PerformLine Blog

Department of Education to Implement Marketing Compliance Regulations

The Department of Education today announced that it is on schedule to implement new regulations of the for-profit education sector dealing with gainful employment and 13 other issues to protect students and taxpayers. The regulations will be released in two phases, the first due to launch July 1, 2011. The ultimate goal is accountability and consumer protection:

“These schools and their investors benefit from billions of dollars in taxpayers subsidies, and in return, taxpayers have a right to know that all of these programs are providing solid preparation for a job,” Duncan continued. “We want to be as thoughtful as possible as we move forward. We’re taking additional time to analyze all the feedback we’ve received to help us strike the right balance between holding these programs accountable to protect students and taxpayers from abuse and making sure we keep whole those programs that are doing a good job.”

PerformLine looks forward to implementing tools that will help our clients manage to these new guidelines. More on that soon!

(Source: ed.gov)

“Flight to Compliance” and LeadsCon East Insights

If the theme of the 2009 LeadsCon East was “Flight to Quality”, then I would say the theme of the 2010 NYC LeadsCon East was most definitely “Flight to Compliance.” The recent proposed amended regulations to the Higher Education Act of 1965 announced by the Dept of Education targets for-profit colleges and definitely shaped the discussions of this LeadsCon conference. In fact, the only other topic of discussion that came close to compliance in number of mentions was the presence of a new company in our space named Lead Beaver. Sorry readers, I won’t go there.

Compliance issues have always drawn attention in our industry but in light of these proposed regulations they have become even more illuminated. The proposed regulations would “provide additional guidance to institutions to ensure that marketing materials and statements are an accurate representation of the institution.” And maybe more important, the proposed regulations clarify the definition of the term “misrepresentation” to include “any false, erroneous, or misleading statement made by one of its representatives, or any ineligible institution, organization, or person with whom the eligible institution has an agreement.”

What does that mean for schools and their partners? It means that compliance is a concern on both the “Buy” and “Sell” side that must be addressed. On the “Buy” side, schools and agencies must keep an eagle-eye on their lead suppliers and publishers to ensure accuracy and maintain integrity of their school’s related copy on ads, landing pages and dynamic forms. Buyers are implementing strategies that include: automated monitoring with screen shots of lead supplier’s forms, compliance scoring of traffic sources, and customization of compliance rules and rule weightings on a per program basis.

On the “Sell” side, aggregators and publishers must be ever watchful to comply with the marketing guidelines provided by the schools and agencies they partner with or they could find themselves ultimately responsible. The potential “damages” for misrepresentation could represent entire tuition program/degree tuition, or at least the student loan amount of all those students who responded to the misleading copy. This has the potential to mean fines totaling tens of millions, or hundreds of millions, for some of the larger for-profit universities.

That issue leads to another very important discussion on compliance monitoring taking place among the largest companies on the “Sell” side–about how exactly to enable greater transparency for their clients without giving away their “secret sauce.” The leading sell-side companies do believe greater compliance monitoring and lower tolerance for misrepresentation is the new way of life. But, it needs to be done in a way that protects their proprietary marketing strategies including their publisher network list. The requirements for greater transparency will make it easier for buyers to optimize out non-compliant lead sources and create opportunities for reliable, compliant lead suppliers to earn larger lead caps and higher CPLs. No longer will the “good guy” lead providers need to subsidize the shady players.

While it may seem a daunting task, adhering to compliance issues doesn’t necessarily mean big changes in how most for-profit colleges approach their online marketing campaigns or how they work with their partners. There are technologies available that meet these demands that are turn-key and rich in data and alerts to keep compliance issues at bay, like PerformMatch™ — sell-side friendly, leveraging either a JavaScript deployment or a less invasive crawl solution. This is true compliance monitoring for schools that goes well beyond the screen shot to track individual violations of misrepresentations. (You didn’t think I could get through this without one plug for PerformMatch™, did you?)

The “Flight to Compliance” will definitely re-shape the Lead Gen industry in the coming year and I believe make us stronger and more focused on delivering top marketing value for our clients.

PerformLine is proud to be a new member of The LeadsCouncil

PerformLine is proud to be a new member of The LeadsCouncil, an independent association whose members are companies in the online lead generation space from buyers to sellers, technology solution providers and investment professionals. All members are united in a common goal of promoting best practices and fostering trust regardless of vertical. LeadsCouncil was created by the industry experts and evangelists Jay Weintraub and Dave Wengel whose ongoing mission both through LeadsCon and LeadsCouncil is to increase the size of the market and number of companies who leverage lead generation online.

LeadsCouncil has the following mandates:

·          Help advance online lead generation and customer acquisition through the promotion of best practices.

·          Develop industry specific research and thought leadership to help evangelize the benefits of the medium.

·          Provide a universal lead certification program for industry to instill confidence in partnerships between buyers and sellers.

·          Facilitate continuing education and networking opportunity between digital lead generation marketers.

CUnet Selects PerformLine’s Campaign Verification Platform PerformMatch™ to Monitor Compliance of Higher Education Performance Marketing Traffic Sources

PerformMatch™’s Campaign Verification Technology Provided Increased Brand Protection and Compliance Monitoring for Higher Education Performance Marketing Leader CUnet

PerformLine, an online ad verification company, today announced that its campaign verification platform PerformMatch™ has been selected by CUnet, a leading interactive educational marketing firm, to help keep publishers compliant with their marketing guidelines. The application of PerformMatch™ enables CUnet to better manage compliance and brand protection for their higher education clients.

CUnet began working with PerformMatch™ in January 2010 to increase affiliate accountability and augment the transparency of the brands’ ad campaigns. CUnet uses the PerformMatch™ technology to automate the verification process and provide data that the account teams can quickly act on.

“The PerformMatch™ platform has greatly increased the efficiency of our creative compliance operations,” said Matt McLaughlin, President of CUnet. “PerformLine has provided our account teams with a unique set of automated tools that make CUnet even better at detecting and resolving questions regarding third-party display of our clients’ promotional copy and student inquiry forms.”

PerformMatch™ is the first real-time end-to-end campaign verification platform that provides advertisers and their agencies with full transparency into where and how their ad creative is appearing on publisher and affiliate web sites. The platform offers advertisers compliance monitoring; brand protection; and an improved ROI by identifying and eliminating wasted spend.

“The PerformMatch™ technology has proven to be an excellent compliance management tool for the higher education sector,” said Alex Baydin, CEO of PerformLine. “We are very pleased to be working with the team at CUnet in helping them provide their higher education clients with the latest compliance and brand protection technologies available.”

About PerformLine, Inc.:
PerformLine, Inc is an online marketing and technology company focused on delivering campaign verification products and services for Advertisers, Agencies, Publishers and Ad Networks. The demand for transparency, brand protection and independent verification resulted in PerformMatch™- the broadest reaching campaign verification platform in-market, offering Display, Email and Lead Generation verification all in one place. PerformLine, Inc. was founded in 2007 in New York, NY. For more information, visit www.performline.com.

About CUnet:
CUnet is the premier provider of online performance media and interactive marketing services driving qualified student inquiries and enrollments for the higher education industry. Founded in 2003, the company has grown rapidly to oversee the promotional campaigns of over 1,000 colleges, universities, and career schools throughout the United States and Canada. CUnet is dedicated to creating cost-effective marketing programs using a mix of online media strategies and formats to find prospective students, generate qualified responses, and maximize enrollments and starts. CUnet is a subsidiary of Nelnet, a leader in education planning and financing for more than 30 years. CUnet is based in Paramus, NJ. For more information, visit www.cunet.com.

PerformLine Partners with Milabra to Add Visual Recognition Capabilities to Campaign Verification Platform

Ad Verification Company Performline partners with Visual Intelligence Platform Milabra to Add Visual Recognition Capabilities to PerformMatch™ Platform.

Performline, a leading online ad verification company, today announced a partnership with Milabra, a visual intelligence platform. This partnership allows for PerformLine to use Milabra’s visual recognition capabilities to offer its advertising and network partners enhanced targeting, brand safety and compliance monitoring. PerformLine’s campaign verification platform PerformMatch™ can now move beyond text and semantic content categorization into image verification by understanding the context of the pictures on a page.

“PerformLine is able to provide ad verification by monitoring and scoring images to offer additional brand safety and compliance monitoring for our clients,” said Alex Baydin, CEO of PerformLine. “This partnership with Milabra is consistent with our commitment to offer our clients the broadest reaching verification platform so they can have the highest level of transparency available.”

Milabra’s patent pending visual intelligence platform can see the image content, image quality, page layout and design in real-time. This visual optimization process empowers advertisers to optimize their buys by recognizing display ad opportunities while protecting themselves from inappropriate content.

“We are excited to extend Milabra’s visual recognition capabilities across a leading platform such as PerformMatch™,” said Sam Cox, CEO of Milabra. “Milabra is committed to offering its partners and clients custom visual recognition capabilities to improve the effectiveness of their customers’ online marketing programs.”

About PerformLine, Inc.:
PerformLine, Inc is an online marketing and technology company focused on delivering campaign verification products and services for Advertisers, Agencies, Publishers and Ad Networks. The demand for transparency, brand protection and independent verification resulted in PerformMatch™- the broadest reaching campaign verification platform in-market, offering Display, Email and Lead Generation verification all in one place. The platform offers advertisers and agencies full transparency into where and how their ad creative is appearing on otherwise blind ad networks. PerformLine, Inc. was founded in 2007 in New York, NY. Its investors include: First Round Capital L.P., Rose Tech Ventures LLC, Dublin Capital Partners, Twin Capital LLC and Western Technology Investment. For more information, visit www.performline.com.

About Milabra:
Milabra’s neural network-based image recognition engine builds the value of online media image and video content with a configurable suite of image services delivered via a proprietary platform over the Internet. This combination of science and structure provides online media companies with fast, accurate and easy to use image-recognition services integrated into a single platform. Milabra is a privately-held company based in New York City. For more information, visit www.milabra.com.

This Thursday’s Capital Call NY is a VC lunchtime networking event that will feature exciting emerging companies, each of whom will present for eight minutes.

http://www.capitalcallny.com/

PerformLine’s Campaign Verification Platform PerformMatch™ Provides Screen Capture Technology To Support Both Brand and Performance Advertisers

PerformMatch™’s screen capture technology enables advertisers to protect their brand and keep their traffic sources compliant as well as empowers networks to earn credibility and increase ad spend.

PerformLine, an online ad verification company, features screen capture technology in PerformMatch™, the only campaign verification platform that verifies display, email and lead generation in-market. This broadest-reaching platform provides full transparency into where and how ad creative is appearing.

The PerformMatch™ technology automatically generates an Impression Detail Page of every ad impression by capturing and then analyzing the referring creative and publisher page. Screen captures are rendered in near real-time and made visible to the advertiser or agency. The ad environment is contextually analyzed to ensure ad networks and publishers are delivering on advertisers rules specified in their insertion order including; categorization of page content, geo-targeting, keywords, and regulatory compliance guidelines for their given vertical.

At the recent Ad Verification Day hosted by the IAB, PerformLine was identified as one of only two ad verification companies able to provide this imperative part of the verification process. Screenshots are invaluable in empowering advertisers and publishers to discuss the data in a like manner. Rather than simply stating where and when the fraud occurs, all parties are able to see the possible compromises to their ad buys and take corrective measures.

“The PerformMatch™ platform allows publishers to have an apples-to-apples discussion with the advertisers,” said Alex Baydin, PerformLine CEO. “The ability to discuss the same data removes any possible conflict between the two parties. Our screen capture technology ensures that the verification space will no longer be based on questionable accuracy.”

PerformMatch™ technology captures an auditable trail of screenshots from lead generation pages to display ad pages. Problematic pages, derived from our proprietary quality score, are flagged for review and the data is made actionable via an intuitive user interface. Leading education and insurance companies rely on PerformMatch™ to keep their traffic sources compliant with FTC marketing guidelines and ensure higher lead quality.

Founder & CEO Alex Baydin speaks at IAB Ad Verification Day

IAB Hosts Interactive Advertising’s First-Ever Ad Verification Summit

Leading Agencies, Publishers and Networks Converge to Discuss Operational and Sales Implications of Latest Advertising Tools

Seeking to lend order and clarity to an increasingly important yet confusing component of the interactive advertising ecosystem, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today convened  the interactive industry’s first interdisciplinary forum on ad verification companies and technologies. “Ad Verification Day: An Introduction and Discussion of Methodologies” is being held in New York City, with an invited roster of interactive industry executives representing marketers, agencies, publishers, ad networks, and technology companies.

Companies claiming the ability to verify online ad buys have arisen during the past several years in response to advertiser and agency concerns that ads are running within content environments that have not been expressly included in a media buy or could harm an advertiser’s brand equity. By verifying delivery of ad campaigns, advertisers and media buyers hope to identify and eliminate budget waste from their online campaigns and safeguard the reputation of their brands.

The IAB, which represents the interests of the sellers of interactive advertising industry, has been a driving force in creating transparency in and removing friction from all stages of the interactive advertising buying process. Ad verification tools, when employed with sound methodologies, hold promise as a new resource for further improving confidence in the process of buying interactive advertising. But members of the association have grown uneasy about the proliferation of ad verification companies with differing, unaudited technologies, and the cost that ad verification is adding to the implementation and reconciliation of advertising transactions.

“We need to make sure that the work of ad verification companies is about brand protection and not confused with currency,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB. “These companies are not audited against any industry guidelines for counting impressions. It is our hope that the IAB, working together with organizations like the Media Rating Council, will be able to create a process and a set of open standards for this new type of tool, with the twin goals of creating a brand-friendly environment for marketers while not adding complexity cost to the ad buying process. Ad Verification Day is our first step in understanding the needs of the market.”

“Ad verification processes should complement existing work agencies and publishers have undertaken to make the interactive advertising supply chain more efficient and effective,” said Dan Murphy, Senior Vice President Interactive Research & Ad Traffic for Univision Interactive Media, and co-chair of the IAB’s Ad Operations Council.

Read the full story here

Eliminate Wasted Impressions & Low Quality Clicks and Leads

• Improve your ROI by quickly eliminating the waste in your media spend on Ad Networks

• Keep Ad Networks Compliant with the Terms of your Insertion Order

• Protect your Brand from appearing on undesirable content

• Avoid Incentivization paths, virtual currency paths, and other low quality traffic sources

• Stay compliant with FTC and AG best practices and guidelines

• Auditable trail of every impression with screen shots

• Quality Scores based on violations for every network and publisher that your media runs on

• Coverage on the following types of media buys: Display, Email, Search

PerformLine Selected by AlwaysOn as an OnMedia Top 100 Winner

Recognized for creating new opportunities in marketing, branding, advertising, and publishing.

PerformLine, the first real-time end-to-end Campaign Verification platform that provides advertisers with full transparency into where and how their ad creative is appearing on otherwise blind ad networks, today announced that it has been chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the OnMedia Top 100 winners.  Inclusion in the OnMedia 100 signifies leadership amongst its peers and game-changing approaches and technologies that are likely to disrupt existing markets and entrenched players. PerformLine was specially selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and industry experts spanning the globe based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz.

PerformLine and the OnMedia Top 100 Companies will be honored at AlwaysOn’s OnMedia NYC event on February 1st, 2010, at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York City.

This two-and-a-half-day executive event features CEO presentations and high-level debates on which forces are disrupting user behavior and creating new opportunities in the marketing, branding, advertising, and public relations industries.

“Our view is that we are still moving up a very steep Internet innovation curve, which means the media world will continue to be radicalized.” said Tony Perkins, founder and CEO of AlwaysOn.  “We congratulate the OnMedia 100 winners for their success in introducing the tools, services, and platforms that continue to disrupt the old ways of Madison Avenue for the benefit of marketers and content consumers alike.”

The OnMedia 100 winners were selected from among hundreds of other technology companies nominated by investors, bankers, journalists and industry insiders.  The AlwaysOn editorial team conducted a rigorous three-month selection process to finalize the 2009 list.

PerformLine’s PerformMatch™ technology automatically generates an Impression Detail Page of every ad impression by capturing and then analyzing the referring creative and publisher page. Screen captures are rendered in real-time and made visible to the advertiser or agency. The ad environment is contextually analyzed to ensure ad networks and publishers are delivering on advertisers rules specified in their insertion order and per FCC and IAB online marketing guidelines. The data is made actionable via a quality score that the advertiser uses to either reward high quality publishers or shut off non-compliant publishers.

A full list of all the OnMedia Top 100 winners can be found on the AlwaysOn website at: http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/34216

“We are very proud to be recognized by AlwaysOn, by being included in the OnMedia 100,” said Alex Baydin, PerformLine founder and CEO. “This is additional recognition of the value that PerformLine’s revolutionary Campaign Verification platform gives advertisers and their agencies in their efforts to keep their brands safe and eliminate wasted media spend.”