ADOTAS

It sounds like a nifty twist on the standard survey feature, and an example on Mixpo’s website reveals a survey that’s unobtrusive, straightforward and simple. But while a survey is a great way to learn how customers interact with a brand or a campaign — you don’t want to simply know who‘s interested in the brand, you want to know why and how – it does demand that extra step of choosing to click on that survey. How do you make people want to do that, rather than proceeding with whatever they went online to do in the first place?

In a recent conversation, Mixpo vice president Walter Harp acknowledged the challenge therein. “If you’ve asked me if I want to fill out a survey, you’ve already gotten one answer out of me,” he said. But one way to get over that hump is lead with the first question, rather than with a request to take the survey. Another method, he said, is to allow viewers to “choose the ad or fill out a survey. Or another way we can do it is post-roll.” Right now, they’re seeing results of “a .01 response rate all the way up to .05. It depends on the survey,” Harp explained. With a survey at the beginning of a video, he said the response rate is around “.03. Some are up to .08. We’re experimenting with the midstream pop-up. That gets about a .01.”

Harp said the goals with BrandMeasure right now have to do with “further driving the appeal. Part of the next version will be incentivizing.” Mixpo’s still considering what those incentives to viewers might be. Meanwhile, regarding the company’s clients, Harp said, “On an analytic side, we’re doing the optimization.”

Surveys incorporated into ads seem to be a fine method of learning about an ad campaign’s audience via information the people in that audience willingly and consciously provide. The challenge will be to turn the process of answering survey questions into something viewers do routinely. Harp suspects, wherever in that process the industry at large may be, it’s heading in that direction. “I think this is going to be standard,” he said. “Is it exacting? It’s not. [Advertisers] can manage the entire funnel. We’re just offering it up as a standard part of the practice.”

Offering local display targeting at scale, MaxPoint claims its Digital Zip technology is twice as accurate for reaching local consumers as traditional zip codes. In addition, the company employs demographic and lifestyle data to enhance its targeting.

With the new video solution, MaxPoint has sweetened the deal for advertisers through a partnership with Mixpo, which enables advertisers to quickly transform TV commercials into dynamic video ads that can be run in rich media display units. Mixpo also recently teamed up with Yahoo! to power its SmartAds for Video

“MaxPoint’s technology targets the most qualified online audiences at the neighborhood level, while we work to deploy the most relevant, engaging in-banner video ad for each individual,” said Mixpo CEO and President Anupam Gupta. “The collaboration results in the first solution for retail advertisers that ties video view, duration and interaction data together with advanced local targeting for increased return on investment for advertisers.”

Datran Media, a digital marketing technology company, today announced that Dennis Syracuse has been appointed senior vice president of marketing analytics. In this role, Mr. Syracuse will establish a marketing analytics consulting practice, which will provide professional consulting services to agencies. Prior to joining Datran, Mr. Syracuse served as senior vice president for Sony Electronics where he successfully and profitably led retail operations and merchandising across 65 SonyStyle store properties. Previous leadership experience includes marketing consulting roles across top brand and luxury retailers.

Mixpo, an online video advertising technology company delivering locally-targeted display ad solutions, and National Cable Communications (NCC), a provider of cable television advertising sales and marketing, have partnered to give advertisers the ability to extend their existing TV commercials to the Web with highly measurable and locally targeted interactive video ad campaigns. Different than pre-roll video ads, Mixpo’s video advertising platform leverages online display inventory, and adds interactivity and geo-targeting logic to any video creative to drive local response.

Web.com, a provider of online marketing for small businesses, and MerchantCircle.com, a social network of local business owners with 20 million unique visitors per month, has expanded their existing partnership to help improve the online visibility of local businesses. In addition to MerchantCircle’s suite of easy-to-use online publishing services, MerchantCircle’s local business members will have access to Web.com-powered marketing products and services designed to help them successfully market their businesses online.

United Sample and eSPIN, a subsidiary of Hearst Magazines Digital Media and aN entertainment/community network for teens and young adults, have launched the new www.Surveys4Teens.com, a community where teens can have a voice and earn rewards for sharing their thoughts, bringing some of the most valued – and most elusive – opinions within reach of companies and market researchers. eSPIN.com currently has 1.7 million users and 860,000 of them have signed up to take surveys in exchange for rewards; now, teens can also sign up for the panel. The online community will serve as a place to take surveys and share opinions.

Visible World, a provider of targeted television advertising, has partnered with Acxiom, Experian, and Nielsen to enable automated data-driven targeting for television ads through Visible World’s open data exchange standard. Preloaded marketing data from Acxiom, Experian, and Nielsen enables advertisers to apply the data they may be already utilizing in their direct marketing and online campaigns to television.

interCLICK, an ad network, has joined the BlueKai Premier Partner Program. BlueKai is an online intent-focused data exchange. interCLICK’s technology platform was specifically designed to leverage 3rd party data to consistently deliver top results for advertisers. As a participant in the program, interCLICK will be a preferred partner for integrating and leveraging BlueKai data for top notch campaign optimization. Marketers working with program members will be able to tap experts who have long and extensive experience working with BlueKai data and who have deeper product integration with the company.

Local advertisers will be able to place standard display ads on Comcast.net (the portal for more than 14 million Internet subscribers) or Comcast’s automotive portal Vehix.com.

According to the Kelsey Group’s Local Video Forecast, online video ad revenues will increase to $1.5 billion by the end of 2012 — representing 11.6% of advertisers’ online budgets.

Mixpo’s platform consists of five components:

• The VideoAd, a dynamic video advertising player that will play in 300×250 standard IAB units on Comcast properties and delivers high-quality video AND direct response lead generation capability.
• The Studio, where companies can easily create high-quality VideoAds from existing video, photo, and audio files, from a broad range of stock media options;
• Ad Rotation, which allows companies to test and compare different versions of a VideoAd for effectiveness;
• The Dashboard, where clients measure how a VideoAd is performing by tracking the number of impressions and views, play-through and conversion, viewers’ geographic locations, and referring sites;
• Automatically generated landing pages for each VideoAd, providing the search terms and other meta data to maximize exposure to more than 100 video sites powered by a range of search engines, including Google, Yahoo and Blinkx.

Mixpo signed deals with three real-estate companies: ActiveRain, Miller Condominium, Marketing and Realogics/UrbanCondominiums.com.

ActiveRain alone represents more than 80,000 member-agents across North America – Miller and Realogics each represent various Pacific Northwest condo developments. While Mixpo is ratcheting up each company’s online presence, the company says they have all been extremely active in the digital space.

“All of these organizations are very progressive from a marketing standpoint, though this is the first structured foray into online video-advertising,” Glenn Pingul, vice president of marketing for Mixpo told ADOTAS. “In the case of ActiveRain, we are talking about a social network that involves more than 80,000 members and professionals in real estate. They are shifting to online video because they see it as more powerful, and with analytics, driving measurable results.”

Under the agreement, Mixpo partners can leverage the company’s newly launched platform to deploy VideoAds (Mixpo-powered online video ads) for placement through ad networks and on Web pages and blogs. The expanded platform includes several new elements, including automatically generated landing pages for each VideoAd, which provides the search terms and other meta data to pump up exposure to 100 video sites powered by the likes of Google and Yahoo.

“Real estate is one category that we believe can benefit tremendously from the deployment of VideoAds to effectively showcase unique properties in a way that is both distinctive from other forms of media and easy to adjust, whether due to analytics or to the basic fact that real estate inventory is not static and changes daily,” Anupam Gupta, Mixpo president and CEO, said in a release. “We look forward to expanding our presence in real estate, as well as other key categories.”

Pingul said Mixpo is eager to expand into several other categories, including travel, publishing, medical and legal – he said new partnerships may come down the pike in the next six months, or even sooner.

In other Mixpo news, Jeff Lanctot has been appointed to serve on its board of directors. Lanctot is the senior vice president of global media for Avenue A/Razorfish.

“As a board member, Jeff’s deep expertise and experience in the overall online advertising world will add great value and perspective to what we’re doing,” Pingul said over e-mail. “Jeff has known Mixpo for some time and we know that he is keenly interested both in online video itself and the local SMB marketplace.”