LOS ANGELES — Giant Media announced the appointment of digital media industry veteran Bruce Budkofsky as VP of Partnerships. Budkofsky brings more than 20-years of experience to Giant Media and its recently launched transparent YouTube pre-buy planning tool, VuePlanner.
In his new role, Budkofsky will lead efforts to partner VuePlanner with brands and agencies advertising on YouTube. VuePlanner enables media planners to transparently plan beyond the channel level, down to the video URL level, selecting individual YouTube videos before the campaign is bought and delivered. VuePlanner allows buyers to hand-curate contextually relevant and brand suitable white-list YouTube segments that are scored using proprietary 1st-party data that incorporates engagement, scale, sentiment and relevance.
“Bruce’s digital media experience is second to none,” said John Cobb, CEO of Giant Media. “He brings tremendous data-driven marketing expertise to Giant Media, which will play a pivotal role in the adoption of VuePlanner for brands and agencies to drive more effective video advertising on YouTube.”
During his career, Budkofsky has specialized in hiring teams, leading go-to-market strategy, opening doors and breaking new business. He has a diverse background that includes TV, desktop, mobile and programmatic ad sales, as well as martech SaaS platforms including data management, video ad serving, SSPs and DSPs. Budkofsky joins Giant Media from Sonobi where he served as VP of the advertising technology developer’s Buyer Suite. Previously, Budkofsky held senior executive digital media leadership positions at Vindico, Dominion Enterprises, Lotame and Fandango. He began his career as one of The Weather Channel’s first digital account executives for Weather.com.
“Today, digital video is where advertisers are experiencing the best opportunity to engage with their consumers. However, there are challenges, especially as it relates to relevant content and brand suitability, and VuePlanner delivers both,” said Budkofsky. “Giant Media is an established and proven leader in the digital video space. While VuePlanner has been used as a managed-service behind the scenes since 2012, we’ve just begun bringing the groundbreaking VuePlanner technology to market, which represents an exciting and massive opportunity for brands and agencies to navigate YouTube.”
Advertisers and agencies can learn more about their current YouTube campaigns for free by inputting YouTube video IDs or URLs into VuePlanner’s Placement Scan at: https://app.vueplanner.com. With insights from more than 200 million monetizable YouTube videos, the tool provides an analysis of the brand suitability and contextual relevance of a sample of the videos they’ve been running TrueView ads against.
For brands and agencies partnered with VuePlanner, the tool distinguishes itself by calculating a VueScore placement quality metric for each campaign by processing and segmenting data from millions of videos on YouTube; scanning and filtering videos by concept and page sentiment through a partnership with IBM Watson, and a proprietary algorithm that determines content relevance, user engagement and traffic trends over time.
Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Membership
In addition to the hiring of Budkofsky, Giant Media is also pleased to announce its membership as a General Member of the IAB, which empowers the media and marketing industries to thrive in the digital economy. Earlier this month, VuePlanner was the VIP sponsor of the invitation-only IAB Video Leadership Summit held in Carlsbad, Calif., where more than 70 senior-level industry stakeholders gathered to address industry challenges and opportunities, with the goal of operationalizing new ideas.
ABOUT GIANT MEDIA
Giant Media is a media and technology company that provides advertisers and their agencies the confidence to plan and buy contextually relevant video campaigns while identifying the environments most suitable for brand advertising. The company supports clients through either a self- or managed- services approach to media planning and buying led by VuePlanner, a transparent, insight-driven planning tool for advertising on YouTube. Giant Media combines proprietary technology and IBM Watson to read, understand and interpret the content and context of hundreds-of-millions videos, which drives effectiveness and increases return on ad spend.
