Making Mobile Actionable with eXelate and Drawbridge

The digital world continues to get increasingly complex as consumers continue to utilize different platforms (PC, smartphone, tablet) throughout their digital day. Our latest white paper, The Smart Data Manifesto, laid out how consumers continue to embrace a digital lifestyle by consuming media across PC and mobile devices. One of the key tenants of smart data is that it must be actionable – data that can drive scalable action in a way that maximizes a business objective.

Our recent State of the Industry Survey on audience targeting also provided evidence of the growing importance of mobile platforms as a way to target audiences. The research showed that although 80%+ of the digital advertising ecosystem (advertisers, agencies, platforms) prefer to use the PC platform for audience targeting, mobile platforms are now also used almost 60% of the time – a trend that will continue to grow.

The skyrocketing importance of mobile is undeniable and that is why our partnership announcement with Drawbridge is so exciting. eXelate’s partnership with Drawbridge will make eXelate’s smart data actionable to over 600M mobile devices while providing Drawbridge’s innovative technology the ability to expand their segment availability from 800 to over 8000 segments.

We believe that the digital marketing ecosystem will continue to look for companies that are working together to provide multi-platform solutions – those that will go across PC and mobile platforms. Our partnership with Drawbridge is an example of how eXelate’s smart data and analytics combined with Drawbridge’s proprietary technology will make digital media more relevant for consumers and effective for marketers.

We’re looking forward to continuing to innovate in a multi-platform world – mobile, here we come.

eXelate and Bizo Join Data Forces to Create ProSumer Segments

eXelate is excited to announce 10 new targetable segments created by combining eXelate’s most popular premium interest and intent segments and Bizo’s powerful business demographic data (e.g. job function, seniority, industry, company size) on over 85% of the US business population. The newly formed segments, branded Bizo ProSumer Segments, offer a more specific way to target audiences who are likely to buy specific products.

Bizo sources its data from a network of over 4,200 publishers and through various means including registration data, offline business databases, encrypted email addresses, vertical websites and IP data. eXelate’s premium data spans the entire purchase funnel, reaching hundreds of millions of online users worldwide in over 900 demographic, behavioral and purchase intent categories.

“eXelate enables marketers to reach potential customers with highly relevant messages through accurate, actionable and agile 3rd party data. The combination of Bizo’s B2B data and eXelate’s in-market data creates unique, targetable audiences at specific financial levels that can afford luxury items,” says Nancy Neumann, VP of Client Services at eXelate.

“Given the high relative education and affluence level of business professional audiences, Bizo’s audience segments represent some of the highest value consumer segments online,” says Bizo’s VP of Channel Operations Patrick O’Brien.  “Now, by combining our segments with eXelate’s high quality in-market data, we can jointly help marketers reach the audiences they care about most with an even greater level of precision.”

Contact eXelate now to start targeting these segments.

Jumptap and eXelate Join Forces to Bring Online Data into Mobile and Across Screens

As Seen On: Jumptap.com

We’re happy to announce a new partnership with eXelate, the leading smart data and analytics engine, to help advertisers deliver highly-targeted mobile ad campaigns by bringing PC-based online consumer behavioral and purchase data into the mobile realm and reach audiences across screens.

In an increasingly multi-screen world, it’s critical for advertisers to think about mobile audience behavior holistically; true intent deciphered through mobile, online and offline behavior. Jumptap is expanding itsAudience+ Targeting Platform by leveraging eXelate’s data and insights on online purchase intent, household demographics and behavioral propensities across 500M online consumers worldwide. As a result, advertisers will be able to target and reach mobile audiences at key points within the decision making and purchase process.

To link to eXelate’s data, the company drops Jumptap pixels within its publisher network. When eXelate receives a request from a user’s device, it sends Jumptap an eXelate user ID, along with an IP address. Once the sync is made, the online data is available to Jumptap whenever it ‘sees’ the user in its network.

“As the world’s content consumption becomes more fragmented across screens, a significant opportunity exists to unite audience behavior for more relevant, holistic messaging,” said Adam Soroca, Chief Product Officer at Jumptap. “eXelate is well-known for its expansive data in the online realm, and we’re honored to be their first mobile partner. This partnership supports Jumptap’s mission in driving a unified audience across screens.”

“Our partnership with Jumptap supports eXelate’s commitment to helping marketers identify and reach their audiences through a data-driven approach,” said Nancy Neumann, VP of Platform Sales, eXelate. “The mobile and online industries are beginning to converge, and we’re thrilled to be working with Jumptap at this exciting time.”

Hitting the Target: Marketing on Phones and Tablets

In case you missed it, the Wall Street Journal released an article on Thursday full of interesting stats about the mobile ad market.  Among the numbers, the WSJ indicates that the mobile ad market is now at $2.6B, but only 20% of that is display. And yesterday’s Ad Age covers the difficulty publishers are having monetizing traffic for more than a $0.75 CPM.

These data points indicate significant opportunity for mobile advertising. Although we aren’t ready to proclaim the often repeated cliché that next year is the year of mobile, we do see some real momentum from marketers and advertisers.

At eXelate, we believe it’s important for the digital ecosystem to address certain key issues in order to more effectively leverage mobile as a platform for advertising. Specifically, we are leading the way in three areas:

• Going beyond local. Mobile is rightfully known as a great domain for geo-based targeting. But both DR and brand advertisers are demanding more robust targeting capabilities for tablets and phones, with behavioral data and richer consumer profiles at the top of their wish lists.
• Improving technical solutions for ad targeting. Whether we’re talking mobile web or mobile apps, display or video, each device has unique specifications to contend with. These differences provide technical hurdles for cross-publisher tracking and behavioral targeting as a whole. We expect to lead the industry to develop best practices to address these issues.
• Providing leadership on regulatory issues. The Federal Trade Commission is happy to let the industry take the lead in establishing clear, consumer-friendly mobile privacy practices, but that means we must lead. The industry must come together to establish best practices around consumer notice and choice.

We are excited to lead the way in addressing these challenges. It may not be the year of mobile, but it’s certainly time for mobile to take its proper share of three-screen marketer media spend.

Nielsen Launches TV Targeting Data: eXelate Powers Changing Channels to Reach Consumers

Yesterday Nielsen announced the launch of their new TV data product for online advertisers, and we here at eXelate couldn’t be more excited. Beyond the fact that it is the first time that a company with the prestige of Nielsen has endeavored to connect TV viewing behaviors with online purchase activity, it also marks another significant step toward a “fully connected” consumer across multiple media.

Advertisers who have grown to trust Nielsen’s expertise in not just telling them “who” and “how many” are watching but also “why” can now take that knowledge and make it actionable in a whole new media for the first time. Imagine being able to deliver a consistent message from screen to screen – eliminating consumer confusion, mixed-messages and delivery hiccups. We are just about there.

The way most advertisers look to create multi-platform awareness between TV and online activity is still disjointed due to both the lack of consistent data and the channels by which to make that data actionable. Nielsen’s launch of TV data through the eXelate platform tackles both of those challenges – benefiting brands and, yes, consumers. Why consumers? Because more relevant advertising can also mean less advertising…something that all of us who have skipped a commercial or two on our DVR (gasp!) will think is a welcome development.

Just as there was a “golden age” of TV, I believe we are entering the “golden age of consumer-brand interaction,” powered by data, and delivering benefits for all of the players involved. Uncle Miltie never had it so good!

Q&A with New eXelate Partner TruSignal

eXelate announced last week that we partnered with TruSignal in our continued effort to bring high-quality audience targeting to marketers. TruSignal’s suite of TruAudience℠ High Value Consumer segments are now publicly available to all of our integrated media platforms. In an effort to introduce you to our latest partner, we had a few questions  for TruSignal’s CRO Jeremy Longinotti.

Take a look and let us know what value you think this partnership will bring to the digital marketing world!

What does this partnership with eXelate mean for TruSignal?

We’ve been really happy with the team at eXelate and their expertise in the digital ad tech ecosystem. As the relationship grows, we are hoping to see an increase in use of and interest in our TruAudience Syndicated Segments. Because of our unique approach, our data segments can be used in both branding and direct marketing campaigns and eXelate will continue to educate the market on the best ways to use data in online targeting campaigns. We also look forward to more innovation from eXelate as they continue to build out their platforms and provide more ways for buyers and sellers to connect.

TruSignal has a unique approach to building audiences, can you explain that?

TruSignal’s approach takes first party customer data and combines it with our own massive database of offline consumer-profile data. With predictive modeling, we find the right combinations of data attributes that generate the most predictive signal for our syndicated segments.  What’s unique about this?  It all happens in an offline manner, distilling all of the data into a single, segmented audience formula. We’re not talking inferred or clickstream data, we’re using real life data—historical performance and consumer profile data from 40 data sources. By going back to the raw offline data, we can access a huge set of over 10,000 attributes, about 80% of which have not been onboarded into the online ecosystem. The result is an audience formula that finds “lookalike” prospects with the highest propensity for a product or service, specific to each of our nine TruAudience syndicated segments. The following TruAudience syndicated data segments are now available through eXelate:

• Auto Insurance Online Propensity
• Term Life Insurance Propensity
• Online Higher Education Propensity
• Mortgage Refinance Propensity
• Political Donor Propensity (Democrat & Republican)
• Political Affiliation
• Estimated Financial Health
• Estimated Household Income
• Underbanked Consumers

Given the importance of your third party data in the process, can you tell us a little more about the data you use to build your vertical specific syndicated audiences?

TruSignal licenses and curates consumer profile data on almost every U.S. household and adult from over 40 high-quality, stable and verified data sources. What this means is that we have real life data such as summarized financial information, census data, public records, lifestyles, catalog purchase activity, hobbies/interests and demographics. From this data, we access over 10,000 predictive attributes which are used in combination with actual customer or industry-specific performance data. Another great part about the data is that we do all the heavy lifting for you. We not only use a proven regression technique that determines which data attributes are the right ones for the segments, but our data team is consistently testing each of our data sources to ensure our data is the most accurate, comprehensive, reliable and predictive data available.

For more information on our partnership with TruSignal, click here.

Modeling eXposed: Digital Media Modeling Summit 2012

In its inaugural year, eXelate’s modeling and analytics event, Modeling eXposed, will address how innovations in data modeling can be implemented into your digital marketing programs for more effective targeting, campaign management, business intelligence, and analytics.  The purpose of the event is to bring industry peers together to share knowledge and exchange ideas for improving advertising performance through flexible modeling solutions.

Through a series of presentations and discussions, eXelate and guest speakers will address innovations in modeling through case studies and interactive panel discussion, providing attendees with a roadmap of how modeling can be successfully implemented into their marketing strategies. Topics include but are not limited to:

• Data analytics for improved marketing decisions
• Custom audiences for cross-channel media optimization
• Adaptive audience intelligence methodology
• Modeling as a direct response and customer relationship strategy

Participation in Modeling eXposed is complimentary, by invitation only. Request an invitation here.

Date: Wednesday, June 20

Time: 1-6pm EST

Venue: The Standard Hotel

848 Washington Street

New York, NY 10014

Using the maX Index to find Spring Break Travel Trends

Marketers seeking to understand consumer demographics, interests, intent or branded segments according to user geography are now able to do so with eXelate’s maX Index, our market-level insights on segments that index high or low for any DMA or state. Based on eXelate’s unparalleled reach as well as our premium and syndicated audience segments, we are able to pull data from millions of unique user IDs and billions of transactions to tell if a specific geographic area is more or less likely to search or click.

For April, we pulled the top Spring Break Travel Trends. Some interesting finds:

• People in the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale area are 4.27 times more interested in travel to Spain compared to others in the US
• People in Manhattan are 4.28 times more interested in travel to the Netherlands than others in the US
• People in Austin, TX are 2.61 times more interested in travel to Germany

Click here to download.

Were you surprised at the places these DMAs are likely to travel to? Read the full story and give your two cents at MediaPost.

Combining Data to Create Powerful Modeling

The Netflix Tech Blog recently posted an entry that discusses their recommendation algorithms and outlined the Netflix Prize, a machine learning and data mining competition to predict movie ratings. The 2009 winner of the contest improved Netflix’s ratings prediction system by more than 10% with a new algorithm. For a company owing 75% of viewership to recommendations, this would seem to be a huge step for Netflix. They didn’t adopt the winner of the contest, however – and the reasoning is perfectly logical.

The winning algorithm focused mainly on predicting ratings. Ratings are an important source of data for Netflix, but new types of analyses & inputs beyond ratings alone have emerged, all of which can help Netflix create even better recommendations. These include context, movie title popularity, novelty, diversity and freshness.

If you’ve been reading this blog or our Twitter handle for the last 2 months, then you are probably familiar with maX™ – or Modeled Audience eXtension, our custom modeling product that helps advertisers build a scaled audience with broad reach that is 3-5x more likely to respond to their campaigns.

We make it work by focusing on all the data – the advertiser’s first party data as well our eXelate premium marketplace data. And we look at as many data points as possible, including demographic, lifestyle, intent, behavior, brand affinity information and other proprietary data sets many advertisers may not have access to. We’ve learned, as Netflix seems to have, that combining multiple forms of data can prove to be the most powerful way to reach an audience. If you were Netflix, what would you have done?

Ad Age Digital: Connecting Madison Avenue with Silicon Valley

eXelate is proud to be a sponsor of the 2012 Ad Age Digital Conference, taking place over the next two days at the Metropolitan Pavilion in the Chelsea neighborhood of NYC. Ad Age always puts on a good conference, and after already hearing from the CEO of Hulu and Gap’s CMO, this one is quickly proving to be a premiere event in the digital marketing space. Going on year 6 of holding the Digital conference, Ad Age boasts over 700 high-level attendees and speakers as well as jam-packed workshops and plenty of networking opportunities.

In her opening remarks, Ad Age Editor Abbey Klaassen pointed out that in the past, the conference centered around how marketers reacted to the digital space. These days, it’s about how marketers are engaging with the digital space – and that’s what we’re all about. We will be here all day to answer any and all questions. Come by to talk to one of our sales or marketing team members and learn how we’re helping digital marketers make the best advertising decisions with our premium, syndicated, and maX modeled data sets.

Also, be sure to follow the conversation on twitter – look for #aadigital.