Luminate Launches First Intelligent In-Image Ad Platform with Brand Safety, Visual Targeting and New Ad Formats

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 22, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Luminate, the pioneer of in-image advertising, today unveiled its next generation in-image ad platform, including unprecedented capability to understand both content and context of an image and optimize appropriate native advertising.  

Combining text analysis, computer vision, machine learning and crowdsourced human analysis, Luminate's advanced platform not only places the most relevant and appropriate ad, it ensures all inappropriate and irrelevant content images are filtered out, protecting brands and publishers from embarrassing and damaging mishaps.

Luminate also launched a range of new ad formats and platform features, making it the first rich ad network specifically built for in-image advertising. Advanced new capabilities include:

• ImageWords: Visual targeting which allows advertisers to contextually target by "image keywords" for both off-image and in-image ads.
• Responsive Branded Ads: Dynamically created to match size, format and context of online imagery and other custom ad spaces.
• Product Listing Ads (PLAs): Ad units dynamically created from advertiser product feeds.
• Collage Ads: Includes a series of relevant items from product feeds.
• Related Content Ads which increase publisher traffic by matching content to imagery.
• Both display (CPM) and performance (CPC) delivery options.
• ImageSafe image content screening and filtering.

With more than 3 trillion images online, growing by 500 million a day and 60% of publishers' page views coming from images, in-image advertising has become one of the fastest growing ad categories. However, approximately 25% of images are not "brand safe" and sophisticated solutions are required to identify and filter them so advertisements are not placed – something that existing technology has been unable to achieve.

Luminate launched the market's original in-image ad platform in 2008 and has remained an industry pioneer, with more than 10,000 publishers reaching more than 200 million monthly unique visitors and more than 5 billion monthly image views. Advertisers on the platform include Best Buy, eBay, Gap, Garnier, Intel, Macy's and McDonalds.

James Everingham, Luminate founder and CEO commented: "Ad platforms have not been doing enough to protect advertisers' brands online. Mistakes where ads appear alongside inappropriate content are common, damaging and, worst of all, many platforms simply consider them an inevitable and acceptable risk. We don't."

"Luminate's technology and human interaction is a major breakthrough and is critical to ensure brand protection and contextual image targeting. In-image advertising has the potential to overcome many of the pitfalls of digital advertising, from banner blindness to low viewability. And now that advertisers know they can trust the process not to jeopardize their brand, we are able to unlock all that value," Everingham said.

About Luminate
Luminate launched the market's first in-image ad platform in 2008 and has remained an industry pioneer, with more than 10,000 publishers reaching more than 200 million monthly unique visitors and more than 5 billion monthly image views. Advertisers on the platform include Best Buy, eBay, Gap, Garnier, Intel, Macy's and McDonalds.

Luminate works with publishers looking to monetize inventory through native advertising and advertisers looking to pinpoint the most relevant in-image ad placements.

Combining targeting and identification technology, it is the only platform that can enable contextually relevant, format-appropriate, in-image advertising.

The company is headquartered in Mountain View, CA and backed by August Capital, CMEA Capital, Foundation Capital, Google Ventures, Nokia Growth Partners, and Shasta Ventures.

For more information, visit www.luminate.com.

SOURCE Luminate