[X+1] Platform Drives Targeting, Custom Audience Segments

Online targeting company [x+1] Wednesday plans to release its media management platform Media+1. The platform, which becomes available in December, combines targeting and analytics, allowing agencies and marketers to design their own customer audience segment that delivers ads.

The targeting is based on an open data architecture that incorporates nearly any consumer data source -- customer or third-party from companies like Claritas--to build target segments based on a combination of behavioral, demographic, geographic and IP characteristics.

One channel that advertisers and marketers can use to target media is through ad exchanges. But all the data is applicable to the entire media plan, even for the ads not bought through exchanges. The open data platform allows [x+1] to integrate server log data transfer from the ad servers. So, even if media buyers purchase content directly from ESPN and Yahoo without going through an ad exchange, [x+1] can take the media and run it through the engine to do audience segmentation, mine the data for attribution, create targeting lists, or conduct reach and frequency analysis.

Media+1 searches across multiple inventory sources including the ad exchanges to conduct real-time impression bidding and buying that is matched to the segments it created, ensuring that the correct ad serves up to the correct person at the perfect time.

John Nardone, chairman and CEO of [x+1], says the platform has been built from the ground up. The project began in June 2008 after the company raised $16 million and brought on a new CTO. "The industry needed to target ads on the exchanges, but we felt strongly that those exchanged don't exist alone," he says. "The big gap in the market was when people began creating exchange buying companies and buying platforms that we viewed as point solutions disconnected from the rest of the media strategy."

Nardone calls Media+1 much more than a one-function "point solution" that enables ad-exchange media buys. It delivers precise audience targeting, either by creating custom business rules or by tapping [x+1]'s Predictive Optimization Engine (POE) to analyze audience response patterns.

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