Acquisition of Adventive enables Brandmint to set ads in motion

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Advertising agency Brandmint has added a well-established technical platform to its product offerings, providing clients with a means to bring the static to life.

Brandmint recently acquired Adventive, a Rochester-based digital ad technology firm that specializes in the creation, delivery and audience-reach measurement of interactive advertising.

While Adventive has been providing its product primarily to the digital publishing community, Brandmint will now be able to incorporate the proprietary elements of the platform into offerings to clients.

“It’s rich media, it’s dynamic motion; static vs. interactive,” said Louie Maier, president and founder of Brandmint.

Static ads still comprise about 80 percent of what shows up on websites and social media platforms. Adventive’s technology adds motion and/or video, creating a more vibrant ad that still fits the standard interactive advertising bureau format sizes of most platforms.

“Those dynamic and interactive ad formats are the technology that Adventive has to easily and quickly create those ads,” Maier said.

Which in turn creates a more engaging, more dynamic spot that the consumer is more apt to not just notice but also remember. And that is the ultimate goal for advertisers, Adventive president Jeff Lambert said.

“For the advertiser, it’s well known if you can capture somebody’s attention for one to two seconds, brand recognition becomes a real thing,” Lambert said. “With static advertising, people don’t even realize that there was an ad as they’re scrolling past whatever to find the content that they wanted.”

Motion or changing colors or other enhancements created by Adventive and/or the team at Brandmint change the game, however.

“If you start scrolling and there’s a dynamic, motion-based or interactive ad unit, many people will stop for a second,” Lambert said. “In that one or two seconds that they stop, the brand is able to engage with that viewer. Whether or not they were interested in the product, brand recognition becomes a real thing. Engagement-enriched media ad units skyrocket and that’s what brands are looking for.”

Maybe it’s a picture in an ad that starts moving or animating the moment you are scrolling by. It’s not just the normal ad we’ve seen a thousands time, so the brain clicks out of “ignore” mode.

“Human nature pauses for a second,” Lambert said. “Just those one or two seconds allows you to capture the attention of that particular viewer.

“Years ago, the KPIs (key performance indicators) used to be impressions and click-throughs. More and more frequently, advertisers are looking for engagement and interactivity statistics. They’re less concerned about somebody clicking through and more concerned if someone is engaging with the brand. That’s where the real money is.”

Around 95 percent of Adventive’s client base is in the publishing industry, Maier said. Those publishers — such as The New York Times, Boston Globe and Essence — then provide a service to brands.

“Well, if the publishers are serving the brands, why can’t Adventive serve the agencies and the brands,” Maier said.

That expanded potential is a big reason why Adventive was attractive to Brandmint. And Adventive’s move into the advertising agency space accelerates one of Lambert’s goals.

“The relationship with Brandmint is interesting because I’ve always wanted to get into the agency side of the business,” Lambert said. “Working with Louie, it’s becoming apparent that maybe Adventive wasn’t initially ready for the way the agency market works, but we sure have a tool that will fulfill a lot of the agency markets’ needs.”

Maier believes Brandmint clients in the financial services space are ideal candidates for the Adventive platform; banks, credit unions, insurance brokers. So, too, are those in the academic, automotive, food and beverage, consumer packaged goods, fashion and health and wellness sectors.

Adventive will continue to operate under its own name as a subsidiary of Brandmint, which now can incorporate advancements in technology into is creative content.

“By combining thoughtful creative direction with in-house technical expertise, we produce high-impact content that performs across organic and paid channels,” Maier said.

“Because Brandmint has been historically creative and media buying, we’re bringing a whole new level of expertise from the technology side, the engineering side.”

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