Articles by: "Dan Lawton, VP, Business Development – DoubleVerify"

Publishers: Use your data to close and retain more deals

July 26, 2021 Dan Lawton, VP, Business Development – DoubleVerify

To convert brands in direct-sold sales conversations, publishers are tasked with proving the quality of their audience and inventory. From prospecting to sales decks to wrap-up reports, we’ve increasingly heard questions about how publishers can use third-party data to support the sales process. The good news is that most organizations already have a lot of valuable data that is leveraged by other teams.

However, just because your organization is collecting data doesn’t always mean that it’s being used successfully. This can be due to lack of alignment on organizational strategies or data living in siloed or complex systems. Often, it’s simply about having a lack of time to understand how to effectively leverage the data. Most ad ops teams are plugged into a variety of data sources that can also provide valuable insights and compelling stories to support the sales process.

Ad sales teams can increase direct sales by using data to zero in on the right buyers and showcase value in pitch decks. They can also use it to effectively package inventory and report on campaign performance in a meaningful way to clients.

Finding the perfect buyers

Prioritizing the right buyers is one of the largest challenges for sales teams everywhere. Leaning on existing relationships or brand recognition can work up to a point. However, informing your prospecting with additional data sets allows you to quickly identify the right prospects to approach and shed light on new market segments. One example of this can be found in a publisher’s programmatic data. With normalized advertiser data, sales teams can identify the biggest spenders on open exchanges for more detailed buyer analysis.

Once those potential buyers are identified, it’s important to understand compatibility to ensure you can tell a story that aligns with a brand’s goals. This typically comes in the form of media quality data from verification vendors that measure metrics such as viewability thresholds, fraud rates, and brand suitability. Based on specific brand goals, content alignment and risk tolerance, publishers can further narrow their list to only include prospects that match up with what their inventory has to offer.

Highlighting inventory and audience value

As a premium publisher, it’s not enough to simply tell buyers that you know your audience. Advertisers only pursue direct deals if they’re confident that the inventory purchased is reaching their ideal audience. First-party data can be helpful here. It allows you to discuss content engagement, demographics, traffic and other metrics that showcase site performance and your user personas.

However, this story becomes even more powerful when combined with third-party measurement and contextual data such as overall viewability, engagement metrics, invalid traffic rates, and more. All of these use established industry standards such as those supported by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

The biggest challenge here is understanding how to line up these data sets. They you can decipher which metrics are going to resonate most with buyers who want an objective truth. More specifically, which metrics gives them the confidence that delivered impressions will reach these users consistently. When used in conjunction with data-driven prospecting, data used during this stage of the sales cycle can provide an opportunity to easily show clients how you can meet their needs.

Advertisers also want to understand where their creatives will go and how they might perform. Creating compelling, tailored packages using all of the available first- and third-party data can level up your pitch. It also helps ensure that expectations are clear going into each campaign.

Telling the performance story

Now that you have the client, how do you retain and expand the relationship? Traditionally, campaign wrap-up decks include run dates, traffic drivers, top-performers and other KPIs. This is a great place to leverage data from different sources to drive home how quality, engagement, and context help brands meet their goals.

Third-party data enables you to confidently highlight benefits such as:

You serve zero fraudulent impressions
Your campaigns met the client’s viewability thresholds
Campaigns were served alongside content that positively supports the brand’s image
Make goods won’t be necessary due to successful targeting

Whether campaigns meet buyer expectations or not, third-party data sets can serve as a retention tool and allow you to speak the same language as your customer. Your team will be able to outline what worked and what didn’t, while including data-driven recommendations for the next campaign. This strategy will give buyers more confidence in your ability to course correct and maximize their return on ad spend.

TLDR: It’s important to infuse your sales strategy with data

Gone are the days where the only sources of buyer friction came from viewability discrepancies and buffering requirements. Yes, those still remain. However, buyers increasingly value inventory that is brand suitable, fraud-free, and in-geo. This makes inventory scrutiny and sales conversations more complex. But the right data can cut right through that to increase conversions and drive business.

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

3 ways publishers can fight fraud before it impacts revenue

March 29, 2021 Dan Lawton, VP, Business Development – DoubleVerify

Announced earlier this month, the discovery of the “SneakyTerra” fraud scheme showed how an organized instance of fraud could impact more than 2 million devices a day. If left unprotected, this scheme alone could cost the industry over $5 million a month in ad spend. As the digital advertising industry grows, attacks like these show how fraudsters are evolving to take advantage of emerging technologies and supply chain complexity.

Some may consider fraud to be a buy-side problem. However, the truth is that this pervasive issue threatens the stability of the ad-supported ecosystem. And it takes millions of dollars away from trusted publishers in the process.

Recently, DoubleVerify surveyed 300 executives in the digital media sector. We asked digital publishers and supply-side platforms about challenges they have faced in the industry (particularly amid the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic). Publishers stated that “the ability to proactively identify and troubleshoot impression-level fraud issues” was one of their biggest concerns moving forward. Fortunately, there are several steps publishers can take to prevent the downstream effects of fraud from negatively impacting their revenue.

Stay informed

The World Federation of Advertisers estimated that by 2025, ad fraud will be a nearly $50 billion industry. With that much at stake, fraudsters are constantly evolving to work around measures that publishers have taken to quell their impact.

An example of this is ads.txt, a common method for publishers to increase transparency by declaring who is authorized to sell their inventory. While this practice accomplishes its goal of reducing fraud, it quickly became a target for a more advanced scheme. In 2018, fraudsters designed a bot network to take advantage of the ads.txt framework in order to commit fraud that would not trigger ads.txt violations.

This demonstrates that no single strategy against fraud will act as a silver bullet. Publishers need to stay vigilant and informed (alongside the rest of the industry) in order to keep a lid on fraud.

Develop transparency and best practices

The more shrouded the supply chain becomes in ad tech, the more gaps open up for fraudsters to exploit. Publishers can implement policies that provide a clear picture of where ad spend is directed to make it easier to diagnose and eliminate potential fraud. These policies have to put supply chain transparency at the forefront because it reduces places for fraud to hide.

In addition to a transparency-first approach, publishers have the ability to implement a few best practices into their anti-fraud strategy. These include:

Proactively looking at inventory on ad exchanges to monitor for misrepresentation.
Ethically sourcing ad traffic to prevent sources that benefit from fraudulent activity.
Establishing baseline metrics and campaign expectations so that you notice irregularities caused by fraudulent faster.

Despite fraud continuing to have a measurable impact on advertiser and publisher performance, there is not a clear road map for anti-fraud strategies. Even if there were, those strategies often expose themselves to new opportunities for fraudulent activity. Publisher operations must remain nimble to combat this evolving threat.

Bridge the buy-sell divide

Fraudsters eat up thousands of opportunities for publishers to monetize inventory by posing as publishers. (Yet they operate with no obligation to create legitimate content.) To make matters worse, the presence of fraudsters in programmatic marketplaces often force trusted sellers to lower prices in order to compete with fraudulent inventory that appears to be high quality.

These second-order effects show how complex the fight on fraud can become. They also know that brands and publishers alone aren’t equipped to snuff it out. By working with third parties that bring buyers and sellers together through verification metrics that measure fraudulent traffic, publishers can prove the quality of their inventory, protect their reputation and give fraudsters fewer openings to exploit.

Fraud negatively impacts publishers by diverting key ad dollars away from premium inventory. This erodes the trust that needs to exist between buyers and sellers. However – with the right tools and strategic approach – the industry can reduce the impact of fraud and it can divert misplaced ad spend back to trusted content providers.