Behavioral Segmentation: How to Make the Most of Your Data
From Hello Kitty Band-Aids to artist-licensed iPhone skins and Subaru’s First Car Story animation app, the consumer demand for customization continues to increase across all industries. Advertisers in every industry are looking for ways to create unique user experiences that appeal to the different personalities of their customers.
In order to deliver a tailored experience to different shoppers, retailers must be able to segment their visitors effectively. Capturing data about how many people are visiting your site and how many pages they visit does nothing to inform you about the types of buying behaviors they exhibit and what factors actually play a role in their converting to paying customers.

This is where behavioral segmentation becomes crucial in optimizing your marketing efforts. Real-time data about the purchasing triggers for different segments of shoppers is essential when marketing teams are working to increase purchase conversion rates and average order values.

This behavioral data is also extremely helpful for increasing engagement rates for your brand loyalty program and email/newsletter sign-up efforts. When you know what people are seeking in an experience with your brand, or if you can narrow down shopping patterns or ingrained behaviors within a particular segment of site visitors, then you are able to serve ads and offers that are specifically designed to direct each segment’s behavior with the best possible conversion rates.
Read more: ClickZ

DoubleClick Experiment Could ‘Re-imagine’ IAB Display Metrics
Google said it will run a DoubleClick for Advertisers experiment, with help from brand measurement research firm Vizu, that could change the way companies measure brand lift from display ads.

The company will present the findings to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

DFA experiments began in mid-2008, but this could be the first with findings presented to the IAB that change brand lift measurements. The pilot aims to show that the use of experimental design principles — a research term — is a good way to address brand measurement challenges and to provide actionable insights to brand marketers.

Sherrill Mane, SVP of research, analytics, and measurement at the IAB, notes that if successful, the research could have far-reaching implications for the future of brand impact measurement of online advertising campaigns.

Surveys are a measurement tool already used by marketers to measure the effectiveness of a campaign, but, there are some challenges today with experimental design and how the responses are collected.

“We hope to move the industry forward by establishing a true experimental design form for this measurement,” said Sanaz Ahari, senior product manager at Google. “Online brand measurement for display is a pretty significant investment for the industry, and the IAB has been talking a lot about a solution around true experimental design, which is our focus.”

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

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–PubMatic (http://www.PubMatic.com), a media technology company that enables premium publishers to realize the full potential of their digital assets, today announced PubDirect. PubDirect is a new management suite of tools and services powered by PubMatic’s optimization engine that accelerates the publisher’s ability to monetize their guaranteed and non-guaranteed inventory in a private marketplace that covers all demand channels.
“Top publishers struggle to directly offer comprehensive premium and reach solutions to advertisers,” said Rajeev Goel, Co-founder and CEO of PubMatic. “With PubDirect, we are introducing a unified optimization engine and insights for publishers to package in the best way to ensure that they meet the needs of their advertisers and don’t miss new revenue opportunities.”
The PubDirect suite of management tools offers premium publishers what they need to navigate the increasingly complex digital marketplace.

•Unified Optimization Engine allows publishers to monetize guaranteed and non-guaranteed inventory against multiple demand sources with a unified strategy to maximize publisher revenue at the impression level.

•Audience Direct gives publishers the ability to respond to the growing demand for audience buys by helping them to create and manage the variable value of their audience in real time. By combining first-party and third-party data sources, publishers can sell audience- targeted campaigns on a guaranteed basis using their existing ad server relationships.

•Deal Management enables pricing and brand controls and enhanced floor and deal modeling to help publishers do more than examine campaign performance. PubDirect tools and services facilitate action.

•Unified Insights enable publishers to understand their inventory and revenue across guaranteed and non-guaranteed sales channels and delivery platforms. In addition, publishers can identify and package new revenue opportunities and easily access PubDirect via their iPad. This first-ever iPad application allows publishers to conveniently view performance at anytime and from anywhere.
Read more: BusinessWire
The ABCs Of DSPs
To the uninitiated brand marketer, the term demand-side platform, or DSP, can be very intimidating. When one ventures into the nascent world of video DSPs, where the definition often changes from provider to provider, things get even more confusing.

DSPs have made a nice foothold in display advertising, and while they are attempting to provide value to video marketers, the technical differences between display and video are forcing some to stretch their claims.

It’s a bit like getting a massage. One service can differ greatly from the next. A Napa Valley resort might offer stress-relieving hot rock massages, or you could endure some of the torturous, yet effective, sports massages I’ve experienced in my past life as a runner. Of course, the massage hawked on Las Vegas Boulevard is a completely different animal (so I’ve heard). Just as the treatment (and resulting sensations) can vary, so too can the promises of each DSP.

A. Brand Safety By their very nature, ad exchanges offer little transparency into the content or pages where their inventory resides. As a result, DSPs are often unable to utilize brand protection in these environments.

Consequently, most video DSPs that promise “superior brand protection” are really offering “implied brand protection,”aka. placing sites in predetermined buckets. This strategy works some of the time, but we all know that premium news sites, for example, carry professionally made content about natural disasters, violent crimes, and other topics not fit for brand adjacencies.
Read more: MediaPost

The influential Wall Street equity research team at J.P. Morgan released a 2012 outlook for the online industry saying it “remains positive on the Internet sector,” and expects the medium to “be driven by strong secular growth, increased online accessibility through smartphones and tablets, and strengthening trends around social, local and video.” That said, the securities firm said its favorite picks for the year are not the Internet’s ad-supported biggies, but major e-commerce players Amazon and Priceline.

“Amazon and Priceline are our top picks for the year,” opined lead Internet analyst Doug Anmuth in a note to investors, adding: “We continue to like Google at current levels, but believe the risk/reward is now more favorable in these other large-cap names.”

While J.P. Morgan did not tout any specific online advertising players, it is positive on the overall sector, noting that online ad spending will continue to be driven by display and is expected to rise about 16% in 2012.

“We expect online advertising to continue to see strong growth, driven by increasing consumer consumption of digital media and increasing allocations of branded ad budgets online,” the report reads, adding: “Consumers have greater touchpoints to digital media through the rapid adoption of mobile devices and tablets, supported with higher engagement trends through the use of social media and networks. We believe consumer time spent online will continue to increase, and the online advertising dollars to follow.

Read More: MediaPost

Brands Will Choose Online Video Over Display Ads in 2012: Adap.tv
Study shows that advertisers will increase online video spending this year, and that brands want viewer engagement.

Adap.tv completed a research report on the digital video industry shortly before the recent Streaming Media West conference in Los Angeles, and company co-founder and vice president of product Teg Grenager sat down at a red carpet interview to share some of its findings.

This is a good time to be in the online video advertising space, as nearly all the advertisers surveyed said they were sure they would increase their online video spending this year. In previous years, advertisers were more hesitant to jump in.

“This year there were some very interesting findings. The industry is changing and maturing a little bit,” said Grenager, noting that the market was due for significant growth.

That extra spending has to come from somewhere, and the loser in advertising budgets looks to be display advertising.

“Digital video actually is, in some ways, a replacement for some of what display was trying to achieve. It’s trying to achieve branding on the Web, and digital video’s just much better at that,” Grenager noted.

Advertisers’ goals are also changing this year. In previous years, they looked to online video ads to build awareness. Now they want brand engagement with their ads. Noting that engagement is more a tactic than a goal, Grenager explained that viewers who engage with an ad in some way are more likely to think about that brand and see it favorably.

Read More: Streaming Media

DataXu Thinks Global, Acts Hyper-Local: Acquires Europe’s Mexad

In a move it says gives it the biggest global footprint of local manpower of any demand-side platform (DSP), DataXu has acquired London-based Mexad, a leading European DSP with offices in Western Europe and Brazil. Both companies are privately-held and terms were not disclosed, but DataXu Co-Founder and CEO Mike Baker says the acquisition gives DataXu a competitive advantage in a sector that increasingly is about local service and market knowledge.

With 36 employees, Mexad manages real-time bidding campaigns and inventory in about 60 countries in Europe and Latin America, complementing DataXu’s local market knowledge in North America, he says.

“They have an on-the-ground presence in all the major markets in Europe right now,” Baker tells Online Media Daily, adding that “feet-on-the-street” is becoming a key differentiator for the DSP business, because it’s not just about having the best software, algorithms and access to RTB inventory that determines success in local markets, but understanding local cultures, ways of doing business in specific markets, and the ability to advise and service local marketers and agencies in those markets.

Read More: MediaPost

Tracking and managing ad inventory is as critical as it’s ever been for online publishers, but the concept of yield management has expanded beyond the ad operations group and today touches every part of a successful online media operation. It has become essential that all areas of a publishing organization have accurate and meaningful data points to make decisions to optimize ad inventory and maximize revenue. Let’s look at how effective yield management can benefit the various departments at an online publisher:

Ad Operations:

This is the nerve center for driving delivery for all those campaigns that the sales group has worked so hard to bring in. But just delivering isn’t enough. The ad operations team must have a clear vision of actual inventory on a real-time basis to ensure they don’t hold back too much inventory. This prevents under delivery, a practice that leaves money on the table for many publishers. Ad operations also has to manage their most valuable inventory and make sure premium impressions are monetized in the most effective manner. Having an effective yield management process allows ad operations to maximize the value of their inventory before it gets released to networks and exchanges or, even worse, goes unsold.

Read More: YieldEx

Yahoo! Begins Requiring Right Media Seats for Demand-Side Platform’s Advertisers

The other shoe appears to be falling.

If you’re a demand-side platform or ad network on Right Media Exchange, you may not be allowed to buy Yahoo! Class 2/remnant inventory on behalf of your client unless your advertiser gets its very own seat on RMX. (Having an advertiser get its own seat is not easy on RMX. It requires time, money – and approval.)

According to multiple, reliable sources, that’s the latest directive from Right Media account managers who began telling some of their DSP/network clients that they will have until December 2 to migrate their advertisers. Thereafter, the display ad inventory “valve” containing Yahoo! inventory which leads directly to the DSP, will be turned off.

As All Things D’s Peter Kafka reported two weeks ago, retargeters such as TellApart, Criteo and Dotomi have already had their “Class 2″ inventory (Yahoo! remnant display ads) shut off.  This week’s move isn’t a huge surprise given the demand-side platform model is essentially the same between retargeters, DSPs and ad networks.

Read More: AdExchanger

TidalTV Taps Korrelate For Offline Sales

Advertisers and publishers are still struggling to connect online marketing messages with offline sales, which could boost demand and prices for online ads. To this end, online video ad platform TidalTV is tapping Korrelate for sales attribution using its census-based O2O (online-to-offline) measurement service.

The O2O service, which so far is focused on automotive purchases, is based on non-identifying data received from third parties about the past behavior of a user’s Web browser, based on the Web pages visited.

This data is used to put group users into segments, which are then targeted with relevant advertising. It is combined with offline data to determine ad effectiveness. The offline consumption information is drawn from RL Polk’s household-level make and model purchase data from vehicle registrations.

This method is sensitive to privacy concerns, according to Korrelate, because it doesn’t require any identifying information about the viewer, and no offline data can be tied back to an individual online user.

Read More: MediaPost

As a real-time media buying platform for video advertising, TubeMogul processes a lot of data on ad spots available for bidding in a given day across both pre-roll and display inventory. In all, these marketplaces are bigger than the New York Stock Exchange in terms of daily transactions.

While it is widely known that display volume is large due to a glut in inventory, a less known fact is that pre-roll video advertising is steadily catching up. Aggregating across the major exchanges and sell-side platforms, from Doubleclick (which includes YouTube pre-roll) to spotXchange and beyond (see a full list of inventory partners here), and controlling for inventory pushed live due to new company partnerships, TubeMogul analyzed average growth in daily volume of ad spots available in the U.S. (inset).

In the past five months, pre-roll volume grew by an average of 34.9% per month, far outpacing display advertising’s 7.8% monthly growth rate. In November, we are seeing an average of over 200 million auctions per day.

Read More: TubeMogul

The Collision of Ad Exchanges and Sell-Side Platforms – Does it Matter?

We are in the midst of industry consolidation in online advertising. Companies are merging (MediaOcean), selling (MySpace, AdMeld, interclick), and buying (Tremor Video, Federated Media) as they adjust business models to meet market demands. Companies like ad exchanges, DSPs, ad networks and sell-side platforms (SSPs), continually innovate and add new offerings to create competitive advantages.

It’s inevitable that exchanges and SSPs collide, as they are essentially in the same space. I see it firsthand when my company, an exchange, is confused as an SSP competitor, even though we are actually a close partner and do business with the majority of SSPs.

Can publishers and advertisers manage this complex environment when both sets offer similar value propositions?

For publishers, they are inundated with choices to sell digital inventory. While looking to sell the most volume at the highest value to maximize yield, publishers also seek advertisers with similar brand values that are relevant to their audience. In sales, publishers want to monetize inventory through partners, while avoiding channel conflict and maintaining direct sales control.

Read More: MediaPost

Display advertising is changing rapidly and getting more and more confusing. And many people are looking to understand its landscape.

Here are five things you need to know that you may not have thought of when it comes to display:

1. There will be fewer ads per page. One of the problems with online advertising today is that there is no barrier to creating new inventory. Constructing a billboard alongside a highway costs capital. There are a limited number of :30 spots you can run during a top-rated TV show. But if you’re a publisher that wants to create new revenue, it is much easier to add more ads to a page than it is to get more users to the site, or to get the ads to perform better. I estimate that there is about five times more supply than there is CPM/CPC demand. The rest of the inventory is spent on CPA offers or site promotions. Smart publishers should be focused on their audience and properly pricing those ads, to make for a more efficient marketplace – rather than flooding the exchanges and networks with new inventory. As the market gets more mature, the market will get closer to a balance between supply and demand.

2. RTB will be the primary way to retarget and your DSP technology will be the difference between success and failure. For some, this goes without saying. Only a demand-side platform (DSP) accessing all of the major ad exchanges can provide enough reach to power retargeting at scale, particularly when there are any kinds of restraints, like targeting by geo. A good DSP is like a racecar or precision surgical tools – it allows the buyer using the DSP to distinguish between good inventory and bad, cheap and expensive, and premium and remnant.

Read More: ClickZ

Limelight Networks Announces Its Dynamic Site Platform for Mobile to Enable Publishers to More Effectively Create and Manage Mobile Web Presence

Service Allows for Tailoring of Content-Rich Web Sites — Ensuring Content is Displayed as it Should be, Regardless of Device

TEMPE, Ariz., Nov 8, 2011 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX) — Limelight Networks, Inc. /quotes/zigman/105873/quotes/nls/llnw LLNW +0.63% today introduced its Dynamic Site Platform for Mobile, an innovative new service that enables publishers to create and manage their mobile web presence. By providing the ability to create mobile-specific sites and repurpose content for multiple devices, the solution ensures that content-rich sites are optimized for every device — regardless of screen size, processing power or bandwidth.

Limelight Dynamic Site Platform for Mobile is built on the company’s cloud-based Dynamic Site Platform to integrate all web content management tasks — saving time and money while ensuring that publishers’ brands are expressed consistently across all online platforms. Using industry-standard languages (XML, HTML, CSS and Javascript), it allows web designers to create mobile sites that leverage the content and features already built into corporate sites. The solution eliminates the need for a separate mobile CMS, further speeding time to market.

Read More: MarketWatch

Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL Share Display Inventory

Still no merger news, but Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL have agreed to share unsold “premium” display inventory among their respective ad networks.

The partnership, announced Tuesday, appeals directly to Madison Avenue’s desire for scalable reach — something that has been increasingly hard to come by via TV, but not yet achievable online.

“This agreement should begin to change the industry’s perception of premium” inventory, Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo EVP of the Americas, said on a conference call late Tuesday.

More to the point, “this is about differentiation,” Levinsohn added, in response to a direct question about increasing competition from Google and Facebook, and whether their rise brought Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft together.   

A clear and present threat, Facebook and Google are expected to increase their share of domestic display advertising this year by 9.3% and 16.3%, respectively, according to eMarketer.

Yet by adding greater scale into the equation, the partners hope the deal will increase demand for their premium display ad offerings.

Read More: MediaPost

DataXu will release the next generation of its digital marketing platform, DX3, to support advertisers through audience, inventory, campaign management, and analytics. The platform, which will launch Monday, allows marketers to optimize across profitable audience segments, media channels, and creative messages. DX3 combines demand-side platform (DSP) features with attribution management. It combines social, video, display and mobile, with search on the way.

Consider that DX3 makes 300 million decisions per second and 1 trillion decisions an hour, as data updates to understand the technology required to support a maturing ad industry. DataXu claims that impression-level multivariate decisioning reduces media costs by up to 60%; and audience overlap management, such as de-duplication between data sets, yields 25% return on investment and 20% reduction in data costs.

Through a dashboard powered by machine-learning technology, DX3 provides advertisers like Scripps Networks with programmatic buying of ads across display, social, mobile, and video, and premium private, guaranteed, and exchange-traded media. It supports Active analytics to convert consumer and campaign insights into actions in real time. Unified audience management combines first and third-party data to create custom audience segments. And Multitouch attribution allocates spending to the best-performing media channels.

Read More: MediaPost

Rocket Fuel Platform Defines Value Of Facebook Ad Campaigns

Rocket Fuel will release technology Monday that helps marketers understand the value of Facebook ad campaigns as a stand-alone strategy or when integrating the medium with mobile, display and search. Social Booster for Facebook automates creation, monitoring and management through intelligent bidding, multivariate creative testing, segmentation, automated optimization, and cross-channel analytics. The data includes first- and third-party, social, Web, weather, search, retargeting, and more.

The platform optimizes campaigns every 10 minutes. It can build mass-scale audiences by understanding how the smaller segments — micro-segments — operate, according to Richard Frankel, Rocket Fuel president and cofounder. “If you build lots of them, you can build super-scalable media for major brands to better understand in greater amount of detail how consumers interact with brands,” he said.

The age of audience buying is over, replaced by micro-segments, Frankel said. Rather than treating 20 million people as men ages 25 to 34, break down the massive segment into smaller bits — for example, 26-year-old single men who live in Wichita and buy electronics. The challenge is that to make it work for a big marketer you need many, he said.

Read More: MediaPost