Internet Advertising : internet Advertising week 9 2012

Target Tricky Audiences with ChoiceStream CRUNCH

Michael Garrity — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 21:55:00 GMT

Audience targeting has become a major part of the online marketing landscape, but one persistent problem is the outliers -- those Internet audiences that are difficult to classify and thus hard to reach.

That's why ChoiceStream recently banded together with advertising agency Hill Holliday to develop CRUNCH Active Audience, a new solution aimed at targeting those hard-to-qualify audiences based on their shared attitudes, psychographic profiles or special affinities for certain brands or products. CRUNCH Active Audience works by using a clean, in-banner poll to ask customers to share information about themselves, such as specific traits or attitudes, indicating their personal affinity for a brand's product or message.

CRUNCH then takes the responses and uses ChoiceStream's network of consumer data to create a Super Profile of the brand's ideal consumer prospect. The solution can even provide clients with the data necessary to custom-assemble a scalable audience based on behavior and performance matching.

This is currently the only audience-targeting solution to take advantage of ChoiceStream's proprietary network of individuals, though it also utilizes third-party data and real-time ad response technology to predict where, when and, of course, who will respond to a specific brand's advertising. So far, Hill Holliday's clients have seen as much as twice the consumer engagement with their campaigns when CRUNCH has been leveraged.

Social Feed Ads from Demand Media

Allison Howen — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:46:00 GMT

Content and social media company Demand Media has introduced a suite of rich-media advertising units that incorporate its Social Feed ad management tools, which allow advertisers to integrate social media content directly into live rich-media ads.

“Our new social advertising products are designed to amplify and broadcast our advertisers’ campaigns across a variety of social platforms,” says Joanne Bradford, chief revenue and marketing officer at Demand Media. “We believe our new Social Feed ad units are the first to allow advertisers to enhance their video-enabled ads using customized content from their social media footprint.“

Advertisers can add customized, real-time social feeds directly into the ad unit, which expands when a site visitor scrolls over it. Additionally, advertisers can update the ads, post updates directly into the live ad and the brand's Facebook page simultaneously or choose to feed content from Twitter into the ad unit. The ad units also provide consumers with access to the brand’s Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or YouTube properties.

Demand Media’s social advertising products are available in both IAB standard and custom rich-media units such as billboards, site skins and overlays that support advanced functionality such as video, audio, Flash and HTML5. Check out some examples here.

AOL Unveils Pictela Enterprise for Premium Online Advertising

Michael Garrity — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:20:00 GMT

AOL continues to experiment in the Internet advertising field, most recently with the beta release of Pictela Enterprise, a new platform for designing, delivering and managing "Premium Format" ad units on the Web.

Advertising agencies will be able to use Pictela's simple, guided self-service interface to manage the brand assets of their clients, and then efficiently serve them into premium online display ads.

AOL's Senior Vice President of Premium Formats, and Pictela CEO, Greg Rogers refers to Pictela as "a content management system for ads."

The new suite of advertising tools features an array of products and services to efficiently meet the needs of ad agencies running large-scale online advertising campaigns. The most important is the Pictela Management Center (PMC), a cloud-based platform for creating, delivering and analyzing Premium Format ads. The solution offers state of the art ad-serving technology and delivers content through a set of standard apps for maximum efficiency, while also supporting standalone custom apps for clients with more specialized needs. PMC supports six IAB standard ad sizes.

In addition, Picela provides Styles & Guides, which allow advertisers to design ads based on the solution's industry-proven standardized templetes and also gives them a detailed Style Guide for each layout that contains asset, application and video requirements for pre-production and design.

Pictela will also offer Reporting and Benchmarking to let users see detailed data about key metrics, including clicks, impressions, interaction rates, exposure time, interaction time and video completion. This will support third-party impression, click and engagement tags.

Finally, the suite comes with Pictela Support during its initial beta launch for training and technical support, as well as a browser-based debugging tool to ensure quality campaign delivery and standardized metrics.

Pictela Enterprise ads will be served across AOL, Advertising.com and other major online publishers.