Adnetik, Criteo, IgnitionOne and Netmining Join the CONTEXTWEB RTB Platform Partner Program
Companies can provide their clients with access to 200 million daily impressions from more than 11,000 direct publisher relationships
NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CONTEXTWEB Inc., www.contextweb.com, the integrated digital services company, today announced that Adnetik®, Criteo, IgnitionOne and Netmining have joined the company’s RTB Platform Partnership Program.
The new RTB partners are now trading live on the CONTEXTWEB RTB Platform. There are more than 25 companies in the partnership program.
Integration with the CONTEXTWEB RTB Platform means partner firms can provide their clients with instant access to 200 million daily impressions from more than 11,000 direct publisher relationships. CONTEXTWEB has the highest level of transparency on exchanges, with 95% of the bid calls containing the full URL, and 50% of the available inventory accepting expandable rich media ads.
The company also provides 31 impression-level data attributes including referrer URL and fold count position.
“CONTEXTWEB has spent years cultivating quality inventory and now it is available to buyers via CONTEXTWEB RTB,” said Nathan Woodman, Chief Operating Officer of Adnetik. “It enhances our ability to deliver smart, relevant ad buying opportunities across valuable inventory with all the targeting benefits of a real-time platform.”
Read More: Businesswire
Limelight Networks Sells EyeWonder Unit to DG
PRESS RELEASE
Limelight Networks Sells EyeWonder Unit to DG, Announces Share Repurchase Program, Updates Guidance for Third Quarter 2011 as a Result of Sale
TEMPE, AZ–(Marketwire – Aug 30, 2011) – Limelight Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: LLNW) (“Limelight”) today announced the sale of its EyeWonder rich media advertising unit to DG (NASDAQ: DGIT) for approximately $66 million in cash after adjustments. The company also announced a share repurchase program as well as updated its third quarter 2011 financial guidance as a result of the EyeWonder transaction.
Sales of EyeWonder
In a transaction expected to close on September 1, DG will acquire the EyeWonder rich media advertising unit from Limelight. DG plans to combine the resources of EyeWonder and MediaMind to create a global, at-scale provider of interactive advertising services. This transaction will enable Limelight to focus on continuing to grow and invest in its globally distributed computing platform and its rapidly expanding software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. These solutions include mobility, web and video content management, web application acceleration, cloud storage, and consulting.
“Limelight sees a bright future for our SaaS solutions, as they deepen our relationships with customers by streamlining their publishing workflows while providing the performance and operational benefits inherent in cloud applications. These open solutions also enable customers to monetize their online businesses using many different sources. Through this transaction, we are gaining more resources to strengthen the innovation pipeline and go-to market activities for these high-value, rapidly growing SaaS solutions and for continuing to scale our core CDN platform upon which these solutions run,” said Jeff Lunsford, chairman and chief executive officer, Limelight Networks, Inc.
Read More: AdExchanger
Fat or Flat: The Value of Rich Media
When it comes to metrics, it’s not about interaction rate, brand time and other ad unit data in a vacuum. Instead, it’s about the relationship between creative and media and how they unite to drive the campaign strategy overall. New media models, RTB and targeting capabilities have enabled us to more efficiently and effectively reach the right audience, but once found, creative and interactive, richer formats inspire that audience to action – and conversion.
As Ari Paparo of Appnexus pointed out in his blogpost Making Rich Media Scale and alluded to in a recent DigiDay article Rich Media’s Uncertain Value “very little research has been done to prove that these expensive, highly customized [rich media] ads are actually more effective than simpler Flash creatives” and rich media standards are sorely needed to scale in the RTB marketplace. One could see the position as a reflection of RTB technology limitations manifesting as a condemnation of rich media, but it’s no secret that new media models have created technical challenges. As pointed out in this ClickZ article from PointRoll’s CEO Rob Gatto, the technology is getting resolved to meet the brand and consumer need for high quality, high impact and more effective rich formats in the RTB ecosystem.
Read More: PointRoll Blog
comScore Releases July 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings
comScore Announces Availability of New YouTube Partner Reporting
RESTON, VA, August 22, 2011 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that 180 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in July for an average of 18.5 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in a record 6.9 billion viewing sessions.
YouTube Partner Reporting Now Available in Video Metrix
comScore is now able to provide YouTube Partner Reporting within the Video Metrix offering, for a never-before-seen look at viewership across hundreds of YouTube partners and their channels. This new feature provides a comprehensive and granular view of the unique audiences within different YouTube partner channels, enabling advertisers to more-easily create and optimize campaigns across specific channels to reach desired target audiences. The July data release for YouTube Partner Reporting includes dozens of beta partners, while comScore and Google plan to initiate reporting of more partners with the release of August data.
A first look at select YouTube partners from the current list of beta partners revealed that Machinima reached 16.9 million viewers with the highest engagement at 1.2 hours per viewer over the course of the month. Maker Studios drew 11.4 million viewers, who viewed an average of 8.9 videos, while Demand Media attracted 15.2 million viewers.
Read More: comScore
ValueClick to Acquire Dotomi
Display Advertising Leaders Combine to Create a Branding and Performance Powerhouse
WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– ValueClick (Nasdaq: VCLK) and Dotomi announced today that they have signed a definitive merger agreement whereby Dotomi will become a wholly owned subsidiary of ValueClick. Privately held Dotomi is the leading provider of data-driven, intelligent display media for major retailers.
Dotomi creates and delivers display advertising where the ad creatives and media placements are dynamically adapted in real time at the user and impression level. The Company works directly with clients to integrate anonymous data and then surrounds each client with technology enabled marketing services. Dotomi manages everything from brand strategy and dynamic creative development to message delivery and decisioning. This data-driven, end-to-end approach results in display advertising that improves consumer brand engagement and generates measurable sales lift both online and offline for its clients.
Through its unique set of capabilities, Dotomi has developed strategic, direct relationships with over 100 retail brands, including over forty brands from the Internet Retailer Top 100. Led by Chief Executive Officer John Giuliani, Dotomi is based in Chicago and has 160 employees.
“Dotomi’s end-to-end offering attracts large brands because of its ‘simple sophistication.’ John and his team have built a great business integrating the technical and consultative points in the display value chain,” said Jim Zarley, chief executive officer of ValueClick. “Together with ValueClick’s portfolio of products, we will be in a position to meet the needs of marketers with a single relationship that will create marketing and analytic consistency. Our combined scale and expertise should accelerate their adoption of digital media. Together we believe we will create a new powerhouse in branding and performance-based advertising.”
Read More: AdExchanger
Making Rich Media Scale
In my recent Ad Age piece on the disruptive nature of RTB technologies I took some shots at the rich media business. Specifically, I called it a “tech hairball”. Of all the points in the article, the rich media comments got the most feedback so I want a chance to explain exactly my criticism.
First, some brief background. The term “rich media” refers to display advertising creatives that utilize an ever-expanding collection of features like video, larger file size, social interactions, expansion beyond the banner slot, etc. Within the industry the term generally is associated with a set of vendors including PointRoll, MediaMind and DoubleClick (where I built and managed the rich media products). The fact that the whole business cannot be easily defined except in relation to the vendor offerings should raise eyebrows. Imagine if you couldn’t fully describe what a database was without reference to Oracle or Microsoft — that situation doesn’t exist in mature tech sectors, yet it is the case for the technology behind the most valuable digital ads running in display today.
At heart, the key issue that holds the rich media sector back is that the technical foundation of these ads remains immature and fragmented causing inefficiencies and complexities throughout the value chain. Rich media was invented by EyeBlaster and Unicast over ten years ago, yet virtually no standards have emerged to govern the delivery, reporting, or effectiveness of these creatives. In contrast, the in-stream video world has gone from inception to widespread adoption of the VAST and VPAID standards in less than five years. Mobile rich media is rapidly developing the ORMMA standard, potentially leaving us in a situation where it’s easier to develop cutting-edge mobile ads than browser display ads. Let’s examine the current state of rich media technology along the path of planning->creation->delivery->reporting->effectiveness and see how fragmentation continually limits the growth of the entire display business.
Read More: The AppNexus Impressionist
