Announcing Rocket Fuel’s Real-Time Brand Safety Shield
Brand Safety is a top priority for our brand advertisers and their agencies, and at Rocket Fuel we treat it as a matter of the utmost importance. So we’re proud to announce the details on how our Real-Time Brand Safety Shield provides the highest levels of brand assurance to our clients.
At Rocket Fuel we take a proactive approach, with three layers of defense that block bad sites and pages before we ever serve a single ad on them. By building additional levels of safety and security right into our platform and processes, we ensure our technology delivers both ROI and peace of mind for brands. We’ll have even more news in the coming weeks about the upcoming ad verification guidelines that we are helping to drive as part of a working group established to create brand safety verification guidelines. The working group is a joint effort between the IAB and the MRC (Media Rating Council).
Read More: Rocket Fuel
Casale Media Offers Advertisers Real-Time Bidding on Premium Online Media Inventory
casaleX Offers Premium Exchange for Publishers to Control and Choose Ad Campaigns; Grants Select DSPs and Agency Trading Desks Exclusive Access to Brand-Safe Inventory
NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire – Aug 10, 2011) – Casale Media Inc., a leading premium online media company, today announced casaleX, an offering that gives select demand side platforms (DSPs) and agency trading desks exclusive access to premium inventory from leading online publishers. casaleX, the industry’s first true premium exchange with real-time bidding (RTB), expands quality advertiser demand available to its publisher partners by integrating real-time bids from select agency trading desks and demand side platforms (DSPs) while still leaving its publishers with maximum control over ad campaigns.
Casale Media is the first premium online media technology company to transform the ad exchange model into a high quality, brand-safe media marketplace. Demand partners are carefully vetted and hand-selected before integration with casaleX to ensure advertisers most appropriate for its publishers. In turn, marketers access the highest quality above-the-fold inventory from Casale Media’s premium publisher roster. Casale Media’s publishing customers utilize RTB for a head-to-head comparison between agency trading desks, DSPs and Casale Media-sourced advertisers to see who can best monetize inventory. Publishers have unprecedented control of campaigns, choosing which advertisers and campaigns can bid for inventory.
Read More: marketwire
How To Monetize Your Content Online, Part II: Demand
In Part One of “How To Monetize Your Content Online,” I discussed the supply side of online publisher monetization, focusing on cultivating fans and working the “reader funnel” to drive audience engagement with four key steps:
1.Attract new audiences
2.Improve site recirculation
3.Move visitors upstream
4.Create loyal readers
But this is only half the battle. Quality content does not come cheap, and it is imperative for publishers to add new revenue streams as a multiplier to audience growth.
New Revenue Streams
While one half of the publisher puzzle is to increase audience engagement and move visitors into valuable pockets of your site, the other half is finding new ways to make money without subverting the user experience.
The last few years have seen advances in optimizing remnant display advertising but this approach really nibbles around the edge of the problem, with most of the revenue growth from these advances flowing to third-party intermediaries rather than to publishers directly. True revenue catalysts for publishers need to come from breaking the banner mold entirely and looking for more fertile ground.
Read More: BusinessInsider
Forecast Downgrades Global Ad Spend
With increasing jitters about the debt crises here and in Europe, and their impact on the world economy, another ad industry group has downgraded its prediction for global ad spending growth in 2011.
London-based WARC now says global spending will climb just 3.2% versus the more optimistic 4.6% it had predicted just a few months ago. If the new estimate proves correct, it would amount to less than half the average annual worldwide spending growth that occurred between 1981 and 2009 (6.8%), per the organization.
WARC did not provide a total dollar figure, but the revision follows similar downgrades from agencies that did offer dollar estimates as well as percentage downgrades.
Last month, Publicis Groupe’s ZenithOptimedia reduced its spending growth outlook by one-tenth of a point, to 4.1% or $471 billion. Also in July, WPP’s GroupM downgraded its forecast, knocking a full percentage point off its estimate — from 5.8% to 4.8% — to $506 billion.
Read More: MediaPost
Media Innovation Group Moves Beyond GroupM, Signs NEO@Ogilvy
Media Innovation Group, the ad technology business spun off two years ago out of WPP’s 24/7 Real Media online ad services unit and known primarily for its work with WPP’s GroupM media buying agencies, has begun actively offering its services to WPP’s entire company roster.
The most visible non-GroupM partner signed up so far is NEO@Ogilvy, the full-service digital unit of The Ogilvy Group.
While MIG’s initial industry visibility came through its media targeting and optimization service, called B3, it then developed its Zeus Advertising Platform — ZAP for short. The ZAP platform includes a wide range of advertising and analytics capabilities, such as ZAP Search, ZAP Ad Manager and ZAP Reporting, all built on top of an underlying data warehouse, said Jon Greenwood, MIG general manager.
That database and the ZAP technology, per Greenwood, now allows MIG to expand its services beyond media buying to any digital-related, data-driven marketing services offered to advertisers by any WPP agency. Greenwood, who has been working at MIG behind the scenes for “a few months” and took on his present role in March, said he’s in active discussions with WPP agencies in North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia.
Read More: MediaPost
Pandora IPO Prices At $16; Valued At $2.56 Billion.
Interactive Internet radio company Pandora Media Inc. continued the trend of hot Internet-related IPOs by pricing its shares at $16 apiece Tuesday night, above expectations.
The company sold 14.7 million initial public offering shares at a level that topped a boosted price range of $10 to $12. The company last week increased the number of shares sold by one million and the price range by $3 in the face of strong investor demand.
At $16 a share, the offering ended up raising $235 million, almost double the amount originally aimed for earlier this month. Pandora sold $96 million of stock, while shareholders, namely Hearst Corp., sold the rest. Pandora commands a market capitalization of $2.56 billion for a business that hasn’t made money and has no prospects of earnings at least through January.
Read More: WSJ
