The past couple years have been a nervous time for conference planners across the advertising industry: recessions have forced both B2B and B2C marketers to tighten their purse strings, potentially threatening both attendance of conference sessions and the amount of exhibitors and traffic on the show floor. The  exhibit floor at SES San Francisco had more elbow room than recent years, but organizers assured me that they had as many exhibitors and attendees as in the past, but that the new location of Moscone West was much larger.

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.

Partners Offer Scalable Solutions via the Creative Media Hub

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – August 18, 2010) –  XA.net, providers of advanced online media management and optimization platforms and services, celebrated its third consecutive profitable quarter, and announced the expansion of their partner service offerings with the Creative Media Hub, a marketplace of trusted partners providing scalable creative services and solutions.

“The XA.net team continues to add value and deliver performance for our clients with our audience-based advertising solutions,” said Rob Leathern, CEO and founder of XA.net. “Just like our data partner integrations, our Creative Media Hub allows our clients to find valuable services integrated with our buying platform to fit their needs,” Leathern added.

The Creative Media Hub’s initial vendors offer a variety of products and services fitting the budgets and needs of advertisers and agencies of all sizes:

• 4delite offers the first self-service rich media publishing platform to make eye-catching flash and HTML5 display ads for the web and mobile devices in minutes. All without writing one line of code.
• BoostCTR offers the only service that lets advertisers outsource the creation and testing of text ads through a marketing copywriter network. Advertisers only pay for ads that beat the performance of their best existing ads.
• Interpolls‘ next generation rich media technologies power campaigns for Fortune 500 marketers and their agencies, providing custom scalable solutions via HTML5, Flash, Video, and social media strategies.
• Oggifinogi is the leader in advanced rich media solutions providing the Real Time Rich Media (RTRM) suite of creative ad products delivering high-impact, feature-rich ad units with cutting-edge technology and analytics designed to deliver market leading ROI.
• OneScreen provides a video syndication and monetization platform enabling advertisers to deliver rich video experiences integrated with XA.net’s platform.

With offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and previous funding provided by prominent advertising technology investors including WGI Group, XA.net is poised to continue its momentum with proprietary real-time bidding and audience management technology, delivered through an easy and intuitive interface.

Today the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) announced the first publishers, networks, and ad exchanges committed to self-certification according to the bureau’s “Networks & Exchanges Quality Assurance Guidelines.” These guidelines, which were finalized and published late in June of 2010, seek to build better advertiser brand safety through “transparency of inventory sources, publisher relationships, content types,  and ad placement details.”

XA.net strives to bring value to advertisers through transparency and was excited to see that almost a third of the first organizations to commit to self-certification made up a significant portion of our inventory partners: AOL/Advertising.com, ContextWeb, Inc./ADSDAQ Exchange, Fox Audience Network, Google, and Yahoo!. XA.net’s CEO, Rob Leathern is a current member of the IAB Networks and Exchanges Committee.

Read the IAB’s full press release for more information about the certification process.

Today on AdExchanger.com, XA.net’s CEO Rob Leathern explains current issues between online ad inventory providers, sellers, and everyone in-between… in terms of doughnuts! “Why Prices of Real-time Bids are Overinflated” will help advertisers understand what goes on in RTB and suggests conventions to improve the transparency of the situation.

Read the feature on AdExchanger.com

XA.net’s CEO Rob Leathern has taken Facebook’s most recent user numbers and extrapolated growth rates for the top countries, based on published populations. Take  a look at Facebook growth ‘by the numbers’:

http://bit.ly/facebook500mm

As participants at Search Engine Strategies San Francisco happening August 16th to 20th at Moscone West, XA.net is happy to extend a 20% discount on conference passes to any one interested in increasing their knowledge of SEM, SEO, and social media strategies and tactics.

Enter priority code “SPGSF20″ during the registration process to receive 20% off.

XA.net CEO and founder Rob Leathern will be featured as a panelist during the Introduction to Remarketing session taking place Tuesday, August 17th, 4:15pm – 5:15pm. Search Engine Strategies is part of the larger inaugural Connected Marketing Week, which also includes events produced by the IAB and Online Marketing Summit.

Contact us if you would like to meet up during the week!

Monday, July 19th, XA.net proudly participated at OMMA Ad Nets in LA. Matt Esslinger, VP of Operations, participated in the “Grill the Vendors: Real Time Bidding” panel with senior executives from Triggit, Pubmatic, Collective Media, and AppNexus:

Here is a ustream recording of the session

Matt reinforced XA.net’s position that, while RTB is crucially important in the online ad industry for its transparency and efficiency and will continue to grow strongly, advertisers cannot yet abandon traditional tag-based CPM buying models, where the majority of publisher inventory still exists.

In this iMedia Connection article, XA.net CEO Rob Leathern discusses the evolution of the online advertising market, the nature and definition of the “DSP” and some of the developments the online display market has seen over the past 24 months.

XA.net has been one of the pioneers in the DSP space, providing media buying technologies and services to advertisers since 2008. We have built and own all our own technologies for campaign management, realtime bidding and audience management, and love what we do!