Media Pitch: Imonomy Reveals How Images Can Combat Banner Blindness

Banner blindness is a problem that publishers and advertisers have been grappling with for years. While the first banner ad in 1994 earned a clickthrough rate of 44%, today readers have learned to ignore display ads and modern clickthrough rates are as low as 0.1%. A quick look at an online heat map, which tracks how much attention readers give certain parts of a web page, reveals that readers are more often drawn to content and images within the article itself, rather than the ads that surround it. As a result, the value of display ads has dropped significantly in recent years along with publishers’ CPMs. Ad tech startup Imonomy is tackling the issue of banner blindness with a unique platform that places advertisements over images. Imonomy founder and CEO Oren Dror explains in the interview below how this approach improves ad viewability and helps publishers increase ad revenue 15%-20% on average. Who are you? What is your technology and how does it work? Who are the entrepreneurs behind it? Imonomy is an intelligent In-Image platform that gives publishers, advertisers, and networks the ability to captivate their audiences on the most engaged areas of websites, the editorial images. I founded Imonomy in 2012 along with Amit Halawa-Alon after working together to build a semantic engine at Yedda, a startup acquired by AOL. One of the dominant insights we gained during that period of our career was the power of images to connect online audiences in meaningful and engaging ways. This insight led us to build a platform that utilizes images’ powerful impact in order to generate significant revenue uplifts for publishers and allow them to establish meaningful relationships with their users. Here’s what our technology does: 1) Our platform dynamically places ads on images to increase user engagement. 2) Our platform uses an algorithm that combines semantic, behavioral, and big data analysis to deliver relevant ads to the relevant audience. 3) We optimize the value of each impression using real-time bidding (RTB), header bidding, and real-time big data analysis to maximize results. Explain your existence: What problem are you solving or opportunity are you enabling? How are you unique and innovative? Amit and I founded Imonomy to answer two major issues facing the online industry: Declining user engagement and diminishing revenues. Our answer is twofold. First, we work to capitalize on a previously untapped resource, images. Images are the most engaging assets publishers have at their disposal and our technology is designed to maximize the revenue opportunity and ROIs from these assets. Second, we believe that the best way to deal with the market’s challenges is by considering the interests of all three major market stakeholders simultaneously: publishers, advertisers, and users. The cumulative result of designing image solutions that meet the needs of all three stakeholders is success for each individual party. Ignore one and the other two will falter. Results: How have you or do you plan to help media companies increase revenue or cut costs? Can you quantify this? Our platform has helped and continues to serve hundreds of publishers to increase their revenues. We attribute our success to three crucial components: 1) Our technology generates incremental revenues on top of the current monetization tools our publishers are using. 2) We use RTB, header bidding and real-time big data analysis to optimize every impression. 3) Our dynamic viewability technology optimizes ad placement by automatically relocating ads to the images with the highest viewability on each webpage. The results? By adding our solution, publishers can expand their incomes by around 15%-20%. Share some wisdom: What do you think are the most important trends affecting the media business today? What do you see that no one else sees? User-centricity. The publishers that will thrive in the coming years will be those that put their users at the center of their focus. Publishers must understand the user journey, how users behave on their sites, and how users respond to different media types and offers. Here are a few key facts that we believe are crucial for understanding user behavior in today’s online environment: 1) Content with relevant images receive 94% more views than content without. 2) Optimizing visuals can increase engagement by 37%. 3) 55% of Pinterest’s audience make online purchase decisions based on images they see on the social network. Users crave and respond best to visual content. Publishers must build their website strategies around this insight both in regards to site structure and monetization. What’s Next? How do you plan on expanding or improving on your offering? Where do you see opportunities for growth? Our business is all about images and this is where we see the greatest potential for growth. We are building our platform step by step with different layers. In our next stage, our platform will include a variety of solutions to boost engagement and business results by utilizing images across the web. Pitch Us: If you've launched a publishing technology startup, the Media Pitch blog is an opportunity to tell your story to the media industry. Check out the contributor guidelines here.

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Media Pitch: Imonomy Reveals How Images Can Combat Banner Blindness

Oren Dror

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