ToneMedia Launches Today, Ad Targeting Gets Smarter With First Platform to Leverage Music to Identify Consumer Purchasing Decisions

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - Feb 1, 2012) - ToneMedia made its debut today, bringing a revolutionary new advertising platform to market which connects music preferences with consumer buying habits. A spin-off of ToneFuse, the largest ringtone marketer in the world, ToneMedia is a digital media company focused on huge consumer scale and deep proprietary targeting, built around the most searched category on the web: music content and lyrics. Working with more than 100 online music content and lyric publishers, ToneMedia reaches 120 million global consumers and 55 million consumers in the US every month. ToneMedia has developed an exclusive platform offering tools, services, technology and data capture that these publishers plug into. In return ToneMedia has access to the participating publishers' browsers to post targeted content and advertising on any specific webpage -- whether it's a site with Led Zeppelin lyrics or a hip-hop blog.

With ToneMedia, advertisers can target consumers in a smarter fashion that is not intrusive and is dozens of times more effective than traditional online advertising.

Using proprietary ToneTargeting technology, ToneMedia analyzes and monetizes music content by matching consumer buying behavior and purchasing patterns to musical interests. ToneMedia tracks and stores the consumer interests and behaviors associated with each unique artist, genre or song. Using ToneTargeting, ToneMedia's four million daily visitors are served targeted ads on the webpage they are viewing based on the music they are looking up on that given day. ToneMedia delivers premium, high impact Flex ad units that support full-page takeover, page washouts, video, pushdown, social connect and rich customizations -- with an average click-through rate of three percent, much higher than the current industry average.

Some examples of music preferences correlated to buying habits discovered by ToneMedia include: Lady Gaga fans are 48 percent more likely to shop for personal technology online than the average ToneMedia visitor, while Adele fans are 89 percent more likely to consider travel to Australia. Blake Shelton fans are 148 percent more likely to be in the market for wedding or engagement products and Lil Wayne fans are 400 percent more likely to purchase a BlackBerry mobile device.

"Music and lyrics have been the number one searched category as tracked by Google since 2004, and we have built ToneMedia around this highly trafficked online behavior," said ToneMedia Founder and CEO Val Katayev. "Using our proprietary data and ToneTargeting technology, we are able to carefully pinpoint the right consumers for the right brands, while providing it during a very engaging and entertaining experience. One recent campaign for a major web destination delivered a click-through rate that was 588 percent over the industry average of 0.09 percent. Our keen understanding of data and consumer interests -- as well as the music and lyric space -- are the building blocks of a great business."

"At Deep Focus, we are always looking for the next great innovations in marketing and advertising, and ToneMedia is taking an inventive and smart approach to connecting with consumers," said Ian Schafer, CEO and Founder of Deep Focus. "ToneMedia is leveraging thousands of pieces of content to reach the right people in the right mindsets, and they are doing it with music, which we have consistently identified as one of the most personal forms of self-expression and self-identification."

Advertisers can now benefit from reaching their exact customer by purchasing a segment -- such as cat owners or IT professionals -- or access to all of a particular artist's pages, to promote an upcoming concert tour for example. ToneMedia has already conducted successful campaigns with leading brands while in stealth mode, and is now making its platform available to all in-house marketing departments and communications and advertising agencies.

"The idea of being able to bring both scale and deep targeting to over four million people a day is exciting," said Andy Blacker, chief strategy officer of ToneMedia, who joins the company after years with Screenvision, Discovery Communications and AOL. "In the same way Facebook is able to understand how to market to you based on personal, shared information -- music content preference is also a key indicator of your consumer DNA and behavior. With ToneTargeting powering everything we do, we are able to take the guesswork out of selling services and products to the right audience each and every day."

About ToneMedia
ToneMedia connects leading advertisers with consumers through the power of music content and lyrics. Using its proprietary data analytics, targeted content is delivered to consumers who visit ToneMedia sites through the most searched category on the web -- music and lyrics. Through its 100-plus content publishers, ToneMedia reaches 55 million unique monthly visitors in the US and engages with more music fans than Yahoo!, People.com and Pandora, including 40 percent of all 18-34 year olds. Covering all musical interests and genres, ToneMedia analyzes and monetizes music content by matching buying behavior to musical tastes. To make this connection, ToneMedia taps into its comprehensive database of active brand consumers and examines their habits across the digital landscape to deliver the most targeted, compelling content. For more information, please visit www.tonemedia.com.