Eyeota Opens New York City Office as the Center of its U.S. Operations.
Eyeota, an audience data company, has opened its first U.S. office in New York’s Union Square. The expansion follows a successful round of funding earlier this year and will allow the company to widen its footprint in the U.S.
“Since we founded Eyeota in 2010, we have been building the company to serve the international markets of APAC, Europe and Latin America. Now that we have established deep roots in these regions working with top agencies and brands, we are well-positioned for U.S. growth,” said Kevin Tan, co-founder and CEO, Eyeota. “We are very excited to embark on our new chapter and expand our business to the States with the opening of the New York office.”
Eyeota provides marketers with access to over three billion unique profiles in Europe, APAC and the Americas. The company currently partners with some of the top agency and trading partners around the globe, including MasterCard, Dentsu Aegis Network, WPP, Neo @ Ogilvy, Havas, GroupM, Omnicom Group, iProspect, among others, and serves the data targeting needs of many leading global brands. By working with global leaders in online and offline data, as well as publishers, Eyeota provides a more comprehensive view of audience data and insights.
“Eyeota stands at the forefront of audience data and market insights, delivering key analysis to advertisers to improve their engagement with online audiences on a more targeted and personal level,” said Russ Fradin, co-founder and CEO of Dynamic Signal. “Eyeota’s exponential growth in audience data segments and expansion to new markets is a testament to Kevin’s international expertise and business acumen.”
Tan has relocated to New York City from the company’s headquarters in Singapore to manage operations and oversee company growth in the States. The Eyeota New York office is primarily comprised of marketing, data analysis, product development, sales and account support staff. Over the course of the next six months, Eyeota plans to double its employee headcount in New York and is seeking candidates for various positions in this region as well as Chicago and key cities in California.
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IRIS.TV Names Ashley King and Christian De Gennaro as Vice Presidents of Sales.
IRIS.TV, a video personalization pioneer that enables publishers and marketers to maximize the value of their video inventory by streaming custom programming to individual users across all devices, today announced it has hired Ashley King and Christian De Gennaro as Vice Presidents of Sales. The newly created positions report to Robert Bardunias, CRO & Co-founder (pictured left) and are based in IRIS.TV’s New York office.
“We are in a period of extraordinary growth and are pleased to add Ashley and Christian to the management of our sales organization,” says Mr. Bardunias. “For a long time we were limited by the number of customers we could service each month. With the addition of Ashley and Christian, we can begin servicing more of the top 100 global publishing brands that are looking for personalization as a way to drive additional consumption and revenue.”
Ms King comes to IRIS.TV from AndBeyond.Media, a marketplace enabling the programmatic buying and selling of native ads where she had been VP Business Development. Before that, she was Partnership Sales & Strategy, Senior Director at Kiosked, an advertising automation platform company. Earlier in her career Mr King held senior level strategy and sales positions with Optimatic Media, Inc., PubMatic, USA TODAY, mSnap/Smart Reply, Frengo Inc (now AdMarvel/Opera) and m-Qube. She is a graduate of the Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire.
“Having serviced major publishing groups and their monetization needs, it is exciting to now bring them supply-side tools like IRIS.TV’s Adaptive Streamtm and Campaign Managertm that delivers in-stream native ad campaigns,” says Ms King.
Mr. De Gennaro was Enterprise Sales Director at Verve Mobile before joining IRIS.TV. Before that, he was VP of Channel Partnerships at Thinknear, a location based mobile ad platform and earlier, was VP of Mobile at Digital First Media, the second largest US newspaper company responsible for national and local mobile revenue generation across 200+ digital properties, as well as the company’s proprietary ad network, AdTaxi. Earlier in his career, Mr. De Gennaro was with American Media, Inc., Qwikker, Consumer Promotions International, Penske Media Corporation and AT&T AdWorks. In addition, he is a founding team member of GPShopper, a leading mobile application developer focused on retail. Mr. De Gennaro holds a BA in International Relations & Economics from Lehigh University.
“IRIS.TV has worked hard to become an industry leader in video personalization for media companies,” says Mr. De Gennaro. “I am looking forward to bringing the company’s Adaptive Streamtm to marketing and e-commerce customers.”
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Hitwise: Hot Holiday Gifts
Hitwise, a division of Connexity, examined the top searches conducted by key audience segments versus the online population during the week ending November 26, 2016 to develop this report on the hot holiday gifts.
“Hatchimals and Fitbit maintained their spots at the top of the Hitwise Hot Products the week ending October 3, which included Cyber Monday,” says John Fetto, senior analyst Hitwise, a division of Connexity. Beyond the top 10, here are some other trends Hitwise saw last week: Elf on the Shelf more than doubled search share as Santa’s rascally watchdog returned to spy on American children. And Apple Watch is gaining interest with a 32% increase in search share week-over-week, though searches are still just a quarter of what Hitwise registered for “Fitbit.”
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Opera Mediaworks Will Rebrand to AdColony: Company unifies branding globally.
Opera Mediaworks announced its new company name will be AdColony with the goal of unifying the brand, performance and publishing business under a single name, while continuing its commitment to quality mobile advertising experiences that deliver outcomes fueled by creativity and data science-driven automation and Artificial Intelligence.
The name change will become effective starting in January 2017, and the company will continue to stay independent, with the corporate entity listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange under Opera ASA.
“I am excited to unify the advertising business under the AdColony brand globally,” said CEO Will Kassoy (pictured left). “We are passionate about brand experiences that evoke emotion and drive real outcomes by combining both creativity with the next generation of advertising technologies like data science-driven automation and Artificial Intelligence. We look forward to building the AdColony brand around this positioning and hope to help elevate the state of mobile advertising.”
AdColony is the mobile video ad platform that the parent company Opera ASA acquired in 2014. After the acquisition, AdColony remained an integral part of and major revenue driver for the Opera Mediaworks business. It felt natural to turn to that established name and to continue the momentum and reputation the brand already had in the mobile ecosystem.
As such, this rebrand will not bring any changes to the company’s customers and partners, and they will simply continue to receive the very best mobile advertising products and services from us. Although the former AdColony business was mainly associated with mobile video advertising, the new AdColony in 2017 will encompass all areas of the former Opera Mediaworks and AdColony business, including rich media/display, streaming video, Instant-Play™ video, and all associated technologies and ad formats across our programmatic marketplace.
The reason for the change is the recent acquisition of Opera ASA’s namesake consumer browser by a Chinese consortium of companies. As part of the deal, acquirers are retaining the “Opera” name and brand, which required a shift away from the name “Opera Mediaworks,” which is a fully-owned subsidiary of Opera ASA.
Second-largest SDK footprint in top 1000 apps
The company will continue to leverage its deep SDK footprint among the world’s best mobile app publishers, second only to Google in the top 1000 apps. These popular apps, which AdColony is lauding as “Today’s Primetime” include fast-risers in the charts like DraftKings, Musical.ly, Shazam, Wattpad, Wishbone, Zynga and many other next-generation media companies. Mobile users are spending more than 37 minutes a day in the top 100 apps, and in other metrics such as session time they often exceed the norm for mobile app use.
Outcomes driven by mobile creativity
AdColony’s market-leading technology unlocks mobile creativity to drive results for brands and publishers. With a dedication to purpose-built, high-performing mobile creative formats, AdColony has been a leader in innovating new, immersive design to leverage the native hardware of mobile devices. The company will be launching new creative formats across video and rich media in 2017 to drive levels of creativity that aren’t possible on other platforms. The company garnered more than 40 awards for its creative work across the globe in 2016 alone.
Data Science and AI: Key initiatives for 2017
The strong SDK footprint also allows AdColony to have access to stronger data signals than other players for better data and targeting, resulting in optimal outcomes for customers. AdColony continues to invest in data science and machine learning, and one of the key initiatives for the company in 2016 has been to unify all of the mobile advertising technology platforms that have been acquired over the years into one powerful and integrated platform.
Over the past several months, the company has invested in state-of-the-art technology and data scientists to work on this unified platform, called Apollo, which will be launched in various phases throughout 2017.
The company plans to launch a new, refreshed website in 2017 which will reflect the new, unified offerings of the global mobile ad platform and the combined businesses as part of the corporate rebranding.
About AdColony
AdColony is one of the largest mobile advertising platforms in the world with a reach of more than 1.4 billion users globally. With a mission to elevate the state of mobile advertising by focusing on the highest quality consumer experiences that deliver outcomes for brands and publishers on today’s primetime apps and sites, AdColony is trusted by Fortune 500 brands and more than 85% of the world’s top grossing mobile publishers. Known for our exclusive Instant-Play™ HD video technology, proprietary rich media formats, our global performance advertising business and programmatic marketplace, and our extensive ad SDK footprint in the Top 1000 apps worldwide, we are passionate about helping brands connect with consumers at scale on the most important screen in their lives. A fully-owned subsidiary of Opera ASA, AdColony is a global organization with over 20 offices worldwide.
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Dstillery and Bombora Partner to Deliver Prospecting Technology and Campaign Analytics for B2B Marketing.
Dstillery, an company focusing on digital intelligence, and Bombora, the leading provider of B2B intent data, announced that the two companies are partnering to bring intelligent full-funnel marketing to B2B advertisers. The partnership pairs Dstillery’s machine-driven audience creation, delivery and optimization with Bombora’s proprietary business intent data to deliver a programmatic solution that lets business marketers find and reach companies that are in active research mode for specific products. Marketers will now be able to leverage the power of programmatic advertising and analytics with a B2B-first approach, and with unrivaled transparency. The solution is also available as a self-service platform.
“As business marketers rush to embrace Account-Based Marketing (ABM), successful B2B media campaigns won’t just reach companies, they will reach only the right target companies — those that are in active research mode,” said Greg Herbst, VP of Programmatic at Bombora (pictured left).
According to Outsell’s Annual Advertising and Marketing Study, U.S. B2B digital marketing will grow to more than $83 billion this year. “This partnership ensures that the same tools used by B2C marketers are available to account-based B2B marketing,” said Dstillery CEO Tom Phillips.
The demand for programmatic media among B2B marketers is growing, and the additional analytics insight delivered by Dstillery and Bombora will help make the case for always-on programs by driving additional business impact at an account level. For advertisers, there is a huge advantage in being able to activate non-intuitive segments based on who is reaching the advertiser’s site and being able to talk to these same audiences across multiple channels. This partnership directly addresses this opportunity.
Bombora tracks the online research behavior of 1.2 million businesses, and is able to identify when a company is ‘surging’ in interest on specific B2B topics. This information is paired with Dstillery’s prospecting data to provide deeper insights into the audiences targeted by B2B marketers. Analytics plays an important role in this partnership, allowing B2B marketers to understand the success of their campaign in terms of the professional attributes of the targeted business users (e.g., company size, employees, industry, job function, seniority).
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New Leaders in Marketing and Product Management at ViralGains
ViralGains, a video-advertising technology solutions company, has appointed two new executives to its expanding leadership team. Julie Ginches — a nationally-renown technology marketing executive — takes the reins as the company’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Glenn Kiladis, a highly experienced executive in mobile, digital, and new media, now leads as Vice President of Product Management and Strategy. Together, they are driving the company forward to meet the rapidly growing demand for its unique video advertising engagement solutions, as it continues to innovate and transform the $22 billion video-ad market.
Ginches (pictured left), who has been called as the “CMO with the Midas touch,” is known for her repeated success in positioning and accelerating the growth of many technology companies including eXelate (acquired by Nielsen), the Rubicon Project (IPO 2014) and DataXu. Widely known and respected for her vision on the future of marketing, she was recently named to VentureBeat’s Top Greater Boston Growth CMOs.
Kiladis, a highly regarded entrepreneurial business innovator, creator and digital strategist, is known for his visionary clarity on the future of people and their interaction with technology and digital experiences. He has driven significant product innovations in adtech, data, apps, digital video, mobile devices, mobile games and more for companies like Fiksu and PCH.
One of Kiladis’s (pictured left) most notable successes was building & leading FreeMyApps, one of the world’s largest app discovery & engagement networks, driving over $75 million in business. He most recently held a leadership position at PCH Media & Entertainment where he focused on strategic mobile app, OTT Video Service and ad-tech platforms. He also serves as an advisor to Aquto, a leader linking mobile data with content producers, and Roostr (recently acquired by Chartboost), a social ad-tech platform.
“From the Super Bowl to the holidays, digital video has proven to be the best storytelling medium ever invented. With the explosion in video advertising on connected devices of all sorts, brands and agencies are driving significant engagement on the part of consumers using the emotional storytelling power of video.” said Viral Gains CEO Tod Loofbourrow. “Both Julie and Glenn bring the right kind of leadership and expertise to help ViralGains extend our product and market leadership and explosive growth”
One of Boston’s most respected new technology firms — and past winner of the region’s prestigious MassChallenge Platinum prize — ViralGains serves the biggest brands in the world with its engagement-driven video platform that excites consumers with relevant brand stories. The platform turns every story into a conversation, and connects qualified prospects with deeply engaging branded content to move them on a journey with a brand that informs them and motivates them to buy.
“In the age of personalization, video technology is getting a big second look,” said Ginches. “Video has long been the preferred medium for brand-based storytelling. But until now, it’s been difficult to use in a personalized way throughout the entire customer journey. By providing a platform that helps brands understand what is working down to individual interactions, we are helping to evolve an ancient art — storytelling — for the modern era.”
“The demand for video-based engagement solutions has grown, and product innovation will serve as a key differentiator,” said Kiladis. “The consumer journey with video will continue to be the focus for ViralGains as we find even greater ways to bring value to agencies and brands that use our platform to achieve true strategic KPIs.”
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Jivox partners with AppNexus to Reinvent Online Ad Retargeting.
Jivox, a data-driven platform for personalized digital advertising, unveiled a strategic partnership and technology integration with AppNexus, the world’s leading programmatic platform for buying and selling digital advertising. The market leaders have joined forces to deliver the industry’s most comprehensive personalized digital advertising solution through the seamless integration of Jivox’s dynamic creative platform with the AppNexus Programmable Bidder.
Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is a simple form of online advertising that allows brands to “follow” consumers after they’ve left a website to encourage their eventual purchase.
“The current generation of retargeting technologies is still very rudimentary,” said Diaz Nesamoney, CEO of Jivox (pictured left). “These products can’t qualitatively or quantitatively assess a user and their likelihood to engage. They also don’t leverage today’s vast amounts of available data and lack the algorithmic sophistication to determine a user’s true interests or intent. Thus these are the products responsible for the all-too-common ads which repeatedly bombard users with offers for products they have already purchased.”
In today’s retargeting ad campaigns, the process of creative optimization and personalization is disjointed from programmatic media buying. Most often, media buying is unaffected by the wealth of data and sophisticated algorithms used to optimize creative, as well as the outcomes and engagement data on users that can help inform brands who to target as well as determine which groups or profiles of users are engaging most with the brand’s advertising and likely to purchase.
With the integration of the AppNexus Programmable Bidder and Jivox dynamic creative platform, however, these functions have been connected. Today, the companies have unveiled a key new feature – Dynamic Audience Scoring™ – that enables this tie-in.
Introducing Dynamic Audience Scoring
With Dynamic Audience Scoring, the Jivox IQ dynamic creative platform instantaneously pinpoints and “scores” – within 10 milliseconds – the most qualified set of users based on a wide variety of data triggers, including activity on the brand’s site, third-party data, contextual signals (e.g., the weather at a user’s location) and their engagement with the brand’s advertising. Jivox applies sophisticated algorithms to score users of this data and can now push those valuations in real time to the AppNexus Programmable Bidder. The combination of Jivox IQ with the AppNexus Programmable Bidder enables media buying to be adjusted in real time to most effectively retarget these individuals with more relevant messaging, products and offers reflective of the kind of engagement they had with the brand.
Dynamic Audience Scoring delivers significantly greater performance and ROI in campaigns by informing the media-bidding algorithms – in real time – of individuals and audiences that are outperforming others, essentially enabling the creation of new high-value audience clusters.
Said Nesamoney, “The integration of Jivox and AppNexus platforms marks the day creative optimization finally meets media optimization. By ensuring the right message always reaches the right audience, this partnership has opened the door for marketers to realize significantly greater value from retargeting and ultimately drive more revenue with significantly less cost from each campaign.”
“The integration of Jivox’s dynamic creative technology into the AppNexus platform offers our joint customers an unprecedented level of precision in finding the best individuals and audiences to reach and delivering a sensibly tailored message to them – by using personalization data and algorithms to automatically adjust bids in real time based on user behavior,” said Alex Chatfield, senior director of client advisory, AppNexus. “We are very excited about what this significant partnership and integration will bring to our clients and the entire market.”
“One of the great challenges of programmatic media buying is determining the value of an impression. Jivox’s new technology is a huge step forward in solving this challenge,” said Tim Bagwell, senior vice president of Xaxis Ad Labs. “At Ad Labs, we use the Jivox platform to develop sophisticated, audience-centric creatives. Those creatives are only effective if they are both relevant to the audience and the audience is engaged. Jivox’s new scoring system will help assure that our creative efforts engage the brand’s most active audiences.”
AppNexus is an internet technology company that enables and optimizes the real-time sale and purchase of digital advertising. Its real-time decisioning platform supports core products that enable publishers to maximize yield; and marketers and agencies to harness data and machine learning to deliver intelligent and customized campaigns. The AppNexus Programmable Bidder enables buyers of digital advertising to upload data directly to the AppNexus open platform, and test and refine algorithmic strategies to optimize campaign results.
The Dynamic Audience Scoring offering is available immediately.
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