Category results for "Advertising"

Display advertising deserves more credit for inbound phone calls

November 10, 2015 Research Team—DCN

According to Marchex’ 2015 Click-To-Call Commerce Mobile Performance Report, click-to-call has emerged as the most common form of purchase-oriented activity from mobile ads. They report that click-to-call commerce, in which a consumer makes a phone call from a mobile Web page or app and makes a reservation, appointment or purchase, will exceed $1 trillion this year.

In its most recent white paper, Marchex set out to determine whether display ads are influential in driving consumers to make purchase-oriented calls. According to The Missing 98%: Why Display Advertising Isn’t Getting the Credit It Deserves, “The advertising technology ecosystem has historically focused on tying display ad exposure to e-commerce purchases, or other online actions such as filling out a lead form or visiting a product web page. However, for most advertisers, the goal of a display advertising campaign is offline, such as an inbound phone call or in-store purchase.”

According to the report:

Not much click-to-call activity occurs directly from display advertising units.
Whereas a paid search campaign that uses call extensions may see call-through rates as high as 20%, Marchex research has shown that it can take an average of 500,000 impressions from a display ad with click-to-call functionality to generate a quality phone call.

But display advertising does influence consumers to make a phone call in the future.
Data from beta customers of Marchex Display Analytics shows that it can take an average of 8,000 impressions from a display ad to influence a phone call within 2 weeks. In other words, display ads influence 60 times more phone calls than they do a direct click-to-call. On average, they found that approximately 2% of phone calls occur directly from display ads or landing pages, and the rest occur in the days or weeks following exposure.

Marchex identified three major challenges of view-through attribution for phone calls:

Lack of a common identifier across online and offline
Cross-screen attribution
Latency

The white paper outlines these challenges in greater detail and makes suggestions on how to address them.

Advertising | Industry-Research

Growing the receptivity of digital ads

October 21, 2015 DCN

Multiscreen users spend the same amount of time viewing video on TV as they do on digital platforms, yet they are less receptive to digital ads reports Millward Brown’s research, “AdReaction: Video Creative in a Digital World.” The study surveyed more than 13,500 multiscreen viewers (for example, people who own a TV and either a smartphone or tablet) in 42 countries on video usage and what they think about video advertising. Now that video ads are playing across multi-platforms, new creative approaches in advertising are essential to ensure consumer receptivity is strong across all screens.

The average consumer, across the globe, between the ages of 16 and 45 in today’s media environment watches 204 minutes of video a day, split equally between TV and online. Forty-five minutes of the average online viewing time is done on a smartphone, while desktop accounts for 37 minutes and tablet for 20 minutes. Digital’s share of total video minutes is higher (42%) among 16-24 year olds among 35-45 year olds than (29%).

It is important to note that consumers reported 50% negativity toward smartphone video ads with computers and tablets trailing at 46% and 45% negativity, respectively. In contrast, live TV had just 30% negativity toward ads. Interestingly, ad viewing using mobile app rewards, where users watch videos to advance to a new level or get tools, rated 54% in favorability, making it the most preferred digital advertising format and skippable pre-rolls (44% positive) and skippable mobile pop-ups (41%) were next allowing consumers to push past their negativity toward mobile ads.

Advertising | Industry-Research

US ad sales will grow by +2.2% this year, with digital surpassing TV ad spending faster than expected

October 19, 2015 Research Team—DCN

Digital media ad revenue will surpass TV ad spending faster than expected, according to Interpublic-owned media buying and research firm Magna Global. According to its US Media Owner Revenues Forecast, advertising revenues grew by +1.6% in the first half across all media categories. While digital media remained dynamic, growth is increasingly contrasted between social and video formats (from +30% to +50%), search (+10%) and banner display (+4%). Magna Global predicts that digital media ad revenues will reach $66 billion and that digital will surpass television in 2016 to become the #1 media category, one year earlier than previously expected.

According to Magna Global, Media Owners Advertising revenues showed little growth in the first half of 2015. Ad sales grew by +1.0% in 1Q15 and +0.8% in 2Q15 (all media including direct marketing, excl. P&O). However, they predict that 2016 will show stronger ad revenue growth than 2015, but has reduced its growth forecast to +3.3% from +3.8%. Traditional media will decrease by 2.9%, while digital sales will grow by +15.1%.

The 2015-2016 National TV upfronts were down in terms of volume, for the second year in a row, with CPM increases in the low single-digit range (compared to mid-single digit a year before). Interestingly, the decline of the impression supply seems to have reached the point where inflationary tension might soon come back into play.

Key figures from Magna Global’s forecasts by media segment:

TV ad sales will decrease by -2.6% (vs. -1.2% in 2014) excluding P&O.
Print ad sales (newspapers and magazines) will decline by 12% to 14% this year and next.
Social and online video ad sales continue to show explosive grow in the short term with full-year ad revenue expected to reach +48.2% and +38.4%, respectively.
Mobile video will also grow by +69% as smartphone and tablet usage continue to grow as more and more content is made available across all screens through apps.
Search remains robust (+11.8% this year) with mobile search up 46% and desktop search up only 1%.

Advertising | Perspectives

Who’s winning at sports content?

October 2, 2015 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

It is generally recognized that good storytelling is not the exclusive domain of media professionals. Today, great stories come as readily from consumers and brands. At Advertising Week, Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint led a panel of diverse—and talented—sports storytellers: Morgan Flatley CMO of Gatorade & Propel, PepsiCo; Jaymee Messler, President of The Players’ Tribune; Adrienne Lofton SVP, Global Brand Marketing of Under Armour; and Lisa Baird CMO of the US Olympic Committee. What emerged was a picture of brand-audience relationships and a marketers’ desire to create distinct content experiences that are brand, channel and—above all–consumer-centric.

Baird said her content strategy starts with the objective of getting the next generation of young people interested in the Olympics. “We don’t try to recreate Olympic sport,” she said, “NBC does a phenomenal job at that.” Instead, her content strategy revolves around telling the story of hometown Olympic spirit which helps young people see themselves in the stories and forges a personal connection between them and the Olympics.

For brands like Gatorade and Under Armour, the objective might seem more straightforward: selling product. However, brands like these are clearly using content to deepen engagement and tell a story that brings their brand values to life. Lofton said that one of her objectives is to take the brand from the playing field to all aspects of the athlete’s life. The trick, of course, is competing with the thousands of messages that inundate consumers on a daily basis. And while television is part of Lofton’s marketing strategy – particularly for reach and driving awareness – Under Armour’s content initiatives also live on a wide range of digital channels. “We drive people to Instagram or Snapchat to give them a peek behind the curtain to the athletes we have great relationships with.” These social media endeavors might be solo, or with a trusted media partner such as ESPN.

Gatorade’s Flatley said that they take a similar approach, using a lot of television because of its broad audience. “But we are also hyper-aware of where the teen athlete is going: how the use different media channels and how engage with on them,” she said. They also experiment with emerging tools, such as virtual reality: The Gatorade Bryce Harper Virtual Reality experience literally took fans inside Harper’s head as he faced the pitcher with the game on the line. Flatley noted that the VR experiment didn’t reach a mass audience, but offered a great opportunity “to experiment with new technology that allows us to go deeper.”

The Players’ Tribune, founded a year ago by Derek Jeter, is an experiment in letting athletes tell their own stories, according to Messler. As with Gatorade and Under Armour, The Players’ Tribune recognizes fans desire to get inside athletes’ minds. Her first objective for the new site was to establish the brand, so she relied heavily on the social influence of the players themselves. However, as the site matures, Messler said they are beginning to take a more scientific approach to develop their content distribution strategy. In both content development and analysis, Messler believes in “A nice combination of the intelligent and emotional.”

Certainly—whether a brand, organization, or media outlet—all content creators are focused on evaluating the effectiveness of their strategy and investment. Baird said it can be easy to focus on retweets and other social numbers, but given her more complex objectives—such as inspiring young athletes to not only develop an affinity for the Olympics, maybe even to join a sport and dream of becoming future Olympians—measurement is a tricky subject. She is optimistic that she’ll be able to track a link between her content and membership in the Olympic National Governing Bodies such as USA Wrestling or USA Volleyball.

The stakes are high and rivalry is fierce: as Morgan from Gatorade pointed out “There’s a high bar for all of us.” Certainly this is true, whether the storyteller is a brand, media company or organization of any type, as all compete for a share of consumer’s finite attention.

Advertising | Innovation | Perspectives

ONE by AOL: Simplifying digital ad complexity to improve creativity—and results

September 21, 2015 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Like the Jetson’s robot maid, Rosie, technology was supposed to make our lives easier. But we could use a little more Rosie and a little less complexity in the digital media and marketing industry as brands scramble to create content and advertising experiences that are optimized across an ever-expending proliferation of devices, screen-sizes, and formats. There are those, however, who believe that automation is an answer to some of this complexity: AOL, for one, continues to build more automation into its ONE by AOL platform in an effort to “allow the machines to do what the machines do best and allow the humans to do what they do best,” according to David Miller, the Company’s VP of Ad Product Management.

Marketers’ biggest concern, says Miller, is keeping their creative relevant and figuring out what is working (and what’s not). “We are trying to let the machines do that so marketers can focus on being more creative and strategic.”

To that end, AOL has expanded the company’s ONE by AOL open automation platform to allow marketers to simplify the creation of multi-variate premium cross-screen advertising. This means that marketers can create content once and—using AOL’s flexible HTML-based templating—easily deploy that content across mobile, video and desktop. While creative assets are core, the system can also incorporate many other elements such as product information, social feeds, SKU information, local retail locations, and any number of other things that brands want to get in front of consumers. “Historically, advertisers have to build five, 10, even 15 different combinations of assets for each different format—desktop, mobile, pre-roll—we want to drastically simplify that,” says Miller.

The ONE by AOL platform also connects with AOL’s audience platform, which incorporates first-party, third-party, and advertiser data. This allows marketers to target specific audiences with customized experiences. Perhaps even more importantly, ONE by AOL provides marketers with a way to clearly evaluate the performance of any given combination of assets against specific demographic segments. “We want to leverage all of the data to allow marketers to look at each individual combination of assets shown to a specific group and be able to compare the ROI of this combination aimed at this group to this other combination aimed at another demographic, then be able to easily change things up to improve results.”

This is achieved through a combination of technological integration and transparency. ONE by AOL provides insights that go beyond impressions and clicks to include insights on the impact of specific pieces of creative on ROI. The goal, says Miller, is to allow marketers to create increasingly relevant, useful advertising. “We need to see the convergence of the right brand experience with the appropriate consumer experience, which revolves around relevance and utility,” he says.

Miller points out that premium brands have long since moved away from “the big ‘click here’ button…the kind of bad ads that cause more ad blockers to be installed.” The rise of ad blocking, according to Miller, can be directly correlated to bad ads and poor consumer experiences.

Miller notes that, as an industry, we need to increase our focus on creating great experiences. “At AOL, we’re trying to figure out how to help move the industry forward overall and simplify life for our marketing partners so that they can focus on the next big cool thing.”

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

Viewability problems spread to video ads on social

September 17, 2015 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

A funny thing happened on the way to social distribution domination. While publishers have started to test more and more original content on social platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, those platforms are still suffering from problems of viewability for ads—especially with video.

Let’s look at the statistics: The Media Rating Council and the Interactive Advertising Bureau suggests a video ad is viewable when at least half of the ad’s pixels are visible on a screen for at least two consecutive seconds. An April study by Google found the average viewability of video ads across the web (not taking YouTube into account) was 54%. When considering video ads on YouTube, that figure jumped to 91% across different devices and apps — and video ads were significantly more viewable on mobile and tablet as opposed to desktop. Non-viewable ads, meanwhile, were either scrolled off the screen or abandoned in less than two seconds.

Short Attention Span on Snapchat
Yet just because ads might be more viewable on mobile than on desktop doesn’t discount the anxiety surrounding their worth. A recent article on Digiday found a full 70% of Snapchat’s mostly millennial audience had moved on from an ad after only three seconds. Given Snapchat currently charges brands for video ads that are viewed for even less than a second, it’s not only raised discussion on the definition on viewability, but also the relative value of these ads for brands.

“Snapchat is using this measurement that just seems off from what brands and clients want and where the rest of the industry is going,” a digital marketing insider with knowledge of Snapchat’s ad model told Garrett Sloane of Digiday. “If an ad is on the screen for less than a second, it’s hard to imagine it made an impression.”

Despite the ongoing debate on the impact of technology giants becoming the gatekeepers for brands and publishers, the platforms will have to work more closely with these parties if they are all going to have long-term, stable ad revenues. Twitter, for example, offers six-second pre-roll ads. Facebook also “teaches brands how to capture attention within three seconds, using muted auto-play videos, which people can scroll right past,” Sloane wrote in Digiday.

Third-Party Verification?
Some companies are demanding third-party tools be used to evaluate which advertisements are actually being seen, to help ensure the accuracy of the information and maintain higher viewability. Complaints from Uniliver and Kelloggs are suspected to be behind YouTube’s announcement to use third-party tools instead of its own in-house measuring tool, Active View.

But this also has its negative consequences. Facebook, for instance, has argued that “third-party verification view tags often slow down consumer experience and don’t always report views consistently,” and has hinted that these third-party verification tools could compromise valuable user data. And Facebook — whose log-in can track which desktop or mobile devices people use — has access to the consumer data that is so crucial to advertisers. That data is difficult for most publishers to obtain otherwise, and generally harder to determine on mobile, because the varying size of different gadgets require different kinds of advertising.

Maintaining a quality user experience versus earning revenue from advertising seems to be the trade-off that’s happening on social platforms. Snapchat, for instance, maintains brands won’t be charged if viewers skip an ad entirely. But it also offers its users the chance to skip any advertisement they wish.

These are early days for video ads on social platforms, so there could be more standards among the major players in the near future. That could go a long way toward addressing viewability issues. Snapchat videos, for instance, take up the entire screen (so eyes can’t wander), and also use the vertical video format which leads to higher view rates.

Or publishers and brands could also try another route to better viewability: better ads, and even native ads that are creative enough for people to play through and share without skipping in disgust.

Advertising | Industry-Research

Do Millennials Consume Content, Ads and Shop Differently?

August 28, 2015 Research Team—DCN

A new report from Adroit Digital compares Millennials’ shopping behaviors and advertising preferences with those of their older counterparts. While Adroit points out that a great deal of research closely examines generational behaviors and attributes, this report focuses on behaviors, particularly how Millennials shop, consume content and respond to advertising as compared with older shoppers. Adroit Digital conducted a study to ask Millennials and those 35 and older about their shopping and content consumption habits. The study was fielded from April 24, 2015, through May 24, 2015 and targeted a random sample of 1,000 US and Canadian consumers who self-identified as 18–34 years of age and who owned both a smartphone and a personal computer, and 500 US and Canadian consumers who self-identified as age 35 and older and owned both a smartphone and a personal computer.

Key findings include:

Both Millennials and those 35 and older do the majority of retail browsing in-store—57% and 61%, respectively.
When it comes to which online social medium affects retail purchases the most, both Millennials and those 35+ chose online review sites, 55% and 54%, respectively.
The majority of respondents are also more likely to click on a mobile ad over a desktop ad—55% of those 18–34 and 52% of those 35+.
The majority of survey respondents replied that online and/or mobile advertising does affect what they purchase—75% of those 18–34 and 73% of those 35+.
Millennials are slightly more likely to click on a native ad than a banner ad—81% compared with 75% of those 35+.
Millennials are slightly more bothered by advertisers’ remarketing efforts—83% of those 18–34 vs. 77% of those 35+.
When it comes to noticing ads between devices, the majority of both age groups surveyed report that ads on their mobile devices grab their attention more than ads on PCs.

Advertising | Perspectives

Where’s the signal? (And why it matters to digital advertisers)

August 19, 2015 DCN

Philosopher Thomas Wells, in an essay for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, argues that advertising is a market failure:

The advertising industry consists of the buying and selling of your attention between third parties without your consent. That means that the cost of producing the good – access to your attention – doesn’t reflect its full social cost.

…

Since advertisers pay less to access your attention than your attention is worth to you, an excessive (inefficient) amount of advertising is produced.

For the web, though, there is still time to turn advertising into a net positive, if we fix a few things.

The main reason advertising exists is to help deal with information asymmetry. Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof pointed out that, in a market where low-quality and high-quality sellers compete, and sellers know their products better than buyers do, high-quality sellers have trouble staying in business. When the buyer can’t tell a low-quality car, a lemon, from a high-quality car, no buyer can justify paying more than a lemon’s value for any car.

Over thousands of years, people have figured out ways to deal with Akerlof’s market for lemons problem. Licensing of sellers, product reviews, and protecting trademarks are all ways to give some advantage to quality sellers.

Advertising is another piece of the solution. Tom Goodwin compares advertising to stone buildings for banks, and writes:

Old world advertising used to be the same, the very act of investing in TV, buying a premium billboard, taking an ad in Vogue, became brand building because of the cost, not despite. The general public doesn’t know rate cards, but there was a tacit, enduring, innate feeling that companies that advertised were companies of quality.

Perceived advertising costs matter to users. In The Waste in Advertising Is the Part That Works, Tim Ambler and E. Ann Hollier describe a signaling test based on showing “expensive” and “degraded” versions of the same TV commercials to experimental subjects, and found:

[P]erceived expense influences perceptions of brand quality, which in turn is the most critical predictor of a participant’s inclination to purchase a brand.

Wells, however, argues that signaling is a waste. He writes:

Like banks housed in grand marbled buildings, companies which pour vast amounts of money into advertising campaigns must be supremely confident about the quality of their products and its long-term sales. Otherwise they couldn’t afford to burn so much money on ridiculous Super Bowl ads. This argument rather reminds me of John Maynard Keynes’s suggestion that in a recession caused by a collapse of aggregate demand one could solve the problem by burying bottles filled with bank notes and then leaving it to private enterprise to dig them up again.

But signaling isn’t just based on the production values of the ad.

Ads appear with content. Signal is proportional to the value of the content, not just the ad itself. In signal-carrying media such as magazines, a positive feedback loop can emerge. Valuable signal-carrying ads bring in money for content, whose quality and perceived cost increases signaling power, therefore ad rates, and so on. This can make a signal-carrying medium a great business to be in.

But when advertisers try to target users individually, signaling breaks down. Targeting turns an ad into the digital version of a cold call. Targeted ads tend to “burn out” the medium in which they appear, through a Peak Advertising effect. Each new targetable medium falls in value and popularity as users figure it out, filter it, or get their governments to restrict it.

Even when a web ad appears on expensive content, it fails to carry the signal that it would convey in a less targetable medium. Users are aware that ads “follow them around,” so instead of viewing an ad as part of an expensive, signal-carrying ad buy, even an ad on high-quality content could be an example of cheap targeting.

Solutions
The two extreme positions on web ads each miss something. Ad blocking everywhere and eliminating ad-supported content is clearly suboptimal. The existence of magazines that people voluntarily subscribe to is proof that some level of advertising can work.

The other extreme is anti-adblocking, telling users to stay in an unprotected, targetable state. This doesn’t work, not just because of the malvertising problem, which make some protection a necessity, but because of signaling failure.

A third way is needed. Fortunately, tracking protection tools are able to block cold-call-like targeted ads while permitting signal-carrying ads. Instead of waiting for more and more users to give up on advertising and get an ad blocker, publishers can help and encourage users to run tracking protection tools instead. But if sites fail to turn the web into a signal-carrying medium, web ads could slide into a no-win struggle like email spam/anti-spam, and anti-advertising philosophy could turn out to be right after all.

Don Marti (@dmarti) is a contributor of code and documentation to the aloodo.org project, a low-friction way for sites and brands to reclaim the value of online advertising from fraud and ad blocking. He is the former editor of Linux Journal. Don is the subject of an out-of-date Wikipedia article, which he will not edit himself, but wishes that someone would.

Advertising | Industry-Research

Viewability Continues to Trouble the Marketplace

August 18, 2015 DCN

Display ads were 11% less viewable in a year-over-year comparison reports Integral Ad Science in their Q2 2015 Media Quality Report. The viewability measure for display dropped from 49.4% in 2Q 2014 to 44% in Q2 2015. In fact, publisher sites decreased their viewability rate from 55.5% to 50.1% as did ad networks and exchanges from 45% to 39.9%.

During the same quarter fraud decreased to 14.1% from 16.5% in Q1 2015. Publishers fared better with fraudulent impressions at 3.7% where ad networks and exchanges had close to 4 times more fraudulent traffic at 14.1%. Overall video ads perform better than display in both viewability (37.2%) and fraud rates (11.6%) in Q2 2105. While the industry has made improvements in non-human fraudulent traffic, it’s slow to improve in viewability.

Integral also offers the “TRue Advertising Quality (TRAQ)” score using a mix of metrics including fraud, viewability, ad clutter, brand safety and professionalism. Display averaged a score of 604 on a scale of 1,000 with publishers scoring a 656 and ad networks and exchanges scoring a 584.

Advertising | Industry-Research

Global Mobile Advertising Revenue 2014

August 14, 2015 Research Team—DCN

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and its Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence, IAB Europe, and IHS Technology report that global figures for mobile advertising revenue which rose 64.8% to $31.9bn (€23.9bn) in 2014 from $19.3bn (€14.6bn) in 2013. They find that this growth is being driven by continued shifts in consumer usage patterns and industry innovations.

According to the IAB, the global figure of $31.9bn (€23.9bn) for 2014 is made up of these regional shares:

North America: 44.9% ($14.318m / €10,781m)
Asia-Pacific: 36.5% ($11.627m / €8,754m)
Europe: 16.6% ($5.306m / €3,995m)
Middle East and Africa: 1.2% ($379m / €286m)
Latin America: 0.8% ($239m / €180m)

Among the key findings:

Growth year-over-year was led by North America, which saw a 76.8% leap over the 2013 figures.
All regions grew by more than 50%.
Mobile display continues to show the highest growth at 88.1%, overtaking search as the dominant segment.
Search represented 46.1% of the total global mobile advertising revenue in 2014.
Display represented 47.4% of the total global mobile advertising revenue in 2014 at $15.1bn (€11.4bn).
Mobile search followed, up 55.%, taking a 46.1% share.

Advertising | Industry-Research

Ad Blocking Predicted to Cost Ad Industry $21.8 billion in 2015

August 12, 2015 DCN

Use of ad blocking software is gaining rapid adoption with 198 million monthly active users worldwide reports The Cost of Ad Blocking published by PageFair and Adobe. Global usage of ad blocking software increased 41% from 2Q14 to 2Q15. In the U.S. alone, ad blocking usage expanded to 48 million monthly unique users, a growth of 48%, presenting approximately 16% of the U.S. online population.

What does this mean for the future of the Internet publishing and advertising? The ad industry anticipates losing $21.8 billion globally in blocked revenue this year with $10.7 billion in the U.S. alone. This figure is set to almost double by 2016 when the global cost of ad-blocking is expected to reach $41.4 billion.

What’s driving adoption rates? User adoption of Google Chrome and its easy installation of ad blocking extensions grew 51% from 44 million monthly active users in 2Q 2013 to 126 million in 2Q 2015. Further, while mobile only accounts for 1.6% of ad blocked traffic, new operating systems such as Apple’s iOS9 will make it easier for consumers to block mobile ad traffic. It’s the first time app Apple will allow app makers to develop ad blocking software for iPhones and iPads. Usage of ad blocking on mobile is expected to increase exponentially.

What do these ad blockers look like? Consistent with prior research, ad block users are typically, young, technically savvy, and more likely to be male.

Why are users blocking ads? PageFair and Adobe also surveyed 400 internet users asking what would drive them to use ad blocking software. The top two responses reported “misuse of personal information” (51%) and “an increase in the number of ads” (41%).

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

Is Programmatic Part of a Winning Strategy?

August 6, 2015 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

There is always a sense of inevitability when it comes to robots and automation. Of course, factories are automated and these days, robot write basic news stories. We expect some kind of self-driving car to hit the road in the not-so-distant future. But what about online ad sales? Should that process be completely automated or is there still a need for one-on-one custom attention for each sale?

While the trend among larger publishers has been toward more programmatic ad sales, it was recently reported that some are bucking the trend. As the Wall Street Journal’s Mike Shields wrote, Vox, Mic and Refinery29 — “the much hyped cadre of venture-backed, web-born, and millennially-inclined publishers,” are largely shunning programatic ads. Perhaps the most firm stance against it has come from Mic’s chief executive, Chris Altchek, who said the site doesn’t use any programmatic advertising at all. Whereas Vox has actually made moves toward embracing programmatic, albeit carefully.

The backlash against programmatic and ad tech is based upon the sentiment that it degrades the user experience. When prominent publishers need multiple ad tech providers to accomplish different tasks, that “mass of tech” slows the speed at which web pages load. Frustrated users then do what seems to be a logical solution: install an ad blocker. And to some publishers, that makes it seem a lot like ad technology companies drive a publisher’s profits away. The fact is that each media outlet needs to carefully consider the potential revenue programmatic can generate versus the possible lost advertising as a result of poor user experience.

Push for Branded Content
“Once you get to a certain size as a publisher, in order for ad tech to make sense it has got to move the needle,” said Scott Grimes, the chief executive of the media publisher Woven Digital. “Just an incremental thousand bucks is just not worth it.”

Instead of relying on ad technology, newer web publishers are looking more to create branded content specifically for their sites. BuzzFeed has been the ring-leader of this trend. Vox, meanwhile, has Chorus for Advertisers, which uses its Chorus insights platform to enable brands to create and distribute the kind of content that works with Vox’s editorial voice.

But Vox Media’s vice president of global revenue and partnerships, Mike Hadgis, admitted this is just one stream of advertising revenue. “Native advertising/branded content, premium editorial, custom high-impact units, video, mobile, social…are all important solutions for our marketing partners and give us a well-rounded portfolio of advertising revenue,” he told Capital New York.

Difficult to Change the Trajectory
But it’s hard to say if a few holdouts will really slow programmatic’s march toward a permanent niche in the industry. Industry insiders speculate that the whims of a few publishers can’t change the general trajectory of the ad technology landscape even if they might have some influence. What they have that other publishers do not is venture capital, which gives them the financial leverage to take such a position on advertising.

Seth Rogin, chief revenue officer at Mashable, told the WSJ that being anti-programmatic is another way of saying one doesn’t understand programmatic. “You start to sound like the old uncle who complained that they’d never go on Twitter.”

And the overall numbers back him up: Programmatic advertising comprised 20% of all Internet advertising revenues last year, worth $49.5 billion, according IAB’s first-ever report on programmatic revenues. That said, ad tech revenues represented approximately 55% of the programmatic revenue pie in 2014 with approximately 45% of programmatic revenue finding its way to publishers.

However, whether you consider programmatic ads as useful and necessary or think that that programmatic is going to take away from the experience of a site, the important thing to remember is that a tool is only useful when it’s used the right way. The trick, then, is to figure out just the “right way” to leverage ad automation so that it supports your site and pleases your audience.