Videology Announces Integration with eXelate

Videology—an online video advertising platform and solutions provider—announced this week that its technology now allows server-to-server communication with eXelate—a data and analytics engine powering digital marketing decisions. This is the first integration of its kind between eXelate and a video advertising platform, pairing data intelligence with media execution in an in-stream video advertising environment.

With more than 1,000 targetable segments in online purchase intent, household demographics and behaviour propensities, eXelate allows marketers to act upon online data in real-time. Direct communication between the eXelate and Videology servers will allow video advertisers immediate access to highly-targeted, premium and maX™ performance custom segments, facilitating execution and immediate scale from the moment the video advertising campaign is launched.

Aleck Schleider, Videology's Vice President, Marketing, and Head of Data and Analytics, comments: "In the simplest terms, Videology's integration with a data engine as comprehensive as eXelate will allow video advertisers to hone their objectives and achieve scale against even the narrowest custom consumer segments almost instantly. What used to take weeks, or even months, can now be achieved from the moment a campaign launches, ensuring that better results are delivered faster."

eXelate premium data spans more than 350 million users globally and provides consumer insights across the purchase funnel. Videology clients across North America, the U.K. and Europe can target and execute media plans against the data—an increasingly important consideration as more global marketers utilise video in markets around the world.
Damian Garbaccio, Chief Revenue Officer, eXelate, adds:"Having the first server-to-server video platform integration allows eXelate and Videology to implement strategic data delivery at scale. Together we are helping brands make the best marketing decisions with data."

The integration also provides Videology with access to syndicated data through eXelate, including Nielsen, MasterCard and other premium data suppliers.

Schleider concludes: "As more advertisers recognise and understand the unique power of video, this partnership perfectly complements the growing demand for custom targeting and audience addressability within the in-stream video space. We're very excited at the advancement that this integration will mean for our clients and the medium overall."

StrikeAd's New Technology Tracks Calls for Mobile Click-to-Call Campaigns

StrikeAd, the London and New York based mobile advertising company, announced this week their new technology, which enables advertisers to optimise the RTB media buy to call duration within a click-to-call mobile ad campaign. The StrikeAd Demand Side Platform (DSP) uses telephony proxy diversion and analytics to track call duration and determine the pattern of an impression profile that is most likely to result in a phone call over a certain duration. It can then bid in real time on similar profile impressions to reduce wasted ad spend and improve ROI.

StrikeAd uses telephony services software to ensure that when a user clicks a banner, they are given a unique phone number to call. The unique number is then mapped with each click ID. When the call is completed, the telephony software tells the StrikeAd server the phone number and call duration. The StrikeAd platform then uses the ID and phone number to attribute the conversion if the call duration was over a set threshold , for example, of two minutes. This data later enables StrikeAd to see exactly which impression profile the call was driven by and identify and buy further inventory with a high potential for another phone call over two minutes.

Michael Dewhirst, CTO of StrikeAd, comments: "Once we know the duration of a call which resulted in a conversion, we can identify the exact details of the impression that drove it, including what device make and model it was, where the banner was seen and what time of day it was and so on. So rather than simply assuming that a click-to-call banner click resulted in a phone call, we verify and confirm whether there was a call at all and for how long it lasted.

"This enables us to then find similar inventory for our clients' ad campaigns which form a similar profile – same device, same time of day, same site, etc – which results in higher conversion levels for our clients by an order of magnitude and reduces huge wasteful spend in terms of advertising budget. This approach is a game changer when it comes to click-to-call campaigns."

StrikeAd offers the world’s first mobile-specific advertising Demand Side Platform (DSP). It allows media agencies to manage and optimise multiple global mobile advertising campaigns from multiple advertisers from a single platform. Advertisers can buy best performing inventory to provide effectively filtered and optimised sales leads.

Infectious Media Addresses RTB Knowledge Gap With New Video Series

Online display company Infectious Media launched last week a series of bite-sized videos aimed at addressing the increasing knowledge-gap of advertisers around real-time advertising and RTB. Bringing together industry experts from companies including Sky, Google and Microsoft, the videos are featured on the company’s new YouTube channel and cover subjects from “What is RTB?” and “The Role of Dynamic Creatives”, to “The Future of Digital Display”.

Martin Kelly, co-founder and Managing Partner at Infectious Media, comments: “The biggest issue we face as an industry is not technological but educational. The market continues to grow at a rapid rate,
but that growth will be hindered if advertisers don’t have clarity around the benefits they can expect
to derive from RTB and real-time advertising.

“This series of videos sets about addressing the questions we frequently encounter when talking to
new clients. We hope advertisers and their agencies will find the opportunity to hear from leading
industry leaders of use, and that this will encourage them to engage, or even re-engage, with the use of real-time advertising within their digital display activities.”

The series consists of six videos each between 3-4 minutes long with speakers from Admeld, AppNexus, Google, Microsoft, The Rubicon Project and Sky.

They can be viewed here.

Vivaki Nerve Center & BlueKai Co-Develop New Data Platform

VivaKi Nerve Center – VivaKi’s dedicated R&D unit for advertising practices and products – and BlueKai – a customer data cloud for data management, analysis and activation – have co-developed a new data platform called Audience Insights that will provide marketers with scale, data aggregation capabilities and safety standards. The announcement was made last week at the 2012 iMedia Agency Summit in Colorado Springs, CO.

Audience Insights allows marketers to glean demographic and behavioral information, as well as activate audience intelligence through media partnerships. Instead of traditional tagging of creative assets and web pages – which could potentially inhibit the consumer experience – Audience Insights reduces the complexity and increases scale by leveraging what is already in place. By ingesting data from campaigns on DoubleClick and Atlas, Audience Insights syncs data via the VivaKi Cookie Synching process to provide a scaled view of audience profiles and insights. BlueKai’s aggregation of marketplace data and its data management platform (DMP) provide a toolset for audience analysis and management, while keeping strict firewalls in place for clients.

Kurt Unkel, Nerve Center President, comments: “It has been very rewarding to see this initiative turn into an industry offering that can scale. This was a collaborative effort in which BlueKai and the Nerve Center brought forth ideas and technology that could truly make this a game-changing offering.”

Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai, adds: “As the defacto in the data management space, BlueKai has forged partnerships with world-class data partners in order to offer our clients the most complete cross-section of data available in the market. We are thrilled to partner with VivaKi to bring this best-in-class platform to the marketplace. Put simply, this partnership is furthering our mission to enable the ecosystem to not only have access to good data, but to also have the ability to drive ROI, make it actionable and integrate data in every platform.”

Growth in the UK & EU Leads to Further Expansion at Evidon London

Following a period of new client wins and rapid growth in the UK and Europe since the launch of their new office last year, Evidon announced last week three new appointments to the business.

Assuming the role of Director of Sales, UK is Steven Garrett, formerly Head of Sales at the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the industry owned auditing organisation for print circulation. With 12 years experience in media and digital media sales, Garrett will be responsible for further enhancing Evidon’s European client list.

Alongside Steven will be Elizabeth Wiltshire, a digital client services professional and campaign manager who joins Evidon to help manage clients in the UK and Europe. She joins from News International as an Account Manager where she spent six years working closely with the sales teams to ensure that digital outputs met the high standards expected at the organisation.

Also joining the Evidon London office as Account Manager is Magalie Kangni, a seasoned customer services specialist with extensive experience in client support management, most recently at Shopzilla. Since 2003, Kangni has worked directly and on behalf of numerous blue chip clients including Symantec, American Express, The Daily Telegraph and Fujitsu Siemens. Her new role will see her managing new and existing relationships across the UK and Europe.

Commenting on the expansion of the team, Damian Scragg, MD of Evidon UK, said, “We are delighted to welcome Steven, Elizabeth and Magalie to Evidon. This is a strategic expansion in line with our impressive growth trajectory – which includes last week’s announcement of our new partnership with Adobe - and all three individuals will play a pivotal role in the delivery of Evidon privacy and compliance solutions across the UK and Europe. This is an extremely busy time for us as we approach the 25 May deadline for the European ePrivacy Directive, so their input and experience in managing our client accounts and expectations will prove especially invaluable going forward.”

Adfonic Global AdMetrics Report Reveals it’s All About Gaming Apps

Adfonic, a global mobile advertising marketplace, released this week its first Global AdMetrics Report, drawing data from nearly ten thousand advertising campaigns, spanning ten thousand mobile sites and apps, during the first quarter of 2012.

Key among the findings of the report, which highlights Adfonic’s reach across all regions, platforms, device types and vertical channels, is the strength of the mobile games channel. In line with wider industry trends that demonstrate the popularity of gaming apps, games inventory represents almost a third of the total advertising inventory across Adfonic’s global network, and consistently delivers the highest CTRs and eCPMs (effective cost per thousand impressions) across all mobile platforms.

With data broken down into territories, the Global AdMetrics Report looks at a broad range of channels including entertainment, games, lifestyle, news and social networking; platforms including Android, iOS, RIM, Symbian and Windows; and many smartphone and tablet devices. The large volume of data on which the Global AdMetrics report is based enables Adfonic to extract meaningful insights into the drivers of global business performance on mobile platforms. By analysing data at a global scale, and breaking this down by region, platform, channel and device, the Global AdMetrics Report helps Adfonic’s advertisers and publishers to plan and deploy their mobile strategies more effectively. The data is also being used to drive increased levels of performance, as Adfonic’s algorithms optimally match advertisers and publishers and maximise the value created for both.

Paul Childs, Adfonic Chief Marketing Officer and Co-Founder, comments: “The Global AdMetrics report enables us to share insights to support advertisers and publishers in driving the most value from mobile advertising by making educated decisions when considering platforms, channels or geographies.

“The reach and performance of the games channel in particular represents a significant opportunity for app developers to generate revenue from mobile advertising. The higher CTRs that we are seeing within this channel are indicative of the greater propensity of consumers to click on mobile ads whilst interacting with apps and sites in their leisure time.”

Further highlights within the report include a focus on Android tablet versus smartphone performance in the U.S., which reveals a 36% higher CTR on tablet devices. In particular, the Android-powered Kindle Fire is taking off with a significant 13% share of advertising inventory and the highest CTR of all formats.

The Global AdMetrics Report is available from Adfonic’s website at here.