myThings' Global Expansion Continues Following Recent $15m Investment

myThings, a global personalised display ad solutions company, announced this week that it has expanded its operations in the U.S. and Latin American markets, in addition to Japan, Turkey, Poland and the Nordics, with the company now operating in 15 markets worldwide. Hand-in-hand with its geographic expansion, the company has recently hired its 100th employee, with a total team growth of 120% in 18 months.

myThings' strategic expansion decision, especially the opening of offices in the U.S. and Brazil, was a result of growing demand from marketers, particularly in the United States, to extend beyond the industry-focused cost per click (CPC) or view-based models offered by traditional retargeting companies. myThings translates its CPA-driven success to their markets, aiming to enable advertisers to run risk-free campaigns by paying only for actual conversions.

A driving force behind myThings' expansion is its recent $15m round led by Iris Capital, the manager of the Orange-Publicis Venture Fund, in addition to existing investors Accel Partners, Carmel Ventures, T-Ventures and Viola PE. To date, the company has raised $37m in four rounds of financing.

The company specialises in generating scalable, incremental sales for its customers via its CPA performance model. As a conversion-driven company, it has delivered over eight million conversions that have generated over €850m for its advertisers to date. myThings leverages its disruptive advancements in digital media technology, especially in big data analysis and real time bidding.

CEO of myThings, Benny Arbel, comments: "We are excited to leverage our growth across more and more markets, setting a substantial footprint in the global display ad space. We look forward to providing a more effective, true CPA solution that enables marketers to drive incremental sales in these regions.”

Moblie Ad Network Todacell Raises £1.29m and Doubles Revenue

To support growth which has lead to doubling 2011 revenue in the first half of 2012, Todacell investors inject £1.289m into the company, which adds mobile veteran Mark Lehmann as CEO, while expanding the London office and adding a Berlin office to double the company’s headcount. Former CEO and founder Moshe Vaknin now serves as a board member and strategic advisor for Todacell.

The growth in smartphone ownership and usage has significantly increased available mobile ad inventory, providing mobile agencies and marketers with a new challenge: campaign optimisation to ensure that they’re reaching the right users.

To address this challenge, Todacell developed optimisation technology that provides blue chip brands and their agencies with a solution that aims to automatically generates a better ROI for campaigns. This is accomplished via a proprietary inventory analysis tool which enables marketers to predict campaign performance in terms of impressions, clicks and conversions based on available inventory and past performance.

For example Todacell was able to improve campaign delivery and ROI for Bannerconnect through their smart automated optimisation process across publishers, location, device and demographics to provide Bannerconnect with lower cost-per-clicks and higher conversions.

Mark Lehmann, CEO, comments: “The exponential growth of mobile usage has resulted in a tremendous quantity of available mobile ad inventory. As a result, mobile marketers and their agencies are demanding campaign targeting and optimisation to ensure that their mobile ads are reaching the right users, who then have a deeper engagement with the mobile ad experience. Todacell’s proprietary targeting and optimisation technology is enabling our advertisers to achieve their campaign goals.”

The European expansion is being spearheaded out of Todacell’s London office, where billings have tripled thus far in 2012 vs. 2011.

Todacell secured the additional £1.289 million trategic investment from AfterDox, a group of investors from telephony billing solutions provider Amdocs, as well as private investors. Amir Goldstein, Chairman, AfterDox, comments: “We invested an additional £1.289 million in Todacell based on the better than expected revenue numbers delivered thus far in 2012 and the high level of customer satisfaction from the international advertisers and agencies working with Todacell.”

To date, Todacell has raised £2.8 million from AfterDox and other private investors.

Turn Drives Continued European Expansion

Turn, a global cloud marketing platform, has made a raft of new high profile hires as part of the company’s ongoing, rapid expansion within the European market.

Tom Hosking joins Turn as UK Sales Director and will drive the uptake of Turn's cloud marketing platform including its DSP and DMP. Previously, Hosking worked at O2 Media as head of O2 More where he was responsible for optimising and driving O2’s personalised mobile marketing product and also brings experience from fulfilling senior roles at Microsoft, Express Newspapers and Carat.

Turn is also expanding its client services team with senior account manager Ina Arens joining from Mindshare, account manager Laura Ambrose appointed from Yahoo! and Value Click and Gaelle Monti who previously worked at Orange. The new client services team members will be tasked with delivering a highly localised premium service to clients across Europe.

Turn’s London office is further bolstered by the appointment of Solutions Engineer Majid Sultan. Sultan was previously CDN service integration manager at Nokia and will play an important role in project managing integrations with customers and third-party technology partners.

Tom Hosking, UK sales director at Turn, comments: “Ad technology is a hugely exciting sector that is constantly growing. Turn began its expansion into Europe about a year ago and has already established itself as a big player in the EU online advertising market and I’m looking forward to playing a part in its continued and rapid growth.”

Pierre Naggar, Managing Director, Turn EU, adds: "Turn is experiencing phenomenal expansion across Europe and we are continuing to actively recruit talented individuals with an analytical and dynamic skill set. The five new colleagues joining our team are just the beginning and as uptake of Turn’s cloud marketing platform continues to grow we will make further additions to our European team to provide a highly specialist and localised service to our global clients."

MediaMind Launches Cookie-Free Ad Targeting for European AppNexus Customers with its Peer39 Data

MediaMind, an independent provider of integrated digital advertising solutions, announced this week that its recently acquired Peer39 data solution is now available to ad networks, DSPs, and other buyers on the AppNexus Platform in Europe. With this launch, advertisers will be able to deliver targeted ads via ad exchanges in relevant environments across seven languages, without the use of cookies.

The combination of geographic targeting with Peer39’s language attributes ensures that ads are being placed in the relevant environment, while targeting away from negative content. Peer39’s data is now available on the AppNexus real-time advertising platform in English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

The availability comes just as the European Union online privacy regulations take effect, which require websites and businesses operating in the EU to obtain consent from users before storing certain information. The regulations are pushing advertisers and inventory sources to re-examine their dependence on traditional cookie targeting and look for other viable options.

Tim Geenen, of Bannerconnect, comments: “As buyers who see tremendous benefit from using Peer39 data in the U.S., we are very excited to have this data available through the AppNexus Platform in European Markets. Page-level data that works across multiple languages is critical to serving ads on the best pages to the right audiences, while enabling our brand partners to comply with privacy legislation.”

Andy Ellenthal, EVP Sales and Operations, adds: “Advertisers are seeking alternatives to cookie-based data, while still increasing ad relevance. This announcement means advertisers will be able to leverage real-time bidding to deliver display campaigns at scale across various European markets, while ensuring that ads appear within relevant context, as well as on brand-safe pages.”