As digital ad spending continues to climb, a growing number of agencies are working feverishly to build their digital capacity. For many smaller shops, growing internal capacity simply isn’t feasible — or at least not economical.
Digital media planning and buying platform provider TRAFFIQ today announced it has been selected as a candidate for Red Herring's 2011 Top 100 Global award, a prestigious recognition honoring the year's most audacious and far reaching private technology companies and entrepreneurs from across the globe.
The degree of control, relevance and accountability that can be achieved through search marketing simply can't be matched with any other online or offline campaign. However, with great performance comes great unpredictability as marketers face difficulty in forecasting appropriate search marketing budgets.
The ad tech space is one of the most confusing industries around. To get some insight, we recently spoke with Traffiq CEO Nick Pahade.
Companies that track consumers' behavior across the web without their consent, and without providing them any recognizable value, should stop. I'll argue that virtually no company that tracks consumer behavior across multiple sites actually provides consumers with recognizable value.
TRAFFIQ Ranks #37 on the Tech 200 List. Lead411 is an information services company that provides business people information, company information, and news about these companies.
Industry veteran, Nick Pahade, on challenges facing companies
TRAFFIQ, a leading end-to-end digital media planning and buying company, today announced it ranked 25th on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500™ ranking of the 500 fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies in North America. TRAFFIQ grew 7,141 percent between 2006 and 2010, the period on which Deloitte based the ranking.
Despite all the excitement in our industry about programmatic buying and selling of inventory (via ad exchanges, DSPs, SSPs, and a variety of direct-to-publisher vehicles like private exchanges and private marketplaces), the vast majority of dollars today are still spent the "old fashioned" way.
Online data firm Datonics has partnered with digital media workflow company TRAFFIQ to provide proprietary keyword and segment-based data to all TRAFFIQ clients, Datonics CEO Michael Benedek said in an email.
Last week’s news of the merger between Donovan Data Systems (DDS) and MediaBank was certainly exciting. In digital media management terms, it’s kind of akin to rooting for the Yankees; only their fans want to see them grow more powerful, because it sure ain’t good for baseball.
Today TRAFFIQ announced an alliance with Nielsen, the global leader in providing insights and analytics into what consumers watch and buy, which will enable its registered users to benefit from Nielsen @Plan market information for planning and optimizing digital display campaigns. TRAFFIQ helps advertisers build campaigns by ingesting a myriad of requirements such as demographic and targeting needs, and then uses its attribute-matching technology to suggest media channels that index highly against an advertiser's goals.
Digital Media Management Platform Plugs in adSage-Powered Bid Management Tools
What carries you forward? Lessons learned in the past. Entrepreneurs recall teachers' enduring missives.
The other day I was talking to a good friend of mine who is on the executive team at a startup in the ad technology space. We were talking about strategy -- and in the midst of the conversation, I suggested that since the company hadn't taken any money yet, it should strongly consider selling at its early "life stage" for $10-20 million now. He gasped and told me, "Are you kidding me? I'd put our valuation at between $100-200 million."
Given the plethora of solutions available, publishers are seeking the best tools to help monetize their audience beyond display advertising. Yet, even as data becomes pervasive, it is also more highly scrutinized than ever before amid growing privacy concerns. The challenge for publishers is to find the right mix of monetization without risking audience exploitation.
TRAFFIQ, the digital media workflow platform, today announced the addition of online advertising technology development expert Scott Tomlin to its team. In his new role as Senior Vice President of Engineering, Tomlin will lead TRAFFIQ's world-class team of developers and engineers to pioneer and deliver to market innovative new software solutions to improve workflow and productivity for the digital media, publishing and advertising industries.
Just a few years ago, many client requests were rather generic, buzzword-driven inquiries like, "What's up with mobile?" or "I want to build a social presence." Today, clients are smarter and looking to improve their ROI beyond the novelty stage to extract real, tangible value from their digital strategies. To meet these more sophisticated needs, agencies and technology providers must evolve and even anticipate clients' needs before they inquire by staying one step ahead in their expertise and offerings.?
Everyone collects data these days. Most people think it’s ushering in a bold new era of low cost, highly effective advertising. But not everyone. Navigating it, and all the companies that want to help, can be a living nightmare.
Chris O'Hara is SVP of Marketing and Males for TRAFFIQ, a digital media optimization company. He has referred to the clutch of ad tech companies with sizable bank accounts from VC investment, not profits, as the walking dead. O'Hara believes that it's only a matter of time before a massive fire sale begins in the industry.
TRAFFIQ announced today it has been ranked #673 on Inc. magazine's annual list of the fastest-growing private companies. TRAFFIQ reported a three-year growth rate of 474 percent and 2010 revenue of $9.1 million.
During the past year, the number of tech companies has exploded. There are some 245 logos on the (in)famous Luma Partners slide. Some of those have been acquired, but many have not and, in the eyes of several observers, are more features of products than standalone companies. In an economic downturn, with its focus on wringing efficiency, how many will be able to argue for a small slice of ad buys?
These are exciting times in the digital media industry. Digital ad spend is eclipsing traditional mediums and generating billions in sales. Technology trends such as the explosive growth of tablet and mobile media device usage open new opportunities — and present fresh challenges.
Demand-side digital media management platform TRAFFIQ expands its offerings so much that it’s hard to keep up. Fortunately, we were able to hit Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing (and regular Adotas contributor) Chris O’Hara with questions regarding the platform’s latest upgrades (including customized and private publisher portfolios and enhanced financial management tools) as well as the many partnerships the company has formed since the beginning of the year.
TRAFFIQ®, the digital media workflow platform, today announced that experienced digital product and program manager Ratha Grimes has joined the TRAFFIQ Product Development team as Director of Product Management.
Here are the three reasons most of the companies within Terence Kawaja's display advertising landscape map will fail, and the three types of companies that will win big.
A troubling pattern is developing whereby Google expects its advertisers to simply accept it when it says, "Trust us that this is for your benefit, we’re Google."
TRAFFIQ®, the digital media management platform for advertisers, recently released several features that help agency users streamline the digital media buying process. Led by TRAFFIQ's VP, Product Management, Bridget Bidlack, under the direction of Chief Product Officer Eric Picard, the recent update now integrates important functionality that agency users have been requesting:
Three fundamental changes to the media business are threatening the current business model for digital media agencies.
Marketers at brands or agencies managing dozens of media buys across the Internet know it can get complicated. Important information, from pricing to placement, sometimes can get lost in transactional back-end processes. On Tuesday, TRAFFIQ will officially roll out supply chain and workflow management ad media-buying tools.
With multiple campaigns in full swing and multitudes of data pouring in, it can be easy to misinterpret details and jump to conclusions about results without sufficient evidence. For example, media buyers may frequently be marketing to consumers who would have searched and/or bought anyway, without being hit with display impressions.
Getting RTB (real time bidding) right is the key to success for many of the companies in the digital media ecosystem.
We've been at this online advertising thing for about 15 years now -- give or take a few years. And we've seen time and again all sorts of tricks, tools, approaches, and technologies that can be used to increase ROI from the advertiser's perspective and yield from a publisher's perspective. I've written tons of articles saying what we should do as an industry to improve advertising from a policy, approach, and technology perspective. But today, I have a nice little article about how to improve your results as an advertiser.
I just finished a two hour marathon of CBS’ fantastic program “Undercover Boss” and felt compelled to rush into my home office to pen this entry. The last installment this evening depicted a senior level Subway executive working under cover in the field with local franchise managers and workers. All I can say is, Subway should have hired a consultant to help socialize the meaning of this endeavour.
TRAFFIQ®, announced a partnership with Phluant, the mobile rich media technology company, which will enable its users to deploy rich media mobile creative across a broad range of mobile inventory providers. By enabling publishers that support Phluant to list their mobile advertising inventory within the TRAFFIQ marketplace, agencies and direct advertisers can now access a single web-based platform to buy and deploy rich media advertising campaigns across guaranteed display, real-time bidded display, and mobile all within one centralized interface.
Ad networks are often a good way for media companies to sell out their online display inventory, but publishers who can't control ad networks face a slippery slope of lost revenue.
Many in the business claim third-party targeting is not only valuable, but actually beneficial to the consumer. I disagree. There is no persuasive argument that consumers benefit at all from third-party tracking. The ads are not perceptibly more relevant to the consumer. The only groups benefiting significantly from third-party tracking are the companies that sell it.
Just a few years ago, client requests were rather generic, mostly buzzword inquiries of the general variety, such as, “What’s up with mobile?” or "I want to build a social presence." Today, clients are smarter and looking to improve their ROI beyond the novelty stage to extract real, tangible value from their digital strategies.
As digital marketers and agencies seek to fully understand the power of the display/search one-two punch to drive sales, there remains a void waiting to be filled by tools that can aggregate measurement for both in a single solution. Ultimately, the industry is craving something that will not only track results across numerous media and touchpoints, but enable advertisers to fine-tune campaigns and adjust allocations on the fly to optimize impact.
TRAFFIQ®, the digital media workflow platform, today announced that online marketing and digital advertising product development expert Matt Miga has joined the TRAFFIQ Product Development team as Director of Product Support. In his new role, Miga will be responsible for building out TRAFFIQ's Tier 2 support team and defining strategic ad operations solutions and support needs for TRAFFIQ's growing portfolio of digital advertising solutions for publishers and agencies.
Last week’s IAB Network and Exchanges conference was full of the usual self-congratulatory “use cases” of byzantine, data-based strategies for squeezing conversions from web-based display banners for direct response campaigns - or, alternatively, helping to drive “branded performance,” based on the listener’s preference.
TRAFFIQ®, the digital media workflow platform, today announced the launch of its new TRAFFIQ Mobile Media Calculator, a mobile application that puts powerful digital media planning tools right in the palm of your hand. Now available for iPhone, iPad and Android, TRAFFIQ's Mobile Media Calculator enables media planners and buyers to easily solve for various media calculations.
Giving online shoppers the ability to create sales alerts and offering collections of blogger-selected fashion items has helped apparel and accessories e-retailer MyNines Inc. to boost the amount of time, and the number of pages, that consumers spend on its e-commerce site.
Today's digital display advertisers love the idea of audience buying because it seems unique. The concept of buying an audience rather than the site it's on is truly revolutionary and will be a continuing part of the digital media conversation for a long time to come. However, many technology companies are being funded, started and run on the misconception that audience buying versus site-specific buying is a binary choice. It's not.
If you work for one of the companies within the famed Kawaja logo vomit map, the only place to be today is at DigiDay Target. The event, in which every single presentation referenced or displayed the famous slide in question, is the nexus point for ad technology executives, publishers, advertisers, and investors looking to understand and profit from an increasingly volatile industry.
Watching events unfold over the past few months around the Middle East has forced me to marvel yet again at the global paradigm shift that has been ignited by the evolution of communication technologies. Twitter and Facebook now sit squarely in the middle of our collective lives as ways to quickly and effectively spark fires. These fires have the power to topple governments in a matter of days!!!!
Every year, San Francisco is abuzz with hope and opportunity as thousands of ad technology executives pour into a few square blocks around the Moscone Center to try and turn technology dreams into riches. On the inside of the convention center, an odd assortment of e-mail and affiliate marketing tools vie for the jaded eyes of direct marketers. On the outside, more seasoned media technology executives find themselves in and out of luncheons and panel discussions, mostly trying to figure out the real time landscape, and the data surrounding it.
I've been writing a lot lately on the topic of online privacy at the intersection of advertising, and particularly the way the third-party tracking ecosystem has been evolving for the past few years. There is an ongoing onslaught of discussion about legislation and how we're probably going to get regulated.
For years, publishers have devalued their inventory by letting a daisy chain of remnant inventory networks and exchanges leverage their audiences. Because every publisher was willing to place ads on every single page, sheer scale created the opportunity for third parties to extract value by adding the splash of data that changed CPMs from pennies into dollars. As third-party data shrinks, the opportunity for publishers to profit from partnering with technology and data companies also decreases.
One of the biggest challenges facing digital advertisers is the ability to accurately and effectively measure the impact of search marketing on display, and vice versa. Much like a billboard wouldn't be measured in the same way as a direct mail campaign, the effectiveness of display and search tactics must be measured separately, yet considered comprehensively.
TRAFFIQ® announced a partnership today with Oggifinogi, the video ad platform, which will enable its demand side customers to leverage the full range of rich media and video advertising on any campaign run through TRAFFIQ or the TRAFFIQ Trading Desk.
If there is one thing I learned after spending several days at Digital Publishing Summit 2011 in Deer Valley, Utah, it’s that the people in this industry really love what they do. It’s not easy walking past world-class spring skiing in what is arguably the United States’ best ski area to enter a dim conference room to listen to a speech on “Auto-nomous Data Management,” but every session played to an SRO crowd of media and technology executives.
Advertisers face an ever-growing list of media buying options as the proliferation of digital permeates the industry. Given the sheer magnitude of choices, over-extended marketers often must turn to their agencies to determine the best fit to meet their goals. Far too often, however, agencies fall short here due to their attempt to be all things to all clients, a tendency that provides little benefit to either party.
TRAFFIQ®, the digital media platform, today announced the release of its DataTree Landscape, a comprehensive guide for advertisers in search of the right targeting data for their digital display campaigns. The interactive chart outlines the integrated data relationships available in the TRAFFIQ platform, organized by their ability to target based on specific audience needs.
As a digital media agency owner faced with keeping up with the times and (more important) earning margins from notoriously labor-intensive digital campaigns, it is tempting to fall back on time-worn models. If you think about the tried-and-true "agency" model, it is exactly what the dictionary says it is: "a consensual fiduciary relationship in which one party acts on behalf of and under the control of another in dealing with third parties."
Recently I was part of a fascinating discussion among some luminaries in the online advertising and media space. The conversation was kicked off when someone mentioned that a friend was starting an internet company. This led to a rollicking debate about the role of technologists in a startup.
There's plenty of consternation in the ad world over what will happen when a do-not-track mechanism comes to ad targeting. Some third-party data providers and publishers have gotten on board in the hopes that transparency is good for all parties. The industry should go along with opt-out but show consumers there's a price to pay when they cut off targeting.
In the interest of providing consumers a higher level of confidence in the online advertising industry, the Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising aim to provide web consumers a mechanism for opting out of behavioral tracking services. In what might seem like a counter-intuitive move, many third-party data providers and publishers have gotten on board.
Nick Pahade is one of those guys who started a business out of his dorm room in college. So even though he is only 35, his move last July to take over as chief executive officer of Traffiq was an attempt to get back into the startup world he had grown to miss.
TRAFFIQ® the digital media workflow platform, announced today its support of the Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising to give consumers a higher level of confidence in online advertising.
Bridget Bidlack, 40, joined the digital media platform as vice president of product management. She was previously director of solutions engineering at Turn.
TRAFFIQ®, the digital media workflow tool for agencies, announced today that Peer39 will be its preferred semantic targeting partner for the TRAFFIQ Trading Desk. Starting today, registered TRAFFIQ customers will be able to seamlessly deploy Peer39's page-level intelligence within their campaigns, and enjoy the performance lift that comes from using semantic data to inform real-time media buying.
With the multitude of media options available and clients' potential desire to jump on the newest "shiny object" without a clear objective, client services teams must work extra hard to build their client relationships to ensure greater success for themselves, their campaigns and their clients. Too often we let clients tell us what they want without asking why or understanding their needs from a larger perspective. When this happens, it positions the agency as a tactical execution team, rather than a true strategic partner.
With all the new technology and access to data, you'd think running a digital agency in 2011 would be tempting. After speaking with a few hundred digital agency principals over the last several years, I would rather work at a car wash. At least you are outdoors doing low-value repetitive tasks. Let me explain.
Everyone loves Terence Kawaja of LUMA Partners’ online ad industry map. Chris O’Hara is SVP of Sales and Marketing for TRAFFIQ, has taken a knife to it and finds that companies at opposite ends of the internet advertising ecosystem will survive, while those in the middle will not survive.
In order to recognize the fastest growing technology companies in the New York City metropolitan area, Lead411 is proud to announce the release of its "2011 Hottest New York City Companies" list.
TRAFFIQ®, the digital media workflow tool for agencies, today announced the addition of new Vice President, Product Management, Bridget Bidlack. Bidlack will join TRAFFIQ's seasoned product team today, reporting directly to recently appointed Chief Product Officer, Eric Picard.
TRAFFIQ®, the digital media workflow tool for agencies, today announced that the leading provider of dynamic creative optimization solutions for display advertisers and agencies, Tumri, will be its exclusive provider of dynamic creative solutions for its platform. Starting today, TRAFFIQ clients will be able to access the Tumri Ensemble self-serve platform and deploy dynamically-generated, personalized, ads with enterprise speed and scale.
According to Blue Kai, I’m a tech-savvy, social media-using bookworm in the New York DMA, currently in the market for “entertainment.†At least that’s what my cookie says about me. Simply by going to the Blue Kai data exchange’s registry page, you can find out what data companies and resellers know about you, and your online behavior and intent.
“Some big breakthroughs are on the way for print media to move onto the tablet,†said Nick Pahade, chief executive at Traffiq, a digital media buying company, “which will spur more rapid consumer adoption.â€
TRAFFIQ®, the digital media workflow platform, announced today it has been selected as Finalist for Red Herring's top 100 Global Award, a prestigious list honoring the year's most promising private technology ventures from around the world.
In this fourth installment, I’ll continue to provide capsule descriptions of the companies that iMedia Agency attendees expressed excitement about in a recent survey. Before anyone contacts me wondering why their company wasn’t on the list: If your company is on the list, it’s because you were listed in at least one survey response. If you aren’t, it’s because no one listed you in their survey response.
AdExchanger.com reached out to executives from platforms, networks and exchanges for their predictions about the digital advertising ecosystem in 2011. CPO Eric Picard weighs in.
TRAFFIQ, the digital media workflow tool for agencies, today announced that the leading B2B audience targeting platform, Bizo, will be its premier B2B media partner. Starting today, registered TRAFFIQ advertisers can reach more than 80% of the US business population, accessed through thousands of leading business sites. Additionally, TRAFFIQ will utilize Bizo's business demographic ("bizographic") targeting data for Trading Desk clients looking to target business-specific audience segments in real-time.