Unruly Partners With MediaCom To Bring Emotional Targeting To Programmatic Video Ad Market In Australia

Video ad tech firm launches new targeting capability which connects advertisers with viewers most likely to engage emotionally with a specific ad; Unruly’s technology allows brands and media agencies to apply emotional intelligence to paid media for first time

SYDNEY – November 30, 2015 – Video ad tech company Unruly today announces they have partnered with MediaCom to launch Unruly Custom Audiences, a new targeting capability that helps Australian advertisers connect with consumers most likely to emotionally engage with a specific ad.

Unruly Custom Audiences targets across paid media the Australian consumers most likely to experience a strong emotional connection to a specific video, maximising brand recall, earned media and purchase intent. Video player formats and functionality are also optimised to ensure the campaign maximises viewer engagement and earned media.

MediaCom will be the first agency to use the new targeting capability in Australia for an online video campaign it’s running this month. Tom Robinson, Head of Content Strategy and Distribution at MediaCom Australia, said: “The launch of Unruly Custom Audiences means we will now be able to find out how, why, where and with whom our customers clients’ ads or video content are resonating.

“We can also use Unruly’s distribution platform to optimise our digital online video distribution to reach and engage the sub-segments of their audience most likely to emotionally engage with the content.”

Unruly’s Australia & New Zealand MD Lance Traore said: “This is a transformational targeting capability for the advertising industry. For the first time, brands and media agencies can use the results of content testing to apply emotional targeting to their video buys. In today’s frenetic, cluttered media landscape, brands that want success on social media and memorability at the point of purchase need to create and distribute contagious content that makes a deep emotional connection with their audience.”

Unruly Custom Audiences – which uses uses data from the video ad tech company’s predictive algorithm, Unruly ShareRank™, created using 2 trillion tracked views and over 395,000 consumer data points – was launched in the UK, Germany and US earlier in the year and has already delivered significant uplifts in campaign performances.

These include a snack food video campaign which saw a 63% increase in brand favorability and purchase intent, and a personal care brand which saw a 155% increase in brand favorability and an 85% increase in purchase intent.

Over the last decade, academic and industry studies have repeatedly shown the effects of emotional advertising on a variety of brand and business metrics. A study by Pringle & Field found ‘emotional campaigns outperform on almost every metric’ including profitability,  while recent research from Dr Karen Nelson-Field, Director at the Centre for Digital Video Intelligence, has found that ads which elicit strong emotional reactions are twice as likely to be shared than those which elicit weak responses.

Traore added: “Consumers who are more emotionally engaged with a branded video are more likely to share the video, more likely to remember the brand, and more likely to buy the product. For marketers, this means more engagement, more earned media and, ultimately, more sales. Digital marketers recognise that even the highest quality content needs to be paired with a repeatable, scalable distribution strategy and that’s why we’ve mapped our content evaluation dataset to our distribution platform – we’re helping advertisers to bridge the gap between the content stack and the tech stack.”

To find out more about Unruly Custom Audiences, click here.

UNRULY, Unruly Custom Audiences, Unruly ShareRank and associated logos, designs and other marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Unruly Group Limited in the United Kingdom, the United States of America and elsewhere. Other trademarks are owned by their respective owners.

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About Unruly

Unruly is the ad tech company that gets videos watched, tracked and shared across the Open Web. Positioned at the intersect of video, social, native & mobile, Unruly uses emotional audience data and user-friendly video formats to massively increase viewer engagement, brand performance & publisher revenues.

With 3 out of every 4 video views now taking place outside of YouTube, 90% of Ad Age 100 brands have already used Unruly to connect with audiences at speed and scale across the Open Web.

Differentiated by a unique data set of 2 trillion video views and powered by a full tech stack, Unruly adds value by algorithmically evaluating content shareability and programmatically targeting custom audiences. Viewability is 100% guaranteed to an audience of 1.35 billion monthly unique users across mobile, tablet and desktop devices.

UnrulyX is the first supply side platform (SSP) for mobile video to offer scaled delivery of native ad formats and guarantee the viewability of premium video impressions bought via RTB.

Unruly employs 200 people across 15 offices, with regional HQs in London, New York and Singapore. Its super power is emotional ad tech. Its secret weapon is passionate people on a mission to #DeliverWow.

Unruly was acquired by News Corp  (NASDAQ: NWS, NWSA; ASX: NWS, NWSLV) in September 2015.

About MediaCom

MediaCom is the “The Content + Connections Agency”, working on behalf of its clients to leverage their brands’ entire system of communications across paid, owned and earned channels to step change their business outcomes.  MediaCom delivers not just individual channel silo efficiencies but also connected communications system effectiveness, by developing and optimising all content – defined as any form of consumer messaging – as the fuel that drives high-performing systems. MediaCom measures and quantifies communications systems across paid, owned and earned through their unique Connected System Audit.

MediaCom is one of the world’s leading media communications specialists, with billings exceeding US$33 billion (Source: RECMA 2015). It employs 6,500 people in 125 offices across 100 countries around the globe. Its client roster includes P&G, VW Group, Dell and Universal. In 2015, MediaCom was recognised by RECMA as the leading global agency network in its Network Diagnostics report, and also was the first agency network to top all 3 key RECMA reports across EMEA.  In the past year, MediaCom has been awarded Media Agency of the Year in the US by AdAge and Adweek, Agency of the Year in the UK by Campaign and The Drum, and Global Agency of the Year at the M&M Awards 2015. The agency also captured six Media Lions at the 2015 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, making it the top performer among all global media agency networks.

MediaCom is a member of WPP, the world’s largest marketing communications services group, and part of GroupM, WPP’s consolidated media investment management arm.

For more information, visit www.mediacom.com

About GroupM

GroupM is the world’s largest global media investment management operation, with total billings exceeding US$96 billion (Source: RECMA 2013). It serves as the parent company to WPP media agencies including MediaCom, Maxus, MEC, and Mindshare. Its primary purpose is to maximise the performance of WPP’s media communications agencies on behalf of its clients, its shareholders and its people by operating as a parent and collaborator in performance-enhancing activities such as trading, content creation, sports, digital, finance, proprietary tool development and other business-critical capabilities.

The focus of GroupM is the intelligent application of physical and intellectual scale to benefit trading, innovation, and new communication services, and to bring competitive advantage to its clients and companies. For more information, visit www.groupm.com.