Happy New Year and I hope your Holiday Season was great.

Around this time every year, I take the opportunity to look back on the previous year and forward at the year ahead. This is the fourth consecutive year I’ve tackled this exercise and I hope it sheds light on what we’re doing at appssavvy, the adtivity by appssavvy platform, and much more.

Last year I wrote about how “I’ve never been more excited about the direction of appssavvy.” At that point, we were only a couple months into expanding on our vision for activity-based advertising from a sales and marketing organization to one entrenched in technology and product. While an often-challenging and bumpy ride, it has been equally exhilarating and, most importantly, groundbreaking.

At this time last year, we were only a couple months into developing the adtivity by appssavvy platform and building-out the appssavvy technology and engineering teams.

By spring, we began beta testing adtivity by appssavvy and in September the industry’s first activity advertising platform launched. adtivity by appssavvy enables leading web, social and mobile publishers to unlock and create new, display advertising opportunities reaching people as they perform activities and offers scalable, center-of-the-experience, display ads, thus creating the most effective way to deliver and receive advertising. To date, more than 50 brand advertisers, including American Express, Chase, Coca-Cola, HP, Sony and State Farm, to name a few, have implemented activity advertising campaigns, which are seeing an engagement rate of 4-to-8 times industry average.

Following the launch, in November we announced the availability of the adtivity by appssavvy Mobile SDK (Software Development Kit) building on our platform for mobile publishers on iOS, including iPhone and iPad, and Android platforms. The first mobile activity-based advertising campaign began the very next week. Below is an example for HP and its TouchSmart 520t with Magic Canvas and 23’ HD touchscreen display.

We built appssavvy on a simple idea: Make advertising better. We challenged ourselves to rethink the delivery and reception of advertising, and identified the shift in Web behavior to one focused on people’s activities. People spend more time on the Web performing activities, including updating statuses, collecting, sending and earning virtual goods, polls and contests, and completing a level, visiting a friend or sending a message within a game, and “Like”ing something to name a few, than on anything else.

This shift led our strategy across hundreds and hundreds of campaigns as a sales and marketing services organization and to the development of the adtivity by appssavvy platform. The proof was in the numbers as we found activity advertising rivals paid search in terms of effectiveness, outperforms standard displays ads by a multiple of 11 and more than doubles rich media. We unveiled this research at the first appssavvy Activity Summit in April and you can download the full research here.

Finally, we capped off the year by completing our Series A-1 $7.1 million venture capital round, which included current investors and new investor, AOL Ventures. The infusion of fresh capital brings the total raised by appssavvy, to date, to $10.2 million, and is further evidence of the activity advertising opportunity for both publishers and advertisers.

In 2012, we’re tasked with the introduction of the adtivity by appssavvy platform and educating the market about the future of appssavvy and the value of activity-based advertising. This effort is already led by our rebrand – adtivity by appssavvy – which is front and center through all our communications and marketing, including recently re-launched web site.

In addition, we have tremendous opportunities to engage both large media companies and mobile companies of all sizes. We’ve made strong in-roads in social media, especially social games, but activity is much more than games and big web publishers and mobile app companies can benefit greatly from activity-based advertising.

Finally, we’re only in the beginning stages of understanding the opportunity we’re tackling. We already know activity-based advertising works significantly better in the display space – we’re seeing an engagement rate of 4-to-8 times industry average. The next step, however, is further analysis and delivering data to publishers to make them smarter about ad delivery.

With that, I’d like to speak to a few themes we’re seeing develop as we enter 2012 and beyond:

1. The Push to Create and Monetize Activity Will Only Grow Stronger. I’ll start with a bit of a self serving prediction, but I wouldn’t be in this business if I didn’t believe it. Publishers are realizing they are not doing enough to stay innovative in their advertising strategy. Therefore, in 2012, more and more publishers will look beyond the page view for ad monetization and the creation of new advertising experiences. They’ll find new advertising opportunities lie with the activities across their properties, whether on the web, social or mobile, and it is more efficient and effective than current offerings, including pre-roll video and mobile display. The activity-based advertising will be the emerging digital advertising category that paid search and behavioral targeting were a few years ago, and which video is today.
2. Advertisers Will Encourage Publishers and Ad Providers to Seek New Inventory. With the advent of social data, targeting, re-targeting and everything else companies are trying to fit into an ad tag, the reality for advertisers is that no matter what you do to target an ad, if you use the same banner real estate to run the ad, consumers will still be blind to it. Therefore, the year of 2012 will be about creating net new inventory that looks and feels native to and a part of the user experience.
3. CPE & CPV Will Be Scrutinized. Traditionally, advertisers buy on a CPM-basis, and then back into a CPE, CPA, CPV or CPI. In that model, it is the impression that got the first look, and engagement and acquisition metrics supported the value of that impression. Today, many ad providers are charging directly on those metrics and advertisers are guaranteed a certain level of engagement or number of conversions. The impression is forgotten about, and the guaranteed number is the focus. While this sounds great, and certainly has value, this year we will see more and more advertisers seek to understand the value of an engagement, view or acquisition. Questions, such as “is an incentivized view as valuable as one that isn’t?” and “where and why is an engagement happening?” will be answered.
4. Intersection of Audience and Context Will Be Strongly Mapped-out. As we see more and more companies create new methods of behavior, social and contextual targeting, we’ll see that each of these only provide a limited value as a standalone. Reaching the right person in the right context at the right time is within reach as these data sets begin to mature and speak to each other.
5. Across Platforms or Lose. It isn’t good enough to be on the Web, social, mobile or TV for that matter. Advertising companies that can’t deliver a campaign across platforms, at least, the web, including social, and mobile in 2012 at scale will lose in the long-term. Sure, cross-platform advertising has been talked about and “offered” for years, but this year the winners will have the ability to cross promote buys across multiple platforms.

Thank you for taking the time to read my annual update. As always, if I or someone else at appssavvy can be a resource to you at any time, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

I hope 2012 is off to a good start and best wishes for a great year.