Check out the rest of Rob’s post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-leathern/just-in-time-advertising_b_1177429.html?

What is different about the targeting data that’s available through Facebook versus anywhere else?

There are two things that are important. One is that it’s the most robust and largest source of self‑reported demographic data available anywhere in the world. No one else is even half the size of Facebook in terms of the amount of data. You can do demographic targeting on a variety of other large portals, or use data from third‑party vendors, but the quality of the data is low and you’re never going to get more than about 40 percent of the online audience. Whereas with Facebook, they reach 165 million people in the US monthly, and they have age and gender information on 95 percent of them.

The second thing is for brands. Facebook has this ability to target people by affinity: brand affinity, affinity of products, affinity to causes and more. The more that companies are spending time creating and driving customers to “like” them, the more targeting data is becoming available on this platform.

Hopefully, in the future, this data will be, targeted by marketers outside of the walls of Facebook in a privacy‑sensitive way since the walls between Facebook and websites have continued getting lower.

Why is it that advertising works on Facebook without first‑party cookies?

The signal that exists in Facebook is strong if you’re smart enough to know how to target users. The reality is that you’re not going to always target every single user you want. Nobody has built a targeting system that is very powerful, and/or generates a lot of money with the one exception of Google.

Google is the only company that has taken user‑supplied data, and has turned it into a meaningfully-sized business. Facebook hasn’t yet either, but everyone believes that they have the potential to do so.

For marketers, Facebook’s quality of data and the value of their data for targeting purposes are continuously increasing. Every dollar that is spent by a brand to drive fans towards their brand is also continuing to grow the power of this platform from a targeting perspective. It’s what you might call the ultimate network business.

Can you talk a little about the evolution of your business? I used to think of XA.net as a self‑service DSP. It feels like you’ve pivoted into the social space.

I don’t think we’ve pivoted at all. Our goal starting the company was always to be in a place where we could have the biggest impact helping marketers run advertising campaigns – systematically, profitably and with less pain. Any platform where many users are likely to pay attention to an advertising message is somewhere we want to be integrated. Facebook has fit that criteria, LinkedIn is one that we’re participating in right. At some point, perhaps Twitter will be in that category. But we’re interested in scale and the ability to tap into a platform systematically.

What I think has changed for us is that we have recognized the social data component. The understanding of that data is going to be an important part of creating value for marketers going forward. We have devoted additional resources in order to get much deeper on the social side than anyone who superficially puts out a press release announcing, “Oh, we’re a DSP and now you can buy social through us.”

We’ve focused our technology development efforts on the social side, not just as a workflow product to help you buy ads more efficiently, but also to understand the audiences that you have and the audiences that you could have. I wouldn’t say it was a pivot. It’s more of a continued concentration of focus in an area that we think is going to be key to unlocking value for marketers.

Speaking about those marketers, who is the ideal client for XA.net today?

We’re working with marketers directly and through their agencies. In some cases, agencies and the marketers themselves are both involved. In other cases, it’s just through the agencies as a service provider to them.

A good example of a very sophisticated company that we’re working with is One Kings Lane. They don’t necessarily have a deep agency relationship so we’re working with them directly.

Also, we’re not in the business of working with small businesses. We have some channel partners that we work with but most of our customers are large or mid‑size enterprises or agencies. Our minimums for display and/or for Facebook are $10,000 a month.

Any thoughts about how commerce is going to change because of social media?

Companies are going to find it useful to tie user purchasing behavior or recommendation behavior more closely into the existing social networks that exist out there. We work with a lot of companies who are trying to understand things like influential customers. Are the influential customers the same ones who are spending the most with them? It’s usually not the case. You may have an influential customer who can spread the word about your product or service that isn’t necessarily the biggest spender on your product or service.

The big trends are going to be tapping into influence and creating viral offers that are spreadable.

The other trend will be companies tapping into existing databases of their most valuable customers and getting them to advocate on their behalf within these social networks. Companies are going to get these users to encourage other users to become fans, to make purchases or to learn more about new products.

There’s this new opportunity for existing, valuable customers to be the voice of the brand which will increase with more social media opportunities and integration.

With XA.net, the overall idea is to provide a media‑buying platform that spans both the social‑‑when I say, social, I mean Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn ‑‑and also the Google world, the search world, right? It would seem, from a marketer’s perspective, that they really need one platform to control both. Do you agree with that?

Yes. I think where we come down on it is that the search business is one that’s been around for a while and there are a lot of solutions out there already. We think that a targeting optimization problem is a much more difficult one and a much more diffused one. Our goal is to have a platform that helps marketers across that spectrum which includes what people traditionally today think of as display or social display.. We see ourselves as having a role to play when there is an existing relationship between the company and the customer.

In the past, with search for the most part, there was no pre-existing relationship available when someone goes to a search engine and searches for a company. We’re going to be in the business of both acquisition as well as retention, and helping companies understand the value and tradeoffs between how they communicate with customers through these various online channels. But search is not currently a part of what we think our customers are typically looking for.

There are a bunch of search marketing companies that have created display platforms or social platforms. What we hear almost universally from customers that we talk to is how, in many cases, the only reasons they use those add‑ons is because they’re paying next to nothing for them. The problem is they’re missing a lot of opportunities because they’re getting very little actual value out of those platforms. We think most marketers are smart enough to go to the best‑of‑breed. We have no interest in being a search provider, but we believe that, on the social and display side, we are a best‑of‑breed provider and can help them out.

What do you think is the biggest gap right now in terms of skill set in digital? Sales? Marketing? Engineers?

First, people with the best and most transformative technology, and the people with the loudest and most effective sales voices are not usually in the same company. I think the inefficiency is in a lot of good salespeople who sell inferior products, and a lot of good technology companies do not yet have the similar salespeople to sell their products. That’s one of the things out there; it’s just a reality. It’s hard to find great talent right now even though there are a lot of people in the market.

On the sales side, there’s an acute need for expanding the base of salespeople who can help translate some of the amazing innovation that’s happening week‑by‑week into the hands of customers. Part of the problem is that it’s hard for customers to understand, because things are changing so quickly. I see that as the biggest area that the industry needs to work on: we need to align the messaging, capabilities and the customers’ understanding of all of the above into a single package.

You have a product called optim.al which focuses on the development of ad creative. A lot of creative people out there are concerned that automation has taken money out of their pockets. What are you seeing about that creative role and how it’s evolving in social?

If it appears like some doors are closing on the creative side, it’s out-weighed by others opening. In certain systematic systems we are working with, companies that have their creative partners login to our own optim.al tool and submit the creative. Some of the creative thinking may be different in that now they think about adding and creating a group of elements that work together. These new tools help creative people figure out new ways of interaction with the consumer. The best thing in our system is the real-time aspect. Within 10 seconds of an ad being turned on, they can receive feedback – it’s potentially a different world than creating a magazine ad, and having it run a month later without actually knowing what the reaction was among consumers. For creatives, there’s this opportunity to engage very meaningfully, and then get almost instant feedback from those creative ideas.

We’re never going to be in a situation where we don’t need creative minds to come up with things that are going to grab people’s attention. The targeting and the matching of the creative to the targeting – all of that stuff can be made more systematic through systems like ours. But the inputs are always going to need to be creative, and you’re always going to need people to think “outside the box” to come up with those components.

Looking into XA.net’s future, what are some milestones that you want your company to achieve?

We want to be seen as the go‑to authority for social and data‑driven media buying.

The other thing I would say is that so far we have been a company focused on building technology. We’ve done pretty well in terms of, given our size, getting into the marketplace and having top‑notch customers. The next two years for us is about building a sales and marketing presence, and getting our name out there. That will be our focus for a while. You’ll start to see more announcements around that.

- John Ebbert, AdExchanger

http://www.adexchanger.com/the-state-of/xa-net/

AdExchanger.com reached out to a selection of companies in the ad ecosystem which use DSP technology. They were asked the following question:

“What’s your reaction to Yahoo! requiring seats for advertisers on Right Media Exchange versus buying through DSPs, ad networks, etc.?”

Rob Leathern, CEO, XA.net

“My answer to this is two parts: 1) the handling of it, and 2) the business strategy/larger picture. As to 1) keep in mind that they told us this at 6.30pm EST on the Tuesday before Thanskgiving to be effective as of December 2nd. This doesn’t give us a lot of time to make a transition for our clients to their own seats. Regardless of the business reasons for the decision, doing this now, in Q4 before a holiday weekend for firms who have spent millions of dollars on their platform is a big middle finger move by Yahoo.

I personally believe it’s a completely wrongheaded approach to partnership, in stark contrast to the relationships we have with companies who have ad platforms like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn and is a sign of a former Internet giant with great assets flailing around for a workable strategy. If they had an easy-to-use self-service model for advertisers to buy from them directly that would be one thing, but they don’t – and *in fact* they told us not more than 6 months ago that the Yahoo! sales team valued DSPs and companies like ours who helped them better service both large customers with complex needs AS WELL AS customers who spend less than $25k per IO since in their words at the time ‘it costs them $10,000 to create and manage an insertion order [IO] through their internal process’. I can’t think that’s improved in the last 6 months.”

– http://www.adexchanger.com/ad-exchange-news/yahoo-right-media-dsps/#xa

NEW YORK & SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Quova, a Neustar Service and a leading provider of fixed IP geolocation data, today announced a partnership with XA.net, Inc., a fast-growing company creating technologies to help marketers engage their customers and prospects through real-time bidding for online display ads, to target advertising based on Quova’s IP data and intelligence. The combination now makes available Quova’s Audience Targeting Solutions (ATS) across XA.net’s demand-side platform: optim.al. ATS provides marketers with valuable intelligence based on IP addresses allowing for more precise targeting of business and consumer audiences.

“optim.al is integrated across all major online inventory sources, so this is a truly powerful solution for advertisers.”

“What is exciting about this partnership is that marketers can tailor their display ads to a specific audience in real-time by using Quova’s hyper-local data while bidding through the optim.al platform,” said Miten Sampat, vice president, Product Strategy, Quova. “optim.al is integrated across all major online inventory sources, so this is a truly powerful solution for advertisers.”

The companies also are collaborating on an innovative analytics offering that enhances XA.net’s industry-leading optim.al for Social advertising platform, the leading Facebook ad testing and management system.

“Though we have seen quite a bit of unbundling of data and media over the past several years, we fundamentally believe that our clients’ media-buys are more efficient and effective when data and media are priced and optimized together,” said Rob Leathern, Founder and CEO, XA.net. “We are excited to partner with Quova to bring our cutting-edge Real-Time Bidding expertise together with their world-class data, into one seamless and compelling package for our clients.”

Learn more about IP Audience Targeting

http://www.quova.com/ip-audience-targeting/

Contact Quova Sales: sales@quova.com

About Quova

Quova provides high-quality IP intelligence data. This data allows companies, large and small, to use detailed demographic and network characteristics to prevent fraud in online commerce; regulate online content (DRM) to stay compliant; and marketers to localize content and analyze traffic. Quova is the only full-service IP geolocation provider with a team of analysts, customer technicians and developer advocates who add human IP to network IP to offer consultative services along with its data. Quova is a Neustar Service, based in Mountain View, California. www.quova.com. Follow @quova on twitter.

Learn more about optim.al

http://optim.al

Contact XA.net Sales: sales@xa.net

About XA.net

XA.net is the first advertising technology company to be both an approved Facebook Ads API Tools vendor and have built its own robust real-time bidding and audience infrastructure, integrated with all major ad inventory sources. Based in San Francisco and backed by a proven team of social media and audience experts, the XA.net technology team created optim.al for Display and optim.al for Social, the leading multivariate ad platform for Facebook.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire -10/31/11)- XA.net, Inc., the first advertising technology company to be both an approved Facebook Ads API Tools vendor and have built its own robust real-time bidding and audience infrastructure, was awarded this prestigious ranking at a ceremony in San Francisco last week. The company’s revenue growth since 2008 stands at a staggering 583%, as verified by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

“We started the company 3 years ago with a very clear vision of what we intended to accomplish,” said Rob Leathern, Co-Founder and CEO, XA.net. “A laser-focused approach to building world-class technology to help advertisers engage their customers and prospects online, period. And we’ve been fortunate to work with truly blue-chip brands and agency partners to bring this vision to life.”

As one of the leading demand-side platforms, XA.net possesses deep roots in real-time bidding for display advertising. The company’s technology team utilized this expertise and built the optim.al advertising system, to help brands create and optimize their ads within the Facebook ecosystem.

“It’s not surprising to me that XA.net has experienced such strong growth,” said Jim Kingsbury, Vice President of Marketing at One Kings Lane. “We’ve been working with the XA.net team for some months now and their technology and services have really helped us ramp up One Kings Lane’s user acquisition efforts.”

Continuing this pioneering vein, XA.net now markets and sells its proprietary social consumer insights, which run far deeper than what is readily available to a brand. The company’s exclusive data is now positively impacting marketing mix decisions, both online and off.

“I’m proud of the decisions we’ve made along the way,” said David Li, Co-Founder and CTO, XA.net. “We made a conscious choice to invest in our technology and hire the very best engineers, instead of billboards along Highway 101. And that resource allocation now provides a cutting-edge advantage for all of our wonderful clients.”

Visit http://optim.al to learn more about the company’s media and data products.

About XA.net
Based in San Francisco and backed by a proven team of social media and audience experts, the XA.net technology team created optim.al for Display and optim.al for Social, the leading multivariate ad platform for Facebook. Please contact sales@xa.net for more information.

I am incredibly bullish on the future of the display business. Online advertising is now the second largest advertising medium, behind television, and  the growth in display is outpacing that of the overall ad market. New technologies are enabling incredibly exciting campaigns, as well as making it possible for advertisers of all sizes, large and small, to benefit from what display has to offer. Right now, the display business is estimated to be around $20-25 billion. At Google, we believe it has the potential to grow to $200 billion, as ad dollars continue to follow consumers online, and as the barriers to entry such as complexity and cost diminish. I believe we are in a new golden age of advertising, powered by technology, and I, for one, can’t wait to see what happens next.

Remember that Google also thinks that 75% of online advertising will be social by 2015. Which I certainly won’t argue with – we believe that this is a huge shift that people have not realized yet, for the most part. I don’t see how it’s a $200 billion business UNLESS it’s very different from just putting the same messages up in a banner online – that means interactivity, creativity and virality are paramount in the new advertising paradigm.

The new RTB partners include Turn, Chango and XA.net. There are now more than 20 partner companies on the CONTEXTWEB RTB Platform.

Integration with the CONTEXTWEB RTB Platform means partner firms can provide their clients with instant access to 200 million daily impressions from more than 11,000 direct publisher relationships. Of the 200 million daily impressions available, an industry high, 90% provide the referring URL, with 40% being expandable, rich media-enabled.

CONTEXTWEB, which specializes in RTB, provides 31 impression-level data attributes, including full-page URL, referrer URL, fold count position and expandable rich media acceptance coding. All bid calls contain the patented Real-Time Classifier categorization from CONTEXTWEB.

“We are excited to be integrated with CONTEXTWEB given their significant percentage of rich media expandable inventory available through their RTB Platform,” said Bill Demas, President and CEO of Turn. “Our clients use the Turn Platform’s data and media management capabilities to reach custom audiences at scale, and being able to apply those capabilities from CONTEXTWEB in brand-safe expandable inventory is a big win for many of our brand advertisers.”

“The RTB API documentation from CONTEXTWEB was so complete, and the onboarding process was so easy, we should have interconnected a long time ago,” said Chris Sukornyk, CEO of Chango. “We look forward to accessing the footprint of mid- and long-tail publishers CONTEXTWEB has available via RTB.”

“XA.net’s ability to combine social media, retargeting and audience targeting via RTB will be greatly enhanced through the vast supply of rich media inventory available to us from CONTEXTWEB,” said Rob Leathern, CEO and Founder, XA.net. “This will help us to continue to provide the most efficient, targeted and performance-driven ad spend possible.”

“The addition of Turn, Chango and XA.net to our partnership program is a further validation of the ‘smart impressions’ we provide bidders at the CONTEXTWEB RTB Platform,” said Jay Sears, General Manager of the CONTEXTWEB Ad Exchange. “The combination of deep customer views through attribute data and a completely brand-safe environment delivers a unique blend of performance and peace of mind.”

For more information about CONTEXTWEB and Real-Time Bidding, please submit a request.

For more information on Turn, visit www.turn.com.

For more information on Chango, visit www.chango.com.

For more information on XA.net, visit www.xa.net.

Contacts:

Marx Communications

Wendy Marx, 203-445-2850

Nielsen estimates that by the end of this year smartphones will overtake feature phones in the United States. One in two Americans will have a smartphone by Christmas.  And along with all those smartphones come lots of apps, games, browsing, and social networking. In fact, the iTunes Store had estimated revenue of $1.7 billion in 2010, and the Android Market increased its revenue to $102 million, up from $11 million the year before.

With all those eyes glued to their smartphones advertisers are taking notice and delivering SMS and MMS messages, banner and full-page ads on Mobile Internet sites, mobile search ads, in-application advertising and mobile video on a CPM and CPC basis. According to Dane Holewinski, Director of Marketing at Greystripe, mobile advertising will be bigger than television advertising for these four reasons:

1. Advertisers will be able to access their audience anywhere and at any time since everyone carries around their smartphone. Television relies on someone being home and watching.
2. Mobile phones are increasingly become THE most important accessory. It connects people to the things they love like family, friends, pictures, social networking, songs..the list goes on and on.
3. People watch TV but they interact and engage with their phones – tactile interaction like touch, pinch to zoom, tap to choose.
4. Ads on television are no longer showing as good of results as other mediums. They are expensive to implement and difficult to update.

If trends are true mobile advertising will be worth $5.04 billion in 2015. That’s a number that’s hard to dismiss.

Given the opportunity to speak about remarketing/retargeting, XA.net CEO Rob Leathern, was pleased with the crowds and session attendance and had this to say:

“People across online advertising disciplines are committed to learning all they can – to incorporate best practices and new technologies for improved campaign performance. Remarketing connects search and display advertising efforts like no other technology, and, when used correctly, can drastically improve conversion metrics for both mediums. It was good to see so many people engaged on the subject.”

Rob’s portion of the panel presentation focused on case studies that showed the best practices XA.net has used implementing retargeting/remarketing for clients’ display campaigns.

Check out Rob’s Introduction to Remarketing presentation slides.