• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 7, 2011

DataXu will release the next generation of its digital marketing platform, DX3, to support advertisers through audience, inventory, campaign management, and analytics. The platform, which will launch Monday, allows marketers to optimize across profitable audience segments, media channels, and creative messages. DX3 combines demand-side platform (DSP) features with attribution management. It combines social, video, display and mobile, with search on the way. 

Consider that DX3 makes 300 million decisions per second and 1 trillion decisions an hour, as data updates. to understand the technology required to support a maturing ad industry. DataXu claims that impression-level multivariate decisioning reduces media costs by up to 60%; and audience overlap management, such as de-duplication between data sets, yields 25% return on investment and 20% reduction in data costs.

Through a dashboard powered by machine-learning technology, DX3 provides advertisers like Scripps Networks with programmatic buying of ads across display, social, mobile, and video, and premium private, guaranteed, and exchange-traded media. It supports Active analytics to convert consumer and campaign insights into actions in real time. Unified audience management combines first and third-party data to create custom audience segments. And Multitouch attribution allocates spending to the best-performing media channels.

Active analytics gave Scripps Networks marketers insight into consumers looking for kitchenware on the user-generated recipe site Food.com early in the buying process, Jonah Spegman, Scripps digital media director, told MediaPost. So early that consumers interacted with the ads twice as much.

For Scripps Networks, DX3's audience management module supports the buy of audience segments. Spegman points to the data management platform features as the most exciting. The company integrates display and video into the process, with social data to come soon. Search retargeting would add value, but that's on the product road map. "Being able to integrate across social, mobile, video and search is crucial," he said.

Between 15% and 20% of Scripps' media spend goes through DataXu, Spegman said.

Scripps shifted buying placements to buying audiences before it began working with DataXu several years ago, but now the buys are more efficient, Spegman said.

Buying audiences through individual networks did not give Scripps the opportunity to compare audiences. Working with DataXu enables Scripps to gain insight into how audiences in one network, such as Google, relate to audiences across Microsoft or Yahoo, rather than just across one network.

During the process of evaluating buying audiences through a DSP rather than direct from ad networks, Spegman said Scripps set up some split tests where it would buy the same audience segments direct from a network and through DataXu. The buy through DataXu garnered cost efficiency between 10% and 15%.