Propel your business to next level with Undertone’s intelligently crafted, High Impact creative experiences

Undertone: The High Impact Platform

Undertone creates memorable ad experiences by thoughtfully orchestrating solutions across video, advanced TV, rich media, and social, to drive unmatched brand lift and audience engagement on virtually every screen and every device.

Undertone established themselves as an early leader in High Impact advertising with their proprietary creative formats & technology, and has continued to grow over their 20+ year stride with their ability to constantly innovate & adapt all facets of their services.

They are the High Impact Company…but “high impact” doesn’t mean “big, disrupting, and in-your-face annoying”. At Undertone, High Impact means ensuring we have the best unique creative formats, targeting & optimization technology, services, platforms & employees.

Reimagining “High Impact”

Undertone is not the high impact company you thought you knew. Over the past 2 years, they have added groundbreaking cookieless technology, powerful new solutions across all screens and devices, premium publishers advancing key social causes, and so much more.

Undertone doesn’t just reach your target audience – now, they can do so without the use of cookies and while putting consumer privacy first. SORT™ technology, also known as Smart Optimization of Responsive Traits, is Undertone’s newest cookieless solution that can predict, optimize, and scale your campaign, all while driving higher performance than traditional alternatives. So far, this technology is outperforming cookie-based targeting tactics across all key KPI’s, with up to 100% lift in CTR & 60% lift in Interaction Rate.

Undertone is not just high impact advertising on display – now, they have high impact formats across every channel, including Video AND CTV. Bringing unique branded, interactive and shoppable experiences to every single screen, enabling brands to deliver seamless and effective messaging no matter where their audience may be.

Undertone doesn’t just have a highly scalable, premium publisher portfolio – now, they have a premium portfolio of publishers that are minority, women, & LGBTQIA+ owned, and publishers aimed at advancing key social issues, with our Uplift Collective.

The advertising industry calls for advanced partners that can adapt to an ever-changing future and Undertone has just scratched the surface on High Impact Innovation across technology, creative and premium environments.

The Art & Science of Advertising

At the core of Undertone’s DNA is creativity. Their in-house, award-winning creative team are experts in creating memorable & results driven ad experiences, which are designed, built & served within the companies’ proprietary rich media ad builder.

When it comes to how Undertone recommends & designs their creative formats for their advertisers, they take a unique approach that combines technical and analytical tools with their intuitive and emotion-based insights.

From a technical standpoint, there is the data-backed, “zeros and ones” approach to their creative. It’s analytical, data driven and to the point, and focuses heavily on what is needed from the campaign in order to meet an advertiser’s desired KPIs. For unique data insights, Undertone leverages their proprietary, creative recommendation engine. This technology analyzes every impression served across all campaigns & formats, and the data is used to help recommend the right feature & format that will work best, specifically for each vertical, KPI & more.

From a design perspective, Undertone’s creative team leans heavily into what will generate emotion within consumers, which they have learned from years of experience & intuition, and validated with Nobel Prize winning research from their partner, System 1. With their research partners, Undertone measures the emotional effectiveness of ads to determine how well a campaign/creative will connect with desired audiences.

In addition, Undertone is constantly evaluating campaigns from an audience standpoint. They utilize their Audience Analysis tools to uncover trends within specific campaigns/verticals on which types of users are clicking on or engaging with certain creative (or which ones aren’t ), to help fuel recommendation and optimization strategies.

Their ability to marry data and emotion to strategically build a campaign with the right cross-platform ad formats, engaging creative and unique targeting approach allows them to deliver ad experiences that will be remembered, all while building long-term brand health.

Right Creative, Right Time but what about Targeting…

Great creativity means nothing without reaching the right audience.

People are engaging with digital content everywhere throughout the day - sometimes on more than one screen at the same time! Undertone knows there is no single way to reach your audience - and it is important to create a targeting strategy that is both precise with the audiences you are trying to reach, but broad in variety of tactics to ensure you are maximizing your audience scale, relevancy, and optimization potential.

Undertone is known for innovation especially when it comes to targeting and their proprietary data and technology capabilities. As reviewed above, their most recent innovation, SORT Technology, is a certified, privacy-first technology that enables brands to reach the right audience without the use of cookies. This is coming at a pivotal time for brands who are wondering “what’s next?”, and for consumers who are sick of being tracked. This technology is a major break-through as it allows brands to reach optimal performance by predicting how consumer groups will respond to the ad, without the limitations in scale that 3rd party targeting normally sees and is officially proving that cookieless technology can be MORE effective than traditional alternatives.

In addition to Undertone’s advanced solutions, they also partner with industry leaders in data & targeting to bring their brands access to unique & robust capabilities.

Premium Environments that are Brand Safe

Undertone’s ability to pair advanced data capabilities with their premium publisher network enables a seamless consumer experience across Display, Video & CTV.

Undertone has 1:1 relationships with all their publisher’s to ensure they are brand safe, load quickly, have quality content, and are specifically certified to run their custom formats. Working with the top publishers across every vertical, Undertone is a proud member of the CBA, TAG, & IAB, and are committed to continuing to adhere to compliance & guidelines as their advertising suite evolves.

In addition to all the great innovation mentioned above, Undertone also recently released a proprietary analytics platform that offers publishers unparalleled access to daily trend analysis and digestible analytics.

Driving Unparalleled Results

Undertone knows in order to drive the best results, it’s important to offer flexibility of solutions & execution. Their cross-screen formats & unique targeting capabilities are available to activate via managed or self-service programmatic campaigns, with integrations across all major DSPs/SSPs.

Every campaign they run is completely customized for their client, which is why Undertone has seen success in driving unmatched brand lift and audience engagement on virtually every screen, and every device. Not only does Undertone crush typical digital metrics like Viewability, CTR (over 33x Google CTR benchmark), Engagement (Avg Interaction time of 29 seconds), VCR, etc., they also provide long term brand value so that working with Undertone means better brand health (35-200% above Kantar Ad norms for Unaided Brand Recall & Purchase Intent), and more loyal consumers.

How Does Undertone Do It?

Successful enterprises know how to identify a niche and create a defensible and leading position within the ecosystem of customers, competitors, employees and regulation. Undertone recognized that advertising must move beyond ad blindness that stems from boring standard units. Further, with supply chains consolidating, the idea of becoming a single source for cross screen campaigns with multiple ad units, all with signature unique creative, white-glove service, with proprietary targeting approaches, would be extremely valued by clients. Any client should be confident that their messaging campaign would be superbly and creatively executed on CTV, mobile or desktop platforms, with the right mix of rich media and video so that campaigns were welcomed and memorable. Everything therefore that UT stemmed from this positioning.

President Dan Aks and the management team buttressed the new positioning emphasis on product innovation and has modernized how the company approaches some of the industry’s biggest challenges.

Over the past few years, Dan along with the hiring team have changed overall company dynamics by hiring subject-matter experts across all major business objectives, adding key industry partnerships, exploring new divisions and most importantly making sure they deepened relationships with all agencies/brand clients.

Pushing the organization to think outside of the box, challenging the status quo, and sourcing the right talent, has made Undertone a thought-leader in the industry and taken them to levels never seen before.

Finally, even the best strategies cannot succeed without a culture that underpins all the endeavors. At Undertone, respect for the individual is the hallmark of what UT does, and manifests itself in policies meant to encourage innovation, diversity, and people friendly practices that genuinely support staff and teamwork. Every employee is an ambassador to market, fulfilling that role no matter what the staff title.