Vibrant Media, the global leader in premium contextual advertising, today announced the launch of Vibrant Lightbox Video, connecting brands and audiences in a cinematic way that is user-initiated. A recent study, which Vibrant conducted with Dynamic Logic, found that 81% of consumers prefer online video advertising they can initiate, as opposed to the forced view of pre-roll ads.
Vibrant Lightbox Video brings together sight, sound, and motion for a relevant video experience that captures 100% share of voice for brands. It delivers contextually targeted ads in a brand-safe environment.
Lightbox aligns with Vibrant’s strategic vision to expand its existing suite of contextual solutions with innovative placements that deliver high performance for top brands and new revenue opportunities for quality publishers. Unlike pre-roll, which has a limited supply of content inventory, Lightbox can reach audiences wherever relevant content exists and the video can be triggered by users through Vibrant in-text hyperlinks in content or from Vibrant Image in-image ads. As a result, Lightbox extends the reach of video advertising beyond the confines of pre-existing video content.
Read more: PRWeb

Rocket Fuel Packages Up CPG Booster
REDWOOD SHORES, CA–(Marketwire – May 2, 2012) – Rocket Fuel, the leading provider of artificial-intelligence advertising solutions for digital marketers, today released CPG Booster, an integrated solution to help CPG brands reach the right audience, drive lift in brand metrics, boost coupon downloads, measure offline sales, and maximize campaign ROI.
Key Facts:•Rocket Fuel’s new CPG Booster helps brands optimize digital campaigns — display, video, mobile, and social — to dramatically increase sales, online and off. Already in use by some of the world’s leading CPG companies, including Pinnacle Foods, CPG Booster drives results in every phase of the consumer purchase cycle — from boosting brand awareness, to increasing consideration, to stimulating purchase.

•Based on Rocket Fuel’s flagship advertising management platform that leverages artificial intelligence and predictive data analytics technology to automatically improve campaigns in real-time, CPG Booster enables brands to easily optimize digital campaigns across channels. Campaigns use AI technology to “learn” from each other, automatically adjusting placement, creative, and targeting across billions of advertising opportunities in online display, video, mobile, and social media to reach the right audiences with the right messages at the right point in the purchase process.

•Rocket Fuel and Forrester Research CPG analyst Tracy Stokes will cohost a webinar on the digital challenges CPG marketers face and the impact CPG Booster can provide on 5/30 at 2pm ET. Register here.
Read more: marketwire

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – May 2, 2012) – BrightRoll, the world’s largest provider of digital video advertising services, today announces it is teaming up with Google’s AdMob to allow publishers and developers to seamlessly integrate video ads into their mobile apps and generate revenue from premium advertisers.
Through this collaboration, publishers and developers who have the AdMob SDK can now use its Ad Network Mediation to access BrightRoll pre-roll ad units through the BrightRoll AdMob Adapter. BrightRoll is the first video ad network available through AdMob Mediation, which lets publishers manage their networks to increase their fill and eCPM.
“App developers often work with several ad networks to maximize mobile revenue. The updated Mediation solution in AdMob’s new SDK 6.0 makes that process easier and enables developers to more effectively build their businesses,” said Clay Kellogg, head of mobile platform and partnership strategy at Google. “BrightRoll’s efforts to make their video ads available via AdMob’s Mediation solution represent an industry-leading example of innovation in mobile advertising.”
Mobile video advertising offers publishers attractive revenue opportunities and superior CPM rates compared to traditional mobile display ads. BrightRoll adapts advertisers’ traditional TV or web video content into pre-roll ad units for a broad range of mobile devices including iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets. BrightRoll currently runs global, large-scale campaigns in every major advertising category, including entertainment, CPG, business, auto, financial services, and food and beverage.
Read more: marketwire

Personalized Video Recommendations Driving Views & Monetization, Three Times In-crease in Views in Some Cases
Amazon has made a big business in part because of its recommendations. Customers who bought this also bought that has proven tremendously helpful for book readers, as well as consumers searching out cameras, pet toys and other products on the world’s biggest shopping site. Netflix, similarly, has grown its business because of suggested movies and shows.

That’s why online video technology providers have staked a claim on personalized video recommendations, with companies such as Ooyala, Taboola and Digitalsmiths having skin in the game.

Ooyala said that its recently added content discovery features had boosted both viewing time and revenue for customers. Prior to the product launch last month, the company had tested the tools with existing customers, which includes broadcasters, media companies and TV networks.

Ooyala found that the first video abandonment rate after one play – i.e. leaving to go to another site – had dropped to 9% with its tools, from a 24% rate with the technology customers had previously been using to encourage viewers to watch more videos. “The more viewers are engaged with personalized videos tailored to their tastes, the longer they watch, and the more money publishers earn,” Ooyala said in a blog post.
Read more: MediaPost

OpenX Publisher Conference Guest Post Series

As he prepares for the conference, Greg took some time out of his schedule to answer the following questions about the recent developments he’s seen in online advertising. Greg Coleman, President of Criteo, will be speaking at the forthcoming OpenX Publisher Conference on May 14 where attendees will hear his thoughts on the challenges and opportunities within the digital advertising landscape.
1. What would you say are the main challenges facing digital advertisers today?

On any given day, there are past, present, and future challenges faced by digital advertisers.  In the ‘past’, advertisers review how sales occur within a given time period and understand, retrospectively, which marketing efforts led to those sales in order to attribute marketing credit to those efforts.  As the number of marketing channels proliferate, the ability to provide proper attribution to those channels becomes more difficult.  In the ‘present’, the staggering amount of data that digital marketers have access to means that there is a real need to understand how to contextualize the data, and frankly to understand what’s relevant and what’s not.  For example, what’s the value of a facebook ‘like?’  And in the ‘future’, marketers need to understand how to allocate their marketing dollars in a world where attention is more and more fractional, and split over many screens, sometimes simultaneously.  But these issues are all on a marketer’s mind, all the time.
Read more: OpenX

Big Data Is Never Too Big When You Can Act On It
We all know that a tremendous amount of online user data is being compiled at an extraordinary rate. An unbelievable, somewhat unfathomable, amount of data is gathered every second of every day. But is all of this data being used to its potential, or are we (collectively) just spending a lot of money to mine and store massive amounts of useless information?

This phenomenon of data overload, known as Big Data, refers to data sets whose size are beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time, and it isn’t a new concept. In fact, Doug Laney has been talking about it for over 10 years. Laney is considered a pioneer in the field of data warehousing, and in a research report dating back to 2001 he described the emerging “Big Data revolution” as the outcome of the effect of the e-commerce surge. According to a study* commissioned by the Columbia Business School and the New York American Marketing Association, 96 percent of marketers said they believe successful brands use customer data to drive marketing decisions.

However, 36 percent of these respondents said they have “lots of customer data,” but just “don’t know what to do with it.” Even more troubling, 39 percent of these marketers admitted they “cannot turn their data into actionable insight.” This is a big problem, because in the universe of e-commerce, being able to interact with your customers based on the behaviors they’re displaying in real time is invaluable for driving revenue, creating brand awareness, and engaging with your customers. The key is being able to react to data instantly.

Read more: ClickZ

Many a parent has angrily warned their children “Don’t push my buttons!” and of course what they are implying is that the children know exactly what to do to create a certain response, or reaction, from Mom or Dad. When you think about it, isn’t it funny that an expression that has been around for generations is so applicable to web design and conversion optimization today?

Most landing pages include a button as part of the main call to action. So the question is: do your visitors know exactly what to do? Are your buttons so clear that it leaves no doubt in the visitor’s mind as to what will happen when it’s clicked?
Here are some guidelines you can keep in mind when creating buttons that beg to be pushed.
First, Prioritize
Ideally you should have a single, clear call-to-action button on your page. If you have more than one, you need to create a visual hierarchy so that their importance is clear to your web visitor. One way to do that is to change the color or size of the non-primary buttons to something visually less interesting (make those buttons duller and smaller).
Read more: ClickZ

What Sells the Digital Magazine?
A magazine is a pretty amazing work of art. It consists of a collection of the most incredible curated insights, editorial opinions, and photographs for a specific genre. In the print world, everyone knows that the cover of a magazine needs to be very carefully crafted in order to compel you to purchase it at the newsstand. Anywhere from 10 to 45 percent of a print magazine’s sales can come from single copy sales (aka, at the traditional newsstand). With this heavy reliance on sales by cover, I wondered…is the same true for success on the digital newsstand?
A few weeks ago I noticed that three digital publishing apps changed their icon on the iPad from a static image representing their company to a dynamic image showcasing their “cover news” for the day. If you haven’t seen them yet, check out how The New York Times, The New York Post, and The Daily all showcase their app. In it, each day you see a very clear cover line and image that is meant to be compelling enough for you to stop and download/buy the app.

Interestingly, at my company, we have been seeing a different phenomenon where it isn’t just the cover but the content inside of the issue that is driving a digital reader to discover a magazine they never knew they couldn’t live without.

Recently we posted a collection on the Titanic. In this collection the visitor was exposed to free articles about the Titanic. Quietly in the corner of the article was a reference to the name of the magazine the article came from. In this case, magazines like Town and Country and Popular Science were successfully able to engage new potential subscribers through the content locked under the cover by sharing it to an audience who followed a common theme.

Read more: ClickZ

Time to Stop Talking About ‘Scale’ And Start Targeting

As a catalogue marketer in the 1990s, I knew which mailing lists would work best for the dress shirt company I represented. We used multiple criteria to measure data quality. But, we always kept the list sources separate, so we knew what worked well and what didn’t work as well. Each data set would become its own brand to us, because each data set would perform differently.

Of course I would track the results and optimize my campaign and work with the lists that brought the highest ROI. Since we were selling higher-quality men’s dress shirts, lists from other higher quality men’s apparel companies would generally perform better, though not every time.

We would expect a performance difference between Florsheim shoe buyers and Johnston and Murphy shoe buyers, for example. Each list would elicit a different response, as you might expect.

I would buy these lists granularly and optimize against more precise data lists, which obviously required transparency from data providers, and a certain integrity in the data sets themselves. This may seem as obvious in terms of “best practices” to you as it does to me.

So, ask yourself: Why does our online industry today do the exact opposite of this?

We have the technology

We can target and measure audiences in so many ways today; you would think it would make sense in this digital world that we would stay granular – and transparent. But, we’re not. Instead, most of the data ecosystem strives for scale instead of precision, blended data sources instead of transparency and quality. Too many of us are making huge, blind buckets of data that are bloated and inaccurate.

Read more: AdAgeDigital

Continuing to lose face among marketers, new research shows that clicks and total impressions are far from the best way to measure online conversions.
Rather, new findings from comScore and Pretarget — both of which market ad targeting services — show a stronger correlation between ad “viewability” and hover time, and conversion rates.
The findings indicate that the traditional way of buying mass impressions and hoping for conversions, i.e., “spray and pray,” is not the most effective approach, according to Kirby Winfield, senior vice president, corporate development at comScore.
“It once again demonstrates the perils of relying on click-throughs for measuring the performance of display ad campaigns, with this metric showing virtually zero correlation with total conversions,” Winfield said.
To arrive at these initial findings, the “intent targeting” specialists at Pretarget analyzed 263 million impressions over nine months across 18 advertisers in numerous verticals. Pretarget then used comScore validated Campaign Essentials to collect “viewability,” and hover data and a DSP to collect click and cookie-based conversion data.

Read more: MediaPost
With New Video Portal, AOL Puts The ‘On’ Back In America Online
Sometimes, what’s old is new again. AOL, whose robust content syndication strategy has helped distance itself from its aggregator past, is once again touting itself as a portal – this time for all things video.

The new hub, dubbed “AOL On,” was dubbed Tuesday evening during its portion of the digital “NewFront” to advertisers, agencies and the press in New York City.
With big acquisitions like The Huffington Post and 5Min Media, AOL had been focusing on spreading its influence to other sites and syndicating content around the Web. Now, it seems, the company wants to bring those eyeballs back.
With AOL On, the Web giant is bringing its entire video offering under one umbrella. AOL On is comprised of 14 discrete channels and more than 300,000 videos, including a new slate of seven original Web series (also something the company has tried in the past), and some 1,000 publisher content partners.
Many of the publishers have been part of AOL’s 5Min syndication network, and while their video programming will continue to be syndicated through that platform, they will for the first time be organized around a single destination.

Read more: MediaPost

What is adnxs.com?
Adnxs.com is run by AppNexus, a company that provides technology, data and analytics to help companies buy and sell online display advertising.
The technology it uses can plug into other advertising serving platforms, such as Google’s Doubleclick, and “data aggregators”, such as Quantcast, which provide behavioural targeting. In essence, this makes AppNexus an an “advertising exchange for advertising exchanges”.
AppNexus offers a number of different services, including:
Ad exchange An auction marketplace where advertisers can bid for ad slots on certain websites.
Data aggregator/supplier The company collects data from a range of online and sometimes offline sources and provides data to advertisers directly or via its exchange.

Demand-side platform Technology provider that enables advertisers to buy ad inventory from other ad exchanges.
Read more: theguardian
How to Manage Your Brand’s Social Life
Consumers are investing serious amounts of their time in social-media platforms, with 16.6% of all online minutes now spent on social networks. With so much focus on social as a marketing tool, it’s worth stopping and mapping out a smart social strategy. A new Ad Age Insights report, “Managing Your Brand’s Social Life,” aims to help brand managers plan for which platforms should get the investment of limited staff and time, what to consider when creating internal social-media guidelines, whether to handle social media in-house or outsource it and what measures a brand should be looking for to get at return on investment. You can measure the ROI of social media, but it may not get you far.

“There is definitely a quantifiable ROI, but the truth of the matter is that it’s very difficult to measure ROI within social media,” said Edelman Digital Senior VP Michael Brito. If a straightforward numbers game is what you’re after, Olivier Blanchard, author of “Social Media ROI” notes that the ROI numbers game remains the same: “It’s still purely a financial measure.” But, he adds, “engagement is not a measure of ROI. There’s no way to actually calculate the relationship between a dollar investment in a particular activity and the number of likes.”

Read more: AdAgeDigital

NEW YORK, April 20, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Alloy Digital, a leading creator and distributor of media and entertainment for the 12-34 demographic, today announced that it has completed the acquisition of B5Media, one of the fastest-growing female-oriented lifestyle digital publishing and media networks.
B5Media’s websites include award-winning TheGloss.com, Crushable.com, Blisstree.com, Mommyish.com, and TheGrindstone.com, featuring content focused on fashion, beauty, wellness, career, relationships, parenting and entertainment.  The B5Media network, which has distinguished itself through honest, intelligent and relatable content, reaches females 14-34 and boasts a combined audience of more than 4 million monthly unique visitors.
The B5Media sites join Alloy Digital’s top ranking network of owned-and-operated web properties, including Gurl.com, Teen.com, and Smosh.com, which is also one of the top-three most subscribed to channels on YouTube.

Alloy Digital is the largest media and advertising network of young adult targeted websites, attracting more than 70 million consumers each month and reaching over 43% of P12-34 internet users. The network holds its position as a top-10 video network delivering several hundred million streams monthly and has ranked at top of its category for more than three consecutive years running according to industry measurement leader, comScore.
Read more: GlobeNewswire
Does Everyone Hate Banner Ads?
Whether you’re in advertising or not, at some point, everyone has been a banner ad hater. From a loud auto-initiated video at the office to an inundating takeover by Taylor Lautner – one that mysteriously became the background of my iPad and then wished me a “Happy St. Patrick’s Day” – we’ve all been victims of an unwanted, unwarranted, or irrelevant banner ad. Even when I tell people what I do, and mention online banner ads, their faces typically show a mild tolerance for the topic. Or they say flat-out, “I hate pop-ups.”
EMarketer estimates spending on U.S. online advertising will grow by nearly a quarter in 2012. However, banners’ projections are below average for the category. And they’ll continue to grow at a slower pace than other forms of online advertising such as paid search, video, and mobile. While banner click-through rates continue to decline, marketers are working to find more ways to validate that banner messaging resonates with consumers, from engagement to direct response metrics.Guess what? The secret is out: blasting billions of untargeted impressions to the masses and tracking latent activity is not an effective form of advertising – at least to some of us it is.

According to comScore Ad Metrix, AT&T, which has been the leader in advertising impressions for the last several years, served nearly 106 billion impressions in the U.S. during 2011. What’s more, the number of advertisers who served over 3 billion impressions in Q4 2011 increased from 24 to 46, compared to the same quarter the previous year. But let’s put this in context. EMarketer reported 231.9 million online users (18+) in the U.S. last year. So, if every adult watched an AT&T ad an even number of times, then it would have been seen an average of 456 times during the year. Yikes! Apparently we have a ways to go in shifting the paradigm.

Read more: ClickZ