Real estate site offers advertisers specifically targeted placements and valuable returns using Placecast's location-based ad targeting

Trulia.com and Placecast Partner to Increase Relevance of Ads with Audience Targeting and Dynamic Messaging

(SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.) – November 19, 2008 — As advertisers and publishers seek ways to improve performance to compensate for shrinking budgets, new technologies like location-based advertising provide a means of improving relevance and response rates. Today, leading real estate site, Trulia.com, and interactive media company, 1020 Placecast, have announced their partnership, using location information to target specific audiences for advertisers and deliver more relevant messages to them on Trulia.com.

Placecast adds a new dimension to audience targeting by using location information as the key to relevance. In Trulia's case, the starting points are the real estate locations in which users express interest. Placecast's proprietary targeting algorithms correlate these with dozens of other demographic, psychographic and geographic data points.

"Once we know the place a user is interested in, we can derive a lot of useful insights about what kind of consumer they are, and then serve them a very targeted ad," said Alistair Goodman, CEO of Placecast.

For publishers in categories such as travel, events, tickets, real estate, weather, classifieds and career search, Placecast uses the location information already present on these sites to target audiences and customize messaging. Improved performance results in a dramatic increase in the value of ad inventory for advertisers, transforming remnant ad space into premium CPM real estate for publishers.

"Turning locations into audiences is one of the biggest challenges facing advertisers today," said Sean Black, Vice President of Sales at Trulia.  "Trulia presents advertisers with multiple opportunities to serve very targeted ads based on location and consumers search behavior.  Placecast is a cutting edge media company and we are excited to be working with them and their clients to build and deliver successful campaigns."

One of the first advertisers to take advantage of this approach with Placecast and Trulia is leading car rental brand, Avis-Budget. Approximately halfway through a three-month campaign, Avis has seen its ads on Trulia perform strongly relative to other publishers. The Avis-Budget campaign is just the first of many in the expanded partnership between Trulia and Placecast.

"Agencies and advertisers are really searching for ways to stretch their marketing dollars these days," observes Goodman. "As an emerging technology capable of driving better performance, Placecast provides an ideal way to effectively target audiences and improve response rates by adding local relevance to national campaigns."