We are excited to announce that Chief Privacy Officer Steven Vine has been asked to present Datran Media’s position on privacy at the W3C Workshop on Web Tracking and User Privacy April 28 and 29th in Princeton, NJ.  Mr. Vine’s position paper was accepted for presentation alongside other privacy experts from Adobe, Apple, CDT, Comcast, Microsoft, Nokia and Paypal.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. Led by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and CEO Jeffrey Jaffe, W3C’s mission is to lead the Web to its full potential. Contact W3C for more information.

On Monday, min Online, a subscription-only publication that reaches over 40,000 top brand and publishing professionals, featured an exclusive story about top-100 publisher, ChaCha, titled, ChaCha Mines Its Own Data to Find Advertising Golden Nuggets. The feature details ChaCha’s success leveraging our unique Aperture Audience Mapping Tool to increase advertising sales, effectiveness and CPMs.  We will be making the case available by reprint and Power Point on our website early next week.

On Monday, thought-leading comments from Datran Media’s SVP of Social and Mobile Chris Gaebler were included in Ad Targeting Gets Social, (subscription required) the cover story of this year’s Ad Age Audience Buying Guide Supplement. The article provides a fair and balanced perspective on the large social opportunity and associated challenges.  Chris has strong points of views based on his brand marketing success and experiences at SONY and other big advertisers as well as his team’s current mission to ensure that Datran Media’s top clients’ multi-channel strategies are enabled for maximum social and mobile marketing success. Touch base with your account manager or sales representative if you’d like to learn more.  

In the same guide, Aperture boldly declares that the future of advertising is now for the hundreds of top brands and publishers now using Aperture measurement to fuel their advertising success, present readers of this blog included! You can review the feature here - a quick and easy way to reference the benefits we provide to our advertising and publishing partners. 

Last but not least, this morning, we announced the launch of Audience Mapping for Publishers . The news is supported by an in-depth ChaCha case study and commentary from Digital Broadcasting group and Martini Media, all valued publishing partners.  Please take a minute or two to consider how the new tool may add value to your digital advertising strategy, and contact Mike Hannon if you’d like to learn more. His contact information is available via the link above.

We are pleased to announce that StormPost has again received top rank in a vendor guide, the new Red Pill Email Vendor and Features Guide. This top ranking follows StormPost’s selection as top email marketing platform by Digiday and consistently high rankings from analysts and publishers. We’d like to thank every single one of our clients for helping us to consistently earn high ranks. We couldn’t do it without you!

Tomorrow morning, Michael Hannon, general manager for Datran Media’s Aperture business, and Shawn Schwegman, chief marketing officer for ChaCha, will kick off day two of the Digital Publishing Summit with a VIP breakfast session at 8:15 a.m with a presentation titled, “The Measurement Key to Driving Greater Value to Brand Advertisers, Ad Sales and CPMs.” If you are interested in learning more about this but cannot make it to the conference, email mhannon@apertureaudience.com. We’d be happy to provide copies ofthe presentation.

Strikes, pins, cocktails, cheers and laughter filled the air on February 16th for the 2nd annual ING NYC Bowling for Breastcancer.org event.  During the event, members of Datran Media’s Aperture team took to the lanes to raise money and awareness for the nonprofit organization dedicated to providing essential medical information for people affected by or concerned about breast cancer. They weren’t alone. The event was attended by 500 agency and media all-stars. Advertising Age served as the event’s media sponsor.

A special thank you goes out to Team Aperture guest bowlers Regina Huang, manager, media operations and technology for Digitas, Yasmena Hussein, media planner for Universal McCann, and Maria Hakimi, media planner for Universal McCann. Thank you for joining the team and supporting such a wonderful cause! It’s not every day we get to kick off our wing-tips or stilettos and don a pair of bowling shoes for such a great cause.

Miss the event? Check out Team Aperture in action by clicking here.  Interested in donating? Click here to learn how.

Wow! The first quarter of 2011 has been a busy and exciting one as I have had the opportunity to constantly collaborate across key IAB committees focused on measurement standards, consumer transparency and other best-practice based initiatives. In many cases, I was one of the welcome recipients of the fruits of our cross-industry labor. In other cases, issues we are addressing through our IAB membership highlighted the fact that not everyone in our “industry” is on the same page around key issues, such as how to count or measure digital audiences and/or the best approach to empowering consumers. The beauty is that the IAB serves as a good meeting place and forum to discuss everything. To that point, because of the collaboration, we are making progress.

At a sub-committee level, I recently assumed the chair position for the IAB email committee. I’ve been very impressed by the work of the committee and am so excited about the current project.

This quarter, the email committee, a cross-functional working group that includes members from over a dozen publishers, vendors and agencies including Erik Kokkonen from CBS Interactive and Chris Ambrosio from ValueClick Media, is at the tail end of producing an addendum to the 4A’s/IAB Standard Terms and Conditions for Interactive Advertising 3.0.

Click here to link to the entire blog entry I created for IAB today to learn more. Finally, if you are a member of the IAB and are interested in joining our committee, please let me know. The more, the merrier. We are all volunteers!

Today, industry news source, ClickZ, provided the FTC with its readers ideas around the agency’s proposed Do Not Track legislation. Comments included perspective from Steven Vine, Chief Privacy Officer for Datran Media. In addition to sharing his opinion with ClickZ, Mr. Vine filed Datran Media’s official perspective with the FTC as well.

Datran Media believes that the best solutions for online advertising are ones that enhance the consumer experience and provide consumers with meaningful choice. As part of our commitment to providing the greatest value to our clients and partners who share this value, we plan to further elaborate on this subject over the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

This morning, we announced that our Chairman and CEO, Patrick Vogt, will speak at a Partner’s Luncheon at the TED 2011 “The Rediscovery of Wonder” conference.

The annual TED Conference invites the world’s leading thinkers and doers to speak about some of the most complex and pressing issues of our day. TED has established the annual TED Prize, where exceptional individuals with a wish to change the world are given the opportunity to put their wishes into action. The TED audience provides support for TED Prize winners to help drive positive change for future generations.

The TED 2011 luncheon event, titled “The Evolution of Modern Leadership,” will be a panel discussion addressing the changing role of leadership in today’s world. The TED luncheon panelists include Ishmael Beah, author of “A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier,” Jeffrey Swartz, CEO Timberland, and Patrick Vogt, chairman and CEO of Datran Media. It will take place on Tuesday, March 1 at 12:45pm PT at the Westin Hotel in Long Beach, CA.

For more information on TED and its global initiatives, visit: http://www.ted.com/. To read the full text of our morning announcement, simply click here.

MarketingProfs is headed to Austin Feb 2-4 for Digital Marketing Forum 2011, and we’d be delighted if you or your team joined us for the 2 day event (3 days, if you add a pre-conference workshop).

Attending MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Forum will provide you with a great opportunity to learn more about digital marketing from many top experts, including Datran Media’s multichannel marketing strategy guru, Nicholas Einsten. It will also allow you to spend time networking with peers.

What else? Well…the forum is in Austin, sometimes referred to as ‘Bat City’, the self-proclaimed ‘Live Music Capital of the World’ and home to one of our largest regional offices and many members of our StormPost team. We were so excited about the location choice that we decided to sponsor it to make sure that alongside education and networking, attendees have everything needed to have a little fun too!

You can save $150 on your Forum pass with code DATRAN150 (expires 1/19). Simply, register here.