ExchangeWire rounds up some of the biggest stories in the US/Canadian digital advertising space. In this week’s edition: ContentAI added to Marketo product suite; New CTO at OpenX; Horizon Media launches Audience Mapping Platform; Trade Associations ask CBA to improve user experience; Taykey launches Smart Whitelist; and FastPay acquires AnchorOps.

Marketo adds ContentAI to Product Suite

Martech and engagement software company, Marketo, has launched Marketo ContentAI to their product suite. The new artificial-intelligence-powered solution engages each customer with the most relevant content across channels and predicts the content most likely to convert each audience.

Manoj Goyal, CPO, Marketo

ContentAI allows marketers to personalise their websites, mobile experiences, and email through drag-and-drop content placement in their UI, and will auto-discover and catalogue website assets for content personalisation using AI to determine the best content to display to each audience.

Manoj Goyal, chief product officer, Marketo, tells ExchangeWire: “Marketo’s 'The State of Engagement' report found that the number one reason customers do not interact with brands is because of irrelevant content. Additionally, many marketers are still unclear on how they can leverage artificial intelligence to best engage with their customers. ContentAI seeks to overcome these challenges, putting the marketer in control of the AI technology to use the right content across all channels for more personalised engagement with their customers.”

ContentAI’s capabilities include automated content discovery, an AI-powered recommendation engine, AI-powered content delivery, audience insights, and key metrics.

OpenX hires new CTO

Programmatic advertising technology company, OpenX, has hired Paul Ryan as chief technology officer to head the technical arm of OpenX and lead the development of new technology for the company.

Paul Ryan, CTO, OpenX

Ryan, previously the CTO and founder of mobile search company Zowdow, has over 30 years of technology leadership experience and will lead a global team of over 250 engineers and data scientists. He has also previously held CTO roles at Yellow Pages Group in Canada, Velocify, and Overture.

“OpenX sits at the middle of one of the driving economic forces of the internet, which is an exciting place to be right now. In the next few years, the programmatic sector is poised for massive growth, as a significant portion of global media spend is estimated to move to digital channels. As digital advertising evolves and the requirements of publishers and advertisers shift to meet the needs of a mobile- and video-first world, I look forward to being part of a team working on the transformative technology that will shape the future of our industry”, Paul Ryan, CTO, OpenX, tells ExchangeWire.

Horizon Media launches Audience Mapping Platform

Horizon Media, an independent media agency based in New York, has launched a data-powered Audience Mapping Platform (AMP) for out-of-home targeting to increase efficiencies of data-driven audience targeting. The AMP will generate data visualisations for quicker evaluation of optimised placements, for both traditional and digital OOH placements, and overlays Geopath’s inventory catalogue with audience data sources to target audiences and optimise total ad spend.

With this launch, Horizon is also making an investment in Mira, a data partner that fuels the AMP platform with real-time metrics. The AMP platform will render Mira’s crowd analytics and real-time location data to provide users with the highest concentration of target audiences. Using Mira’s technology, Horizon also plans on evolving the AMP into a digital OOH programmatic buying platform in the coming months, bringing all OOH planning within one platform.

“Technological innovation and access to valuable new data allows us to evolve and improve the way that we do business”, said Jill Nickerson, senior vice president, out-of-home, Horizon Media. “There wasn’t a third-party tool that satisfied our data and automation needs, so we created AMP, a sophisticated, data-driven out-of-home planning tool that has quickly streamlined our planning and buying process, leveraging audience, location, and first-party client data. The tool also allows our teams to use the same audience profile data set as other investment groups within the agency, making audience-targeted investments universal across those channels."

Trade associations ask Coalition for Better Ads (CBA) to improve user experience

Some of the top trade associations, 4A’s, ANA, and IAB, have joined together to propose an industry-wide self-regulatory system with the goal to banish the most offensive advertising formats from the internet.

Stu Ingis, Partner, Venable, CBA Coordinator

In September 2016, the Coalition for Better Ads (CBA) was formed by a group of advertising trade associations, advertisers, publishers, and agency groups, to develop global standards for online advertising. In a letter to the CBA, the above-mentioned trade groups have asked for the adoption of 'The Better Ads Experience Program' to improve user experience and keep the development and implementation of standards moving forward. The program provides a framework for companies involved in digital advertising to pledge to comply with the ad standards established by the CBA. It has also been proposed that internet browser companies and other 'delivery technology companies' help the CBA police and enforce compliance with the industry program.

Stu Ingis, partner, Venable, and CBA coordinator, tells ExchangeWire: “The Coalition for Better Ads and its members have been actively working on multiple fronts to promote marketplace adoption of the Better Ads Standards. The proposal from three leading trade groups participating in the Coalition addresses important areas of this work, including developing an interpretative process for the Standards, a program for certification of compliance with the Standards, and evaluating and developing principles to address the use of the Standards by browsers and other technologies for assessment and implementation. The proposal will inform the Coalition’s ongoing discussions and actions on these matters as we work to improve the online ad experience for consumers.”

Taykey launches Smart Whitelist

Audience data company, Taykey, has launched Taykey Smart Whitelist, to optimise for inventory quality, relevance, and engagement. By identifying content generating the most engagement across the general population, Smart Whitelist, can be used across all campaigns, while being used with audience-targeting tactics for engagement and performance.

Amit Avner, CEO & founder, Taykey

With brand safety being a top concern for marketers, Taykey is using a ‘wisdom of the crowds’ approach to address this issue by using the company’s AI to scan social platforms, websites, blogs, and wikis to identify the topics generating the most engagement among users. The topics, updated throughout the day, are then translated into lists of hundreds of URLs to represent the most relevant article and video placements, and sent directly to participating DSPs for targeting.

"Concerns about inventory quality and relevance are increasingly pushing our industry towards more manual, and less scalable, tactics for managing ad environment. We're excited to introduce a more data-driven solution that helps advertisers find quality, without sacrificing efficiency and scale”, Amit Avner, CEO and founder, Taykey, tells ExchangeWire.

FastPay acquires AnchorOps

Financial technology company, FastPay, has acquired AnchorOps, the leading provider of electronic payment solutions for media buyers. The acquisition will combine FastPay’s focus on lending to media sellers and AnchorOps’ proficiency in payments and reconciliation for media buyers into one platform, improving overall workflow from invoicing to payment disbursement.

Jed Simon, CEO/Founder, FastPay

When asked about the benefit of this acquisition to the media industry, and the coming together of the fintech and martech worlds, Jed Simon, CEO/founder, FastPay, tells ExchangeWire: “FastPay and AnchorOps have been addressing friction within different sides of the media supply chain. FastPay has been primarily serving media sellers – providing streamlined and intelligent ways of managing cash flow, which is a particular challenge, due to the long payment terms inherent in media. AnchorOps, on the other hand, has been focused on streamlining and digitising payment workflows for media buyers. So, we've each built robust businesses (each processing USD$1bn [£753m] per year) but these systems historically haven't been connected – even worse, buyers and sellers are still using rudimentary tools (email/phone/excel), not a platform, to manage invoice flow, reconcile invoices, and dispute-resolve. There's a real opportunity to close that loop to drive greater efficiencies and deliver more value for our combined customers.

On the convergence of fintech and martech, I don't necessarily see a broader convergence trend happening here. We've chosen to focus on a single vertical (media) as we believe it's large, global, dynamic, and (quite frankly) exciting! The technical advancements and investments in ad tech and martech have greatly outpaced the financial workflow – our goal is to modernise and digitise this workflow and provide the financial rails on which the industry transacts.”