Wildfire and Adaptly Introduce First Social Marketing Solution With Integrated Ad Technology That Optimizes Engagement

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. and NEW YORK, Feb. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Wildfire, the global leader in social media marketing software, today announced with Adaptly the integration of Adaptly's unique social advertising and optimization technology with the Wildfire Social Marketing Suite. The combination of Wildfire's market-leading suite of tools for designing, publishing, and managing brand content through social media – used by more than 10,000 customers, including many of the world's most recognized brands, such as Facebook, Amazon, and Target – with Adaptly's ad optimization technology gives marketers, for the first time, unified control over the combined effect of paid, earned, and owned social media to maximize consumer engagement with the brand. Engagement encompasses social actions such as likes, comments, and sharing of content.

Unlike first-generation ad serving solutions – which focus on traditional metrics such as cost per clicks, fans, or impressions – Wildfire's solution integrates Adaptly's technology that optimizes social ads not only for cost but also for maximum engagement. Adaptly's proprietary technology aggregates more than 160 social metrics from a brand's earned and owned channels, analyzes the impact of paid media on earned media in real time, and continuously refines ads (including content and target audience) to reach the best social audiences and drive ongoing engagement – the objective that marketers care about most today – at the lowest cost. This self-optimizing technology is unavailable from any other vendor, and Wildfire is the first to bring it to the broad market through a complete integrated social marketing solution.

Content and Advertising Integrated into a Single Seamless Solution

The ability to integrate advertising with content is becoming a critical requirement for social marketing thanks to the launch of Facebook's Sponsored Stories ad units, which allow marketers to turn fan-generated content into social ad units. For brands to run Sponsored Stories ads they must successfully engage consumers. The Wildfire Social Marketing Suite provides all the tools needed to engage consumers through social media. Extending the Wildfire Suite with Adaptly's social advertising technology now enables marketers to optimize their whole social strategy in a single seamless solution.

"Integrating a brand's ads with its content is key to maximizing engagement through social media, yet powerful ad management had been a missing piece from social marketing software suites," said Victoria Ransom, Wildfire CEO. "We are delighted to partner with Adaptly to bring their innovative advertising optimization technology to our customers. We evaluated many solutions in the market and Adaptly was the clear leader, with a best-in-class technology that is science-based, data-driven, and results-focused. Adaptly is fully aligned with Wildfire's philosophy of developing highly scalable software solutions that automate social marketing processes to generate maximum impact at the lowest cost and effort for customers."

"At Adaptly we've been focusing on building a powerful social ad platform, spanning Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and StumbleUpon," said Nikhil Sethi, Adaptly CEO. "We are excited to partner with Wildfire, to bring together paid, owned, and earned media. Integration of our proven ad optimization technology with Wildfire's results-driven platform allows brands to both improve the customer experience through smarter, more relevant advertising and drive significantly better results."

Self-optimizing Technology Maximizes Audience Quality and Engagement

The integration of ad management and optimization into the Wildfire social marketing platform delivers compelling value for brand marketers:

• Enables marketers to specifically target their most valuable audience segments, and even discover new audiences that are highly engaged with their brand.
• Enhances performance of social promotions, brand pages, and newsfeed messages by driving fans to engage with brand content
• Gives brand marketers for the first time a real-time view of advertising, page, and campaign metrics in one unified interface to easily and effectively evaluate engagement and total social marketing ROI
• Allows marketers to optimize advertising across multiple social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn

Ad Optimization Delivers Compelling Results for Customers

Wildfire beta customers have experienced significant results with the Adaptly ad optimization technology. For example, beta customers' "people talking about this" metric on Facebook – one of the most powerful measures of fan engagement – rose on average by an order of magnitude during their campaigns. Beta customers also saw significant cost improvement, on average more than doubling the size of their fan base while beating their goal for cost per fan by 49%.

Enables Brands of All Sizes, as Well as Agencies, to Optimize Any Level of Social Ad Spend

The Wildfire solution makes it possible for brands to spend at any level with optimal results. For large global brands that are spending tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month on social ads, the integration of Adaptly's technology with the Wildfire suite provides unprecedented ease and control in managing and optimizing ad spend. It also opens the door to social advertising for small and midsize companies, eliminating the need for a full-time person to manage what had previously been a highly manual process. Agencies also benefit from Wildfire's integrated solution, enabling them to more efficiently deliver cost-effective results for their clients.

Available through Limited Beta Program

The integrated ad management capability is currently available to a limited number of beta customers.

About Wildfire
Wildfire is the leader in social media marketing software and the only social media marketing company to have received an investment from Facebook's fbFund. Our patent-pending technology allows large brands, small businesses, and agencies to create social campaigns and pages, communicate with their social audience, and measure their own and their competitors' social media performance. Intuitive and affordable, our software is simple enough for the least tech-savvy manager yet flexible enough for the most creative marketer. Wildfire serves thousands of companies, including Facebook, Amazon, Ogilvy and Target, and has offices in California, Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Munich, and Singapore. For more information, please visit www.wildfireapp.com.

About Adaptly
Adaptly is changing the way brands increase engagement on social networks by helping them harness the unique value of each social network. It offers one consolidated platform to complete a social media ad buy across multiple social networks including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and more. Adaptly recently introduced Momentum, a new measurement tool to help brands evaluate how different marketing initiatives impact their overall brand performance across paid, earned and owned social media.

Founded in 2010 by Nikhil Sethi and Garrett Ullom, Adaptly was incubated through DreamIt Ventures and is now based in New York City. Investors include First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, Lerer Ventures, kbs+p Ventures and more. Adaptly's clients include brands and agencies such as PepsiCo, Diageo, News Corp., Razorfish and hundreds more. For more information, please visit www.Adaptly.com.

SOURCE Wildfire