Peer39 announced this morning a new partnership with the leading DSP in the APAC region, Brandscreen, to provide advertisers and agencies with page-level targeting. The offering is the first of its kind in the Asia Pacific market, and will give buyers the option of audience and semantic targeting for the first time. Peer39's quality, safety and category attributes will now be available for the region’s media-buyers through Brandscreen, allowing them to leverage semantic-targeting in real-time.

"Brand Safety can mean many things to different advertisers,” says Julian Tol, Brandscreen’s CEO. Some advertisers want to avoid objectionable content that may be inappropriate for their audience. Others may want to simply avoid misaligned content that doesn’t meet the objectives of the campaign or creative execution. This new partnership allows agencies to enforce a precise, customized brand safety policy across all exchange-traded media."

The first agency trading desk in the region to take advantage of the new offering is Ikon Communications. Ikon is already recognised as having one of the most advanced exchange-trading strategies in the market. Phil Cowlishaw sees a massive opportunity for advertisers in running campaigns in brand-safe environments as well as delivering the efficiencies available in the automated channel:

"Bringing together Brandscreen and Peer39 for the first time ensures maximum levels of brand safety and pre-emptive protection for our clients, who are investing more and more through our Agency Trading Desk. The integration allows Ikon to unlock the true value and context of each available impression, before bidding, delivering enhanced performance results for our clients."

You can read a Q&A around this announcement with Phil Cowlishaw, Performance Media Director of Ikon Communications, and Andy Ellenthal, CEO of Peer39, here. The full press release on the new APAC-focused partnership is available below.

NEW YORK, NY – 30 August 2011 | SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - 31 August 2011

Starting today in the Asia Pacific region, brands and agencies are able to leverage page-level intelligence in real time, thanks to a first-of-its-kind partnership between Brandscreen and Peer39. Peer39’s quality, safety and category attributes are now available through Brandscreen to allow brands to take advantage of the efficiency of intelligent media buying while retaining control over the environment in which their ads appear.

Brandscreen will offer Peer39’s page level data to clients in order to maximize performance, increase scale and ensure brand safety in the rapidly evolving Real Time Bidding (RTB) ecosystem.

“We’re delighted to be the first DSP to offer page level data to clients in the Asia Pacific region,” says Julian Tol, Brandscreen’s CEO. “As an industry, we've learned that reaching the right audience in a relevant, quality environment is the key to advertisers achieving the scale and results they deserve. Our clients have been asking for insights into page quality and topic, and especially brand safety. The more actionable data available, the better it is for our clients and the industry as a whole.”

The first agency trading desk to benefit from this unique partnership is Ikon Communications. Phil Cowlishaw, Performance Media Director says "Bringing together Brandscreen and Peer39 for the first time ensures maximum levels of brand safety and pre-emptive protection for our clients, who are investing more and more through our Agency Trading Desk. The integration allows Ikon to unlock the true value and context of each available impression, before bidding, delivering enhanced performance results for our clients.""

Julian Tol says "Brand Safety can mean many things to different advertisers. Some advertisers want to avoid objectionable content that may be inappropriate for their audience. Others may want to simply avoid misaligned content that doesn’t meet the objectives of the campaign or creative execution. Brandscreen technology allows agencies to enforce a precise, customized brand safety policy across all exchange-traded media".

Peer39 works in real time to enable advertisers to target audiences in the right page environment, enabling more effective ad buy and bidding decisions. Using its semantic-based classification technology, Peer39 provides three channels of data, including quality, safety and category. Rather than looking at a domain to determine ad relevancy, Peer39’s approach looks at every page to determine ad relevancy by understanding the environment where an ad may appear.

“This flagship integration represents a significant step forward for the emergence of real time buying in APAC. Peer39 virtually invented the concept of page relevancy in RTB,” said Andy Ellenthal, CEO of Peer39. “Our attribute channels are the only pervasive data source that injects real time page level insight into every buy. In addition, as concerns over privacy and brand safety continue to evolve, the need to integrate quality and safety controls at the page level becomes a must have. We look forward to working closely with Brandscreen to ensure that the data we provide becomes an actionable addition to each buying decision for media buyers and planners.”

About Ikon Communications

Ikon provides clients with industry-leading brand, consumer, strategic and implementation planning, integrated digital solutions and world class media buying. Ikon was founded in 1999 to service the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Since then Ikon has grown from a staff of eight to over 130 people and work alongside a number of clients including Coca-Cola, Vodafone Hutchison, Sony, Myer, Westfield and Diageo. Ikon launched its in-house trading desk offering in December 2010 to help clients navigate the increasingly complex and fragmented digital media landscape. The benefit has been to shift the purchase and optimization of digital media from traditional black box managed-service digital optimization to self-serve technology platform. Through the trading desk, Ikon has been able to make online performance media useful, transparent and most importantly effective across display, video and mobile. For more information about Ikon please contact Phil Cowlishaw, Performance Media Director, Ikon Communications, phil_cowlishaw@ikoncom.com.au / +61 2 9290 7597

About Brandscreen

Founded in 2006, Brandscreen is Asia's leading Demand Side Platform. Brandscreen is the first and only enterprise-grade DSP to go live across all Asia-Pacific markets, including China, Japan, India, Korea, Australia, and covers the South East Asian region from its Singapore hub. Brandscreen is the lead technology partner of many of the world’s leading agency and network trading desks. Brandscreen technology enables its customers to run lean, powerful, own-branded, self-service trading operations, enabling them to drive outstanding performance for many of Asia’s leading advertisers. Brandscreen delivers technology, integration, education and support in a complete package designed to get trading desks operating quickly and effectively. For more information about Brandscreen please visit www.brandscreen.com or contact Julian Tol, CEO, Brandscreen jtol@brandscreen.com / +61 422 511 360

About Peer39

Peer39 has developed proprietary semantic advertising technology that provides page level intelligence that accurately and efficiently matches online ads to content. The company's patented natural language processing and machine learning algorithms are able to derive Quality, Safety, Language, and Category attributes from web pages, thus empowering networks, exchanges, publishers, SSPs, DSPs and emerging advertising platforms to boost monetization. By processing tens of thousands of URLs per second and enabling over 3 billion ad requests daily, Peer39 provides a cookie-less data solution built to address the real-time needs of today's online advertising ecosystem. Headquartered in New York City, Peer39 maintains a research and development center in Israel. Peer39 Labs conducts primary research in semantic analysis and targeting technologies resulting in numerous patents covering its technology and business practices. Peer39 is a member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Council for Accountable Advertising, and is an OnMedia Top 100 winner and was chosen by MIT's Technology Review as one of 10 Web Startups to Watch. For more information about Peer39, please visitwww.peer39.com, follow us on Twitter at @SemanticizeMe or contact James Oppenheim, CMO, Peer39 james@peer39.com / +1-646-381-0639.

Follow ExchangeWire APAC on @ew_apac

Join us on Linkedin: ExchangeWire: Ad Trading, APAC

---