Telecom Powerhouse Adopts Gateway Technology as AudienceScience Continues Leadership Position in Global Audience Delivery Solutions for Marketers

NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire – Jan 31, 2012) – Digital marketing technology company, AudienceScience®, today announced that global telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom is now using the AudienceScience Gateway as its audience delivery solution. The Gateway allows the group to monitor its own information, define and engage with relevant audience segments, and use this knowledge for managing targeted advertising campaigns.

This partnership with Deutsche Telekom is further illustration of AudienceScience’s continued growth and momentum within key international markets. AudienceScience’s global presence is helping partners focus their digital campaigns through its technology, expertise, and data, delivering universal access to digital audiences at scale across multiple channels for the world’s largest advertisers, agencies and publishers. Deutsche Telekom will leverage the Gateway technology to enable Interactive Media and Scout24 Group to provide more targeted and relevant messages via online campaigns to the appropriate audience at the right time of engagement.

“Deutsche Telekom is a blue-chip global company well-known for its excellence in customer service and technology infrastructure,” said AudienceScience CEO Jeff Pullen. “We’re very excited to be their technology partner, helping them to achieve their marketing objectives.”

Read More: Marketwire

Brands Must Empower Consumers Or Risk Alienation

Consumer empowerment poses several marketing challenges for brands and agencies, not the least of which is simply keeping up. Also, some brands pay lip service to transparency when it comes to serving customers — but they don’t follow through.

Those were two of the insights delivered by a MediaCom-sponsored Webcast Tuesday featuring Dell’s Tiffany Bissey, head of global digital and emerging media for the computer giant; Matthew Mee, director of strategy for MediaCom’s Europe, Africa and Middle East region and marketing consultant Martin Lindstrom.

“The difference now,” from just a few years ago, said Mee, is that consumer expectations [of satisfactory brand service] are constantly edging ahead. They’re setting the pace–Twitter is a good example — and we’re trying to keep up.”

They better make sure they do, Lindstrom said of brands. Brands that don’t fulfill promises or otherwise let down consumers in the digital age will receive a massive and immediate push back, he said. Lindstrom even predicted the emergence of a “WikiLeaks for brands,” which could be devastating for companies that “don’t keep their houses in order.”

Read More: MediaPost

Seeking better market position, online video ad platform TidalTV is rebranding as Videology and seeking a more technology-heavy image.

“To be honest, TidalTV is not a good name,” confessed Scott Ferber, chairman and CEO of Videology. The new name “is more reflective of our core offering — a screen-agnostic, data-driven approach to video advertising, encompassing both supply-side monetization and demand-side ROI,” he said.

Also this week, Videology is launching a sell-side platform to complement the capabilities currently offered to media agencies. AOL Video has signed on as the first participating publisher.

Launched in late 2007, the Baltimore-based company built its reputation offering video advertising, optimization and yield management services to clients, while its AdOSTM technology uses relevant data to improve ad delivery.

Read More: MediaPost

Mapping the Future of Media Buying

I had the opportunity to sit down with Ben Fox, EVP of Adconion Media Group’s Magnify Platform, a few weeks back and we shared a long discussion on the future of many things digital. For the past year, Fox has been on the road sharing his thoughts on how digital media buying and selling infrastructure is evolving, not only in how money is being earmarked, but the impact of digital advertising on consumers and brands.

While there were a number of great takeaways from our conversation, Fox’s overall perspective on the digital media buying process is invaluable. At the center of media buying today is that most advertisers need a combination of unique ad types, analytics, and targeting tools to get the job done. In short, it’s nearly impossible to create a digital media buying “recipe” because each advertiser has different ingredients.

During the past decade the process used to get digital ads in front of target audiences has gone through a phenomenal evolution. The process of buying media directly from publishers has given way to automated systems that tie advertisers together with available inventory. Not only are today’s ad ops faster, but generally more efficient, measurable, and effective.

Read More: ClickZ

Adconion Media Group Bolsters Financial Prowess by Adding FD All-Star Robert Dighero to the Board

SANTA MONICA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The Adconion Media Group announced today that Robert Dighero will join its board of directors, effective immediately. Robert will become a non-executive director and chairman of Adconion’s Audit Committee.

Robert Dighero has over 20 years operational experience, the last 15 working with internet companies. He is a partner at Passion Capital and White Bear Yard and an active investor across Europe focused on early stage e-commerce, payment and marketplace businesses. He has led several investment syndicates and taken on a number of board and advisory roles.

Robert was CFO of QXL ricardo plc from 1998 to 2008, overseeing development from start-up to the company’s sale to Naspers. He managed a wide range of corporate actions including the company’s dual listing IPO, consolidating the European online auction market with nine acquisitions, the largest over $1 billion, and launching an MBO. The QXL Group was the best performing share on the London Main Market in both 2004 and 2005 and in the All-Share in 2007 with an over 35,000% share price increase in 5 years. Robert was short-listed for CBI / Real FD, “FD of the Year” in 2007 and the following year negotiated the £1 billion sale of QXL via a public take-over offer. Prior to QXL, Robert was CFO of AOL UK and previous roles included that of M&A at Bertelsmann USA and at Verulam Investments. Robert started his career at Bain & Co, having left Cambridge with a First class degree and a post-graduate degree in Engineering. He has an MBA from Insead.

Read More: Businesswire

Many of us in this industry have been fighting the good fight for a long time now to make display advertising a better outlet for brand dollars. And, if we get it right, everyone wins. But up to this point, the focus has almost entirely been on better technology. That’s not going to cut it.

From my rough calculations, the vast majority of venture-capitalist dollars, roughly $2.5 billion of $5.7 billion in the first half of 2011 alone, and strategic exits have focused on the automation of the sales and buying process, targeting and optimization.

Improving technology obviously has its benefits, but as an industry we have a bigger problem to fix: the essence of display advertising itself. We are all so caught up on acronyms and technology that we sometimes forget what it is that we are doing: We are in the business of advertising. The problem? A lot of display ads are not noticed. Beyond click-through rates hovering at fractions of fractions of a percent, 43 percent of users say they ignore and disregard banner advertising. To fix this, we need to change the economics: fewer and bigger ads. Not just bigger ads, but fewer.

Read More: Digiday

Meet Your Audience (for the Second Time)

These days, advertising and data platforms are giving marketers a wealth of information that can be used to validate their strategies and optimize their digital campaigns for better performance. There’s a lot of data to sort through – some more useful than others. Sometimes, good campaign optimization comes down to the basics: understanding who your audience is, and why they are doing what they are doing.

Let’s look at a real-life example of a digital display campaign, run through the digital ad agency of a popular mattress retailer. The agency wanted to test new inventory sources for the campaign by running broadly on general interest sites, evaluating the demography of audiences that showed purchase intent, and optimizing over the course of the campaign to maximize impact.

A theory being tested was that older audiences, who report more difficulty sleeping than younger demographic groups, would respond more favorably to the retailer’s online display ads. Campaigns were initially skewed to sites that over-indexed against an audience composed of ages 50 and older.

Read More: ClickZ

Unruly Adds $25M In Effort To Scale Social Video Campaigns

Anxious to scale its social video advertising platform, Unruly just secured a $25 million Series A investment from Amadeus Capital Partners, Van den Ende & Deitmer and Business Growth Fund. Since its debut in 2006, the London-based company claims to have executed over 1,400 social video campaigns, while delivering, tracking, and auditing 1.34 billion user-intended video views.

“We set out to help brands capture the massive opportunity in social video,” said Unruly founder and Group CEO Scott Button.

Unruly’s proprietary technology, RAMP (Real-time Amplification and Measurement Platform) powers social video campaigns for Old Spice, Electronic Arts, adidas, Unilever, T-Mobile and Coca-Cola.

It also had a hand in spreading Evian’s “Roller Babies,” T-Mobile’s “Life’s for Sharing,” Coca Cola’s “Happiness Factory” series, and Old Spice’s “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaigns.

Profitable since 2009, Unruly reported full-year revenue of $25 million in 2011, and a current revenue run-rate nearing $50 million.

Industrywide, social video campaigns generated 2.7 billion views in 2010 and more than 8 billion views in 2011, and are predicted to generate 20 billion views in 2012, according to Unruly.

Read More: MediaPost

Despite a lack of measurement standards, local online ad spending will show double-digit growth over the next few years, and will continue to increase its share of total local ad spending, according to a new report from eMarketer.

As consumers turn to local search, mobile devices, hyper-local sites and daily deals to satisfy their need for highly relevant news and information, local online ad spending will rise up to meet them, insists eMarketer analyst and report author Lauren Fisher.

“Local online ad spending is growing as fast as — if not faster than — total online ad spending,” according to Fisher. “National advertisers shifting dollars to follow the U.S. population online will largely fuel this growth.”

As of May, 90% of U.S. agencies surveyed by local forum site Topix said their clients had asked for geographically targeted ads. Although the agency sample was small, it included large firms that represent a greater number of national advertisers.

For eMarketer, any company using digital ads to reach an audience in a specific area is engaging in local online advertising. Most research firms agree on this general definition, but they largely disagree on how to apply it across advertiser type, ad format and online property. The result: conflicting local ad-spending estimates.

Read More: MediaPost

How Search Marketers Expect To Use Data In 2012

About half the search marketers participating in MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit survey during the three-day conference said they take responsibility both for search and social campaigns — making the range of topics discussed at last week’s MediaPost Search Insider Summit all the more important.

Most marketers — 72.7% — who participated in the survey said they rely on interest-based targeting in search campaigns. Targeting beyond keywords continues as a trend in search engine marketing, as well as social. Evidence of the movement can be found in a recent Twitter campaign connecting AMC TV brands to consumers.

Search marketers also clearly understand the benefits of tying social and social data into search engine marketing campaigns, as well as search engine data into social media campaigns. When asked whether their company has a Google+ account, 82.4% of respondents said yes.

It turns out that 60% of marketers said they tie search data into two or more online campaign media. Aside from social, some of the options discussed at the MediaPost Search Insider Summit include tying search data into display advertising or campaigns supported by demand-side platform providers.

Read More: MediaPost

SAY Media has unveiled a platform that identifies individuals on the company’s network who have stopped regularly consuming live television and then targets ads to them online. Working with Quantcast, the offering pulls together online and offline data to give advertisers insight into behavioral changes for video and television consumption.

SAY Media recently began testing the platform with one unnamed brand. The companies will monitor the target audience for behavioral changes. The platform targets through traditional Web browsing rather than mobile devices, but that will change as the technology develops.

In its development of the offering, Quantcast ran a statistical model against profiles that SAY Media developed that identify consumers who are “highly likely to be off the grid” — meaning those who have curtailed watching live television content.

Read More: MediaPost

How Big Data Analytics Can Save Publishing
Private Exchanges Are The First Step Toward Reclaiming The ‘Premium’ in Premium Publishing

Traditional newspaper and magazine publishers, responsible for most of the high-quality and original content we consume, have seen a huge decline in advertising revenues. While it’s the easy and obvious call to support premium publishers as they point fingers and blame VCs for investing in disruptive buy side tech, I’m going to go out on a limb and say something blunt: Publishers, you deserve every bit of this.

Publishers have not generated much of the almost infinite supply of channel-choking inventory, but they have also done next to nothing to preserve what is good and proprietary and “premium” about their own inventory. In some cases, they have chosen lowest common denominator ad networks, exchanges and supply side platforms to do the hard work of selling.

Publishers of high-quality content with large, desirable audiences need to reclaim their online ads inventory. Only big data tools can dig them out of the undifferentiated, over-supplied, machine- driven nightmare of the sell side by enabling publishers to scalably and cost-effectively analyze, price and allocate inventory in the new environment.

Read More: AdAge

Acquisition Enhances Ad Optimization Capability for Social, Search and Display Campaigns

SAN JOSE, Calif.—-Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Efficient Frontier, a leader in multi-channel ad buying and optimization. Adobe solutions are central to how digital marketing and advertising is created, managed, executed, measured and optimized. Adobe currently captures approximately five trillion digital transactions per year for more than 5,000 customers, including many of the world’s largest advertisers, publishers and advertising agencies.

The acquisition of Efficient Frontier will add multi-channel ad campaign forecasting, execution and optimization capabilities to Adobe’s existing Digital Marketing Suite. Along with the Suite, Adobe’s digital marketing capabilities include an enterprise-class data management platform, a leading video ad management and monetization platform, and an enterprise content management system. Adobe will continue to build upon the foundation of its independent ad buying and optimization platform for search, social and display, enabling the company to offer a more complete suite of capabilities to digital marketers, advertisers and publishers for reporting and analytics, personalized experiences, multi-channel campaign management and media monetization.

“With the explosion in global Internet advertising, our customers need to know where, when and how to spend their digital marketing dollars to get the greatest return,” said Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of Adobe’s Digital Marketing Business. “The addition of Efficient Frontier will give our Digital Marketing Suite customers a leading platform for turning ad spend into business impact.”

Read More: AdExchanger

When Is Audience Targeting Worth It?

ADOTAS – The field of audience targeting – also known as audience analytics – has long proven attractive and effective to online marketers. Honing campaigns to focus on specific audiences is not only logical, but it promises to provide a better way to generate return on ad dollars for the goals an advertiser is trying to achieve.

Because advertisers pay a premium for audience targeting, it’s important to examine the return on investment as it relates to all aspects of a campaign. As online marketers are beginning to understand, it’s rare that any one dimension of a media campaign is responsible for success. Furthermore, they’re finding out that each dimension delivers different results depending on a number of variables.

Whether you’re trying to determine the best creative, the highest performing website, the right audience demographic or all of the above, the ability to simultaneously analyze these variables is key to determining the optimal mix of online ad campaign attributes.

Taking a holistic look at the ways audience analytics combines with other online marketing factors is essential to knowing how, when and where to invest in audience targeting. This is no easy task. A brand may be looking at targeting 10 different audience segments across multiple ad networks, making it difficult to determine the right combinations of creative, placement, timing and other campaign considerations that work best.

Read More: Adotas