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

Earth Day Accelerates Growth at Green Sites
Royal Wedding Drives Interest in Entertainment News Sites

RESTON, Va., May 20, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — comScore, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly analysis of U.S. web activity at the top online properties for April 2011 based on data from the comScore Media Metrix service. Green sites saw their second consecutive month of strong growth as Americans looked for ways to celebrate Earth Day (April 22) and cut back on fuel costs. Incentive sites were also popular in April, helping Americans stretch their dollars with promotions, daily deals and free samples, and the Royal Wedding drove gains at Entertainment News sites.

“More than 26 million Americans celebrated Earth Day this year by visiting green websites,” said Jeff Hackett, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix. “With gas prices climbing past $4.00 a gallon, Americans have a greater incentive to be thinking green to provide some economic relief.”

Green Sites Sprout for Earth Day
The Green category held on to the #1 spot in April, posting an even stronger gain of 32 percent. More than 26 million Americans visited the category during the month, with Shine Green taking the top spot with 7.9 million visitors (up 364 percent). Planet Green Sites came in second with 3.3 million visitors (up 15 percent), followed by Care2.com with 2.0 million (up 11 percent) and Mother Nature Network with 1.8 million (up 24 percent). EnergyGuide.com grew 6 percent to 918,000 visitors, while EPA.gov saw 916,000 (up 10 percent).

Read More: comScore

Ad Choices Update

For the past several months, Media6Degrees has been rolling out the Ad Choices icon in support of the Digital Advertising Alliance’s Self Regulatory program. At this point, we’re pleased to announce that the icon is being used on over 90% of our campaigns.

Given our wide adoption, we wanted to share some details on how users are responding to this new message:

• To date, we’ve served almost a billion impressions that included the icon.
• People who see the icon click through to expand the overlay at a rate of less than 0.005%.
• The overall opt-out rate is 0.0001%.
• Of the people who clicked on the icon to expand it, 3% eventually choose to opt-out.

These numbers tell us a couple of things. First, marketers are lining up behind the program. Our customers are top brands that recognize the value of informing users of their choices regarding advertising. They should be commended for supporting this initiative.

Second, despite some sensationalism in the press and attention from Washington, actual users don’t appear to be that concerned about targeted advertising based on behavior. Perhaps after years of getting targeted direct mail at their homes, which often contains very personal information, people have come to understand that targeted marketing is generally benign, and occasionally quite beneficial. Or perhaps they truly appreciate the value of receiving customized ads. Whichever it is, users are overwhelmingly forgoing the opportunity to opt out.

Read More: Media6Degrees

AudienceScience will officially release a lifecycle management and brand impact feature Wednesday for its data management platform created for media planners and buyers. The latest version of the AudienceScience Gateway DMP provides a better ability to collect and aggregate huge volumes of data from disparate sources, while maintaining privacy standards, according to the company.

The feature supports a fundamental shift in online target marketing, notes AudienceScience CEO Jeff Hirsch. Until now marketers used data management platforms per transaction or campaign, rather than to develop a long-term relationship with customers. It’s a shift in how data is being used, he says.

The lifecycle of a campaign spans from the consumer’s first interest in a product or service through the purchase process. Previously, AudienceScience had stored information for 12 weeks because the focus remained on immediate purchase intent items. Now brand marketers want a longer view of consumer activities.

Read More: MediaPost

Martini Media, NetSeer Team to Target Richest Audience Online

Deal paves road to personalized advertising to the most affluent consumers where they devote their time, energy and money

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Martini Media (www.martinimediainc.com), the digital platform that engages the $100K+ audience where they work and play most, will now target ads according to reader/viewer intent. The capability comes from a combination of in-house site data and a licensing deal with NetSeer (www.netseer.com), whose technology now lets publishers and advertisers see all the content on a Web page and understand the advertising environment it creates.

“This is a quantum leap for marketing,” said Skip Brand, CEO (http://bit.ly/dWT1FH) of Martini Media. “We can now target ads to the richest, hardest to reach people online the way they actually view media. And we can do it through the enthusiast sites proven to generate the greatest impact on brand awareness, preference and purchase.”

For example, Martini now will be able to distinguish contextually whether an individual page is the right environment for a yacht or auto or travel ad. NetSeer makes this possible through algorithms that determine a reader’s intent. “Bass” can mean music, fishing, or cooking; NetSeer technology spots the difference in context of surrounding content, so the opportunity is classified correctly. What’s more, the consistent classification assures that brand ads will be placed only in the most relevant environments.

Read More: BusinessWire

AdoTube has been working with FreeWheel and clients since March 2010, and has now been named as a FreeWheel Certified Partner. 

AdoTube, a leading in-video advertising platform, has been named by video monetization technology company, FreeWheel, as one of its Certified Partners. This new level of partnership comes from continued collaboration between AdoTube and FreeWheel, who have teamed up to empower a number of clients with limitless monetization opportunities through leveraging AdoTube’s various in-stream ad formats and premium ad network in conjunction with FreeWheel’s flagship product, Monetization Rights Management®.

Certified Partner status further ensures that AdoTube has met a substantial set of criteria that allows FreeWheel to vouch for AdoTube’s technology and solutions. FreeWheel requires companies to fully adhere to industry standards set forth by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), as well as an additional set of FreeWheel-specified criteria.

 “This program is a way for us to work with our valued partners like AdoTube to continue to strive for the best levels of support, integration, and operational excellence on behalf of our mutual clients,” said Brent Horowitz, VP, Business Development at FreeWheel. “The result should be higher standards and improved operations industry-wide.”

Read More: AdoTube

Joost Video Network Becomes Stand-alone Business Unit

Adconion Media Group plans to announce Thursday the spinoff of the Joost Video Network into a stand-alone business unit. The newly launched digital media company will provide premium branded solutions for advertisers and brand marketers seeking to target audiences with in-stream and in-banner video advertising.

Nick Higgins will lead the new unit as executive vice president. He previously held the position of head of global video at Adconion Media Group. Prior to joining Adconion, Higgins was at MSN, where he held several senior positions during the past 10 years.

Adconion acquired the assets-digital rights management, video player, and content distribution of Joost from ex-Skype founders in November 2009, and then launched the Joost Video Network in February 2010 across North America, Europe and Australia. Since then, Tyler Moebius, CEO of Adconion Media Group, says the company quadrupled revenue to $30 million and expects to triple digital growth in 2011, making it the largest global video player operating in more than seven countries.

 Read More: MediaPost

InvestingChannel Seeing CPMs Increase Due To Targeted Offering Says CEO Desai

Nikesh Desai is Founder of InvestingChannel, a vertical ad network and publisher services company.

AdExchanger.com: How did the InvestingChannel begin? And how has the company pivoted since it was first started?

ND: We started this business for a couple of key reasons, amongst others:

1.The business was started as an advisory business designed to help  financial media companies with their digital advertising revenue strategies.  We quickly discovered that many of our clients required execution both on the ad sales and operations/optimization side and often lacked the resources, reach and expertise to effectively monetize their valuable audience.
2.With the ease of content creation and the resulting proliferation of sites, particularly in finance, along with the desire for independent, trusted content, online audiences  have dispersed to niche sites to consume content rather than the larger ‘big brand’  destinations.  These audiences are highly coveted and desirable for endemic and non endemic advertisers but because of the fragmentation, lack of ad infrastructure and size, it is extremely  difficult for advertisers to find and target these largely unduplicated audiences  The business insights we gained from our consulting business coupled with the power and growth of the long/mid tail audiences  led to the creation of InvestingChannel.

Read More: AdExchanger

According to Blue Kai, I’m a tech-savvy, social media-using bookworm in the New York DMA, currently in the market for “entertainment.” At least that’s what my cookie says about me. Simply by going to the Blue Kai data exchange’s registry page, you can find out what data companies and resellers know about you, and your online behavior and intent.
 
In this brave new world of data-supported audience buying, every individual with an addressable electronic device has been stripped down to an anonymous cookie and is for sale. My cookie, when bounced off various data providers, also reveals that I’m male (Axciom), have a competitive income (IXI), three children in my family (V12), a propensity for buying online (Targusinfo) and am in mid-management of a small business (Bizo). I’m also in-market for a car (Exelate) and considered to be a “Country Squire,” according to Nieslen’s Prizm, which is essentially a boring white guy from the suburbs who “enjoys country sports like golf and tennis.” Well, I’m horrible at tennis, but everything else seems to be accurate.
 
As a marketer, you now have an interesting choice. Instead of finding “Country Squire” or “Suburban Pioneer” on content-specific sites they’re known to visit, now I can simply buy several million of these people, and find them wherever they may be lurking on the Web. This explains why you suddenly see ads for BMWs above your Hotmail messages right after you looked at that nice diesel station wagon on the VW.com Web site.

Read More: ADWEEK

MacWorld Publisher IDG Launches Private Advertising Exchange
Tech Giant Set to Prove Publishers Can Launch Ad Exchanges, Too

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — More publishers are looking to claim ownership over digital advertising to combat the growing dominance of Wall Street-like trading desks they believe are depressing the value of online ad inventory.

IDG, publisher of technology titles such as Computerworld, Macworld and PCWorld, has formed its own private advertising exchange consisting of 450 tech-focused websites into which a select group of advertisers will be able to buy advertising. The private exchange, called TechMediaExchange.com, will launch in February and represent 90 million unique viewers and a billion impressions.

We don’t want just anybody to be a part of this,” said Peter Longo, CEO of IDG’s Networks division. “We want this to be a vetted group of sites that are truly focused on technology — quality sites that advertisers want to be against.”

Read More: AdAge

Aiming to reduce redundancy and offer more integrated online ad services, Cox Media Group said Tuesday it will merge its Cox Cross Media and Adify units to form Cox Digital Solutions. The new company will be led by Cox Cross Media head Steve Shaw and promises to facilitate online buys across Cox Media properties and third-party niche content networks.

Adify, which helps publishers build vertical networks and serves ads across the 180 networks it powers, was acquired by parent Cox Enterprises in 2008 for $300 million. The move has helped Cox expand its online ad operations and create vertical networks around its own properties, which include newspapers and radio and TV stations as well as related Web sites.

In 2009, for instance, Cox used Adify to build an auto-related ad network around its AutoTrader.com brand. Now the company will tie the Adify platform more tightly into its own digital ad operations to offer agencies and advertisers more efficient placement across its 1,300 local media sites in 145 markets as well as national reach through the more than 7,000 specialty publishers it works with. That adds up to traffic of about 135 million unique visitors a month, according to Cox.

Read More: MediaPost

New Year, New Attribution Model

A few years ago, marketers discovered that most of the conversions happened without an associated click in display advertising. Then, a little while later, view-based conversions were added to the performance metric. While it was a small step forward, the obvious question is: if the last click is not always indicative of the user’s decision to convert, why would the last view be any better? In short, it’s not.

In an earlier ClickZ column, I discussed the importance of going beyond the last click or last ad impression and described why an incorrect attribution model will lead to suboptimal results. Well, a new year calls for a new model – multi-touch attribution where all interactions within an association window are considered to have influences over a user’s conversion.

The power of digital advertising offers more than just targeting with higher precision; it also provides instantaneous feedback on how ads perform. With consumers exposed to increasingly more ad impressions and interactions of different media types, it’s become harder than it should be to explain how each event along the path to conversion affects the user’s decision. In the analytics sense, the current flawed last-touch attribution model suffers from the lack of a probability framework. Since the last touch (click or view) is defined by the conversion event, it’s difficult to calculate the probability. Therefore, it’s nearly impossible to measure the true influence of the last touch.

Read More: ClickZ

It is customary to divide online advertising into two categories: direct response and brand advertising. I prefer instead to divide it according to the mindset of users: whether or not they are actively looking to purchase something (i.e. they have purchasing intent).*  When users are actively looking to purchase something, they typically go to search engines or e-commerce sites. Through advertising or direct sales, these sites harvest intent. Google and Amazon are the biggest financial beneficiaries of intent harvesting.  When the user is not actively looking to buy something, the goal of an online ad is to generate intent. The intent generation market is still fairly fragmented and will grow rapidly over the next few years as brand advertising increasingly moves online. P&G – which alone spends almost $4B/year on brand advertising – needs to convince the next generation of consumers that Crest is better than Colgate. This is why Google paid such a premium for Doubleclick, Yahoo for Right Media, and Microsoft for aQuantive (MS’s biggest acquisition ever).

Read More: BusinessInsider.com

Q&A: The Internet’s Traffic Cop

As more people go online for everything from video to social-networking updates, Internet service providers have to race to make sure the network has the capacity to deliver what customers expect. Behind the scenes, a company founded by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, works to ensure that that network is running more efficiently.  Akamai is probably best known for storing things like videos on its servers, which are located closer to households. The closer the servers are to a user, the better the person’s experience is because the data doesn’t have to travel as far across the lines of the Internet. Akamai also uses algorithms to direct traffic on the Internet in the most efficient way — which isn’t always the way that normal Internet protocols would try to direct it. And the company has been expanding into areas such as security and “cloud computing” — where things like email and documents are handled and stored online rather than on a person’s computer.  Digits spoke with Akamai’s co-founder and chief scientist, Tom Leighton, about how information is getting delivered to consumers and what needs to be done to speed up delivery. His responses are summarized below.

Read More: Blogs.WSJ.com

Adify Licenses NetSeer Technology To Lift Ad Conversions

The ad industry continues to automate systems to squeeze every dollar from campaigns to improve return on investments. Ad network Adify will announce this week that it has licensed NetSeer’s Contextual Services and concept-based analysis technology to better predict sites where ads will attract consumers to produce best.  Knowing how to sort through the millions of Web sites to discard those with dribble and keep the ones with great content has become an art. NetSeer aims to help Adify find those sites to help clients gain the best ROI. John Mracek, chief executive officer at NetSeer, says contextual signals, when done correctly, can play an important role in increasing performance and understanding consumer intent.  NetSeer will help create the “short list” that Adify will use to trim down and present to clients. It will give Adify a sense of the sites that fit specific criteria through NetSeer’s categorization abilities and KnowledgeBank, a concept graph supported by spiders crawling the Web to determine what’s important. It opens up advertising for companies that Gropper refers to as “mid-tail” — companies that fall well below those on the comScore 500 list.

Read More: MediaPost

If you weren’t paying attention you might be confused. Or, maybe you are paying attention and you’re still confused. Or, maybe in your confusion you’ve decided to quit paying attention and watch for signs of warmer weather.  Just in case, there is an interesting juxtaposition today in Ad Age between research from Advertiser Perceptions that reports marketers are accelerating the shift back to content sites for media buys (“Marketers Shifting Online Budgets to Content Sites”), and a column from investment banker Tolman Geffs arguing instead that the momentum is with the audience networks (“Get Ready for the Coming Land War in Online Display Ads”).  Says researcher Advertiser Perceptions: A survey of agencies and marketers revealed that 52 percent of them plan to spend more on content sites this year, whereas only 35 percent said they were likely to increase budgets for ad networks.

Read More: HuffingtonPost

Hulu to Launch a Subscription Service in May?

In May, Hulu plans to start testing a subscription service for a monthly fee of $9.95, claims the L.A. Times, citing people familiar with the plans. Currently, Hulu viewers can see the five most recent episodes of popular shows such as Glee and Lost. The subscription service, called Hulu Plus, would enable users to see older episodes of these shows.  Although unconfirmed, this news is on track with a previous report that said that Hulu was planning to launch a subscription service in a matter of months. Back then, it was speculated that the monthly fee would be $4.99, but the price of access to unlimited TV shows seems to have risen in the last couple of months.  If it’s real, Hulu Plus is perfectly aligned with the launch of iPad 3G; the two could be a fantastic combination for accessing your favorite TV shows from any location. The monthly fee, however, is not negligible.  When we first wrote about Hulu’s possible subscription service, we asked you if you’d pay $4.99 for it, and many of you answered yes.

Read More: Mashable

The Marketplace Appreciates Obfuscation in Pricing

Pricing is defined as the property of having material worth. Pricing though does not dictate individual value, but rather the value of a good for the average.  Let me illustrate by an example:

Sherri walks into CVS to purchase some shampoo for the Herman household.  She sees Pantene for $6.45/bottle or Sunsilk for $9.99/bottle (totally made up numbers).  Sherri has a specific price in mind she wants to pay for Shampoo based on her proprietary valuation system (special needs, bottle shape, accessibility, etc) and based on this specific value, she is able to decide between Pantene and Sunsilk.  Pantene and Sunsilk are offering (pricing) their products at these price levels because they have done a comprehensive supply/demand curve and have optimized where they should price their product for the optimal (not always most) amount of buyers.  This is done through market and competitive research as well, as, historical sales scenario planning data.  In this scenario, the marketplace appreciates pricing obfuscation:  it’s simple for the consumer and it’s simple for the business.  The consumer never sees the profit margins (unless they are purchasing from a public company and even then, how many consumers read financial reports) and the business never knows how much the consumer was really willing to pay (potentially more).  There is not really a tension here – if a product’s price is not adequate for a consumer, they will move onto the next product on their list.

Read More: DarrenHerman.com

After his keynote speech at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting last week, IAB Chairman Dave Moore took the time to speak with CPX COO & President, Rob Rasko.  Moore talked about the event, his first as chairman, and the great opportunity to network, exchange ideas, compare problems and seek solutions together.  He discussed the issue of self-regulation and the importance of educating legislators about how the Internet works, stressing that, especially in an economy that is still recovering, the last thing the industry needs is legislation that hurts business. In addition to serving as Chairman for the IAB, Moore is also Chairman and Founder of 24/7 Real Media.  When asked how 24/7 plans to affect the market in 2010, Moore referred back to a prediction he made in his keynote: that demand side platforms would become a service to every major agency. He discussed 24/7’s position as the inventors of the first demand side platform, known as B3, before the term was even coined, and the growth that platform has already experienced. This year, they plan on continuing to play a major role in driving the WPP digital strategy.

Read More: CPXAdNetworkBlog

Adconion Unveils New Joost Video Ad Network, Positioning For Video Platform Future

Adconion announced the Joost Video Network today – “a complete suite of online video  advertising products and services… with global in-banner and in- stream video advertising capabilities, including pre-, mid- and post- roll video advertisements.” (Read the release.) The announcement comes a little over three months since Adconion acquired Joost.

AdExchanger.com: What were the challenges involved in converting Joost into a video ad network?  What parts of Joost provided infrastructure – and what didn’t?

NH: The main technical challenge was integrating the Adconion ad server in to the Joost player, which was key in order to provide our advertisers both the ability to re-target users across pre-roll and display ads as well as provide them with integrated reporting.  Other than that, launching the Joost Video Network was pretty seamless, because we could leverage our existing network capabilities – after all, we are the world’s largest independent audience network.

Read More: AdExchanger.com

New Tool For Brand Advertisers On The Google Content Network

Two types of advertisers run campaigns across the Google Content Network. The first group, direct response advertisers, measures the success of their campaigns by looking for clicks, traffic to their sites, and sales. In contrast, brand advertisers typically use display ads to raise awareness and purchase consideration for a product or service a person might buy down the road. Other advertisers are looking to achieve a combination of these goals. On the Google Content Network, we’ve been focused on building new capabilities that make it a great place for brand advertising of all kinds. For example, last year we introduced frequency capping to enable advertisers to manage how often their campaign reaches the right users. We’ve also developed new innovative tools to measure the impact of brand campaigns. Today, in response to feedback from brand advertisers, we’re announcing a new feature that allows these advertisers to reach their advertising goals more easily. This feature, which filters out “below the fold” inventory, enables brand advertisers to be more selective about where ads appear. The new filter gives you the ability to show ads only in places that appear on the user’s screen when the page loads, without requiring them to scroll down.

Read More: AdWords.Blogspot.com

As companies try to improve consumer messaging around online ad targeting in anticipation of new privacy regulation, technology platform company [x+1] this week released an application giving marketers and agencies the ability to integrate customer and third-party online and offline data to target ads. The platform, Open Data Bridge, supports targeting data across multiple channels, such as display ad, Web site and email campaigns. The service, being offered as part of [x+1]‘s trading desk platform, has been tapped by several undisclosed “large” clients.

Read More: MediaPost

Does Apple’s iPad Take A Bite Out Of Web Advertising

We’ve known for quite some time about the iPhone’s inability to render Flash content within the mobile Safari browser, and based upon Apple’s announcement of the iPad today, it looks like that device isn’t going to do it, either. Touted as a savior for the publishing business, this device will potentially revolutionize the delivery and commercialization of content. But most publishers are publishing their content to the web. Via websites. And for those that don’t yet have paywalls, they support their websites with advertising. Those ads are almost 100% rendered in Adobe’s Flash. So when people use the iPad’s web browser to visit their favorite newspaper (as Steve Jobs did in his keynote; see photo at right, courtesy of Engadget), they won’t see the ads at all. That either means advertisers will need to stop building ads in Flash (no chance) or publishers will need to build app versions of their publications upon the iPad SDK (software development kit), resulting in a lot more work, a lot more time, a lot more resources.

Read More: AdAge

Sick of Ad Networks? Start Your Own

Last month media giant CBS Interactive announced that it would stop using third-party ad networks to sell inventory across media properties and instead use its own internal ad serving platform, dubbed “Madison.” It’s not the first time a publisher has openly rejected the use of ad networks, which are sometimes considered a necessary evil for publishers that can’t sell all of their inventory. (After all, some revenue is better than none.) ESPN, Weather.com, Turner Networks, Forbes and Gawker have been very vocal about their refusal to do business with them, noting that they can greatly devalue inventory and create channel conflicts. But as consumers’ media consumption becomes even more fragmented, single-domain publishers are finding it more difficult to provide adequate reach to advertisers, both in quantity and quality. A website with just a few million unique visitors and no sophisticated behavioral or contextual targeting capabilities is all but invisible to big brand advertisers, who will just turn to ad networks to deliver large, targeted audiences for their campaigns.

So what’s a publisher to do?

The answer is simple: reject the ad network, not the ad network model.

Read More: Adotas