Vizu launches Ad Catalyst

Wisdom of crowds service moves beyond crowdsourcing

Vizu is expected to announce on Wednesday its Ad Catalyist, a new service to give advertisers and marketers a better way to measure the effectiveness of their display ads. The new service is a new direction for Vizu, which started out as a self-service polling and market research company. "Market research is still cloaked in mystery," said Dan Beltramo, CEO and founder of Vizu. With respect to market research, there is this "fear" about the process unless the research is done by PhD's vs. Vizu has a wisdom-of-crowds approach, said Dan. I guess there's still some fear about what the crowds have to say.

Vizu will continue to keep the self-service polling and market research portion of its business running, but it's now setting its sights to tackling the measuring of display ads. 

So, how does it work? Vizu will cookie the audience of its publisher partners so they can eventually survey them about a current campaign. Say the campaign is for Dell Computer and the computer maker wants to know whether its campaign is raising purchase intent. Vizu will poll the audience across its publisher partner sites by popping up a little survey on those sites, such as, "How likely are you to buy Dell Computers?" About three percent of the audience participate in the polls, said Dan. The Vizu team can then react to the survey results, which display which creative unit is performing best, or which section the ad works best on, etc. The subsequent tweaks and surveys and follow-up tweaks and modifications have helped some of Vizu's advertisers raise their brand awareness or purchase intent by 12%, said Dan.

Essentially, people who've seen the ad are 12% more likely to buy a product over those who did not see the ad.

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