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Creative Ad Tech Firm Gazehawk's Founders Moving To Facebook

Gazehawk's founders are moving on to Facebook.

The company's technology was recently featured at the IAB's Annual Leadership Meeting for the insights its tech provides into the performance of creative - specifically its heat mapping technology to measure users' visual engagement with ads.

The company's founder Joe Gershonson and Brian Krausz announced the news on their site. Joe Gershonson tells AdExchanger that the the company's tech and intellectual property will be sold separately.

"GazeHawk Team Joins Facebook

When we founded GazeHawk, we chose to attack a truly difficult computer vision challenge. Our team took a problem that many thought to be impossible - using ordinary webcams to determine where volunteers were looking on their computer screens - and turned it into a powerful product with real potential. While we're still excited about the future of this technology, the time has come for us to move in a different direction.

While working on GazeHawk, we attracted the attention of the Facebook team, who were impressed with our ability to build out a powerful technology and platform. Likewise, we were impressed by the compelling story going on at Facebook today. As a result, we're happy to announce that we will be joining the Facebook team. There's a great culture at Facebook, focusing on fast, bold, innovative solutions, and we're looking forward to being a part of it. We'll be working on projects unrelated to GazeHawk, most likely on product and backend engineering.

GazeHawk's product and technology are not part of the acquisition and will remain completely independent of Facebook. GazeHawk has developed a best-of-class technology that does not exist anywhere else, and is committed to seeing it continue to provide benefits to others. The team welcomes suggestions and thoughts on potential options at team@gazehawk.com.

A huge thanks to Y Combinator, our other investors, our advisors, and everyone we've worked with over the last two years. It's been an amazing journey, and it wouldn't have been possible without you!

-- Brian & Joe"

Visit the site.

Though an acqui-hire of sorts, no doubt Facebook sees the need to speak to brands regarding insights on effective, premium advertising through the Facebook platform. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Gazehawk was a Y Combinator company and presented at last September's ad tech event.

Read more about the research that Gazehawk performed as part of the IAB's new portfolio of larger, "premium" ad units here.

The Business Insider says the Gazehawk team starts at Facebook next week.

By John Ebbert

True Action Network Chief Creative Seabrook Seeing Data and Performance Driving The Creative

True Action NetworkBilly Seabrook recently became Chief Creative Officer of True Action Network, the full-service ecommerce and digital marketing agency arm of GSI Commerce which is wholly-owned by eBay. Seabrook comes from Publicis' agency Digitas where he was the executive creative officer. Read the release.

Seabrook discussed his new role, "the big idea" and the shifting creative landscape with AdExchanger.

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AdExchanger: How would you say digital is transforming culture in creative agencies today?

BS: It's an interesting question and it relates to True Action because it was one of the motivators for me to join the agency.

One of the biggest trends that's happening – and a lot of people have recognized this, especially the creative - is within the agency holding company model, there's an unfortunate reality that a lot of the agencies tend to compete against each other.

This competitive culture that's built into the structure ultimately has consequences on the creativity and the deliverables to clients. There's a lot of land grabbing going on, if you will. And how it relates to True Action is interesting because it's unique in the marketplace -especially with the relationship with eBay - in that, all of the agencies within the fold are designed to be compatible and complementary. So you can build off each other and apply the skills and share business across multiple agencies within the family, which is mutually beneficial. I think that type of culture inspires people and creative, in particular. Ultimately, it delivers great work to the clients because there's nothing getting in the way of a good idea.

Can you see marketers starting to bring creative in-house? In some ways, does True Action represent that sort of shift?

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How Do Search Marketers Overcome The Creative Challenge In Graphical, Display Advertising?

Display Creative and SearchIt is well-chronicled that the "creative" element among the optimization triad of audience, context and creative remains the biggest wildcard when driving a campaign's performance. And for search marketers moving into display, addressing "creative" isn't just about text ads anymore as they must deal with the nuance and complexity of creating compelling graphical display ad units.

So, AdExchanger.com asked a group of industry experts from the search side of the ad ecosystem the following question:

"How do search marketers overcome the creative challenge in graphical display advertising?"

Click below or scroll down for more to read the answers:

Kirstin Peters, Director, Performance Innovation, Performics (Publicis)

"The creative elements to graphical display advertising are definitely more of an opportunity than a challenge for search marketers. Search marketers thrive in testing and optimization environments, so moving from limited character text to larger ad units in multiple sizes and formats means more components within the ad to test/optimize and add unique value.

Dynamic creative optimization tools will be key in enabling marketers to do this efficiently and without an army of designers and traffickers. Headlines, images, products, and calls-to -action can be tested individually and/or as part of a composite ad unit, giving search marketers a high potential for optimization over CTR. Dynamic creative units can also be optimized against specific audience segments, providing even more optimization opportunity.

Ultimately, marketers taking a search-like approach to biddable display (via DSPs) should be able to integrate dynamic creative optimization with audience buying and real time bid decisioning, which offers search marketers unprecedented potential to impact conversion/ROI via display."

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Collective To Acquire Dynamic Creative Tech Company Tumri

Collective and TumriAccording to multiple sources, and the company itself has now confirmed, Collective will announce the acquisition of dynamic creative ad tech company Tumri shortly as the ad tech ecosystem M&A has continued to accelerate in recent weeks (AdMeld by Google on June 13, Performable by Hubspot and MediaMind by DG on June 16).

After competitor Teracent was acquired by Google in November of 2009 - as well as Adroit Interactive by MediaMath, Dapper by Yahoo! and ADISN by CrowdGather in 2010 - Tumri has gone through a change in management and a strategy shift which moved the company towards providing multi-variate, creative ad tools versus services.

Last September, Tumri CEO Hari Menon told AdExchanger.com (AdExchanger.com Q&A), "Going forward, we believe that value will come much more from our clients using our software and less from Tumri providing direct services to those clients. Either way, what is important is that the advertiser sees the value of our solutions and achieves their objectives."

With this announcement, Collective will have made its third acquisition of the year after buying Oggifinogi, a rich media ad tech company focused video ad creative, in February, and UK-based WebTV Enterprise, a video ad network, in March. Tumri not only brings display ad multi-variate tech in-house but additional staff familiar with the details of today's display advertising challenges and opportunities.

In general, dynamic ad creative tech has been increasingly seen as a "point solution" within a larger media buying, ad tech platform or end-to-end marketing stack which Collective appears to be building.

According to CrunchBase, Tumri had raised $31 million since its founding in 2004. Investors include Time Warner Investments and existing investors Accel Partners, Shasta Ventures and Tenaya Capital.

UPDATED at 1:30 p. ET: Collective formally announced the acquisition of Tumri. Release is below:

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CEO Kartzman Sees Growth For Spongecell, Continuing Fragmentation For The Industry

SpongecellBen Kartzman is CEO of Spongecell, a creative ad technology company.

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AdExchanger.com: How much has the company changed - or not - in the last year?

BK: We've significantly expanded the team - 35 today. And, we're starting to look at a bigger opportunity here - not only on the product side, but also the global sales opportunity for us, too.  We've got more clients, and those clients being big brands domestically.

It's interesting that you added the “how much has it changed or not.”

Part of the core mission and product hasn't changed all that much in that we've stayed focused on building a technology platform that allows ads to be very professional, curated by creatives, yet can be built in a short amount of time.

I think we've stayed true to the mission and will continue to focus on enhancing the product, but at the same time build the architecture so it can scale.

What trends have you noticed on the client-side in the past year?

People are starting to realize that display is working for them, and it's a part of the media mix that is increasing.

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BoostCTR Creating Effective Copy At Scale For The Marketer Says Co-Founder Lenderman

BoostCTRRob Lenderman is Co-Founder, CIO-CMO of BoostCTR, a crowdsourced marketplace the optimization and testing of online ad creative.

AdExchanger.com: Where did the idea come for "BoostCTR"?

RL: A few years ago I was working at a company that inherited an AdWords account for a multi-million dollar company. They had not had a single text ad changed in three years.  We knew the leverage that you get from a better ad, so I started an internal contest at the company to see who could write the best ads.  I was so overwhelmed with my other responsibilities that I needed the help and figured a contest was the fastest way to get help and make it fun. We had 10 people from the admin to the VP write.  It was taking forever for me to get the ads, put them in the account, analyze the data, etc. so David and I had the idea of creating a tool to automate this. That was the first part of the idea.

It also turned out that I won the contest and some of the other marketing people involved actually wrote some of the worst ads, which was unexpected.  The admin finished in the middle of the pack. At that point David and I realized that the best person to write is not always the one managing the account: it’s generally the best writer with the best skillset, and sometimes just someone with a fresh perspective.  So the idea of creating a network of professional writers was born.  When we put the network of writers together with a tool that saves the SEM manager hours a week you have BoostCTR.com.

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It's Time to Search for Ads Says Moat Co-CEOs Jonah Goodhart and Noah Goodhart

MoatJonah Goodhart and Noah Goodhart are the Co-CEO's of Moat, a creative company.

AdExchanger.com: Please share a brief background on the executive team at Moat.

JONAH GOODHART: The company was founded by myself and Noah Goodhart. We brought on Ant Taylor as part of the founding team to serve as our GM. Mike Walrath serves as our Chairman.

Noah and I got our start in digital advertising in the late 90's with a company we founded called Colonize. Colonize earned revenue through online customer acquisition. We had clients such as American Express, Paypal, and AT&T. Display advertising was our largest distribution source and we became a very large buyer of display inventory, spending millions of dollars per year. In fact at one point we were advertising so much that we actually had more traffic than Google! Our media buying technology at that time was essentially Mike Walrath and some spreadsheets. Mike was working at DoubleClick where we bought a large portion of our inventory. We worked with Mike to find efficient ways to "bid" for inventory from choice publishers.

Overall though, the buying process for display was very manual and inefficient. In late 2002, Mike decided to leave his job and launch a new company to address this problem. We talked and decided to partner - he would start Right Media and we would fund it.

I imagine that most AdExchanger readers know the Right Media story so I'll skip that part but after Yahoo! acquired the company, Noah, Mike and I decided to form WGI Group in order to make angel investments (we've made over 20 so far). When Noah and I decided to launch a new venture, we surveyed the display landscape and saw several good companies working on the science of online advertising, but saw very few focused on the creative side - the art. So, we decided to launch Moat to work on the creative opportunity. After launching the company, we went about building our team and brought on Ant Taylor. Ant had been a rising star at Right Media and had decided to leave Yahoo! after spending a few years there managing the exchange. Ant saw firsthand the importance of creative as he worked with some of the biggest CPG companies in the world and decided to join Noah and I to help build Moat.

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POP Leveraging Brand Power To Engage Windows Gamer Audience Says Art Director Thiel

popSeattle-area creative shop, POP, recently collaborated with Microsoft to create a Games for Windows Marketplace as the digital agency was tasked with engaging the frenetic audience of online games. Read the release.

Nick Theil, art director on this project for POP, discussed the ins and outs.

AdExchanger.com: From a creative standpoint, how do you balance between creating excitement and interest for the end user, and getting them to buy something?

NT: This often depends on what you're trying to sell. Nike focuses on the exhilaration of competition and the thrill of the victory. Apple highlights beautiful and accessible design that will make your life better. In this case, Games for Windows (GFW) uses the brand power of the game titles to engage the user and a simple, clear interface to give them the most direct access to buy. Oh and offering some great prices definitely helps.

What are you trying to accomplish with the big images on the home page?

Great products usually speak for themselves, however the brand selling the product can sometimes get in the way. In this design the Games for Windows brand stepped quietly into the background in favor of elevating the individual game titles by making them larger than life. Ultimately the GFW brand accounts for only a fraction of the overall page design. Utilizing Microsoft's "Metro" visual style (seen in the new Windows Phone 7), the content, in this case the game titles, became the design.

How much usability testing did you do with gamers? Any learnings you can share?

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PointRoll VP Mead On New Ad Sequencing And Retargeting Research

PointRollIn a press release, creative ad technology firm PointRoll announced new research that it says showed, "Through ad sequencing, advertisers can actively and frequently engage users on a one-to-one basis by developing an ad sequence based on a user’s previous exposure or engagement with ads. The study found that by using sequencing, advertisers are able to better engage their audiences and facilitate them through the purchase funnel." Read the release (PDF).

PointRoll vp of business development and analytics Max Mead discussed sequencing and its attributes.

AdExchanger.com: First, please define what you mean by "sequencing."

MM: Sequencing is defined as a series of distinct creatives served within a single campaign. The triggers can be time-based (e.g. the creative changes daily), view-based (e.g. the creative changes after the user has seen a creative), or engagement-based (e.g. the creative changes after the user has interacted with a given creative). The latter two methods are currently only possible in the digital realm.

We get a lot of questions about how sequencing differs from retargeting. While both have the same goal of delivering a more personalized message based on a previous event, retargeting is set up as a distinct campaign, and the event triggering the retargeting is often an activity on a marketer’s website, email or other marketing channel. Sequencing, however, can be triggered by engagement with the advertisement itself. Because we typically see 5%-8% of people interacting with our ads, this creates a sizable pool of people available for future marketing. We have started working with some advertisers on a concept that we’re calling “upper-funnel retargeting” that brings this same ad engagement trigger concept into the retargeting realm and helps with scale.

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Reaction To Yahoo! Acquisition Of Ad Tech Firm Dapper

AdExchanger.com reached out to a cross-section of executives from the digital advertising ecosystem to gauge their reaction to the acquisition of display ad technology firm Dapper by Yahoo!

Bill Wise, CEO, MediaBank

"While the acquisition is reactive to Google's acquisition of Teracent last year, it is an deal that actually makes a ton of sense to Yahoo & its shareholders, and should be accretive. More holistically, Yahoo needs to become THE UNDISPUTED LEADER in display like Google became in search, which will require a much more proactive, innovative and visionary approach to driving share shift. Thus, I look forward to more deals like this and hope the integration leads to synergies across the Yahoo properties, as well as the Right Media Exchange..."

Elizabeth Blair, CEO, Brand.net

"The Dapper acquisition shows Yahoo! is moving forward again in display advertising technology. Most people forget that Yahoo! pioneered this technology in 2006 with "Smart Ads" and led the industry. It worked beautifully and clients loved it. But previous management decided to rebuild it from scratch, shutting it down (!) in the interim and outsourcing to Tumri and Teracent. Like most display initiatives, it fell behind Search projects (Panama) and Newspaper Alliance projects (APT). The error was compounded by letting Google pick up Teracent (and cheaply). So - it's symbolic of how and how badly Yahoo! lost its way. Positively, it's a sign that Yahoo! is serious about resurrecting its history of display advertising technology innovation. Google, Microsoft and Facebook are moving fast and closing the gap quickly. I want to see more, bigger, faster Yahoo! announcements focusing on technology and talent acquisitions, and superior execution, to catalyze promising first steps."

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