We quickly covered yesterday DataXu‘s news on the launch of DX Social, their cross-channel social engagement platform.
Following a chat with Shane Keats, Director of Product Marketing at DataXu, we found out more about the DX Social platform and what it brings to advertisers and buying desks.
DX Social was born out of the pressing need to add a social component to DataXu’s high speed data trading platform. For the time being, the social component ties into the Facebook Ads API, where vast audiences are to be found. Keats suggested DX Social may be looking into adding more social networks / platforms in the future, but for the time being the focus remains on leveraging the power of the Facebook platform.
But what exactly does DX Social do?
In a nutshell, it allows media buyers to translate audience data gathered through display advertising on non-social web properties into Facebook highly targeted audiences. The process involves, of course, the Facebook API, as well as DataXu’s own audience analytics and filtering algorithms.
The DX Social advantages?
We believe this platform to be very powerful if used to its full potential:
– the cookie-free DX Social has the RTB benefits without the troubles usually associated with cookie-dependent solutions, thus avoiding many of their privacy pitfalls;
– superior ad optimization applied to social media campaigns, that would otherwise not be possible by advertising solely on Facebook, since Facebook does not let advertisers see and take action at impression level;
– social retargeting, a concept that has been so far elusive to say the least, but made possible through DX Social’s audience building capability, where a media buyer can opt to re-message only the most socially engaged sub-set of an existing audience;
– social media engagement through display media, achieved by replicating audience engagement data from social media into display campaigns, and targeting only those who are most likely to engage with the brand.
Advertisers who already tried DX Social reported excellent results, including 3-digits percentage lift in “likes” of their Facebook page achieved in only several days, while maintaining the “like” stickiness (no unlikes) [1. “The increase in Facebook followers we achieved during our campaign using DX Social is unlike anything we previously generated,” said Steven ‘Lounge’ Price, director of digital strategy at SIMPLE Mobile. “We added hundreds of fans every hour, and achieved a monthly lift of 661% in just four days. Also notable was the lack of erosion (unlikes) from new fans. ”].
The DataXu DX Social platform appears to be very much in line with the general trend of moving away from the ad networks model to that of RTB ad exchanges, a trend that was started by the increasing need for transparency on the buy side. In its current form, DX Social seems to have retained the key advantages of both networks and exchanges, particularly the level of transparency required to eliminate the arbitrage usually associated with ad networks.
Currently, DX Social is open to US and European advertisers only, though Shane Keats assured us that the platform will open up globally quite soon. The company, DataXu, has recently opened their London office where the landing team is led by ex-Yahoo agency group head Martin Brown [2. DataXu Expands into Europe, Opens New Office in London].
About DataXu
Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, DataXu provides the only cross-channel Demand Side Platform for online, mobile, social and video advertisers. Impression level decisioning and actionable analytics increase digital campaign performance, improves operational efficiencies and delivers unique consumer insights to advertisers. DataXu’s executive team unites leading executives in digital media with MIT technologists. The private company is backed by Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners and Menlo Ventures. For more information, visit www.dataxu.com or follow them on Twitter at @dataxu.
