The deal is part of Vibrant Media’s mission under new CEO, Cella Irvine, to expand upon its existing suite of contextual solutions with innovative placements that deliver high performance for top brands, new revenue opportunities for quality publishers, and relevant experiences for consumers. With several key innovations in 2011, Vibrant Media’s contextual platform (VXPlatform) now includes a suite of advertising products – Vibrant Image, Vibrant Video, Vibrant Bar and Vibrant Display – in addition to Vibrant In-Text.
"Traditional ad models were brought online through pre-roll and display, but we create unique media placements that are designed for the interactive nature of the internet and deliver truly relevant ad experiences to users,” says Cella Irvine, CEO of Vibrant Media. “Roughly 30% of our publishers’ content is images and they now play an important role in our strategy to deliver new media placements."
“ISM shares Vibrant’s vision to create industry-leading in-image contextual advertising,” says Kevin Tung, Co-founder and COO of Image Space Media. “By combining our image technology with Vibrant’s unmatched scale, robust contextual platform, and incredible sales force, we’ve built a significant offering. Vibrant is a company unafraid to invent – we love everything about that.” ISM clients include Groupon, USA Today, Netflix, Amazon.com and Air France.
The acquisition of ISM will enhance the delivery of Vibrant Image, a product that identifies static images within brand-safe content across the Web and embeds small overlays within them at the bottom of the image. Vibrant Image is a premium placement that is more contextually engaging than standard display ads, claims the company. Chrysler (pictured) is a brand that has incorporated Vibrant Image into their digital media strategy.
Jason Gole, VP, Digital Media Director, Universal McCann for Chrysler says, “Vibrant Image ads enable Chrysler to engage users, while they're captivated by images, delivering a hyper relevant and visually rich ad experience. We are very encouraged by the high level of performance we are seeing through this new, innovative ad format."
For publishers, there is a significant revenue opportunity through leveraging image content. Every page viewed on Vibrant’s network generates approximately 1.5 images available for Vibrant Image – these photos can now be monetised.
ISM will become a Vibrant Media company, integrating easily with its existing VXPlatform to expand Vibrant Image through advanced performance and targeting capabilities. Vibrant currently works with over 6,500 publishers and with top brands including Vodafone, Chrysler, Three and Unilever’s Lynx/AXE brand. Click here to see a demo of Vibrant Image.
About Vibrant
Vibrant says: “Vibrant is a world leader in contextual technology aligning billions of words across the internet with relevant video, information, tools and advertising. With over 6,000 premium publishers, reaching more than 250 million unique users per month (comScore, 2011), Vibrant gives top brand marketers the opportunity to deliver highly targeted advertisements within premium Web content and offers publishers premium editorial tools to re-circulate users throughout their websites. Vibrant clients include Microsoft, General Motors, Unilever, Sainsbury’s and Hewlett Packard.
The company, founded in 2000, has offices in London, New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Paris, Hamburg, Munich and Dusseldorf. Vibrant has featured in the Inc. 500 and Deloitte Fast 50 lists, and in the UK: Media Momentum 2006, 2007; 2008 and Sunday Times Tech Track in 2004 and 2005.”
