Articles by: "Mimi Wotring, SVP of Publisher Sales & Client Services – DoubleVerify"

News publishers are an invaluable part of our society, providing essential information and fostering public discourse. But as we’ve seen so far in 2024, contentious election cycles can increase challenges for digital advertising in the news sector.

Despite the audience engagement that comes with news content, brands sometimes choose to avoid advertising next to volatile topics altogether. Advertisers still benefit greatly from the audiences of established news outlets – even during election years, when volatile content is more commonplace. This is why it is in both sides’ best interests to revise their approach to brand suitability in 2024 and beyond.

Election season dynamics: Impact on buyers, sellers and audiences

Divisive rhetoric and misinformation surge during election years and make online audiences more sensitive to the content they consume. Despite this, publishers still need to juggle the unique requirements of each buyer with a fast-paced and unpredictable 24-hour news cycle. This often requires continuous adjustments to keep up with demand and maintain brand suitability alignment.

Advertisers face their own election-year challenges. Our research emphasized this with a survey revealing that two out of three consumers would likely stop using a brand or product if it appeared next to false, objectionable or inflammatory content. Some brands respond to this increased wariness by tightening their avoidance measures, which can inadvertently reduce campaign reach and negatively impact news publishers.

Instead of both sides continuing to miss out on vital opportunities to generate revenue and reach engaged audiences, there is an opportunity to improve the way we communicate and transact with each other. A few small adjustments can make a big difference with the right tools and tactics.

Best practices to consider during election seasons

These best practices are a great starting point for brands and publishers to manage brand suitability requirements and reduce brand suitability violations. They can also make longer-term partnerships more sustainable once a contentious election cycle is over.

1. Advocate for context-based suitability measures over keyword-based ones

More nuanced brand suitability settings offer smarter and more sophisticated protection than simple keyword-based tools. They enable buyers to make decisions based on the actual content and its sentiment. Some solutions allow advertisers to go deeper than a “yes or no” approach to the screening process by letting buyers choose their own levels of risk tolerance toward certain types of content, such as whether it is user-generated or more authoritative.

2. Promote use of inclusion lists as a trusted publisher

Some brands and advertisers are mindful of the value that trusted news sources provide in any climate, both to their own goals and to society at large. These buyers might be more open to tools like inclusion lists, which can preserve their access to compatible news publisher inventory no matter what their brand suitability settings might be. The only hurdle is that they might not be aware of their existence. Publishers can take this as an opportunity to educate their partners and ensure their placement on any inclusion lists that they eventually develop.

3. Facilitate open and frequent communication with partners

Advertisers and publishers should work together and troubleshoot potential delivery issues as quickly as possible. Even small problems can significantly impact campaign performance if they are left unchecked for long enough. For example, is your team asking partners to update their keyword lists regularly? Do they understand the partner’s sensitivities enough to align their ads on the appropriate pages? Questions like these, alongside a consistent reporting schedule are a helpful way to ensure that partners are on the same page and budgets are spent effectively on the right audiences.

Brand suitability: Advancing the conversation

News is one of the most engaging forms of media. And during an election cycle, audiences seek out information to inform their decision making. Despite its potentially polarizing nature or volatility, news can provide a highly engaging context for brand placements. However, to ensure that the context is ultimately suitable, it is important to engage in nuanced decision making and to keep the conversation going.

Advertising | Supporter Spotlight

How to have the brand suitability conversation with advertisers

September 28, 2022 Mimi Wotring, SVP of Publisher Sales & Client Services – DoubleVerify

Leaders know that strategic conversations, though often complex and time-consuming, are the ones worth having. Within an industry, the ability to successfully navigate these conversations, both internally and with clients, can separate the quality teams from the pack.

Brand suitability is one of those topics in online advertising where buyers and sellers have plenty to gain from conversations that help them align strategically on goals. According to a DV/Harris poll, 87% of consumers feel that brands bear responsibility for ensuring their ads run adjacent to safe content. Brands have a real financial interest in protecting their brand’s reputation online, and publishers have been tasked with reacting to this new pillar of the digital advertising world.

Conversations reveal opportunities, not doom and gloom

Brand safety and suitability is a concept that is here to stay. However, that doesn’t mean that publishers are doomed to experience rising incident rates on their campaigns. Tools are improving, block rates are decreasing, and teams on both sides of the industry are becoming more efficient, transparent and collaborative. All that remains is continuing to build momentum and best practices for both sides to benefit from the measurement and performance opportunities out there.

With the dwindling (and imminent loss) of third-party cookies, advertisers are experimenting more than ever. They are looking into targeting based on contextual relevance, brand suitability, attention metrics and other alternatives to help them understand performance in more privacy-friendly ways. Publishers hold a lot of power in those conversations if they are proactive about their audience knowledge and technical know-how.

Bringing buyers to the table

For brands and agencies, ad tech has stepped in to provide brand safety and suitability solutions, creating the illusion that it is simply an issue for publishers to deal with alone. However, advertisers still have much to gain from fruitful brand suitability conversations with the sell-side.

Publisher teams need to remind their advertising partners that a “one-size-fits-all” approach does not work effectively when it comes to brand suitability. Publishers and their audiences are diverse. So, limiting strategies can ultimately hold brands back in their efforts to maximize reach and performance. Ad tech has also evolved to the point where brand suitability is not just something you turn on and off. Between inclusion lists, exclusion lists, contextual classifications, mobile app controls, keyword avoidance and more, advertisers have much more diverse and nuanced tools at their disposal.

Icebreakers: Questions to ask your partners

In many cases, brands and agencies may also not know how to navigate these conversations with publishers. New brand suitability tools are regularly made available, and both sides stand to gain from analyzing and revisiting their strategies. Based upon our experience putting together a brand suitability guide, here are some effective questions that publishers can ask to better understand how partners may be thinking about brand suitability.

What types of content does your brand find most or least suitable to advertise next to? Do these topics fit into industry accepted content taxonomies?
Are you utilizing keyword lists in your brand suitability strategy? Are those keywords overlapping with more nuanced brand suitability tools that may be better ways to maximize reach?
Is your team utilizing inclusion lists to deem it appropriate for your ads to always appear on trusted sites and publishers? What are the criteria you have for such distinctions?
Are you utilizing a brand safety floor that protects you from the riskiest content related to malware, phishing and spam?

Deciding to begin a complex conversation is the hardest part. Once you do, the opportunities for improved revenue and reduced friction become apparent.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Supporter Spotlight

Ad quality trends up and blocking trends down according to new report

July 25, 2022 Mimi Wotring, SVP of Publisher Sales & Client Services – DoubleVerify

In today’s constantly changing digital advertising ecosystem, it’s critical to monitor trends across the industry. This is especially true when it comes to ad verification, with utilization being heavily impacted by specific issues important to various brands, verticals and geographies. Knowing how these trends are playing out gives teams an upper hand in strategic planning and conversations with buyers.

Every year, DoubleVerify analyzes trillions of impressions delivered across over 2,100 brands across 80 markets to provide publishers and advertisers with insights into key media quality and performance in our annual Global Insights Report. While the report includes extensive regional data, global benchmarks, vertical spotlights and more detailed analysis, here are some key trends for publishers to consider.

Ad quality improves and blocking declines

As advertisers and agencies continue to refine their verification strategies, we saw reduced instances of blocking that can negatively impact publishers. Last year saw a 9% decrease in brand safety and suitability violations, with the overall violation rate continuing its trend downward from 11.7% in 2019 to 10% in 2021. Violation rates are defined as impressions that do not comply with a brand’s specific settings, but do not always indicate that a block occurs. Viewability rates have also continued to improve, led by video viewability increasing 4% year-over-year.

This steady improvement in ad quality shows how adoption of quality measurement affects the industry overall. This, combined with education that leads to more nuanced brand suitability settings from brands can help publishers monetize more of their inventory while also having a positive impact on campaign performance.

Fraud violations decline while schemes continue to be uncovered

Online ad fraud schemes are an ever-present threat. They adapt to new technology and trusted industry safeguards, such as ads.txt, or through device spoofing and other insidious attack vectors. The good news is that publishers are being impacted less, with overall fraud violations declined by 7% compared to the year before.

Unfortunately, signs indicate that fraudsters are more active than ever. DV saw a 70% spike in schemes uncovered in 2021 when compared to 2020, especially in video and CTV. Emerging channels with high demand are breeding grounds for bad actors. Verification vendors will need to continue to evolve as fraudsters attempt new forms of misrepresenting inventory and funneling ad spend away from legitimate publishers.

Attention looms as an advertiser focus

Advertisers are constantly searching for the best ways to improve the performance of their creatives, and attention metrics are an increasingly important way for them to do just that. Beyond viewability, attention metrics can capture that elusive moment where consumers are intrigued by a product or brand, motivated to engage, and ultimately, driven to convert. In a world where consumers see upwards of 10,000 ads per day, measuring attention can provide powerful insights into which ads are likely to perform.

For example, a global technology brand working with DV saw that high engagement impressions were 32% more likely to convert to sign-ups or sales relative to baseline impressions. Where a user’s attention is on the page can make a marked difference in ad performance.

Attention measurement informs buy-side and sell-side teams about key video and CTV metrics such as ad audibility, in-view rates, completion rates, fully on-screen rates and more. In 2021, DV saw Audible and In-view On Completion (AVOC) rates increase by 23% YoY across all devices, indicating improvements in how video advertising is seen by users. Clearly, the ability to monitor and optimize for attention metrics will be a differentiator in the space. The ability to sell segments of inventory based on attention metrics shows buyers that you have optimal ad performance in mind.

While not indicative of all verification vendors, publishers should look to understand how buyers are utilizing verification tools and how it may impact them. A lot has changed in ad verification since its inception, and publishers that consider the same quality and attention metrics that brands care about stand to benefit the most.

Access DoubleVerify's full Global Insights Report containing methodology, definitions and additional information here.

Advertising | Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

How publishers can benefit from the rise of attention analytics

January 19, 2022 Mimi Wotring, SVP of Publisher Sales & Client Services – DoubleVerify

Americans spend nearly 8 hours a day on digital devices, according to a new report from eMarketer. Yes, that means time spent on devices now rivals how long people sleep. However, according to Harvard Business Review, for consumers to be affected by advertising messages, they need to be paying attention. This may seem obvious but capturing consumer attention can be challenging.

User attention has become more fleeting in the internet age. A Microsoft study states that the human attention span has dropped to just 8 seconds – shrinking 25% in just a few years. With users seeing thousands of ads per day, and privacy changes affecting how we measure performance, how can the industry determine whether an ad was seen by someone who is actually paying attention?

The opportunity in attention measurement

The rise of the internet set up the reach and quality metrics that everyone is familiar with today, but a lot has changed since then. In pursuit of optimal performance, advertisers gained interest in additional ways to measure and categorize impressions using brand suitability, contextual relevance, viewability and fraud. While these metrics have improved advertising performance immensely, none of them effectively measure attention.

Specific, industry-accepted metrics to measure attention are still being defined. They are also impacted by increased pressure to ensure privacy-friendly measurement. Some solutions rely on eye tracking and other technologies that are based on sampling.

Pay attention to measurement criteria

Our approach to attention measurement is a more complex endeavor that includes a combination of over 50 exposure and engagement signals that help us understand whether a user’s attention is or isn’t captured by an ad. Exposure signals include an ad’s entire presentation, such as viewable time, share of screen, audibility and more. The engagement side focuses on user-initiated events while the ad creative is displayed, including user touches, screen orientation, video playback and volume control, among others. These signals give advertisers and publishers helpful information about ad performance for both campaign and inventory optimization.

Rising use of attention metrics comes at a time when performance is getting harder to measure directly due to privacy changes across the industry. Behavioral targeting enabled by third-party cookies is giving way to other methods for measuring ad performance. For many advertisers, combining attention and quality metrics is a way to utilize new KPIs that can effectively improve performance over time.

People have grown increasingly savvy, avoiding or ignoring intrusive and non-relevant ad placements, so publishers and marketers must evolve to improve experiences and performance. Attention is a way to use privacy-friendly data to measure ad impact without using third-party cookies to track or measure data from the user.

How publishers benefit from analyzing attention

These insights enable more effective media buying, but how can publishers better understand attention as it relates to their inventory? First, we need to understand how attention is measured.

Attention is understood through a mix of exposure and engagement. Exposure is measured by looking at how long an ad was viewed by a user, how it was presented and what share of the screen did the ad take up. Engagement is measured by checking if a user is present and looking at whether they interacted with the ad. This includes actions such as clicks, hovers, volume adjustments, screen orientation, etc.

Key attention themes to watch for in 2022

Exposure: Brand awareness can be driven by measuring exposure to better understand how insights such as time-in-view, share of screen or quartile completion correlate with brand favorability and recall improvements over time.
Engagement: Metrics such as hover, click and mute rates show how optimized engagement can directly lead to increased conversions.
Cost-Benefit: Publishers that use attention to increase ad engagement can demand higher pricing from existing placements.
Understand Creative Impact: Advertisers can begin building better creatives based on knowing when and where to place messaging for maximum impact.

Analyzing attention gives publishers an opportunity to better understand how to package premium inventory in new ways. Advertisers value the increased conversions and brand awareness that comes with placements that result in higher attention rates. Similar to packaging inventory based on quality, this inventory can garner higher CPMs. With the right analytical tech stack, attention measurement enables publishers to understand their inventory in new ways, helping to drive yield.

It’s still early days for attention measurement, but signs are growing that it’s here to stay. Like any new set of metrics, the industry must come together to agree on standards that allow for interoperability and simple communication between buyers and sellers. Ultimately, it’s important to remember that attention is a way to better understand users and the impact of advertising, which is why the industry must evolve alongside new behaviors with the help of new data and analysis.

Advertising | Perspectives

Publishers: Consolidate your tech stack to drive growth

June 21, 2021 Mimi Wotring, SVP of Publisher Sales & Client Services – DoubleVerify

The rate of change in ad tech is intense. It’s being driven by demand for improved performance, trust, transparency and privacy. Many solutions to these problems target buy-side players. So, publisher technology has often been reactive, adding in-house or one-off solutions to solve specific problems.

The most successful publisher organizations are able to synthesize vast amounts of data to make optimized decisions. Unfortunately, the tools that enable this process have a tendency to make operations more disparate and isolated over time. Increasing numbers of advertising partners, technologies, and tools make it difficult to see the forest through the trees. In an ad tech world – where complexity is the norm – striving for simplicity has become a lost art.

From silos to synergy

While most organizations can see the pitfalls of an overly complex tech stack, many of these technologies are unavoidable. Each part of the stack serves a purpose and may meet the needs of a specific department. However, that doesn’t always lead to scalable outcomes that benefit the entire organization. For executives trying to improve cross-team collaboration and transparency in order to find new growth opportunities, the tech stack must be constantly scrutinized.

Time spent maintaining disjointed point solutions can be a full-time job. In addition, each department in your organization has increasingly complex goals and responsibilities that threaten to add more technology to the stack:

Each team often maintains legacy systems that may not be ideal for the changing scale of the entire business. There is an opportunity for media companies to undertake top-down initiatives that align team goals and processes at a higher level through unified data and technology. Many publisher tech stacks include most, if not all, of the solutions below. By unifying data between these tools and making data visible to more teams, decision making is improved and business goals are more easily achieved.

Economies of scale: playing the long game

Over time, tech solutions and workflows solidify. This makes it difficult to know how much time is spent maintaining these systems versus focusing on company goals. Reducing dependence on in-house or one-off solutions will have massive cost benefits as publishers scale.

With a unified data foundation and goal alignment, data silos created by disparate software are eliminated. Workflows are cleaned up. And holistic views of performance allow for additional optimization opportunities and more time is spent on growing revenue. The costs of the required technology solutions are also reduced. Instead, they are replaced by tools that can bring data together for multiple departments and use cases.

How to know when it’s time to consolidate

In smaller teams, individual operators may add specific tools that help one person do the work of many. But as an organization grows, you will reach a plateau that limits scale unless data, results, and opportunities can be easily shared. Increasing collaboration between departments presents exciting revenue opportunities, but only if those teams speak the same language. A simplified tech stack becomes a way to increase transparency and reduce the barriers for collaboration.

Questions to ask when evaluating your tech stack:

What are the high-level business goals that each piece of technology supports? Technology should be added only after goals and supporting processes are clearly defined.
How do department needs differ? Where do they overlap? Identifying areas where technology can meet more than one need for the company can help simplify operations.
How much time is spent maintaining in-house or point solutions? In many cases, dedicated roles are required to keep solutions up and running.
Do your systems talk to each other? How difficult is it to create a single view of performance? With the volumes of data that businesses rely on, it’s common to struggle to bring it all together in meaningful ways.
What is the short-term investment needed to simplify your tech stack vs long-term benefits? This can mean looking at specific technologies, how they’ve been configured, or overall costs. It can be painful to think about rebuilding tech implementations for a cleaner, more effective foundation, but in the long run, you might be better off.

Tech stack consolidation allows your team to improve interdepartmental cooperation and transparency in order to capture new revenue. Less time and money will be spent maintaining and translating KPIs from various point solutions. The sooner your organization begins scaling its tech stack for the future, the sooner you can begin accomplishing top-down organizational goals with less overhead.