Mediasmith In the News

Quova Introduces Advanced IP Audience Targeting; Delivers Display Ads by Organization Type and Location, Debuts at ad:tech London

Mediasmith — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 16:00:25 +0000

Digital Ad Campaigns Now Capable of Reaching Corporate Workers, Convention Attendees, University Students, and Hotel Guests; Mediasmith Campaigns Go Live

LONDON & MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Sep 21, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Quova, a Neustar Service and a leading provider of high-quality Internet Protocol (IP) geolocation data, today announced the availability of its IP Audience Targeting Solutions (ATS), an advanced, highly scalable audience targeting system for online display advertising. ATS helps brand marketers more effectively implement online display advertising at an organizational level without the use of cookie-based tracking or targeting. Powered by Quova's 'User Type' data, ATS provides a vehicle to reach a specific audience with a tailored message.

"Quova's IP Audience Targeting Solutions has enabled Mediasmith to effectively reach the business community through small business and enterprise targeting," said David L. Smith, CEO and Founder, Mediasmith. "Combining scale and accuracy, Quova is a valuable part of our targeting strategy."

Quova's IP intelligence and real-time network analytics enable brand marketers to select the type of organization they want to see their ads, whether it's a university, convention center or place of business. Marketers can develop ad creative that is geared specifically to these segments and through ATS, deliver it in the most relevant context to the person viewing an ad.

"Different than de facto advertising practices, ATS allows marketers to target audiences based on where they log onto the Internet. This means brand advertisers can reach consumers or enterprise customers with special offers at their place of work, play, study, or travel," said Miten Sampat, Vice President, Product Strategy, Quova, a Neustar Service. "Agencies and marketers will be impressed with how this scales for campaigns."

MORE ABOUT DELIVERING ADS BASED ON IP ADDRESSES

Quova's ATS utilizes a proprietary database of over 3.5 billion publicly available IP addresses to create a custom target set for each campaign. Quova manages the entire process from start to finish: determining custom IP placements, running targeted ad campaigns, ad optimization and reporting.

An IP address is a numerical label assigned to each device (e.g., computer, printer) participating on a computer network that uses the IP for communication. For more than 10 years, Quova has been a leading provider of IP data to the online advertising ecosystem to help businesses understand the location of their users. Quova supplies valuable IP intelligence to leading search engines, government agencies, fraud and security companies and many others in the online advertising ecosystem.

For more information about IP intelligence, Quova's IP ATS for display advertising, pricing, and a free consultation, please contact a Quova sales representative at sales@quova.com.

Quova provides high-quality IP intelligence data. This data allows companies, large and small, to use detailed demographic and network characteristics to prevent fraud in online commerce; regulate online content (DRM) to stay compliant; and marketers to localize content and analyze traffic. Quova is the only full-service IP geolocation provider with a team of analysts, customer technicians and developer advocates who add human IP to network IP to offer consultative services along with its data. Quova is a Neustar Service, based in Mountain View, California. http://www.quova.com/ . Follow @quova on twitter.

SOURCE: Quova

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Mediasmith Appoints Preston Bealle as SVP, Director, New York

Mediasmith — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:48:15 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO, July 28, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- San Francisco based media agency Mediasmith announced today that Board of Directors member Preston Bealle is joining the company on a full-time basis as SVP, Director, New York. Bealle will assume New Business Development responsibilities on a national basis with emphasis on New York. Bealle has a strong track record in advertising and the digital marketplace with years of executive level agency, client and site side experience which he brings to the Mediasmith management team. His expertise includes account management and digital advertising. On the site side, he has grown multiple companies to an acquisition path, including Jumbo.com, Homeworkcentral.com, Babygear.com, Gorp.com, and a group of legal document stores. He has worked with a diverse array of clients, including Hanes/L'eggs hosiery, Skippy peanut butter, Hellman's mayonnaise, Nabisco Life Savers, General Mills cereals and flour, Clorox, Hewlett-Packard, Time Inc., GM, Merrill Lynch, IBM and Colgate.

"We are excited that Preston has joined Mediasmith on a full time basis. His track record, both in business development and on the strategic side is unparalleled. He is a great addition to our team and is clearly the right person to take our New York effort to the next phase," said Mediasmith CEO and Founder David L. Smith.

Bealle's agency experience is at large ad agencies in NY and San Francisco, including JWT/NY, Dancer Fitzgerald Sample NY-LA-SF and back to NY, and Saatchi/NY. He was the first director of online advertising at any agency, at Poppe Tyson/NY.

"I've long felt this is the best interactive agency around, and I've seen most of them," said Bealle. "Mediasmith is a great fit for NY clients who need leading-edge interactive expertise coupled with knowledge and deep experience in all media."

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Mediasmith celebrates NYC expansion with cocktail event and Times Square spectacular display

Mediasmith — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:48:26 +0000

What Are The Key Metrics For Brand Awareness Campaigns In An Automated Buying Environment?What Are The Key Metrics For Brand Awareness Campaigns In An Automated Buying Environment?

Mediasmith — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:14:36 +0000

With all the talk about brand dollars moving online, what is it that everybody is tracking for brand marketers? -especially in the growing automated buying environment online.

With this challenge in mind, AdExchanger.com asked a range of representatives on the tech and services side of the digital ad ecosystem the following question:

"What are two or three key metrics that need to be tracked for brand awareness campaigns in an automated buying environment?"

David L. Smith, CEO and Founder, Mediasmith

At the early stages (and amazing still today) many brands looked at DR measures like clickthrough rates as brand proxies. As has been proven many times in recent years, clickthrough rates are actually poor metrics as proxies for almost any campaigns, even DR, let alone brand. View throughs have been another proxy for branding. The argument (whether you agree that the view happened is a result of a web impression or other contact with the consumer), is that a view through customer must know something about the brand.But today, we have real brand analytics. The classic brand analytics are awareness (aided or unaided) and brand lift (intent to purchase).

For too long, the industry has depended on metrics for brand that are inadequate. That is rapidly changing.

Vizu launched an enterprise level platform last year that is affordable enough to be always plugged in for a major advertiser. Dynamic Logic and Insight Express have answered with similar products. And I am certain that others are on the horizon. These metrics mirror the classic P&G annual research. They are just always on and can provide site by site metrics in real or near real time, assuming a large enough campaign.

There is no reason to consider less perfect metrics when the ideal (for a reasonable price) is available now.

Placing ads in images new way to sell products

Mediasmith — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:28:35 +0000

Casey Newton, Chronicle Staff Writer

San Francisco Chronicle June 13, 2011 04:00 AM

Monday, June 13, 2011

For years, advertisers have complained about "banner blindness," Internet surfers' tendency to browse sites without noticing the rectangular ads on the periphery of most Web pages. And most browsers excel at blocking the pop-up and "pop-under" ads that advertisers have relied on for more than a decade.

Now some of the nation's largest publishers are starting to sell ad space in what may be the final frontier of digital advertising: the trillions of images displayed across the Internet. If startups in Silicon Valley and elsewhere have their way, it will soon be commonplace to mouse over an image and find advertising, e-commerce or other information contained within them.

"This category is very quickly coalescing into the immense opportunity and trend that we expected it would," said Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Pixazza, a 3-year-old Mountain View company that delivers ads and e-commerce to 3,000 digital publishers. The company now serves ads to 150 million unique visitors a month, a figure that has tripled since January.

But even as the number of ads they serve skyrockets, the startups acknowledge a significant risk - that they will alienate Web users, who will go to great lengths to avoid intrusive advertising.

"Three years from now, what users expect to be able to do with an image will have a lot to do with how responsible the companies who are in the industry today are," said Rey Flemings, CEO of San Francisco startup Stipple. "It is just vitally important that the companies that are in this business respect users."

For all the difficulties that companies face in reaching consumers on the Web, online advertising keeps growing. U.S. companies spent $26 billion on digital ads in 2010, 15 percent more than they did in 2009, according to a study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

The question for Pixazza, Stipple and their competitors is what - if anything - users would like to see when they move their cursors to hover over an image.

Pixazza (pronounced "pick-SAW-zuh") launched in 2008 with a big goal: to make every image on the Web interactive. "Now every picture is worth more than 1,000 words," its website asserts. The company has raised $17.8 million to date, more than any of its competitors, and its investors include Google's venture capital arm.

Lisbonne says that, eventually, moving a cursor over an image will unlock all sorts of information, similar to the way that flipping over a baseball card reveals useful statistics and biographical details about the player on the front. But to date, Pixazza has focused on using images to enable shopping.

The challenge that image-based advertising companies face is choosing who will tag the Web's trillions of images and match the pictures with advertisers. Pixazza's founders decided they couldn't do it using computer science alone.

"Algorithms even at their best don't tend to have judgment and taste and style," Lisbonne said. "I'm not sure my wife wants to know the computer's opinion of what lighting fixtures we should have in our living room."

Products, websites matched

To augment its technology, Pixazza uses contract employees to identify products inside images on websites and match them with products from Pixazza's network of advertisers. Mouse over an image of a denim shirt-clad Sean Penn on MSNBC.com and a pop-up image will suggest a similar, less expensive shirt identified by Pixazza's contractors. Click the image and you can buy the shirt.

Shara Johnson is one of the company's contractors. The 34-year-old resident of Virginia Beach, Va., spends several hours each week poring over fashion and celebrity photographs and matching them to more affordable merchandise.

"I'm always on the lookout to see what the new trend is," said Johnson, who started working for Pixazza two years ago to earn side income while she launched a video production company. "It appeals to that sense. It's like you're a buyer and you're selecting clothing for that particular store."

Lisbonne credits the mix of human and computer technology with Pixazza's growth. The site is on pace to deliver 30 billion image views this year, a figure that has increased 50 percent in the past two months. Among the sites where the ads are now appearing are the website for "The Today Show" and the gossip site Just Jared.

Flemings thinks Pixazza has it wrong.

Like Pixazza, his company tags images and lets consumers shop from them directly. But where his competitor shows consumers similar, more affordable items, Stipple tells consumers exactly what's in the image.

"If you Google 'red Ferrari,' you don't want Google to say, 'You can't afford it, so we'll show you red Hondas,' " Flemings said.

Stipple allows images to be tagged by a variety of people: the person who took the photo, the stylists who created a celebrity's look, or brand agents who notice their products in a picture. The result is that anyone who mouses over one of Stipple's dots will learn the precise products featured in the image - even if it's an outre Lady Gaga dress. Gaga photos were tagged by Stipple last week and featured on Gilt Groupe, the flash-sale fashion site.

Scope to expand

Stipple, which launched the first version of its product in September, has raised $2 million in venture capital to date, led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Like Lisbonne, Flemings says that in coming months the scope of information contained within images will expand significantly.

"I would consider everything you've seen in an image to date, including Stipple, image advertising 1.0," Flemings said. "It doesn't even scratch the surface of what's possible."

While Pixazza and Stipple compete to build e-commerce into images, other companies are embedding a more familiar form of advertising into images. Santa Monica's GumGum puts Google AdSense-style keywords along with banners and Flash ads into images on sites from Gannett, Time-Warner, gossip site TMZ, and others. (It also serves ads on SFGate.com.)

Founder Ophir Tanz said his company's ads are clicked on 20 times more frequently than a similar banner ad, because users who mouse over the ads are typically paying much closer attention.

In New York, Image Space Media is making a similar bid for users' attention.

Images make new connections possible, executives said. After a recent campaign for Gillette razors that featured Jennifer Lopez as its spokeswoman, Image Space worked to embed Gillette ads into images of Lopez on fashion and celebrity gossip sites, extending the reach of the campaign.

"We've just begun to scratch the surface on how you can use this creatively," said Adrienne Skinner, Image Space's chief revenue officer.

David L. Smith, founder of San Francisco digital advertising agency Mediasmith, said his company will probably begin pursuing in-image advertising for his clients soon.

"I don't have any question that we will test and do some of this stuff," he said. "Intuitively, it makes a lot of sense."

Mediasmith Announces the Opening of Their NYC Office

Mediasmith — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 23:17:14 +0000

(SAN FRANCISCO, February 10, 2011)— After a very successful 2010, San Francisco based media agency Mediasmith has announced that they have opened an office in New York City. This office will complement their long established headquarters in San Francisco, and their Los Angeles based office that opened in early 2010.

“In conjunction with our offices in San Francisco and Southern California, this is the next logical step towards virtual national coverage,” said Mediasmith CEO and Founder, David L. Smith.

Mediasmith’s NYC office will be headed by Pamela Raley, SVP of New Business Development/Eastern Region. Pamela Raley joined Mediasmith in January 2011 and has extensive sales and digital marketing experience with companies such as CondeNast, Disney, Hearst Magazines, and Newsweek. While at these organizations, Raley was involved in the strategy and execution of 40+ brand website launches including Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Oprah and the larger, female-centric sites for Disney and ABC. In addition, Pamela has worked with major B2C companies, such as P&G, Nestle, Kraft, Kellogg’s, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, General Motors, Mazda, Hawaii Convention & Visitors Bureau, both in the U.S. and abroad on integrated advertising and marketing campaigns. She also consults with companies on digital media. From 1994-2000, she served as an Independent Director on the Board of Directors for MTMG / Marriott Corporation.

IAB guidelines and their impact on the media planning community

Mediasmith — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:09:45 +0000

Eliot Kent-Uritam says a few words about the new IAB guidelines, which will be activated in 2011. Click here for the video.

At Connected Marketing Week, Talk Is Heated Around the Future of Display

Mediasmith — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:01:24 +0000

In a recap of ClickZ's Connected Marketing Week in San Francisco, Mediasmith's Eliot Kent-Uritam shares a few thoughts on ad networks. More

Interview with David L. Smith at IAB Innovation Days

Mediasmith — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:44:07 +0000

David L. Smith speaks with the IAB's Marla Aaron at the 2010 IAB Innovation Days at Internet Week on June 8-9 in New York City. See the video here.

What's Hearst's iCrossing Acquisition Worth?

Mediasmith — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:12:42 +0000

David L. Smith shares with MediaPost his research and thoughts on the cost of Hearst acquiring iCrossing. More