Mediaplex, Personify Team for One-Stop-Shop Offering

Measurement is the name of the game, as online marketing players Mediaplex and Personify join forces to sell a combined ad delivery, tracking and retargeting product.

Through the deal, the two companies will both promote Mediaplex’s online ad and email products with Personify’s e-business analytical software.

In the ideal setup, an advertiser would deliver ads via Mediaplex’s MOJO AdServer, track results, optimize, and build consumers profiles with Personify’s CI Platform, then retarget consumers using Mediaplex’s MOJO Mail.

Naturally, the goal is to provide online businesses with a single offering that will bundle customer acquisition and retention tools.

“Marketing campaigns that are targeted on customer behavior will produce significantly higher response and purchase rates by delivering the right information to the right customers at the right time,” stated Mark Menke, who is vice president of business development at Mediaplex. “Simply put, more visitor intelligence makes for better marketing campaigns.”

But the combined product also includes a way to measure online advertising campaigns’ return on investment — a trend that many players in the online ad industry have begun offering in recent months.

In August, Coremetrics and email marketer Digital Impact teamed up to offer a similar combo package to advertisers. Meanwhile, Avenue A and DoubleClick have both rolled out their own in-house analytics divisions. And late last year, pay-for-performance ad network ValueClick bought online marketing analysis firm StraightUP!. (ValueClick is also in the process of acquiring Mediaplex for about $40 million in stock.)

The union of ad serving and metrics is one way that the players in online advertising hope to convince advertisers of the value of their services.

And many believe that such proof is becoming increasingly necessary if Web media and ad delivery firms hope to boost their share of traditional companies’ advertising budgets, which continue to dwindle as the economic downturn persists.

Instead, by offering a trackable way for clients to deliver and optimize their campaigns, efforts like Mediaplex and Personify’s are aiming to do just that.

“We believe that the integration of Mediaplex’s proven solution with Personify CI will lead to the improvement of response and conversion rates of marketing campaigns,” said Scott Ernst, Personify’s vice president of corporate and business development. “Subsequently, this will lead to efficient budget allocation, higher sales, and more satisfied customers.”