eXelate’s data eXcellence awards

This Thursday, eXelate will host its first-ever data eXcellence awards. The awards are the industry’s first and only event celebrating the innovative use of data for smart marketing decisions.

Every second, digital media organizations worldwide leverage online data. Whether it’s for reaching a highly niche audience, understanding the profile of a brand’s consumer, or converting buyers as they traverse the web, data is the catalyst for smarter marketing decisions.

This week, we will highlight one organization from five categories – agencies, publishers, platforms, eXelate partners, and organizations outside of digital advertising – who have implemented our data to achieve dramatic results. We asked the entire industry: 1) what was your business challenge? 2) how did you use data to solve that challenge? and 3) what results were achieved? We look forward to discovering the winners on Thursday night.

To request an invitation to the almost-sold out event, please click here.

Follow all the event excitement on Twitter with #eXelateawards. 

Audience Targeting Budgets to Increase by 38%: eXelate and Digiday’s State of the Industry

In March and April of 2013, we again participated in the State of the Industry Survey in conjunction with Digiday. The survey captured feedback from over 650 digital advertising professionals on the importance of audience targeting in launching high-performance direct response and branding digital campaigns. Respondents represented a wide range of industry stakeholders – advertisers, agencies, ad networks, ad exchanges, and demand side platforms (DSPs). The research was driven by the ongoing need to reduce the complexity of the ad-tech ecosystem by providing clarity to the real demands of advertisers and agencies.

A surprising survey insight included the fact that both advertisers and agencies preferred 3^rd party online data as the #1 source of audience targeting data over 1^st party social media, 1^st party custom, and 3^rd party offline data for both direct response and branding campaigns. This result confirms that the audience targeting ecosystem continues to rely on accurate and actionable 3^rd party data pools to power effective audience targeting campaigns.

Key highlights from the eXelate and Digiday State of the Industry survey include:

• Audience targeting continues to grow with more than 80% of advertisers and 90% of agencies, ad networks, ad exchanges and DSPs utilizing the capability
• Over 60% of advertisers prefer 3^rd party online data for audience targeting, followed by 1^st-party CRM data
• Over 80% of the ecosystem reports that audience targeting is an effective marketing strategy
• 3^rd party online data is the highest ranked data set for both direct response and branding campaigns for both advertisers and agencies, outperforming 1^st-party social, custom and CRM data, as well as 3^rd-party offline data
• More than 69% of respondents report they plan to increase their audience-targeting budgets, with an average budget increase of 38%

“Despite the ongoing debate on 3^rd party cookies and data, it is clear that all parts of the digital advertising ecosystem – advertisers, agencies and platforms, increasingly rely on, and prefer the efficacy and reach of, 3^rd party data,” stated Khurrum Malik, CMO (eXelate).

See the presentation:

Click here to view the full results.

White Paper: 2012 Audience Targeting State of the Industry Survey

In late 2012, eXelate partnered with Digiday and took stock of the audience targeting industry by surveying the data targeting methods, trends, and future plans of agencies, marketers, and ad platforms (ad networks, exchanges, and DSPs). The survey concluded that data usage in online advertising is getting more sophisticated as custom data – first party or performance data modeled to achieve scale – has grown significantly in usage based on the launch of proprietary data modeling solutions. Below are additional key findings:

Click here to download the white paper.

Read more about the State of the Industry findings in Mediapost’s Data and Targeting Insider.

Trusted Data + Custom Audiences = HIGH Performance Marketing

A few weeks ago, we partnered with Digiday to gauge marketer, agency, network, exchange and DSP’s perspective on the current and future role of data in their digital marketing efforts. We wanted to get inside the head of data buyers and understand the challenges and opportunities top of mind as we close out 2012 and move into the new year.

Of over 800 respondents, we found that at least 80% of agencies, networks/exchanges and DSPs, and marketers embrace audience targeting – and each of these companies are employing audience targeting for more than half of their digital campaigns.

What does that tell us? To retain clients and win new business in 2013, agencies will need trusted data and custom audiences to achieve high performance marketing.

Another interesting finding from the survey was what agencies, networks and advertisers thought was the most essential KPI:

SVP of Sales David Fischer presented the three types of data marketers should leverage in order to achieve optimal marketing in 2013 at the Digiday Agency Summit in Florida last week. Click here to see more key takeaways in the full presentation. 

Daylight Savings Time: A New Advertising Opportunity?

Recently, Freakonomics posted a blog about “cyberloafing” – surfing the web instead of doing work – the day after the Daylight Savings Time change, when we “jump ahead” an hour on Sunday and therefore lose an hour of sleep, making most workers a tired lot come Monday morning.

Who wants to work when they’re tired? Apparently, not many people, as the study showed that entertainment-related searches on the Monday after the time change were up 3.1% from the previous Monday and 6.4% higher than the following Monday (based on data gathered in over 200 US metropolitan cities over a 5 year period).

We at eXelate found an 8.5% increase in entertainment searches on Monday the 12th versus the Monday the 5th.

So, should advertisers be taking advantage of all this extra web surfing by consumers?

Maybe not everyone should rush to get more display time on the Monday after Daylight Savings Time, but it is a reminder that marketers should always be thinking outside of the box when it comes to targeting ads. There will always be the holiday shopping rush online and  consumers searching for spring break deals in February, but there are certainly other times during the year that online display ads can get a lot of play. In such a forward-moving digital world, any small event could cause a shift in online behavior. Be sure you’re ready!

How Can Agencies Take Advantage of Online Audience Data?

“The Changing Mission of Marketing Data,” a study by the Winterberry Group, revealed that US marketers will invest as much as $840 million by 2012 on information about digital audiences, transactions and “clickstream” behaviors.

So why are these marketers all turning to data? Data can fuel a marketer’s initiatives in three ways.

1. Discover. Data can help marketers identify new prospects, glean audience insights and observe and plan for trends.

2. Reach. Marketers can use data to target the right consumers, minimize waste and improve user experience.

3. Expand. By leveraging first party data and creating models based on best performers as well as reaching optimal audiences at scale, data can make a marketer’s job much more effective.

VP of Sales Jeff Huter dove into these three data abilities at Digiday Agency in LA last week. Click here to watch the presentation.

To delve deeper into how data can help marketers to discover, reach, and expand, download the presentation.