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

As a marketing professional, I spend a lot of time learning and educating on digital trends.

With the current rate of growth, mobile marketing has been one of the most exciting to monitor. The data on user adoption is changing almost daily, with consumers actively changing the way they consume, share, and publish. To keep up with these changes, brands and media companies are regularly making advancements that impact our industry.

For this column, I spent some time with my agency’s mobile strategy team to define the top four current trends.
More Data Capture, More Targeting
Advertisers have been able to target by location, content, and demographics for some time now. Recently “social targeting” and retargeting across mobile-enabled platforms has emerged. The new capabilities represent a significant opportunity to hone ad delivery. They also allow for greater customization of messaging. •Social targeting (e.g., partners like LocalResponse, Twitter, and Facebook): Scrapes social conversations tied to location to target users. Great for determining very specific communication opportunities. •Retargeting (e.g., partners like Tapad, BlueCava, and Adelphic): Uses connected devices that require registration to trigger usage patterns. Technology can then serve ads based on data collected. The “Holy Grail” will be a connection point and solid data capture between all digitally enabled platforms (desktop, IPTV, phone, and tablet)…but you can’t be too greedy.

Content Is Adapting
Read more: ClickZ

Say Media Debuts Content Ads

Say Media is among the latest online publishers to adopt a “viewable” impressions standard for display ad campaigns.

The company, which operates a network of sites spanning categories like fashion, technology and food, has introduced a new ad format based on a cost-per-exposure pricing model that charges only for ads visible within a user’s browser.

The new Content Ads from Say Media use technology are developed in-house to recognize when an ad unit is viewable and are geared toward small and medium-sized businesses running ads against endemic content within its network.

Earlier this year, comScore released research based on a study of a dozen brand campaigns showing that nearly a third (31%) of online display ads are never seen. Studies by AdSafe and others have estimated that figure to be even higher.

Ads may not be seen for a various reasons, including a slow-loading ad, users not scrolling down far enough on a page to see an ad “below the fold,” or other technical causes. Say Media’s new ad format and exposure-based ad pricing coincides with a broader industry push to shift from the traditional “served impression” for campaign reporting to the viewable impression as part of the “Making Measurement Make Sense” (3Ms) initiative.

The effort by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Association of National Advertisers and the 4As calls for a set of standards for measuring viewable exposures, among other things.

Read more: MediaPost

DoubleClick Experiment Could ‘Re-imagine’ IAB Display Metrics
Google said it will run a DoubleClick for Advertisers experiment, with help from brand measurement research firm Vizu, that could change the way companies measure brand lift from display ads.

The company will present the findings to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

DFA experiments began in mid-2008, but this could be the first with findings presented to the IAB that change brand lift measurements. The pilot aims to show that the use of experimental design principles — a research term — is a good way to address brand measurement challenges and to provide actionable insights to brand marketers.

Sherrill Mane, SVP of research, analytics, and measurement at the IAB, notes that if successful, the research could have far-reaching implications for the future of brand impact measurement of online advertising campaigns.

Surveys are a measurement tool already used by marketers to measure the effectiveness of a campaign, but, there are some challenges today with experimental design and how the responses are collected.

“We hope to move the industry forward by establishing a true experimental design form for this measurement,” said Sanaz Ahari, senior product manager at Google. “Online brand measurement for display is a pretty significant investment for the industry, and the IAB has been talking a lot about a solution around true experimental design, which is our focus.”

Read more: MediaPost

The State Of Rocket Fuel: CEO John Sees Impressive, Real-Time Bidding Impact

George John is CEO of Rocket Fuel, an online advertising technology company.

As part of its “State of…” series of articles with industry executives, AdExchanger.com spoke with John to discuss his company, his views on the space, and the state of Rocket Fuel today.

Click below or scroll down for more:

•RTB Impact On Display •The Ad Network & Company Positioning

•Revenue, Momentum •Trends Ahead for 2012 and 2013

•Mobile, Social And Rocket Fuel

•Milestones

AdExchanger: Are you seeing the impact you originally anticipated with real-time bidding (RTB) for PC‑based display?

GJ: It’s much better than I thought. If you consider the layers of sophistication around leveraging exchanges and liquid inventory, where “1.0″ was the original Right Media Exchange, and you’d log in and define your targeting rules and your bids, then “2.0″ was real-time bidding – but it doesn’t add anything to that style of buying.

Read more: AdExchanger

Integrating SEO with your social media strategy isn’t just something you should “think” about doing. Optimizing your social media efforts so that both search engines and social community members can find your content is essential if you’re going to have any chance at success and for your own efforts to get the “credit” rather than another company or individual.
Take for example last year’s viral video of the man with the “Golden Voice.” I wrote about this in depth, but in essence, had the newspaper who originally found this man paid attention to optimizing their content along with allowing it to be shared, they would have gotten the millions of views, plus the notoriety that came along with finding the man and becoming the authority on the subject, not MSNBC’s Today Show or YouTube.

Your company doesn’t have to have hundreds of thousands of dollars set aside to integrate search engine optimization into your social media efforts. Any small business can make sure they’re taking the essential steps that will help their content get the traction it needs. The key to making sure that your content is optimized is two-part. First, optimizing for how people search when they go to a search engine like Google or Bing, and second, optimizing for how people search when they go to a social networking community like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.
Read more: ClickZ
Key Findings in Audience Efficiency
I spoke the other week at AdMonsters OPS Markets London on the subject of audience efficiency. This is a methodology both to evaluate individual segments relative to a target audience, usually client converters or visitors, and the most efficient way to describe that target. We posted a preliminary piece on this very site. I offered five key findings based on more than 200 client models in my presentation and want to share three of those findings, and their implications, here.

A Reminder on Audience Efficiency

We can visualise audience efficiency as a tradeoff between how well an audience segment fits a client’s target audience (lift) and the reach. Mathematically, there is no possible selection of audiences that provides the same lift for a given reach or vice versa.

Third-Party Audiences Aren’t Efficient on Their Own

In this luxury auto manufacturer example we see that different third parties have radically different audience efficiency characteristics. At one extreme, we see that partner 2 has very high lift but very low reach. Partner 2’s total audience reach is higher than this, of course, but these are the only segments that show up as statistically relevant to this client target. At the other extreme, we see that partner 5 has very low lift, just 1 to 2 times the network average, though with very high reach.
Read more: admonsters

As mentioned in a recent article on the top five ad formats that will boost your brand, comScore asserts that the creative has four times the impact on results as the media plan does. An analysis of 400 campaigns indicates that the creatives contributed to 52 percent of the overall results, while the media plan contributed to just 13 percent.

Choosing the correct ad format can definitely boost your brand, but there’s a lot to be said for good ideas, regardless of how they are delivered.

Here are some compelling creative ideas that you can put into action to drive engagement and make the user experience more memorable. Example campaigns have been mainly drawn from last year’s MediaMind Rich Media award submissions.

Change up the standard interaction rules As the world becomes much more touch-centric, the same old point-and-click can start to drag a bit. If you can show your users a bit of non-standard interaction love, it’s hard to for them to resist at least trying it out.
read more: iMEDIACONNECTION
Grow Your Revenue Faster: How to Efficiently Engage More Buyers
Today’s business challenges are largely focused on marketing – how are you presenting your products at the time prospective buyers start looking? And where are your buyers looking for information about what products to buy?

The answer is: primarily through Internet searches and their social networks. Whether you are marketing to other businesses or to consumers, customers’ preferences are established way before they talk with your salespeople. How do your marketing people ensure that your products are being considered as early in the buying process as possible and with the best possible information?
How are the most advanced companies evolving their marketing and sales teams into the new world so they beat their competition like a drum? The answer starts with a clear and expanded role for marketing, promoting products and services where your buyers are figuring out what to buy, and aligning marketing with sales so your teams leverage each other to maximize productivity and teamwork – it’s a matter of life and death for your company. Sound revolutionary? Not really.

There are five steps to maximize revenue growth today. I assure you the results can be stunning:

1.Show up early and often. Engage prospective buyers the instant they start looking for your kinds of products. Leverage PPC, SEO, digital advertising, and partnerships that lead prospective buyers to your website – and custom landing pages so 100 percent of your prospective buyers are now engaged with your company in a way that’s better than your competition.

2.Develop trust; content is king. Marketing must develop prospective customers’ interest by sharing white papers and educating prospective customers about what’s possible using your products (versus your competition) via a highly evolved website that’s chock-full of valuable content that you share with prospective buyers so you earn their trust and respect.
Read more: ClickZ

In today’s online world, mass can be reached in months, not years. For proof, all you have to do is look at Pinterest’s explosion over the last six months, becoming the fastest standalone site to surpass the 10 million unique monthly visitors mark.
So why haven’t location-based social networks had this kind of explosive growth? After all, services like Foursquare and Gowalla have both been highly regarded and used by digital early adopters. Facebook even tried to launch its Places functionality as a standalone piece before folding it into the status update feature. Interestingly, Facebook places so much importance on this functionality that even after it shut down Places, it purchased Gowalla for its developer expertise. All social networks would love to have the size and engagement rates that Facebook receives, with a user base of 850 million and an average spent time in January 2012 of 405 minutes.

However, location-based services are dependent on smartphone penetration. Yes, people can use tablets for these services, but I think we can all agree that the majority of activity will be on smartphones. If we look at smartphone penetration according to the International Telecommunication Union (November 2011), there were an estimated 1.186 billion global active broadband subscribers in 2011, and 796 million smartphones have been sold in just the last two years according to IDC (Feb 2012).
Read more: ClickZ
Pubmatic Acquires MobiPrimo, Integrates Mobile Into Ad Platform
As hot for mobile as its publisher clients, PubMatic just announced the acquisition of MobiPrimo. An established mobile development technology firm, MobiPrimo clients include Nokia, Motorola and Microsoft. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Per the deal, PubMatic is planning to integrate the mobile platform with top mobile networks, ad servers and demand-side platforms.

“Integrating mobile into our platform simplifies a previously complex effort,” said Josh Wetzel, vice president of mobile at PubMatic. “Now, we’re giving publishers a single platform.”

Mobile or otherwise, PubMatic needs every edge it can get. According to 34 distinct criteria, Forrester recently deemed AppNexus and Admeld to be superior sell-side platforms.

PubMatic and Rubicon Project were both recognized by Forrester as strong competitors in the sell-side space, and credited search for aggressively ramping up their development efforts, as well as turning once-distinguishing platform features into standard offerings.

Read more: MediaPost

“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community. Today’s column is the first of a two-part series and written by Esco Strong, Director, Exchange Marketplace Management at Microsoft

Even if you’re but a casual follower of the digital display advertising space, one such option and term you’ve no doubt heard in kind over the past twelve months is “Private Exchange.” From panels to blogs to product pitches, I have seen the term bandied about by a variety of players and in different contexts, to the great confusion of our industry. It is sometimes even used to describe fundamentally divergent concepts and products. I would like to end that confusion.

In this blog series, I will attempt to clarify the key concepts, verbiage and use cases of what a “Private Exchange ” is, and is not. Part one will focus on explaining some of the different use cases and ways this terminology is used.In part two, I’ll dive deeper into what “Private Exchanges” can offer and analyze the various use cases and implications of using the different types of exchanges.

I won’t cover all of the possible permutations here, as the term has been used quite extensively within the industry to mean all sorts of different things. I will instead focus on the most common scenarios that touch the core functionalities involved in this area: Use case #1: “Private Exchange” = a siloed marketplace with controls managed individually by publisher

Read more: AdExchanger
Tapad Brings Retargeting to Phones, Tablets, But Marketers Aren’t Talking
One big growth area of display advertising is retargeting, which is popular with online retailers that want to get ads in front of consumers who’ve abandoned a shopping cart or otherwise left their site. Aggressive retargeting means you might see a lot of one ad from, for example, Bonobos, making it feel as if the internet knows where you’ve been (because it does).

Such ads will soon be following you to a smartphone, a tablet, or both — a technological hurdle, as so-called cookie-tracking can’t happen across different devices.

When we last wrote about Tapad, in September, the New York startup was busy helping advertisers retarget consumers within mobile phones, producing a $20 million revenue run-rate in the process. Tapad has since been working in beta on expanding the offering to help advertisers reach the same consumer across multiple screens: personal computers, cellphones and tablets. The company is releasing the technology out of beta today.

Read more: AdAgeDigital