis and Phoenix. They are also announcing nine new executive hires. These new hires are:

Brian Pearlman, senior account executive, from Millennial Media
Ryan Bleich, senior account executive, from AOL
Chris Backschies, regional sales manager, from WeatherBug
Terah Bocchi, senior account executive, from Belo Phoenix
Jeff Margolis, senior account executive, from Adfusion
Bill Kramer, regional sales manager, from quadrantONE
Josh Parker, account executive, from Specific Media
Matt Sexton, regional sales manager, from RadiumOne
Ken Yonan, regional sales manager, from Specific Media

“We’re excited to grow our team and continue expanding in the coming year,” said Kurt Hawks, vice president of operations for Greystripe. “In 2012, we look forward to using this growth to reach advertisers in every significant U.S. market, continue innovation and push the envelope by creating the best in brand advertising for mobile.”

In 2011, Greystripe launched two new mobile ad units: video advertising and its popular Ad Boosters. Both have seen impressive results. Over 55 brands have run mobile video ads, delivering over 200 ad creatives. On average, 50 percent of consumers have watched the entire video ads, with click-through rates between 1 and 3 percent. Ad Boosters are a next generation ad format featuring social media integration, local content and deals. These Boosters make mobile advertising more relevant and valuable to smartphone users and have shown a 300 percent increase in click-through rates compared to similar ads without the Boosters.

After officially launching in Europe in February through a series of partnerships, Greystripe hired Tim Scoffham to head EU mobile growth. Scoffham came to Greystripe from 4th Screen Advertising, where he was the commercial head. The company has now established a direct European presence in the U.K., France, Germany, Spain and Sweden.

To find out more about Greystripe, visit www.greystripe.com

About Greystripe:

Greystripe, a division of ValueClick, Inc. (Nasdaq: VCLK), is the largest brand-focused mobile advertising network in the US by reach. Greystripe delivers the highest engagement and most sophisticated targeting for brand marketers, the maximum revenue for publishers and app developers, and the best ad experience for users. Greystripe’s proprietary advertising platform serves billions of rich media impressions to over 40 million users of touch-driven devices through more than 3,500 application titles and mobile websites across all major mobile platforms.

For more information, please visit: http://www.greystripe.com

About ValueClick, Inc.:

ValueClick, Inc. (Nasdaq: VCLK) is one of the world’s largest digital marketing companies. Through a unique combination of data, technology and services, ValueClick increases brand awareness and drives customer acquisition at scale for the world’s largest advertisers, and maximizes advertising revenue for tens of thousands of online and mobile publishers. ValueClick’s brands include Commission Junction, ValueClick Media, Dotomi, Greystripe, Mediaplex, Smarter.com, CouponMountain.com, Investopedia.com, and PriceRunner. The Company is based in Westlake Village, California, and has offices in major advertising markets worldwide. For more information, please visit http://www.valueclick.com.

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

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

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

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

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

ABOUT SOLVE MEDIA

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

Heather Frank, previously vice president of consumer media for USA TODAY, has been named editor-in-chief of USA WEEKEND. O’Brien and Frank will both report directly to Hunke.

The USA WEEKEND marketing staff will be incorporated into the USA TODAY marketing team reporting to Sandra Micek, senior vice president of marketing for USA TODAY.

“USA WEEKEND is a key publication in our portfolio and I look forward to exploring ways to expand its potential. Michael and Heather bring vast experience to their new roles and will play a large part in the USA WEEKEND executive team that will position us well for the future,” said Hunke.

O’Brien, based in Chicago, joined USA WEEKEND in 2002 as account executive/Midwest and was   promoted to advertising manager/Midwest in 2004 and advertising director/Midwest in 2007. He was named vice president of advertising last year. Previously, he held positions with Time4Media, McGraw Hill and Cahners Business Information. O’Brien is a graduate of Barat College.

Frank joined USA TODAY in 2010 as general manager of Your Life and was later named vice president of consumer media in 2011. Previously, she led the content programming and operations teams for RevolutionHealth.com. Prior to that, she was the editor-in-chief for Meredith Corporation’s women’s lifestyle sites. From 1997 to 2003, she was an executive at America Online, where she led editorial teams in developing programming in response to popular culture and current events. Prior to joining AOL, Frank was the general manager for new media at WHERE magazines. Frank is a graduate of Newcomb College.

USA WEEKEND is a national weekly newspaper magazine with 22.6 million circulation and 49 million readers in print and online.  It is distributed through more than 800 newspapers. Awarded for its journalism and design, USA WEEKEND focuses on social issues, entertainment, health, food and travel. It has an expanded presence in the social media arena with active participation on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. USA WEEKEND is a Gannett Co. Inc. (NYSE: GCI) publication.

REDWOOD CITY, CA – YuMe, the operating system for TV 2.0, today announced the results of a joint study with Nielsen, which quantifies the true impact of online video when combined with a major CPG TV advertising campaign:  reach, frequency, and recall increase substantially even as the CPM rate decreases. The results offer a compelling look at how brands can effectively and easily reach more viewers with a complementary, TV 2.0 media mix of TV and online video. Planning across both media as part of a single holistic campaign delivers an impact and return on investment which dramatically exceeds that of TV alone.

For this study, YuMe utilized Nielsen TV/Internet Fusion to assess the impact of a $500,000 online video ad buy for a PHD client’s $2.6 million TV flight. The flights ran concurrently throughout September 2011. Results show that a $500,000 spend on the Connected Audience Network, YuMe’s premium, in-stream video ad network, increased reach against the targeted 35–54 age demographic by 7 percentage points. In addition, more than 6 million people in the target demographic were not reached by the TV schedule alone, and were picked up only when online video was added to the schedule.

A high level summary of key findings from the YuMe-Nielsen study highlights the many benefits of a TV 2.0 campaign strategy:

•    Content present on multiple media extends reach:  YuMe online video increased reach for the targeted 35–54 age demographic by 7 percentage points when complemented by a TV flight. In addition, nearly 9 million people were exposed to the campaign on multiple screens.

•    Average frequency across screens increases:  The number of respondents exposed to the PHD campaign three or more times increased by 31 percent, while those exposed to the campaign six or more times rose by 52 percent.

•    Low eCPMs for online video drive substantial cost efficiencies:  Although less than one-sixth the cost of the TV schedule, the $500,000 spend invested in the YuMe Network drove an increase of 34 percent in gross rating points (GRPs) from the original TV schedule. The efficiency of the online video spend was nearly double that of the concurrent TV spend and the cost per point (CPP) was reduced by 11 percent.

•    Brand and message recall improves with YuMe:  Impression-per-impression, YuMe online video outperformed TV in terms of both brand and message recall compared to the campaign TV norm. Results of a Nielsen TV Brand Effect analysis showed an increase of 22 percent for brand recall and 31 percent for message recall one day post-exposure.

•    YuMe outperforms online video ad network norms:  YuMe’s Connected Audience Network outperformed its peers in both brand and message recall, demonstrating an increase of 33 and 50 percent respectively seven days post -exposure.

“We know our consumers are watching multiple screens throughout the day and sometimes watching more than one screen at a time,” said Kelley Train, PHD. “Because of this fact, we are constantly pushing our media to be more about reaching the right audience versus the platform in which the ad is being delivered. Utilizing both TV and YuMe’s video network as complimentary partners, we were able to achieve valuable additional reach, efficiency and effectiveness for our client.”

As consumers diversify their entertainment activities across an array of connected devices, it becomes more difficult for advertisers to maximize reach on a single platform. By complementing a schedule of TV ads with a concurrent online video flight, advertisers can reach consumers whether they are watching TV or online video to increase scale and reinforce the brand’s message.

“TV and digital ad planners can no longer operate in a vacuum in which online video advertising remains a silo apart from TV spend, because it fails to account for the fact that audiences are no longer stationary,” said Ed Haslam, Vice President of Marketing for YuMe. “Dual-platform campaigns offer demonstrable value and greatly outperform a TV-only campaign while improving overall cost efficiency.”

For more information, and to download the full report on the YuMe-Nielsen study, please visit www.yume.com/content/whitepapers.

About YuMe
YuMe is the software infrastructure provider powering digital video and the next generation of television with its operating system for TV 2.0. Its video advertising technology and services seamlessly connect advertisers, app developers, content distributors, consumer electronics manufacturers, and publishers across the globe. YuMe’s patent-pending Relevance Engine powers its premium in-stream video ad network, the YuMe Connected Audience Network, and its industry-leading advertising management solutions, ACE for Publishers and ACE for Advertisers. The YuMe Relevance Engine matches the right ad to the right audience on whatever screen they are viewing—PC, mobile, or connected TV. YuMe is a privately held company headquartered in Redwood City, CA with its European headquarters in London. The company is backed by Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures, Intel Capital, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung Ventures, and Translink Capital. For more information, visit www.YuMe.com, follow @YuMevideo on Twitter (www.twitter.com/YuMevideo), or like YuMe on Facebook at www.facebook.com/YuMevideo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See below the infographic put together by BlueKai.

“Utilizing our online reach of more than two billion daily ad impressions and our ability to target IP addresses directly, CPX is in a unique position to expand the scope and granularity of audience targeting,” said Jonathan Slavin, Chief Revenue Officer of CPX Interactive. “By integrating Semcasting’s data, we can now offer our agency and advertiser partners the ability to link detailed user demographics to precise locations and create next-level audience modeling and look-alike targeting, all at better than an 80 percent match rate against not only our own direct traffic, but also against RTB and exchange traffic.”

“Semcasting’s ability to connect our industry-leading public data to more than 1.4 million home IP zones and 3.8 million business IP zones in the US means advertisers and their agencies now have a way to leverage their existing investments in customer and marketing intelligence to plan their online campaigns. Semcasting’s data and analytics capabilities combined with CPX’s ability to deliver messaging directly to these IP zones at massive scale makes this a synergistic partnership. CPX is an ideal distribution partner for us,” said Ray Kingman, CEO of Semcasting.

About CPX Interactive

CPX Interactive is a digital advertising company consistently serving more than two billion daily ad impressions. Its global distribution engine includes both a private marketplace of more than 4,000 quality publisher sites and an on-demand network with access to virtually every major aggregator of digital media. CPX campaigns are churned through a continuous cycle of planning, execution, optimization, reporting and analysis – each leveraging the company’s unparalleled scalability. CPX has proven success with more than 300 major brands worldwide. For more information, visit http://www.cpxinteractive.com.

About Semcasting

Semcasting is a supplier of predictive data solutions that help marketers, agencies and ad networks target online and offline customers. IP Audience Zones was built with the same predictive modeling technology used in the development of Semcasting’s premium data. It contains detailed, publicly available and modeled information on more than 227 million individuals–mapped as demographic zone clusters to IP Addresses. Semcasting data is licensed to data compilers and ad networks and is used by hundreds of public and private companies each month for targeting T&E, finance, retail telecommunications, and political campaigns.

LOS ANGELES – Break Media, a leading creator and publisher of digital video content for men, today announced its Social Video Accelerator, an innovative new advertising technology which combines guaranteed video distribution with a suite of social analytics that maximize viral pass-along of advertiser content. The new unit is designed around the growing trend of Cost per View (CPV) advertising.

While demand for the CPV model increased among advertisers in 2011, thus far, publishers and networks have struggled to match it. YouTube has previously predicted that by 2015, more than 50 percent of online video campaigns will include inventory sold on a CPV. A recent study performed by Break Media and Advertiser Perceptions found that although 40 percent of advertising campaigns now use CPV in some fashion—a two-fold increase over the previous year—17 percent of advertisers stated they would select it as their preferred pricing model for video if more publishers and networks offered it.

The Social Video Accelerator will debut across the Break family of sites, which includes Break.com, the web’s largest comedy video site, and the Break Media network, which now reaches more than 120 million unique viewers each month. The technology is designed to distribute both advertiser assets such as trailers and videos as well as branded entertainment created in partnership with Break Media’s award winning in-house Creative Lab.

“The Cost per View video pricing model made huge strides within the industry this past year, with a number of advertisers citing it as their preferred model,” said Andrew Budkofsky, EVP of sales and partnerships for Break Media. “While this emergence has opened up an entirely new battleground for advertising dollars, advertisers must demand a solution that delivers a guarantee of quality, relevant context and targeting above and beyond simply counting numbers of views in order for their campaigns to be effective.”

“With the amount of competition for attention and eyeballs, we’ve looked for partners who can help us build a quality audience and guarantee our video content will reach it,” said Simone Deocares-Lengyel, media director at KD&E, the agency for Take-Two Interactive which runs multiple trailer release campaigns a year. “Being able to purchase against a guaranteed CPV and track both paid media as well as earned media presents a huge opportunity for us to distribute our content in the most meaningful way possible.”

The Social Video Accelerator is available now. For more information on all Break Media advertising units, visit us online or contact sales@breakmedia.com.

About Break Media:

Break Media is a leading creator, publisher, and distributor of digital entertainment content including video, editorial, and games. The company’s properties include the largest humor site online—Break.com—as well as Made Man, Game Front, Holy Taco, Screen Junkies, Cage Potato, All Left Turns, Chickipedia, and Tu Vez. The Break Media Creative Lab is an in-house production studio creating original videos that range from award-winning branded entertainment to celebrity-driven web shorts to viral one-offs. The Break Media Network represents hundreds of publishers as one of the largest video advertising networks online, reaching more than 120 million visitors each month. For more information, visit www.breakmedia.com.

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced the launch of its Validated Campaign Essentials™ (vCE) product, a new measurement solution for validating digital ad delivery. vCE enables a holistic view of campaign delivery and a verified assessment of ad-exposed audiences via a single, third-party source. Unlike existing single-point solutions, it provides an unduplicated accounting of impressions delivered across a variety of dimensions, such as ads delivered in-view, in the right geography, in a brand safe environment and absent of fraudulent delivery. A U.S.-based vCE Charter Study involving 12 national premium brands found that, in many cases, ads are delivered but not in-view or on target and therefore never have a chance to make an impact.

“The display advertising market today is characterized by an overabundance of inventory, often residing on parts of a web page that are never viewed by the user. This dilutes the impact of campaigns for advertisers and represents a drag on prices to publishers,” said Dr. Magid Abraham, President and CEO of comScore. “Conversely, some ads below the fold are quite visible and deserve more credit. comScore’s introduction of vCE signals an evolution in digital advertising that will bring greater transparency and accountability to the market. Ultimately, this type of third-party validation will help identify and appropriately price the proportion of online ad inventory that delivers value, improve buying and selling decisions, and instill more confidence and trust in the industry.”

vCE enables a comprehensive, holistic view of validated impressions, which can be expressed as ‘validated gross rating points’, or vGRPs. This new metric reflects measurement of ads that were not only delivered, but that had an opportunity to have an impact on consumers. Validated impressions are also the basis for vCE’s campaign audience reports, which include reach and frequency, comprehensive demographics, and behavioral segments only for people with a valid exposure.

vCE Charter Study Findings
To better understand the quality of ad delivery today, comScore conducted a U.S.-based vCE Charter Study, which involved 12 national brands, 3,000 placements, 381,000 site domains and 1.7 billion ad impressions. Select advertisers from the charter study include Allstate, Chrysler, Discover, E*TRADE Financial, Ford, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Kimberly Clark, Kraft, and Sprint. All of the impressions analyzed in the study were delivered in iframes and none required publisher site pixels.

Topline study results are included below, and a full whitepaper with detailed insights and analysis will be published in March 2012.

- Across all charter campaigns measured, 69 percent of the ad impressions were classified as being ‘in-view.’* The remaining 31 percent were delivered but never seen by a consumer, a likely result of a consumer scrolling past the ad before it loaded or a consumer never scrolling the ad into view. In-view percentages varied by site and ranged from 7 percent to 91 percent.

- An average of 4 percent of ad impressions were delivered outside the desired geography, but individual campaigns ran as high as 15 percent. In many cases, ads were served in markets where the advertised product is not sold, meaning wasted ad spend and sub-optimal effectiveness results.

- 72 percent of Charter Study campaigns had at least some ads running next to content deemed “not brand safe” by the advertiser, meaning that the content is deemed objectionable by the brand. This type of unsafe delivery has the potential to damage the brand, creating a difficult situation for all members of the digital advertising ecosystem.

A separate UK-based vCE Charter Study is in progress, with enrollment currently underway. To learn more about participating in the study, please contact Mike Shaw ( mshaw@comscore.com), Head of EMEA Advertising Effectiveness Products. vCE is available in the U.S. immediately and will be gradually rolled out in international markets throughout the first quarter of 2012.

*In-view parameters are consistent with those that have been recommended by an industry consortium called the ‘Making Measurement Make Sense’ initiative, consisting of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the American Association of National Advertisers (4A’s) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB.) These parameters say that at least 50 percent of the advertisement must be viewable for at least 1 second in order to be considered in-view.

Industry Leaders on vCE and vGRP

“One big issue with internet advertising is that not all ads that are served end up being seen. This is a core issue raised by the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative. In order for marketers to have the same confidence in the digital channel as they do in TV, we need measurement around the visibility of ads. What comScore is doing with the vGRP initiative based on validated impressions is an important step in that direction.”
–– Mike Donahue, EVP, Strategic Partnerships, 4As

“At Kellogg’s we are continually seeking to improve the overall effectiveness of every media dollar spent. Key to enabling our decisions is understanding who each impression reaches, how visible our ads are, and where the greatest efficiencies exist. Being able to validate our media delivery through a single source with vCE creates opportunities for both near real-time optimizations as well as enhanced future planning.”

––Aaron Fetters, Associate Director Global Digital Strategy and Analytics at Kellogg Company

“comScore’s new validated Campaign Essentials product is a step forward in addressing several fundamental issues surrounding the current state of counting online ad impressions. comScore’s introduction of validated ad impressions and vGRPs is aligned with the 3MS recommendations of moving the industry to a viable impression standard. vCE is an innovative solution that adds a level of transparency that is welcomed.”

—John Kahan, GM, Business and Customer Intelligence, Microsoft’s Online Services Division

“It is critical that we can understand the extent to which ads delivered on our sites are actually viewed by the intended audience. This type of insight allows us to improve our relationships with consumers and our advertising partners. comScore’s vCE is a welcome innovation, and I am particularly excited about how this measurement solution can help us optimize our site content and the advertising that we deliver on it.”
–– Scott McDonald, Senior Vice President, Research & Insights, Condé Nast

“The inclusion of vCE within the overall comScore suite of tools will offer us another metric to provide to our clients with the type of data they require and have been seeking for many years. They want to know that the money they are spending online is doing its job and will actually have a chance to make an impact. This type of third-party, holistic validation is a great start to do just that and is a win for all parties in the industry. Once standards are in place this can and will serve as a new currency in the marketplace.”

–– Julian Zilberbrand, SVP Global Digital Director, Technology Activation Group, Starcom Mediavest Group

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.

SES Accelerator San Diego 2012; Online Marketing Summit 2012
SAN DIEGO – The SES Conference & Expo has announced a one-day event in San Diego, the SES Search and Social Accelerator. This event is being held in collaboration with the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) and will take place from 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 9, 2012. The SES Accelerator is aimed at experienced marketing and advertising professionals who have been in the industry for 3 to 5 years. For more information or to register to attend SES Search and Social Accelerator or Online Marketing Summit, visit: http://sesconference.com/accelerator/.

The sessions at the SES Accelerator will consist of three concurrent tracks beginning after the keynote on Thursday and continuing through to 5:30 p.m., and then followed by SES’ traditional Black Hat/White Hat Unconferenced session. Topics will focus on search, social and analytics and sessions will feature the top experts in these fields.

The event’s opening Spotlight Session, “Optimizing Humans! The Art of Data-Driven Social Marketing,” will be given by Marty Weintraub, the CEO of aimClear. The online marketing agency has managed Facebook ad campaigns generating over 10 billion impressions internationally for clients including MarthaStewart.com, Siemens, Second Life and Budget Direct. Weintraub has written extensively for respected Internet marketing trade publications and is the author of the book Killer Facebook Ads.

When asked about his Spotlight Session, Weintraub remarked, “Wondering how to explode your social media strategy? This keynote presentation focuses on immediately actionable paid and organic social tactics marketers can use for enhanced demographic research and data-driven community outreach.”

“We’re thrilled to be working with OMS to deliver a highly compelling day of online marketing best practices,” said Mike Grehan, the Global VP of Content for SES parent company Incisive Media. Grehan, who will be delivering the day’s opening remarks prior to Weintraub’s keynote speech, continued, “We anticipate our attendees will embrace a day of free idea exchanges on the subject of internet marketing but, unlike our other events, there will be no exhibitor floor or vendor sales. The focus will be strictly on actionable education for today’s experienced marketing and advertising professionals.”

To register for SES Accelerator, complete the registration form.

About SES

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

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

About Online Marketing Summit

Online Marketing Summit (OMS) offers an educational environment that facilitates incredible learning, networking and collaboration opportunities amongst marketers, executives and digital professionals. OMS is singularly committed to its mission to educate marketers on the emerging best practices of online marketing through a professional development conference and exhibition. More than 12,000 marketers have learned, collaborated and networked at OMS events over the years. For more information, visit www.onlinemarketingsummit.com.

We’re on it. Last year, we partnered with AdXPose, which was acquired by comScore. Now we can document for our partners when we serve an ad and it is seen. comScore has shared with us numbers that validate our intuition that above and below the fold have become meaningless because of reader habits, and that new ad units can help generate new revenue for publishers.

For example, last year  one in four ads above the fold was never seen, and 32% of  all ads were delivered but never seen. This means ads below the fold, while traditionally less costly, were almost as effective as those in the traditional “best” spots above the fold.

Because we have been serving ads for over a decade, we were in a position to spot this early, and to do something about it.

We’ve come up with some new, best-in-class products that can be used by any publisher, whether they use our ad server or any other. They’re aimed at creating additional revenue for publishers, while assuring brands and advertisers their ads will be seen (we can prove it) in a brand-safe environment. As far as we know, we’re the first to do this.

We started as the infrastructure for our publisher partners when we served the ad. As we evolved, we became more of a full service outsourced ad operations company. This enabled us to learn more about how online advertising technology really works to help marketers, and therefore to help publishers.

This year, we have begun to launch new best-in-class products for all publishers whether they use our ad server or not. The best-in-class InView format, for example, will appear only if we know the user will see it – and that can be measured. This InView product is designed to meet the new ways readers consume publications.

We will also offer other best-in-class products for all publishers (regardless of which ad server they use). “TVAds OnPage” is a best-in-class video ad format. Ad Ops services from ZEDO are also best-in-class because we are a US company with high standards and because as the only ad ops company that builds an ad server we are a true technology expert that can run any ad server perfectly.

During the course of this year, we will roll out three more products for all publishers that are best-in-class.

We continue to move forward in product development, knowing we operate in a very fast-moving environment and we must continue to prove our value.

About ZEDO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Amongst the Top 100 online properties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the IAB

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

About Winterberry Group

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

SES New York 2012
NEW YORK – SES New York 2012 announced today that Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and Author of Web Analytics 2.0, will present the keynote address at the conference to be held at the Hilton New York on March 19-23, 2012. At SES New York Kaushik, whose keynote is entitled “Business Optimization in a Digital Age,” will present his latest insights on designing multi-channel digital marketing programs to achieve maximum economic value.

The largest search and social media event of its kind, SES New York attracts 3,500 to 4,000 online marketers. Incisive Media is offering a pre-agenda savings of up to $800 for those who register by January 20, 2012.

“We promise our attendees they will hear from the most innovative experts – the most creative minds in the industry – and who could personify this better than Avinash Kaushik,” said Matt McGowan, Managing Director of Americas at Incisive Media. “Even though the surge of social media has caused search marketing to become much more complicated, he’s promised to convince us that the right integrated digital marketing strategy can pay off with big returns on investments.”

“SES New York is always a high point in my conference year, and I’m preparing to add to the excitement with my keynote on balancing the many digital marketing channels across the four most important business drivers,” said Kaushik. “Metrics play a significant role in multi-channel digital strategies and I will, as usual, be discussing how to leverage key metrics for optimal campaign results. I’m really looking forward to meeting old friends and meeting new colleagues at the show.”

About SES New York

The five-day SES New York conference includes informative presentations and panels, intensive training workshops and a large exhibit hall. Each day is choreographed to leave plenty of time for networking opportunities with industry peers. Its real-time case studies provide attendees with best-practice knowledge that can be immediately applied to their marketing programs, and its classroom-style learning offers a high degree of interactivity.

The SES New York agenda, programmed by the SES Advisory Board, is designed to help online professionals do their jobs better. This year, specific consideration has been given to Demand Gen, SEO, PPC, RTB, mobile, local, as well as both earned and paid social media.

Until end of day January 20, 2012, Incisive Media is offering a pre-agenda registration savings of up to $800.

About Avinash Kaushik

Avinash Kaushik is the Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and the co-founder of Market Motive Inc. Through his blog, Occam’s Razor, and his best-selling books, Web Analytics: An Hour A Day and Web Analytics 2.0, Kaushik has become recognized as an authoritative voice on how marketers, executive teams and industry leaders can leverage data to fundamentally reinvent their digital existence. Kaushik puts a common sense framework around the often frenetic world of web analytics and combines that with the philosophy that investing in talented analysts is the key to long-term success. He passionately advocates customer centricity and leveraging bleeding-edge competitive intelligence techniques.

Kaushik brings practical insights to companies like Unilever, Dell, Time Warner, Vanguard, Porsche, and IBM. He has delivered keynotes at a variety of global conferences, including SES Conference & Expo, Monaco Media Forum, iCitizen, JMP Innovators’ Summit, The Art of Marketing and Web 2.0.

Kaushik has lectured at major universities such as Stanford University, University of Virginia, University of California – Los Angeles and University of Utah. Avinash received the 2009 Statistical Advocate of the Year award from the American Statistical Association, and the 2011 Most Influential Industry Contributor award from the Web Analytics Association.

About Incisive Media

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

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

For more news and event updates visit the SES press room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that 182 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in December for an average of 23.2 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience viewed 43.5 billion videos.

Top 10 Video Content Properties by Unique Viewers

Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in December with 157.2 million unique viewers, while VEVO ranked second with 53.7 million. Yahoo! Sites ranked third with 53.3 million viewers, followed by Viacom Digital with 45.8 million and Facebook.com with 42 million. More than 43 billion videos views occurred during the month, with Google Sites generating the highest number at 21.9 billion. The average viewer watched 23.2 hours of online video content, with Google Sites (7.9 hours) and Hulu (3 hours) demonstrating the highest average engagement among the top ten properties.

*A video is defined as any streamed segment of audiovisual content, including both progressive downloads and live streams. For long-form, segmented content, (e.g. television episodes with ad pods in the middle) each segment of the content is counted as a distinct video stream.

Top 10 Video Ad Properties by Video Ads Viewed

Americans viewed 7.1 billion video ads in December, with Hulu generating the highest number of video ad impressions at nearly 1.5 billion, followed by Adap.tv in second with 1.1 billion. Tremor Video ranked third with 942 million, followed by BrightRoll Video Network with 872 million and Specific Media with 496 million. Time spent watching video ads totaled more than 3 billion minutes during the month, with Adap.tv delivering the highest duration of video ads at 636 million minutes. Video ads reached 51 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 46 times during the month. Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 46.

*Video ads include streaming-video advertising only and do not include other types of video monetization, such as overlays, branded players, matching banner ads, homepage ads, etc.
**Indicates video ad network
†Indicates video ad exchange

Top 10 YouTube Partner Channels by Unique Viewers

The December 2011 YouTube partner data revealed that video music channels VEVO (53.5 million viewers) and Warner Music (31.7 million viewers) maintained the top two positions. Gaming channel Machinima ranked third with 22.7 million viewers, followed by Maker Studios with 10.4 million, FullScreen with 9.7 million and Big Frame with 8.3 million. Among the top 10 YouTube partners, VEVO demonstrated the highest engagement (67 minutes per viewer) and highest number of videos viewed (782 million), while Machinima exhibited the second highest engagement (64 minutes per viewer) and number of videos viewed (340 million).

*YouTube Partner Reporting based on online video content viewing and does not include claimed user-generated content

Other notable findings from December 2011 include:

- 85.3 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
- The duration of the average online content video was 5.8 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.
- Video ads accounted for 14.1 percent of all videos viewed and 1.2 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

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.

São Paulo, Brazil – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data showing that Facebook assumed the top position in the Brazilian social networking market following a year of exceptional growth. In December 2011, Facebook.com attracted 36.1 million visitors – representing an increase of 192 percent in the past twelve months – to surpass Orkut as the leading social networking destination in the market.

“Facebook’s rapid ascent in the Brazilian market has certainly been one of the most interesting stories to develop during the course of 2011,” said Alex Banks, comScore managing director for Brazil. “Brazil has always been a particularly social market and currently owns the fifth largest social networking population in the world. But despite the cultural affinity for social media, Facebook adoption had traditionally lagged in the market. That has all changed in the past year, during which the site has tripled in audience size as engagement has grown sevenfold to assume the leadership position in the market.”

Facebook.com, Orkut and Windows Live Profile Lead Social Networking Rankings

Results from the recent comScore study It’s a Social World revealed that Brazil was one of just seven markets (including China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Poland and Russia) where Facebook did not lead the local social networking category according to October 2011 data.

In December 2011, however, Facebook.com finally secured the top position in Brazil’s social networking ranking with 36.1 million visitors age 6 and older accessing the site from a home or work computer, nearly tripling in audience size in the past year. Orkut, which fell to the #2 position with 34.4 million visitors, still managed to grow its audience 5 percent in the past year despite Facebook’s growing prominence. Windows Live Profile ranked third with 13.3 million visitors (up 13 percent), while Twitter.com ranked fourth with 12.5 million visitors (up 40 percent).

Vostu.com and Tumblr.com both achieved triple-digit audience increases with Vostu.com growing 338 percent to 4.9 million visitors and Tumblr.com growing 206 percent to 4 million visitors. New to the scene in 2011, Google Plus attracted 4.3 million visitors during December 2011, with Brazil ranking as one of the top global markets for the social network by audience size. The combined unduplicated audience of Google Plus and Orkut was 34.9 million visitors, still trailing Facebook.

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs

Facebook.com Visitors Average Nearly 5 Hours on the Site in December

Facebook.com saw impressive growth across all major metrics during the past year, including significant increases in audience engagement. In December 2011, an average visitor to Facebook.com spent 4.8 hours on the site, surging from just 37 minutes in December 2010. Visitors consumed an average of 500 pages of content on the site during December (up 655 percent), and visited the site an average of 27 times during the month (up nearly 163 percent).

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs

Profile of a Facebook.com Visitor in Brazil

A closer look at visitors to Facebook.com revealed that females averaged more time on the site at 5.3 hours compared to 4.1 hours for males, mirroring a broader global dynamic of females’ heavier social networking engagement. People between the ages of 25-34 accounted for the largest share of visitors to Facebook.com at 30.6 percent of the total audience, while visitors age 15-24 averaged the most time on the site at 6.2 hours per visitor in December.

Geographically, visitors from Rio de Janeiro and Distrito Federal displayed the highest levels of engagement with the site averaging 5.1 hours on the site during the month. Visitors from São Paulo accounted for more than one-third of all Facebook.com visitors.

Mr. Banks continued, “We saw Facebook’s audience surpass that of Orkut in Brazil’s Southeast region before the site became the category leader for the entire country. While the Southeast was undoubtedly the region where Facebook’s ascension to the top of the category began, we have seen that now only half of Facebook’s Brazilian page views come from this region compared to more than 75 percent a year ago, demonstrating the widespread adoption of the site throughout the country.”

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs

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, UK – Qriously, a London-based mobile start-up, today announced two innovative and pioneering mobile advertising products in conjunction with its expansion to the U.S marketplace.

To meet the growing demand for mobile and app usage measurement tools, Qriously today added two new products, Censio and Tactus, to its suite of services for commercial and editorial partners, as well as app publishers. Censio allows app publishers to better understand usage of their apps by asking users questions in real-time; Tactus enables mobile advertisers to perform copy tests by serving questions to measure users’ awareness to previously served advertisements.

In addition, Qriously announced that it is expanding its operations and new business development efforts to the U.S, in response to the rapidly expanding mobile advertising market. Studies show that the international mobile advertising market is now worth $3.5 billion (USD) and is expected to rise to $24 billion by 2015.

“We’re seeing more and more companies focusing on mobile product and service development who nevertheless remain hampered and ill-equipped by a shocking dearth of hard data and analytics to support them,” said Christopher Kahler, co-founder and CEO of Qriously. “This applies to the exponentially growing area of mobile advertising as well, which is expanding much faster than supporting technologies which improve relevance and value to users. Using our range of products, companies can quickly and easily gain invaluable real-time insight into the opinions of mobile users worldwide.”

Joe Zahtila, the former CRO and COO of Dynamic Logic, joins Qriously as General Manager for its North America operations. Julian Kenny, who has more than 18 years’ experience in the creditor insurance sector and orchestrated the £240m (GBP) acquisition of Basilica to BT, has been named Executive Vice President of Finance and Operations.

With a global device reach of more than 35 million, Qriously measures in real-time the location-based perceptions of mobile users by replacing or supplementing advertisements in smartphone and tablet apps with customized questions. The service can take the immediate pulse of worldwide public opinion on any brand, topic or product by providing engaging and relevant questions where ads normally appear.

Qriously, which in 2010 successfully raised $1.6 million (USD) in funding from venture capital leaders Accel Partners and Amalfi Capital, offers a software development kit (SDK) to enable app publishers to aggregate immensely valuable and actionable feedback from consumers interacting with their apps.

In March 2011, the mobile innovator launched its signature Pulse product, which gauges location-based consumer sentiment in real-time. To meet the growing demand for mobile and app usage measurement tools, Qriously today adds two new products to its suite of services for commercial and editorial partners, as well as app publishers.

About Qriously
London-based mobile start-up Qriously measures real-time, location-based public sentiment by replacing ads in smartphone and tablet apps with short, targeted questions. Qriously Insights is a series of sentiment studies compiled from the opinions of thousands of engaged and active mobile smartphone users on an hourly basis.
Please visit www.qriously.com.

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

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

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

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

Key components of the Digby Localpoint Platform include:

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

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

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

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

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

Digby Localpoint helps brands:

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

- Understand when their most loyal customers visit their locations

- Uncover conversion rates for products purchased in retail stores

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

- Influence buying decisions

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

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

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

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

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

About Digby

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

The Media.NYC.2020 Final Report outlines three possible scenarios for the City’s media evolution – fragmentation, a new equilibrium, and further concentration – and highlights several initiatives, launched by Mayor Bloomberg over the last two years that were initiated through Media.NYC.2020 findings. These initiatives include:

- Cultivating collaboration among the City’s start-ups, media companies, and academic institutions through the NYC MediaLab

- Fostering innovation through the NYC BigApps Competition, developed in partnership with the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications to provide software developers with access to City datasets

- Spurring entrepreneurship through low-cost, shared workspace for start-ups through incubators

-Investing in seed-stage companies through the NYC Entrepreneurial Fund

- Mentoring enterprising New Yorkers through NYC Venture Fellows and JumpStart

Martin Kon, the Partner in Oliver Wyman’s Media & Entertainment practice who led support of Media.NYC.2020, comments: “The pace of change in media is such that, at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, devices and applications that debuted will likely materially impact the media industry…but the same will be true again next year. Innovation is not waiting for any slower players. The thoughtful process that the NYCEDC followed in its Media.NYC.2020 initiative will greatly help New York City remain a leader in fostering innovation and supporting economic development in the rapidly evolving media space.”

“As we continue to cultivate the 21st century economy here in New York City, the Media.NYC.2020 report will help ensure that the City’s media sector remains the most forward-looking, international, connected, innovative, and adaptive on the planet,” said New York City Economic Development President Seth W. Pinsky. “While the sector will undoubtedly continue to face future challenges, we are committed to creating growth opportunities that build on our strong history of leadership and ensure that we remain the global leader for many decades to come.”

About Oliver Wyman

Oliver Wyman is a global leader in management consulting. With offices in 50+ cities across 25 countries, Oliver Wyman combines deep industry knowledge with specialized expertise in strategy, operations, risk management, organizational transformation, and leadership development. The firm’s 3,000 professionals help clients optimize their business, improve their operations and risk profile, and accelerate their organizational performance to seize the most attractive opportunities. Oliver Wyman is a wholly owned subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies (NYSE: MMC), a global team of professional services companies offering clients advice and solutions in the areas of risk, strategy, and human capital. With 52,000 employees worldwide and annual revenue exceeding $10 billion, Marsh & McLennan Companies is also the parent company of Marsh, a global leader in insurance broking and risk management; Guy Carpenter, a global leader in risk and reinsurance intermediary services; and Mercer, a global leader in human resource consulting and related services. For more information, visit www.oliverwyman.com. Follow Oliver Wyman on Twitter @OliverWyman.

LOS ANGELES – the Rubicon Project, the online advertising technology company, today welcomes Brian Barnum to the team as Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer and Mark Torres as Senior Vice President of People and Culture. Barnum will be responsible for the successful implementation and over-achievement of the company’s operating plan. In addition, along with the current leadership team, Barnum will drive strategic execution for providing a real time trading platform for publishers who aim to capture the most revenue and the highest possible price for their inventory. Torres will be tasked with maintaining and growing the company’s innovative culture – ensuring the Rubicon Project continues to attract the brightest and most talented industry veterans and technologists.

“The growth of premium real-time enabled inventory available on REVV exploded in 2011 with number of monthly bids growing from 15 billion to more than 1 trillion and impressions traded growing 60% to now more than 120 billion monthly,” said Frank Addante, CEO and Founder of the Rubicon Project. “We believe this growth is a clear indicator of the massive opportunity for the industry in 2012. Brian’s repeated experience in preparing technology companies for the public markets will be valuable in helping us successfully scale and further our commitment to innovate for the industry.”

Barnum’s experience expands across several successful technology businesses, including Transaction Network Services (NYSE:TNS), Rent.com (NASDAQ:EBAY), Business.com (NASDAQ: DEXO) and Dex One Digital, the interactive division of Dex One Corporation. As the Chief Financial Officer, Barnum took TNS through an IPO and secondary offering. At Rent.com, Barnum prepared the company for an IPO while managing an M&A process that culminated in an acquisition by eBay valued at approximately $415 million. While serving as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer at Business.com, Brian prepared the company for the public markets, while orchestrating an acquisition for $350M M&A offer by Dex One Corporation. Later he joined the executive team as the President of Dex One Digital, a division which encompasses all of the digital business lines for the publicly traded Yellow Pages publisher.

“I am extremely excited to be a part of this team. Not many companies have the potential, assets and talent to shape the future of what is fast becoming an enormous industry – but Rubicon does,” said Barnum. “I will be focused on applying my experience in taking companies public and driving a crisp operational execution. I’ll be working with our team to help Rubicon evolve beyond its startup roots and continue to innovate and provide publishers the technology they need to successfully compete in today’s market.”

Also joining the team, Mark Torres comes to the Rubicon Project after nine years with Reed Business Information, the world leading business to business publisher. While at Reed, Torres oversaw the Human Resources function as Corporate Vice President, Human Resources supporting titles such as Variety, Broadcast & Cable, Interior Design and Publishers Weekly. Prior to his tenure at Reed, Torres was Vice President of Human Resources at Ticketmaster and prior to Ticketmaster held senior management Human Resources positions at Sony Pictures Entertainment where he oversaw the Television Division.

“Our team is what makes the Rubicon Project so unique. When we started this company, people and culture were the top priority,” adds Addante. “Growing a motivating culture remains a top priority today. The people of Rubicon are the most integral asset of the company, and therefore I’m excited to have Mark on board to ensure we continue to cultivate a culture that inspires, rewards and attracts the industry’s best innovators.”

About the Rubicon Project

the Rubicon Project launched in 2007 with a mission to automate buying and selling across the $80 billion global online advertising industry. REVV, the company’s real-time trading platform, has executed nearly two trillion trades for more than 450 of the largest properties on the Internet. REVV helps Comscore 500 publishers like Time Inc., News International and CareerBuilder make more money by optimizing their ad revenue, eliminating unnecessary ad operations costs, protecting and growing their direct sales channel and ensuring their sites’ visitors are safe. Today, REVV analyzes more than 1 trillion bids resulting in more than 1 billion successful and protected trades each month from more than 52,000 advertisers using 700 buying channels (ad networks, exchanges and DSPs). Ad buyers turn to REVV for single point real-time access to the #1 network reach of users (650 million uniques as ranked by Quantcast) across premium inventory and audiences. Headquartered in Los Angeles, with offices in New York, Seattle, London, Paris, Hamburg and Sydney, the company is backed by $60 million in funding from Clearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, IDG Ventures Asia, Comcast Ventures and News Corporation.

Combining Adap.tv’s RTB technology with Collective’s audience data, Collective’s private exchange will offer pre-roll video advertising space across targeted audiences and premium publishers in real-time auctions. Publishers include IPC, WWE, The Independent, Sony Music and iVillage.

The move will see Collective become the first in the UK to launch an RTB private ad marketplace for premium video programming.

“Our marketplace gives advertisers and agency partners a new way to access premium VoD inventory, but with this inventory being in such demand, we don’t see it as a low cost entry to buy video in the UK,” said Jamie Estrin, Director of Collective Video. “RTB pricing is controlled by supply and demand, and high quality premium video is always in high demand in the UK.”

Adap.tv’s interface will run the exchange that connects buyers with Collective’s pre-roll inventory.

“Our unique partnership with Collective will see the launch of the UK’s first RTB private marketplace for video,” said Brian Fitzpatrick, MD for EMEA at Adap.tv. “Real-time bidding is relatively new in the video space – our technology will offer Collective Video’s clients a new way to trade VoD directly.”

About Collective
Collective helps brand advertisers connect and engage with target audiences across display, video and social media. Collective’s industry expertise provides a strategic advantage to its clients by leveraging proprietary audience modelling, insights and ad effectiveness metrics. Our flagship products, Collective Display and Collective Video®, are powered by AMP®, our market-proven data and media management platform. Collective is headquartered in New York with offices in London, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Collective’s investors include Accel Partners®, Greycroft Partners and iNovia Capital.
http://uk.collective.com/

About Adap.tv

Adap.tv builds the technology that makes buying and selling video advertising simple and efficient. The company’s products – Adap.tv for Advertisers, Adap.tv for Publishers and the Adap.tv Marketplace – work in harmony to connect video advertising buyers directly to sellers on a single platform. The Adap.tv Marketplace is the industry’s largest video marketplace for premium publishers and brand name advertisers, with over 6,500 sites selling inventory and hundreds of campaigns running daily. Based in San Mateo, CA and with sales offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle and London, please visit http://adap.tv/.