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

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

DG announced today a strategic partnership for deeper collaboration in advertising technology between MediaMind, its online unit, and 24/7 Media, WPP’s marketing technology company.
The partnership could form the basis of a global – in scope and in media – advertising delivery system that unites television advertising with digital. Here’s the score card: MediaMind was recently acquired by DG, a company that acts as the delivery system for between 80 to 90 percent of television ads, as well as syndicated content.

The DG platform takes content and creative from agencies or post-production houses and delivers it over IP network or satellite to the network operations centers of broadcasters. 24/7 Media, acquired by WPP in 2007, provides its Zeus Advertising Platform, or ZAP, to WPP clients. ZAP is an audience-management platform that lets brand advertisers track the effectiveness of individual marketing elements and how they influence conversion.

The acquisition of MediaMind by DG is significant because it brings together capabilities for traditional TV advertising and digital, according to Andrew Bloom, SVP of corporate development for DG and MediaMind. He said, “You have a company that sits at the heart of the TV ecosystem buying a digital campaign management platform that does delivery, planning, buying, optimization and reporting. A roadmap is laid out for how a single platform could begin to address TV, digital TV, digital and social media.”
Read more: CLickZ
Think Globally, Act Mobile-ly
The rise of the mobile Internet is a worldwide phenomenon with distinct local manifestations. Significant differences from country to country argue against imposing a monolithic, global approach to mobile media – tactics or practices that work well in one market may not prove optimal in others. However, there is much to gain from comparing the evolution of mobile in different markets and from cooperating and sharing information across countries. With that in mind, last year the Interactive Advertising Bureau (where I work) established the mobile committee-global.
Consisting of staffers from IABs around the world working on mobile media in their markets, this group holds calls every two months to share information and insights, provide project updates, and facilitate mobile coordination between the various international IABs. As a kickoff project, the IAB has published a global mobile anthology providing insights into different countries’ experiences with mobile media, contributed by about a dozen of the global IABs. A few key themes emerge around adoption of voice and data and the state of basic and advanced mobile media.
Read more: ClickZ

SAN MATEO, CA – March 27, 2012 – Dedicated Media, a customer acquisition platform listed among comScore’s Media Metrix Top 50 U.S. web properties, and Aggregate Knowledge, a media intelligence company delivering the predictive analytics on which the world’s largest advertisers make their digital media decisions, today announced a partnership that includes integration of Dedicated’s SMARTstack technology with the patent-pending AK Media Intelligence Platform. As the media intelligence platform of record for Dedicated Media, the AK Platform will enhance targeting, audience analytics, media buying, and third-party data scorecarding.
The Dedicated Media SMARTstack ad delivery system processes millions of bits of data in milliseconds. SMARTstack will use the highly scalable AK Platform to collect, analyze, and optimize campaigns across thousands of attributes in real time to develop rich insights and to extract the maximum performance out of each impression in each campaign.
“Dedicated Media combines customized audience modeling with millions of primary and third-party behavioral data points, continuous real-time optimization, unparalleled reporting, and industry recognized brand safety to provide advertisers with unsurpassed results,” said Chris Berman, COO and co-founder of Dedicated Media. “This requires intelligent and predictive analytics across multiple channels packaged within a neutral platform to manage the data quickly and easily. The AK Platform is the perfect solution for us because of its sophistication. The easy-to-use dashboard gives us a powerful tool to buy media smarter every minute of every day.”
Read more: Aggregate Knowledge
Mobile Ad Serving Still In Test Mode Among Publishers
Publishers are in the very early stages of establishing mobile ad infrastructure, and they continue to try out a range of solutions in an already fragmented market. According to a survey of 95 online and mobile publishers fielded by InsightExpress on behalf of Mocean Mobile, almost half of respondents had at least tried DART for Mobile over the past two years, but 41% had also tested AdMarvel, 34% Mocean and 19% Nexage. And when it comes to the currently used solution for many publishers, DART (17%), AdMarvel (14%) and Mocean (13%) have to contend with 15% of the market that still relies on in-house or custom ad-serving technologies.

“There is a heck of a lot of experimentation going on,” says InsightExpress’s Joy Liuzzo. “When you see this much experimentation, it is indicative that folks are interested in learning.” “And they probably are not finding all of their needs solved in one place,” Liuzzo adds.

The research shows that publishers often are favoring different vendors for apps, mobile Web, video and rich media. In fact, the prominence of custom solutions in the mobile ad-serving mix suggests that many publishers still feel the need to knit things together. And the mobile media also find their own inventory fragmented across models.

About 45% of respondents say they are responsible for selling less than half of their own mobile ad inventory. Only 55% are selling 50% or more of their inventory. And in most cases, it is the ad sales group that is driving the decisions about which ad servers to use, not ad operations.

Read more: MediaPost

CPX Interactive Rolls Out Social Media Advertising Solutions
New York, NY, March 20, 2012 –(PR.com)– Digital advertising company CPX Interactive today announced the second in a series of 2012 product launches – a suite of social media display advertising strategies. CPX leverages its unparalleled online reach to deliver social media solutions that include a dedicated social media network vertical, custom social integrated ads, in-app and in-game display units, and a managed cost per fan program for the Facebook platform. The packaging of these services is designed to help advertisers better understand new options, metrics and ROI strategies in the emerging social media landscape.
“Since the early days of the digital advertising industry, CPX Interactive has proven its ability to successfully optimize display advertising campaigns against any desired metric. Social media is simply the latest environment for online display, but the fundamentals remain the same,” said Mike Seiman, CEO and founder of CPX Interactive. “Ultimately, successful execution of these strategies is predicated on our ability to target and optimize huge amounts of quality inventory. We are now packaging them in a way that more clearly illustrates the potential for display advertising within social media.”
Read more: pr.com

The State Of Rocket Fuel: CEO John Sees Impressive, Real-Time Bidding Impact

George John is CEO of Rocket Fuel, an online advertising technology company.

As part of its “State of…” series of articles with industry executives, AdExchanger.com spoke with John to discuss his company, his views on the space, and the state of Rocket Fuel today.

Click below or scroll down for more:

•RTB Impact On Display •The Ad Network & Company Positioning

•Revenue, Momentum •Trends Ahead for 2012 and 2013

•Mobile, Social And Rocket Fuel

•Milestones

AdExchanger: Are you seeing the impact you originally anticipated with real-time bidding (RTB) for PC‑based display?

GJ: It’s much better than I thought. If you consider the layers of sophistication around leveraging exchanges and liquid inventory, where “1.0″ was the original Right Media Exchange, and you’d log in and define your targeting rules and your bids, then “2.0″ was real-time bidding – but it doesn’t add anything to that style of buying.

Read more: AdExchanger

Today’s social media networking sites are conduits to build, expand, and reinforce brands’ relationships with its target audience. Social media in today’s brand management arena is not just about setting up a Facebook Page and post content that is no different from similar editorial material found on the corporate website. It is about brands building an online relationship with its customers that encapsulates trust, reliability, and service-centricity. Indeed, the intent of any social networking strategy must mirror the same focus and attention that offline relationships are built on over the years.
What this means is that it takes time for companies to create a profile on the social media environment to engage with the online community. Invariably, this approach raised questions on how brands should measure the success attributed to social media. This is especially tricky. Some brands perceive social media similar to the many digital channels available to advertisers, whereby there’s an implicit perception that measurement standards adopted for online advertising applies in social media.

In my opinion, the success metric from social media networking is improved sales revenue, and it has to be clearly attributed to the social media strategies implemented by the brand or its appointed agencies. This approach builds on the belief that discussions that that originate from social media networking will lead to revenue opportunities for brands and advertisers.
Read more: ClickZ
AOL Ad Platform Customizes Display
Hoping to attract more brand dollars, AOL has debuted a technology platform for marketers to customize the design, delivery and management of display advertising. Pictela Enterprise gives ad agencies a guided self-service interface to manage their clients’ brand assets and serve them directly into online display ads.

“We are putting the power of publishing in the hands of the ad agencies and their clients,” said Greg Rogers, senior vice president, premium formats at AOL and CEO of Pictela — which AOL acquired in late 2010.“Think of [Pictela Enterprise] as a content management system for ads.”

The platform is certified to serve its ad units across AOL, Advertising.com and most major online publishers.

Building on AOL’s Project Devil initiative, Pictela’s product suite of products and services includes a cloud-based platform for the creation, delivery and analysis of premium ads.

At launch, the system supports six IAB standard ad sizes, including 300×1050, 300×600, 970×90, 728×90, 160×600 and 300×250.

Read more: MediaPost

LOS ANGELES–(BUSINESS WIRE)–SocialVibe, a digital advertising technology company, today announced new milestones that further establish the company as the leader in the engagement advertising market. To date, the company has powered more than 500 opt-in engagement campaigns for more than 200 of the world’s leading brands including Toyota, Pepsi, GE and Disney. SocialVibe delivered advertisers more than 1.7 billion seconds of consumers’ active attention in 2011 by leveraging its unique engagement advertising technology platform and its network of premium publisher sites.
SocialVibe’s 2011 milestones include:

• Powered more than 500 engagement advertising campaigns for more than 200 leading global brands across five continents.

• Delivered 1.7 billion seconds of consumers’ active attention with brand messages.

• Doubled the number of engagements served compared to 2010.

• Amassed an extensive network of premium partner sites and apps to reach more than 100 million unique consumers every month.

• Integrated augmented reality technology into brand engagement ads, an industry first

• Published a research study with independent firm KN Dimestore that demonstrates more than 90 percent of people pay active attention to a brand message when interacting with a value exchange engagement ad.

• Introduced engagement advertising internationally into Latin America, and established a U.K. office to lead EMEA engagement efforts. • Secured $20 million in funding led by Norwest Venture Partners.

• Doubled company headcount over 2010.
Read more: BusinessWire
First Cross Channel Tracking Technology for Mobile Devices Unveiled by AdTruth
SAN JOSE, CA–(Marketwire – Feb 23, 2012) – AdTruth, a division of 41st Parameter — the global leader in device recognition technology used in fraud prevention and digital media — today unveiled a critical new capability of AdTruth’s DeviceInsight™ technology: Mobile Web to Mobile App Bridging. This allows marketers to recognize users across Mobile Web and App content enabling more effective mobile ad targeting while fully respecting consumer privacy.
Mobile usage continues to grow and the numbers are staggering; yet, there are real and pressing challenges in reaching mobile audiences effectively. Because so few mobile devices store cookies, tracking and targeting is extremely difficult. Even in cases where tracking is possible, a single user — using the same device to access both the Mobile Web and App-based content — will have two distinct identities: one based on the application they’re using and another based on their browsing behavior. In some cases, AdTruth identified more than a 90 percent overlap between these two audiences. This inaccurate audience recognition results in inefficiencies, wasted impressions and lower overall ROI for mobile advertising campaigns.
“The size, scope and marketing potential of the mobile industry continues to be underestimated,” said James Lamberti, vice president and general manager of AdTruth. “Mobile gaming revenue alone is nearly at par with Hollywood. It’s incredible. Unfortunately though, the capabilities for marketers to reach their audiences on mobile devices are very limited. What we’ve introduced today — the ability to recognize a single user across mobile apps or their mobile browser — is a big step toward removing a critical barrier to effective audience targeting. It’s going to allow marketers to do so much more.”
Read more: marketwire

As retailers increasingly embrace mobile to boost foot traffic and drive m-commerce, mobile advertising is expanding as well. To capitalize on that trend, mobile ad network Jumptap has partnered with hyperlocal data provider PlaceIQ and appointed a director of retail to oversee ad efforts in the category.

Through the alliance with PlaceIQ, Jumptap says it will allow advertisers to reach the precise areas most likely to contain members of their target audience, whether luxury shoppers, tourists, students or travelers.

PlaceIQ claims its ad-targeting technology creates a “hyperlocal digital index of the physical world,” by understanding not only what is there, but who is in a place, when, and what they’re doing.

While some of this is static data about a location (down to a city block), much of it is gleaned from user actions, like searches people perform or ads they click on in a given spot at a certain time via mobile devices.

The start-up claims its technology is “privacy-friendly,” since it profiles locations rather than people, without gathering or storing personally identifiable information (PII).In December, PlaceIQ landed $4.2 million in first-round venture funding.

Jumptap works with third-party data providers including Acxiom, TargusInfo, Datalogix and Polk to provide information about consumer demographics from purchase history to income level to what cars people own. That anonymized data helped double click-through rates for retail campaigns in the fourth quarter.

In addition to teaming with Place IQ, Jumptap announced its hiring of Matthew Mulderink as its first director of retail to lead strategy for retail publishers and advertisers. Prior to joining Jumptap, Mulderink was director of strategic accounts at ad optimization firm at Dotomi, acquired last August by ValueClick. He was previously in a similar role at Yahoo, working with retailers including Best Buy, Target and Sears.
Read more: MediaPost
SpotXchange First to Provide Auto- Versus User-Initiated Video Advertising Information to Real-Time Bidding Buyers
DENVER – February 21, 2012 – SpotXchange, Inc., the largest global marketplace of video ad inventory, today announced that it is the first real-time-bidding (RTB) supply source to offer its partners initiation type (auto-initiated versus user-initiated) information for video ad inventory in real time with every bid request.  This information will help SpotXchange’s RTB partners valuate inventory more effectively and make more efficient buying decisions.
There is a significant difference between auto- and user-initiated video ads, which results in two different user experiences.  An auto-initiated ad plays automatically when a user visits a web page, but the video ad does not block the user from viewing intended content.  User-initiated ads must be viewed by consumers before reaching their desired content, such as a video or game.  Because higher levels of consumer engagement are associated with user-initiated video ads, advertisers are willing to pay a premium for them.
Historically, however, user- and auto-initiated placements have been bundled together in brokered deals by ad networks and sold at a flat CPM.   With SpotXchange providing partners with initiation type information in real time with each bid request, SpotXchange’s RTB and direct buy partners can value each placement opportunity independently. This transparency coupled with robust audience data, leads to higher ROI for advertisers and increased yield for publishers, by providing high-quality inventory to the exchange.
Read more: SpotXchange