• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, February 1, 2017

Ad tech firm AppNexus on Wednesday said it will partner with the Federation for Internet Alerts (FIA), to globally distribute geo-targeted weather advisories and life-saving warnings in real-time.

The direct integration with the FIA Alert Hub, a centralized, cloud-based hub that aggregates official all-hazard alerts, and AppNexus’ ad-serving technology allows safety information from government agencies and nonprofit organizations to be delivered digitally to the public anywhere in the world.

Traditionally, for a nonprofit or government organization to serve public service announcements (PSAs) through AppNexus, the partner would provide the PSA images that would be shown to users. Then AppNexus would manually set up the ad campaigns to serve these images for the appropriate length and impacted locations.  

Now, organizations that have partnered with the FIA can push alert data to FIA, and FIA pushes that data to AppNexus through the integration. AppNexus then processes the alerts dynamically, in real time.

AppNexus said the integration with the FIA doesn’t replace AppNexus’ existing traditional PSA partner program but is appropriate for organizations with alerts that need to be served in real-time.

Brian O’Kelley, CEO of AppNexus, told Real-Time Daily via email: “Until now, distributing official public safety advertising alerts over the internet wasn’t possible in real time.

The direct integration of our ad-serving platform with FIA’s hub, clears the way for government organizations and non-profits to get emergency warnings quickly to the people who need them. The speed and the reach our integration gives alerting organizations is an upgrade to international emergency preparedness systems and has massive potential to help save lives.”

AppNexus said that since December 2016, the FIA has sent 71,819 issued alerts to AppNexus, which resulted in 14,992 alert activations. These alerts resulted in the delivery of 471.8 million impressions served to the public. Examples of the expanded alerts served include avalanche, flash flood, tornado, red flag, winter storm, blizzard, severe thunderstorm, and wind chill warnings.

AppNexus is currently trafficking alerts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Environment Canada, with the ability to add alerts from other official alerting authorities, which can be disseminated anywhere in the world.