• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, November 19, 2015

Sonobi, an advertising technology developer, on Thursday will launch guaranteed targeting on display campaigns through its JetStream platform.

“In the U.S. only 28% of forecast 2015 total digital advertiser ad spend is expected to be executed using data-enabled media buying,” stated John Donahue, chief product officer at Sonobi.

“This leaves the majority of digital marketing dollars being spent on undefined users, especially across display. Solving this requires technology that empowers sell-side clients to ensure buyers are able to identify and guarantee desired audiences on quality content, as seen across traditional media,” added.

To address these challenges, JetStream will enable buyers and sellers to take advantage of a technology that offers end-to-end media planning and procurement tools. It works by delivering the ability to validate, propose, manage and report across programmatic RTB, private marketplace and guaranteed media ecosystem directly within the JetStream platform. 

The company also announced that CRM agency Merkle and DSP MediaMath will integrate JetStream -- as well as key features within their demand platforms -- to deliver audience guarantees to their respective advertising clients. “The Merkle Sonobi partnership represents a major evolution of marketing.

Through a deep integration of Sonobi's JetStream technology, brands can harness the power of Merkle's comprehensive people-based discovery, planning and buying capabilities to guarantee audience reach at scale and define quality media experiences for their consumers," said John Lee, EVP, Chief Strategy Officer at Merkle, in an email to Real-Time Daily.

Sonobi’s Donahue explained to Real-Time Daily how JetStream works. The JetStream platform is able to guarantee the buy, for example, if a retailer wants to guarantee that it is engaging with its most loyal customers. “Publishers’ ad servers don’t generally understand audiences," Donahue says.

"When you buy an audience on an upfront basis, you can get 100% of that audience. With programmatic buying, you may only get 10 to 20% of the audience. It’s a scale problem. When you pre-qualify the audience, and buy that audience in a guaranteed, upfront capacity, our technology allows you to understand the quality of each and every impression,” he adds.

Donahue’s reference to “audience guaranteed” buying -- which means that if a brand wants to buy an audience upfront on a single publisher, like The Huffington Post, for example -- that brand is receiving its most valuable customers upfront on HuffPo.

In addition, header-based integrations allow Sonobi to see every consumer, every page view and every marketable impression, according to Donahue. “We can take a buyer’s audience and their first- or third-party data and look at how much of that audience is on all of our premium publishing brands. You can see the audience there, all the impressions and the number of opportunities that are available in a guaranteed upfront capacity.”

The big takeaway here, according to Donahue, is “there’s a separation in the way people buy media today. It’s either bought experientially ('I want my ads on that particular site’) or it’s bought on a spot basis.” Sonobi offers buying on an upfront capacity in order to build the specific audience(s) that brands want. The hope is that more branding dollars will flow into the programmatic landscape with upfront buys.

“If you could take the upfront experience, combine it with the spot, data-driven market where you’re getting the audience you want in real time, and you combine those two worlds, then you get the audiences you want and the experiences you’re looking to create,” he explained.