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.”
Read More: Marketwire
AccuStream Research: Video Advertising Networks, Media Serving Platforms and Exchanges positioned to Reap Net Revenue of $1.4 Billion In 2011
SEASIDE, Calif., July 12, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Video advertising networks, media serving platforms, auctions and exchanges are on track to achieve $1.4 billion in CPM share, transaction and fee-based revenue in 2011, a 67.5% annual rate of growth, according to a sector analytics report produced by AccuStream Research.
The report, Video Advertising Networks, Serving Platforms and Exchanges 2007 – 2014: Inventory, Gross Media Spend and Net Revenue Analysis, is a comprehensive segment-by-segment appraisal of inventory formats delivered, represented, sold, served and mediated by each platform provider, or cleared through real time bidding (RTB) environments.
Net revenue estimates are derived from total inventory and gross media spend, weaving together the complete market managed by each provider. Net revenue is gross media spend minus publisher payouts, applicable when the platform provider also represents and places inventory.
The sector participants analyzed ran $6.26 billion in aggregate media spend across their platforms in 2010, with $3.1 billion attributable to video campaigns or inventory.
Video inventory, sellout rates, corresponding CPMs, participation percentages and serving fee data is aligned with business model analytics surrounding in-page video serving, premium and remnant/3rd party pre-roll sales with ad serving, exchanges, plus multi-platform operations are detailed across expanding global operations.
Each video advertising network and platform is analyzed by total inventory (exclusive, non-exclusive, monthly and annually), business model, participation ranges, CPMs by format. In-depth Q & A’s augment the report’s analytics.
In-page video and rich media platform players include Eyewonder, Pointroll, MediaMind, FreeWheel, Limelight MMP and Google’s DoubleClick.
Read More: PRNewswire
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.
Read More: Forbes
Getting the most from creative optimization tools
Online marketing is notorious for going through fads faster than you can say, click. But for many industry veterans, dynamic creative optimization (DCO) was different. It seemed like the real deal. Companies like Tumri and Teracent pioneered this new technology back in 2008, and ushered in an exciting change and opportunity for advertisers. The promise of self-optimized campaigns where machine learning algorithms shoot millions of ad variations into the virtual ether and ensure that consumers get the most relevant messages seemed to have marked the beginning of a new era. This really was the “next big thing.”
But was it all for naught? Even with all the buzz, creative optimization never really outgrew its awkward teenage phase; today, it’s still more of a niche solution. There are no formal figures that exist for this market, but our recent analysis looked at the commonly accepted categories of creative optimization: targeting, retargeting, and optimization/testing and estimated revenue for companies that provide solutions for each. This rough analysis suggested that in 2010 the combined revenue of these companies totaled around $100MM — $120MM, which doesn’t really spell success. (If you come up with different figures, I would love to see them.)
Read More: iMediaConnection
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.
Read More: New Media Age
5 ad operations tips for the year ahead
As we evaluate our successes and shortcomings from 2010, and set expectations for 2011, it’s always good practice to review the work that your team developed, and the processes by which they did so. I wanted to take a moment to share, with the online advertising community, some of the observations and ideas that we’ll be using to build a stronger ad operations process for the year ahead, and beyond. Here are five ad operations tips to get your 2011 off to a great start.
1. Review workflow, processes, and templates
In all probability, the last quarter of 2010 was a hectic time, with your ad ops teams working extended hours, implementing makeshift processes, and coming up with temporary solutions. Traditionally, workload drops drastically in Q1 and the pressure is significantly lower. Hence, the beginning of 2011 presents an ideal opportunity to review workflow, processes, and templates.
Read More: iMedia Connection
