Read the press release here.

Take The Helm NYC is a competition run by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) designed to attract the ”best and brightest” technology companies to cluster in Lower Manhattan.

“Wall Street is world-famous for financial trading, whilst Manhattan is the home of brand advertising. This is the natural home for Grapeshot’s new move to the US market,” says Grapeshot CEO John Snyder.

Grapeshot will use the winner’s prize money to build out its New York team to service an array of new customers recently signed up to use its popular ”keyword contextual” tools.

“Few people realize that digital ads today are traded like stocks on exchanges, and our technology shows buyers what is on an internet page, before they bid for, and finally buy, an ad slot in the exchange,” explains Snyder. Analyzing over 15 billion bids per day, Grapeshot Keywords is the most used data service on New York’s premier ad exchange.

“I am just so impressed by how bold the NYCEDC has been to organize this competition and attract so many companies to Lower Manhattan. Coming from Cambridge, England, the opportunity to participate in growing New York’s emerging LoMa technology cluster is an invitation to be part of the new heartbeat of New New York,” said John Snyder.

About Grapeshot

Grapeshot uses keywords to target and exclude ad placements online, helping customers boost performance and brand with confidence.

Target what you want, exclude what you don’t; to the page level, using your own keywords. Move beyond whitelists, prospect for cookies, or add scale to your campaign with 100% brand protection.

Grapeshot’s technology is based on algorithms developed at Cambridge University to generate keyword profiles. Grapeshot leads the market in keyword contextual targeting, with offices in London, New York, Amsterdam, and Cambridge, UK.

www.grapeshot.co.uk

The New Firefox Cookie Policy

This MediaPost Story

Here’s the Mozilla Bug Report Discussing the Measure

Jonathan Mayer, a developer at Firefox, has announced that from v22 of its open-source browser, Firefox will begin blocking all third-party cookies. What’s a third party cookie?

“Roughly: Only websites that you actually visit can use cookies to track you across the web.”

Who does that exclude? Ad networks. Which means that, if this goes ahead, retargeting on the exchanges is nixed for 23% of the non-mobile browser market share.

What’s causing this? Two possibilities.

1) Slating this measure for release in June might be brinkmanship: a bluff response to disrespect for Do Not Track measures already in use in Firefox and other browsers. Part of this is problem about how to interpret default Do Not Track settings and the notion of consent.

2) Cookie tracking still has the “creepy factor.” No matter how much the industry kicks and screams about the harmlessness of cookie targeting, users still do not like to be tracked. Firefox, being part of the Open Web Foundation, is responding to this dislike to capture market share.

One upshot of this measure would be reduced revenues for many websites, especially those websites that cater more heavily to Firefox’s biggest market segment: tech-savvy (post-)college graduates. A page impression with cookie data associated tends to command a higher price because of the greater predictability of the user’s behavior.

With that in mind, how should players in the ecosystem respond?

1) Publishers might start dropping first-party cookies on their users and selling this data either through DMPs or to select partners. They would do this with Grapeshot, as several of our publisher partners already have, by dropping keywords for context-specific data to retarget later, either to extend their audience on other sites, or to sell as behavioral data.

2) Everyone gets more interested in contextual.

Here’s a screenshot of the new Firefox cookie setting:

Some Data on Browser Usage Share

One trade desk ran Grapeshot across 53 different campaigns in November 2012: a total of 500 million impressions.

While Grapeshot targeting was used on 4% of delivered impressions across the campaigns, Grapeshot-targeted lines won 7% of their clicks, 15% of their profit, and 22% of their conversions.

Grapeshot’s performance on 4% of impressions

“Grapeshot Keywords generated a big percentage of our performance on a small percentage of spend—just the advantage we were looking for…”

 

 

 

 

 

Grapeshot Keyword Contextual

Target what you want, exclude what you don’t to the page level, using your own keywords.

BOOST PERFORMANCE

—Grow Your Cookie Pool: Profile and target new users engaged with relevant content cost-efficiently
—Drive Audience Conversion: Win more bids, knowing cookies you target are brand-interested
—Add Efficiency: Identify and optimize to the content that is converting best for each campaign

BRAND WITH CONFIDENCE

—Grow Spend: Improve client belief that ads placed in the “auto” channel won’t include “car crash”
—Expand Reach: Move beyond whitelists to relevant, transparent content perfect for each campaign
—Reduce Cost: Brand-sate contextual can be more efficient and effective than cookie-only targeting.

Grapeshot is available for keyword contextual targeting on AppNexus, Turn, and FlashTalking.

For more info, call Grapeshot or email info@grapeshot.net:

+1 646 351 1500 (US/CAN)
+44 203 284 6262 (EMEA)

There’s a scandal in the UK at the moment. Several economy meat products have been found to contain horsemeat when they shouldn’t.

Supermarkets and food producers can prepare for a deluge of negative placement on their online ad display campaigns.

With Grapeshot, supermarkets and food producers can avoid these negative placements in real time, by using custom Brand Protection channels to exclude all pages containing sensitive keywords from their banner campaigns.

Here’s what it would look like:

In Grapeshot, you just add keywords to the channel to be excluded using a drag-and-drop interface. Grapeshot suggests additional keywords in real time to help you build the channel. The suggestions are not based on a dictionary, but on the words on webpages on the real Internet. The corpus of words is automatically updated as Grapeshot crawls the web.

Here are the Suggestions:

Grapeshot makes protecting brands easy. Besides safeguarding the image of the brand, Custom Brand Protection improves campaign performance by eliminating impressions on content that is unlikely to generate clicks.

Just imagine someone forwarding an email with your burger brand next to a story about contaminated meat! Worry no more.

In the past most media-buyers have been happy enough using a combination of IAB-compliant brand safety strategies and black-/whitelists. The problem with this is that it is not sensitive to the needs of the brand. It’s not really brand safety—it’s just standard safety.

That’s why Grapeshot’s Brand Protection, combined with positive keyword contextual targeting, is the next step forward: it’s truly sensitive to the needs of the brand—and to the needs of the campaign.

New York, USA

Grapeshot’s keyword contextual channels are now live on the Turn platform.

Turn clients can use Grapeshot channels to target impressions whose contexts are relevant to the creative being served. Whilst buyers have previously used domain whitelists and static categories, Grapeshot uses keywords.

Brands can now rely on clear and consistent sets of keywords, even when the page or domain inventory is in constant flux. Inventory is categorized pre-bid, at the page level using defined sets of positive keywords (for targeting) and negative keywords exclusion (for precise brand safety).

“In the competitive market for cookies, buyers can now find relevant URL-bids to make their audience-retargeting more safe, precise and economically efficient”, says Grapeshot CEO John Snyder. “We see the rise in demand for Dynamic Creative Optimization and the need to actively prospect for new cookie audiences both re-introducing context as a key part of tactical media-buying on the trading desks.”

“It is great to have Grapeshot on board with Turn in the US and Europe, increasing our clients’ contextual targeting capability with the value of keywords. It’s the next step in creating maximum efficiency and efficacy for top brand and agency marketers,” said David Simon, Director of Business Development at Turn.

“We are excited to integrate with the Turn platform as agency teams have been requesting the use of keyword contextual inside their favorite DSP,” confirms John Snyder. “We expect the resolution of the page content, at keyword level, will encourage stronger adoption of RTB by the large brands which have demanded higher levels of transparency and accountability before they swing their budgets across. Keywords delivers that confidence.”

Grapeshot is shipping pre-defined “Standard” channels in the Turn console, as well as the Grapeshot Keywords app for buyers to create “Custom” channels fashioned around the keyword needs of each brand. Agencies with a heritage in PPC Search performance advertising can now drive display advertising with the same keyword levels of precision and performance.

ENDS

www.grapeshot.co.uk

www.turn.com

About Grapeshot

Grapeshot provides next-generation keyword-contextual technology, for deep precision targeting and brand safety based on collections of keywords. Over 50 pioneers in the online advertising industry use Grapeshot to underpin their buying and selling, including Xaxis, Glam Media, Mail Online, Thomson Reuters, Yell, IPC Media, Telegraph Media Group, Adconion and Microsoft’s Mi9. Follow @GrapeshotRTB on Twitter.

About Turn

Turn delivers real-time insights that transform the way leading advertising agencies and marketers make decisions. Our cloud applications and Internet-scale architecture work together to provide a complete picture of customers, execute cross-channel campaigns, and connect with a worldwide ecosystem of more than 100 partners. Turn is headquartered in Silicon Valley and provides its platform, products, and services worldwide. Company revenue has more than doubled every year of Turn’s existence. For more information, visit turn.com or follow @turnplatform.

In its second piece on the rise of the ad tech app ecosystem, ExchangeWire speaks to another European player building a buy-side app that can be run across multiple platform partners. Here CEO John Snyder discusses the Grapeshot app in more detail and its approach to building on the pipes of the new programmatic eco-system.

What is the app? How does it work?

Grapeshot Keywords was launched in April 2012 on AppNexus App Marketplace and quickly had 50+ buy-side customers using positive and negative keywords to target and avoid certain pages in the AppNexus bid stream. Over 12 billion ads a day have the actual pages analysed by Grapeshot, with each page profiled at the raw keyword level. Grapeshot channels are also defined by keywords, giving the power for customers to craft their own keyword sets for each brand – and opening up full transparency of how segments are defined. The app also shows matching inventory – the type of pages in which your campaign will run – for each channel.

Read More:

http://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2012/12/17/the-rise-of-the-ad-tech-app-ecosystem-series-grapeshot-discusses-its-keywords-app-multi-platform-approach/

As usual, we’ll start off by coming up with some words and phrases that are unique to the context of Christmas: ‘Christmas’, ‘advent’, ‘nativity’, and ‘Rudolph’ and follow the steps from the previous blog entry.

Then, let’s see what Grapeshot Keywords suggests!

In general, the closer the ‘Suggestions’ are to your intention for the channel, the more suitable the Keywords you have in your channel for context you intend. This is because the Suggestions are actually drawn from Grapeshot’s probabilistic analysis of the real text on the web. If they are what you want, then the context is right.

Let’s add to the channel to broaden the context of the targeting around things like gifts and Christmas shopping.

We built this channel by taking a look at news stories around Christmas and finding common phrases like ‘countdown to Christmas’ and ‘stocking filler’ that are unique to the Christmas context.

Using unique phrases and keywords is the best way to ensure that you target only the intended context. If you were to use the keyword ‘stocking’ you might expect to target other contexts involving stockings, like clothing. ‘Christmas stocking’ and ‘stocking filler’ are much better.

Depending on the product for which you are advertising, you may wish to add keywords that are more product-specific to the Christmas channel, like ‘iPad’, ‘Surface tablet’ or ‘Nexus 7’.

This channel is more generally about Christmas, but the keywords in it would also work well with many of the keywords in the Grapeshot Standard channels about electronics, food, or drink.

Let’s see how the Christmas channel is matching RTB inventory!

Great! Those are some great matches around topics like greeting cards, recipes, carol lyrics, and so on. About as Christmassy as the Internet gets!

Merry Christmas from Grapeshot, and a Happy New Year!

That’s right. It’s Kate Middleton. Kate Middleton has just become pregnant with the future heir to the throne of the United Kingdom.

A spectacular topic for ad revenue, as it’s currently the top news topic on the world’s most read online news website, the Daily Mail (incidentally, one of our clients).

Who would advertise around this news topic? Anyone selling baby products, or nausea remedies, or pregnancy wear. That sort of thing.

But how would you go about targeting pages like this in RTB? Let’s see.

Load up Grapeshot Keywords (this is how it looks in AppNexus’s RTB Console), and click ‘Create Channel’.

Let’s get down to business!

After this, we just click ‘Create Channel’ at the bottom right.

Here are the keywords in our channel. And there are the suggestions, on the right-hand side. Easy.

It’s making some fairly good suggestions already. Drag and drop, or type more words, until you’re satisfied. I’m going to stick with this for now.

I wonder what kind of AppNexus RTB inventory it’s matching? Let’s check. Click ‘Matches’ at the top of the channel.

Great!

Pretty refined. I suppose the last thing to do is check the new channel’s coverage. In the time it took me to type this paragraph, Grapeshot Keywords has already updated to show me a forecast of the channel’s coverage.

10.7 million impressions on royal baby stories available per day. Not too shabby.

Have fun!

http://www.adexchanger.com/online-advertising/grapeshot/