Ad Tech and Martech
prnewswire | August 21, 2023
Today, Direct Digital Holdings, Inc. a leading advertising and marketing technology platform operating through its companies Colossus Media, LLC ("Colossus SSP"), Huddled Masses LLC ("Huddled Masses") and Orange142, LLC ("Orange142"), announced that it has partnered with Beeswax, a FreeWheel-owned programmatic buying platform.
The ad tech group, which is the ninth Black-owned company on the NASDAQ U.S. stock exchange, will collaborate with Beeswax to expand access to, as well as simplify the path for, buying multicultural – alongside general market – connected TV ad inventory.
The integration works like this: Colossus SSP, a Direct Digital Holdings-owned supply-side platform, works with both multicultural and general market publishers, giving its users access to a more diverse range of CTV ad inventory. As such, marketers and agencies that use FreeWheel's Beeswax to buy CTV ads can now reach a wider array of viewers.
This partnership and its accompanying capabilities are noteworthy as they provide a much needed and timely solve for many of the issues that marketers and agencies are facing today, including a dynamic, complex and fragmented TV ad ecosystem and a consumer landscape that is becoming increasingly more multicultural and diverse.
On a more technical note, this partnership includes integrations on both the buy and sell sides of CTV ad buying. On the buy side, Direct Digital Holdings' two digital marketing companies, Orange142 and Huddled Masses, will work with Beeswax to serve CTV ad placements for marketers. On the sell side, as outlined above, Direct Digital Holdings will work with Beeswax on simplifying and expanding access to both multicultural and general market CTV ad inventory via the group's supply-side platform, Colossus SSP.
"The media and marketing landscape today is very nuanced – from fast-changing innovations to constant industry fragmentation to audiences that are becoming increasingly more diverse and harder to reach, across multiple screens," said Mark Walker, CEO, Direct Digital Holdings. "Taking that into account, we sought a partner who brought a real-time, holistic understanding of the ecosystem, as well as a track record of creating simple and much needed, innovative solutions that remove friction and address and resolve the needs of marketers today. FreeWheel, through its work with Beeswax, exemplifies and understands these key traits and we're excited to be working with them."
"We are humbled and thrilled to team up with a partner who not only understands this space, but also is minority owned," said Tess O'Brien, VP, Head of Revenue, Beeswax. "We look forward to working with Direct Digital Holdings to drive innovation and growth in CTV, while helping to provide Beeswax's clients with an easier pathway to access multicultural content within the programmatic ecosystem."
About Direct Digital Holdings
Direct Digital Holdings (Nasdaq: DRCT), owner of operating companies Colossus SSP, Huddled Masses, and Orange 142, brings state-of-the-art sell- and buy-side advertising platforms together under one umbrella company. Direct Digital Holdings' sell-side platform, Colossus SSP, offers advertisers of all sizes extensive reach within general market and multicultural media properties. The company's subsidiaries Huddled Masses and Orange142 deliver significant ROI for middle market advertisers by providing data-optimized programmatic solutions at scale for businesses in sectors that range from energy to healthcare to travel to financial services. Direct Digital Holdings' sell- and buy-side solutions manage approximately 136,000 clients monthly, generating over 250 billion impressions per month across display, CTV, in-app and other media channels.
About FreeWheel
FreeWheel empowers all segments of The New TV Ecosystem. We are structured to provide the full breadth of solutions the advertising industry needs to achieve their goals. We provide the technology, data enablement and convergent marketplaces required to ensure buyers and sellers can transact across all screens, across all data types, and all sales channels, in order to ensure the ultimate goal – results for marketers. With offices in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, London, Paris, Beijing, and across the globe, FreeWheel, A Comcast Company, stands to advocate for the entire industry through the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video.
About Beeswax
Founded in 2014 by a team of former Google executives, Beeswax is the programmatic buying platform that gives media buyers ownership and total control. Its Bidder-as-a-Service™ platform gives brands, media companies, and advertising technology firms greater control, flexibility, and transparency over their programmatic advertising. Beeswax customers include Uber, DraftKings and Nexstar. Beeswax is headquartered in New York City and has raised $28 million in funding from leading investors including Foundry Group, RRE, You & Mr. Jones, and Amasia.vc.
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Advertiser Platforms
Business Wire | July 28, 2023
LG Ad Solutions, a global leader in connected TV and cross-screen advertising, today released the findings of a new study that found that 84% of Canadian viewers like enhanced ads, and more than half (52%) will engage with them. Enhanced ads are Connected TV ads that include dynamic QR codes, change messaging based on time of day, are location specific or use weather to trigger relevant creative.
The majority of Canadian consumers (69%) are likely to engage with enhanced ads that show real-time sports scores or a countdown to games/events and team match-ups. In fact, enhanced ads with sports-related dynamic content are the most likely to improve brand favorability and purchase intent, with one in three viewers reporting a positive impact.
LG Ad Solutions surveyed more than 650 Canadian consumers who owned a connected TV in February 2023 to understand the value of enhanced ads and viewer preferences and attitudes towards them. The study, titled “Enhanced Ads: The Actionable Format,” also found:
One in two viewers are likely to engage with weather-triggered enhanced ads, and 69% like the idea of ads that factor in weather.
More than three-quarters (78%) of viewers like the idea of ads that provide closest store locations. Further, one in three viewers is likely to be favorable towards local extension enhanced ads.
Enhanced ads with QR codes had the lowest level of engagement at 43%, noting that QR codes lacking a clear call-to-action suffer in engagement. However, when done effectively, one in three viewers are likely to be favorable towards QR-enhanced ads and one in three are likely to purchase brands that use QR-enhanced ads.
Interactive ads are popular with viewers, as 62% prefer interactive ads to static or regular video ads. Contextual ads were also popular with viewers, as 77% liked ads that take into consideration the context in which the ad is being viewed.
"The results of this study reinforce the desire among consumers to have a more personalized advertising experience, receiving information that is timely and relevant to them,” said Jason Randall, Country Manager, Vice President of Sales, Canada, LG Ad Solutions. “Unlike traditional television, Connected TV provides brands a way to give viewers the experience they’re looking for and help drive better brand engagement through more interactive and compelling advertising content.”
For more information on LG Ad Solutions and to download the full study, please visit https://lgads.tv/resource/canada-enhanced-ads-study/
About LG Ad Solutions
LG Ad Solutions is a global leader in connected TV and cross-screen advertising, helping brands find hard-to-get unduplicated reach at optimal frequency across the fragmented streaming TV landscape. We bring together LG’s years of experience in delivering world-class smart TVs to consumers worldwide with big TV audience data and Video AI designed to connect brands with audiences across all screens.
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Brand Marketing
globenewswire | August 17, 2023
AUDIENCEX, the AI-enabled digital advertising partner built to optimize real-time campaign performance for brands and agencies, today announced a strategic partnership with Yobi, an AI-focused predictive data platform offering customized solutions for businesses to maximize marketing performance and shopper intelligence.
The partnership between AUDIENCEX and Yobi brings deeper predictive capabilities to AUDIENCEX Intelligence (AXi), a suite of AI-powered, privacy-safe data science tools that empower businesses to propel revenue growth while prioritizing customer experience and privacy. Utilizing Yobi's data, which captures critical behavioral signals without compromising personal information, independent agencies and challenger brands now have the ability to gain unrivaled performance from predictive audience modeling without prohibitive barriers to entry.
This strategic partnership combines AUDIENCEX’s digital marketing expertise and omnichannel media access with Yobi’s predictive modeling and fully consented data to enable businesses to uniquely optimize campaign performance, maximize return on ad spend (ROAS) and customer lifetime value, and gain a competitive advantage. In-market campaign results with several mid-market brands have demonstrated outstanding results when utilizing these capabilities through AXi. On average, these campaigns have seen significant reductions in CPA, with a decrease of approximately 65%. Simultaneously, CTRs have seen an impressive surge, with an increase of over 1460%. These enhancements translate into a substantial increase in ROI for AUDIENCEX clients and a more cost-effective allocation of their advertising budget.
"This partnership with Yobi will unlock the potential of AI-enabled predictive modeling for independent agencies and challenger brands," said Garrett MacDonald, CCO of AUDIENCEX. "We are excited to be working with Yobi in creating a powerful new solution that will help companies take customer experience and performance to the next level. This new approach will enable companies to utilize privacy-preserving predictive signals to enhance engagement and ensure relevance with their audiences. This groundbreaking collaboration will further empower our clients to stay ahead of the curve, power their campaigns with data-driven insights, understand their target audiences better, and achieve higher campaign effectiveness in today's fiercely competitive environment.”
“By activating ML generated predictive insights and optimizations, companies can unlock unprecedented demand generation and growth at a fraction of the cost,” noted Max Snow, CEO of Yobi, “We are proud to collaborate with AUDIENCEX to help businesses harness the power of predictive data science with complete consumer privacy.”
About AUDIENCEX
AUDIENCEX is an AI-enabled, performance-first programmatic advertising partner built to deliver results for challenger brands and independent agencies. Their expert teams deploy holistic strategies throughout the digital ecosystem, engaging the right audiences with predictive analytics, custom algorithms and automated optimization to drive scalable performance throughout the purchase funnel, across channels and devices. Named one of the fastest-growing companies in America by Deloitte, Inc., The Financial Times and the Los Angeles Business Journal, AUDIENCEX is headquartered in Los Angeles and operates remotely throughout North America, including New York and Dallas.
About Yobi
Yobi is a predictive ML company that has established the largest, consented US dataset to democratize the data capabilities of Big Tech. With a privacy-centric approach, Yobi's technology generates actionable shopper predictions without compromising personal information. Yobi helps enterprises maximize marketing effectiveness and machine learning model performance. The company was founded in 2019 by Max Snow, Bill Wise (CEO, Mediaocean), and Tom Griffiths (Director of the Computational Cognitive Science Lab at Princeton University).
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