SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – May 2, 2012) – BrightRoll, the world’s largest provider of digital video advertising services, today announces it is teaming up with Google’s AdMob to allow publishers and developers to seamlessly integrate video ads into their mobile apps and generate revenue from premium advertisers.
Through this collaboration, publishers and developers who have the AdMob SDK can now use its Ad Network Mediation to access BrightRoll pre-roll ad units through the BrightRoll AdMob Adapter. BrightRoll is the first video ad network available through AdMob Mediation, which lets publishers manage their networks to increase their fill and eCPM.
“App developers often work with several ad networks to maximize mobile revenue. The updated Mediation solution in AdMob’s new SDK 6.0 makes that process easier and enables developers to more effectively build their businesses,” said Clay Kellogg, head of mobile platform and partnership strategy at Google. “BrightRoll’s efforts to make their video ads available via AdMob’s Mediation solution represent an industry-leading example of innovation in mobile advertising.”
Mobile video advertising offers publishers attractive revenue opportunities and superior CPM rates compared to traditional mobile display ads. BrightRoll adapts advertisers’ traditional TV or web video content into pre-roll ad units for a broad range of mobile devices including iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets. BrightRoll currently runs global, large-scale campaigns in every major advertising category, including entertainment, CPG, business, auto, financial services, and food and beverage.
Read more: marketwire

Personalized Video Recommendations Driving Views & Monetization, Three Times In-crease in Views in Some Cases
Amazon has made a big business in part because of its recommendations. Customers who bought this also bought that has proven tremendously helpful for book readers, as well as consumers searching out cameras, pet toys and other products on the world’s biggest shopping site. Netflix, similarly, has grown its business because of suggested movies and shows.

That’s why online video technology providers have staked a claim on personalized video recommendations, with companies such as Ooyala, Taboola and Digitalsmiths having skin in the game.

Ooyala said that its recently added content discovery features had boosted both viewing time and revenue for customers. Prior to the product launch last month, the company had tested the tools with existing customers, which includes broadcasters, media companies and TV networks.

Ooyala found that the first video abandonment rate after one play – i.e. leaving to go to another site – had dropped to 9% with its tools, from a 24% rate with the technology customers had previously been using to encourage viewers to watch more videos. “The more viewers are engaged with personalized videos tailored to their tastes, the longer they watch, and the more money publishers earn,” Ooyala said in a blog post.
Read more: MediaPost

What Sells the Digital Magazine?
A magazine is a pretty amazing work of art. It consists of a collection of the most incredible curated insights, editorial opinions, and photographs for a specific genre. In the print world, everyone knows that the cover of a magazine needs to be very carefully crafted in order to compel you to purchase it at the newsstand. Anywhere from 10 to 45 percent of a print magazine’s sales can come from single copy sales (aka, at the traditional newsstand). With this heavy reliance on sales by cover, I wondered…is the same true for success on the digital newsstand?
A few weeks ago I noticed that three digital publishing apps changed their icon on the iPad from a static image representing their company to a dynamic image showcasing their “cover news” for the day. If you haven’t seen them yet, check out how The New York Times, The New York Post, and The Daily all showcase their app. In it, each day you see a very clear cover line and image that is meant to be compelling enough for you to stop and download/buy the app.

Interestingly, at my company, we have been seeing a different phenomenon where it isn’t just the cover but the content inside of the issue that is driving a digital reader to discover a magazine they never knew they couldn’t live without.

Recently we posted a collection on the Titanic. In this collection the visitor was exposed to free articles about the Titanic. Quietly in the corner of the article was a reference to the name of the magazine the article came from. In this case, magazines like Town and Country and Popular Science were successfully able to engage new potential subscribers through the content locked under the cover by sharing it to an audience who followed a common theme.

Read more: ClickZ

Time to Stop Talking About ‘Scale’ And Start Targeting

As a catalogue marketer in the 1990s, I knew which mailing lists would work best for the dress shirt company I represented. We used multiple criteria to measure data quality. But, we always kept the list sources separate, so we knew what worked well and what didn’t work as well. Each data set would become its own brand to us, because each data set would perform differently.

Of course I would track the results and optimize my campaign and work with the lists that brought the highest ROI. Since we were selling higher-quality men’s dress shirts, lists from other higher quality men’s apparel companies would generally perform better, though not every time.

We would expect a performance difference between Florsheim shoe buyers and Johnston and Murphy shoe buyers, for example. Each list would elicit a different response, as you might expect.

I would buy these lists granularly and optimize against more precise data lists, which obviously required transparency from data providers, and a certain integrity in the data sets themselves. This may seem as obvious in terms of “best practices” to you as it does to me.

So, ask yourself: Why does our online industry today do the exact opposite of this?

We have the technology

We can target and measure audiences in so many ways today; you would think it would make sense in this digital world that we would stay granular – and transparent. But, we’re not. Instead, most of the data ecosystem strives for scale instead of precision, blended data sources instead of transparency and quality. Too many of us are making huge, blind buckets of data that are bloated and inaccurate.

Read more: AdAgeDigital

As a marketing professional, I spend a lot of time learning and educating on digital trends.

With the current rate of growth, mobile marketing has been one of the most exciting to monitor. The data on user adoption is changing almost daily, with consumers actively changing the way they consume, share, and publish. To keep up with these changes, brands and media companies are regularly making advancements that impact our industry.

For this column, I spent some time with my agency’s mobile strategy team to define the top four current trends.
More Data Capture, More Targeting
Advertisers have been able to target by location, content, and demographics for some time now. Recently “social targeting” and retargeting across mobile-enabled platforms has emerged. The new capabilities represent a significant opportunity to hone ad delivery. They also allow for greater customization of messaging. •Social targeting (e.g., partners like LocalResponse, Twitter, and Facebook): Scrapes social conversations tied to location to target users. Great for determining very specific communication opportunities. •Retargeting (e.g., partners like Tapad, BlueCava, and Adelphic): Uses connected devices that require registration to trigger usage patterns. Technology can then serve ads based on data collected. The “Holy Grail” will be a connection point and solid data capture between all digitally enabled platforms (desktop, IPTV, phone, and tablet)…but you can’t be too greedy.

Content Is Adapting
Read more: ClickZ

Say Media Debuts Content Ads

Say Media is among the latest online publishers to adopt a “viewable” impressions standard for display ad campaigns.

The company, which operates a network of sites spanning categories like fashion, technology and food, has introduced a new ad format based on a cost-per-exposure pricing model that charges only for ads visible within a user’s browser.

The new Content Ads from Say Media use technology are developed in-house to recognize when an ad unit is viewable and are geared toward small and medium-sized businesses running ads against endemic content within its network.

Earlier this year, comScore released research based on a study of a dozen brand campaigns showing that nearly a third (31%) of online display ads are never seen. Studies by AdSafe and others have estimated that figure to be even higher.

Ads may not be seen for a various reasons, including a slow-loading ad, users not scrolling down far enough on a page to see an ad “below the fold,” or other technical causes. Say Media’s new ad format and exposure-based ad pricing coincides with a broader industry push to shift from the traditional “served impression” for campaign reporting to the viewable impression as part of the “Making Measurement Make Sense” (3Ms) initiative.

The effort by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Association of National Advertisers and the 4As calls for a set of standards for measuring viewable exposures, among other things.

Read more: MediaPost

DG announced today a strategic partnership for deeper collaboration in advertising technology between MediaMind, its online unit, and 24/7 Media, WPP’s marketing technology company.
The partnership could form the basis of a global – in scope and in media – advertising delivery system that unites television advertising with digital. Here’s the score card: MediaMind was recently acquired by DG, a company that acts as the delivery system for between 80 to 90 percent of television ads, as well as syndicated content.

The DG platform takes content and creative from agencies or post-production houses and delivers it over IP network or satellite to the network operations centers of broadcasters. 24/7 Media, acquired by WPP in 2007, provides its Zeus Advertising Platform, or ZAP, to WPP clients. ZAP is an audience-management platform that lets brand advertisers track the effectiveness of individual marketing elements and how they influence conversion.

The acquisition of MediaMind by DG is significant because it brings together capabilities for traditional TV advertising and digital, according to Andrew Bloom, SVP of corporate development for DG and MediaMind. He said, “You have a company that sits at the heart of the TV ecosystem buying a digital campaign management platform that does delivery, planning, buying, optimization and reporting. A roadmap is laid out for how a single platform could begin to address TV, digital TV, digital and social media.”
Read more: CLickZ
Think Globally, Act Mobile-ly
The rise of the mobile Internet is a worldwide phenomenon with distinct local manifestations. Significant differences from country to country argue against imposing a monolithic, global approach to mobile media – tactics or practices that work well in one market may not prove optimal in others. However, there is much to gain from comparing the evolution of mobile in different markets and from cooperating and sharing information across countries. With that in mind, last year the Interactive Advertising Bureau (where I work) established the mobile committee-global.
Consisting of staffers from IABs around the world working on mobile media in their markets, this group holds calls every two months to share information and insights, provide project updates, and facilitate mobile coordination between the various international IABs. As a kickoff project, the IAB has published a global mobile anthology providing insights into different countries’ experiences with mobile media, contributed by about a dozen of the global IABs. A few key themes emerge around adoption of voice and data and the state of basic and advanced mobile media.
Read more: ClickZ

Aiming to remain a key hub for sharing photos, Facebook acquired mobile photo application Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock. The transaction — Facebook’s largest to date — also underscores the company’s efforts to bolster its mobile offerings. Instagram will continue to operate as an independent business under the same name.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post that the acquisition would enhance the ability of Facebook users to upload and exchange photos among family and friends.

“We need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook,” wrote Zuckerberg. “That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. ”Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.” Launched in October 2010, the Instagram app now has more than 30 million registered users.

Read more: MediaPost
One Year Later, What We’ve Learned About Private Ad Exchanges
If 2011 was the year of testing for publishers who operate so-called private ad exchanges, 2012 looks like it may be the year of putting lessons into action. Private exchanges began popping up in late 2010, with the goal of increasing the price of online-ad inventory that was going unsold by direct-sales teams.

To accomplish that, publishers license real-time bidding technology from tech partners. It helps them orchestrate auctions for ad impressions and determine which buyers get access to inventory, as well as what inventory is made available at what prices. Though exchanges have perhaps dozens of other characteristics, that’s where the standardization ends.

That’s because publishers who have taken the leap have charted vastly different paths, employing sometimes contradictory business rules, forcing advertisers and the trading desks and technologies through which they bid on audience segments to learn about each on the fly.

Take, for example, the thorny problem of whether to sell private-exchange inventory to advertisers already making more-expensive ad buys from the sales team. Some publishers fear that big-spending direct advertisers will spend less or stop spending altogether on reserved inventory if they see how much cheaper the unreserved inventory is in the private marketplace.

Read more: AdAgeDigital

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

SAN MATEO, CA – March 27, 2012 – Dedicated Media, a customer acquisition platform listed among comScore’s Media Metrix Top 50 U.S. web properties, and Aggregate Knowledge, a media intelligence company delivering the predictive analytics on which the world’s largest advertisers make their digital media decisions, today announced a partnership that includes integration of Dedicated’s SMARTstack technology with the patent-pending AK Media Intelligence Platform. As the media intelligence platform of record for Dedicated Media, the AK Platform will enhance targeting, audience analytics, media buying, and third-party data scorecarding.
The Dedicated Media SMARTstack ad delivery system processes millions of bits of data in milliseconds. SMARTstack will use the highly scalable AK Platform to collect, analyze, and optimize campaigns across thousands of attributes in real time to develop rich insights and to extract the maximum performance out of each impression in each campaign.
“Dedicated Media combines customized audience modeling with millions of primary and third-party behavioral data points, continuous real-time optimization, unparalleled reporting, and industry recognized brand safety to provide advertisers with unsurpassed results,” said Chris Berman, COO and co-founder of Dedicated Media. “This requires intelligent and predictive analytics across multiple channels packaged within a neutral platform to manage the data quickly and easily. The AK Platform is the perfect solution for us because of its sophistication. The easy-to-use dashboard gives us a powerful tool to buy media smarter every minute of every day.”
Read more: Aggregate Knowledge
Mobile Ad Serving Still In Test Mode Among Publishers
Publishers are in the very early stages of establishing mobile ad infrastructure, and they continue to try out a range of solutions in an already fragmented market. According to a survey of 95 online and mobile publishers fielded by InsightExpress on behalf of Mocean Mobile, almost half of respondents had at least tried DART for Mobile over the past two years, but 41% had also tested AdMarvel, 34% Mocean and 19% Nexage. And when it comes to the currently used solution for many publishers, DART (17%), AdMarvel (14%) and Mocean (13%) have to contend with 15% of the market that still relies on in-house or custom ad-serving technologies.

“There is a heck of a lot of experimentation going on,” says InsightExpress’s Joy Liuzzo. “When you see this much experimentation, it is indicative that folks are interested in learning.” “And they probably are not finding all of their needs solved in one place,” Liuzzo adds.

The research shows that publishers often are favoring different vendors for apps, mobile Web, video and rich media. In fact, the prominence of custom solutions in the mobile ad-serving mix suggests that many publishers still feel the need to knit things together. And the mobile media also find their own inventory fragmented across models.

About 45% of respondents say they are responsible for selling less than half of their own mobile ad inventory. Only 55% are selling 50% or more of their inventory. And in most cases, it is the ad sales group that is driving the decisions about which ad servers to use, not ad operations.

Read more: MediaPost