Among the newly introduced features are:

• MediaMind HTML5 Factory – an integrated authoring tool for HTML5 Rich Media ads
• MediaMind Video Ad Designer - a WYSIWYG tool made to assemble interactive video ads (VPAID) that are compliant with DG’s IAB award-winning AdAPPter format.

Also featured in this product release are enhancements to DG’s Analytics product surrounding video metrics as well as significant additions to Smart Versioning, DG’s market-leading dynamic creative optimization (DCO) solution.

Staying true to its heritage as a provider of scalable advertising through technology, DG continues with this release to integrate its various tools to enable a smooth campaign process from creative production all the way to ad delivery, measurement and optimization.

A new metric shaking up the online advertising industry, viewability indicates the percentage of ads that were seen versus served. There is a significant correlation between viewability and performance; the 63 percent of rich media ads that were viewable showed a 54.5 percent boost in click-through rates versus total served ads.

Here are some key points from the report relevant to APAC:

• The biggest global benchmark – analysed over 600 billion display ad impressions from 47 countries worldwide.
• Japan and Malaysia made up the largest portion of impressions served in Asia.
• Japan is also accounted for the bulk of in-stream video served by MediaMind in the region.
• East Asia experienced better click-through rates (CTRs) than North America, particularly formats like standard banners, rich media, in-stream video and mobile.
• South Asia is a developing market with strong prospects of moving digital ads at scale, boasting high dwell rates, average dwell times and expansion times
• Australia and New Zealand are mature markets that is driving the overall economic growth, including digital advertising

The Benchmarks include a comprehensive analysis of complete 2012 engagement metrics from more than 600 billion display ad impressions from 47 countries worldwide. The full report is available for download here, whereas the infographic is available here.

Ad management platform DG is now entering the Asia Pacific region with a new corporate identity created to unified all of its TV and online solutions under one single corporate umbrella.

MediaMind,  the organization’s online product line will continue to exist as the platform’s name and there is also a  new TV-online integration product line call ‘VideoFusion’ .

“Through our acquisitions, DG is uniquely positioned to accelerate the convergence of advertising across an ever increasing number of screens,” said Neil Nguyen, CEO and President of DG. “Unifying all our brands and technologies under the DG umbrella will make it easier for all advertisers to take full advantage of our unique offering. We believe that the most powerful branding messages should be delivered with sight, sound and motion and when it comes to serving ads, we always aim to be ‘Spot on.’”

Developed by the world-renowned Chermayeff & Geismar, DG’s new brand hierarchy and ‘Spot on.’ tagline celebrates the spot as the core creative element of advertising.

Read the full press release here.

The Agency Working Group evaluated over six dozen entries to arrive at the five creative ad product concepts that will become the IAB’s first-ever Digital Video ad format standards.

“This attests that DG, the world’s leading ad management and distribution platform, truly offers a cross-platform solution to advertisers globally,” said Gianluca Milano, VP, Sales Engineering and Professional Services, DG.

According to Peter Minnium, Head of Brand Initiatives, IAB, “DG MediaMind’s entries scored among the top in the “Ad Control Bar” and “TimeSync” categories.

Rising Star Ad Control Bar: AdAPPTER

AdAPPTER allows you to take your existing pre-roll video and make it interactive. It includes social links, image and video galleries and twitter feeds all in one.

View demo here

Rising Star Time Sync: Sidebar and Timeline

Sidebar showcases products and messages throughout the video with interactive images that change based on the content in the ad and can expand to give more details. Perfect for CPG/retail and travel clients.

View demo here

Timeline lets you create interactive “bookmarks” throughout the video so the user can get numerous calls-to-action throughout the experience.

View demo here

The evaluation process included quantitative scoring to get to a short-list and then qualitative discussion to determine the final winners. In this latter phase, in addition to further culling, entries were clustered into the five winning ad product concepts.  This is why there are twelve winning companies and five Digital Video Rising Stars.

DG MediaMind has been invited and will join the IAB Digital Video Ad Control Bar Rising Star Working Group and IAB Digital Video TimeSync Rising Star Working Group with fellow digital video innovators to define, build, and implement these Digital Video Rising Stars.

For the full press release on the IAB site, click here

TAG Heuer is one of the most recognized global brands in luxury timepieces – representing an elite level of technical achievement and style.

The brand maintains its larger-than-life  image not only with A-list celebrity ambassadors, but also with large-format attention-grabbing ad creative that often exceed publisher specs.

In the Fall of 2012, the company wanted to take a real-time approach to optimizing its online campaign performance while retaining its oversized, attention-grabbing creative.

The client was also interested in impression quality and tracking ad viewability. It selected the DG MediaMind ad serving platform to provide both optimization and ad serving in one solution.

Results

With real-time performance of the two versions in hand, the team determined that creative with fewer frames and more product information grabbed user attention and delivered more clicks.

Using MediaMind real-time optimization, the TAG Heuer LDC Campaign improved CTR and Dwell by 28.0% and 50.3%, compared to the benchmark metrics at week two.

Using DG MediaMind Ad Serving provided multiple benefits for this client: real-time optimization; more robust metrics including viewable impressions; and seamless execution of its signature oversized ads delivered significant improvements in both dwell and CTR for this elite luxury brand.

Download this case study in PDF

Related articles

• TAG Heuer Gets Timely with MediaMind

This article was originally posted in Marketing Magazine Australia.

Mazda2 homepage takeover with synchronised units

The creative team at JWT hit first gear with this homepage takeover ad in which robotic arms deftly deconstruct and reassemble the entire page to showcase the new Mazda2, itself newly reassembled with less weight and more power. Developed with the brand’s fun-to-drive spirit in mind, the takeover promotes the model’s new slimmed-down design and slimmed-down pricing for the ad’s audience. (View demo.)

Nissan Qashqai with 360-degree webcam

OMD developed a winning strategy for the launch of the new Qashqai integrated 360-degree webcam that synergised the innovative spirit of the brand. The goal was to trigger the interest of users and encourage them to experiment with the brand using a game-style PC-mobile combination. This helped to position the brand as one that strives on technology and innovation. Consumers in Spain loved this ad, for obvious reasons. (View demo.)

Samsung Smart TV

The main concept behind the Samsung Smart TV creative was to showcase its unique user interface, together with the enriching content internet-connected TV offers. Using subtle speech bubbles, videos and hand icon representation to simulate the motion and voice control experience ‘online’, Samsung achieved strong brand awareness and recall for its new Smart TV. The success of the concept is reflected in the benchmark-breaking results of the campaign. (View demo.)

REI homepage takeover with carousel

BBDO developed a ‘gear that inspires’ strategy targeting outdoor enthusiasts who have a symbiotic and emotional relationship with their gear: they expect gear to continually evolve through technology and their gear challenges them to reach goals they’ve set for themselves. The goal was to emphasize REI’s deep understanding of this relationship and their ability to provide gear outdoor enthusiasts want and need in every situation mother nature brings their way. (View demo.)

CBS Volvo S60 in-stream video

The ad unit for Volvo’s all-new S60 was the perfect extension to its ‘Naughty’ campaign giving users the chance to be naughty themselves. They could drive the car over the banner leaving behind a pattern of tire marks as well as kick up dirt, gravel and oil across the screen. This was really great execution, purposefully provocative and polarising, forcing people to think of Volvo in unexpected ways. It also effectively positioned the Volvo S60 as racier and more powerful than any previous Volvo model. (View demo.)

Samsung ‘Take Part’ Olympics expandable ad

Calling all Olympic Games fans across the globe. Samsung, the official wireless partner of the London 2012 Olympic Games, built this expandable banner ad to promote their Olympic Games app, ‘Samsung Take Part 2012′. The app allowed you to play games and compete with friends. (View demo.)

Gatorade ‘Win From Within’ synchronised banners

Iris Worldwide developed ‘Win from Within’ as part of Gatorade’s 2012 brand campaign in a bid to build awareness and consumer education of the G-Series Pro range. Utilising Gatorade’s British Cycling and Triathlon assets, they built a range of talking banner suites to showcase the science behind the range, while integrating teasers for three new videos, to encourage interaction on specific cycling and triathlon websites and ultimately drive purchase of the range via Gatorade’s online store. (View demo.)

The Campaign homepage takeover and trip to win

To promote the release of Warner Bros’ new election comedy The Campaign, starring Will Farrell and Zach Galifianakis, creative agency Substance, working with PHD, designed and built a sliver format for the MSN Sports homepage. The aim was to showcase the trailer and encourage users to vote for their favourite character by simply clicking on their face. Results were collected in almost real time and the units ‘remembered’ which character the user voted for so that on viewing the ad for a second time, they would get a ‘personal thank you’ message from the candidate. (View demo.)

Danone VPAID

Danone wanted to increase the engagement of its creatives on the Internet, so they agreed on testing new formats that increase its levels of interaction. The new VPAID (video player ad interface definition) interactive pre-roll was a perfect solution that converts a linear spot into something new. The user can now interact, learn more about the product and get discounts for testing. (View demo.)

The takeaway into 2013 is this: when you add great creativity to cutting-edge ad technology, the sky is the limit for what you can do to engage your audience. Top agencies are getting increasingly smart about their use of media, creative and data for enhanced campaign performance. Whether it’s rich media, video, dynamic ads, mobile or other emerging media, marketers must keep experimenting, making sure they take advantage of cross-channel opportunities technology makes available.

Adx: We are happy to see that you-MediaMind has successfully run a couple of ad serving projects with local publishers which are willing to follow the IAB standards. And also from your presentation, we know that MediaMind have worked with PPTV to push VAST in China. That is a huge breakthrough.

Dean: Yes, absolutely. China shows great potential and faces great changes. That’s why we are here. China’s publishers need to embrace that kind of changes. Unless they take this turning point， they are going to face limited options in the future.

Adx: Yes, that’s true. So do you have any experience in other countries being through periods resembling to China Market and what kind of problems did you encounter at that time?

Dean: Well, actually the entire online advertising industry has been through this stage of standardization. Publishers first built websites and afterwards they thought about doing advertising to make money. They built up their own working model from then. This happened in the western countries too. But obviously for scalability reason and in order to make things easier for agencies and the advertising industry, there needs to be some rules and standards. Therefore, we have the IAB which is the turning point for online advertising because before that everybody did their own thing. The problem was no agency and advertiser would work with one exclusive partner. So if each partner has different rules, it would make the whole industry complicated, leading to bad creativity. And bad creativity led to bad results. Then publishers had to fake results to make them look good and ended up in this crazy spiral. China has got itself in that spiral and has been in that spiral for many years. The western industry realized that thinking long time ago and worked together to help them get out of that spiral. And what happened is that we have much better creativity, much better consumer interaction and much better results.

The full article has been published in both Chinese and English. Click on the link to read the Part 1 and Part 2 of the interview.

During that time he sat down with Campaign Asia and talks about the challenges facing digital advertising and what the future looks like.

Here are some of the questions he answered:

What are the challenges facing marketers in Asia, and what are they asking for to help them?

The way consumers consume contents nowadays—they are everywhere, we can’t catch where they are, and brands can’t drive consolidated campaigns to reach out to them.

Marketers are constantly looking at cross-channel analytics to understand reach and impressions, to break the gap between online and offline. They also want to optimise their content.

What trends will we see in the region in the next year?

There will be three things: mobile advertising, video, and data still sucks.

Video will be an important element in advertising campaign in Asia, as it allows brands to extend the advertising opportunity online and create response among consumers. Display advertising allows brands to extend their opportunities online and create responses among consumers…. And you will see more premium content.

Multiscreen is becoming more common among consumers. It is still at the test and trial stage now, but it will become a normal thing in the next 18 months. Mobile and TV cannot be treated as separate channels anymore, and synchronisation is needed to put different devices together. All TV channels, be they of push content, on demand or from the internet, will also be connected.

To view the full article please click here:

http://www.campaignasia.com/Article/324630,qa-dgs-ricky-liversidge.aspx

To meet the challenge of updating Groupon’s daily offers in a timely manner without adding production costs, the      agency used MediaMind’s Smart Versioning dynamic creative optimization tool.

By creating and serving ads that were constantly updated with the deal of the day, sales revenues increased by 30%,  production    time and costs were lowered, and they are able to track ad performance on a publisher level to optimize  ROI.

Click here to read the full case study, or you can download the PDF

MediaMind’s Smart Versioning (SV) tool is a solution to that! In our recent research we analyzed two billion global SV campaign impressions and compared them to 300 billion global impressions from standard banner campaigns in two campaign categories: Direct Response and Branding.

Click here to download the full research PDF.