C.A.S.T., the First Native Ad Platform Supporting Content-Integrated Ad Units, Brings Native Advertising to Europe through Integration with Leading French Tech Publisher 01net

TEL AVIV, Israel, February 28, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

Native Advertising, one of the fastest growing formats in online advertising in the US in 2012, is crossing the pond as C.A.S.T. announces a partnership with French technology publisher 01net.

Defined as any form of advertising that is innate, pertaining to or characteristic of the content around which it appears, native advertising has gained significant traction because it counters banner ad blindness and improves user experience. In fact, according to research from Solve Media, nearly 60% of ad agency media buyers say native advertising will be "very important" or "extremely" important in 2013, and 40% of media buyers are already allocating at least 10% of their budgets for native advertising.

The C.A.S.T. platform allows publishers to easily add sellable inventory in the form of scalable native ad units. By creating ads that better suit each publisher site or network, all sides benefit. Users have a better, more consistent experience on the publisher's website, advertisers see better performance and user engagement with their brands, and in the end, publishers generate more revenue from higher quality placements.

"We selected the C.A.S.T. native ad platform because we were impressed with the engagement and sales metrics the company achieved for existing customers," said Stanislas Samuel, Business Development Director, NextInterActiveMedia. "Banner blindness is a real problem today, and implementing the C.A.S.T platform provides us with a scalable native ad offering which delivers results that will improve our bottom line."

C.A.S.T. was designed to specifically address challenges to scaling native advertising and provides medium-to-large publishers the flexibility to integrate and manage their existing advertisements in the same private platform, customized to the needs of their sellers, buyers and analytics teams. The C.A.S.T. platform allows advertisers to manage their own campaigns via a self-serve module or work directly with the publisher's sales team, on a private marketplace built for these unique units.

Initial customers are experiencing significant increases in revenue after implementing the C.A.S.T. native ad platform based on proprietary ad, content, placement, optimization and predictive algorithms.

"Whether in the US, Europe OR Asia, publishers are facing monetization challenges exacerbated by banner blindness," said Omer Kaplan, CEO & co-founder of C.A.S.T. "We provide  large publishers like 01net with easy-to-integrate-and-manage advertising which improves the overall site experience while generating incremental revenue for them. "

About C.A.S.T.

C.A.S.T. was established to create new revenue channels and better manage the ad placements of premium publishers, enabling them to manage the challenge of RTB platforms and programmatic buying.

C.A.S.T. enables publishers to break the standard in banner advertising and gain control over their ad revenue by offering scalable native advertising solutions, utilizing responsive ad design, and integrating proprietary ad placement and optimization technology - all in a truly private offering facilitating direct management of existing advertising relationships.

Please feel free to visit C.A.S.T in San Francisco, Tel Aviv or on the web @ http://www.breakthestandard.com/.

About NextInteractiveMedia

A result of the acquisition of Groupe Tests by NextRadioTV (3 national TV stations, 2 national radio stations) in April 2007, Groupe 01 operates in the magazine, internet and event organisation market. The Internet division, NextInteractiveMedia comprises the news websites of the group NextRadioTV; each of them offers mobile applications developed especially for smartphones and touchpad.

01net.com attracts 6,6 million French unique visitors (Médiamétrie Net Ratings November 2012) making it the must-see technology generalist website in French. Telecharger.com is the download service of 01Net and provides more than 200 million downloads per year in French speaking countries.

For additional info, please contact:
Uriah Av-Ron
PR for C.A.S.T.
e: [email protected]
t: (646) 755-6120 / +972-50-7-427-087

SOURCE C.A.S.T.