Many of us in this industry have been fighting the good fight for a long time now to make display advertising a better outlet for brand dollars. And, if we get it right, everyone wins. But up to this point, the focus has almost entirely been on better technology. That’s not going to cut it.

From my rough calculations, the vast majority of venture-capitalist dollars, roughly $2.5 billion of $5.7 billion in the first half of 2011 alone, and strategic exits have focused on the automation of the sales and buying process, targeting and optimization.

Improving technology obviously has its benefits, but as an industry we have a bigger problem to fix: the essence of display advertising itself. We are all so caught up on acronyms and technology that we sometimes forget what it is that we are doing: We are in the business of advertising. The problem? A lot of display ads are not noticed. Beyond click-through rates hovering at fractions of fractions of a percent, 43 percent of users say they ignore and disregard banner advertising. To fix this, we need to change the economics: fewer and bigger ads. Not just bigger ads, but fewer.

Read More: Digiday

Meet Your Audience (for the Second Time)

These days, advertising and data platforms are giving marketers a wealth of information that can be used to validate their strategies and optimize their digital campaigns for better performance. There’s a lot of data to sort through – some more useful than others. Sometimes, good campaign optimization comes down to the basics: understanding who your audience is, and why they are doing what they are doing.

Let’s look at a real-life example of a digital display campaign, run through the digital ad agency of a popular mattress retailer. The agency wanted to test new inventory sources for the campaign by running broadly on general interest sites, evaluating the demography of audiences that showed purchase intent, and optimizing over the course of the campaign to maximize impact.

A theory being tested was that older audiences, who report more difficulty sleeping than younger demographic groups, would respond more favorably to the retailer’s online display ads. Campaigns were initially skewed to sites that over-indexed against an audience composed of ages 50 and older.

Read More: ClickZ

Unruly Adds $25M In Effort To Scale Social Video Campaigns

Anxious to scale its social video advertising platform, Unruly just secured a $25 million Series A investment from Amadeus Capital Partners, Van den Ende & Deitmer and Business Growth Fund. Since its debut in 2006, the London-based company claims to have executed over 1,400 social video campaigns, while delivering, tracking, and auditing 1.34 billion user-intended video views.

“We set out to help brands capture the massive opportunity in social video,” said Unruly founder and Group CEO Scott Button.

Unruly’s proprietary technology, RAMP (Real-time Amplification and Measurement Platform) powers social video campaigns for Old Spice, Electronic Arts, adidas, Unilever, T-Mobile and Coca-Cola.

It also had a hand in spreading Evian’s “Roller Babies,” T-Mobile’s “Life’s for Sharing,” Coca Cola’s “Happiness Factory” series, and Old Spice’s “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaigns.

Profitable since 2009, Unruly reported full-year revenue of $25 million in 2011, and a current revenue run-rate nearing $50 million.

Industrywide, social video campaigns generated 2.7 billion views in 2010 and more than 8 billion views in 2011, and are predicted to generate 20 billion views in 2012, according to Unruly.

Read More: MediaPost

Auto Booster Ad Technology Platform Integrates Brand and Direct Response Campaigns to Integrate Traditionally Isolated Advertising Efforts for Maximum ROI

REDWOOD SHORES, CA–(Marketwire – Oct 12, 2011) – Rocket Fuel Inc. (rocketfuel.com), the leading real-time ad targeting company, today officially launched Auto Booster(SM), a transformative technology platform that boosts the efficiency and effectiveness of brand and direct response campaigns for the automotive industry. Rocket Fuel announced the new technology platform today at the J.D. Power Automotive Internet Roundtable, taking place October 12-13 in Las Vegas.

What Auto Booster Does:

• Auto Booster helps automotive marketers connect brand advertising efforts with direct response campaigns — so all digital campaigns are jointly optimized to maximize both long-term national brand impact and localized campaign-attributed sales.
• Auto Booster optimizes results at every level of the funnel by collecting and analyzing synchronized learnings and data from multiple types of campaigns. No longer do auto marketers have to use proxy metrics such as click-through rate (CTR) to understand the value of branding or consideration efforts. Auto Booster can optimize digital media — in real-time, as the campaign is running — to deliver the greatest boost in awareness, consideration, purchase intent, or any other brand goal. As the only solution of its kind available on the market, Auto Booster provides automotive marketers with increased effectiveness and scale — as well as cost savings.

Read More: Marketwire

Greystripe Launches Next Generation of Mobile Ads Featuring Social Media Integration, Local Content and Deals

Ad Boosters feature industry firsts in social and vertical market targeting

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today Greystripe, the largest brand-focused mobile ad network and part of the ValueClick family (Nasdaq: VCLK), is introducing the next generation of mobile advertising with its new Ad Boosters. These new ad units were developed with the goal of making advertising more relevant, contextual and valuable to consumers.

Greystripe has developed two types of Ad Boosters: industry-focused units and social units. With its industry-focused ad boosters, Greystripe is the first company to introduce mobile ad formats focused on a specific, targeted vertical. Verticals include: retail, consumer packaged goods, automotive, travel, technology, health and restaurants. These customizable boosters allow advertisers to direct users to specific actions related to the advertiser’s need. The retail booster, for example, includes a Find Store button, a Coupon button and a Buy Now button.

Social Boosters allow marketers to enhance the impact of mobile advertising with engaging social connections including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube.

Read More: Businesswire

Ooyala Customizes Video Analytics For Facebook

Ooyala launched an integration tool Thursday that gives companies like ESPN and Miramax direct access to real-time analytics from Facebook’s 800 million active users who view and share videos. The insights provide data to serve up custom content.

Custom Analytics with Business Dimension Reporting for Ooyala Analysts allows publishers to customize and track video performance across audience segments. Publishers leveraging Facebook Connect can track demographic and psychographic statistics, such as age, gender, location and interests to create more targeted and relevant video viewing experiences for their users. Data is collected based on tags, rather than information associated with individuals.

Alex Holub, director of product management at Ooyala, said the technology supports uploaded content distributed online to laptops, desktops, mobile, tablets and other devices.

Analysis provides domain reports. When the content goes viral, the report provides information on the URLs. It also offers a graphical view of where content is consumed by country, and in the United States, by state. The platform also tracks the length of time viewers watch the videos, along with any ads that appear in the videos.

Read More: MediaPost

Value-based optimization delivers up to a 45% better response from high-value customers, and improves return on ad spend by up to 80% for companies in financial services and technology sectors, according to a DataXu study released Thursday. The stats come along with an emerging marketing objective from the company.

DataXu CEO Mike Baker said brands and agencies have been asking for value-based optimization. It factors in the price of the item that consumers view or purchase to identify the value of customers. The information is used to automatically optimize campaigns not only based on volumes of sales, but on the most profitable customers. The strategy relies on measuring against an aggregated baseline driving cost per action (CPA) and integrating in real time online shopping cart values and sales data.

“You now can use ad exchanges and DSPs to maximize profitable sales,” Baker said. “One brand told us that even though they drive many sales online, many of them are ROI negative because they have ad networks that they’re paying for conversions, but the conversions are a very low value. They hope one out of 10 of those conversions are a high-spending customer, but that’s a random hope.”

Read More: MediaPost

Ad Buyers Embrace Digital, Publishers Lag

While major publishers continue to drag their feet, agency display media buyers are investing big in both new ad products — from audience targeting to custom creative — as well as adopting new buying methods like real-time bidding, according to Forrester Research.

As such, Forrester analyst and report author Michael Greene recommends that publishers meet client needs by “investing in creative capabilities, complementing sales and ops teams with strong technology and focusing on developing high-quality audiences.”

This past June, Forrester surveyed agency media buyers about the current and projected state of their media-buying practices on behalf of their interactive-marketing clients.

It found that buyers rely on a range of media execution partners. “A strong majority of buyers buy through a variety of direct and indirect sales channels,” according to Greene. Indeed, 58% of display buyers reported that they buy through a mix of direct sales, ad networks and DSPs/trading desks.

Programmatic buying is also becoming a preferred buying method, Forrester found, as sales teams may be caught up playing phone tag with buyers, while buyers are quickly embracing the workflow efficiencies of programmatic buying — typically through real-time bidding.

Read More: MediaPost

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

Today, AudienceScience is announcing that Jeff Hirsch will be stepping down as CEO of the company and Jeff Pullen will take over in the chief executive role after joining the company a year ago. Link coming to the press release.

AdExchanger.com: Why is AudienceScience making this change now?

JEFF HIRSCH: My desire to focus on my strengths and the needs of the company drove the change. I have been with AudienceScience for almost five years, taking over as CEO three years ago. In that time, we have more than quadrupled in revenue, established a solid global presence and expanded exponentially in terms of personnel resources.  Of course, with that kind of growth the job of the CEO changes. There’s a lot more operational and human resource work than a lot of people realize, for example.  Doing that job took me out of the market for the most part.  My passion is working with clients to clarify what makes us a great company and talking about the changes that are happening in the industry. The job of CEO of a 200 person + company simply doesn’t allow enough time to be in the field. That’s where I want to be and that’s where the company needs me.  With that, AudienceScience needs another executive to help steer the ship toward continued profitability and sustained growth. Jeff Pullen is the guy to do that. Jeff and I have been friends for years and have developed the kind of trust and communication that this configuration will require. We have worked together in the past and I’ve worked with him as a member of the board. We’re a formidable team.

Read More: AdExchanger

Video Advertising Strategy: Audience Optimization

Video is an increasingly important online advertising channel for both branding and performance. In last month’s column, “Video Advertising Strategy Part 1: The Metrics,” we discussed how to choose the right combination of metrics for your campaign success. This time, let’s look at how we can enhance the branding and performance of a video campaign using the latest real-time audience targeting and optimization tools. Video ads are highly engaging and much more expensive to deliver than traditional display ads; therefore, we need to be much more precise with our audience targeting approach.

Let’s look at the following four areas for a winning video ad campaign strategy:

Optimization: The required component of optimization is to apply the same predictive learning process available in display to your video campaign. Predictive learning is incredibly powerful when combined with a real-time feedback loop of the user engagement and campaign success metrics. Predictive learning optimizes both the targeting and bid price paid when buying a video ad impression and the technology should come as an integrated part of your media platform (aka demand-side platform or DSP). The effectiveness of the optimization depends on the quality of the platform’s algorithms combined with the type of success metrics fed into the system. Plugging in different real-time response metrics, such as ad engagement, advertiser website engagement, or brand survey responses will lead to correspondingly different optimization outcomes. Therefore, using the appropriate tools to monitor and understand the implications of these changes through in-flight analytics and data visualization is a must-have for maximizing video campaign performance.

Read More: ClickZ

Industry veteran Pooja Kapoor to lead efforts to help large publishers embrace holistic strategies to maximize their digital ad revenue

New York, NY – March 28, 2011– Admeld (www.admeld.com), the company that helps the world’s top online publishers sell ads smarter, today announced the appointment of Pooja Kapoor as director, Strategic Advisory Services (SAS). Kapoor, a seasoned online advertising veteran, will be responsible for developing and leading strategic consulting engagements with the industry’s largest publishers. She will report to Jason Kelly, Admeld’s chief media officer. Kelly was previously VP of strategy and revenue management at Time Inc. Digital, and prior to that he managed numerous strategic consulting engagements for premium publishers at Rapt and Microsoft Advertising.

“In an increasingly complex ecosystem, publishers are looking for guidance on how to realize potential revenue opportunities by evolving their sales, operational, and technical infrastructures,” said Kelly. “Pooja’s expertise will help publishers overcome these challenges and successfully implement strategies to maximize the value of their inventory and audiences.”

Read More: AdMeld

The Two Jobs of a Great Engineering Team

It isn’t hard to explain at a high level what Magnetic does. In the simplest formulation, we use search data to target online advertising across the Internet.  That is the mission of our business.

To succeed in our mission we need to solve many engineering and business problems. First, we must provide our customers with access to enough of the right data for them to effectively target to meet their campaign goals.  To do this, we give marketers a scalable, powerful and yet simplified solution to create, manage and review the success of their campaigns.  Additionally, with billions of targeting actions per month being executed across Magnetic’s platform, we need to analyze our data in order to identify ways to better serve our customers.

So, while the high-level description of our business might seem straightforward, the engineering and product problems aren’t so simple.  Above all, there are two rules we use to distill the responsibilities of Magnetic Engineering into a core team mission statement: keep our products running, and continuously improve our products.

Read More: Magnetic

Martini Ads Target Affluent Consumers’ Offline Buys

Usama Fayyad has joined Martini Media’s board of directors. A data analytics scientist and architect of the Yahoo data systems, Fayyad will help the company develop the next generation in ad targeting technology. The platform aims to connect advertisers with consumers generating annual income of $100,000+. This group makes up 25% of the Internet population, but holds about 70% of the spending.

Branding that leads online consumers to make purchases offline has become an art — rather than direct purchases — especially for big-ticket items, such as cars and gems. mInstinct, the new targeting platform from Martini Media, allows marketers to insert ads that brand companies, products and services.

Fayyad will work to move the platform from “applied research” to “theoretical research” to “Martini 2.0,” making sure it supports brands that want to quickly scale up campaigns. The work will close gaps between audience targeting methods — contextual, demographic, behavioral, psychographic, and social-graph targeting — developing a closed-loop system that creates a direct pipeline from publishers to the most affluent audience online.

Read More: MediaPost

Display advertising will make a leap this year in an effort to keep up with changes across the Internet. Microsoft and Vibrant stepped up innovations, each separately releasing new ad units and technology this week.

Vibrant plans to release a suite of contextual tools for display ads beginning Thursday. The first in a line that will roll out this year taps semantic analysis, frequency of words, page positioning, source code data and demographics to determine contextual relevancy. The technology matches ad copy to the content in articles that appear on the Web page.

The company’s creative services team designs and builds VIA Dynamic ads with live feeds that enable the advertiser’s ad to match the page context in real-time, creating unprecedented contextual relevancy.

A typical Bertolli pasta ad would post on an Italian cuisine cooking Web site. With Vibrant’s VIA Dynamic technology, that same Bertolli ad would dynamically adjust to feature keywords and phrases from articles on the page such as ingredients, restaurants and chefs — enabling a more precise match between page and ad. VIA Dynamic also features Multivariant Creative Optimization, which helps performance by changing the ad’s background color, fonts and call to action.

Read More: MediaPost

AudienceScience, Tumri Partner To Boost Audience Targeting

In an effort to ingratiate clients with more dynamic and targeted creative, behavioral targeting firm AudienceScience on Thursday is expected to announce a partnership with Tumri.

Initially, AudienceScience will use Tumri’s Ensemble optimization platform to boost audience targeting. The partners have also developed a display ad platform that offers more targeting options for brands.

“The self-serve platform makes our display ad creation process more streamlined,” Jeff Hirsch, CEO of AudienceScience, said of the partnership. Regarding early tests, Hirsch added: “We’ve been able to improve the quality and speed of dynamic audience targeting.”

Per the Tumri deal, new applications include display ad optimization, product level re-targeting and display ad personalization, along with additional analytics.

Read More: MediaPost

There appears to be good momentum in digital advertising for ad verification solutions, but where does it all end up?   Can a “point solution” evolve into a sustainable, long-term business within the ad technology stack?

I’d argue more “points” will need to be added – especially if these companies want to “exit.” But first, let us review…

A Brief History

When pure-play ad verification companies arrived on the scene nearly two years ago, ad networks and publishers rejoiced.

[Record scratch sound here!]

Hardly.  Agencies have been the happy ones.

As you may know, ideally with third-party ad verification solutions, agencies get to verify what they’re buying from ad networks and publishers as it’s stated on their insertion order (I.O.) agreements. For example, ad verification might confirm that a particular geographic requirement has been met (“target U.S. users only”) or that the context of the content in which an ad runs is deemed in or out of context.

Another benefit for agencies is that it allows them to say to their marketer client that they are insuring brand safety for the marketer’s campaign. With marketer’s hesitant to put their ad spend into digital, ad verification helps overcome the traditional mindset.

To date, it appears challenges still remain around ad verification being reactive rather than proactive. Rather than preventing an ad from being served before it hits a page, the technology may find out after the ad is served that it was an inappropriate placement. No doubt agencies want to prevent the phone call from the marketer: “I just saw my cell phone ad in a Gawker story about Brett Favre’s latest misstep.”

Read More: AdExchanger

AdMeld On Data

Close the blinds, publishers, as the AV club nerd sets up the film projector (wheezing the whole time): today’s educational film comes from revenue optimizer AdMeld and is called, “Data Is the New Black.” There’s a lot of confused and fearful chatter in the hallways these days about data, but do you actually know the many things that comprise user data? Or what collectors do once they get data? The video talks about real dilemmas such as data leakage, but also offers smart ways to make data selling work for you, including conversing with data buyers to learn more about your audience – all to a hip soundtrack made on space-age synthesizers. We hope everyone is mature enough to watch this video because, no, you don’t need a permission slip from your parents to view it on YouTube.

Read More: AdExchanger

Do You Have What — and Whom — It Takes to Compete in a Digital World?

We live in a world that’s increasingly connected, digital and mobile, and influenced by social networks. The shopping and media-consumption patterns of consumers are evolving at a dizzying clip. Entire industries such as travel and music have been largely reshaped almost overnight. Multibillion-dollar, digitally enabled companies evolve in a few short years.

All of this has the management teams of all sorts of companies asking a key question: “Are we prepared to operate in an increasingly technology-driven world?”

Companies that have the right leaders in place will be able to answer with a confident “Yes.” Spencer Stuart recently completed a global and multisector study to provide insights into this very issue. Through 50 interviews with top-level executives in nine industry sectors across North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region, we honed in on a series of best practices for companies building their organization’s digital capabilities. Here are the top four pillars for solving the digital-leadership challenge:

Senior-level buy-in. Investments in digital require the appropriate buy-in and support of the board, CEO and top leadership because of the breadth of digital’s impact on the company. Digital is about more than simply a new approach to marketing campaigns; success ultimately will be measured by the seamless integration of technologies across advertising, direct response marketing, sales, supply chain, public relations, employee communications, and supplier and vendor relationships.

Read More: AdAge

Looking to make their display ads more appealing to advertisers and agencies, Yahoo today announced on its blog that it has plans to buy Dapper, a mashup technology to bring the advantages of search-based advertising into the world of display ads.

Dapper’s technology lets users easily set up their display ad preferences online, such as total amount to spend on a campaign, and put the most updated and accurate website information into display ads. For example, an e-commerce website selling electronics would be able to showcase its most recent sales items in its display ads in real-time.

The company launched back in 2008 when companies like Yahoo ironically were saying their display ads were declining and rumors had it that companies like Yahoo and Google were working on their own similar technology.

Competitor LucidMedia, a similar platform for optimizing display ads, was used by Yahoo Right Media in 2008 to ensure that advertisers’ creative display advertisements appear alongside relevant content on publishers’ sites.

When the company launched, results were promising but not well documented due to the early stages. Today, Dapper appears to showcase some impressive statistics, including results of 2 1/2 and 8 times higher engagement from consumers.

Read More: VentureBeat.com

AppNexus Raises $50M! And We’re Hiring…

I’m super excited to announce that, as of today, we’ve closed on a $50M Series C funding. We’ve raised this round from existing investors and one of our key strategic clients, Microsoft. I think this is a great validation not just of the company, but also of the real-time bidding (RTB) space in general. You can read more about it in our press release found here

Also… we are hiring across the board! We are looking for great talent – especially on the engineering side. From rock-star, amazing engineers and product managers (ranging from junior, entry-level to team leads and directors) to work on data pipelines, adserving and bidding, user-interfaces, web services and general management. If you are someone amazing — or know someone amazing — that might want to work on some crazy, globally-distributed technology, send them my way (mike at appnexus dot com) or check our careers site here: http://www.appnexus.com/careers/

For you less technical folks, we are also hiring for services, account management, finance and marketing!

Read More: MikeOnAds.com

For Content Owners, Digital Changes Everything

In two weeks I will be leading two discussions at The CTAM Summit in New Orleans. I will be joined by an amazing group of innovators and leaders in the content and content marketing space to dig into how “social media” is impacting the content landscape. In preparing for the discussion, it is daunting and exciting to consider the number of ways that social media is affecting every aspect of how content creators and distributors operate. When you think about the questions surrounding the viewer/consumer life cycle and touch points, you can see just how pervasive change is going to be. 

Viewer acquisition/marketing - Methods for reaching consumers with advertisements are changing for every marketer, from CPG to content producers. But while many CPG brands have been around for generations, content companies are looking for ways to create brands every day. This means that finding the required effective reach to launch new shows and drive tune-in, is paramount to content companies thriving in a new media landscape. How will content owners solve the challenges facing all marketers in a way that meets their unique needs? Content companies do actually have some advantages here.

Content creation/distribution – The changes in consumer content consumption habits, especially time- and screen-shifting, will forever change the way content creators produce programming and plan distribution. Should separate content be develop for mobile and Web? Should the programming be pre-released or delayed for digital viewers? Is there an effective strategy for building an audience through social media distribution and then scaling distribution through traditional channels? What about the other way around? Can social media be used to test content and adjust to audience preferences in real time? (Hint: the answer to the last one is a very big YES.)

Read More: MediaPost

MediaMath is an important behind-the-scenes player for advertisers at a time when advertising networks, exchanges and platforms are changing the way advertising is bought and consumed. The New York-based demand-side digital media platform monitors activity on ad exchanges, where marketers bid to place ads on publishers’ Web sites, and helps them quickly buy the space and the audience they need. The system is helping turn advertising from a job for creative “Mad Men” to a numbers-based “real profession,” says MediaMath Chief Executive Joe Zawadzki.

Forbes:MediaMath allows marketers to directly buy, manage and optimize media. Tell us more.

Fifteen million impressions a day across exchanges, across different media. [We] simplify what could be a very complicated process into a series of pretty straight-forward stats, in terms of how to point all of the technology at the market’s problems.

What is the opportunity for publishers who want to sell ad inventory?

Ultimately, the more demand in an auction-based system, the higher the price. And for non-auction based systems, it’s bringing incremental advertising dollars that they’re not getting from direct sales. It’s like optimization is not zero sum. There has always been this tension between advertiser and publisher. People think that in the negotiation that someone wins and someone loses and, for the advertiser to get better performance, they need to beat up on the publisher. The reality is that, with optimization–because not everyone is looking for the same thing and because every advertiser has their own demand curve–they look for different brands, different audiences. If you do a good job with optimization, both the advertiser will see better performance and the publisher will see higher prices. It’s not an “or,” it’s an “and.”

Read More: Forbes.com

Do You Want To Succeed at Social Media or Social Media Marketing?

Do you want to succeed at social media or social media marketing? There is a huge difference. It’s the difference between using social media tools and adopting social media philosophy. The difference between sparking posts about your marketing and posts about your product or service. The difference between marketers who focus externally on how the brand is broadcast versus internally on how the brand is realized.

So do you want to succeed at social media or social media marketing? The answer is the former, but many marketers focus on the latter. I’d like to make this difference more real by sharing two examples — the first in the entertainment industry and the second my own experiences in a mall this weekend.

“Snakes on a Plane” is the entertainment industry’s greatest pre-release social media success story to date. The Guardian called it, “Perhaps the most Internet-hyped film of all time.” Fans produced their own T-shirts, posters, trailers, novelty songs and parodies. Producers organized a contest to select a fan’s music for use in the movie. The filmmakers added shooting days in order to implement changes suggested by fans on the Internet (including Samuel Jackson’s famous and unprintable line about snakes.)

But what were these people fans of? Not the product, apparently. As EW put said about the movie: “SOAP came in below even the most ridiculously cynical predictions.” Read More: MediaPost

The Fundamentals of Real-Time Bidding

When it comes to online advertising, there’s a common misconception that real-time bidding (RTB) is a whole new ball game, requiring a separate media strategy and an entirely new set of campaign goals. While it’s true that RTB is a different buying model for marketers to understand, the promise of digital display advertising remains “right message, right customer.” What RTB adds to the equation is “right price and right time.” Thanks to RTB and auction marketplaces, digital display can now be purchased in ways similar to search, and it dramatically improves a marketer’s ability to reach specific audiences at scale. It’s easy to think this might just be relevant for direct response campaigns, but in fact RTB delivers tremendous advantages for brand and branded response campaigns as well. Let’s look at how RTB enables all advertisers to more efficiently and effectively achieve four common campaign objectives.

1. Find custom audiences at scale
The fundamental concept of RTB is it enables marketers to target audiences directly, instead of using content as a proxy for audience. In auction markets, marketers bid (or not) on individual ad impressions based on the demographic and behavioral profile of a consumer, in contrast to traditional content-based buys where inventory is purchased to hopefully reach a targeted audience.

The beauty of RTB is that marketers target audiences based on their own custom definitions of which consumers are appropriate for a campaign. A classic strategy is to use remarketing data that tracks when consumers have visited the advertiser’s website. But with RTB, marketers can now take it to the next level and leverage their full customer relationship management (CRM) database for targeting. These data represent the advertiser’s full view of its customers (registration data, purchase history, loyalty tier, etc.). By using a CRM-capable demand-side platform (DSP), an advertiser can execute powerful cross-sell, up-sell, and retention campaigns.

However, these strategies, while extremely effective, tend to have limited reach. To increase scale, advertisers can use look-alike modeling to expand the size of the targetable audience. Look-alike modeling finds new consumers that closely resemble the demographic and psychographic attributes of an advertiser’s existing audience. How does this work? Imagine a dart board where the original remarketing audience is the red bull’s-eye in the center. Look-alike segments are the concentric circles that extend out from the center, with each circle increasing the scale of audience available at decreasing levels of similarity.

Read More: iMediaConnection