Vibrant Media, the global leader in premium contextual advertising, today announced the launch of Vibrant Lightbox Video, connecting brands and audiences in a cinematic way that is user-initiated. A recent study, which Vibrant conducted with Dynamic Logic, found that 81% of consumers prefer online video advertising they can initiate, as opposed to the forced view of pre-roll ads.
Vibrant Lightbox Video brings together sight, sound, and motion for a relevant video experience that captures 100% share of voice for brands. It delivers contextually targeted ads in a brand-safe environment.
Lightbox aligns with Vibrant’s strategic vision to expand its existing suite of contextual solutions with innovative placements that deliver high performance for top brands and new revenue opportunities for quality publishers. Unlike pre-roll, which has a limited supply of content inventory, Lightbox can reach audiences wherever relevant content exists and the video can be triggered by users through Vibrant in-text hyperlinks in content or from Vibrant Image in-image ads. As a result, Lightbox extends the reach of video advertising beyond the confines of pre-existing video content.
Read more: PRWeb

Rocket Fuel Packages Up CPG Booster
REDWOOD SHORES, CA–(Marketwire – May 2, 2012) – Rocket Fuel, the leading provider of artificial-intelligence advertising solutions for digital marketers, today released CPG Booster, an integrated solution to help CPG brands reach the right audience, drive lift in brand metrics, boost coupon downloads, measure offline sales, and maximize campaign ROI.
Key Facts:•Rocket Fuel’s new CPG Booster helps brands optimize digital campaigns — display, video, mobile, and social — to dramatically increase sales, online and off. Already in use by some of the world’s leading CPG companies, including Pinnacle Foods, CPG Booster drives results in every phase of the consumer purchase cycle — from boosting brand awareness, to increasing consideration, to stimulating purchase.

•Based on Rocket Fuel’s flagship advertising management platform that leverages artificial intelligence and predictive data analytics technology to automatically improve campaigns in real-time, CPG Booster enables brands to easily optimize digital campaigns across channels. Campaigns use AI technology to “learn” from each other, automatically adjusting placement, creative, and targeting across billions of advertising opportunities in online display, video, mobile, and social media to reach the right audiences with the right messages at the right point in the purchase process.

•Rocket Fuel and Forrester Research CPG analyst Tracy Stokes will cohost a webinar on the digital challenges CPG marketers face and the impact CPG Booster can provide on 5/30 at 2pm ET. Register here.
Read more: marketwire

OpenX Publisher Conference Guest Post Series

As he prepares for the conference, Greg took some time out of his schedule to answer the following questions about the recent developments he’s seen in online advertising. Greg Coleman, President of Criteo, will be speaking at the forthcoming OpenX Publisher Conference on May 14 where attendees will hear his thoughts on the challenges and opportunities within the digital advertising landscape.
1. What would you say are the main challenges facing digital advertisers today?

On any given day, there are past, present, and future challenges faced by digital advertisers.  In the ‘past’, advertisers review how sales occur within a given time period and understand, retrospectively, which marketing efforts led to those sales in order to attribute marketing credit to those efforts.  As the number of marketing channels proliferate, the ability to provide proper attribution to those channels becomes more difficult.  In the ‘present’, the staggering amount of data that digital marketers have access to means that there is a real need to understand how to contextualize the data, and frankly to understand what’s relevant and what’s not.  For example, what’s the value of a facebook ‘like?’  And in the ‘future’, marketers need to understand how to allocate their marketing dollars in a world where attention is more and more fractional, and split over many screens, sometimes simultaneously.  But these issues are all on a marketer’s mind, all the time.
Read more: OpenX

Big Data Is Never Too Big When You Can Act On It
We all know that a tremendous amount of online user data is being compiled at an extraordinary rate. An unbelievable, somewhat unfathomable, amount of data is gathered every second of every day. But is all of this data being used to its potential, or are we (collectively) just spending a lot of money to mine and store massive amounts of useless information?

This phenomenon of data overload, known as Big Data, refers to data sets whose size are beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time, and it isn’t a new concept. In fact, Doug Laney has been talking about it for over 10 years. Laney is considered a pioneer in the field of data warehousing, and in a research report dating back to 2001 he described the emerging “Big Data revolution” as the outcome of the effect of the e-commerce surge. According to a study* commissioned by the Columbia Business School and the New York American Marketing Association, 96 percent of marketers said they believe successful brands use customer data to drive marketing decisions.

However, 36 percent of these respondents said they have “lots of customer data,” but just “don’t know what to do with it.” Even more troubling, 39 percent of these marketers admitted they “cannot turn their data into actionable insight.” This is a big problem, because in the universe of e-commerce, being able to interact with your customers based on the behaviors they’re displaying in real time is invaluable for driving revenue, creating brand awareness, and engaging with your customers. The key is being able to react to data instantly.

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