SEATTLE – BrandVerity (www.brandverity.com) announced that PoachMark, BrandVerity’s pay-per-click (PPC) ad monitoring service, now monitors PPC ads run on the AdSense network.

PoachMark’s monitoring agents now monitor a number of high-traffic websites that display AdSense ads. Advertisements that meet criteria specified by PoachMark customers are flagged, filtered and alerted on. While AdSense monitoring has been available to select PoachMark subscribers for several months, it is now available to new accounts.

“As our clients have driven unauthorized affiliates out of the major search engines, we have seen the same affiliates resurface purchasing AdSense ads instead,” said David Naffziger, BrandVerity CEO. “This addition to PoachMark greatly enhances brand owners’ ability to monitor and manage unauthorized affiliate activity.”

AdSense monitoring is included with paid PoachMark subscriptions at no additional cost. For more information about BrandVerity and a free trial of the PoachMark service, go to www.brandverity.com.

BrandVerity provides technology solutions to brand owners to combat trademark abuse and advertising fraud. The company’s first product, PoachMark, provides unparalled insight into the search activity of affiliate marketers, giving brand owners a tool to ensure compliance with their search policies and recover fraudulent commissions. BrandVerity was founded in 2008 and is based in Seattle, Washington. For more information, visit www.brandverity.com.

The funding is led by a combination of institutional and individual investors including Lake Street Capital, RLI Partners, Melton Investments, Silicon Valley investment veteran Milan Mandaric, and Redleaf Group, whose CEO, Michael Tomana, has joined the company’s Board of Directors. This is LucidMedia’s third round of funding.

“The continued expansion of LucidMedia’s network, as well as our overall growth, is particularly noteworthy during a time of consolidation throughout the broader online advertising sector,” said Ajay Sravanapudi, LucidMedia President and CEO. “In any economic climate, we believe that offering some of the industry’s highest levels of performance, insight and brand safety provides significant value to the industry and we are very pleased to further our commitment to our clients and partners by opening our Madison Avenue office.”

“LucidMedia has a unique base of proprietary technology, an impressive leadership team and a genuine opportunity to become a disruptive force in contextual online advertising,” said John Kohler, Chairman of LucidMedia’s Board of Directors. “The time is right for LucidMedia to invest in its strategic position and we look forward to working with the team to address the opportunities at-hand.”

“I have been watching LucidMedia for some time and am impressed by the company’s vision and execution, particularly in such a challenging economic environment,” said Bill Melton, head of Melton Investments. “The company’s unique approach to contextual advertising provides agencies, advertisers and other prospective clients with compelling ways to get the most out of their online spend.”

To learn more about working with LucidMedia’s New York City sales office, interested agencies and advertisers can contact LucidMedia at info@lucidmedia.com for additional information.
LucidMedia Networks, Inc.
274 Madison Avenue
Suite 701
New York, New York 10016
Phone: 212-532-2650

About LucidMedia:

LucidMedia is an online contextual display advertising platform and meta-network focused on optimizing advertising performance for advertisers and their agencies, as well as ad networks and publishers. LucidMedia uses its patented technology to empower advertisers to reach new levels of performance, insight, safety, and cost-efficiency in their online advertising campaigns. The company achieves this through delivering contextual relevance at the page-level for unparalleled targeting, transparency, optimization, and inventory. Through its patented ClickSense® contextual advertising and targeting engine, LucidMedia categorizes traffic from many of the Web’s most respected networks and exchanges in both English and Spanish, providing advertisers with a way to more effectively target online advertising inventory and increase their return-on-spend. Formerly known as Entrieva, LucidMedia was founded in 1999 and launched ClickSense in 2004. Using the deep contextualization of ClickSense, The LucidMedia Network is the first advertiser-centric ad network that can offer complete brand safety, real accountability, and transparency down to the page-level. Today many of the world’s largest interactive agencies, Web advertisers, ad networks, and ad exchanges are relying on LucidMedia to achieve their advertising revenue goals. LucidMedia is headquartered in Reston Virginia at the heart of the Dulles Technology Corridor, with a national sales office in New York City.

On top of OgilvyOne ITOP’s existing platform, the joint venture will utilize the award winning Open AdStream® ad management technology, enhanced specifically for the Chinese market. OgilvyOne ITOP’s existing ad network covers key categories like IT & Telecommunications, Fashion & Entertainment, and Business & Finance and provides mid to large scale advertisers high quality targeted ad placements and audiences.

Utilizing the latest technology, ITOP 24/7 will pioneer the shift from traditional staff based advertising service to the use of internet advertising platforms, creating a more cost effective and robust advertising channel. OgilvyOne ITOP currently reaches up to 100m daily page views across its network of sites. OgilvyOne ITOP, whose current clients in China include IBM, China Unicom, Microsoft, and Daphne, is a solution for both small and large scale companies looking to maximize ROI. ITOP 24/7 will offer unique insight into the growing Chinese online market.

“24/7 Real Media is a pioneer in its category and a proven leader with more than ten years experience in running ad networks globally. They’re an excellent choice for us to partner with; providing our clients with the best breed of ad management technology,” commented Chris Reitermann, President of OgilvyOne China, “With the onset of the financial crisis, many more clients require effectiveness and measurement from their marketing campaigns, providing increased opportunity for a company like ITOP 24/7 that focuses on online marketing offers more targeted results and better ROI.”

Reitermann adds, “ITOP 24/7 is a venture that will enable us to bring marketing technology with scalability and effectiveness to our own business and our clients’. This type of business is just forming in China, but we are confident that it will become more platform-driven in the future. We also see a trend with advertisers asking for more vertical and niche sites as a part of the media mix. ITOP 24/7 enables advertisers to effectively reach audiences across a broad range of smaller sites.”

“Our relationship with OgilvyOne extends 24/7 Real Media’s reach into China and ITOP 24/7 will give Chinese advertisers an ad network that provides enhanced ROI, transparency and measurability,” said David J. Moore, Chairman and Founder of 24/7 Real Media, Inc. “We are looking forward to building a new ad network paradigm in China with ITOP 24/7.”

ITOP 24/7 targeting services will significantly increase the performance and ROI of online campaigns, enabling advertisers to connect with potential consumers through contextual matching. The combination of advertising service and targeting platforms, along with the extensive network power of Ogilvy, provides unparalleled exposure to advertisers in China.

About 24/7 Real Media, Inc.

24/7 Real Media, Inc. a WPP company (NASDAQ: WPPGY), is the leading global digital marketing company, empowering advertisers and publishers to engage their target audiences with greater precision, transparency and ROI. Using its award winning ad serving, targeting, tracking and analytics platform, powerful search marketing technology and global network of specialized Web sites, the company has turned the art of reaching audiences across virtually any digital medium into a measurable science. The company is headquartered in New York, with 18 offices in 12 countries throughout North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region.

For more information, please visit www.247realmedia.com. 24/7 Real Media: The Science of Digital Marketing.

24/7 Real Media is a member of the NAI and adheres to the NAI privacy principles that have been applauded by the FTC. These principles are designed to help ensure Internet user privacy. For more information about online data collection associated with ad serving, including online preference marketing and an opportunity to opt-out of 24/7 Real Media cookies, go to: www.networkadvertising.org.

About ITOP and OgilvyOne Worldwide

ITOP, a precision marketing department of OgilvyOne Worldwide, established in January 2008, began providing contextual advertising services in August 2008. ITOP’s contextual advertising platform supports multi ad formats, publishing, and contains an iWord and iTopic targeting engine as well as bidding systems; becoming 1 of only 4 contextual matching engine providers in Chinese. ITOP receives around 100 million daily PVs from selected reliable media partners in the ITOP platform and gains more than 200 thousand clicks per day via this inventory.

OgilvyOne Worldwide is the strongest, most experienced and most highly awarded one-to-one marketing network in the world, with over 110 offices in 56 countries. It provides clients with a full range of direct, consulting and interactive services to deliver profitable customer relationships. The roster of clients is equally balanced between global clients including American Express, Cisco, Coca-Cola Company, DHL, GlaxoSmithKline, IBM, Nestlé, SAP and Unilever, and leading clients in our local markets. OgilvyOne Worldwide is a unit of The Ogilvy Group, which is part of WPP Group plc (NASDAQ: WPPGY), one of the world’s largest communications services groups.

NEW YORK – Vibrant (www.vibrantmedia.com), the world leader in contextual advertising solutions, has announced the launch of Vibrant Related Content, the editorial application of its advanced patented contextual technology. This automatic hyperlinking system recirculates users to more related articles, video, music, and images within a website. Users in turn are able to conveniently access more information pertaining to subjects of interest. Vibrant Related Content is live in beta and will begin rolling out to 3,500 publishers. As for advertising, publishers may choose to monetize these units which can accommodate standard IAB ads.

Vibrant is already live on more than 3,500 premium publisher websites and reaches more than 120 million unique users worldwide with its commercial Vibrant in-Text Advertising product, identified by green double-underlines. Vibrant Related Content is clearly differentiated by mirroring the style of the publisher’s own editorial hyperlinks and adding a small magnifying glass icon to indicate that further editorial information is available. Publishers can customize both the appearance and functionality of the unit, which is skinned with the publisher’s look and feel.

According to a new, custom study by Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company, commissioned by Vibrant, in-text advertising has been shown to be one of the most relevant and most effective ad formats available.

Says Vibrant Co-founder and CEO Doug Stevenson, “Adapting our contextual technology for editorial use is a natural evolution as we expand our relationships with publishers and with users, ultimately, who enjoy interactivity and appreciate the convenience of in-text links to surface related information.”

According to Tim Brower, Director of Digital Development at Detroit Media Partnership, “Two things we really focus on at www.detnews.com and www.freep.com are offering a great user experience and making sure people find compelling articles. Vibrant Related Content offers a simple, effective way to achieve both, so implementing it across our sites was an easy decision to make.” Click here for demo. http://www.vibrantmedia.com/demos/verticals/US/BD/news/detNews/detNews _relatedContent_noAd.html (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser’s address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.)

According to one recent report on web use*, “Link-following continues to be the most common navigation action, accounting for about 45% of all page transitions.” By providing more links from within their own archives, Vibrant Related Content gives publishers a significant tool to propel “forward navigation,” eliminate “dead ends” and keep users on their website. In addition to the publisher’s own content, Vibrant intends to provide access to additional music and video content.

About Vibrant

Vibrant, a world leading contextual advertising network, gives marketers the opportunity to deliver highly targeted, user-initiated advertisements within the text of premium Web content and offers publishers premium editorial tools to recirculate users throughout their websites. The company works closely with advertisers, agencies and Web publishers to plan, buy, deliver and optimize contextual campaigns across 3,500 premium publisher websites. Reaching more than 120 million unique users per month (Comscore, May 2008), Vibrant Media manages more than five hundred billion words and phrases each month for top advertisers such as Microsoft, Unilever, New Line Cinema and IBM. The company was founded in 2000 and has offices in London, New York, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris and Hamburg, with more than 200 employees. Vibrant’s rapid growth has been recognized by both the Inc. 500 and Deloitte Fast 50 lists. For more information, visit: www.vibrantmedia.com, www.vibrantmedia.co.uk, www.vibrantmedia.de, www.vibrantmedia.fr.

*”Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use,” Harald Weinreich and Hartmut Obendorf, University of Hamburg; Eelco Herder, University of Hannover; and Matthias Mayer, University of Hamburg, February 2008.

Jonathan Baron joins Vibrant as the new Vice President of International Sales where he will lead pan-European sales as well as new territories including Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia. Before coming to Vibrant, Baron served as Microsoft Advertising’s Asia Regional Sales Director and then led the Multinational Sales force for the U.S., EMEA and Asia. Prior to that, he headed pan -regional sales in Asia for MSN. Jonathan got his start in the publishing business at United News Media, EMAP and IPC.

Naomi Ferguson brings extensive knowledge and experience to Vibrant as Head of Technology Client Sales. Previously, Naomi managed the technology, telecoms and gambling categories at AOL. Prior to that, Naomi worked at the Financial Times where she was Group Head of Technology Client Sales.

Carl Jordan comes to Vibrant as Director of Publisher Solutions Europe. He will lead the relationship with publishers and extend Vibrant’s reach by solidifying its position as the partner of choice for publishers across Europe. Carl comes from Google where he was responsible for providing discovery, monetisation and commerce solutions to media and publishers within the EMEA region. The portfolio of products included Google Websearch, Adwords, News, Maps, AdSense and Checkout. Before that, Carl was Head of Agency Sales UK for Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and prior to that he was the Agency Sales Manager for Emap Metro Online.

Sheila Williams, Vibrant’s new Publisher Solutions Director UK, comes from Associated Northcliffe Digital where she served as Head of Digital Partnerships. Sheila has worked in publishing for over 14 years, most of that online. Her broad experience includes selling display advertising on some of EMAP’s leading consumer magazines, agency sales across The Times and Sunday Times, sponsorship and promotions across IPC brands.

Says Craig Gooding, Vibrant COO and Co-founder, “We have nearly doubled our staff in London over the last six months in order to grow our existing European businesses and break into new markets in Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia. These high powered hires will, on the one hand, help grow our premium publisher network to deliver significant incremental revenues for our publisher partners and, on the other hand, deepen and expand our relationships with advertisers to deliver a suite of solutions based on our proprietary contextual technology.

Other new hires in the London office include: Matt Boak as Senior Account Manager, Alex Davies as Account Manager, Emmy Lacey as Account Manager, Tom Pepper as Account Manager, Fiona Salmon as Account Director, Fola Sullivan as Account Director and Anna Tracey, who returns to head the UK Sales team.
About Vibrant Media
Headquartered in New York, Vibrant Media is a world leading video and contextual advertising network, giving marketers the opportunity to deliver highly targeted, user-initiated advertisements within the text of premium Web content. The company works closely with advertisers, agencies and Web publishers to plan, buy, deliver and optimize Vibrant In-Text Advertising campaigns across thousands of websites. Vibrant Video provides measurable brand engagement through the largest pay per click video advertising network. Reaching more than 120 million unique users per month, Vibrant Media manages more than five billion words per month for top advertisers such as Sony, Intel, New Line Cinema, Microsoft and Toyota. The company was founded in 2000 and has offices in New York, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, London, Paris and Hamburg, with more than 200 employees. The Company’s rapid growth has been recognized by both the Inc. 500 and Deloitte Fast 50 list for two consecutive years. For more information, visit www.vibrantmedia.com.

“These awards reflect the growing influence of in-text on the advertising landscape as a whole.” Says Craig Gooding, CCO and Co-founder, Vibrant Media, “We have seen the industry embrace in-text advertising since our inception in 2000 and today Vibrant works with the world’s leading brand advertisers who are reaching more than 120 million users worldwide. The Vibrant Awards is designed to inspire excellence and we want to thank the winners for delivering some of the smartest, most impactful and creative executions of in-text and contextual video advertising across Europe.”

Hundreds of campaigns from around the world were considered and evaluated based on creativity, word selection and the campaign’s ability to effectively communicate the brand message/meet campaign objectives. European finalists included:
Adidas – End2End project
BP – Race for Champions
Chrysler France – Sebring Launch
Coke – Grand Theft Auto ‘Give a little Love’
Corel – Fortunately
Diageo – Pimms
Fiat – Fiat 500
Ford – Kuga
Fortis – Business leader
HP – The Computer is Personal
IBM UK – Wimbledon
Intel – Intel Centrium Processors
Karstadt – Jubel
Lloyds TSB – Premier Loans
Microsoft – Windows Mobile
Nike – Football T90
Nintendo – Super Paper Mario
Nissan – Urban Proof
Paramount Pictures – The Kite Runner
Sky – Lost Series 4
Tourism Ireland – Visit Ireland
Unilever – Axe Shock deodorant
xBox – Fun for all
Yahoo! – Yahoo! Answers
The distinguished panel of industry judges consisted of:

* Guy Phillipson, CEO, IAB UK
* Peter Bale, Executive Producer, Microsoft
* Dr. Jochen Kalka, Editor-in-Chief, W&V
* Susan Kingston, Business Director International, Neo@Ogilvy
* Rich Sutcliffe, Digital Editor, Media Week
* Richard Townsend, Managing Partner, Circus Street
* Rob Watt, Media Director, Avenue A | Razorfish

Three awards were presented.

Gold Award:
First Place (Gold) was awarded to Yahoo! Answers (Carat Digital, UK). The campaign creative was custom built for in-text and designed to intelligently align the Yahoo! Answers database of real user questions with relevant words within online web content. Each creative was pre-populated with actual questions asked by Yahoo!’s users. For example the word “pasta” would trigger the question “how do you cook pasta?”. This unit would drive users to real-time answers related to cooking pasta and the opportunity to post their own responses. This campaign ran across 12 different sectors and achieved an outstanding average CTR.

Silver Award:
Second Place (Silver) went to Fiat (Isobar, France) for their 2008 Fiat 500 campaign. Fiat used words such as ‘compact’, ‘chic’ and ‘fun’ to deliver creative that featured objects commonly identified with these words. These objects created a personality for the compact car and the relevant product and emotional words helped to raise awareness amongst their two target audiences of core targets and early adopters. The average CTR for the campaign was excellent.

Judges Choice Award:
Finally, the Judges Choice Award (Blue), is a special honour awarded to Chrysler France (Mediaedge:cia / Proximity BBDO, France) for its innovative and creative Chrysler Sebring launch in France. Creative agency Proximity BBDO France created five videos clips specifically for in-text that focused on daily situations (e.g. cooking dinner, asleep in bed, doing exercise). The creative maximised the intimacy of the internet with a comic video clip. As the user moved their mouse over relevant words within web content they would trigger an ad that would show a man who had been interrupted during his daily routines. The clips were shown relative to the time of day so if the user moused over in the morning they would see him being woken up or in the evening they would see him cooking dinner. The annoyed man would play an active role, directing users on how to use the unit to click for photos, car information, their local dealer or to request a brochure on the new Chrysler Sebring.

Vibrant will be hosting its US inaugural Vibrant Awards on 12th June in New York.

About Vibrant Media
Vibrant Media is a world leading video and contextual advertising network, giving marketers the opportunity to deliver highly targeted, user-initiated advertisements The company works closely with advertisers, agencies and Web publishers to plan, buy, deliver and optimise Vibrant In-Text Advertising campaigns across thousands of websites. Vibrant Video provides measurable brand engagement through the largest pay per click video advertising network. Reaching more than 120 million unique users per month, Vibrant Media manages more than five billion words per month for top advertisers such as Sony, Intel, New Line Cinema, Microsoft and Toyota. The company was founded in 2000 and has offices in New York, London, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Paris and Hamburg, with more than 200 employees. The Company’s rapid growth has been recognised by both the Inc. 500 and Deloitte Fast 50 list for two consecutive years. For more information, visit www.vibrantmedia.co.uk.