Rocket Fuel UK

Some great news to start our week, with Rocket Fuel being awarded a place on Forbes’ prestigious List of America’s Most Promising Companies.

Rocket Fuel ranks #22 on the Forbes list of America’s 100 Most Promising Companies, which Brett Nelson of the Forbes staff describes as “privately held up-and-comers with compelling business models, strong management teams, notable customers, strategic partners and precious investment capital.”

It’s these very tangible criteria, due diligence and credible data that makes this accolade a genuine badge of honour that will help fuel awareness, growth, investment, recruitment efforts, employee pride, and more.

It’s no mean feat to achieve a place on Forbes’ list. They use a combination of algorithms to crunch tons of data (from 30,000 sources — press releases and social networks to job boards and court filings — to come up with one score that measures a company’s potential), and then blend this data with good old-fashioned research — surveys, interviews, fact checking, and more.

This is a fantastic badge of recognition for our leading role in the industry, as well as in terms of Rocket Fuel’s global perception.

We’re hiring at Rocket Fuel UK, if you’re interested in joining us, please send your CV to infoUK@rocketfuel.com.

Rocket Fuel UK hosted a breakfast debate earlier this week looking at the question of, whether behavioural targeting outperforms contextual targeting when it comes to grabbing the attention of web users, or if it is the other way around. Which has the greatest impact and traction, and should these tactics be combined or do they work better as separate strategies?

Should the bulk of advertising budgets be kept in brand advertising within trusted and known content sites, or should it be reallocated to ‘the most precise audience you can reach,’ not necessarily engaged in reflective content.

I kicked off the discussion by talking about the fact that digital advertising is no longer a secondary channel in the chief marketing officer’s arsenal. Once a bastion of simple banner flipping and annoying pop-up ads, display advertising is rapidly overtaking traditional media as the preferred channel to drive targeted awareness and the customer pipeline.

Yet with all the advancements in digital formats and devices, the dramatic shift to digital advertising is more likely a function of data—the explosion of anonymous online databases categorising individual Web users based on their demographic attributes, surfing and purchase behaviour, and content preferences.

In 2011, the available data volume is predicted to grow to 1.8 zettabytes (a trillion gigabytes, that’s a 1 with 21 zeros trailing behind it), and data is crucial at Rocket Fuel, with the data warehouse having grown from five billion events to 30 billion events a year which takes 2 petabytes of storage.

The type of data is also becoming more sophisticated, not only including browsing behaviour, the referring url, site actions, etc, but can also track purchase intent, interests and psychographics, painting a rich portrait of the consumer, and reaching the consumer at the right time of day is crucial.

With a presentation entitled ‘Content is King’, Tom Bowman, VP Strategy and Operations at BBC Worldwide observed that advertising needs to shift from commercial messaging to consumer-led stories, augmented content, be innovative, engaging and fun.

Pointing out that the best definition of a brand is ‘the most valuable piece of real estate in the world – a corner of someone’s mind’, Tom pointed out consumers’ voracious appetite for content, but that the appetite for advertising is smaller, with Advertising Association tracking data showing how public favourability towards advertising has been in steady decline since the 1990s, but are far more welcoming of sponsorship and product placement.

He then discussed that when it comes to reach – the dominant role is still played by broadcasters and that TV watching is up, even in the new media age.

The role of the now covers the curation of content on any platform; and this is particularly important for brands looking to secure acceptance and viewership of content across multiple media platforms.

Tom concluded with a quote from John Hegarty: “Targeting specific audiences is a wonderful science but unless you include broadcast in some way within your marketing strategy you’ll be talking to an ever shrinking audience. And that’s not particularly good for the long term health of any company.”

The final speaker was Pete Robins, Managing Partner of Agenda 21 who spoke on the subject ‘From gut instinct to data instinct’.

Pete pointed out that serving effective ads is allowing exploration of content units in the form of ads or website hubs which means that data planning and exploiting technology becomes more crucial to get mass specificity.

And that a ‘mass of audiences’ is not a ‘mass audience’ – the message needs to be relevant to the individual given their scale and range.

Pete also pointed out that more channels means more opportunities and therefore more need for media agencies to keep up to date, and as digital becomes even more important to even more businesses. He speculated that it’s only going to get more complex – with a growing need for ‘depots’ of data sources that are reliable and that we have confidence in.

He concluded that the rules of engagement should be that technologies within digital media channels are rapidly exposing weaknesses in communications strategies and that the key will be to establish ‘why’ an individual will be saying things rather than just ‘what’.

Merging messaging with the right technologies which can increasingly take decisions based on swelling data sets should lead to be more specific across all digital touch points, and this will mean more relevancy – it means people will be able to opt in and opt out as they go, it ultimately gives them more choice and control.

What we can conclude from this debate is that it is not about using one tactic or another but it’s about understanding the usage and benefits of each and combining them to get the best results.

Richard Frankel, President and co-founder of Rocket Fuel, was featured in AdAge with the below article on how New Technology Allows Marketers to Target Buyers Down to the Prospect’s Tiniest Attributes.

When the online display industry got started over a decade ago, advertisers were focused on buying “eyeballs.” You tried to reach as many as possible for your budget, but targeting was rudimentary. To get to women, for example, you would buy an ad placement on an online women’s magazine.

Today, with real-time bidding and exchanges — and tools for analyzing petabytes of behavioral, contextual and sales data — advertisers buy not “eyeballs” but “audiences.” They go after targeted shoppers who are in the market for certain goods or are likely to be interested in a certain brand. Display-ad networks like Yahoo, AOL, Google Display Network, Audience Science, ValueClic or Specific Media provide a list of audience segments, and media buyers choose the ones they want to target. It might be “sedan shoppers” or “digital-camera buyers.”

But even audience buying is not finely tuned enough in a world where customers are finicky, highly adept at searching for products, brand-disloyal and impervious to all but the most targeted advertising messages. Consumers thinking about their next luxury sedan while browsing international vacation packages are different, for example, from folks deciding between buying a Veloster or a CR-Z this weekend. Yet most ad networks would treat all of these people as “sedan shoppers.”

So what’s next? It’s already here. Call it “artificial-intelligence targeting,” for lack of a niftier term. Media buyers might describe an ad placement like this: “men aged 35-44 with two kids who live in the Buffalo, New York, area, read car-enthusiast web sites, are in-market to buy a car, and love the Audi brand –- but could be tempted to buy a Lexus in the next 2 months.” But with this new technology we need not be limited to thinking in terms of a handful of attributes (say seven, as above). We can meaningfully use the tens of thousands of attributes that exist about consumers.

How is this possible? The surge in availability of behavioral, demographic, intent and other kinds of consumer data means media buyers have access to millions of real-time data points. Of course, to make sense of this ad data deluge, you need super-advanced software to crunch it, analyze it and spit out actionable metrics. Artificial-intelligence programs use advanced math to analyze the data, identify connections and adjust to patterns that emerge along the way. Each successive ad buy can be more and more targeted and effective.

As the targeting grows increasingly micro, marketers actually get more scale than they could before. Micro-targeting means micro scale if you use only 5 or 10 consumer attributes. But if you leverage tens of thousands of attributes, you will find lots more people who could be a good fit for your product or message. When we add in all the data, we increase performance (better accuracy) and scale (we find more people because we have more ways to find them).

To be effective using the new technology, a campaign will need to analyze as many of a prospect’s attributes as possible. It’s the difference between focusing, say, on “women age 25-44″ as opposed to “women age 25-44 who buy more than 12 pairs of shoes per year, live in a sunny climate, always buy full-price, favor gladiator sandals and love Jimmy Choo.” Success also requires updating campaigns in real-time as targets change.

Consumers don’t think of themselves as audiences, but as individuals with personal tastes and needs. Artificial intelligence allows media buyers to move beyond buying audiences and instead buy every ad with many individuals in mind.

You can also view this article on the AdAge site: http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/time-online-advertising-move-fashioned-audience-buying/230788/

When we announced our groundbreaking Real-Time Brand Optimization (RTBO) product back in April of 2010, we strongly believed that we could make brand advertising more effective in the digital world, addressing a real need in the marketplace.
While most ad targeting solutions only allow advertisers to optimize campaigns to meet online action goals, such as clicks, leads or conversions, traditional brand marketers want online campaigns to drive awareness, preference, purchase intent and in-store sales. But the advent of real-time media buying through ad exchanges made measuring, tracking and driving improvement in those metrics an impossible manual task.

RTBO takes brand sentiment feedback from in-banner surveys (we work with each client’s choice of Dimestore, Vizu or Dynamic Logic) and feeds it directly into our real-time targeting technology. We apply that data instantaneously to media buying decisions, enabling campaigns focused on driving upper and mid-funnel marketing metrics like awareness, consideration and purchase intent to get better as they are running.
Our agency and brand clients have wholeheartedly embraced the RTBO and brand metrics approach – we’ve literally run hundreds of campaigns optimizing to true brand metrics instead of clicks – and even more important they are seeing measurable, meaningful impact.
As Vizu CEO Dan Beltramo tells us “Real-time brand platforms like Rocket Fuel signal a needed shift to more brand relevant solutions for online advertising. In the campaigns that Vizu has measured, Rocket Fuel is a strong performer for driving brand lift metrics, even against endemic sites and portals.”
Today we announced the next generation of our solution for brand advertisers, and we’ve made our RTBO solution for brands even more effective by making it available across all digital channels including display, video and mobile, and for all client campaigns, even those run outside of Rocket Fuel.
There are a whole host of powerful new features, for the full list please read the press release.
To learn more about RTBO and what Rocket Fuel is doing for brands, please reach for us at infouk@rocketfuel.com.

Admittedly this is a bit of hyperbole, but in Forbes, Rocket Fuel CEO George John posits that digital advertising is failing to live up to its potential in the hands of brands and their agencies because they have not kept pace with the evolution of technology and consumer behavior.

The problems are several-fold:

• Online ad spend lags consumer behavior by five years.
• Brands act like the Internet is a printing press.
• Agencies don’t know what their customers’ goals are.

Of course vendors must fulfill their side of the equation. George concludes:

To make every penny of the $500 billion spent per year on advertising per year count – and to move the industry into the trillion-dollar realm where it belongs – advertisers and agencies need to demand better results from their advertising technology partners. Online advertising won’t be a mature industry until it delivers results on every dollar spent.  Read the full article here.

Last week, I had a chance to review the past quarter, and what an amazing few months it has been!

On April 7th, we officially launched Rocket Fuel in the UK; We hired a sales team and had Pete Robins, managing partner at agenda21 come on board as an adviser. We signed our first deals and got our first campaigns up and running and then excitingly, signed our first renewal business. It has been a sensational quarter! Hard work from the team, but this is certainly what we signed up for!

At Rocket Fuel to prove we don’t only work hard, we also play hard! So at the end of the quarter, we hosted our launch party in the UK. Together with 250 guests from London advertising businesses, we celebrated Rocket Fuel taking off in the UK.

You can see the photos by clicking on this link  and catch the video right here:

After the launch party, we then made 2 ladies happy by announcing them as prize winners in our launch party prize draw: Jo Walsh from Harvest gets to invite a guest to dinner at ‘Le Caprice’ and Adriana Matyaskova from Profero can take her guest for champagne ‘high tea’ at the Savoy.

1st Prize Winner, Jo Walsh, HARVEST

2nd Prize Winner - Adriana Matyaskova, PROFERO

The last couple of weeks have proven that now is probably one of the most interesting times media has ever had. There is a newer way businesses are coming into this space. Our adviser, Pete Robins, tends to describe it as “the smarter networks”.

The ability to take technology and data and merge them together, and make decisions on the fly about how you buy and value media, is an unbelievably fascinating space. It stretches the agency people to the limit in terms of what they do, and Rocket Fuel is right pinnacle to where that’s at, which is something that is really fascinating and exciting.

I’m extremely enthusiastic to be leading Rocket Fuel UK. It is a phenomenal business, they are on fire in the States and I’m convinced we’re not far off of being on fire here in the UK.

Last Friday, Variety hosted a wide range of media and tech luminaries including Mitch Singer, CTO at Sony Pictures, Facebook’s Mark Jacobson, Saatchi & Saatchi founder and CEO Judah Schiller, producer and director Brett Ratner,  Demand Media co-founder Shawn Colo, and Rocket Fuel CEO George John at the sold out New Media Summit in Beverly Hills, CA.

William and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, also participated at the event to support the development of London’s Tech City Initiative. Following Prime Minister David Cameron’s announcement on 4th November 2010, the East London region is set to be transformed into the British equivalent of Silicon Valley. Known as East London Tech City, the scheme has already received backing from giants such as Google, Facebook, and Intel.  And Rocket Fuel opened its London office in April of this year.

George John discussed the future as part of “Mega-Trends – Finding Opportunity in Today’s Major Societal Movements.”

The panel of futurists, analysts and investment experts debated what trends we should be paying attention to now to fuel continued innovation:

• 
How will the growing U.S. Hispanic population, and declining European birth rate impact consumer demand?
• Will the faith-based community maintain its strength and influence?
• How will changing consumer preferences in viewing content (i.e. trends towards renting movies rather than buying) – impact the entertainment and media industries?

Personally I find it very exciting to know that our CEO presented for an audience that included the Royal couple! However, they have put the bar high, our American colleagues, and I do hope they’re not expecting me to present in front of Mr. Obama in the next coming months

With the new sales guys on board, the preparations for our Launch Party, and time just passing by way too quick, it has been quite a while since I updated my Blog. I will have some exciting feedback from our Launch event, which will take place tomorrow evening, but in the meanwhile, I wanted to share this article from Erin Griffith that appeared in Adweek today, following an interview with Rocket Fuel’s new board member, Clark Kokich.

Razorfish’s Clark Kokich on buzzwords, and a ‘damn good question’

By Erin Griffith

Clark Kokich of Razorfish

Adweek: As chairman, how involved are you day-to-day at Razorfish?
Clark Kokich: I’m working half time there. I’ve been here for 12 years so I do some client work and some new business work. I’m also working on a book.

A book?
It’s about marketing but it’s not really a Razorfish book. It’s actually going to be a tablet app coming out in the fall. There’s a book portion for people who like words but it will include interactivity.

An app-book. That’s new to me.
I hope this is the first one. It won’t be the best one because it’s the first one, but then everyone else can build off of the concept.

You just took a board seat at a startup called Rocket Fuel. You mentioned you’ve been approached by many promising ad companies and chose this one. What about the company caught your eye?
The fact is, everybody in our industry talks about using technology to deliver value in real time and it turns out its extraordinarily difficult to do. When I looked under the hood at Rocket Fuel, I discovered that these guys were actually doing it. They come from a very scientific background. We like to say ‘It’s not rocket science,’ but it’s actually turning out to be rocket science, and it helps to have a rocket scientists doing the work.

Rocket science, eh? I see that some of Rocket Fuel’s founders have backgrounds at NASA. Can you explain how one might apply rocket science to advertising?
When you look at all the inputs we have to deal with in terms of banners, search, social, and mobile, the cascade if data is overwhelming. Up until I met these guys I hadn’t seen a company that had the wherewithal to take that avalanche of data, make it meaningful, and use it in real time.
One of the biggest challenges we face is the overwhelming amount of data and inability of people and systems to process it and make it meaningful. That’s what they’re working on. They haven’t totally solved it yet but they’ve made more progress than anyone else I’ve seen.

Complaints about the lack of dollars flowing into digital advertising are that digital ads don’t present their metrics in a way advertisers are used to. How does Rocket Fuel address that?
That’s one thing they’ve innovated in. They can optimize in real time based on brand awareness.
That’s a lot of buzzwords. What exactly does that mean? 
(Laughs) I understand. The first time they approached me, I was like, “Yeah, fine, I’ve heard this 500 times before,” but when I looked closer, it was clear they were really pulling it off.
It means that during the campaign they deliver surveys (to viewers of an ad) and track the change in awareness (of the brand), and from there can figure out what targeting scheme changes impressions of the brand in the biggest way. They’re tracking which of those are changing peoples’ preference and awareness of the brand.

Is this in any way strategic for Razorfish?
No. Rocket Fuel could be a partner for an agency. Certainly the agency channel is their biggest channel.

Would Razorfish benefit from owning a real time digital media buying company like Rocket Fuel?
I can’t comment on that.

So what do you think, in general, needs to happen for TV dollars to move over to digital?
That’s a damn good question. I’m not in the business of trying to figure out how TV dollars come over to digital, I’m in the business of thinking about how clients should build their brands. And there’s no question that television will continue to be huge for the advertising industry. The one thing it provides that digital cannot provide is scale. Once the scale of online video is competitive with the scale of television, then you’ll see dramatic changes. TV is still the only medium in video where you can decide to talk to people and know that in a few weeks they’ll have heard it, and in a very compelling way with sound and motion. There’s a lot you can do with online video and its very effective but I think scale will tip the balance.

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/advertising-isn-t-rocket-science-132975