IPG Media Lab Leads Interpublic’s Investment In Samba TV

Read original story on: New York Times

Led by IPG Media Lab’s advisement, Interpublic Group (IPG) is taking a minority stake in Samba TV, a startup that specializes in advanced TV analytics. Following the announcement this morning, IPG looks to leverage Samba TV’s technology into actionable insights from audience behaviors, thereby developing more effective strategies for clients. “We’re always looking to fill the hole and find new opportunities to measure what was previously unmeasurable,” said Chad Stoller, a managing partner of the Lab.

Read our previous Partner Spotlight to learn more about Samba TV.

 

Header image courtesy of Samba TV’s Twitter

Get Ready For A New Industry Standard for Mobile and In-Store Measurement

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, six ad agencies, including IPG Mediabrands, recently selected Placed’s attribution product as the preferred tool for digital to in-store measurement, signaling a rising industry standard for mobile measurement.  As part of the partnership, the agencies will also get access to Placed’s insights tool that provides location analytics and examines customer traffic patterns.

Such new industry standard is both necessary and inevitable, considering the increasing prominence of smartphones in consumers’ everyday lives and the industry’s lack of efficient tools for mobile-to-store measurement. “We really look at attribution as a metric that’s going to help grow the category of mobile and give clients more confidence in mobile,” remarked our managing partner Chad Stoller, when IPG took a minority stake in Placed in September last year.

A confluence of new technology trends – from new, more intimate interfaces and advanced curation filters to hyperlocal technologies – is emerging as an unprecedented kind of measurable intimacy that connects brands with the modern consumers through their personal mobile devices. And the industry needs to keep up in this new trend by embracing new mobile measurement tools so as to better serve their audience with contextualized and relevant brand messages.

 

Editor’s Note: updated on 2/20/2014 to better reflect our 2015 Outlook.

Interpublic Invests in Mobile Measurement Company Placed

The Lab is very happy to report that our parent agency Interpublic has taken a minority stake in Placed, the Seattle-based mobile attribution company that we just featured in our partner spotlight last week. Placed measures mobile ads’ effectiveness in driving customers into stores, using a panel of consumers who in exchange for rewards have agreed to share their physical location data when they download a Placed app. They currently have the largest opt-in panel of mobile location data, with more than 200,000 smartphone users.

This investment was led by The Lab, and highlights our ongoing efforts to better measure the fast-growing mobile ad market.

“Attribution is a pain point of mobile,” said Chad Stoller, managing partner of IPG Media Lab, IPG’s media innovation and investment unit that will oversee the holding company’s relationship with Placed. “How do I know this is working? There need to be better metrics when it comes to mobile.”

For IPG, the Placed investment will help clients make more efficient mobile media buys, Mr. Stoller said. IPG will work with Placed as it develops its own proprietary ad products as well as leverage Placed’s data to strategize other types of media buys for clients, he added.

Online video ads get more attention

YuMe and IPG Media Lab, recently partnered on a research project to track relative attention level to video advertising in a lean forward PC experience vs. a lean back TV experience.  Specifically, we wanted to know:

  1. Do people pay attention to online video differently than they do when watching TV?
  2. If people have the option of avoiding advertising, will they, and how does it differ?
  3. If the experiences of watching TV and Online Video are different, should an online ad impression be valued the same way that TV ads are?

Continue reading “Online video ads get more attention”

Brian Monahan predicts digital things

What’s in store for digital in 2011? Brian Monahan, EVP, Managing Partner, IPG Media Lab offers his prediction in an interview for Ad Vision—a month long video series produced by Microsoft Advertising.  Brian was one of 30 global advertising experts interviewed for the series. Interviews are released every weekday. The first of the series was posted on May 9, 2011 and the last will mark the beginning of  Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

To view the full interview:

4 words that may change shopping forever

“I’m hungry.” “I’m bored.”

Groupon is building an entire experience around these four simple words with a unique little app called Groupon Now. The idea is that users open the Groupon Now mobile application and are presented with two buttons: “I’m hungy” and “I’m bored.” After selecting an option, the application presents users with a list of time-sensitive deals based on their location.

“It makes Google’s market look quite small if we get it right. It’s really tapping into the largest part of commerce in the U.S.—local,” says Groupon investor Harry Weller. Continue reading “4 words that may change shopping forever”

API-enabled ads pack more punch

The history of storytelling is as much about technology as it is about narrative. As humans have transitioned from the earliest cave scratches to the newest highly interactive digital experiences, the way stories are told have had a powerful influence on the stories themselves. As the number of media channels continue to blossom, marketers must not only become more familiar with existing tools, but stay relevant by seeking out competitive new platforms.

The IPG Media Lab‘s most recent Media Trial focused on one important new element of storytelling: data. Data sets are increasingly being structured and exposed via APIs so that third parties can grab and understand the data in real time. Weather, headlines, traffic, sports scores, tweets, videos, social data—the available data sets are only limited by your imagination. Marketers who can curate these streams in real time may be able to create more engaging and more impactful stories, with the results to match.

Continue reading “API-enabled ads pack more punch”

Predicting Peak Media

At the IPG Media Lab one of the things we track intensely is the ways in which consumers adopt new media technology into their lives.  As consumers have more options to connect with content, we’ve noticed a trend towards fully mediated lives.  Just as the Rotarians eliminated Polio, the engineers of Silicon Valley have seemingly eliminated boredom.  Consumers are filling the dead zones in their lives with content—in the elevator, on the bus, in the bathroom!

There is a concept called “peak oil“  that attempts to predict when oil production will max out. Estimates vary, but it’s predicted that peak oil capacity will happen at some point between 2006 and 2020. These estimates are predicated within the boundaries of known reserves and man’s ability to extract them. Continue reading “Predicting Peak Media”

Data is the new black….cyan, magenta, and yellow

Historically, ads have been closed systems. The information contained in the ad itself is fixed. Most of the interactivity in digital ads to date has been limited to the ability to link somewhere or to engage with content elements that were included in the unit at the time it was trafficked. But anyone who has ever looked at billboard that had a clock or thermometer knows the power of real time information to capture attention.
There is a new generation of rich media providers who now enable advertisers to pipe up-to-the-moment content into digital display ads. The number of data sources available by API is growing every day – weather, traffic conditions, UV index, Tweets, Facebook updates, you name it! The next generation rich media companies are working hard to make it easy for advertisers to incorporate these feeds while assuring the ads never break.
Continue reading “Data is the new black….cyan, magenta, and yellow”