Adelphic, a Viant® people-based, self-service platform for cross-channel programmatic advertising, announced today the addition of digital out-of-home (DOOH) inventory to its platform. This all-new offering enables advertisers to access Adelphic’s digital out-of-home inventory via Rubicon Project’s Private Marketplace (PMP). Through partnerships with both Clear Channel Outdoor Americas, one of the world’s largest outdoor advertising companies, and Captivate, North America’s leading location-based digital video network, clients can purchase DOOH inventory including digital billboards, airports, office lobbies and elevators, at scale, seamlessly, within a PMP. In addition, the company announced that Enplay, the OOH agency within MDC Media Partners, has agreed to work with Adelphic to gain access to the inventory on behalf of its clients.

The addition of DOOH inventory to Adelphic’s people-based DSP, powered by Viant’s proprietary user and device graph, provides advertisers and brands with the ability to more efficiently buy programmatic inventory through a cross-channel approach. Now, ad buyers can utilize audience-driven insights for better targeting and analysis of campaign performance across the complex consumer journey.

“As the industry becomes increasingly automated, Adelphic is looking to lead the charge in cross-channel programmatic activation,” said Adelphic National Vice President, Jeremy Haft. “By including digital out-of-home inventory as part of our self-service programmatic ad buying capabilities, we are bringing the efficiency of programmatic to an advertising medium that was largely purchased manually.”

While tech-savvy marketers acknowledge the benefits of extending programmatic capabilities to DOOH, Adelphic is the only DSP providing OOH buyers with the ability to automatically convert traditional OOH metrics [events] into impressions within the platform, for improved cross-channel optimization and reporting. By standardizing the bidding measurement, Adelphic makes it easier for advertisers to buy premium inventory at scale and better understand performance results through more accurate measurement and reporting. By layering on location targeting to cross-channel advertising, marketers using Adelphic’s people-based platform have the ability to retarget people who work in office buildings while simultaneously reaching users across devices in a deterministic fashion, including mobile and desktop.

“Working with Adelphic aligns with our strategy to provide robust audience driven data and programmatic opportunities within mobile and OOH,” said Lauren Barbara, Managing Partner, Enplay, MDC Media Partners’ OOH Unit. “As we push to move the OOH industry forward, working with Adelphic to gain access to programmatic inventory helps drive greater returns for our clients wanting sought-after audience segments in physical locations with highly relevant custom messaging in real-time.”

The inclusion of a DOOH strategy enables advertisers to reach and impact their target audiences in real-world moments. Brand marketers value engaging consumers through these more traditional methods, and PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that DOOH advertising revenues will overtake traditional OOH media spend in 2020 (growing at a rate of 15 percent year-over-year for the next four years).

To view the full article, visit MarTech Advisor.

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In acquiring Adelphic for an undisclosed price, Viant hopes to create a “people-based DSP” that combines media execution with deterministic data from parent company Time Inc.
But don’t think of what Time Inc. is building as a mini walled garden, said Viant CEO and co-founder Tim Vanderhook.

“Everyone wants the scale that Facebook and Google have, but they want it across the independent web of publishers out there,” he said. “The industry was hoping that AOL would deliver something like that, but it’s been some time since they were acquired by Verizon, and Time Inc. is stepping into that gap.”

The deal, as well as the integration between Viant and Adelphic, is expected to wrap up before the close of Q1.

AdExchanger caught up with Tim Vanderhook and his brother, Viant COO Chris Vanderhook, to talk about how Time Inc. might bring its ad tech vision to life.

AdExchanger: There are a lot of DSPs out there. Why buy Adelphic?
TIM VANDERHOOK: Adelphic reaches more than 1 billion devices a month and that, combined with Viant’s more than 1 billion opt-in users, is a potential industry opportunity.

Agencies have two really big needs today – a universal ID that works across devices and self-service programmatic capabilities. Viant brings the universal ID and Adelphic brings the self-service capabilities.

CHRIS VANDERHOOK: Adelphic also has a good engineering team born out of Quattro Wireless, which was bought by Apple and became iAd. They have the pedigree and they have the technology platform.

What exactly does it mean to be a people-based DSP?

TV: The largest DSPs in use today are desktop-first and built on cookies, which leads to commoditization and outdated technology. But when you have a mobile-first approach, there is the ability to do cross-device reach and frequency with opt-in registered user data on top. It’s accuracy with significant scale.

And beyond media execution comes measurement and the ability to measure digital’s impact on in-store sales, which represents 90% of revenue for many advertisers.

Is it really possible for Time Inc. to take on the walled gardens?

TV: “People-based” doesn’t have to mean “walled garden.”

CV: The majority of the money, especially for Facebook, is driven by people-based data. But if you look at Time Inc.’s Q3 earnings last year, digital ad revenue was up 63%, and Viant was a big driver of that growth. That is the value of people-based data.

But whether we’re the antithesis of walled gardens or not, marketers are looking for an alternative and they’re looking for self-serve. With Adelphic, that is what we can give them.

The narrative Time Inc. and Viant are weaving is around openness, but what makes you not just a mini walled garden yourself?

TV: Can you third-party ad serve into an environment and can you do your own measurement? If the answers are “no,” then you’re a walled garden, and other people just have to trust you because there’s no verification.

But we allow marketers and agencies to third-party ad serve into our environment and we allow them to run auditing and verification services on top of it. We’re not trying to disintermediate the market. We’re trying to enable an open web so that marketing can be tracked overall.

Why is self-serve so important to your buy-side partners?

TV: Self-serve capabilities are in extremely high demand within the advertising agencies specifically. It’s become so that the managed service layer is actually the ad agency itself sitting on top of the technology platforms that they’re utilizing for clients to execute in a people-based fashion.

To view this article in its entirety, visit AdExchanger.

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Move is intended to give advertisers self-service capabilities for data-driven buying.

Magazine publisher Time Inc. said it has agreed to acquire Adelphic Inc., an automated advertising buying platform.

The move is intended to offer marketers the ability to directly buy advertising that targets specific consumers.

Terms weren’t disclosed. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter.

Time Inc. said the ad tech firm will complement Viant, a data-driven marketing company it acquired last year that has a database of more than 1 billion registered users. Adelphic enables agencies and clients to buy advertising on their own, a self-service capability that Viant currently lacks.

Time Inc., which publishes Sports Illustrated, Fortune and People, completed its purchase of Viant Technology Inc. last March. At the time, the publisher said it would blend its content and subscriber data with Viant’s data on more than 1 billion registered users.

“This is the next piece of the puzzle that we’ve been putting together,” said Jen Wong, Time Inc.’s chief operating officer. “The forecasts show that a big chunk of the market is interested in transacting through automation. That’s particularly the case in mobile. This will allow us to do that.”

Ms.Wong described Viant as a managed service business that executes purchases on behalf of agencies and clients. Increasingly, agencies and clients want to execute those purchases themselves.

Adelphic, she said, has that self-service capability. “We’ll be able to put Viant’s data layer on top of Adelphic, enabling agencies to access that audience through self-service,” she said.

Michael Collins, chief executive of Adelphic, based in Waltham, Mass., said the combination of Viant’s audience data with Adelphic’s automated buying should provide greater value to clients. “Their data and premium content together with our automated buying technology will be a very powerful combination,” he said.

Time Inc. earlier this month revamped its ad sales workforce and said it would focus even more heavily on category selling.

The pending purchase comes at a time when Time Inc.’s future as a standalone company is in question, amid continuing pressures on its print advertising and newsstand revenue. Time Inc. hired investment banks last December to help review its strategic options after turning away two acquisition overtures led by media investors that included Edgar Bronfman Jr.

To view this article in its entirety, visit The Wall Street Journal.

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Adelphic’s CEO, Michael Collins, lends his perspective on Marketing-Mix Modeling in a cross-screen and cross-channel world.

If you are in brand management, chances are you have leveraged marketing-mix modeling (MMM).

In case you haven’t, MMM is the well-used planning tool that helps brands determine where ad spend should be appropriated for campaigns. For many marketers, it is the center of their media planning process. However, this singular channel-focused tool misses a profound amount of marketing opportunity and holistic insights into audience and ad campaign reach.

It is an understatement to say that audiences are fragmented more than ever before. Further complicating the job of media planners, audiences are also increasingly spreading their time between multiple channels. Originally conceived as a planning tool during the days when television dominated, MMM provides advertisers with generalized statistics based on national or regional time series data. At its inception, this was an effective tool before audiences became so fragmented.

What MMM fails to provide is a true holistic view of consumers based on their behaviors across multiple channels and screens. It also cannot give marketers the ability to plan for a seamless, sequenced dialogue with individual consumers across multiple screens. It is also not effective in leveraging the stream of real-time consumer insights that marketers now receive from newer, interactive channels.

Consumers are, by nature, multichannel and they consume content through multiple screens every day. Marketers need to better align their consumer engagement efforts with this multichannel behavior. When done successfully, this realignment allows for more effective ad spend, as placement decisions can be made in real time based on each consumer’s prior engagement with a brand.

For instance, if a brand successfully engages a consumer with an upper-funnel message in one channel, it would be inefficient to serve another upper-funnel message to the same consumer on another channel. Armed with the insight that the consumer is already engaged, a mid- or lower-funnel message would be better use of budget.

Different channels also provide different benefits for brands. For example, mobile is a very strong channel for engagement, with an average of 0.5% click-through rates, but it is not as strong as other channels on conversion. Conversely, desktop is strong on conversion rates, but weaker for engagement, with an average of 0.1% click-through rates. So, initially engaging a consumer in mobile and then driving that same consumer to conversion in desktop will likely drive a higher ROI than conducting both activities in the same channel.

Making decisions in real time based on cross-channel data and engagement will significantly improve advertising ROI. The most innovated and forwarding-thinking brands are moving to this audience-centric approach to campaign planning and execution. As more brands move in this direction, the legacy of MMM and planning based on television will be replaced and the age of digital advertising will finally have arrived.

The industry continues to evolve the solutions that will ultimately take the place of MMM. In the interim, marketers should focus on a few things: Plan for audience, not channels, sites or apps; build holistic, multichannel consumer profiles — and make them actionable in real time.

And, finally, brands need to test and trial cross-channel solutions that will help set the standards for measurement and attribution that we will need for the future.

To view this article in its entirety, visit AdExchanger.

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Mobile and cross-channel demand-side platform (DSP) Adelphic on Monday announced a partnership with Integral Ad Science (IAS) allowing Adelphic customers to verify, optimize, and analyze their mobile-first and cross-device ad campaigns using IAS’s solutions for pre-bid targeting across viewability, ad fraud, traffic ad quality, and brand safety. IAS is a provider of  verification, optimization, and analytics solutions.

Ad buyers have increasingly demanded third-party verification to ensure transparency, since verified delivery of high-quality ad impressions is important to advertisers. “The combination of IAS’ pre-bid verification with Adelphic’s cross-channel media platform allows for quality and transparency controls before an impression is even delivered to any audience across any device,” Gina Kim, head of partnerships of Adelphic, told Real-Time Daily via email. “The partnership will offer a check earlier in the programmatic workflow to prevent questionable impressions and will assure brands that their messages are being seen by the right audiences.”

Verification features from IAS that are available through the Adelphic platform are for display, video, and mobile in-app advertising inventory. For display, features include viewability, fraud, brand safety, and ad quality. For video, the platform will offer ad fraud and brand safety capabilities, and for mobile, it will offer brand safety.

The industry has made transparency through viewability and fraud protection solutions a priority, Kim said. Integrating the IAS solutions into its platform will enable Adelphic customers to target before their campaign runs. It aims to improve ROI and ensures ads are being placed precisely where, when, and how they’re supposed to appear.

To view this article in its entirety, visit MediaPost.

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