in.media » ad serving

News of the Day

Pramod Tummala — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 14:52:16 +0000

GLAM MEDIA TO ACQUIRE NING, THE LEADING PLATFORM FOR CREATING SOCIAL NETWORKS AND OWNED BRAND FAN WEBSITES
Silicon Valley Pioneer Marc Andreessen to Join Glam Media’s Board of Directors

Acquisition Will Create One of the Largest Social Media Content Companies with over 240 Million Users & 100,000 Publishers —Creating the First Paid, Owned & Earned Media Platforms for Brands

Silicon Valley, CA— Sept 20, 2011—Glam Media, Inc. (www.GlamMedia.com), the number one vertical social content platform company with the largest online global reach for women, today announced that it is acquiring Ning (www.ning.com), the leading online platform for building social websites, including more than 100,000 custom branded fan sites.

“Ning is the clear leader for creating custom social websites and communities. Acquiring Ning adds a natural extension to our social media platform, new distribution channels and a talented Silicon Valley team, all of which support our aim to connect brands with engaged, passionate audiences,” said Samir Arora, Chairman and CEO of Glam Media. “With the addition of Ning, Glam Media will truly become the first next generation media company in the post-social world.”

Since launching the first social blog community in 2005, Glam Media has experienced tremendous success, growing from just seven publishers and 12 authors to more than 2,500 publishers and 4,000 authors globally today. The company has trusted relationships with more than 1,000 leading brand advertisers and is a Top 10 web property with more than 85 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S. and more than 200 million globally.

Read More: MediaPost

News of the Day

Pramod Tummala — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:40:54 +0000

Rocket Fuel Goes Real-Time, Integrates Ad Targeting Data

Ads aren’t as effective as they could be. It takes data — lots of it — and many different kinds. Integrating survey data to improve real-time ad targeting, Rocket Fuel on Monday will unveil an update to Brand Booster that integrates survey results in any digital channel across all campaigns. The tool — built on the company’s Real-Time Targeting Platform — optimizes multichannel campaigns in real-time, tying metrics from display, video, mobile, and social advertising campaigns.

Brand Booster 2.0 aims to improve media buys based on awareness, preference and purchase intent, rather than proxy metrics like clicks that do not represent actual consumers going into a store to buy a product. The platform relies on brand data to make media-buying decisions in real-time.

George John, CEO of Rocket Fuel, said marketers typically don’t have access to brand survey results until after campaigns run or through manual reports that don’t easily integrate into media-planning tools as quickly as they should. It requires a quick response to make a difference.

The evolution of real-time ad serving and predictions based on the method creates new challenges for marketers. For Rocket Fuel clients, learning how to spend money wisely on campaigns means optimizing campaigns in real-time through answers to survey questions. The platform adjusts ads that serve up as questions are answered. A consumer products goods (CPG) company launching a new shampoo might need to know if consumers in Los Angeles would prefer a rose scent rather than carnation.

Read More: MediaPost

Standing Up for Audience Targeting

Last week, John Mracek, the CEO of NetSeer, commented that audience targeting is overrated and touted the benefits of contextual targeting. While I can appreciate that early-generation audience targeting lacked scale and performance causing industry-wide frustration, that was three years ago. At that point, audience targeting amounted to contextual-consumption data and the data markets of today were non-existent.

Fast forward to today. Much has changed although many solutions are still incomplete. Successful audience targeting requires an entirely new solution, as well as a fundamental shift in the way we think about audience and data. Opposed to contextual platforms, which have existed for nearly twelve years, true audience targeting is still in its infancy. Right now successful execution requires access to diverse sets of data that haven’t been widely available until recently, so it’s easy to understand why most people still believe that scalable audience targeting beyond context is unachievable.

However, to say that data is the new black is to say that having the opportunity to make informed decisions is in style and will come to pass. Utilizing data effectively helps contribute to better business decisions overall. That’s unlikely to change as time goes by and data becomes more integral to our businesses. While the term “data” is used quite loosely, user data can be used for much more than just targeting.

News of the Day

Adam Glantz — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 13:43:00 +0000

CLiP On: DBG Debuts Ad Platform

Getting into the distribution game, Digital Broadcasting Group just opened up its platform to allow third-party publishers to syndicate and monetize its online video.

The DBG Content Library Platform — or CLiP for short — debuted on Thursday with several launch partners, including Technorati and entertainment destination Ology.

Publisher partners will have access to roughly 20,000 original and licensed videos, including “The Confession,” starring Kiefer Sutherland, and “ControlTV,” produced by Seth Green.

“With more than 80% of Web users viewing video regularly, the cost to develop and program premium content on a regular basis is often the biggest deterrent for publishers of every size,” said DBG Chief Product Officer Matthew Corbin. “CLiP answers [these] increased demands.”

Read More: MediaPost

News of the Day

Jeff Kuntz — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 14:33:00 +0000

Vibrant CEO and Co-Founder Doug Stevenson Steps Down; CFO Jeff Babka Promoted to COO Running Day-to-Day Operations

NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire – Jul 13, 2011) – Vibrant Media, the leading provider of contextual advertising solutions, today announced that CEO and co-founder Doug Stevenson has stepped down from his CEO position. Vibrant co-founder Craig Gooding was named non-executive Chairman and will serve as strategic counsel with a focus on products and technology. CFO Jeff Babka has been promoted to COO while retaining his CFO responsibilities and is responsible for day-to-day management of the company.

“When I co-founded Vibrant, we were a small group of entrepreneurs passionate about realizing the potential of an important, sizeable market opportunity,” said Doug Stevenson. “Over the following 11 years, I led the team that transformed an early stage start-up to a profitable company with more than $100 million in revenue. It has been a rewarding and gratifying time, and given the company’s current strength and market position, I believe that now is the right time for me to step down and spend some time with my family. I’m confident that Vibrant will continue its aggressive growth, and make significant contributions to the web advertising space.”

“Vibrant has grown at a good clip during the last few years, and we’re excited about the opportunities ahead as more top brand advertisers and premium publishers see positive returns on their investments in contextual advertising,” said Jeff Babka. “We believe we’re well positioned to take advantage of the continued trend of offline ad dollars moving online and expect to see our growth rate increase as we deliver the industry’s best technology solutions for content-focused advertising.”

News of the Day

Pramod Tummala — Fri, 20 May 2011 14:20:39 +0000

With LinkedIn IPO, B2B Marketing Gets The Spotlight

Let’s face it: In the family of all-things-marketing, business-to-consumer (B2C) has long been the beautiful butterfly, showered with attention and accolades, with business-to-business (B2B) the boring bookworm relegated to reading heavy textbooks through thick glasses. The bookworm, however, is about to become a butterfly: LinkedIn, a B2B social network, is going public at what promises to be a huge valuation.

But first, why the raw deal for B2B historically? Granted, B2B marketers can be a little bit acronym heavy (you mean you don’t know what CRM or ERP means?), but really it’s just simple math. The marketing dollars spent trying to reach and sell products or services to businesses are significant but dwarfed by the hurricane of dollars unleashed annually by companies trying to reach consumers to sell them their next car, mortgage, vacation, cellphone or diet pill. In terms of advertising spend specifically, B2C ad spend will exceed $300 billion in 2011, with B2B about 10-15% of that.

News of the Day

Pramod Tummala — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 14:48:03 +0000

AOL Starts Mapping Plans For Huffington Post

AOL plans to focus more on video during the next year, expanding into Asia with products and offerings after setting up the infrastructure in the U.S. The company has high-definition studios in New York and California and recently bought a company supporting a network of videographers to provide production, distribution and monetization of content, according to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, speaking at the Signal L.A. conference in Los Angeles Tuesday.

Armstrong and Arianna Huffington, AOL president and editor in chief for the newly created Huffington Post Media Group, provided insight into the $315 million deal announced Monday. Federated Media Executive Chairman John Battelle led the discussion.

Some reports suggest that the political content attracted AOL, but Armstrong calls that theory “a red herring” because 85% of content or traffic on HP doesn’t have anything to do with politics. “Our interest in buying the Huffington Post was about the social content and the future in distribution and, frankly, Arianna’s TLC around the content space,” Armstrong said.

Read More: MediaPost

Specific Media CTO McCartney joins VisualDNA

He was instrumental in building the Adviva ad-serving platform which Specific Media acquired and on which its offering is based. He joins VisualDNA as CTO to help the company scale up.

According to VisualDNA founder and CEO Alex Willcock, “McCartney started last week and is building out our platform to enable massive scale. It’s a big coup for us.”

In the coming weeks, VisualDNA intends to tie up with demand-side platform AppNexus, synching data so that media agencies can buy against it.

“We’re getting a lot of traction in that we collect first-party, opt-in data, when there’s very little high quality data around,” said Willcock.

News of the Day

Jeff Kuntz — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:28:17 +0000

Cox Merges Adify With Digital Sales Arm

Aiming to reduce redundancy and offer more integrated online ad services, Cox Media Group said Tuesday it will merge its Cox Cross Media and Adify units to form Cox Digital Solutions. The new company will be led by Cox Cross Media head Steve Shaw and promises to facilitate online buys across Cox Media properties and third-party niche content networks.

Adify, which helps publishers build vertical networks and serves ads across the 180 networks it powers, was acquired by parent Cox Enterprises in 2008 for $300 million. The move has helped Cox expand its online ad operations and create vertical networks around its own properties, which include newspapers and radio and TV stations as well as related Web sites.

In 2009, for instance, Cox used Adify to build an auto-related ad network around its AutoTrader.com brand. Now the company will tie the Adify platform more tightly into its own digital ad operations to offer agencies and advertisers more efficient placement across its 1,300 local media sites in 145 markets as well as national reach through the more than 7,000 specialty publishers it works with. That adds up to traffic of about 135 million unique visitors a month, according to Cox.

Read More: MediaPost

New Year, New Attribution Model

A few years ago, marketers discovered that most of the conversions happened without an associated click in display advertising. Then, a little while later, view-based conversions were added to the performance metric. While it was a small step forward, the obvious question is: if the last click is not always indicative of the user’s decision to convert, why would the last view be any better? In short, it’s not.

In an earlier ClickZ column, I discussed the importance of going beyond the last click or last ad impression and described why an incorrect attribution model will lead to suboptimal results. Well, a new year calls for a new model – multi-touch attribution where all interactions within an association window are considered to have influences over a user’s conversion.

The power of digital advertising offers more than just targeting with higher precision; it also provides instantaneous feedback on how ads perform. With consumers exposed to increasingly more ad impressions and interactions of different media types, it’s become harder than it should be to explain how each event along the path to conversion affects the user’s decision. In the analytics sense, the current flawed last-touch attribution model suffers from the lack of a probability framework. Since the last touch (click or view) is defined by the conversion event, it’s difficult to calculate the probability. Therefore, it’s nearly impossible to measure the true influence of the last touch.

News of the Day

Adam Glantz — Thu, 27 May 2010 13:59:47 +0000

Yahoo’s Bartz Promises Movement on Ad Products and Revenue

Yahoo’s Carol Bartz hinted at new offerings for CPG advertisers and the long-awaited transition to the APT ad serving platform this morning at the company’s annual meeting for investors. Repeating the firm’s recent “science, art, and scale” mantra, Bartz promised investors the company will deliver when it comes to driving revenue and better monetizing ad inventory. Bartz said Yahoo has been actively marketing its display offerings to advertisers and agencies, but more surprising, said the firm has been running product tests on behalf of consumer packaged goods advertisers. She hinted that Yahoo is helping CPG advertisers better understand how online activity informs real-world shopping behavior. “We’re very, very immersed with some customers in how to marry the online/offline experience,” she told the investor audience. “CPG is getting very interested in these things,” she continued, adding that Yahoo can set up product sample trials at scale with two million consumers rapidly. “We’re out there testing that; we’re out there marketing it,” she said. Bartz also hinted the company will unveil new display ad capabilities later today during the investor event. “You are going to see special creativity, special art for online advertising,” she said. “Not enough creativity has gone into what the medium will allow,” said Bartz, lamenting that currently online advertising is not creative enough and often simply mimics print or other media creative.

Read More: MediaPost

Wired Introduces Adobe-Built IPad Edition

Wired magazine has introduced its much-anticipated iPad edition, a slick $4.99 app that was built by Adobe in a 10-month development process despite Apple’s midstream ban on software written with Adobe Flash. Adobe wound up writing the code in Objective-C, an Apple-approved language. At first look, the app, an enhanced version of the June issue, appears to push magazines further toward their potential on tablet computers. That’s partly because the graphics that play a big part in Wired’s print edition lend themselves to interaction and animation, but the app also introduces some elements that other magazines can readily adopt. Readers can slide their fingers on certain pages to see a Lego Lamborghini assembled brick by brick, for example, or to rotate Mars and pull up information on the spacecraft that have landed at different spots on its surface. Video could show the same progressions, but touch control seems more involving.

News of the Day

Adam Glantz — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:30:23 +0000

RTB Platforms: Lessons From Wall Street?

Real-time-bidding platforms are the buzz in the digital advertising space, heralded as the future of the ad biz with the potential to return the industry to the profitability of Mad Men glory days. Proponents argue that the efficiency that RTB platforms provide will have a transformative effect, altering Madison Avenue’s business from selling “sizzle” to the Wall Street model of delivering returns. Yet given the evolving state of the advertising business and Wall Street’s recent flirtation with our economy’s collapse, are we ready to bet the future of our industry on an unproven model? More importantly, what lessons can be taken from the recent banking debacle to ensure that RTB platforms are able to deliver on all the hype?

1. Standards – Financial markets are predicated on the idea that information about assets is what drives market efficiency. If RTB platforms are to deliver on the promise of efficiency, the display markets need a trusted source of information. Even in light of the recent economic crisis, few would dare buy a financial instrument that had not been rated by an independent, third-party authority. Like financial trading markets, RTB platforms will require a standardized system of metrics that enable buyers and sellers to evaluate transactions across common terms. And in the case of digital media, such standards must encompass the quality, the brand safety and value of those impressions being traded. Without a standardized set of metrics through which to evaluate inventory, RTB platforms will just be another iteration of rate-card-based buying.

Read More: MediaPost

A New Data Player

An old Ad.com colleague of mine, Mike Peralta, recently joined a newly launched start-up called Magnetic, which you can read more about here. In short, the company provides DSPs and their kind with search behavior data to use in display retargeting campaigns. I told Mike, I find it odd that this is the first time I’m hearing of a provider who does this. Especially since Yahoo! based their entire behavioral targeting business on this principle years ago. But here we are, with another way to retarget valuable customers, and I think its a really good one for a few reasons (not just because Yahoo already did it, which isnt always a good reason.)
- It will get more display marketers thinking about the interplay between display and search.
- Unlike offline data, search data is easy to update in real time or near real time.
- There is a lot of it, so a lot of people can play and experiment to find what works.
So while I have publicly cautioned against the “more is more” pile-on effect we are seeing in the data space right now, I do think search data has a justified place at the table.

News of the Day

Jeff Kuntz — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:46:08 +0000

Aggressive Data Mining May Prompt Federal Regulation

Technological advances and a public now used to sharing information online has led to a new frontier for marketers, one in which they can mine rich data troves and serve up relevant and useful advertising. But marketers are risking the wrath of regulators and the public. Marketers are now taking offline data (income, credit rating, home value, savings) and merging that with online data. The offline data — including extremely sensitive, personally identifiable information — has been used by the direct marketing industry for decades. But only recently have marketers begun to connect it to online behavior. But it’s getting more common. “The line between merging online and offline data isn’t no-man’s land anymore; it’s becoming more of a common practice,” said Mike Zaneis, Washington lobbyist for the Interactive Advertising Bureau.