Vibrant Media has hired Canadian media professional Michael DiGiovanni to lead a new Canadian office that will help the company build a clientbase among media buyers and publishers north of the border.
The New York-based company comes from an older generation of ad tech, and boasts that it’s been doing native for much longer than it’s been called “native.” Founded 15 years ago, Vibrant initially started with in-text advertising — targeted text ads similar to Google AdWords, but embedded in publishers’ content.
Since then it’s diversified its in-content solutions, with units like in-image ads and expandable in-content video. But what qualifies it as “native,” said DiGiovanni, is the powerful tools Vibrant has built to ensure ads are precisely matched to content, and contextually relevant to the user reading it.
To accomplish this, Vibrant’s algorithms scan the text or image surrounding an ad placement for keywords and other markers, DiGiovanni explained. “Based on every refresh of each individual article page [within our publisher network], we understand the words, the images and the videos on that page,” he said. “So we’re able to say, this is an article on chicken recipes, and this is the most appropriate and relevant advertiser to go on that page.”
Previously, DiGiovanni was an online media director with Publicis Group in Toronto, first at Starcom MediaVest and then at ZenithOptimedia. He left in 2007 to become an account executive and later director of sales for Gorilla Nation, a family of brands at Evolve Media that includes eBaum’s World and Marvel.com.
He said he was attracted to Vibrant because of its long history in contextual advertising, and the strength of the targeting solution it’s developed. “Anyone that understands the power of search — the same sort of planning methods can apply to native,” he said. “It’s less about chasing down the right site than chasing down the right content. It’s really contextual hyper-targeting.”
Though a lot of native ad companies have been pushing for more attention-based metrics, like average time-on-page or total reads, Vibrant has always been a performance network, meaning clients only pay for clicks or completed video views.
Vibrant falls more on the “visually-tailored display advertising” side of the native spectrum — it doesn’t produce or distribute the kind of high-touch sponsored content that tech companies like Polar and Pressboard have specialized in. Other companies that work with in-content ads similar to Vibrant’s, like Slimcut Media, don’t consider in-content advertising to be native, reasoning that while the ads may be visually unintrusive and contextually relevant, they are still clearly ads, not content.
Regardless of the precise terminology, what Vibrant promises is scale. Its ad solutions are installed across some 6,000 publishers in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, including Hearst, IDG Entertainment (PC World) and Northern & Shell (Star). Several of its solutions are now available to be bought programmatically through common demand-side platforms, allowing advertisers to add their own first-party data into the mix.
DiGiovanni said in addition to winning over Canadian media buyers, he’ll be looking to add more Canadian publishers to Vibrant’s network.
“Our plan is to launch big, to have a footprint here,” he said, adding that he hopes to be bringing on as many as a dozen sales and support staff by the end of the year.
