Marin Software and BlueKai Partner to Bring Audience Data to Search Advertising

Partnership first to break the silo of audience data and search marketing, delivering audience-based intelligence for search and informed marketing across all channels

SAN FRANCISCO, CA December 16 — Sophisticated marketers understand the key to realizing the full potential of online advertising exists within their data. Marin Connect offers marketers a flexible and open platform through which they can seamlessly integrate disparate sources of data – cost, contextual, revenue, and audience data – into a central, unified interface. Marin Connect serves as the foundation of Marin Software, powering marketers’ ability to unlock the potential of their data and deliver the right offer to the right audience at the right time for the right bid.

Today, Marin Software (NYSE: MRIN) announces Marin Audience Connect and an official partnership with BlueKai, the only independent SaaS solution for data management, analysis and activation in marketing. Through BlueKai, Audience Connect unites advertisers’ first- and third-party audience data with keyword intelligence. Advertisers can now target more effectively, customize creative and optimize bidding by specific audiences for search campaigns as well as display, video, analytics, native advertising and site optimization.

News Facts:

• Consumers’ attention is increasingly split across a variety of online channels and device types; advertisers seeking a higher ROI need to better identify and understand their customers so they can target them with the right message at the right time. Marin Audience Connect, through a partnership with BlueKai, combines advertisers’ first-party data (site, offline, social, mobile, analytics data) with third-party data (over 40,000 attributes of audience data across 400 million profiles of purchase intent, demographic and behavioral data) and search data (keywords, cost, conversion and revenue). This trifecta of data intelligence results in a comprehensive and rich audience profile that helps marketers piece together multiple customer touchpoints across various channels.
• Through Marin Audience Connect, marketers are able to incorporate and bid on search-based audience segments. Combining BlueKai audience data with Marin’s goal-based bidding algorithm enables advertisers to maximize conversions for audiences that deliver the highest customer lifetime value.
• Marin Audience Connect allows advertisers to create or augment Customer Audience segments based on intent data and activity generated by search marketing campaigns and applies it to all marketing efforts, including display, video and mobile and social. The increased audience targeting allows marketers to incorporate more refined and relevant targeting into their Facebook ad campaigns using Marin’s Facebook bid optimization.
• BlueKai Data Management Platform clients have the ability to further extend their search intelligence and take informed marketing action against BlueKai’s 100+ activation partners to power cross-channel ad targeting, site customization, native advertising as well as analytics for audience expansion.
• For B2B marketers Marin Audience Connect integrates with B2B audience data provider Bizo, enabled as part of the BlueKai Partnership. Bizo gives marketers access to 120 million business professionals, allowing B2B advertisers to optimize their digital marketing campaigns by industry, company size, geo, and job function.
• Additional information on Marin Connect and Audience Connect can be found at: www.marinsoftware.com/platform/connect.

Quotes:

• “While keywords have served digital marketing well as a proxy for consumer purchase intent, keywords alone tell an incomplete story,” said Matt Ackley, chief marketing officer at Marin Software. “By combining keywords with detailed audience data, marketers gain unprecedented insights that allow them to identify and target customers with the highest lifetime value.”
• “Search intelligence has always been a prized data asset for marketers and our partnership with Marin is a strategic way to deliver more value from search marketing as well as cross-channel campaigns beyond search,” says David Wiener, vice president of product at BlueKai. “It makes a marketer’s dialogue with the consumer smarter ­ across search, display, site optimization, and throughout all your messaging touchpoints.”
• “MoneySuperMarket is keenly focused on establishing a data-driven marketing strategy that crosses ALL marketing programs,” says Darren Bentley, Head of Performance Media, at MoneySuperMarket. “The partnership between BlueKai and Marin will help us unify our core audience data assets with what we’ve learned in the search world, enabling us to take meaningful marketing action and cohesive messaging across all channels to drive the highest ROI.”

Forward-Looking Statements:

This press release contains forward-looking statements including, among other things, statements regarding anticipated developments in digital advertising, performance and benefits of Marin’s platform, Marin Connect and Audience Connect. These forward-looking statements are subject to the safe harbor provisions created by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; defects and service interruptions in our platform (including but not limited to Marin Connect and Audience Connect); delays, reductions or slower growth in the amount spent on online and mobile advertising; and unforeseen developments in the digital advertising industry generally, technological changes; competition; and the fact that the search and mobile markets are emerging markets and rapidly evolving. These forward looking statements are based on current expectations and are subject to uncertainties and changes in condition, significance, value and effect as well as other risks detailed in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent reports on Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K that we may file from time to time. Marin Software assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.

About BlueKai:

BlueKai is Big Data for Marketing. The BlueKai Data Activation System enables marketers and publishers to use what they know to power what they do, turning insights into action, and driving higher efficiency & performance in their marketing. Through data activation, our enterprise-level SaaS solution unites fragmented data sources to drive omni-channel data aggregation and targeting. BlueKai's customers use data to analyze, advertise, optimize and monetize their audiences in ways that were previously unavailable to them and with BlueKai's "data unchained" methodology, your customized data segmentation can be leveraged anywhere and is not restricted to any single channel. BlueKai has been delivering big data-driven marketing solutions since 2008 to many Fortune 500 brands.