News
BLOOM Digital Platforms to acquire netProphets
“The expertise that netProphets brings to us is widely respected in the ad ops community,” said Vlad Stesin, Vice-President of BLOOM Digital Platforms. “As our industry continues to gain in complexity, both publishers and advertisers need the right blend of tools and expertise to ensure quality of execution when it comes to a variety of formats through various channels, and the use of audience data targeting. The netProphets offering creates efficiency and guarantees quality delivery of increasingly complex digital operations.”
This acquisition will complement and extend BLOOM’s software solutions, providing highly specialized services and software tools to its growing global customer base.
“As a company that has built extensive experience working with all major ad serving solutions in use today, we see a tremendous opportunity in contributing our expertise to the AdGear platform,” said Ben Cormier, founder and CEO of netProphets. “netProphets’ proprietary campaign monitoring and forecasting technology will further enhance and broaden functionality available to customers of BLOOM’s AdGear platform. Our combined offering aims to enable our customers to be more innovative, efficient and ultimately more profitable.”
netProphets is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Following the merger of the two companies, Mr. Cormier will continue to lead the organization’s publisher services group.
About BLOOM Digital Platforms
With offices in Montreal and Toronto, Canada, BLOOM DIGITAL PLATFORMS is a provider of real-time digital advertising technologies for publishers, ad networks and ad agencies. The company’s flagship platform, AdGear, allows digital media players to innovate by leveraging ad analytics and audience targeting technology for traditional web advertising, rich media, mobile and video. The company’s software handles over 40 billion ad requests monthly, serving customers in Canada, US and Europe. For more information about BLOOM and its products, please visit http://bloom-hq.com and http://adgear.com
06.27.11
Leaning forward
Over the past couple of years we’ve done a lot of work and have listened to a lot of what the industry is saying. We’re cautious types, so we tend to keep our minds on making a great product and building a great business rather than talk about ourselves. But here’s a little update on what we’ve been up to.
As most of the world is still conducting guaranteed, or traditional ad buys, we’ve spent the past little while scaling the platform and getting ever so closer to our goal of providing a full stack solution. As all the big ad serving guys got bought out, we feel that there is space for indepedents like us who work for the clients, instead of representing a large media company’s agenda.
Although we’ve started dabbling in RTB in 2009, building RTB support into a full-blown ad platform has always been our goal. The release of our agency product includes quite a bit of features (some of them listed here), all of them aiming at making media planners’ lives better by automating as much as possible, but also by allowing to gain more insights across both traditional and RTB buys. We believe that the holy grail of digital media planning is in balancing quality with quantity, guaranteed with non-guaranteed, CPM with CPC. Finding the right balance and keeping track of it all is crucial in making sure the advertisers’ media dollars are spent the best way they can be. Our work with our large agency clients, Cossette and BCP, led to the development of some really cool stuff revolving around a whole range of huge problems – attribution modelling, rich media and much more. We’re now certified for rich media on most of the major networks, including AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, CNN, BBC, MySpace, Turner, and many more. We’re even certified to witness on Facebook.
Our publisher product has also evolved tremendously, with the addition of extensive support for VAST/VPAID, a shiny new mobile SDK for iOS devices, support for automatic discovery of content, better analytics, and much more. We now count some awesome publishers as our clients, too, including Prote.in, OneScreen, Mediative, V Tele and others. One thing became painfully clear as we start running full steam is that publishers who work with us don’t consider their inventory as commodity. They consider it as a strategic advantage and want to twist and bend it to get access to better targeting, rich formats and ultimately better deals to be made with advertisers.
On the RTB side of things we’re now proud to count Recoset and SteerADS as our machine learning optimization partners. But more on that later.
04.29.10
BLOOM partners with Atex
Spring is in the air!
After having announced our partnership with StreamTheWorld, we are finally ready to announce another partnership that has long been in the works. With more than a 1,000 customers in 54 countries, Atex is a global leader in software for publishing and media industries. Although based in London, U.K., the company has a presence in dozens of cities around the world. Their impressive client list speaks for itself.
Atex has a long history of providing software to the publishing industry (dating back to “green screens” in editorial rooms), but has succeeded in reinventing itself for the digital age. AdGear is now a cog in the Atex platform, providing Atex customers ad serving capability integrated with ad booking, CRM and CMS solutions offered in their DNA suite of products.
For us this means access to new markets and a wide distribution through sales channels all over the world. Most importantly though, this is a fantastic opportunity to help media companies create competitive ad products for advertisers. Integration with Atex systems allows us to tightly integrate display advertising with content, context, user profiles, behavior data, and much more. To make this happen we’ve been working closely with Atex teams in Brazil, U.K., Sweden and in the U.S.
A more formal press release announcing our partnership can be found on Atex.com here.
04.27.10
AdGear platform fully integrated with StreamTheWorld
We’ve been working on this for the past little while, but now we’re finally ready to announce our partnership with StreamTheWorld. With clients such as Corus, CBS Radio, AOL, COX, SKY News, Radio Suisse and many others, the company is a global leader in audio and video streaming solutions.
Through this agreement, STW customers will get access to AdGear, our suite of ad analytics and audience targeting tools. More specifically, our software enables in-stream ad management in the STW platform, making possible live, in-stream ad replacement. In human terms, we detect the beginning of an ad playing on live radio and online we replace it by another ad — more targeted and more relevant to today’s global listener. This is a big deal considering the complexity of streaming, multiple encoding schemes in place for various players, and still the lack of standardization across the industry.
This agreement is exciting to us for many reasons. Most importantly, however, this is a great validation of one of AdGear’s core principles — its openness. Using our APIs allows technology and media platforms to embed ad management functionality in their own applications, creating competitive advantages in two core areas that matter to digital media online: data and formats.
We’re very much looking forward to making our product evolve with StreamTheWorld who, by the way, have assembled a fantastic team. We’re very happy to be working with them.
The first client migrated to our solution happens to be Tetes A Claques, featuring original video content that is very popular especially in francophone countries.