BrightRoll Launches TAGTM, the Online Advertising Industry’s First Total Audience Guarantee
Program Ensures Delivery of Digital Video Ad Campaigns Through Guaranteed Impression Volume to an Advertiser’s Target Audience
SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – Oct 6, 2011) – BrightRoll, the leading provider of digital video advertising services, today announced the launch of TAG™, its Total Audience Guarantee for campaigns run on the BrightRoll network. The first-of-its-kind program gives digital video advertisers the ability to pay only for the impressions that actually reach their target audiences.
“As more of our clients look to allocate portions of their TV budget to online video, it’s essential that we not only hit their target audience, but do so in a way that is consistent with their broadcast campaigns,” said Doug Wyatt, Digital Associate Director, Maxus. “We’ve had great success with BrightRoll in the past, which is why I’m excited to see TAG™ in action. It’s definitely the kind of tool that will help to further bridge the gap between online video buying and traditional television buys, and demonstrate to advertisers that we’re able to reach our precise audiences efficiently and effectively.”
With TAG™, advertisers know how many impressions will reach target audiences before a campaign begins. BrightRoll then delivers the campaign at scale, targeting 100% of the guaranteed impressions to the advertiser’s audience. Post campaign, advertisers receive confirmation of impression delivery through comScore’s AdEffx Campaign Essentials. TAG™ is available for segments based on age, gender and geographic data. Delivery of each TAG™ campaign is optimized to the specified audience through a combination of targeting methods and data providers using BrightRoll’s BRIQ™ technology platform.
Read More: Marketwire
Vibrant, the Contextual Ad Leader, Names Former Top NY Times Co. Executive Cella Irvine New CEO
New York, October 3, 2011 — Vibrant Media, the leader in premium contextual advertising, announced today the appointment of Cella Irvine as Chief Executive Officer. Irvine joins the fast-growing company as it continues to expand its global reach and suite of contextual ad solutions.
Irvine brings more than 25 years of digital and tech industry experience to Vibrant. As the former CEO of The New York Times Company’s About Group, she has extensive experience in contextual advertising, which drove About.com’s revenue through topic-based content. Prior to About, Irvine was Chief Administrative Officer of Digitas, an ad agency unit of Publicis, where she was responsible for operational, administrative and governance functions. Before Digitas, she was Global Head of Strategic Planning and then Chief Operations Officer for a business unit of Marsh, Inc., a risk consulting firm. She has also previously held management roles at Hearst and Prodigy.
Read More: Vibrant Media
Retargeting: An Introduction to a New Opportunity
Depending on who you ask, conversion rates on websites hover around 2 or 3 percent. That leaves at least 97 percent of site visitors with unfinished business potential.
We all know that your maximum unrealized potential isn’t 97 percent, but it’s probably not 0 percent either. Somewhere between these two extremes lies the size of the missed opportunity. This is where retargeting comes in.
Retargeting, also known in some circles as remessaging, and by Google AdWords users as remarketing, is the act of presenting a display ad to someone after they either:
-Saw one of your ads but failed to convert (creative retargeting — these people don’t even go to your site).
-Visited your website but failed to convert (site retargeting).
-Searched and found, but the website failed to convert (search retargeting).
Read More: Search Engine Watch
The Highs and Lows of Advertising in Online TV
In theory, video ads that appear within full TV episodes online should be an unstoppable force in digital advertising. They provide brands with a captive, focused audience for their video creative, but more than that they’re more effective than TV ads alone.
In its most recent Advertising Fact Sheet, Nielsen reported increases in general ad recall, brand recall, message recall, and ad likability for TV plus premium online video versus TV alone. In other words, those consumers who saw a commercial spot embedded in a TV program online demonstrated a more favorable response to that ad than those who saw the same ad on TV alone.
For those countless advertisers running cross-media campaigns, this is big news. There are plenty of opportunities to advertise in this way online, thanks to video players from major television networks and premium ad-supported streaming video sites. And as of last year, there are also more ad placements for the taking.
Read More: ClickZ
AOL, Firms Explore an Offer for Yahoo
AOL Inc. and several private-equity firms are exploring making an offer to buy Yahoo Inc., according to people familiar with the matter, devising a bold plan to marry two big Internet brands facing steep challenges.
Silver Lake Partners and Blackstone Group LP are among the firms that have expressed interest in teaming up with AOL to buy Yahoo or trying to take it private on their own, these people said. They added that at least two or three other firms could be interested in participating if a formal buyout proposal is drawn up.
The people familiar with the matter cautioned that these discussions—involving private-equity firms, AOL executives and financial advisers—are preliminary and don’t yet involve Yahoo. The conversations may not lead to an approach given the complexities in structuring a proposal, the people said.
Spokeswomen for Yahoo and AOL declined to comment.
AOL, which spun off from Time Warner Inc. in late 2009, currently has a market capitalization of $2.68 billion, far smaller than Yahoo’s $20.56 billion market value.
Shares of Yahoo jumped 13% to $17.23 in after-hours trading Wednesday, after rising 5.7% to $15.25 at 4 p.m. on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The stock traded 49.6 million shares in the regular session, compared with an average of 17 million shares a day so far this month. It was one of the best-performing tech stocks of the day.
One of the scenarios under discussion among the buyout firms is a complex deal in which China’s Alibaba Group would buy back Yahoo’s roughly 40% stake in Alibaba, the people said.
Some of Yahoo’s other assets would also be sold off to interested media or technology companies, and the remaining company would be of a much smaller valuation that private-equity firms could get financing for, one of the people said.
Another scenario involves AOL combining its operations with Yahoo in a reverse merger after Yahoo disposes of the Alibaba stake, the people said. It is unclear if the resulting entity would be listed publicly.
Alibaba Chief Executive Jack Ma has expressed interest in repurchasing Yahoo’s stake in his company, which analysts value at about $10 billion. A big chunk of Yahoo’s current market value comes from its Alibaba stake.
Separately, AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong has also talked privately about the idea that Yahoo could buy AOL, according to a person familiar with the matter. Another person familiar with the matter said private-equity firms may also look to partner with media companies to buy Yahoo.
A combined Yahoo-AOL would have greater scale to compete in online advertising against industry juggernaut Google Inc. While both companies draw huge amounts of users, their advertising businesses have struggled as they’ve faced competition from a range of websites. The scenarios being discussed are similar to ones financial firms have discussed before. Yahoo and AOL discussed a merger in 2008, as Yahoo weighed a $45 billion takeover offer from Microsoft Corp. Microsoft eventually pulled its bid.
While private-equity firms have long contemplated a deal for Yahoo, talks have heated up in recent weeks as several senior Yahoo employees have left the company, intensifying pressure on Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz to prove she can turn the company around, the people familiar with the matter said.
Ms. Bartz has improved Yahoo’s profitability by cutting costs, but revenue hasn’t grown much and the company faces other problems. The Internet pioneer, for example, has shown fewer benefits than competitors from a broad recovery in display advertising—an area where it faces increasing competition from Google and Facebook Inc.
The company, which reports third-quarter earnings next week, claims that more than 600 million people use its home page, email service or other sites every month. But the number of Yahoo pages viewed by its users, known as “user engagement,” began shrinking in the second quarter. Yahoo also has seen a drop in the value of advertising against content that Yahoo pulls from other sources.
Ms. Bartz said in a recent interview she needed more time to pull off a turnaround.
Read More: WSJ.com (Full Article Here)
Google, NBCU Cancel TV Ad-Sales Pact
NBC Universal and Google have discontinued their ad sales partnership begun in 2008, the companies have confirmed. The split deprives Google’s TV ad sales unit of one of its major alliances, although it still has deals in place with Dish TV, DirecTV and a handful of smaller networks like Ovation and the Tennis Channel.
The NBCU networks covered under the arrangement included CNBC, MSNBC, Oxygen, SyFy, Chiller and Sleuth.
Two years ago, when the deal was struck, it was seen as a groundbreaking boost for Google’s efforts to transform the TV business by providing a powerful online platform for ad sales.
But sources said that NBCU had concluded that there was little value derived from having an Internet company sell its ads. Some of the nets—like Chiller and Sleuth—were just getting off the ground at the start of the deal, and are just now being assigned to national sales teams at NBCU, according to sources.
Buyers complained that the sales proposition was somewhat exaggerated compared to what was actually available through the Google service. “There was little if any prime-time inventory available for Syfy,” said one buyer. “It was weekend or daytime or overnight. And with Oxygen you couldn’t even get daytime and it was mostly weekend or overnight. So there were a lot of issues that had to be explained to clients once you got under the hood.”
Buyers also have questioned Google’s approach—selling spots to the highest bidder via an online auction process—for some time.
Read More: MediaWeek
A Roadmap to a Better Media Buy
In the new display media environment of 2010, media buyers have literally thousands of options when it comes to ad network and website buys. How can buyers approach this in a way that is smart and delivers good value for clients? We’ve seen simple mistakes based on the “bigger is better” fallacy — that a plan with 30 media buys is better than a plan with just three. The core problem with these super-complicated plans is that they trade comprehensibility, quality, and results for bulk; it’s going to be a whole lot of work for underwhelming results.
Instead of size, the perfect digital media plan should focus on four core features:
- Reach — lots of people who are good targets for your message
- Knowable results — every plan should incorporate tools and measures that will help you know if you’ve achieved the outcomes you want
- Relevant content — sites that provide strong support for a message, brand, or product
- Integration — make your message a part of the consumer story
Each focus has a place in a media plan and must be part of the overall strategy. A really great media plan balances all of these things. Here’s how they can all be integrated into the perfect media plan.
Read More: iMediaConnection
