San Francisco – Vizu Corporation (www.vizu.com), a San Francisco-based company providing a real-time online brand ad effectiveness measurement platform to leading advertisers and publishers, announced the addition of Paul Gunning, CEO of Tribal DDB Worldwide, a global interactive agency that consistently ranks among the world’s top-10 and Pierre C. Bouvard, Senior Vice President of Media Sales at TRA Inc., a media measurement and analytics software company, to Vizu’s Board of Advisors. They join current board advisors: Bob Jeffrey, CEO & Chairman, J Walter Thompson; Stephen Klein, builder of innovative technology companies including iballs; and Dick O’Hare, a digital media industry veteran who held top posts with DoubleClick, AOL and Yahoo.
“Vizu is at the forefront of reshaping the way we think about online brand advertising,” says Mr. Gunning. “Brand advertisers have historically limited their online advertising because they haven’t had a relevant means of measuring its effectiveness. In establishing Brand Lift as a reliable, everyday metric for online brand advertising, Vizu is removing this obstacle, and opening a new frontier in digital media advertising.”
“Vizu’s Ad Catalyst platform is being used by hundreds of the world’s most important brands to measure the effectiveness of their online brand advertising efforts in real time,” says Mr. Bouvard. “By providing a common currency of communication between advertisers and their partners in the digital media ecosystem—creative agencies, media buying agencies, online publishers, and online ad networks—Vizu enables a new level of collaboration that is reminiscent of the heyday of online direct response advertising when precise measurement drove rapid spending growth. Now that all parties involved in executing an online brand campaign can be on the same page rallying around a common, well defined branding objective, major new efficiencies are being achieved.”
Mr. Gunning oversees the strategic and financial direction of Tribal DDB’s network of 60 offices spanning 42 countries around the globe. Tribal DDB is a unit of Omnicom and a wholly owned subsidiary of DDB Worldwide. Prior to becoming CEO in 2008, he was President of Tribal DDB East, responsible for the management and profitability of Tribal DDB Chicago and New York. Previously, as vice president, general manager of Tribal DDB Chicago, Mr. Gunning developed the largest office in the Tribal DDB network, helping to craft online advertising strategies for clients such as Lowe’s Home Improvement, Johnson & Johnson, and State Farm Insurance. In addition, he led strategic consulting projects that led McDonald’s, Gatorade and Quaker Oats to name Tribal DDB as their Agency of Record. Before joining Tribal DDB in July of 2000. Mr. Gunning held a variety of positions at interactive advertising agencies, hi-tech merchandising companies and promotions agencies.
Mr. Bouvard has 25 years of experience in media and market research, creating new entertainment brands with significant audience growth as well as senior leadership roles in sales, marketing and operating. He has advised a number of digital media startups and venture funded companies on strategy and insights. Previously, as President of Sales at Arbitron Inc., Mr. Bouvard led the sales and marketing effort to launch Arbitron’s Portable People Meter (PPM), an innovative multi-media audience measurement service. Also at Arbitron, Mr. Bouvard created the out-of-home and custom research divisions. Earlier, Mr. Bouvard was EVP at Coleman Insights, a leading market research and consulting firm to the radio industry in the U.S. and in Europe. At Coleman, he helped launch the nation’s first Hip Hop formats in Los Angeles and New York City and oversaw the programming and marketing strategies of dozens of highly successful major market stations. Mr. Bouvard also advises Colligent, a social media audience affinity application, has served on the boards of Adify and TRA, and currently is the Chairman of the Board of the IRTS, a leading media charity in New York City.
“We look forward to leveraging Paul and Pierre’s insights and expertise in the world of online brand building and marketing measurement,” says Vizu’s CEO, Dan Beltramo. “With advertisers demanding an alternative to click-through-rates for measuring the effectiveness of online brand advertising, we’re seeing tremendous growth in the demand for our metrics platform.”
Tribal DDB Worldwide (www.tribalddb.com), an Advertising Age A-List Agency, is headquartered in New York with 60 offices spanning 42 countries around the globe. Since it was founded in 2000, Tribal DDB has expanded and been recognized well beyond its digital roots. By 2005 Tribal DDB was named Interactive Agency of the Year by Adweek and at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, where it took home the most Lions and the Cyber Grand Prix. This was followed in 2007 by Tribal DDB being the first “digital” agency to win Global Agency Network of the Year from Advertising Age, and then, in 2009, being the first to win the Grand Prix in Film at the International Advertising Festival at Cannes. Tribal DDB continues to draw on its expertise in digital innovation and its heritage of creativity and insights to bring clients the most effective and differentiating marketing solutions for today’s world. Tribal DDB Worldwide is part of Omnicom Group’s DDB Worldwide.
TRA, Inc. (www.traglobal.com) is a media measurement and analytics software company whose products help advertisers, agencies and television networks improve advertising accountability and return on media investment. TRA’s Media TRAnalytics® is a web-based platform that matches the advertising households actually receive with the products the same households actually buy, enabling TRA’s clients to find “The Right Audience” while providing an unmatched level of transparency, measurement, media planning/selling and improved ROI. TRA’s investors include Intel Capital, Kodiak Venture Partners, WPP and Arbitron. TRA is the recipient of the BeyeNETWORK’s 2009 Vision Award for Business Impact in Analytics. TRA is certified under ISO 27001, the information security management system standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) designed to ensure security controls for protecting information assets. TRA owns U.S Patent No. 7,729,940, entitled “Analyzing Return on Investment of Advertising Campaigns by Matching Multiple Data Sources.”
Vizu Corporation (www.brandlift.com) brings the same metrics used to measure and optimize brand advertising effectiveness in the offline world to the online medium. By providing the first real-time, enterprise technology platform that allows brand advertisers and their partners in the digital media ecosystem – publishers, ad networks, exchanges, and demand side platforms – to collaborate around measuring and optimizing Brand Lift metrics, Vizu enables its customers to move their target audience through the purchase funnel, from building awareness to creating intent and preference. Vizu’s brand advertising effectiveness platform is used by over 60% of Advertising Age’s Top 100 Brand Advertisers and Comscore’s Top 50 Media properties to support all key aspects of the advertising lifecycle, including media buying, audience profiling, and Brand Lift optimization.
