IZEA Green Lights Display Advertising Offering to Complement Existing Social Media Sponsorships

Palm Beach, FL 12/5/11 (StreetBeat) --IZEA, Inc. (OTCBB:IZEA.OB), a world leader in social media sponsorships, today announced its IZEA Media offering has graduated from pilot program to official offering. The pilot program was initiated in October to understand the receptiveness of IZEA bloggers and advertisers. IZEA Media provides a display advertising solution comprised of hand-selected blogs and social media-related advertising inventory. In the 45-days following the launch of the program the company signed up 196 publishers, representing approximately 25 million monthly pageviews.

"IZEA Media empowers brands to reach their target audience and seamlessly bolsters the effectiveness of their IZEA Social Media Sponsorship campaign," said Ryan Schram, IZEA Chief Marketing Officer. "We believe this new offering will further our leadership in the social media sponsorship space and provides us with unique capabilities moving forward."

During the pilot, IZEA ran advertising programs for LG, Tivo and Carapelli. The programs supported social media sponsorship initiatives including sponsored blog posts, tweets and check-ins.

"The speed at which this new offering was built underscores the value of our publisher network. We're able to execute in months what it took many of our competitors years to do," said Ted Murphy, IZEA CEO. "We have made the strategic decision to support this offering more aggressively and will commit additional engineering resources and staff to complement the program."

IZEA hired Pamela Runsick as Director of Advertising Operations. Runsick was formerly Advertising Operations Manager at Bonnier Corporation, parent company of Field & Stream, Parenting and Popular Science magazines. While at Bonnier, Rusnick managed online advertising operations for the Parenting, Technology, Outdoor and Luxury Groups.

The company has integrated IZEA Media into its SocialSpark blog sponsorship platform, allowing bloggers to quickly apply for the program and install the required ad server code. The integration is intended to expand the IZEA Media publisher base and consolidate the payment processes into a single platform.

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