Jeremy Steinberg is VP, Digital Sales & Business Development, FOX News Network.

Late last week, Steinberg offered an update to AdExchanger on his company’s efforts in the online audience buying space.

AdExchanger.com: Last May, you discussed with AdExchanger.com some of the things you were doing on the product side to address audience buying.  How has it worked out?

JS:  Really well, and – within the next couple months – we’re going to be rolling out a fully-revamped audience insights suite of services for our advertisers, which will provide enhanced targeting opportunities for audience, as well as context.

It’s equally important to marry the two together and is a key differentiator for us. This is a big investment in our business and in our future.

We’ve known for quite some time that we have by far the most engaged audience in news, and the numbers in comScore really speak to that.  We’re investing in new technology because we want to prove it to our advertisers that our advertising works.

We’re doubling down and offering robust segmentation of our audience so advertisers can dive in deep to reach their targets, or, even better, to find out who their ads are performing best against, and then optimizing accordingly.

Will the focus of this product be on PC-based display?  Mobile, video?

It’s focused on [PC-based] display to start. We’re certainly going to explore expanding it to other channels down the road.

Any trends you can share that you’re seeing with display today in your business?

There’s a lot going on in this area. There’s the direct, and indirect.

On the direct side, we’re seeing increased demand from the prior year, and one of the reasons for that increased demand is my team is out in the marketplace proving the value of our inventory. We’re doing that through our investments in custom solutions, and in ad technology. We’re talking about audience targeting about real‑time bidding. That’s something that has been of keen interest to our clients.

In addition, my national team is out there talking about how we can activate campaigns socially. We believe all of these solutions are differentiating us from the competition and the general Web. That’s why we’re seeing great demand.

Read more: AdExchanger

Given the nascent quality of connected TV advertising, it’s hard to really offer a substantive comparison between the value of such placements versus the comparatively more established PC-based video and mobile ads.

But you have to start someplace and Videology (the video ad network recently formerly known as TidalTV) has a few stats that appear to offer further evidence of the complementary quality of connected TV media buys as part of a larger video ad strategy.

Since there’s currently no uniform way to “click” a connected TV video ad the company’s study (pdf) discusses the value of video completion rates (VCR) for ads seen on wifi-enabled televisions.

The number that jumps out about connected TV ads is that it has a 110 percent video completion rate over regular online video. As if that we’re special enough, mobile video’s completion rates are around 10 percent lower than ones seen on PC-based web video ads. And the prices for ads across those devices tend to reflect that.

As Videology notes, the divergence in completion rates between mobile and connected TVs make obvious sense: mobile phone users tend to be on the go and given 3G buffering, people give up on a video that doesn’t load in a matter of seconds. With wifi-TVs, users probably are planted on their couch and home connections tend to be infinitely better than access a user can get on a street or a moving bus/train.

For an advertiser looking at click-through rates, mobile is still a very good addition, as smartphones deliver a 350 percent CTR increase for an average price increase of 30 percent. That’s a very strong, over 10 to 1 ratio.

If  ”engagement” like video completion is the main aim, connected TV delivers improved completed views at a ratio of 2 to 1 compared to cost increases, which is roughly 54 percent higher than online video prices.

But do these improved rates equal the cost required to reach them?

Videology just looked at eight campaigns — it doesn’t identify them further — and found that using multiple screens showed brand lift

increases between 70- and 300 percent, while the online video campaigns showed brand lift in the 15- to 130 percent range.

On average, multiple screen campaigns using  online video, mobile and connected television screens showed average brand recall rise 9 times higher than those relying solely on online video.

Read more: TVExchanger

Can you accurately measure the impact of online video advertising on offline consumer purchases?

Videology is going to try. The ad platform, formerly known as TidalTV, is entering into dual partnerships with database marketing and behavioral targeting services provider I-Behavior and Kantar Shopcom, which runs a database containing information from 231 million consumers across 270 CPG, retail, travel, lodging and services categories.

The goal is to help marketers reach users based on their demographic makeup or in-store activity, explained Kevin Haley, Chief Scientist at Videology.

“What advertisers really want to know is if their advertising moves soap off the shelves,” says Haley. He says the ability to provide advertisers with ongoing, offline ROI measurement should have a “significant impact on advertising strategies within the digital video space.”

With the three-way partnership, advertisers can target offline purchase-based segments across Videology’s in-stream video network of more than 80 million consumers, Haley promised.

Meanwhile, given the volume of data that will result from the enterprise, Haley sees an opportunity for analysis of purchase behavior at the brand level, including increases in sales volume, frequency of purchase and retail penetration.

Launched in late 2007, Videology was known to the world as TidalTV until earlier this month. The name change was meant to convey a more video- and technology-heavy image.

Read more: MediaPost

Future Publishing and The Guardian have encouraged companies to embrace private exchanges while there is still time to learn.

Agencies and publishers have downplayed calls this week for more industry education (nma.co.uk 19 January 2011) to reduce nervousness around private ad exchanges.

Marco Bertozzi, MD of research firm VivaKi Nerve Center (right), said, “I don’t buy the nervousness anymore. A year ago not many publishers were as involved as they are now. Most didn’t trust it. Nine months later it’s a very different story. If you can get the FT to work with you in a private marketplace you can get anyone.”

He reckons almost every publisher is “dipping their toe in the water”, with feedback showing that they are seeing better returns through the exchanges than selling to ad networks.

He points to The Guardian, Future and Associated as some of the early adopters.

The Guardian began trading premium performance inventory via a private exchange with Rubicon Project in October 2011, but it first experimented with exchange trading in 2008, which it scaled in 2009 before developing new UK inventory to trade programmatically in March 2010.

Tim Gentry, Guardian News & Media’s commercial effectiveness manager, said the early move was driven in part by being able to gain experience while volumes were relatively low and the market was relatively immature. “The short-term aim for us is to grow our share of market by capturing trading-desk spend that was previously going to networks,” he said. “Longer term, we are aiming to gain the skills and experience that will make us one of the best premium publishers.”

Read more: newmediaage

Facebook may be the biggest social network on the planet, but social ad targeting firm 33Across says it now has the distinction of managing the world’s largest social and interest graph.

The company was set to announce today that it has acquired San Francisco-based publishing sharing tool Tynt, which says it reaches more than 1 billion global users monthly. Ostensibly, the acquisition expands 33Across’ data footprint to more than 1.25 billion people worldwide (which the companies say eclipses Facebook’s 800 million, although comparing Facebook’s network to 33Across’ isn’t exactly an apples to apples comparison).

Tynt, which tracks when readers cut and paste content forsharing via email and other social channels, has more than 500,000 publisher clients, including NBCUniversal, Sports Illustrated and MarthaStewart.com. 33Across will maintain the Tynt brand but take ownership of all of the company’s assets, including technology, patents, filings, analytics and tool sets, as well as its roughly 17 employees, including senior leadership.

Read more: ADWEEK

Growth in mobile video consumption is so poised, it’s difficult to predict how high and fast the curve might move, while the same goes for advertising and other revenue streams.

“The opportunity appears to be enormous by any stretch of the imagination,” said Nielsen Senior Vice President Scott L. Brown, noting the boom in smartphone penetration.

Mike Bloxham, the executive director of the Media Behavior Institute, said: “There’s a huge amount of growth yet to come in mobile-related revenues … we’re almost at a Jurassic stage of development.”

Bloxham did caution that analyst suggestions that the mobile advertising market would parallel growth in usage could be too ambitious. If mobile accounts for 8% of media consumption time, that hardly means 8% of ad dollars would be apportioned in the space, given the many other factors that impact media buying.

“That’s complete garbage,” he said in joining Brown on a panel at the NATPE event. “Media money is not allocated based on time spent alone. It’s much more complicated than that.”

Read more: MediaPost

Ad agencies are engaged in a wrenching transition, driven by technological change. The very underpinnings of the agency business are shifting, as the business confronts a variety and challenges in digital media. Digiday is embarking on a series of video interviews with agency leaders to discuss how the modern agency is built. There’s little doubt there is not an easy blueprint for the “agency of the future.” There will be new agencies, evolved “traditional agencies,” and even new hybrid marketing companies that are part agency, part tech and part media.

The series is made possible through the sponsorship of Videology, the video advertising platform until recently known as TidalTV. To introduce the series, I sat down with Videology CEO Scott Ferber to get his view on how technology is shifting the agency’s role. Ferber, who founded Advertising.com and sold it to AOL for $435 million in 2004, believes that agencies will evolve to become technology enablers, stitching together pieces of tech created by others. He’s mostly down on the idea of agencies owning technology. See the full interview below.

Read more: DIGIDAY

If content is the crux of all our marketing efforts, we should be learning, adjusting, and optimizing. If not, it will lead to a negative consumer experience.

One of my first columns for ClickZ was the importance of content and its role as a tangible media format. In the last few months, content continues to be a hot topic. The volume of content being distributed is increasing and the way an advertiser collects and uses data is changing. In our everyday professional lives, it’s easy to “set it and forget it,” but this can counter all the hard work put into content development and distribution.

So where to begin? The most common way a user will reach your content is through a basic search, meaning that search engine optimization is vital to your content planning approach. The optimization plan will need to take into account how all the content is distributed, be it via web, video, mobile, tablet, and social posts.

With media planning in its traditional sense merging with these specialized fields (search, social, mobile, experiential, and video), it’s important to make cross-channel content optimization central to any strategy. To do so (and remain sane), here are a few guidelines:

1.What are consumers already telling me? Social behavior, social trends, and search queries represent some of the best data for determining content needs and optimizations across all channels. It’s easily accessible to advertisers and beneficial when tied to syndicated and longer term research.

Example: Use data from Twitter, Facebook, or Google. The consumer is already being vocal, and as an advertiser you have access, so mine this data to improve content development and inform optimizations for existing content.

2.Is my content relevant to the experience? What is your consumer seeking? Take the research from step one and apply it to their experience, get a basic understanding of the consumer’s needs in a specific environment, and make sure your content answers their question.

Read more: ClickZ

Tremor Video’s acquisition of TubeMogul’s InPlay ad analytics tool helps both companies respectively sharpen their value to a fast-evolving video marketplace. The deal, terms of which were undisclosed, gives Tremor yet another layer of insight into publishers’ ad management programs. At the same time, TubeMogul can be seen as more fully ensconced on the demand end of the digital video ad sales equation and is no longer trying to play both sides of the fence.

Analytics is the difference: Tremor plans to integrate InPlay, which TubeMogul created about three years ago to attract more publisher business, with VideoHub, its end-to-end video ad sales platform. While VideoHub serves both ad sellers and buyers, Tremor is largely aimed at working with publishers. At a time when video ad spending remains the fastest growing category of ad spending — eMarketer said last month that video ad dollars will rise 40 percent in 2012 to $3.1 billion — the providers of video ad services are primarily differentiated by their analytics and tech stack.

Read more: TVexchanger.com

PointRoll, a Gannett Company and the leading provider of digital marketing technology, today announced the findings of its recent Video Benchmark Study and revealed a robust new set of in-stream video formats. The study conducted concluded that 78% of viewers completed 100% of interactive in-stream ads, compared to 69% who completed 100% in-stream ads without interactive elements. Additionally, interaction rates, where users specifically took an action within the ad, for in-stream video ads were more than three times higher than that of in-banner video ads.

PointRoll’s Video Benchmark Study, which compared campaign results from April–December 2011, also revealed some interesting nuances across vertical ad categories. Among those that were top performing across interactive in-stream ads were automotive, entertainment and non-profit organizations. Consumer electronics manufacturers, consumer goods manufacturers and telecommunications companies were among the top three vertical categories for in-stream video ads that did not include interactivity.

Read more: PRWeb.com

Vibrant Media, the global leader in premium contextual advertising, announces today the acquisition of Image Space Media (ISM), the in-image advertising technology company.

The deal is part of Vibrant Media’s mission under new CEO, Cella Irvine, to expand upon its existing suite of contextual solutions with innovative placements that deliver high performance for top brands, new revenue opportunities for quality publishers, and relevant experiences for consumers. With several key innovations in 2011, Vibrant Media’s contextual platform (VXPlatform) now includes a suite of advertising products – Vibrant Image, Vibrant Video, Vibrant Bar, and Vibrant Display – in addition to Vibrant In-Text.

“Traditional ad models were brought online through pre-roll and display, but we create unique media placements that are designed for the interactive nature of the internet and deliver truly relevant ad experiences to users,” says Cella Irvine, CEO of Vibrant Media. “Roughly 30% of our publishers’ content is images and they now play an important role in our strategy to deliver new media placements.”

“ISM shares Vibrant’s vision to create industry-leading in-image contextual advertising,” says Kevin Tung, Co-founder and COO of Image Space Media. “By combining our image technology with Vibrant’s unmatched scale, robust contextual platform, and incredible sales force, we’ve built a significant offering. Vibrant is a company unafraid to invent – we love everything about that.”

Read more: Vibrant Media

“Ad Agents” is a column written by the agency-side of the digital media community.

Joseph Leon, Managing Director EMEA of Essence Digital, a global, digital marketing agency based in London and New York.

In 2011, the biggest hype, the loudest buzz and the best conversation starter in digital media was without doubt RTB – (Real Time Bidding). Big words, such as revolutionary, seismic and rocket science, were bandied around and based on remarkably similar sales pitches from several leading RTB players, you’d be hard pressed not to believe that half of NASA’s scientists had jumped ship to join the digital revolution.

At its most basic, RTB is a mechanism for trading ad space in real time – sellers can essentially hold an auction for each impression and advertisers can assess, price and bid for it dynamically.

The main benefits for advertisers are indisputably cost efficiency and targeting – you pay the right price for what you need and discard what you don’t. But in practice, what does this mean for advertisers?

Read more: AdExchanger.com

Powerful though it may be, for marketers, big data can be a big headache.

For brands that want to reach audiences across the growing landscape of social platforms, executing effective campaigns can mean managing different strategies, different planning and buying processes, and different analytics tools. Crunching data across multiple social platforms and reporting performance can become a labor-intensive operation for a lucky (or not so lucky) few.

Unified, which launches today, aims to streamline the entire cycle of marketing across major social ecosystems with technolog intended for enterprise clients. Calling it the industry’s first “Social Operating Platform,” the company says it will help global brands and agencies simultaneously execute campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and other social services with a patent-pending tool that manages each step of the process, from planning, buying and optimizing campaigns to analyzing earned media and determining returns on the investment.

“There’s a definite shift happening from traditional buying to real enterprise-class, big data management in the advertising space,” Unified CEO Sheldon Owen told Adweek.

Read more: ADWEEK

Break Media, the big digital video advertising network, says it has started a new video technology designed around the growing cost-per-view ad-buying metric.

The new technology, called Social Video Accelerator, combines guaranteed video distribution including pass-along advertiser content. It will run across the Break network — including Break.com, the Web’s big comedy video site, which now reaches more than 120 million unique viewers each month.

While cost per view (CPV) ad models are growing, less than half of video publishers are offering it, says Break Media.

Read more: MediaPost

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – Jan 17, 2012) – BrightRoll, the leading provider of digital video advertising services, today announced that it became the first ad network to exceed 100 million unique viewers, according to the most recent comScore Video Metrix in December 2011. According to the data, BrightRoll reached more than 110.4 million unique U.S. viewers, with an average of 7.9 videos per viewer. Additionally, the company’s data shows it managed 3.5 billion video ads in December, representing one out of every two U.S. video ads.

“We are thrilled to be the first video network to surpass the 100 million unique viewers milestone,” said Tod Sacerdoti, BrightRoll CEO. “We believe this continued dominance by video networks versus legacy broadcast publishers maps directly to the movement of ad dollars from broadcasters to aggregators.”

Top 10 Video Advertising Properties by Unique Viewers

BrightRoll is ranked as the top online video advertising property in December 2011 with 110.4 million video ad-exposed unique viewers, while Specific Media ranked second with 81.8 million. Adap.tv was third with 81.1 million viewers, followed by Videology with 56.6 million viewers and Tremor Video with 56 million viewers. More than 7 billion video ads ran in December, averaging 19.3 minutes per viewer.

Read more: Marketwire

Among marketers, what separates the good from the bad? Nothing less than effective real-time audience measurement, according to new research from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, in partnership with strategic consulting firm Winterberry Group.

Smart marketers, they found, are already shifting from traditional data focused on products, channels and campaigns to the real-time identification and optimization of consumer audiences.

The long-established use of personally identifiable information — like names and postal addresses — for targeted marketing purposes is increasingly being complemented by aggregated and “anonymyzed” digital data.

The point is to improve ad effectiveness through better targeting as well as efficiency through more economical media buying, according to Patrick Dolan, EVP/COO at the IAB.

“The plethora of new data sources, targeted technologies and advertising delivery platforms enable marketers to amass more intelligence from varied sources,” said Dolan. “This promising resource can only bear fruit if marketers can take that raw data and harness it effectively, going beyond traditional usage.”

Read More: MediaPost

Today, Adobe solutions are central to how digital marketing and advertising are created, managed, executed, measured and optimized. Our focus on market leadership in the digital marketing space has driven some dramatic changes at Adobe including the recent acquisition of Efficient Frontier, a leader in multi-channel and auction-based digital advertising optimization across search, display and social media.

With Efficient Frontier, Adobe delivers an industry-leading independent platform for digital ad buying to our customers. With this addition to our Digital Marketing Suite, we offer a more powerful solution for managing search, display and social media to better answer the needs of our customers. Even more importantly, we add the expertise of over 300 talented Efficient Frontier employees to our team.

Read more: Adobe Featured Blogs

Collective has today announced the launch of a private marketplace to offer media buying agencies and advertisers real-time bidding (RTB) access to its premium video platform.

Combining Adap.tv’s RTB technology with Collective’s audience data, Collective’s private exchange will offer pre-roll video advertising space across targeted audiences and premium publishers in real-time auctions. Publishers include IPC, WWE, The Independent, Sony Music and iVillage.

The move will see Collective become the first in the UK to launch an RTB private ad marketplace for premium video programming.

“Our marketplace gives advertisers and agency partners a new way to access premium VoD inventory, but with this inventory being in such demand, we don’t see it as a low cost entry to buy video in the UK,” said Jamie Estrin, Director of Collective Video. “RTB pricing is controlled by supply and demand, and high quality premium video is always in high demand in the UK.”

Read more: adap.tv

There has been a lot of discussion of late about convergence between the buy and sell side – with a number of large players trying to build their own end-to-end stack. Here Joe Zawadzki, CEO at Mediamath, argues that an independent buy and sell side is in the best interests of the industry.

There is an interesting question being posed in ad tech right now: should the buy side and sell side be allowed to coexist within the same platform? Put another way, how much does focus and loyalty to a specific class of customer matter?

It turns out, a lot, for at least three big reasons:

Conflict.

In finance, playing both sides is what precipitated the financial crisis of 2008. Investment banks that had CDO factoring capabilities as well as retail clients to buy them – buy-side and sell-side – were at the heart.

They knew what clients wanted and how much they had to spend, their risk tolerances and rating systems.

Read more: EXCHANGEWIRE