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

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

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