ADTECH Makes Sweet Music with we7

London, UK – 17 May 2010 – ADTECH, a leading provider of ad serving technology and part of AOL Advertising, has today announced that we7, the UK-based ad-funded free music streaming service and integrated download store, has selected its ad server solution to deliver targeted ads to music listeners. ADTECH will replace we7’s existing solution from Atlas.

Co-founded by ex-Genesis front man and digital pioneer Peter Gabriel in 2007, we7 has pioneered new techniques and ideas in technology and business models and has grown its user base by 400% year on year since inception. The service has over four million licensed tracks to stream and download from all four major labels and hundreds of independents.  It attracts 3 million unique users per month – 1.5 million to the main site and the rest through a widget network. *

“We’ve just (end of April 2010) achieved our first month of advertising covering the cost of music streams, three years after launching – it is a huge milestone for us and shows that advertising can support legal online music streaming services. Our site is 100 percent funded through advertising so partnering with a company who can support our unique business model – now and moving forwards is absolutely critical to us,” said Gareth Reakes, Chief Technology Officer, we7.

He continued: “We needed an ad server which could integrate with our ‘MediaGraft’ engine - which enables us to ‘graft’ adverts to the beginning of each song visitors listen to. It also creates new, targeted, advertising inventory which links the emotional power of music, creative short audio adverts and digital display ads (such as MPUs) together in such a way that digital effectiveness measurements increase significantly. The result is powerful promotional messages for advertisers, ‘paid-for’ free music and payments for music rights owners.”

“The solution from ADTECH is fantastic - it works well with MediaGraft and feeds directly into our music player, telling it what to do in terms of which audio ads to retrieve and which creative type to deliver,” said Gareth Reakes. “It’s certainly not straightforward display ad delivery – there are multiple assets/creative formats to manage such as multiple images, audio, video etc. What’s great is that ADTECH’s solution not only describes what should be shown and heard, but also specifies how it should behave too.  Many ad server companies just can’t do this type of templating; they only provide plain texting which isn’t good enough for us.”

He continued: “We went live at beginning of April and migration has gone very smoothly. The team at ADTECH demonstrated a high level of technical competence which helped us to move swiftly and the interface is very intuitive so we were able to get up and running ourselves in no time at all. The documentation was supportive and has made creating new templates – really important to us - very easy.

Above all, the targeting functionality in ADTECH is superb and supports our business model of providing visitors with relevant, personal and local ads. By listening acutely we fully understand what users are listening to which makes it easier to feedback to advertisers. As we grow we’ll start to do more clever things with the ad server and eventually, alongside our MediaGraft engine, we’ll also enable visitors to choose the type and style of ads that are attached to their music choices so the ads are increasingly relevant.”

“Consumer habits are changing - and we7 now gives advertisers a unique way to get personal and intimate with people who are willing to hear their messages,” said Ken Parnham, Managing Director, ADTECH UK and Ireland.

*according to we7, April 2010
ADTECH Press Contact UK
Nikki Alvey, The PR Network
Phone: +44 (0) 7973 354 706


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