Former AOL and WPP executive Brian Fitzpatrick joins board of contextual digital advertising company, Smartology

Contextual digital advertising company Smartology has appointed Brian Fitzpatrick as a non-executive board director as it embarks on the next phase of its growth plan. Formerly head of EMEA at programmatic video advertising specialist Adap.tv (purchased by AOL in 2013), Fitzpatrick, who is also an investor in Smartology, brings in-depth online media expertise and extensive experience of building media companies to his advisory role.

Smartology’s bespoke technology creates weighted semantic content profiles for each item of an advertising client’s branded content as well as for publisher partners’ editorial pages. Understanding both content and context allows branded content to be matched and displayed with editorial articles on the same or closely-related topics. Advertisers adopting the SmartMatch™ platform can reach their target audience with relevant and brand-safe thought-leadership material based on users’ real-time online activity rather than their previous behaviour or profiles based on third-party data.

Brands using SmartMatch see significantly increased ROI on their advertising budgets. For example, A/B testing on a campaign for a financial client showed that engagement with ad impressions served using SmartMatch was over 18 times higher than those using a standard content-led static banner. On the sell-side, this allows publishers to charge a premium for content because ads can be so highly targeted.

Prior to his roles at Adap.tv and AOL Platforms, Fitzpatrick was managing director for Europe at The MIG (Media Innovation Group), a WPP Digital company where he oversaw the enterprise from start-up to one of the industry’s most successful agency technology businesses.

Commenting on his board appointment at Smartology Fitzpatrick says: “Smartology has built a world-class team of developers, technology experts and media specialists. The result is an innovative audience targeting solution that matches branded content with editorial, making it a relevant ‘add on’ for the reader because it is based on their immediate interests. In other words, as audiences become increasingly frustrated with the one-size-fits-all approach to advertising it puts content where it counts, thereby benefiting the advertiser, the publisher and the end user. Joining the board at this stage of the company’s growth is an exciting opportunity.”

Mark Bembridge, CEO at Smartology, comments: “Brian has an enviable track record from the perspective of both commercial acumen and programmatic media expertise. Combining his skills with the market opportunities afforded by audiences that want relevant, high-quality content in real-time will enable us to build on our success to date and expand the company further.”

Fitzpatrick joins other Smartology board members Mark Bembridge, Nicholas Coutts (chairman), Adam Fraser-Harris (CFO), Marcus Keane (CTO) and Michael McCalmont (non-executive director).

-ends-

About Smartology

Founded in 2010, Smartology has developed an innovative and cutting-edge semantic solution for digital advertising that enables brands to optimise their content libraries by focusing on its relevance in relation to editorial articles.

Smartology’s profiling and matching technologies are at the core of its SmartMatch platform, which integrates with a media owner’s ad serving platform. Using natural language processing and algorithms, it semantically profiles content from both the media owner and the advertiser and builds a model of the significant concepts within it. These concepts are weighted and organised into content profiles which are used by the SmartMatch system to select the most relevant content from the advertiser, be it editorial or video, to display alongside any given article on the media owner’s website in real-time.

Smartology’s media owner partners include the Economist, the Financial Times and Reuters and it counts over 40 global brands, such as Blackrock, London Business School, Mishcon de Reya, RBS and Robeco Bank, as advertiser clients.

More details are available on the website: http://www.smartology.net/


For more information, please contact:

Kate Alexander
PR consultant
Email: kate@alexanderpr.co.uk
Tel: +44 (0)7788 584413