Everything You Need to Know About Facebook’s Launch of Its Revamped Atlas Ad Platform

Facebook took a major step toward achieving its goals of making sure its users see advertising that is relevant to them -- no matter which devices they are using, and even when they are not on the social network itself -- and of allowing advertisers to be a part of the process both online and offline. The social network Monday officially introduced Atlas at Advertising Week 2014 in New York, confirming reports earlier this month by The Wall Street Journal and Ad Age. Atlas managing director Erik Johnson -- who is slated to moderate an Advertising Week panel Monday at 2 p.m. ET, “Where the Cookie Crumbles: Solving the Cross-Device Problem” -- officially announced the launch of the revamped Atlas in a blog post, as well as confirming an agency-wide ad-serving and measurement partnership with advertising holding company Omnicom, parent of agencies Omnicom Media Group, BBDO and TBWA Worldwide, which was also past of the Ad Age report earlier this month. Johnson wrote in the blog post: Today, we are announcing the launch of Atlas. We’ve rebuilt Atlas from the ground up to tackle today’s marketing challenges, like reaching people across devices and bridging the gap between online impressions and offline purchases. People spend more time on more devices than ever before. This shift in consumer behavior has had a profound impact on a consumer’s path to purchase, both online and in stores. And today’s technology for ad serving and measurement – cookies -- are flawed when used alone. Cookies don’t work on mobile, are becoming less accurate in demographic targeting and can’t easily or accurately measure the customer purchase funnel across browsers and devices or into the offline world. People-based marketing solves these problems. Atlas delivers people-based marketing, helping marketers reach real people across devices, platforms and publishers. By doing this, marketers can easily solve the cross-device problem through targeting, serving and measuring across devices. And Atlas can now connect online campaigns to actual offline sales, ultimately proving the real impact that digital campaigns have in driving incremental reach and new sales. Atlas has been rebuilt on an entirely new code base, with a user interface designed for today’s busy media planners and traffickers. Targeting and measurement capabilities are built-in, and cross-device marketing is easy with new ways of evaluating media performance centered on people for reporting and measurement. This valuable data can lead to better optimization decisions to make your media budget even more effective. As reported by the Journal last week, Atlas is a re-engineered version of the Atlas Advertiser Suite that Atlas developed when it was still owned by Microsoft, prior to being acquired by Facebook in February 2013, and it will provide advertisers with a greater understanding of which Facebook users have seen, interacted with or acted upon ads, as well as offering an automated demand-side platform ad-buying bidding tool, targeting Facebook users elsewhere on the Internet. Johnson offered more details on the partnership between Atlas and Omnicom: We’re excited to announce that Omnicom is the first holding company to sign an agency-wide ad-serving and measurement partnership with Atlas. Together, Omnicom -- powered by Neustar technology -- and Atlas will jointly develop integrations to enable more automated capabilities for Omnicom’s clients, including Pepsi and Intel, which are among the first testing the new platform. And Johnson discussed the initial partners in the revamped Atlas, saying: We’re also welcoming a key group of partners that cross search, social, creative management and publishers. These partners will bring people-based measurement to more channels and platforms with seamless integrations. For example, Instagram -- as a publisher -- is now enabled with Atlas to both measure and verify ad impressions. And for Atlas advertisers that are already running campaigns through Instagram, Instagram ads will be included in Atlas reporting. The complete list of Atlas partners follows: Creative Partners Paid Search: Kenshoo Marin Software Social Advertising: Shift Social.com Social Moov Video and Rich Media: Jivox Innovid Celtra Flashtalking Medialets Goldspot Media Phluant Publishers AdMarvel Aarki Immobi The Weather Co. Phluant Adelphic Kargo Medialets Rhythm Conversant Celtra Tapad Opera Mediaworks Millennial Media Instagram Facebook LiveRail Some of Atlas’ partners weighed in on the launch, as well. Shift, a Strategic Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer, said in a blog post: Atlas’ cross-network data provides advertisers with a better understanding of performance across advertising campaigns via cross-channel and conversion reporting. Advertisers can then leverage reporting for multitouch attribution, which provides a comparison of performance of all campaigns using Atlas technology. Atlas’ “people-based” metrics will also help marketers better reach the people they want across devices, platforms and publishers. Shift’s platform complements Atlas by giving advertisers access to proprietary marketing solutions and measurement tools that help marketers save time and maximize revenue across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. As advertisers create, launch and manage Facebook advertising campaigns using Shift’s programmatic ads solutions, all campaign details will automatically be reflected in the Atlas platform, ensuring a more seamless user experience. Advertisers will also have access to Shift’s own campaign reporting, which provides insights specific to social and mobile performance. SPMD Kenshoo said in a press release: Through the partnership, deduplicated campaign performance data from Atlas is automatically imported into Kenshoo Search, saving marketers time by removing the need for manual tracking application, creating campaigns twice and data manipulation. Senior vice president of product Will Martin-Gill added: Kenshoo’s industry-leading software was designed to deliver infinite optimization by leveraging insights from each channel to inform the next. Partnering with Atlas to provide clients access to highly accurate, deduplicated data saves them time and improves the efficiency of their campaign optimization within Kenshoo. Forecasting, budgeting, portfolio optimization and campaign automation are hallmarks of Kenshoo’s best-in-class predictive-marketing software. Combining these with Atlas delivers the industry’s most accurate cross-channel reporting and optimization solution by relying on one source of truth that accounts for how consumers move across channels. And Jivox, developer of data-driven dynamic ad platform Jivox IQ, said in a release: Jivox’s flagship ad platform, Jivox IQ, has been fully integrated to extend Atlas’ reach into the broader marketplace of display advertising, providing customers with the ability to develop and serve data-driven native, video and mobile ads across the entire Atlas ad serving and measurement platform. Jivox founder and CEO Diaz Nesamoney said in the release: There is a huge opportunity for Atlas to take advantage of the broader display, search, video and mobile marketplace. The synergies of our technologies will give brands an easy way to develop, run and measure campaigns on any screen. Johnson added: As a data-driven ad platform, Jivox is ideally suited to provide highly creative, dynamic ads for the Atlas environment. By partnering with Jivox, our clients will be able to create a variety of rich media ads and run them at scale through our reliable and simple platform, ensuring that every impression is viewable and delivered to the intended audience.

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Everything You Need to Know About Facebook’s Launch of Its Revamped Atlas Ad Platform

David Cohen

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