Dedicated Media Selects Aggregate Knowledge as its Media Intelligence Platform
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
Driving Mobile to Scale
Mobile advertising is beginning to live up to its promise. There is so much innovation at the moment that it’s hard to find a more exciting place to be. But as with all beginnings, a million things still need to fall into place before mobile fully evolves.
In order to drive growth, education is vital. We must to continue to educate and evangelize about mobile’s range of advantages to marketers and agencies.
Then we need to deliver the goods. In order to do so, we have to establish a more scalable framework where the creativity and special features of smartphones, tablets, and other connected devices are not being compromised.
New ad formats are a given when it comes to achieving this goal. Embracing the ecosystem’s desire for richer brand marketing that speaks to mobile’s unique requirements and benefits, one of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s key initiatives of this year is the Mobile Rising Stars contest. Winning ad format concepts were revealed a few short weeks ago in Miami Beach at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. These winning ad concepts will go through a development, deployment, and testing process and, with success, be inducted into the IAB standard advertising unit portfolio, the definitive standards for the digital advertising industry.
Are Ad Servers Specifically For Publishers Or Advertisers Still Necessary?
Publisher ad server. Advertiser ad server.
Does it really matter any more?
As ad servers on both sides of the digital media aisle look to buy and sell, ad serving capabilities would, in theory, appear to be on the verge of merging – especially as demand-side platforms, sell-side platforms and exchanges take over the delivery of real-time biddable ad impressions.
AdExchanger reached out to executives in the data-driven ad ecosystem and asked the following: ”Are ad servers specifically dedicated to the publisher or advertiser still necessary?”
Click below or scroll for more:
•James Avery, CEO, Adzerk
•Sebastiaan Schepers, COO, BannerConnect
•Dean McRobie, CTO, annalect (Omnicom)
•Ben Kneen, Director of Ad Products, WebMD
•Eric Simon, VP Business Operations, [x+1]
•Brian Tomasette, VP Media Products, DoublePositive Marketing Group
•Larry Allen, SVP Business Development, 24/7 Real Media
James Avery, CEO, Adzerk
“No. As a product guy it baffles me that they have continued as separate products for so long. The difference between a publisher side ad server and an advertiser side ad server is small enough that many small and medium size advertisers currently use publisher ad servers (especially the free ones). Adding to the pressure for these products to combine is that the modern ad network tends to be a half publisher and half advertiser – on any given day they might be optimizing the traffic that comes from their publishers or placing ad buys through the exchanges or through other publisher side ad servers. As publisher side ad servers continue to add the features that these networks and small advertisers are looking for the feature gap will close and advertiser side ad servers will start to see more and more competition from the publisher side ad servers.”
Read more: AdExchanger.com
MMA Guidelines Create Order Out of a Tangle Of Mobile Ad Sizes
In an effort to standardize display ads on mobile devices and thus make them easier for brand and media managers to buy, the Mobile Marketing Association has come up with six standard units for mobile phones and recommended specific ad sizes for use on tablet devices.
The Universal Mobile Ad Package was arrived at after an MMA analysis of some 150 billion mobile ad impressions in the second quarter of 2011 arrived at the conclusion that mobile ads were being bought and delivered in some 60 common formats in the U.S.
That profusion of ad sizes and shapes amounts to a lack of standards, says MMA president and CEO Greg Stuart, and could inhibit the growth of mobile advertising among marketers.
“There are two things you have to do to promote mobile advertising,” Stuart says. “One is to help marketers understand the value of mobile to their brands: how they can use it, what the ROI is, how it fits into the rest of their marketing mix and so on. But after doing that education on value, the second task is to reduce the friction of using mobile ads. If there’s a high cost of implementation or execution, then marketers and their agencies will stay away.”
Read more: Chief Marketer
Major Retail Mobile Sites, Apps Reached 60% Of Smartphone Owners During Holiday 2011
The renewed emphasis on mobile Web development among brands in 2011 paid off last holiday as many more mobile shoppers accessed the major retailers via browser than app.
According to Nielsen metering data taken directly from over 5,000 volunteers and their devices late in the year, the top brands combined — including Amazon, Best Buy, eBay, Target and Walmart — reached nearly 60% of smartphone users during the height of the shopping season. But in most cases the majority of that traffic was coming to the retail mobile Web site and not the app.
In October, mobile Web among the top five retailers reached 53% of smartphones, but 45% were accessing the retailer over their Web site and 24% via apps. At the height of m-commerce season in December, overall reach into smartphones among the top retailers peaked at 59%, but 51% of smartphone users were touching the brands via the browser and 28% by app.
As the season ebbed in January, the full reach of retail among smartphone returned to the pre-season level of 52%.
Read more: MediaPost
