SEATTLE - (Business Wire) Mixpo, an online video advertising company dedicated to serving the local small and medium-size business (SMB) market, today announced that it has signed agreements with five locally focused media publishers, including: pioneering local online news sites Crosscut, Sun Valley Online and Pegasus News; ITZ Publishing, an online publishing consultant for newspapers across the US, and KGORadio.com, the Web site for KGO Newstalk AM 810, the most listened-to radio station in northern California.
The company has also disclosed performance data for two initial video campaigns conducted on behalf of the new partners, with results outlined further below.
Under the agreements, Mixpo’s new partners can leverage the company’s recently launched online video advertising platform to enable their advertisers to easily create, deploy and optimize VideoAds, Mixpo-powered online video advertisements, for placement on the publishers’ local Web sites and blogs, as well as on the advertisers’ own Web sites, blogs, and other online destinations. With the improved performance that video-based display ads can bring, Mixpo’s new partners are now positioned to monetize their display advertising inventory more effectively. The Mixpo platform is entirely turnkey, making it very easy for partners to deploy for their client advertisers and giving the partners the option to white-label the platform, or sell it under their own brands, if they so choose.
Mixpo’s newly announced partners include:
Crosscut, a Seattle-based source of local and Northwest news and commentary, combining original journalism with the best selections from other sources.
SunValleyOnline.com, which provides a comprehensive source for daily breaking news, blogs, entertainment, real estate, ski/recreation reports, and vacation information. The site brings community members and visitors together to communicate about issues and timely Sun Valley matters.
Pegasus News, a subsidiary of Fisher Communications, Inc., specializing in providing personalized local news, information, and advertising. Fisher plans to take Pegasus's news, information and advertising model, which currently services the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area, to additional U.S. markets in the coming year. Pegasus also developed The Daily You, an automatically personalized news service.
ITZ Publishing, a consulting firm that works with leading newspaper groups and publishers to develop and execute comprehensive online plans with a focus on building traffic and online revenues. Current active customers include Media News Group newspapers (The Denver Post, Salt Lake Tribune, LA Daily News), The Philadelphia Inquirer, Swift Communications, Wick Communications, Washington Post Community Newspapers and many independent newspapers.
KGORadio.com, the online companion for KGO Newstalk AM 810, a radio station serving the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. The station produces 100% live, local programming featuring extensive news coverage and compelling talk shows on a daily basis. KGO's listeners expect the best in news, talk, traffic, weather, business updates, health reports and sports coverage. The listeners have honored the station by rating KGO the most listened-to radio station in Northern California for 30 consecutive years, solidifying KGO as a strong voice for the community.
“We believe local media publishing is an ideal category for online video advertising, as it provides a base of locally and vertically targeted sites where businesses can effectively reach relevant readers in ways that encourage and facilitate interaction with the advertisers,” said Anupam Gupta, Mixpo President and CEO. “We are excited to add five hyper-local companies to our roster of partners and we look forward to selectively adding new publishers, all while positioning them to benefit from the substantially higher monetization on their online advertising inventory that video can bring.”
"A significant part of our mission lies in providing local newspapers with turnkey technologies they need to succeed to drive revenue growth in a challenging and evolving marketplace," said Greg Swanson of ITZ Publishing. "We believe that online video advertising will play an important role in the growth of online publishing revenues and are already seeing great traction as we have begun working with some of our local publishing partners. The unique advertising portal we are developing in partnership with Mixpo is already of tremendous value to online sales people."
"Mixpo delivers dynamic online video advertising that is highly targeted to our local audience," said David Brewster, Publisher of Crosscut. "We have tested Mixpo's video advertising platform for the past six months and found that video ads outperform traditional static banner advertisements, provide a higher quality of advertising to Crosscut readers, and give our advertisers a more robust advertising option."
INITIAL RESULTS
In addition to direct sales of advertising, Crosscut has experimented with various ad networks. Some of these networks delivered advertisements that were irrelevant or inapplicable to Crosscut's discerning audience. Mixpo offered an elegant alternative that delivered advertisements from local companies whose products or services were appropriate to Crosscut's content and readership. These advertisers better fit the Crosscut brand, and, not surprisingly, their ads yielded quality results. For a local winery client, Crosscut deployed a Mixpo in-banner video ad to drive people to visit the winery for a wine tasting. Direct response overlays drove users to a special coupon they could print out and redeem at the winery. The campaign garnered a .8% click-to-views rate (equivalent metric to click-through-rates (CTR), in which the industry average is .1%). In addition, 67% of viewers who clicked on the ad watched the video, showing a high level of engagement by Crosscut viewers.
Meanwhile, a KGORadio.com client, a homebuilder selling a luxury development in Northern California, wanted to drive potential buyers to the physical property by using online video advertising. Using the Mixpo platform, the company launched a video ad during a recent weekend with a special $50 gas card promotional offer for those who would visit the development. The company promptly received hundreds of leads. As was the case with the Crosscut campaign, this online video ad yielded an approximate .8% click-to-views rate, while 70% of users who clicked on the ad viewed the video.
The Mixpo online video advertising platform consists of five integrated components, including:
- The VideoAd, a dynamic video advertising player that businesses can easily embed into in-banner video ads, search engine landing pages, Web pages, or blogs;
- The Studio, where companies can easily create high-quality VideoAds from existing video, photo, and audio files, from a broad range of stock media options;
- Ad Rotation, which allows companies to test and compare different versions of a VideoAd for effectiveness;
- The Dashboard, where clients measure how a VideoAd is performing by tracking the number of impressions and views, playthrough and conversion, viewers’ geographic locations, and referring sites;
- Automatically generated landing pages for each VideoAd, providing the search terms and other metadata to maximize exposure to more than 100 video sites powered by a range of search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and Blinkx.
About Mixpo
Mixpo is an online video advertising company dedicated to providing the local small and medium-size business (SMB) market with technology-based products that are both easy to use and effective in driving results. Through its pioneering online video advertising platform, Mixpo enables local publishers, interactive directories and local search marketing companies to easily and affordably create, deploy, and optimize online video ads that drive measurable results and fuel more effective marketing campaigns for their clients. The company's turnkey Mixpo-to-Go channel program gives partners the flexibility to private-label the Mixpo platform, and easily integrate it into their advertising portfolios. For more information visit: http://www.mixpo.com.
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