OpenX Blog

EyeCue Digital, an ad network, helps global brands reach their target audiences. When they began buying video ad inventory through OpenX Market, engagement rates more than doubled – from 25% to over 60%. Paul Martecchini, Head of Marketing for OpenX, spoke with Ryan Berkofsky, Director of Strategic Alliances at EyeCue Digital, to learn what’s driving those rates up.

Paul Martecchini [PM]: Tell us about EyeCue Digital.
Ryan Berkofsky [RB]: We’re a niche ad network. We match our advertisers with the best traffic sources for their brand campaigns. Because our advertisers need both audience and scale we work with a mix of direct publishers and ad exchanges such as OpenX Market to find the best possible place to run our campaigns.

Before EyeCue, I was on the buy-side and found that my ad placements often missed their target. We want the publisher to be just as happy as the advertiser, and one way to do that is to ensure the ads we place resonate with the publisher’s readers. We make sure we understand our advertisers’ target audience. Then we find the absolute best sources to place their ads.

PM: What brought you to OpenX Market?
RB: OpenX Market has the right combination of premium inventory and targeting capabilities we need for our advertisers. OpenX Market gets us the right audience at scale.

PM: What kind of campaigns do you send to OpenX Market? And who are your clients?
RB: All of the campaigns we send to OpenX are brand campaigns. Our customers include Telus (the Canadian telecom), ING Direct, and Quebec/Ontario Tourism.

PM: How are your results with OpenX Market?
RB: We’ve been very successful with OpenX Market. We place a lot of video ads and measure success based on engagement. Users who play the video for 5 seconds or so are counted as engagements. Prior to OpenX Market, our campaigns had engagement rates of 20 to 25%. Since OpenX Market, engagement rates have shot up to 60, 70, even 80%. I have a long-term client who is now doing backflips over the results.

PM: How do you target your campaigns? Do you buy on domain? Category?
RB: We use everything, but right now the biggest spend is on the run-of-network muted audio campaigns in Canada, the U.S., and some European countries. We’ve also done a handful of smaller campaigns where we targeted by run-of-channel, or by site.

OpenX Market’s targeting really benefits from your reporting. For each campaign we get a list of every site and impression that ran our ads. This is a huge benefit for us because if we come across a site that performs really well for us we can specifically target it. And if we come across a site that’s under-performing, OpenX Market makes it really easy to cross it off the list. This kind of reporting – which is automatic with OpenX Market – makes it more economical to launch run-of-network campaigns that are cost-effective.

And there’s another way it saves us money: we don’t need to engage an outside party to create the reports for us, as we are obliged to do when we use other networks. Those outside parties charge us flat CPM on every campaign, which comes out of our pockets. With OpenX Market we avoid that charge completely.

PM: How do buy from OpenX Market?
RB: I use the OpenX Market Advertising Console, which is great because gives me complete direction and control over my campaigns: geo-targeting, frequency capping, channel targeting, daily caps, and pricing.

The ability to control my campaigns is really critical. My relationship with our advertisers would suffer if we had to wait for a vendor to launch or change my campaigns. But with Ad Console I can make changes as soon as my advertisers request them.

PM: Any advice for someone considering OpenX Market?
RB: With OpenX Market, you can get better engagement rates, and it’s obvious to me that OpenX Market has better inventory.

And I’d say that OpenX delivers outstanding service. My OpenX account team has been very proactive. They call me if something doesn’t look right. Every marketplace claims to offer that level of service, but OpenX actually delivers it.