Archive for the ‘platforms’ Category
Friday, February 26th, 2010
Click Forensics announced the “beta version of its display ad verification platform which it says “Protects Against Impression Inflation and Fraud.” Read the release.
AdExchanger.com spoke to Click Forensics CEO Paul Pellman about the news.
AdExchanger.com: Please define what you mean by “impression inflation.” How pervasive is this issue and how do fraudsters pull it off typically?
PP: Impression inflation is not necessarily fraudulent activity, although that can certainly be part of the problem. We define impression inflation as anything that happens in the ad-serving chain that would mislead the advertiser into believing its campaign delivered more impressions to the target audience than it actually did. A simple example would be a botnet impression that’s counted as a human. Another example might be an ad delivered below the fold that’s never seen by an actual human being, but the impression is counted and billed. Impressions delivered in the wrong geo or daypart also shouldn’t count. Then there are the malicious schemes, such as ad stuffing (displaying multiple ads in the same ad unit for a very brief period), and invisible pages (malware opening pop-unders or 0×0 browsers to pull ads). These methods can inappropriately pad impression counts and invoices, reducing overall advertiser campaign effectiveness. The best ad networks and publishers want to assure advertisers that their campaigns are free from these inflated impression counts and their budgets aren’t being wasted.
Do you offer ad serving capabilities, too? Potentially, it would seem Click Forensics could start a media business. Thoughts?
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Tags: brand safety, Click Forensics, display advertising, impression fraud
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Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
Hooked Media Group announced in a release that it has launched Yoo-Me, “a premium gaming technology platform” that it hopes will create a compelling, publisher monetization solution given the influence of social media today.
Prita Uppal, CEO of Hooked Media Group, discussed the announcement with AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: What is broken with the publishing model which Hooked Media is fixing?
Uppal: Today’s media consumption on publisher sites is extremely fragmented and not entirely social. This trend has led to diminished traffic, engagement rates and sellable ad inventory. Hooked’s Yoo-Mee gaming application helps to reverse this trend by providing publishers access to the benefits associated with social communities. By partnering with Yoo-Mee, publishers are connected to a vast community of players. Publishers visitors, who mostly do not engage with others on the site, can now engage with each other on the site and, more importantly, can invite, compete, challenge and broadcast to and with the rest of the internet community so that people who may not visit the publishers site, now have a reason to come and join in the fun. Through Yoo-Mee, Publisher’s receive incremental revenue streams from both advertising, cash tournaments, and virtual currency, but also growth in traffic and user engagement.
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Tags: Data, display advertising, gaming, hooked media group, Publishers
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Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
Carnet Williams is CEO and Co-Founder of Sprout, a brand engagement ad platform.
AdExchanger.com: Let’s start with the name – how does “Sprout” mesh with what you’re doing today? And, what problem is Sprout solving and how does this play out with your announcement about Disney?
CW: The display advertising business is still incredibly young. There is so much room for innovation to sprout. We want to make display ads relevant and engaging. We want to enable brands to plant relationships with customers and nurture those relationships with continuous conversations over time.
Today, we announced Sprout Engage Ads. Sprout Engage Ads allow brands to make stronger connections with their audiences by providing a fun, interactive experience, wherever their audiences travel online.
Our first customer to roll out these ads is Disney, who created Engage Ads for Alice in Wonderland. These ads are designed to take display advertising to the next level by bringing personally relevant data right into a standard Flash ad unit. The ads are ’smart’ in that they know when you have engaged with them so you will never see the same content twice. In addition, the ad and the Facebook application is linked so the ads know if you have engaged with the app and vice versa. For example, if you add yourself to the Mad Hatter’s Army in the ad, when you come to the Facebook app you will be recognized as being in the army.
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Tags: advertising, brand advertising, carnet williams, demand-side platforms, marketing, sprout
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Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
Demand-side platform CPM Advisors announced that it would be leveraging the technology infrastructure of publisher optimizer, Mediageeks. Read the release.
AdExchanger.com discussed the announcement with CPM Advisors CEO Rob Leathern and MediaGeeks GM Jacob LeWinter.
AdExchanger.com: It’s interesting that a demand-side tech company is partnering with a publisher-side technology company – and beyond just buying media through aggregators (yield optimizers). What’s the takeaway here?
Rob Leathern: The smart players in this space are the ones that can build valuable core technologies but also work with other providers who can help support those efforts with relevant technologies. It’s all about driving ROI for the advertiser, using cost-effective best-of-breed technologies that can help support that and not reinventing the wheel. Ad- and data-serving for us is about having the quickest, cost-effective, most efficient delivery infrastructure that can support our key assets in advertiser interface, decisioning, campaign data and budget management, and optimization.
Jacob LeWinter: As Mediageeks built out our global infrastructure we realized our services and technology were beneficial to more than just enterprise websites, and mediageeks evolved to be a leading ad infrastructure company. We now work with publishers, media companies, data platforms, DSPs, and even other supply side platforms who want robust scalable ad technology and solutions. We plan to work with the major players in each of these areas.
Mediageeks has been working with publishers but has not been as well-known as some of the other aggregators – why not?
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Tags: cpm advisors, demand-side platforms, DSP, Jacob LeWinter, Mediageeks, rob leathern, Yield Optimization
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Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
WildTangent, with an online games ad network of over 100+ million unique users according to the company, announced a “unique advertising platform, BrandBoost™, which provides brand marketers the opportunity to reward gamers with complimentary game play and virtual items in return for brand engagement.” Read the release (PDF).
WildTangent’s EVP of Business Development and Marketing, Dave Madden, shared a few insights into the new platform with AdExchanger.com.
What data points do you capture with BrandBoost in order to express brand engagement to brand marketers?
We capture standard ad metrics including click-through data. What’s important to keep in mind is that the user chooses whether or not to engage with the advertisement. It is presented to them as an alternative to monetary payment.
How do you charge for BrandBoost?
We charge on a cost per engagement basis usually in neighborhood of $.10-$.15 which translates into a $100-$150 cpm.
In that consumers are incented to interact with advertising with virtual currency and rewards, does this skew the opportunity at all for advertisers using the BrandBoost ad platform? How do you make the case here for marketers?
Not at all. The consumer is making the choice to view an ad as an alternative to purchasing an item or paying for a game session. The choice to interact is independent and is typically the result of the ad being relevant and targeted. As an example, we are currently running an ad with the popular Percy Jackson movie which runs only in tween-targeted games.
By John Ebbert
Tags: advertising, games, marketing, wildtangent
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Thursday, February 18th, 2010
Triggit announced its new self-service, demand-side platform for online display advertising today. Read more on TechCrunch.
AdExchanger.com spoke to Triggit CEO Zach Coelius about the launch and his expectations for the product.
AdExchanger.com: How different is this new platform then what you have been running to date?
ZC: Our launch today is the beta version of our Real-Time Bidding (RTB) platform for marketers and their agencies. It is a dramatic improvement on the alpha version we pushed out to clients a couple months ago. It enables clients to set-up, target and control their campaigns with a fully self-service interface. The key difference is that we are starting to put the full power of RTB into the hands of marketers. This means clients can use their own retargeting values, audience segments and third party data from leading providers to transparently buy media across all the major RTB exchanges. With RTB, our clients are able to target down to specific sites while being able to leverage the scale of the billions of available daily impressions. The platform also enables them to manage universal frequency capping and see unified analytics, reporting and optimization.
We have been working hard for the last year to build the real time bidding technology that enables the power and ease of use of this platform. We are excited to get it in the hands of new users and hear their feedback.
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Tags: display advertising, real-time bidding, rtb, triggit
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Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
AdSafe Media recently released its first Safety Report that showed – when looking at display ad media across its platform – “58% of network traffic was ‘invisible’” and “29% of traffic was served to sites featuring UGC” among many data points. Read the release (PDF). And, you can download the report here (PDF – signup required.).
AdExchanger.com discussed the report and AdSafe Media with the company’s VP Of Product, David Hahn.
AdExchanger.com: Given your observation of a decrease in non-transparent inventory in Q4, what is your sense of momentum for transparency into inventory? Is UGC becoming more or less transparent? Any other momentum stories you can discuss?
DH: We see inventory non-transparency (meaning the lack of real time, source level disclosure of the URL on which an ad is to be served) as a large and growing concern in the display markets, especially with the recent increase in “audience buying” via networks and exchanges. Lack of source level transparency is primarily an unfortunate side effect of inventory “daisy-chaining” (or inter-network reselling) that currently helps facilitate high inventory liquidity in the display marketplaces. As more advertisers begin using these platforms as a primary buying channel, it’s essential that we as an industry balance the positives of liquidity with the risks of not knowing where an ad is being placed. In short, liquidity is good because it equates to more efficient markets and greater inventory utilization; non-transparency is bad because it results in more brand safety risks to advertisers in the form of bad ad placements, and thus less dollars online.
The decrease in non-transparent inventory that we saw in Q4 was primarily due to our efforts to mitigate transparency issues by partnering with our clients. Without our efforts to improve transparency, we would have certainly seen a much higher percentage of non-transparent inventory. UGC is one of the key categories in which we have seen increasing non-transparency, most likely due to the large amount of inventory and the re-brokering required to monetize it.
How does AdSafe technically gather the data that helps you determine whether content is brand-safe or not? Are iFrames a challenge for this process? If so, how?
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Tags: adsafe media, david hahn, display advertising, media buying
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Friday, February 5th, 2010
Resonate Networks announced that it has launched attitudinal targeting in a release on Wednesday.
AdExchanger.com discussed the new targeting capabilities with Resonate Networks’ CEO Bryan Gernert.
AdExchanger.com: Given the rich sources of social data available today, how important is social media to creating Resonate’s dataset? Or, is it important?
BG: While social data is important for advertisers in terms of ensuring your brand, service or product is involved in the real-time conversations within social media channels, attitudes, values and beliefs are at the core of consumers’ actions, brand affinities, purchase behavior and media consumption. That said, data on audiences’ attitudes is invaluable to marketers and outweighs social information. Advertisers who leverage attitudinal data are able to connect with audiences on a deeper, more enduring level.
Considering your familiarity with your attitudinal targeting product, it might make sense for Resonate to develop its own media business, where it buys on behalf of clients? Any plans in this area?
Resonate’s Attitudinal Targeting does include placing the media buys. Here’s how it works, clients come to us with their campaign goals and target audience, we work with them to identify additional audiences that deliver on their strategy based on our research and data. We then use our proprietary Quality Visitation Indices(tm) to identify the best online properties to deliver the highest concentration of the desired target audience. Once the media plan is in place we work directly with these sites to deliver our clients advertising to highly targeted audiences through the most precise online media. Essentially we connect advertisers to consumers with a precision not otherwise possible.
What about the shelf life of attitudinal data? How long does it work? And how “real-time” is your attitudinal targeting?
Actually attitudinal data doesn’t have a short shelf life because consumers’ values remain relatively consistent. Traditional targeting and data don’t allow for advertisers to understand audiences in the same profound manner that attitudinal targeting and data allow. People’s attitudes do change over time but at a much slower pace than their purchase & search behavior. With each wave or our continual research we add new, valuable data so we not only know why consumers make decisions but our data and methodology enable us to identify trends and shifts in audience attitudes over time. Think about it this way, Contextual targeting is based mostly on intuition (i.e. people who frequently visit SierraClub.com are environmentalists), while Behavioral Targeting is based upon assumptions (if Joe Smith searches for a camera and/or is on an electronics site he is interested in buying a camera). These types of targeting have their place and value, however knowing why people make decisions and tapping into audiences that identify with brands based on attitudes, orientations and beliefs – key elements that shape purchase behavior and brand relationship – position advertisers to develop long-term, successful connections with desired audiences. Research is at the heart of what we do but we’re not a research company, we connect advertisers with highly targeted audiences to deliver the most effective campaigns.
By John Ebbert
Tags: display advertising, media buying, resonate networks
Posted in platforms | No Comments »
Thursday, January 28th, 2010
Adam Cahan is CEO of Auditude which provides a technology platform for video management and monetization.
AdExchanger.com: Please provide some background. How did Auditude begin?
AC: Auditude was founded in 2005 around our Content ID/fingerprinting technology. In 2007, we took our first round of institutional financing and began to build the team we have in place today. We have fingerprinted over 100 channels of broadcast television since 2005, which powers our Content ID offering. In 2008, we launched our complementary video ad management platform, Auditude Connect. Our ad platform customers include Major League Baseball, MySpace, MTV Networks and Yahoo!. Some of the largest names in content, websites and advertising trust us to manage their online video assets and monetization.
We’re headquartered in Palo Alto, CA with offices in New York, Los Angeles and London.
What problem is Auditude trying to solve and for whom?
Auditude is helping create a viable business model for premium online video by making video advertising truly manageable in a highly distributed and complex environment. Imagine all the business rules and challenges that occur when premium video such as TV content migrates online. There are many questions that arise including how to deal with advertiser exclusions, manage multi-party selling (websites, content owners, and third parties), incorporating new ad products as well as managing the overall consumer experience. This is in addition to forecasting and accounting for revenue shares, and delivery across multiple sites in real time.
We’ve spent a lot of time on our product removing and automating a lot of these challenges by trying to apply display advertising models to video content. We’ve taken a holistic approach to delivering ad management capabilities that deal with content, context and user interaction. We believe that we can help solve some of the challenges through scaling capabilities and, thus, see more content and consumption continue to increase online.
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Tags: ad network, display advertising, video, video advertising
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Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
Vlad Stesin is VP, Strategy at BLOOM Digital Platforms, makers of AdGear, an ad serving platform.
AdExchanger.com: Please discuss AdGear. How did it start? And what challenge is AdGear trying to solve?
The team working on the platform has built and operated the proprietary ad serving infrastructure at Cossette, Canada’s largest independent advertising agency. We’ve been running that platform since 2001, serving billions of monthly impressions for clients such as Coke, General Motors Canada, McDonald’s, Nike, H&M, Brother, GlaxoSmithKline, Molson and others. Our emphasis has always been on two things: richness of data and flexibility of ad formats, no matter the shape they take.
In 2008 we spun out the digital marketing technologies team into BLOOM Digital Platforms, where we set out to build AdGear, our new generation of ad management tools for publishers and advertisers. Our goal is to build a true next-generation ad platform with an emphasis on managing data and properly accommodating for third party services, be it optimizers, ad networks, third party data providers or ad exchanges. Unlike legacy systems built before things like yield optimization and third party data exchange were commonplace, AdGear was built from the ground-up specifically with the intention of making dealing with such services simple and comprehensible for publishers.
We have released a first version of the publisher product last year, while the advertiser version is currently in closed beta.
Who do you see in your competitive set? What will be the key differentiators for AdGear?
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Tags: demand-side platforms, display advertising, DSP, SSP
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Thursday, January 21st, 2010
The demand-side platform (DSP) leaderboard just added another competitor as LucidMedia says publicly for the first time that it, too, has a DSP solution – in fact, they’ve had it for over a year now according to the company.
With more details on the way in the coming weeks, LucidMedia CEO Ajay Sravanapudi discussed demand-side platforms, LucidMedia’s solution as well as the platform’s real-time bidding (RTB) capabilities.
AdExchanger.com: What are the “must haves” for a DSP and why?
AS: The key “must haves” for a large agency looking to deploy a successful demand-side platform (DSP) initiative are: multi-source real-time bidding (RTB) integration and scale, an advanced ad server, audience and contextual targeting, universal frequency capping, detailed reporting with discrepancy management and reconciliation, brand safe filtering, smart bidding strategies, the ability to leverage 3rd party targeting data, and managed services.
Properly integrated real-time bidding is not standardized or modularized. There is still a great deal of heavy lifting development needed to bring on each inventory source, balance the volume, and bid effectively. A good DSP needs to solve these problems. Smart bidding strategies are also critical. The DSP model promises that agencies can claim a larger slice of the ad spend dollar but, without intelligent and flexible bidding, that slice may not be fully realized. Agencies should look for RTB solutions efficient enough to drive bid costs below $0.001.
The concept of an agency-side buying and management platform relies heavily on managed services at the inception of any in-house DSP program. The current transitional period is favoring the managed service approach to demand-side platforms as agencies step into the traditional ad network role. Agencies are finding the networks played a large role in accepting the media risk and owning the optimization of a campaign. As agencies become buy-side networks they sometimes find they need additional campaign execution talent, potentially offsetting the efficiencies that drove them to the DSP model in the first place. Managed services allow the transition and knowledge transfer to happen in the most effective manner.
AdExchanger.com: What about the LucidMedia solution… how will your DSP differentiate from the current entrants in the space?
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Tags: demand-side platform, display advertising, lucidmedia, media buying
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Thursday, January 14th, 2010
Demand-side platform provider, CPM Advisors, announced a partnership today with BlueKai today which it says uniquely offers clients access to BlueKai’s in-market data directly within CPM Advisor’s CPMatic media buying platform. To date, CPM Advisors has been a part of BlueKai’s Certification program. Read the release.
AdExchanger.com spoke to CPM Advisors CEO Rob Leathern more about what this release means.
AdExchanger.com: How is this announced partnership different than the way a DSP works with BlueKai today such as the BlueKai Certification program?
RL: Our platform is an open self-service way to buy media and data, which means that we can bring a much wider range of advertisers to try BlueKai data via CPMatic.com, applying our media buying optimization system to make it work for buyers. Anyone can sign up and create an account right now and quickly be running retargeting or behavioral campaigns across a number of providers. You still have to ask us to enable your account for behavioral buying (retargeting is set), but that will be a standard option within the next two weeks.
AdExchanger.com: Are there specific vertical datasets which are popular with CPMa clients these days? Any that we might not expect?
RL: We see good demand for a variety of other data in the B2B space, tech, shopping and adult education. We are always communicating with our data partners like BlueKai and eXelate on what we’re hearing in the market and they’re usually very responsive and we believe that competition to create new data segments is good for advertisers. A few different education data segments are available via our platform today, for example.
AdExchanger.com: When buying media with data appended, could you make some general estimates regarding how you buy? – is it through ad networks, ad exchanges, direct-to-publisher buys?
RL: Most of our data buys are via ad exchanges and large aggregated sources, though we also do run behavioral campaigns across other media buys that we are doing when it makes sense and is okay with the publisher. Some sources will integrate data into their own supply platforms, others not – we think it’s about finding the best combination of media and data via the most efficient avenue, for the client to get the results they want.
By John Ebbert
Tags: cpm advisors, demand-side platforms, display advertising, DSP, platforms
Posted in platforms | No Comments »
Friday, December 11th, 2009
Zach Coelius is CEO of Triggit, an online advertising technology company.
AdExchanger.com: So what is Triggit – and where’d the name come from? Are you a buying platform? A media buying services company?
ZC: Triggit provides Real Time Bidding (RTB) technology and services to innovative marketers and their advertising agencies. Specifically, Triggit’s technology individually prices and bids for billions of impressions daily on the real time display exchanges. Triggit’s media partners include such companies as Google, OpenX, Admeld, Pubmatic, Adnexus and more.
At Triggit, marketers use our technologies to allocate their media budgets on the real-time bidding enabled media exchanges. In this process we provide our clients a range of offerings to meet their needs. For sophisticated agencies, ad networks and large ad buyers, Triggit’s self-serve technology platform enables them to leverage their own data, insights and media buying expertise in the exchange buying process. Others want a more hands off approach to their media spend, and for those clients Triggit’s account managers take complete ownership of the campaigns and provide full media buying services as well as technology to achieve unprecedented ROI.
As far as our name goes, Triggit is Scottish for “playful,” and more importantly “URL” for not taken. We picked it a long time ago for a very different business model and have never found a reason to change it. It also happens to be pretty memorable. We like it.
How do you differentiate from other buying platforms in the space?
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchange, Ad Networks, demand-side platforms, DSPs, triggit
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Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
Murthy Nukala is CEO of Adchemy, a demand-side buying platform.
AdExchanger.com: What is “de-averaging” as it relates to digital advertising and how does Adchemy “de-average”? Would you say “addressable media” is an equivalent?
MN: De-averaging summarizes a trend toward increasing the relevance of digital advertising. Today’s dominant online advertising model primarily relies on a one-size-fits-all approach to satisfy the need for scale. Consequently, advertising designed for the “average” audience member really is not that relevant to any particular audience member. De-averaging means recognizing that there are many small audience segments that all require different marketing experiences. We also call this “different marketing paths for different people.” It’s a move toward greater relevance.
Adchemy technology gives marketers the capability to address micro-segments fully, improving relevance, conversion, and as a result, ROAS. It automatically micro-segments audiences, values them appropriately, and delivers relevant and consistent marketing to each—from banner and search ads and websites to merchandizing, pricing and promotions. As a result, marketers can massively scale their digital marketing campaigns while maximizing relevance, engagement and conversion.
“Addressable media” isn’t the same as de-averaging. Addressable media allows marketers to make more highly targeted media buys. It’s a start, but it’s not sufficient. If marketers don’t show highly targeted ads and landing pages to those targeted media buys, then there isn’t any better relevance.
Do you consider Adchemy a services or technology company?
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Tags: ad exchange, Ad Networks, Ad Technology, adchemy, audience buying, de-averaging, demand-side platforms, DSP, DSPs, media buying, optimizatioin
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Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
Toby Korner is VP, Account Management at [x+1], which released a new CPG-focused product today (Release here. More here from AdWeek.)
AdExchanger.com: Why offer a CPG product? Curious your thoughts on product development for this as I assume you see identified CPG as low-hanging fruit for a reason – perhaps for brand dollars?
TK: You could say low hanging fruit for brand dollars, but also to allow the CPG players to have the same type of online presence as Ecommerce and direct marketers have enjoyed for years, even in the performance space. The ability to target based on actual purchase behavior and online behavior across the entire Internet as well as accurate measurement on the back end is a major gap that we are filling in the industry.
Talk about the tracking of offline purchases in CPG Connect. This would appear to be entirely dependent on what the client can offer to you – ideally it should be in real-time for optimization purposes, no? Is your product dependent on real-time offline transaction feedback?
The media is tightly integrated with IRI’s consumer panel data. We have anonymously matched our online data to their panel and in-store purchases. We work closely with IRI to define the consumer segment that the CPG advertiser wants to target, then integrate that with our own and 3rd party data to accurately and efficiently target consumers that look like the target audience. Post campaign, we measure the in-store impact of the exposed panelists vs. non-exposed panelists based on actual sales. In short, the client does not provide the sales impact, we bring it to the client through our integration with the panel.
Tags: ad exchange, CPG, display advertising, media buying, xplusone
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Monday, November 16th, 2009
Eric Roza is President of DataLogix, an advertising data and technology company.
AdExchnanger.com: Can you discuss trends you’re seeing in the data marketplace?
ER: There’s no question that data is hot all of a sudden. But, candidly, the use of data to drive online advertising effectiveness is still in its infancy. To give you perspective – the entire Behavioral Targeting market is barely more than $1B in 2009. By contrast, there are a dozen advertisers that EACH spend more than $1B on traditional media in any given year. Online media companies have begun to realize that to tap into the big traditional media budgets, they need to find the right audience, and there is no better way to do this than through proven data sources with which advertisers are comfortable. The agencies get this, big time. Digital advertising, whether it be search, email or display, is still dominated by “bottom-of-funnel” advertising and clickstream works well for this, but it’s not where the big dollars are. The kind of data we are bringing in will enable advertisers to move up funnel and use the web effectively for branding, as they do today w/ traditional media.
Why is your recent announcement with Nielsen’s PRIZM segments important? Could this be another step toward brand ad dollars migrating online?
You are right on – this is all about brand dollars, and moving online advertising up the funnel. The largest CPG companies and publishers use PRIZM to drive billions of dollars in segmentation decisions, and have never before been able to use this data online at the household level.
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Tags: ad exchange, advertising, affiniti digital, Data, datalogix, DSP, DSPs, marketing, nextaction, platforms
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Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
Shaukat Shamim is CEO & Co-Founder of Permuto.
AdExchanger.com: Where did the idea for Permuto come from? And how about the name – what’s the story there?
SS: We are a company comprised of online advertising junkies, all of the founders been involved in online advertising from the formation days of Internet. We had our hands on building ad servers and other core technologies that eventually became backends of Yahoo! and DoubleClick. Naturally, we looked at online display advertising and we saw large inefficiencies.
Everyone knows that “search” has revolutionized online advertising. When we dug into search, we made a surprising discovery where a large majority of the top 100 advertisers of search are ecommerce shopping, travel and auto retailers. That was a light bulb moment. We decided to build a company that will make display advertising “effective”, as effective as search, and to be very much focused on bringing search-style economics in display advertising.
Permuto means “Total transformation” in Latin. During the early days, as we were scrambling for a name with deep correlation with our business, Navdeep Saini, our CTO, pointed out the name, and lucky us, it was available.
What’s your view on ad exchanges? And how will they play a part of Permuto’s plans?
(more…)
Tags: ad exchanges, ad network, ad platform, media buying, permuto
Posted in platforms | No Comments »
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
Mike Baker is CEO of DataXu, a demand-side, media buying platform.
Tell us about your new agreement with Havas. What does this mean for DataXu? And, even advertising as a whole?
We have enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with Havas. Their marketplace insights have helped us apply our technology to make the process of buying and optimizing online display advertising more efficient. I think the relationship is also a sign that ad agencies are starting to embrace leading technology to “game change”. As digital media consumption becomes pervasive, media leaders are realizing that they need to actively re-tool their assets and competencies to compete successfully.
How did DataXu begin?
DataXu was founded to commercialize a new data-driven decision language created by several of my co-founders at MIT in support of NASA Mars Mission Planning. The decision system automatically designed 1162 viable Mars Missions by sorting through billions of different combinations of vehicles, crew plans, orbital trajectories, and technology choices. The DataXu team transported from Mars to Madison Avenue after confirming that the technology could solve a similar data-centric problem for advertisers: making real-time decisions about ad placements leveraging vast amounts of data.
What are some of the challenges you see in the advertising space today that has created an opportunity for DataXu?
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Tags: advertising, buying platforms, media buying, real-time bidding, rtb
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Thursday, September 10th, 2009
Turn announced today that Bill Demas has been promoted to CEO of Turn, Inc., an online advertising platform and network company. Jim Barnett, who stepped down from the CEO role, will remain as Chairman. According to the company, this secession plan has been in the works for a while and Demas has been “deeply involved” with the company as a board member since 2007 and as its COO since December.
Demas told AdExchanger.com that among other things, the combination of Turn’s buying platform strategy and its rapidly growing ad network made the role very attractive as the company attempts to expand beyond its “traditional focus on performance advertising into brand advertising.”
He also suggested that some of the learnings from his Yahoo!/Overture days will be applicable with Turn saying, “Just as Overture pioneered search advertising and helped large agencies and advertisers to succeed, Turn is pioneering strategic technologies in display advertising for the same types of companies.”
Demas added that Turn is “an earlier version of the hyper-growth I helped lead at Overture. We had to rapidly scale our operations both nationally and internationally while hiring the very best.”
Outgoing CEO Jim Barnett said in the release, “Bill has been an exceptional leader and trusted colleague for many years, and has played a critical role in Turn’s remarkable growth. I can’t think of anyone more qualified and better suited to take over as CEO of Turn as we continue our rapid growth.”
Read the release here.
Tags: ad exchange, ad network, media buying, platform, turn
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Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
Helene Monat is President, AdSafe Media, an advertising technology company.
AdExchanger.com: What challenge does AdSafe Media solve for marketers?
HM: AdSafe Media was founded with the goal of helping brands implement safe and successful digital advertising strategies. While many brands and agencies have adopted best practices for advertising on the Internet, the complexities of the ad-serving ecosystem can yield significant problems, specifically risks to brands in terms of content adjacencies (i.e. the content that appears next to advertising). AdSafe technology provides brand marketers with the first independent, third-party service to protect their integrity and equity. AdSafe’s suite of products enables marketers and agencies to safely and successfully execute digital advertising strategies by preventing brand campaigns from being displayed in potentially harmful online environments.
How can AdSafe help bring brand awareness dollars online and serve the brand marketer? Any examples?
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Tags: ad exchange, Ad Networks, adsafe, adsafe media, advertising, brand marketing, media buying, platform
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