Venturian Media Completes Acquisition of Social Shopping Site boxedup.com
Venturian Media Ltd, a leading affiliate publishing and performance marketing company, today announced the acquisition of social shopping site boxedup.com in an all share deal.
Ross Travill, co-founder of Venturian said:
boxedup is the perfect addition to our existing portfolio of product comparison and discount shopping sites which will all be integrated into the main boxedup platform, offering the consumer a means to organise every aspect of their online shopping. Additionally, our advertiser partners will benefit from new engagement opportunities and a means of generating incremental sales from an established and growing international community of savvy shoppers looking to find, share and compare online offers and their personal ‘wish lists’.
Since launching in 2005, Venturian Media has established itself as an international super affiliate delivering over sixty million pounds in sales to advertisers in 2008, with offices in the UK, Australia and India. The affiliate-based monetisation of boxedup, providing latest prices and offers to users – from a wide range of retailers – for the products that they want to buy, is a strong natural fit blending a fast growing revenue type with an innovative online retail and social media environment. Econsultancy forecasts that the affiliate marketing industry will generate more than £4bn in online retail sales in 2009 in the UK alone. The service aims to be profitable by Q4 as an independent unit within Venturian Media, with the team confident of creating a social media network which has a scalable business model delivering real profits and without compromising the consumer experience and the integrity of its network.
The boxedup site was launched in July 2007 by Chris Osborne and Jeremy Baines. Chris will continue to lead the effort in building a range of features and services currently under development, and explains
ultimately we’re looking to create the dominant platform on the web that consumers, publishers, retailers and brands use to engage and interact with in relation to shopping and product-related activity, on boxedup.com and beyond. We’re building a significant database of consumer purchasing intent that will power the monetisation and drive the social and community experiences across the service.
Chris goes on to say
by becoming part of Venturian Media we’re in a great position to continue building the service for our users around the world within a performance marketing organisation that’s got deep expertise in the online retail area, which is a strong combination.
For further press information, contact Chris Osborne on (0)7771 598 741 or email chris@boxedup.com
Subway Launch Order By SMS
Startling news has reached the Venturian Media offices that over the pond in the good old US of Stateside things are changing that are going to have a startling affect on the way we live our lives. No I’m not talking about Mr Obama becoming El Presidente’, the more important news is Subway are allowing you to order via SMS Txt message!
Now I’m partial to a subway or two (6″ Southwest Cheesesteak has changed this formerly lean mean footballing machine into something that resembles a size five football) and this could prove catastrophic to my diet plans. No longer will I be put off by the thought of the long queues during the Northampton lunchtime rush hour as I’ll be able to text through my order and go straight to the front of the queue to pick it up. Think of the calories I won’t be using up by walking those extra 5 yards.
Fortunately this hasn’t hit good old blighty just yet, but when it does I’m sure I’ll have a little test – purely from a technology point of view you understand. It’s interesting to see technological innovations such as this hitting the fast food market and it will interesting to see the next innovations.
The Free Branding Benefits Via Complementary Search
A recent study commissioned by Google and undertaken by Enquiro Research and Ipsos Mori in the UK has indicated that advertisers can expect a boost in brand recall over their competitors by as much as 76% when they appear prominently in both paid and organic search results. Brand awareness can be as much as 30% higher and relative brand affinity up to 17% greater.
Obviously Google have a vested interest given that they are seeking to promote search as a viable brand channel in order to attract more of the lucrative brand budgets from FMCG and luxury goods advertisers but even sceptics must agree that the evidence is pretty compelling. Similar Google commissioned studies in France and Germany have also mirrored these results giving weight to the argument that saturation of the SERPS brings quantifiable branding benefits.
As specialists in performance based search marketing we are often asked by our network partners to provide proposals to their advertisers as to how we can demonstrate additional value above and beyond the incremental sales delivered through our complementary SEM. Obviously each advertiser is different and there are many factors which will influence our suggested strategy but one benefit which we always try to highlight is the additional branding that complementary ads give.
These studies raise the important question as to how much greater the brand awareness, recall and affinity for advertisers who not only have representation through organic and / or paid listings but also work with affiliates such as ourselves to co-ordinate and saturate the search space. Equally, many advertisers will often not have a dual presence in both organic and paid results and sometimes neither on key generic search terms. This means that affiliates who provide them with complementary branded ads with dedicated exposure in ad copy make the branding benefits to the advertiser especially relevant and important.
Complementary search activity from affiliates who are presently rewarded only on direct response actions is currently a free means for advertisers to increase their overall exposure in the SERP’s and reinforce their brand and product proposition. Additionally, organic listings are less easy to manipulate to ensure the desired brand message or product is being advertised effectively with relevant copy and a strong call to action making complementary paid ads an even more powerful tool for communication and branding due to the greater degree of control over accuracy and prominence.
It would be really interesting to see the results of a similar study which looks as the effect of multiple paid search listings for a single brand both in conjunction with organic listings or without. If Google would like to fund the study we’d be happy to oblige!
Venturian Media Buy.at Football Title Hopes Hit
The eagerly awaited buy.at football tournament kicks off in London town on Friday with current holders Venturian Media’s players dropping like flies! Last seasons goalkeeper and the tournaments oldest player is missing due to work commitments and key midfielder Stuart “Mad Dog” McDermott got injured in a 7 a’side encounter on Monday which will rule him out for up to 4 weeks (although he reliably tells me his drinking arm will still be fully operational!).
Last years tournament was well organised, a great laugh and importantly the football was played in (mostly!) good spirit and we are looking forward to meeting a few old friends. Check out some of the action below taken from Fraser’s excellent affiliate blog.
A brief run down on the lads that have managed to make up this years team :
Neil “Nasal” McDermott
Will be looking to build on last years performance as injured goal hanger extraordinaire (although hopefully without the injury). He is a Director at VM and head of all web builds and UK relationship management.
Alister “Slinky” McDermott
Upset he didn’t win player of the tournament, this self professed arrogant sod “starred” in Brits Behind Bars (well for the 15 minutes he could take in prison) with current Big Brother loser Mario. A cultured defender and big unit to boot, he is head copywriter based out of our UK office.
Chris “Pinchy” Pinches
Rumours that Chris was hired purely on his footballing abilities have so far proved unfounded. This beast of a man never stops running and will be praying it doesn’t go to penalties with his record! A top graphic designer who is involved heavily in the branding of our websites.
Ben “Sloppy” Cockburn
DGM’s very own head of something technical, Ben was a late call up to the squad but he will be keen to get one over on the DGM heavy CK Net team. We’ve been reliably informed (by himself) that he is fit and can play in a number of positions which will prove very useful as the tournament progresses.
Murray Gascoyne
Another late call up due to the injury to Mad Dog, he is in mainly for his willingness to drive to London and his ability to hold the midfield, and his own in the bar.
Special Guest
Venturian Media have booked a special star guest who (surprisingly for someone in affiliate marketing) used to work for DGM. With his hectic social life, whether he turns up or not is a different matter!
Money-AU Australian Finance Site Accepted by Google News
One of our first big builds for the Australian market was the finance site money-au.com.au which features the leading finance providers that run affiliate programes and enables users to, amongst other things compare credit cards and also check out the latest finance news which we publish 4 times a day during the working week.
Great news for us and our writing partners Adfero is that we have been accepted as a source by Google news which means our content is now syndicated to Google’s global readership. So you can now see our articles published next to some real big hitters such as the Times, and in the example below, the Calgary Herald.
It’s great news for us as our site can now be judged as an authority site and this will hopefully mean increased repeat visitors and somewhere down the line more people using our site to purchase finance products.
Twenty Twenty Cricket Courtesy of Npower and Affiliate Window
Sunday saw the Northampton Steelbacks and Glamorgan Dragons go head to head in 20 / 20 (not the teen drink) cricket action and we were lucky enough to get a pair of free tickets courtesy of official sponsors npower which we thankfully received from the guys at Affiliate Window (cheers Owen).
Talking of windows, we were actually stood under the one which was smashed by a huge hit by Glamorgan’s Herschelle Gibbs, who scored 98 off just 45 balls. Luckily our stunned expressions were caught by the Sky Sports News team, which made me spit my tea out at breakfast the following day!
A big crowd caught a spectacular game in beautiful weather with Northampton posting an imposing score of 207, with opening pair Rob White and Niall O’Brien putting on 103 without loss. Glamorgan came out of the traps slowly with both openers Robert Croft and David Hemp both falling in the same over. Herschelle Gibbs then entered the fray but his Herculean effort was not enough to overcome Northampton’s massive total, with Steelbacks South African all rounder Andrew Hall taking 5-29.
Our first taste of 20/20 cricket was an excellent day out. There’s a real mixture of supporters attending, from the very young to the very old, and the action is constant and absolutely spectacular. You see more fours and sixes in 5 overs than you sometimes see in a 5 day test, and I for one can’t wait to go back and sample more of the same, not to mention the Tetleys and Magners!
Venturian Media Website Relaunch
Venturian Media have relaunched our website to recognise the fact that we now operate on a worldwide basis. Our old site had been live for over 2 years and neglected for much of those – much like the old adage about the gardener and their own garden, we’d spent so much time developing web sites that we’d forgotton about our own!
The new web site has a blog (which you’re reading!) which will enable our contributors to talk about news and comment both in and out of our industry, and hopefully let you know a bit about our business and the people who work here.
That’s all for now, we’ll be looking to add more posts over the coming weeks and months – I’ve already made the team swear an oath that this won’t be one of those blogs with several posts a week for the first month or so which then falls to a post every quarter! We’re aiming for a post every other week and anything else will be a bonus!
The other promise I have made myself is to try and cut down on my (over)use of exclamation marks! I’ve just counted 5 in this post so I’ll have my work cut out.