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Articles by: "Dave Constantino, VP of Client Development – Oracle Advertising"

Advertising | Supporter Spotlight

Advertising’s attention evolution

Advertising is changing faster than ever. Consumers have more choice, audiences are blocking more ads, and global impacts such as the Covid-19 pandemic have shifted engagement and content demands across the board. All of this, coupled with regulatory changes that stand to make attribution even more challenging, have thrust us into an attention evolution. Now, we must consider renewed approaches and varied metrics to capturing and retaining real human attention at scale.

Across the numerous campaigns, ad formats, channels, and devices marketers have in motion at any given moment, getting a comprehensive understanding of performance is the only way to build solid and results-driven strategies. However, this is only possible through a commitment to measuring performance beyond baseline verification metrics. In other words: emphasize consumer attention, which, let’s face it, is no easy feat.

At its most effective, true partnership between brands and publishers paves the way for success, supporting marketers in realizing such coveted results and successful programs. Thus, it has never been more critical to demonstrate partnership value and audience quality. 

Get your metrics right

So, the next time you are formulating the right attention metrics to illustrate to advertisers that your audiences are engaged and that your inventory will deliver results, consider the below framework. Here are some tips we’ve developed based on the most recent quarterly measurement benchmarks from Oracle Moat. They should help set you apart from the rest so that you can provide a connected story and showcase actual value: 

1. Desktop display

When looking at measurement for display advertising, the amount of time spent with the content on the page in addition to how people engage are critical to understanding success. To determine the time spent, metrics such as dwell time, which tracks the average time spent with the content in the foreground tab of the web browser, are the most reputable and accurate ways to determine attention. To measure engagement with advertising, we need to understand the quality of the attention, how long ads are in view, whether people interacted, and for how long. We use metrics such as attention quality, in-view time, interaction rate, and interaction time to do this.

Expert tip: The average benchmark for attention quality – percentage of ads that go from hover to interaction – is 28.6% across all desktop display ads. As an industry, this reinforces the fact that we must focus on bringing the creative conversation to the forefront.

2. Mobile

The mobile environment yields the most fragmented audience attention. This puts added pressure on brand messaging to make an impact. There are consistencies between how we measure across mobile and display – such as dwell time and in-view time. However, with mobile, we can also measure the rate of impressions touched by a user and leverage that as a proxy for interaction and engagement.

Expert tip: 75% of all ad impressions on mobile in-app video are audible for any amount of time. Audibility is increasingly creating opportunities for publishers and marketers to engage with the user and capture attention.

3. Branded content

With a growing number of publishers launching in-house studios to facilitate and produce sponsored editorial, branded content is rising. With the onus on the publisher to showcase the quality and engagement of the content program, metrics such as scroll rate, scroll depth, and active page dwell time are significant indicators of attention and program success. 

Expert tip: Average down scroll velocity – an indicator into whether a user is reading the article or skimming it – is 87.7 pixels per second across all buy types.  These attention signals are often overlooked but provide valuable insight into readership and are key to a successful balance between ad monetization and quality editorial.

4. Video and digital streaming services

To effectively assess the quality of video data exposures, a mix of sight, sound, and motion signals are necessary. Looking towards metrics such as percent of video played in-view, completion quality, audible rate, and completion rate will help you build a complete picture. 

Expert tip: Even with the massive popularity of video and digital streaming, there are still nearly 20% of all video ads on desktop that play out of focus. Some would argue that if the sound is on that there is some level of attention yet remember not all attention can and should be scored equally.

Attention quality matters. Furthermore only 69.4% of videos reach complete status, and although a great stat to include in campaign wrap reports, that signal alone doesn’t tell us much about attention performance, and we need to continue to raise the bar beyond legacy ways of evaluating success. For example, in reality, only 23% of those same desktop video ads were audible and visible on complete, which is a massive drop-off, equating to a 27.9% completion quality score.

Optimized for attention

To optimize toward attention, you must track it in all its forms — whether that’s aggregate time on screen, interaction rates, video completion, and audibility, or even the screen real estate of an ad. There are so many variables that change how consumers engage, thus how brands should consider seeking their targets and how publishers should ascertain to provide optimal value.

At the end of the day, a single metric can never tell the whole story, as attention is not the same in every place or every circumstance. As we hear repeatedly: one size certainly doesn’t fit all. As you begin – or continue – your measurement journey, remember that through better measurement and a focus on attention beyond verification, you will not only understand what is successful. You will also be able to identify gaps and optimize toward areas that drive real impact.

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue | Supporter Spotlight

4 Ways publishers can invest in accountability to build revenue in 2022 

Spending on programmatic advertising is set to hit $133.04 billion in 2023, representing over 90% of display advertising, according to eMarketer. This rise in programmatic advertising presents publishers with a new challenge. While spending increases, so do the estimates around the cost of ad fraud. Publishers must exert more control over inventory than ever before if they aim to maintain customer trust while being a part of the programmatic marketplace. The good news is, providing a trustworthy, fraud-free environment for advertisers can be what sets you apart from the competition.  

Certainly, achieving transparency with advertising partners remains a persistent industry challenge. However, there are also few ways that publishers can maximize their opportunity for monetization while building audience trust and meeting the needs of advertisers. Let’s look at a few and what they may involve. 

Pay attention to bad actors and ensure fraud-free experiences  

It seems like an obvious criterion, but advertisers and agencies need to ensure real people see their ads. Delivering quality impressions and identifying any invalid traffic is table stakes for publishers who want to build trust with advertisers. 

In the past, attempts to prevent invalid traffic (IVT) have been tedious at best, and, at worst, horribly ineffective. To be genuinely effective at blocking IVT, publishers need intelligent solutions to identify patterns associated with malicious bot activity. Your solutions should do this without slowing download times or exposing consumers’ personally identifying information (PII). This is how you truly stay ahead of the game.  

Commit to responsible media  

We can all agree that getting brand safety right is essential—that value transcends across the ecosystem. The right technology needs to be in place to safeguard brand reputation while also being nuanced enough to allow access to quality inventory. Having the right tools in place will instill advertisers with confidence that working with you is an efficient and responsible investment decision.  

However, brand safety is about so much more than avoiding inappropriate or non-brand-aligned content.  Establishing a marketing strategy that brings brand values into the equation has increased importance, especially when it comes to reaching younger audiences. Curating packages in line with advertiser values (such as diversity, social initiatives, and environmental impact) will make you a more attractive partner overall. Publishers that support and maintain responsible media practices demonstrate integrity and care for audiences by doing what they can to avoid potentially damaging exposures. 

Work with reliable tools you have now 

Faced with an economy overwhelmed by COVID-19 and web traffic spread across a variety of devices and channels, more than 70% of advertisers feel they need to simplify management of programmatic budgets to have more inventory control. To meet the challenges of rapid declines in revenue during pandemic-caused turmoil, publishers cannot wait idly for the next technological innovation. In fact, conditions like these create opportunities to plan how to lower expenses and optimize value.  

For example, take a look at the tools you currently have at your disposal and determine if you are truly getting the maximum value. Connect with your partners, revisit best practices, and uncover new features that you may have missed or metrics you may not have paid much attention to before. Measuring attention meaningfully goes beyond simple verification metrics—such as valid, safe, and viewable—to more nuanced metrics that can provide deeper and more tailored performance metrics that can set you apart from your competition. 

Moving targets: establish dynamic pricing to deal with flux 

When the average cost of an ad impression falls precipitously due to high supply and low demand, as they did in early 2020, ad revenues creep lower as well. In January and February of 2020, the price of an impression fell by almost 28% compared to 2019. To cope with these changes, effective publishers employ dynamic pricing methods that incorporate bid analysis.  

By leveraging learnings to set minimum pricing rules per device, content category, type of bidding, advertiser, and other parameters, publishers can address growing demand and fierce competition. Even under the most challenging circumstances, ad revenue can rise if publishers continuously analyze the bids they receive for ad space and create opportunities to set minimum prices—between fill-rate and revenue—that reflect customer demand. 

New measures of success 

As an industry we are increasingly looking toward new measures of success and a commitment to the responsible media strategies that inform them. Human, viewable, and brand-safe data still sets the baseline for core measurement, but true brand effectiveness requires further evolution. 

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue | Supporter Spotlight

Two ways publishers can increase digital ad revenue from news content

The media is covering news from more angles, and at more depth, than ever before. The Tokyo games generated a flurry of content that spanned fashion, mental health, gender equality, politics, and more. (And let’s not forget the athletes and actual events!)

The summer games reflect how big news events typically branch out across industries, lifestyle categories, etc. Sometimes, the link between what would be considered a critical piece of news and everything else is tenuous.

Unfortunately, in the pursuit of absolute safety and stringent brand preservation, many advertisers err on the side of caution. They employ rigid brand safety practices that lead to overblocking, which diminishes the yield publishers need to bring the important conversations to the fore. As a result, many advertisers sit on the sidelines as journalists explore the various facets of evolving news. Unfortunately, that even includes topics that could be on-brand for many advertisers.

News content holds digital advertising’s future

The advertising industry’s pullback associated with Covid-19 coverage early last year illustrates the negative impact this can have on publishers, advertising brands, and the overall consumer experience. In early 2020, traffic to major U.S. news sites jumped more than 50% compared to the same period the previous year. However, that increase in visitor time and attention did not provide a corresponding revenue increase because many advertisers were steering clear of any content referencing the virus.

The root of the problem lies in the “blocklist.” This simplistic brand safety tactic prohibits ads from being served based on keywords appearing in URLs or nearby content. According to news reports, “coronavirus” was the number-one term on industry blocklists. In fact, more than three thousand advertisers have blocked ads from appearing near it.

Despite these challenges, there is ample opportunity for publishers to move the conversation past purely transactional ad sales and take more active control of their content strategy. By offering curated inventory packages that are both contextually relevant and brand suitable, publishers are able to address advertisers’ brand safety concerns. They can provide also advertisers with greater control over the audiences they are reaching and the content they are aligned with.

Adapting advertising to the news ecosystem

Overly restrictive blocklists impact publishers and advertisers, yet the news will always have complexities and nuances. However, according to GroupM, “There are simple ways to advertise in news without compromising brand safety. But to avoid hard news, or even bad news, flies in the face of the facts.”

Adapting to fast-paced news cycles requires you do the following:

1. Gain insights and control

Evolve from the brand safety of yesterday. Focus instead on understanding the context of the content surrounding brand messaging. Contextual Intelligence tools help advertisers and publishers understand and evaluate billions of webpages and other digital content. This allows them to evaluate supply and identify brand-suitable environments for advertising based on overall page context, not a single word or meta data.

For example, many advertisers might decide they are comfortable with ad placements around current content related to topics like personal hygiene, cleaning, telework, streaming entertainment, food delivery, education, cooking, books, games, or exercise. While each marketer needs to determine its own standards for brand suitability, this type of related content may be appropriate.

In an interview, Edwin Wong, SVP of Insights & Innovation at Vox Media, noted that: “When quality content is matched with people’s passions and interests, it creates a much richer picture of who the audience is, why they are there and what motivates them. When we do this right, we no longer base contextual targeting on just the individual, an individual action, or an individual piece of content, but on what our platforms deliver for the audience holistically. It changes the retroactive perspective of targeting and makes context targeting future-facing.”

2. Provide meaningful ad measurement

Establish baseline metrics

Two primary benefits emerge from consistent monitoring and accounting for viewability, invalid traffic, and brand-safety reporting across your campaigns. First (and very importantly), you protect your advertisers’ brand dollars. Second, effective brand safety will be dynamic. Brand suitability takes page context and intent into account to address continuous content evolution.

Life beyond verification

Connect your campaign to data sets that reveal meaningful impact so that attention becomes an outcome to pursue in tandem with traditional KPIs such as viewability and verification. More broadly, marketing campaigns need an industry ready for new metrics to gauge cross-channel impact beyond just verification.

Measure across channels 

Publishers and platforms will look to brands to maintain consumer loyalty and trust in their expertise. This calls for both robust content and multichannel dissemination.

Evolve KPIs to gauge true engagement and impact

Innovative marketers who experiment with formats beyond traditional social media posts and editorial-style content learn more because verification alone won’t tell you about impact post-view. As marketers seek further control over their ad spend and a better understanding of campaign efficacy, measuring advertising outcomes like consumer attention will become crucial.

When you move measurement beyond ad verification to attention, you’ll show advertisers how your inventory helps them drive success and hit their KPIs. That’s a surefire way to keep them coming back for more.

Drive more revenue through agility

Changes to ad targeting, data collection, and privacy regulations will continue to challenge the digital advertising ecosystem to evolve and bring new solutions to market that support its future. The ability to stay agile and adapt to the changing industry will be critical for publishers while increased collaboration across the ecosystem will provide not only innovation, but an increased customer experience and the need every stakeholder to rise to the occasion.

Advertising | Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

3 Ways ad measurement is evolving to gauge true ad impact

It is no secret that the last year drove significant changes in consumer behavior. It transformed the way we shop, with 75% of U.S. consumers saying that they have tried a new shopping behavior. And most intend to continue that behavior after the pandemic. During this period, consumers also spent more time on digital media, streaming, digital audio, and online gaming.

Despite consumers’ demand for more content—and the increasing complexity of multi-channel distribution—most media companies are still in the early stages of transforming their operations to take advantage of these new realities. And many brands are not confident they can measure results accurately and completely across media types. That’s especially true in the growing connected TV (CTV) and gaming channels.

Additionally, there’s the ongoing need for diligence around brand suitability through solutions that thread the needle between protecting their clients’ brands and driving media effectiveness. Instead of relying on rigid blocklists, evaluations of brand suitability should examine and understand page activity along with context to address continuous content evolution.

All those changes in behavior lead us wondering—how well do we really understand today’s consumer?  We need to continue to ask questions about the true impact of ads. We need to ask what we are getting in terms of attention, what messaging resonated with whom, do we know if somebody is paying attention differently on one platform versus another, and what media channels drive sales and store visits.

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) recently polled marketers to understand which media KPIs are most important. It’s telling that half focused on ad effectiveness. Proactive marketers are taking steps to understand this campaign performance information. These steps include:

Optimize baseline verification measurement

Verification is the baseline to evaluate ad effectiveness. This includes validity and viewability (e.g., is a real ad served to an actual person who can see a relevant ad)? Ads need to be in a suitable environment as defined and controlled by each brand. And ad fraud is a challenge all brands face.

As an example, we recently exposed a publishing site that appeared to be redirecting traffic to three hidden domains with completely different content that is not safe for work (NSFW). The site leverages domain misdirection and context spoofing to commit blatant ad fraud and subvert brand safety measures.

Track engagement and impact

Once you connect your campaign to datasets that reveal meaningful impact, things rightly center around attention. To succeed, marketing campaigns new measures and metrics suitable for gauging cross-channel impact past the baseline of verification. Human, viewable, and brand-safe impressions still set the standard for core measurement. But true brand effectiveness requires deeper evaluation.   

Measure across channels

Fluid media consumption habits change how we reach and capture audiences. This shift requires both robust content and multi-channel dissemination. It also calls for the ability to understand how consumers actually pay attention across emerging formats to uncover what real viewing means.

Innovative marketers who plan and experiment with formats beyond traditional social media posts and editorial-style content learn much more. That’s because verification alone won’t tell you about impact post view. To get this insight, marketers are using measurement to evaluate key metrics including:

  • How many impressions were relevant?
  • How many uploads of the same ad ran to the same viewer?
  • Did anyone pay attention?
  • Did you capture your audience in the environments where they spend their time?

Evolve and achieve

Effective measurement is a constant evolution. Undoubtedly, results from each campaign can help you continuously refine your digital strategy toward better outcomes. However, without additional insights, advertisers will have performance blind spots regarding true measures of campaign effectiveness.

Proactive measurement and tracking key KPIs will enable advertisers and publishers to determine if viewers are paying attention to an ad (via time on the screen and engagement). Armed with this information, they can establish custom metrics based on business need, and use analysis to help shape future programs

 

 

Advertising | Perspectives

Building a 360-degree customer view to thrive in post-cookie publishing

Last year was a whirlwind ride in ad land. Publishers navigated through a tumultuous period of reduced ad spend, axed campaigns, and overzealous keyword blocking. However, 2021 brings with it a new and arguably more significant challenge: the deprecation of third-party cookies and other universal identifiers.

But don’t listen to the nay-sayers as they opine the prospect of a doomed ad ecosystem. Instead, know this: The impending changes to online advertising, while no doubt disruptive, present incredible opportunities for advertisers and publishers alike. Publishers and content creators possess troves of first party data. Given their direct relationships with audiences, they may be in the best position possible.

Publishers: Seize your moment

Eliminating third-party cookies and other universal identifiers alters the dynamics of the digital advertising market. The “cookie-free” world aims to serve the needs and wants of consumers first and foremost. Consumers will set the terms for digital advertising. This marks a fundamental change from what we’ve been used to.

Publishers currently have the strongest and clearest connection to consumers through their large networks of audiences. As the market makes its shift away from universal IDs, we can expect to see many brands and advertisers work more closely with publishing partners. But this additional leverage doesn’t mean publishers can get away with business as usual. Innovation is crucial. For publishers to establish staying power, they’ll need a sophisticated first-party data strategy that’s proactive and meets the needs of today’s advertisers.

Diversification is key

As the digital advertising industry moves beyond personal identifiers, diversification will be key to success. A single-point, silver-bullet solution to replace cookies or MAIDs isn’t what anyone’s calling for. It’s unlikely that such a solution will exist given the ubiquity and heavily embedded infrastructure we rely on today.

Rather, the answer will more likely involve a diversified portfolio of solutions and approaches to data-driven targeting and measurement. The fundamentals for sound data strategy won’t change, though. In the “cookie-free” world, publishers will still need to:

  • Preserve customer experiences and deliver heightened value to visitors
  • Support advertisers in reaching the right people with the right message at the right time
  • Optimize yield through diversified approaches to inventory packaging

Strategic shifts

However, changes to data strategy will center around three core areas. Publishers will need to maximize data to build stronger advertiser relationships, leverage context-based technology to increase understanding of one’s inventory and commit to measurement that extends beyond baseline metrics.

Publishers must:

1. Maximize the value of your greatest assets: Harness the power of data and enrich the understanding of your customers.

As premium publishers move towards a subscription model and first-party data becomes critical, we expect to see the shift to gather as much known first-party data as possible. Many will leverage new subscription models in order to do that. The new data will primarily reveal demographics and online behavior restricted to a publisher site portfolio. However, publishers will need to enrich that data to get a 360-degree view of their audience to better sell inventory.

2. Learn how contextual intelligence drives value.

There are myriad signals on a page. Sentiment, for example, reveals the tone and context of an article. Understanding this context (and doing so at scale) will play a more integral role in ad targeting as cookies disappear.

ID-free technology such as contextual intelligence maintains an acute focus on content and consumer mindset. This allows intelligent publishers to curate inventory packages, based on high value content, which their advertisers seek.

Tapping into reader sentiment will be of particular interest to both advertisers and publishers. Research shows the value of emotionally connected customers. They buy, visit, and pay attention at higher rates compared to people who don’t share the same emotional connections. As context gets more advanced, expect to see this area explored with great interest from both advertisers and publishers as they aim to create detailed views into the content interests and subsequent consumption behaviors of their audiences.

Furthermore, brand safety, suitability, and sentiment-based decision making opens up publishers to more curated, bespoke solutions. This will more accurately value their supply and subsequently make addressable media more valuable. Plus, contextual advancements across a variety of formats, coupled with new and more data-informed approaches to context, will create additional opportunities for advertisers to reach people in an anonymous capacity. Sky’s the limit for the future of contextual.

3. Find out how analytics and insights matter more than ever.

Among the adtech lessons of 2020—media moves fast. Measurement must keep pace during critical times. It must also operate across all channels and platforms to ensure a comprehensive view of success and uncover areas for optimization.

We can also expect a greater focus on analytics with limited reliance on personal identifiers. Publishers will want to prove that their sites are safe for advertising. They’ll need viewable inventory that features low invalid traffic (IVT). They will also want to provide rich insights to show the best creative performance, media attention across multi-format content (such as video, CTV or streaming audio, eSports, desktop, and mobile).

A portfolio approach for the future

We cannot overstate the importance of looking ahead, beyond universal IDs. Digital advertising exists to evolve, and businesses need to adapt. The change to identity unquestionably baffles the best of us. However, some may mistakenly invest in only one solution when we’re certain another shift will closely follow. The nature of this business requires more forethought and imagination, especially now. By widening the array of solutions and ap

Advertising | Perspectives

3 insider tips to enable unified cross-channel measurement

With billions of dollars transacted on metrics that didn’t exist a few years ago, precision and rigor in detailed measurement matter more than ever before. Yet connecting and rationalizing fragmented data across multiple channels remains one of the most significant barriers in advertising. This poses a pressing challenge when considering the unpredictability of this past year and how it has impacted consumption habits.

To deliver a successful cross-channel strategy, marketers and publishers require special insights about how to precisely measure the impact of advertising attention and optimize consumer experiences. It requires unifying all views of prospective consumers in the TV and digital landscapes.

Here are three insider tips that enable you to unify your view:

1. Monitor cross-platform saturation to avoid ad overload

The struggle to achieve visibility goals has flummoxed the most-savvy professional. This is in part because of the historical barriers to measure fragmented data regarding de-duplicated frequency between platforms. However, it is essential to span the measurement gap to ensure that activation strategies align with measurement capabilities. However, you would be surprised as to how often this falls short. For example: 

  • Marketers and publishers deliver on valid and viewable as the de facto standard. Yet reach and frequency are often being measured without this crucial filter in place.
  • When campaigns are delivered, particular audience segments are curated across 1st and 3rd party datasets. Yet measurement of that performance is based on demographic buckets that only roughly align to how your campaign was carefully targeted.
  • With the growing evolution and consumer adoption of connected TV (CTV) programming, it’s apparent that there’s a significant opportunity to access valuable audience share. Still, it’s challenging to unify your CTV strategy with the remainder of your digital and linear advertising approach. And this leaves you blind and unable to advance.

No one wants a wasted ad budget. Instead, leverage measurement solutions that enable detailed analytics of all ad buys across all households to work for you. They can help pinpoint hurdles or make inflight changes while the campaign runs. This degree of analysis on any-time intervals across a digital and TV portfolio will also help you develop best practices for future campaigns.

2. Pinpoint inefficient ads to untangle cross-platform performance

How can you tell when ad waste occurs? This question undoubtedly plagues our ad tech industry, which  faces epochal changes. Consumers encounter ads, even when they are off-target audiences. And relevant ads hit the same audiences ad infinitum. Learning to pinpoint inefficient ads and untangle cross-platform performance allows you to identify how much you spend efficiently sending real messages to real people.

Sophisticated cross-platform measurement solutions provide tools to measure trillions of impressions across TV and digital–and stop bad actors in their tracks. For example, the teams at Moat by Oracle recently uncovered StreamScam, characterized by forged household IP addresses, app IDs, and device models to make it look like ads were playing in digital environments when they weren’t. 

Note the following industry-wide digital ad expenditures for reference:

  • 20% serves to bots only—and never end up on the screen
  • 20% serves an empty room
  • 25% serves inattentive viewers
  • 30% serves digital, 40% TV
  • 10% serves a saturated audience

3. Unlock sophisticated audience relevancy 

With the constant evolution in ad tech, sophisticated audience relevancy means something different now than it did even five years ago. With new and emerging channels, platforms, and technologies, reaching the people you care about and in a cross-platform capacity is both more important, and in some cases, more daunting than ever.  

Today we know that people have, on average, six devices from which they consume media. All of those devices present a fundamentally different engagement experience and are all vying for our attention.

Let’s be honest, when it comes to reaching people, a one size fits all approach rarely fits the bill. Relying on imprecise definitions measured only by age and gender audiences is one clear example of potential constraints. Focus on finding better alignment with your campaign goals. This requires more inclusive data on audience interests, family structure, past purchase behavior, and more—compared to a national industry-recognized baseline. 

It is critical that marketers and publishers earn how to leverage solutions to tie relevant audiences with a unified view from TV to digital. This will provide true cross-channel clarity and empower more informed decision-making for your next campaign.

Advertising | Revenue

By prioritizing context and understanding over “attention,” Vox Media is poised for growth

Dave Constantino, Senior Director, Client Development of Oracle Data Cloud talks to Edwin Wong, SVP of Insights & Innovation at Vox Media about how strategy and tech power advertiser flexibility, immersive content, and emerging formats.

DC: Vox Media is seen as a trusted resource for its clients, from being a strategic partner to a thought leader. What are the short and long-term opportunities that you see for the advertising industry to transform and connect brands and publishers more closely to consumers? 

EW: As a modern media company, we help brands reach audiences wherever they are – across nearly every platform including TV and streaming, podcasting and digital. In the short-term, we are focused on offering brands flexibility, which continues to be a major priority for every advertiser at this moment. Long-term, we are modernizing the ways brands can work with us on brand building across the modern platforms where audiences are.

In long-term planning, we are putting greater emphasis in areas with strong growth in consumer engagement and areas where we can broaden the opportunity for marketers to work with us. This can be seen across the growth of our podcast network and our investment in our ad marketplace.

We’re excited about the opportunity in podcasting. The medium represents a shift from quick feed-based media experiences. It gives listeners a chance to lean in, connect, and immerse themselves around a subject. In fact, we found that 74% of listeners believe podcasts provide content not available elsewhere.

Investment in local journalism also presents a significant opportunity for marketers looking to reach local audiences at a national scale. We found that 38% of local news site visitors do not visit any national news sites. This means a large audience is not being reached by brands who only advertise on national news properties.

The study also found that a localized version of an ad (i.e. creative that included the name of the city) in a locally relevant environment performs significantly better compared to a non-localized creative on a national news site. In fact, almost every brand metric we measured was significantly higher among those who viewed this localized experience compared to viewers of a national news site. There’s a real opportunity there for brands to reach audiences and support local media. 

DC: Brand safety has been top-of-mind for brands long before the woes of 2020; how do you see advertisers navigate this shift from brand safety to suitability?

EW: News around the pandemic, the much-needed rise of awareness around systemic racism and climate change have caused the definition for what is considered “brand safe” to evolve along with our current reality. Early on, brands cautiously steered clear from any association with news and stories around the pandemic. We also saw brand safety go past its intended solution when ads were blocked on the home pages of Vox, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal around coronavirus content.

We are also seeing a shift in advertisers reassessing how their actions and their marketing budgets reflect their values as a company. More than ever, employees and customers are holding companies accountable for following through on the values they are communicating to the world. Every company needs to take into account how they are allocating their resources, whether its advertising budgets or team resources. 

To reach a place where brands feel safer spending on the open web, part of the solution will be for publishers, like Vox Media, to build opportunities for advertisers to align themselves with quality, trusted content. Publishers should be focused on solutions where brands aren’t being forced to sacrifice quality or brand safety for scale.

Another part will be to help our partners understand how and when our audiences want to hear from brands. In fact, this year we learned 86% of our audience strongly believes that making great products is no longer enough. Brands also need to make society better.

I believe that, in the last decade, we celebrated the entertainment and engagement of the feed. The next will be more about the understanding, activation, and change from the stories we report and tell each other.

We must recalibrate what brand safety looks like in this new context.

DC: What do we need to get done in what’s left of 2020? And what do we prioritize in early 2021 to ensure that we are moving the industry forward?

EW: It’s time to redefine the concept of contextual targeting and how we use first party data. Vox Media has always believed that the context and engagement of content can be a strong signal when it comes to audience targeting. This is a key part of driving the industry forward. On the data and audience privacy side, 2021 will have wide implications of how we use data when engaging our consumers.   

When quality content is matched with people’s passions and interests, it creates a much richer picture of who the audience is, why they are there and what motivates them. When we do this right, we no longer base contextual targeting on just the individual, an individual action, or an individual piece of content, but on what our platforms deliver for the audience holistically. It changes the retroactive perspective of targeting and makes context targeting future-facing.

Compared to behavioral targeting, we also found contextual ads are also more inclusive. We recently worked with a client recently to reach Small Business owners across the U.S. We found that with personalized behavioral ad targeting, only 27% of the impressions reached women. But when we optimized with contextual targeting, 40% of the impressions reached women. What percentage of small business owners in the U.S. are women? 38%.

DC: Our industry values scale, clicks, views, but what about impact, connections, and loyalty? Can you talk to the sweet spot of setting a strategy that enables you to find audiences and earn their attention?

EW: We prioritize perspective, context, and understanding over “attention.”

Our networks have made strong impact, connections and built loyalty with audiences across a number of platforms, covering nearly every topic. We’ve put a focus on growing our consumer revenue lines of business, across subscriptions and commerce. And we’ve seen New York Magazine and The Strategist have record months this year and Vox launched a successful contributions program. These are all built on audience loyalty and trust.

Perspectives

Defining the publisher of the future

Since the dawn of the printing press, publishers have been navigating the forces of technology. From the advent of newspapers and magazines in the 17th century to the more recent emergence of electronic media like radio, television, the internet, and mobile devices, content creators have needed to continuously adjust their business models to adapt to new technologies, channels, and consumer behavior. 

Today, the pace of that change is accelerating. This year, for the first time in history, digital advertising is set to surpass all offline advertising mediums combined. Analysts estimate that advertisers will spend almost $130 billion on digital media in 2019 in the U.S. alone.

Yet even as digital dominates and content creators are leveraging new and exciting media for storytelling, publishers are looking toward the future and preparing themselves for the next set of opportunities and challenges on the horizon. To succeed in the hyper-speed world of the modern digital economy, publishers should focus on three large issues that will help determine their success or failure.

1. Bring the focus back to media quality

The trailblazers of digital advertising have always been pushed and pulled by centrifugal forces, especially those on the sell-side. As hundreds of millions of people first moved online, advertisers raced to get their messages in front of those digital audiences. And an immediate income stream was born for anyone who could drive traffic or, more important, capture attention.

At the dawn of the programmatic era, increasing complexities came into play. And this may have pulled the pendulum too far toward scale and away from media quality. These days, consumer choice at an all-time high and publishers face increasing competition from walled gardens. So, it is vital for publishers of all sizes – from big cross-channel players to digital-only hubs – to regain that focus on media quality. 

Beyond the big three issues of brand safety, viewability, and fraud, publishers need to realign their thinking and their metrics to better match consumer behavior. For example, in the fight against non-human forms of traffic, questions such as “did a person ‘see’ our content?” sometimes override the more important question of “did a person actually ‘read or watch’ our content and for how long?” Let’s swing that pendulum back to consumer-focused media quality.

2. For publishers, media quality is the top job

Publishers must keep their focus on what truly matters: engaging their audience through compelling storytelling. This includes building an advertising experience on their properties that puts the user experience first. This must include integrity around validity, viewability, and brand safety.

When it comes to demanding higher quality ads and organic content on the web, publishers have a huge opportunity to move the needle. Publishers have the advantage of providing consumers and brands with a curated platform that offers a more  controlled experience, enabling them to tell their story and reach consumers in an impactful way that drives an emotional connection.

This level of command over content allows publishers to control the conversation with their advertisers, share peace of mind with their partners, and better demonstrate the value of their media and audiences. 

3. Valid, viewable, and safe is only a starting point

How can publishers tell if their efforts to build a better ad experience are successful? New and nuanced forms of measurement hold the key.

While consumers may never love all forms of advertising, we know from research that they  find certain types more tolerable. The job of providing better advertising that meets those can’t fall on publishers alone, of course. It will take buy-in from advertisers, agencies, and all industry players.

More important, when publishers themselves measure media quality only in terms of things like brand safety, viewability, and invalid traffic, they are missing out on other relevant signals. A publisher that is achieving a holistic view with their metrics is able to see if their content is connecting to a brand’s message or if it’s engaging an audience.

This holistic view comes from more sophisticated measurement, offers answers to questions such as:

  • Is there ad clutter?
  • Who are the returning users?
  • Which formats are in play? (i.e., infinite scroll vs. photo galleries vs. sticky player)
  • What is the site experience? (i.e., navigation or content discovery, which can be especially valuable for full-page branded content campaigns)

In short, valid, viewable, and safe is just a starting point. The publisher of the future will set a higher bar. Through a better understanding of performance, monitoring context, and applying more advanced ad quality metrics, the industry will be able to launch ads that resonate, are viewed and interacted with, and, ultimately, serve the interests of both advertiser and viewer. All because the entire ecosystem better understands what the audience wants.

The publisher of the future is now

More than ever, as attention spans continue to shrink in the modern digital landscape, publishers need to understand what truly influences attention, quality, and engagement. By focusing on these signals, publishers will not only delight their audience, but they have the power to make brand advertising more effective.

The publisher of the future looks forward with optimism and a strong conviction for storytelling. The publisher of the future recognizes they have the opportunity to deliver entertainment and experiences the world truly desires. It starts with helping marketers connect with their audiences sustainably and ethically, protecting an ecosystem that citizens rely on every day.

You are the publisher of the future. And the future is now.

About the author
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Dave Constantino is the Senior Director of Client Development at Oracle Data Cloud, where he is responsible for driving revenue across the full measurement solutions suite encompassed by Moat Analytics, Contextual Intelligence, Moat Outcomes and Moat Reach. He joined Oracle with the Moat acquisition in 2017, where he focused on scaling the sales team and revenue for the business with strategic publishers and platforms. Prior to Oracle, Dave has held various roles as a SaaS leader and in sales.

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