MediaMind 24/7 Partnership Could Lead to TV Integration

• Tweet
• Buffer

DG announced today a strategic partnership for deeper collaboration in advertising technology between MediaMind, its online unit, and 24/7 Media, WPP's marketing technology company.

The partnership could form the basis of a global - in scope and in media - advertising delivery system that unites television advertising with digital.

Here's the score card: MediaMind was recently acquired by DG, a company that acts as the delivery system for between 80 to 90 percent of television ads, as well as syndicated content. The DG platform takes content and creative from agencies or post-production houses and delivers it over IP network or satellite to the network operations centers of broadcasters.

24/7 Media, acquired by WPP in 2007, provides its Zeus Advertising Platform, or ZAP, to WPP clients. ZAP is an audience-management platform that lets brand advertisers track the effectiveness of individual marketing elements and how they influence conversion.

The acquisition of MediaMind by DG is significant because it brings together capabilities for traditional TV advertising and digital, according to Andrew Bloom, SVP of corporate development for DG and MediaMind. He said, "You have a company that sits at the heart of the TV ecosystem buying a digital campaign management platform that does delivery, planning, buying, optimization and reporting. A roadmap is laid out for how a single platform could begin to address TV, digital TV, digital and social media."

Bloom said that MediaMind and 24/7 have been working on deeper integration to allow joint customers within WPP using MediaMind to more easily access the audience insight and buying capabilities of ZAP.

He said, "The strategy is that MediaMind is an open platform freely integrated with best-of-breed partners. Where our customers require us to integrate into some of their technologies, we want to make it easy and seamless to do that."

Next, the two companies will work on dynamic creative optimization, allowing MediaMind's Smart Versioning product that lets advertisers optimize creative based on audience information access ZAP's audience data.

Through DG, MediaMind will be able to encode, caption, and deliver TV ads to online video publishing channels - such as that of 24/7. Planning and buying television advertising, Bloom said, "is part of our future roadmap."

Bloom said, "In the future, as the MediaMind platform evolves to enable TV ads delivered through the DG platform to be encoded for online video delivery, and as the ZAP platform evolves to being able to buy TV as well, we become a very interesting partner for someone like 24/7."