Visible Measures and VivaKi Crack the Code on Viral Video

BOSTON, April 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Until now, the viral capacity of a video campaign, and its ability to generate earned media, has relied on an unspecified combination of art and conjecture. Today, through a partnership with VivaKi and months of co-development work with Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG), Visible Measures is empowering the agencies of Publicis Groupe to apply an equal dose of math and science to the art of viral video.

Central to the solution is a new, online video planning platform called CONTAGION™, the industry's first data-driven earned media planning and measurement application for video campaigns. Co-created by SMG and Visible Measures, the platform builds upon over six years of Visible Measures video data, benchmarks, and insights to provide planners and buyers the unprecedented ability to plan, adjust, and project video campaign performance across paid, earned, and owned viewership opportunities with an unparalleled level of predictability and repeatability. CONTAGION also allows buyers to target digital environments that maximize brand impact by identifying and selecting sites with endemic content, appropriate mindsets, equity and credibility, and surroundings.

"CONTAGION helps VivaKi agencies optimize earned media exposures by enabling them to project performance based on different campaign scenarios. Our agencies can change campaign variables like the budget commitment, offline and online channel mix, site list, and more, and determine how these changes will affect overall campaign performance," said Kate Sirkin, Global Research Director with SMG.  "We can also plan for the complete performance of a video campaign across paid, earned, and owned media channels in one dashboard."

"Visible Measures has been pioneering the optimization of earned media for years through leveraging our proprietary video campaign benchmarks, insights and modeling," said Visible Measures Chief Analytics Officer Seraj Bharwani. "Now with CONTAGION, Publicis Groupe agencies will benefit from Visible Measures' unique video dataset in one simple dashboard, informing them of the optimal approach for driving earned viewership for clients, and quantifying the overall brand impact of each effort with True Reach™, the industry's only MRC-accredited metric for earned media performance."

The current challenge for brands and agencies in planning, producing, and launching branded video campaigns is that audiences can choose when and where they watch branded videos and whether or not they share them, leading to different levels of earned viewership and overall campaign performance. By combining video benchmarks and campaign objectives for earned media, CONTAGION takes the guesswork out of projecting video campaign performance.

"Visible Measures' data allows us to look at factors from prior comparative campaigns to predict the potential earned viewership," said Mark Rolland, Executive Vice President, Global Brand Agency Leader at Saatchi & Saatchi. "We're excited to have a tool that can help amplify our powerful creative content and propel it further and faster with the additional, contextual media insights."

Contagion leverages Visible Measures' proprietary video dataset—the broadest video dataset in the world—which has captured over 10,000 video campaigns, 500 million videos, and 3 trillion video views over the past six years. Core Visible Measures metrics, such as True Reach and engagement, have been accredited by the MRC.

There are four distinct use cases involving digital video where agency teams can use CONTAGION to drive increased exposure and impact from video creative and associated media plans:

• Event Sponsorship: Enhance the reach & engagement associated with the sponsorship of an event like Super Bowl, Olympics, NFL, MLB, March Madness, World Cup, Master's Golf Tournament, Oscars, and others. 
•  Product Launch: Leverage the full potential of digital video and branded content to maximize awareness of a new product, brand extension, new model, or any form of product enhancement.
• Brand Positioning/Re-Positioning: Drive deep engagement with the target audience through any combination of tactics ranging from Social TV programming, digital portal programming, Web-exclusive entertainment, long-form-reality content, and cause-driven programming.
• Product Usage/Continuity: Inspire target audience with long-form product demonstration, Test-Drives, How-To content, Tools & Techniques, and Contests driving on-going engagement with the product and top-of-mind awareness for the brand.

The partnership and CONTAGION product are offered exclusively to Publicis Groupe agencies (inclusive of VivaKi's Audience on Demand addressable media platform), for the first year, and then the solution will be made available to the marketplace. Initially, CONTAGION will be a US-centric product offering, but will potentially roll out to other markets within the next year. Brands with campaigns run through CONTAGION only pay for views delivered in the US.

"Our goal with products like CONTAGION and partnerships with companies like Visible Measures is to provide Publicis Groupe clients with first-mover advantages and pioneering opportunities that give them a competitive advantage," said VivaKi's Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer Rishad Tobaccowala. "The Groupe's unique approach to partnerships and open source development enables us to deliver these advantages and solutions far more effectively and efficiently than our counterparts who insist on building everything 'in house.'"

About VivaKi, Starcom MediaVest Group, Saatchi & Saatchi
VivaKi was established in 2008 to accelerate the digital transformation and expertise of Publicis Groupe and its agencies. Today we are the global leader in digital advertising solutions, working with the world's leading organizations to help them navigate the evolving and chaotic consumer landscape. We achieve this by scaling the products and solutions clients need today, while incubating the tools they will need tomorrow.  Starcom MediaVest Group is the Human Experience Company. SMG brings brand experiences to life through three global agency brands: MediaVest, Starcom, and Spark. With nearly 7,300 employees in 110 offices worldwide, SMG partners with the world's leading companies including The Coca-Cola Company, Kraft Foods, P&G, Samsung, Walmart, among others. Saatchi & Saatchi is known for its outstanding creative ideas that generate powerful emotional connections between consumers and products. This is a key element in Lovemarks, Saatchi & Saatchi's unique methodology for elevating the status of brands created to create "loyalty beyond reason" and "inspirational consumers."

About Visible Measures
Visible Measures is the innovation platform for video. Leveraging its patented, proprietary video analytics technology, the company has developed the largest video data footprint in the world. Visible Measures uses this unprecedented video dataset to deliver video ads as content while optimizing engagement and earned viewership for Fortune 500 brands and agencies. Premium publishers use Visible Measures' revolutionary choice-based video promotion technology to generate significant new revenue streams. Visible Measures has invented a number of digital video metrics for the advertising industry, including the world's first accredited viewership and earned media metrics, which fuel top video charts for Advertising Age, the Wall Street Journal, Variety, Autoweek, iMedia, and others. To learn more about Visible Measures and its innovation platform for video, please visit http://www.visiblemeasures.com.

Contact:

Visible Measures
Matt Fiorentino
[email protected]

VivaKi
Cheri Carpenter
[email protected]

SOURCE Visible Measures