The digital marketing industry is fond terms like “actionable analytics” or “addressable analytics” – superior tools that give you deeper insights so you can make better decisions and look smart. What’s not to like? Good reports are essential, but they are usually a waypoint to what you really care about: using more data to get better results faster than your competition.
DataXu technology represents the next generation of data-driven decisioning, designed to convert data into insight into action continuously. We call this Active Analytics™ because it goes beyond passive reporting, and actually executes millions of decisions on behalf of a user. It can analyze more data and adjust more quickly than even the best “actionable analytics.”
Reporting, which is usually what is meant by analytics, is fundamentally a passive activity, even on its best day when the reports are “actionable.” They are passive because they are show a reader what happened in the past, and leave the onus of the decision and action on the reader. Good reports are “actionable,” and help a reader make a decision more quickly. But the reader still has to make a decision, pick up the phone, renegotiate a deal, push a button, shift budget, etc. to execute the action. This is an old paradigm that fails to thrive in the era of Big Data and micro-second transactions.
Why can’t more technology platforms do this? You need an integrated Big Data stack that can not only process and report on your data, but can also transact programmatically. It turns out this is pretty hard to build, but it will define the future of Big Data technology, even well beyond digital marketing.
By Aaron Kechley, VP of Products
Share on Facebook- Posted by Aaron on January 31st, 2012
Check out this episode of “Innovation Hub” with Kara Miller on WGBH Radio featuring Mike Baker and three other experts discussing the future of advertising:
Share on Facebook- Posted by Logan on January 24th, 2012
Fact #1: 2012 Super Bowl inventory is sold out.
Fact #2: Traditional advertising is dying.
Last Tuesday, NBC announced it had completely sold out its Super Bowl broadcast inventory.
A nice note in an otherwise dismal couple of years for advertising. Worldwide ad spend tanked during the recession, side by side with the housing market collapse. In 2009, the industry experienced its worst single year decline since the Great Depression. Overall U.S. advertising plunged 12.9% that year according to Zenith Media.
But U.S. digital spend dropped only 3.4%. And as the recovery has slowly taken hold, digital has outgrown traditional by nearly 3X (7% to 20.2%).
It’s true that flagship events like the Super Bowl are not going away any time soon, but the rest of the traditional media world is in psychotherapy over how their analog dollars have turned to digital dimes.
But does that mean that just because you’re digital, you’re a winner? What does the continuing economic climate mean for the advertising business?
Our viewpoint is that the players that will survive today’s economy and thrive are the ones who can manage digital marketing more efficiently. What does that mean in practice? Brands need partners that can automate the marketing process, whether buying media or data. We expect we’ll see a winnowing this year. Companies with too many hands touching too many keyboards will try to sell before they go under, even ones with significant venture capital backing.
Another reality is that agencies are done with alphabet soup. They realize there’s a huge cost to constantly juggling vendors. As they account for wasted staff time, vendor integration headaches and all the other friction that goes with managing an army of partners, they’ll increasingly choose integrated platform providers with enterprise-class technology and service. They and their brands can’t afford the alternative.
By Shane Keats, Director of Product Marketing
Share on Facebook- Posted by Shane Keats on January 13th, 2012
Today we are excited to announce that we’ve acquired Mexad, the leading European DSP service provider.
With customers and operations in Germany, the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, as well as Brazil – not to mention advertising campaigns running across 60 countries – Mexad brings DataXu a truly global scale.
In just the past two years, DataXu has built the #1 ranked DSP current offering, according to the December 2011 report: “The Forrester Wave™: Demand-Side Platforms Q4 2011.” But having the best DSP technology is only part of our larger plan to become a leading player in digital marketing management. Indeed, as the digital market continues its torrid growth, brands and agencies are seeking bigger partners who can not only integrate all of the digital pieces but also bring enterprise-quality expert data and analytics support on a global basis.
And this type of talent is in short supply. According to McKinsey Global Institute, “by 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions.” That’s why we acquired Mexad, which is highly regarded for its expertise, service quality, and trustworthiness.
While the transition to a pervasively digital world is disruptive and confusing at times, one thing is clear: data is the new coin of the realm. Companies that can collect it and act on it in real time will win in the digital era. And that’s our commitment to our customers. We will provide them with the best platform for data-driven decisions and the best service to help them leverage their data.
We enter this New Year with a continued commitment to be a trusted partner to brands around the world, to share our learnings with them, and collaborate with them on the continuous stream of DataXu innovations that are defining the leading edge of digital marketing.
Share on Facebook- Posted by Julie Ginches on January 9th, 2012
By Adrian Tompsett
With the New Year comes the looming Yahoo! Class Two deadline of January 11th. For those folks not familiar with that whole deal, please see my previous post here: http://www.dataxu.com/2011/11/is-yahoo-giving-google-an-early-christmas-gift/
After causing an uproar with major advertisers and agencies with the impossible original deadline, Yahoo! quickly retreated and pushed things into the new year. This time around we are assuming they will stick to their guns and play this out for real. As I wrote earlier, I applaud Yahoo!’s desire for transparency and accountability in our industry. Love that it sounds the death toll for many of the ad networks and other no value add players who were simply playing the arbitrage game. But is this really about transparency?
Answer there is probably not so much. DataXu is a fully open and transparent digital media marketing platform – yet was still grouped in with the naughty arbitragers. So what is it really about?
Could it be a big bet on Yahoo!’s part that they are simply too big to buy around? Meaning a bet that their inventory is so valuable (DR folks have lived on Yahoo! Mail for years), that limiting and controlling access will drive folks back to buy direct from Yahoo!? Or that this will drive additional sales to Class One where CPM’s are WAY higher, and this will ultimately drive up Yahoo! yield? Or a big experiment that will ultimately be rolled back within 2012 if things don’t go as planned? Of course, the funny thing is, that end of the day, remnant is remnant because it goes unsold. So how could making things difficult for your indirect channel be the right move?
Ultimately, the motivation behind the move doesn’t matter a whole lot to marketers. A good time for us industry wonks to debate over cocktails, but for our clients, they just want to know how this will impact their display buying in 2012. And the short answer there is most likely not a lot, if at all based on who they have chosen to work with. Within our client base, some folks have chosen to move forward with their own seats to continue buying Yahoo! Class Two via RMX. That’s great. Others have taken a closer look at their spend and performance, but decided instead, not to move forward with their own seats. One could say they are they are taking the other side of Yahoo!’s bet, and buy around them. As the only RTB platform in the market built from the ground up to do impression level decisioning, and not just a better way of trading on RMX, we are pleased to be fully supportive of both strategies.
Almost takes you back to the whole 1999 to 2000 transition when the digital world was supposed to end. You all remember how that played out. T minus 5 days and counting.
Share on Facebook- Posted by Adrian Tompsett on January 6th, 2012
Leveraging a Digital Marketing Management platform to execute programmatic buying of exchange-traded media is a great solution for marketers. While these platforms offer advantages in scale, cost and optimization, marketers are also aware that there is some risk and it goes something like this: “Can you ensure that this ad will not run next to content about <<insert unsavory topic here>>?” Experienced marketers know that the definition of “unsavory” will vary by brand, by product, and by campaign. Enter the need for customizable Brand Safety tools in programmatic media buying.
For providers of digital marketing management platforms, DSPs, independent Brand Safety solutions and other parties in the space, enabling control over where ads can run has been a long-standing priority. Currently many DSPs and digital marketing management solutions offer brands a mix of blacklist and whitelist options, brand safety tools with levels of priorities, and the ability to partner with a 3rd-party solution. This week DataXu raised the bar again by releasing its precision whitelist and blacklist capability.
This new feature enables users to move beyond blocking an entire domain to restrict ads from running on a specific content but instead to either restrict or include pages at the subdomain and directory levels. What does this mean for marketers? More reach, more safety, and more value from their digital marketing efforts.
DataXu has an established reputation as an innovator solving many of our customers’ most challenging problems including Brand Safety concerns. In June of this year, Double Verify named DataXu as one of the top-three safest advertising platforms. According to the study, it wasn’t even a close race: “The most compliant platforms [outperformed] the lower tier of players by almost 5 times.” More recently, DataXu received a score of 5 out of 5 for Brand Safety in the December 2011 Forrester Research, Inc. report “The Forrester Wave™: Demand-Side Platforms, Q4 2011.”
Marketers require a streamlined technology to help ensure brand safety in this complex digital marketing landscape. DataXu’s DX3 platform includes its industry-leading, multi-level, customizable Brand Safety feature as part of its integrated stack. As a result, DX3’s advertisers can assign a Brand Safety level to meet their needs without incremental operational burden. DataXu brings the effort full-circle by offering fully transparent, sub-domain-level reporting to allow advertisers visibility into exactly where their ads have been shown. These tools enable advertisers to more effectively manage their brand’s reputation with its consumers.
By Whitney Jones, Product Marketing Manager
Share on Facebook- Posted by DataXu on December 28th, 2011
By Shane Keats
- I was born in 1988 to Robin Burgener, my father.
- I do not have a mother, but Cat Deeley, the host of So You Think You Can Dance, made a show about me that ran for 9 episodes.
- I did not become an object until 2004. Since then, people have purchased me twenty five million times.
- I am smaller than a Magic 8 Ball but much, much smarter.
- The more you use me, the smarter I get. What am I?
If you guessed 20q, then you already know just how much fun this toy can be. The little globe works just like the “20 Questions” parlor game. Think of something – a piano, a horse, money – then start 20q. Within a score of questions, 20q will tell you exactly what you picked.
It’s uncanny how often it guesses correctly (20q owners claim 80% accuracy, and 95% when extended to 25 questions). The physical version does not actually learn from use (though the website instantiation does) making its accuracy even more impressive.
For your children, or your inner child, this is one gift idea that doesn’t require a PhD to evaluate.
Available at Amazon and wherever fine gadgets are sold.
image courtesy of Amazon.com
Happy holidays!
Links:
http://www.amazon.com/Radica-20Q-Artificial-Intelligence-Game/dp/product-description/B0001NE2AK
Share on Facebook- Posted by Shane Keats on December 20th, 2011
By James Baldassari, DataXu
DataXu’s engineers are hard at work creating the technologies to create value for our advertisers. We process petabytes of big data to make hundreds of thousands of real-time decisions per second.
This is a challenging task, and we’ve been fortunate to be able to leverage many open source software packages to help us get our product to market faster. In many cases, we’ve used excellent community-built open source ideas as a foundation, and built improvements on top of them. This post, by DataXu Principal Software Engineer James Baldassari is an example of how we contribute some of these improvements back to the software community.
We hope that by posting this, we’ll get some great feedback to make our products even better!
For the non-technical: Avro is an open source program maintained by the Apache Foundation that facilitates communication between a client and a server. In advertising technologies, such as real-time bidding, there are hundreds of thousands (soon to be millions) of real-time requests per second between servers (for example, an ad exchange) and clients (for example, DataXu’s real-time bidding system). For many reasons, we believe Avro is a good technology choice for the OpenRTB project.
Please Click Here to continue reading
Share on Facebook- Posted by James Baldassari on December 15th, 2011
Today we are excited to announce that the December 2011 Forrester Research Inc. report: “The Forrester Wave™: Demand-Side Platforms, Q4 2011” has recognized DataXu as a Leader with DX3 rated as the #1 ranked current offering. Amid a sea of marketing claims, we believe this recognition by Forrester provides further validation of our platform’s exceptional capabilities and the standard of excellence that our customers value and competitors aspire to achieve.
The inspiration for DX3 came from listening to the needs of our customers who wanted a simple way to make digital marketing more effective. That’s why we created the first fully integrated enterprise platform that automates and optimizes digital marketing investments, making it easy for a marketer to use Big Data to drive profit. DX3 incorporates all the required tools – DSP, data management and attribution management into an easy-to-use console that boosts results and saves brands millions of dollars in redundant technology and data fees. We knew that DX3 was a breakthrough, but what a great accolade to be recognized as the highest ranked offering in the industry within a month of launch!
And this recognition was well-earned. Of the three dozen DSP vendors evaluated, only seven qualified. Forrester put these solutions through a rigorous test, based on a number of factors valuable in an end-to-end solution: breadth and scope of media and data access provided; depth and sophistication of vendors’ algorithmic optimization; richness and degree of flexibility in reporting systems; approach to managing brand safety and inventory quality; overall usability of the platforms; and, especially important for such a new tool set, overall client support.
The analysts concluded that “DataXu’s current offering is actually the strongest” and is “differentiated by its approach to advanced attribution, its depth of experience in multichannel buying and optimization; and its uniformly strong algorithmic optimization capabilities. The company has made major advancements in the robustness of its offering, with a focus on consolidating analytics, advanced attribution, audience management, and programmatic buying into a single technology stack.”
While we’re the newcomers to the industry, we’ve been able to evaluate the limitations of existing products and changing market needs, ultimately leapfrogging older first-generation solutions. We are innovating more quickly and growing faster than the incumbents, accomplishing more in 2.5 years than those who have been in the game three times as long.
We’re gratified that the experts at Forrester have recognized our work, and we want to thank you for your support, collaboration and input in helping us solve the toughest challenges in digital marketing. We’ve only just begun and are eager to show you what’s next!
Sincerely,
Michael K. Baker
Download your complimentary copy of the December 2011 Forrester Research Inc. report: “The Forrester Wave™: Demand-Side Platforms, Q4 2011 here.
Share on Facebook- Posted by Mike Baker on December 14th, 2011
DataXu’s Channel Sales Manager, Brian Dolan, talks about leveraging Big Data for digital marketing management in a rapid-fire Pecha Kucha session (20 slides, 20 seconds each) at Digiday’s Data Marketing Summit in Deer Valley, Utah – December 5th.
Share on Facebook- Posted by Vinda Rao on December 13th, 2011
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