In February 2011, Google’s DoubleClick ad exchange did a Real-Time Display Advertising  State of the Industry Survey with Digiday, which found that advertisers and agencies are reporting that they will spend more on digital advertising in 2011 because of the benefits of real-time bid (RTB) inventory acquisition technologies.  To help buyers achieve the benefits they expect from RTB, Google published a new whitepaper that shares their view of real-time bidding for online display advertising.  Based on research and primary interviews with Google’s RTB experts across our product, sales and services organizations, this survey provides a clear definition of what real-time bidding is and how buyers can get involved with it.  Readers will find LucidMedia identified by Google at the forefront of this new technology in the free whitepaper here (PDF).

After almost a year of effort, Epic completes final phase of migrating company to new multichannel ad-serving Platform, and decommissions its legacy ad server.

Epic Marketplace (www.epicmarketplace.com), one of the world’s leading integrated multichannel digital marketing solutions providers leveraging the social media, mobile, display, and video channels, announced today the completion of its migration to a comprehensive new cross-channel ad serving Platform. The new Platform provides for a seamless integration between all of Epic Marketplace’s distribution channels, and the ability to acquire inventory on either a real-time bidding (RTB) or direct basis, all with a universal frequency cap. An enhanced attribution analytics engine is a key component of the new Platform.

The new Platform represents a substantial transformation of the Epic Marketplace ad serving paradigm. Among the changes, the company has decommissioned its segment verification program, which was a component of its legacy ad server. The new Platform was architected and built with an enhanced suite of consumer privacy protections, positioning the company to further enhance its world-class status as a leader in digital marketing consumer protection best practices.

The new Epic Marketplace Platform is driven by a proprietary Optimization Engine (OE) that is built around advanced polynomial statistical analysis. The OE, as the “brain” of the new platform, is data-type agnostic and analyzes data input on a non-PII basis from multiple sources – e.g., social media data, cookie data, mobile data – and then renders targeting solutions applicable across all of Epic’s distribution channels. Among the critical targeting solution sets are strong core competencies in audience aggregation, keyword bidding and contextual analytics, the latter via a real time semantic contextual engine.

“This new Platform is a culmination of a vision we set forth several years ago,” said Don Mathis, President and CEO of Epic Marketplace. “With its launch, we are fully positioned for the next five years of growth in our sector – which will be all about the integrated campaign and the opportunity to provide our clients with cross-channel digital marketing solutions, not just a stand-alone display media buy or a social fan campaign, for example. With the new Platform, we can help clients achieve their marketing objectives across the critical digital traffic channels and throughout the marketing funnel.”
Epic Marketplace has strongly leveraged its deep partnership with LucidMedia in the development of certain components of the new Platform’s infrastructure. In particular, the new Platform utilizes key components of LucidMedia’s comprehensive demand-side, real-time bidding (RTB) management platform and its patented semantic contextual targeting engine as integral pieces of the infrastructure of the new Platform.

Through the new Platform, Epic Marketplace is confident that it will provide even greater value for its clients. The company’s enhanced capabilities will allow it to scale campaigns with a universal frequency cap and in a fully integrated approach across social, mobile, display and video, across its own network of premium inventory, and across major exchanges and supply-side platforms such as AdMeld, PubMatic and Rubicon.

“We’re very pleased that after such a long process, this important work for Epic Marketplace has been completed so effectively – and on-time,” said Mathis. “Our new Platform solidifies our market leadership position and allows us to leverage data and enhanced statistical targeting across all critical digital marketing channels. Moreover, the new Platform has been built with an enhanced suite of consumer privacy protections, further ensuring our compliance leadership position as well.”

For more information on Epic Marketplace, please log onto http://www.epicmarketplace.com.

Working with data partner eXelate, LucidMedia has been included in their Premier Media Partnership (PMP) program, making it easier for media buyers to purchase data along with their ad inventory in the LucidMedia demand-side platform. Our full on-platform data integration allows for our reporting, insights, brand safety and reach to be applied to the data eXelate provides through the platform.

You can get the full story from AdWeek.

Epic Media Group has just announced a strategic partnership with LucidMedia.  You find all the details in the original Business Wire press release. Epic Media Group, including Traffic Marketplace which is the #17 largest ad focused property as ranked by comScore with 141M unique US users, will now utilize LucidMedia’s comprehensive real time bidding (RTB) capabilities and enhanced contextual targeting technology. The new partnership allows Epic to better position itself as the market leader in advanced digital marketing services.  It will help Epic’s advertisers and agencies reach consumers across the many pools of real-time media available today including their own premium inventory.

LucidMedia President and CEO Ajay Sravanapudi said, “After extensive testing on both sides, Epic has recognized that the depth and breadth of LucidMedia’s platform capabilities can significantly advance their ability to get maximum value for their clients. Epic has confirmed that our platform will not only complement but also enhance its existing platform. We have spent a decade building and fine-tuning our demand-side platform for scalable ad operations and we have been working closely with Epic to integrate our capabilities in a way that will give their clients the flexibility and access they need to succeed online.”

LucidMedia announced two strategic personnel milestones last week which will take the company to the next level as a media platform. We hired Natalie Mazer as Vice President of Optimization to maximize the performance of the LucidMedia demand-side platform. We also announced that Paul Rostkowski, formerly Vice President of Sales, has been promoted to Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).

We sat down with them to discuss the future of both LucidMedia and the digital advertising landscape.

LucidMedia: What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the interactive advertising industry?

Natalie:  The fragmentation of audience across media has been challenging for agencies and their clients. Where once direct-from-publisher inventory was sufficient to achieve performance, web audiences have become increasingly diffuse, particularly with the advent of mobile and video advertising. It takes sophisticated technology to be able to reach the right users at the right time and at the right price.

Paul:  The privacy debate continues to be a hot issue for the digital advertising industry.  Media companies need to support our industry groups in their efforts to educate the public. LucidMedia was one of the first DSPs to offer a real-time network opt-out on our homepage.  We work closely with the industry groups like IAB, NAI and Privacy Choice to ensure we are employing the industry’s best practices when it comes to privacy.

LM:  What problem is LucidMedia solving today with its online advertising management platform?

Natalie:  In a competitive economic climate, advertisers are looking to improve efficiency. With universal frequency capping and a powerful optimization engine, the LucidMedia platform produces goal-driven results within budget.

Paul:  Brand safety is a major concern for brand advertisers. Agencies and advertisers come to us for protection that preemptively identifies unsafe impressions and ensures that ads appear only on pages with appropriate content.

LM: You’ve both been involved in start-ups for years. What is your number one tip for entrepreneurs in the technology sector?

Natalie:  Hire a team with complementary skills and the right attitude. It may be tempting to hire all super-stars, but that strategy is expensive and doesn’t guarantee the creation of a functional corporate culture.

Paul:  Focus on getting your product to market and getting revenue in the door when you’re first starting.  The more you have coming in, the better off you’ll be in the long-run.

LM:  Please discuss the recent partnerships LucidMedia has formed and what impact that has had on the business.

Natalie: Getting all the major data providers on-platform has been a huge step for LucidMedia. Our engineering team has been focused on these efforts for some time and now that’s up and running, the potential is enormous.

Paul:  On-platform video and mobile buying is the next frontier for display advertising.  It has been a real growth area for us and our partners, particularly [mobile advertising network] MobClix and [rich media pioneer] Oggi Finogi.

LM:  What is next in advertising business management? How do you see this evolving in the next two to three years?

Paul:  As the big exchanges and agency holding companies choose their partners, there will be another technical revolution. Right now everyone is focused on building out platforms, but soon the push will shift to integrating those solutions. That’s where a company like LucidMedia, with the combined expertise of eight technology-side experts, will excel.

Natalie:  I agree with Paul. White label solutions are becoming the norm. Platforms that exist with purchased technology, but that don’t have the back-end engineering support will experience difficulties when it comes to complex integrations.

LM:  What major trends do you see affecting LucidMedia the most recently?

Paul:  Agency trading desks have been adopting technology like crazy, trying to keep up with DSPs and all the data providers rolling out user interfaces. In some cases, it may be easier to acquire than to build.

Natalie:  There continues to be confusion surrounding RTB and what it means for online advertising.  Everyone bids in real-time now; it’s how the platform decides what to bid that’s the real differentiator.

Protecting the privacy of online users when it comes to digital advertising is fast becoming the hot topic.  Digital advertising associations, privacy watchdog organizations, and even Capitol Hill are all wading deeply into the privacy waters.  With all this change going on around us it is a good time to reiterate LucidMedia’s strong stance on protecting the privacy of online users who receive advertisements through our digital ad management platform.

Early last year the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began issuing revised guidelines for behavioral advertising.  And the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) recently launched a new program that calls for labeling online ads that their members serve based on the habits of online consumers.  You can check out AboutAds.info for more information on the new labeling guidelines.  Our Congress has even been exploring online privacy legislation that would set new boundaries for the collection of personal data by online advertisers.

Amidst all this change and heightened awareness, LucidMedia continues to take privacy seriously.  In fact, we were one of the very first demand-side platforms (DSP) to offer a real-time network opt-out on our homepage.  We are working with all of the leading privacy authorities to ensure we are employing the industry’s best practices when it comes to privacy.

When it comes to privacy, LucidMedia does not use any personally identifiable information (PII) and we do not work with partners who do employ PII.  We do not track or target specific or individual users online nor do we acquire data from providers who do track specific or individual users online.  We do not employ regenerating or FLASH tracking cookies.  Any cookie we do place is set to expire at no more than 90 days.  We use anonymous and general demographic data only, acquired through 3rd party providers or interpreted by our patented contextual engine, to improve the overall effectiveness of our campaigns.

You will find our corporate privacy policies available online at lucidmedia.com/legal.

Brand safety is a major concern for advertisers and agencies. When you pair our contextualization engine with real-time bidding, you get a brand-safe environment for your display advertising.

But what happens when you throw images or video into the mix?

LucidMedia has partnered with Milabra to  contextualize visual data to improve brand safety and increase audience engagement through serving more relevant ads.

Sam Cox, CEO of Milabra had this to say about the pact:

“We are excited to work with LucidMedia to enable its advertisers to move beyond text and semantic content categorization into visual verification and optimization by understanding the visual context environment of their ads on a page. Our visual recognition capabilities fit in ideally with LucidMedia’s digital media platform and DSP to provide advertisers and agencies a comprehensive base of visual data and brand-safe media that now extends into images and visual elements.”

And Ajay Sravanapudi, Founder and CEO of LucidMedia said this:

“Adding Milabra’s visual intelligence data and brand safety technology to our platform is another important step in LucidMedia’s ongoing mission to provide the online advertising industry’s most comprehensive and transparent targeting capabilities for advertisers and agencies. This important new offering combines effectively with our recently announced preemptive brand safety capabilities as well as the breadth of targeting data and proprietary technology we offer.”

We’re looking forward to working together to provide the most brand-safe campaigns in the industry.

Nearly every online marketer is concerned with transparency and brand safety.  These seem to be the biggest roadblocks to brands embracing display.  A quick search on AdExchanger reveals a dozen articles on both subjects in the last few months.  We’ve all talked about it yet there still seems to be more misconceptions than fact surrounding what is possible when it comes to real brand safety.

In April of 2010 Winterberry Group LLC reported that “transparency and brand safety have conspired to inhibit billions in potential online display ad spending.”  Brand safety continues to undermine a broad investment in display advertising by brand advertisers despite the obvious efficiencies being delivered by today’s ad networks.  This is because truly preemptive brand safety is difficult so most have settled for simple post impression verification and are therefore not getting a truly brand safe environment for their message.  But the DSP trend changes all that.

With the advent of contextual display advertising, a host of new advertising opportunities opened up for marketers across every industry.  Whether contextualization is done at the site level (i.e. ESPN.com is about sports) or at the page level (i.e. automotive content on CNN.com), the ability to target ads around content—in addition to demographic and behavioral profiles—is pretty powerful stuff.  But with these big opportunities comes an equal amount of risk.  Imagine an automotive ad next to a news story about a horrific car crash or an ad for a vacation package next to tsunami news coverage of the same destination.  We see it in contextual search as well as display.  It’s enough to make any brand marketer anxious about any sort of online advertising.

The good news is that advances in targeting technologies and demand-side platforms (DSP) with real-time bidding (RTB) are creating truly brand safe environments for brand advertiser.  But like transparency, everyone defines brand safety differently.  There is one feature that separates effective brand safety from all the other forms of impression analysis and delivery verification out there today.  It‘s preemptive brand safety.  Is your trusted flavor of brand safety truly preemptive?  Or is the brand safety you rely on from your DSP really just post impression analysis disguised as safe filtering?  This is another great myth in our industry often perpetuated on purpose only because preemptive is difficult to pull off.

Real brand safety, meaning a demonstrably safe environment for brand advertisers to promote their message online, comes from sanitizing the ad space before the ad is served.  Of course pre-impression analysis for relevance, performance and safety is very difficult to do so it’s the least prevalent form out there.  Evaluating billions of impressions a day for relevance takes a robust platform and deep integration with all of the real-time bid aggregation points.  But it pays huge dividends in both safety and efficiency by guaranteeing quality impressions and eliminating the need for pass-backs.  With truly preemptive brand safety you only buy what is safe with no waste in the equation.

But when pages are not categorized for meaning in advance, ads get served next to inappropriate content and the advertiser simply gets a report indicating that it has happened again.  That isn’t preemptive brand safety, that’s reactive reporting.  It’s the equivalent of closing the gate after the cows get out (and wander down the middle of the highway disrupting traffic and endangering your brand investment).

Everyone knew it would take third-party providers to deliver real brand safety.  Back in March, Jonathan Margulies at Winterberry Group acknowledged as much right here on AdExchanger.  It isn’t in the publisher’s best interest to exclude their own content from advertising—for a publisher the more bidders the better.  The interest in such technology falls on the demand side but most advertisers lack the engineering infrastructure to build such a solution.  In the display advertising landscape, providing preemptive brand safety is the responsibility of the demand-side platforms.  Various platforms provide this ability in varying degrees – from zero to truly preemptive.  Ask the question.  Make sure you are getting the truly preemptive kind that boosts efficiency and return on spend.

Reprinted from AdExchnager.com Data-Driven Thinking column, a media community blog containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Follow LucidMedia on Twitter @lucidmediaVIP and follow AdExchanger.com @adexchanger.com.

It seems like “brand safety” is getting to be like “transparency” in our industry; everyone offers it in one form or another but like transparency, brand safety means different things to different people.  And just like transparency, everyone defines brand safety differently.  There is one thing that separates effective brand safety from all the other forms of impression analysis and delivery verification out there today.  Preemptive.  Is your flavor of brand safety truly preemptive?  Or is the brand safety you are getting from your demand-side platform (DSP) provider post impression analysis?  Is it reactive?  This is another of the industry myths perpetuated by other solutions rushed to market.  Real brand safety, meaning a demonstrably safe environment for a brand advertiser to promote their message online, comes from truly preemptive brand safe filtering.  But in practice pre-impression analysis for applicability and safety is very difficult to do.  Evaluating a billion impressions a day for applicability takes a robust platform and intelligent integration with real-time sources.  But it pays huge dividends in efficiency.  With truly preemptive brand safety the pass back is meaningless.  With truly preemptive brand safety you only buy what is safe and there is no waste.  No wasted targeting, optimization, time, or ad spend.  Make sure your brand safety is preemptive before you put your message out there.