Meebo Launches Ads on its Fast-Growing Partner Network

Guarantees a Minimum of 30 Seconds Per Ad Engagement for Brand Campaigns; Toyota and AT&T Sign Up as Charter Advertisers

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Meebo, the company that enables real-time social interactions, announced that Toyota is the first marketer to advertise on Meebo’s partner network on behalf of the third-generation Prius. Meebo’s partner network is comprised of 85 leading publishers that have signed up to integrate Meebo across their site. Te announcement means that marketers can now run advertising on a much larger scale with Meebo, but with the same results as the high-performing social ads on Meebo.com. AT&T has also signed up, and will be among the next major marketers to advertise on the network.

Meebo continues to make significant strides toward achieving its goal of bringing real-time social interactions to every user on the Web. With 40 of the 85 signed partners already live with Meebo, the company has an overall monthly reach of 50 million people. Once fully deployed to all 85 partners, Meebo will enable real-time social interactions for over 100 million people per month.

In addition to increased scale now offered by Meebo, brand advertisers can continue to expect Meebo ads to outperform the market in terms of click rates, time spent, and user engagement. To demonstrate the value Meebo can deliver to brands, Meebo guarantees that when users engage an ad inside the Meebo experience, users will spend a minimum of 30 seconds with the creative, or Meebo will make up the time spent with complimentary media (as needed).

Toyota is partnering with Meebo to make it easier for Prius customers to communicate with their friends, as part of the 2010 third-generation Prius marketing campaign called “Harmony Between Man, Nature and Machine,” which began in May. Toyota will feature a highly interactive ad for the third-generation Prius on dozens of sites across Meebo’s partner network. The “drawing nature” banner ad – highlighting the vehicle’s 50 MPG – will appear within the persistent Meebo Bar that lets users interact in real-time across their social networks. Users can share the experience with their network of friends.

“Meebo’s ad strategy since day one has been to deliver engaging social ads with industry-leading metrics that consistently exceed the expectations of our clients,” said Martin Green, COO, Meebo. “Today is a big day for Meebo. We now have a solution that performs for the world’s leading brands across a growing network of tens of millions of their prospective customers.”

Meebo’s approach to advertising gives users a targeted invitation to experience a brand’s content. If the user chooses to engage the ad on the Meebo Bar, then the ad expands to a rich overlay that can be as large as 900×400 pixels, the same size as the expanded state on Meebo.com. Brands will be able to target to select groups of individuals across Meebo’s network of partners, choosing the right age, gender, and interest categories for their products. Creative from the marketer can feature video content and/or rich social applications such as games, quizzes, widgets, product showcases, or interactive mini-sites. Users can also easily share the brand experience with their friends through a variety of methods (share ads via IM, email, or posts on social services like Twitter or Facebook). Key ad metrics for Meebo include:

10X higher click rates than typical ads on social media sites
More than a minute average time spent with the ad content

In conjunction with the release, Meebo is announcing that in addition to buying on a traditional cost per thousand impressions (CPM) model, marketers can choose to purchase across Meebo’s network on a cost per engagement (CPE) basis, only paying for those users who accept the invitation and choose to experience the brand’s content.

Partners are leveraging Meebo’s functionality to provide a safe, private, and brand-friendly approach to real-time social interaction. Partners signed up to run Meebo ads include Aeria Games, Bleacher Report, CafeMom, CrispyGamer, Current TV, DailyStrength.org, dotblu, eBaum’s World, FanPop, Flixster, GGL Global Gaming, IGN.com, Internet Brands, myYearbook, OutSpark, Paste Magazine, Piczo, Sonico, SparkPeople, StarPulse, Sugar Publishing, Webs.com, WhateverLife, and dozens more. Meebo will be sharing ad revenue with the partners.

For more information about ways to work with Meebo, please contact [email protected].

About Meebo, Inc.

With 50 million people sharing over 5 billion messages and 75 million links every month, Meebo is one of the Web’s fastest growing social media companies. Founded in September 2005, Meebo enables real-time social interactions with instant messaging and group chat at meebo.com and on partner sites across the Web. Meebo is headquartered in Mountain View, CA. Visit meebo.com to connect with friends live on the Web.