“In the third quarter of 2016, we experienced growth of 141% in our platform business, and signed our first platform agreement with a major US agency holding company,” says CEO Randy Wootton in a statement emailed to MMW on Monday.  We are continuing our transformation into a leading predictive marketing platform provider, and announcing changes today designed to further our growth at scale. We are excited about the company’s platform business growth and our guidance for the fourth quarter remains unchanged.”

As part of these changes, Rocket Fuel is further organizing its operations around two core offerings – predictive marketing platform solutions and media services – with David Gosen, currently SVP and Managing Director of International, expanding his role to become GM, Platform Solutions & International, and Simon Hayhurst, currently SVP of Product, becoming GM of Media Services.

This reorganization will also result in the elimination of 93 services and administrative positions, representing 11 percent of the employee base. Along with real estate consolidation projects, including the relocation of the company’s corporate headquarters and other streamlining of facilities, the company anticipates that these changes will reduce operating expenses by approximately $20 million annually.

“Our top goal in 2017 is returning to growth,” said Wootton. “We will do this by working side by side with the world’s largest agencies and brands to leverage the value of our predictive marketing platform. We believe we can accelerate the traction in our platform solution business, which – at scale – should have lower costs of sales and service. We will continue plans to integrate our Moment Scoring technology into the top marketing platform OEMs to improve their predictive capabilities. Finally, we will continue partnering with some of the most influential system integrators to create robust solutions for their customers that integrate the very best offerings in the adtech/martech ecosystem.”

Wootton continued: ”We are inspired by the evolution of digital marketing from programmatic media buying to truly predictive marketing, particularly the application of AI and big data to predict the potential of every moment and make marketing more meaningful and accountable. The business models and cost structures for our media services and platform businesses are different, so the changes we are making today will better align our company to these goals. They reflect our commitment to building the definitive full funnel platform for predictive marketing, and we look forward to leading the way in 2017 and beyond.”

The post Rocket Fuel Continues Shift to Platform Business appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

CampaignTech East, if you’re not familiar, offers attendees behind-the-scenes perspectives on the newest digital strategies, marketing tools, and ground-breaking technologies for this campaign cycle and beyond.

“Participants of the two-day event are given the opportunity to hear panels and presentations, and connect and learn from the revolutionaries of digital politics, advocacy, and technology,” a statement emailed to MMW reads.

Rocket Fuel’s Amanda Whiteman will participate on the panel entitled, “Attack Of The Digital Ad Vendors” scheduled to take place at 11:00 am ET on Monday, May 2. Given the number of players and partnerships now in the digital ad marketplace, this session offers participants an introduction to the platforms and offerings of the panelists.

The panel will be moderated by Sean J. Miller, Editor at Campaigns & Elections.

To learn more about what Rocket Fuel can do for a political campaign, click here.

The post Top Programmatic Marketing Platform Gets Political appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Representing the touted programmatic marketing platform provider, Medici participated in a panel discussion entitled “How Big Will Digital Media’s Gains Be in the 2016 Election?”

The session was designed to explore “how political advertising has evolved in the past four years, where local digital and mobile will likely occur, and what innovations campaigns are using to target voters,” the company says.

This was the Street Fight Summit’s fifth annual pow wow. The summits are designed to dig into the future of beacons, retail marketing, the changing programmatic landscape, investor focus areas, and the continuing growth in mobile.

To recap everything that happened at Street Fight last week, click here.

The post Rocket Fuel’s Medici Dishes on Digital Political Advertising at 5th Annual Street Fight Summit appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The result? Rocket Fuel is now bringing geo-targeted advertising to real-time emergency communications.

Specifically, Rocket Fuel will provide a new outlet for targeted AMBER Alerts.

Distributed by law enforcement and redistributed to a network of partners by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), AMBER Alerts display geographically targeted information about child abductions to the public through practically every communications channel available.

Robert Hoever, Director of Special Projects for the Missing Children Division of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, says, “When a child is abducted, fast action can be critical to a safe recovery. Rocket Fuel’s partnership with FIA will help to quickly reach the right people at the right time and place with information about an abduction, helping communities work together to rescue children and save lives.”

The post Ad Tech Titan Tackles The Critical Cause of Child Safety appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Stock trading was actually halted for a time when the ad tech company got an acquisition offer from rival company Gravity4.

Gravity4 made an unexpected bid to pay $350 million cash for Rocket Fuel.

According to Re/code’s Kara Swisher, Gravity4 CEO Gurbaksh Chahal wrote in a letter to the company’s board: “I have observed that Rocket Fuel has hit a road block in this environment, and continues to struggle with its declining gross margins, as evidenced by its recently reported loss of $13.6 million in Q1, with no guidance as to what the remainder of 2015 holds in store … For Rocket Fuel, the status quo is not an option.”

The story was reported by Business Insider.

While it’s not unusual for stocks to halt trading, it is rare for this to happen with an ad tech company.

“Chahal is the troubled founder of another ad tech company, RadiumOne, from which he was ousted by his board after he was accused of punching his girlfriend,” revealed Business Insider. “The prosecution dropped felony charges after a plea bargain in which he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors: domestic assault and domestic violence.”

Chahal later started Gravity4, a rival ad tech company that in the past nine months has made nine acquisitions of small ad tech companies such as Triggit and, most recently, AdX Search.

Known as a “perennial self-publicist who once appeared on Oprah,” Chahal has both fans and critics. He claims his new company is currently valued at $1 billion.

The post Ad Tech Firm Rocket Fuel Stock Soars on News of Acquisition Bid appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The offering, we’re told, helps advertisers run successful mobile campaigns to drive increased in-store traffic.

The testimonials are already coming in.

“We engaged Rocket Fuel to increase foot traffic and the purchase frequency of Dr Pepper at more than 1,000 grocery store locations,” said Sheila Bonner, Vice President of Shopper Marketing at Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc.

“Rocket Fuel succeeded in driving 213,000 store visits at a cost of only $0.21 per visit,” Bonner explains. “And, as a part of the broader promotional effort, we introduced 25,000 new households to Dr Pepper products. This was our first foray into using Local Lift as an in-store purchase-intent driver, and Rocket Fuel went well beyond our expectations and those of our retail partner.”

Measuring impact is part of the plan.

As part of the launch, Rocket Fuel says it teamed up with Placed to enable advertisers to measure the direct impact of mobile ad spend in “driving real-world actions.”

“As measured by Placed Attribution, Rocket Fuel’s geotargeted campaigns average lift rate was 41.34 percent in 2014,” the company said in a recent news release.

According to company data, Rocket Fuel has driven a $0.57 average cost per store visit for brick and mortars, “meaning that retailers can recoup their marketing investment during the consumer’s first visit, realizing immediate positive ROI.”

The bottom line? Location savvy digital ads prompt ‘immediate ROI.’

“Location data availability is growing: Rocket Fuel sees lat/long on 40 percent of bid requests in the U.S. Advertisers that leverage location-specific Rich Media units, like Tap-to-Locate, which deliver a customized map of the closest advertised locations, are experiencing even greater campaign success,” the company says.

The post Location Savvy Digital Ads Prompt ‘Immediate ROI’ appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The reason is simple; if marketers can track what their customers are doing, watching, listening to, purchasing and talking about, no matter how or on what device they’re using, they will also know what products and services to offer them and, even more importantly, know how to market those products and services to them more effectively.

At the forefront of this multiple tracking endeavor, or cross device optimization as it’s been named, is massive digital ad buying agency Rocket  Fuel, and they want to bring the promise of CDO to their nearly 1500 clients.

Mark Alan Prior, the mastermind behind Rocket Fuel, tells VentureBeat that cross device optimization is one of the last frontiers in mobile advertising, which earned nearly $17 billion in 2013 and is predicted to nearly double that this year.

Rocket Fuel is in an excellent position to take advantage of CDO as they are the leaders in the programmatic ad industry and one of the biggest platform providers in the sector.

Founded in 2008, the company had over $240 million in revenue in 2013 and, with mobile advertising expected to grow to $35 billion by the end of the year, wanted to position themselves at the forefront of the transition from desktop clients to mobile.

Rocket Fuel has partnered with Facebook and, when they unveiled their retooled Atlas recently, the company was a launch partner in the social media giant’s attempt to take over the number one spot in mobile advertising, where Google is currently the king.

Prior believes that, with cross device optimization, advertisers will finally be able to prove that mobile advertising actually drives desktop and online transactions, something that can’t be quantified this time. If Rocket Fuel has their way, that situation will soon be remedied.

The post It's Getting Easier to Track Mobile Consumers Across Multiple Devices appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

On Thursday, the provider of artificial intelligence (AI) advertising solutions touted its new Mobile Advertising Suite, which we’re told has “already delivered significant return on investment” for hundreds of global advertisers.

According to eMarketer, mobile ad spending is expected to double to $9.6 billion this year and skyrocket to $35.6 billion by 2017, thanks to an explosion in consumers’ mobile device usage.
Bolstering the capabilities of its solutions amidst the ongoing evolution of mobile advertising, Rocket Fuel says that with its Mobile Advertising Suite, advertisers can achieve a number of important things, like driving in-store activity by utilizing Rocket Fuel’s big data analytics to build anonymous location profiles that marry consumer intent with geographic behavior.

“Marketers are recognizing more and more that even though a smaller screen, mobile provides a compelling stage for storytelling that moves brands closer to their consumers than ever before,” says Greg Stuart, CEO of the Mobile Marketing Association. “As a respected player in display advertising, Rocket Fuel’s investment and commitment to mobile with the launch of their Mobile Advertising Suite is emblematic of how digital marketing companies are now applying their expertise and leveraging their success with mobile.”

To learn more about what Rocket Fuel is bringing to the table in 2014, click here.

The post Rocket Fuel Blasts Off with Next-Gen Mobile Advertising Suite appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.