Category results for "Advertising"

Online Video is the Fastest-growing Category of Internet Advertising

August 5, 2015 DCN

Online video advertising revenue is estimated to reach 16.2 billion worldwide with the US by far the largest market at $8.5 billion reports ZenithOptimedia’s Online Video Forecasts 2015.

Given the rapid penetration of smartphones and tablets, worldwide total video consumption is expected to increase by 20% in the coming year from 48.1 minutes per day this year to 57.6 minutes per day in 2016. Mobile devices are expected to be the main platform for viewing online videos growing from 46.8% (22.5 minutes per day) share of time spent this year to 52.7% (30.4 minutes per day) in 2016.

Online video viewing globally skews to young adults and is slightly more male (14.2% males 18-24 and 13.8% males 25-34 vs. 8.5% females 18-24 and 8.4% females 25-34) based on comScore (Video Metrix, September 2014). Understanding online video consumption habits and the video publishing infrastructure is important to marketers in identifying the right short- and long-form advertising and branding opportunities for their target audience.

Advertising | Perspectives

Ad Blocking: A Problem in Need of a Creative Solution

July 29, 2015 DCN

Instead of Blocking the Blockers, Let’s Focus on Making Advertising Better

The adoption of ad blockers is climbing at an alarming rate, with usage doubling since 2013. The reason cited for this steep incline is that people hate advertising. Wrong. Sure, people hate irrelevant, intrusive and offensive advertising, but all you have to do is ask someone to tell you about their favorite ads and you’ll hear a very different story.

It’s true that we are moving into a period in which many more direct-to-consumer content offerings will become available, but it’s also unrealistic to think that 100% of consumers are going to pay for ad-free content services. Ultimately, content will need to be paid for by someone and even the direct-to-consumer offerings will likely contain some level of advertising, whether it be dynamically inserted or sponsorship integrations. So let’s stop entertaining the notion that advertising is going to go away and focus instead on improving the advertising experience — both its relevancy and targeting — so that, together with the content experience, we can truly delight and not alienate audiences.

A medium with a message

There was a time (and it still may be the case) that people were as excited about the commercials as they were about the Super Bowl itself. The fact is that strong, relevant, entertaining commercials have always done well. Great creative gets viewed, discussed, shared, talked about and remembered for years to come. In a digital world, the potential for creative to make a significant impact is even more possible. Unfortunately, that’s not what most people are seeing now… (Continue Reading on AdAge)

Advertising | Industry-Research

U.S. Programmatic Display Ad Revenues Totaled $10.1 Billion in 2014

July 21, 2015 Research Team—DCN

Programmatic buying and selling of online display-related advertising generated $10.1 billion in 2014, comprising 20% of last year’s overall internet advertising revenues ($49.5 billion) according to the first-ever IAB Programmatic Revenue Report, prepared by PwC US. This figure represents approximately 52% of display-related advertising in 2014 ($19.6 billion), while non-programmatic display-related revenues accounted for the remaining 48% at $9.4 billion.

As David Silverman, Emerging Company Services Practice Co-Leader of PwC, points out in the report, “over the last several years, publishers and advertisers have continued to adopt programmatic buying and selling of digital inventory into their media strategies; however, within the complex programmatic ecosystem there has been a lack of consensus around the definition of programmatic and its associated types and formats and the size of the programmatic market in comparison with the overall internet advertising market.”

For the purpose of this study, programmatic was defined, but not universally accepted, as “machine based buying and selling of digital media including auction based methods like RTB and private marketplaces as well as the automation of direct sales, sometimes called programmatic direct.”

Highlights from the IAB report include:

Open auctions made up approximately 70% of the programmatic revenue in 2014.
Display banner ads made up approximately 80% of programmatic revenues in 2014, but the findings demonstrate that mobile and video formats will take more of advertiser and publisher budgets and inventory over time
Ad tech revenues represented approximately 55% of the programmatic revenue pie in 2014 and approximately 45% of programmatic revenues ultimately found its way to the publishers.
The majority of programmatic inventory was bought and sold through Open Auctions, but the report predicts a shift to other types (i.e. Private Auction, Unreserved Fixed Rate or Automated Guaranteed) in the next few years.
Programmatic revenues from ad tech outweighed those from publishers in 2014.
Programmatic buying and selling are moving forward; however, sizing the programmatic industry will continue to be a challenge until standardization and increased transparency become more apparent.

Advertising | Perspectives

The Age of (Atypical) Advertising Alliances

July 9, 2015 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

Coopetition. It’s a term long familiar in Silicon Valley, but only now making the rounds in the advertising world. It means that companies known for battling it out in the marketplace sometimes have to work together for the greater good for both companies. (It’s also a founding principle of DCN.)

The result? Unusual advertising alliances are shaking up the $531 billion global advertising business. It might seem bewildering, but given the trends taking place in advertising and technology and predictions for the future, it may be what story-driven marketing needs. Alliances this year include the Pangea group of publishers, the Truffle Pig ad agency, and even a video deal between Vice, Bank of America and Pinterest.

Vice Video Series
At the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Vice CEO Shane Smith had observers buzzing when he announced that Vice, Bank of America and Pinterest were joining forces to market “The Business of Life.” It’s a digital video series produced by Vice that launched earlier this year. With Bank of America backing it up, Vice can further its aim of providing better personal finance education, while having the Bank of America brand and knowledge to back it up. Bank of America can also leverage the Vice brand, including its storytelling ability, authority in the video world, and hip factor with the millennial demographic.

Pinterest, meanwhile, can roll in valuable insight from its new division, Pinsight Labs, into the collaboration. In the Labs, “a team of strategists analyze data from its platform to find insights for brands and other partners to help inform their marketing efforts,” Jack Marshall and Suzanne Vranica wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Put another way, Bank of America can look deeply into Labs to see what financial topics might interest millennials most—because Pinterest too has a strong hold over the much-coveted millennial crowd.

“You have new alliances forming. You can see where [the industry is] going,” Smith said at Cannes. “You can see it going to a more bespoke, case-by-case, platform, content, brand kind of thing.”

Truffle Pig Collaboration
According to Smith, the new deal is not much different than the other recent unusual advertising alliance that’s taken the marketing world by storm: Truffle Pig.

Truffle Pig is a collaboration among the advertising giant WPP, DailyMail and Snapchat. Much like the real-life truffle hog it’s named for, the new advertising agency is meant to sniff out and market content that only a true truffle pig can. (A truffle pig, by the way, has an excellent sense of smell that helps it discover truffles. Yum.) The agency will create both online and print sponsored content, including vertical video that’s meant to be shared on social media, and presumably, viewed on mobile. It makes sense given that a new report from Ooyala has found that mobile viewing today accounts for 42% of all online viewing—it’s grown more than 367% over two years. Forty-five percent of millennials have also reported preferring to view video on a mobile device rather than a computer.

Truffle Pig will test its concept first on DailyMail.com, Elite Daily and Snapchat but plans on extending it to any new digital clients. Alex Jutkowitz, head of Group SJR, which will head the Truffle Pig agency, summed up the premise behind the effort at a press conference at Cannes: “Great content is not just about creating it, but having platforms for it… Engaging millennials and having distribution is key. Snapchat is where the millennial fish are and that’s where we are going.”

Pangea Alliance
And earlier this year in March, the Guardian, CNN International, the Financial Times, Reuters and The Economist announced that they would form the Pangea alliance, to allow marketers to use programmatic advertising and pool data from their individual audiences.

“The essence behind this is it will give us a greater degree of strategic control over the direction of our business. Five heads are much better than the Guardian’s on its own,” the Guardian’s Tim Gentry (and leader of Pangaea) told the Wall Street Journal.

And that really sums up the idea of coopetition: strength in numbers.

Advertising | Perspectives

Ad blocking: Why now?

July 6, 2015 DCN

Users say that they’re blocking ads because of the annoyance. But ad blocking has only recently started to catch on, and ad annoyance has been there since the beginning. Distracting blinky ads, slow page load times, security concerns, the whole enchilada. For many users, web ads in the days of dial-up connections and pop-up windows were even more annoying than the web ads of today.

The ease of use of ad blocking hasn’t changed either. Free, convenient ad blockers have been available for more than a decade. But WebWasher, AdSubtract and others earned good reviews, then failed to catch on.

Today, though, ad blocking is a thing. And that’s not so much because new reasons to block ads are appearing, but because reasons not to block are going away.

The red line, retargeting, is a query for a form of targeted advertising that is easily visible to users—ads that users can see following them around. [View full report in Google Trends]
The blue line is a query for “how to block ads.” Users looking for a solution.

Why does the blue line start to take off only after the red line? Web ads were just as annoying before users started to see how they were targeted. What is it about targeted ads that changed the decision to block? Why was the 2010 What They Know series in the Wall Street Journal such a big deal?

Is better targeting causing blocking, or is it just an accidental correlation? Survey data suggests that users react differently to ads depending on how accurately they are targeted. In one study, 66% of adult Americans said they do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests. And when the researchers explained how adtech can target ads to them, the percentage saying they don’t want targeting went up—as high as 80%.

If you don’t believe academic studies, believe the company with the best marketing in the world. Would Apple really put this copy on the Safari browser page…

The web pages you visit often leave cookies from third-party websites. These cookies can be used to track where you go on the web, target you with ads, or create a profile of your online activities. Safari was the first browser to block these cookies by default.

…if it didn’t resonate with users? If users like being tracked, Safari could easily feature extra tracking, to help users connect and share with brands.

Are ad blocker users irrationally squicked-out by targeting that’s actually good for them? And are users just being dishonest by using web content without accepting the ads?

Fair is fair: advertising and the reciprocity norm
It turns out that ad blocker users are pretty good at applied behavioral economics. If we understand what the basic bargain behind advertising is, we can understand why people put up with advertising in some media but block it in others.

Gavin Dunaway at AdMonsters writes:

The transaction between most Internet content providers and users is something I’ve always referred to as the “unspoken handshake” – users pay for their content consumption with personal data as well as by allowing advertisers the opportunity to reach them.

That’s one kind of fair exchange. It’s the lead generation bargain. Fill out this form to WATCH OUR FREE WEBINAR! People choose to reveal personal info all the time, every time they enter a sweepstakes or swipe a supermarket loyalty card.

But are users passively choosing to share data with unknown third parties? (Quick, name three companies that ran trackers on the last news story you read, and what they do with your data.) Studies suggest otherwise.

But advertising isn’t just about the lead generation bargain. Lead generation can send a special offer to buy a product for a lower price…

…but it can’t build a brand that people will be happy to pay a higher price for. That’s where signaling comes in.

Clearly lead generation is not the point of high-value old-school ad media such as TV, radio, and print. Nobody gives up any personal data to watch Knight Rider on broadcast TV, or buy a copy of the newspaper out of a vending machine. But that impersonal advertising is where the money is. Print is trending down but still more valuable than either web or mobile on a per user minute basis.

The bargain that matters in advertising’s big leagues is the exchange of signal for a user’s attention. An ad can be a public, credible, costly display of the advertiser’s intentions in the market. When an ad fails to send a signal, as is the case when it’s targeted to a user who can’t tell if it’s part of a big campaign or just the digital version of a cold call, the ad doesn’t hold up its end of the signal-for-attention bargain, and the user starts looking for an opportunity to block it.

One way to look at the blocking problem is to accuse ad blocker users of violating a reciprocity norm, by entering into an implied lead generation bargain and then failing to hold up their end. But the other, more valuable deal—the signal-for-attention bargain—is the one that advertisers broke first.

How to stick to both bargains?
One important direction is to make the lead generation bargain explicit, not sneaky. Instead of using malware-like third-party tracking techniques, make it easier for users to control how they share their info.

The other half is of the solution is to restore the signal-for-attention bargain. Some of the most promising new work from web browser developers holds the promise of changing the web advertising game to work more like signal-carrying print and broadcast media. Firefox and Apple Safari have tracking protection functionality in progress, and Microsoft Internet Explorer has had it for a while.

Tracking protection can displace ad blockers by filling users’ immediate need to block the low-value targeted ads that follow them, while at the same time leaving the door open for signal-carrying advertising that works better for brands and pays better for publishers.

Web publishers today have a choice: get dragged into a no-win game of blocking vs. anti-blocking, or change the conversation and offer users an alternative that works better for everyone. Instead of just lecturing users to turn off your ad blocker, it’s time to encourage them to enable tracking protection, and turn on the signal.

Don Marti 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 ofLinux 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

Reuters’ Digital News Report Finds Social, Mobile on the Rise but Video Flat

June 17, 2015 DCN

The Reuters Institute 2015 Digital News Report’s global tracking study (20,000 news consumers in 12 countries) offers robust findings on consumer news consumption.

The U.S. country-specific data (2,295 news consumers) identifies Online—which includes social media—as the main news source (43%) compared to TV (40%), Social (11%) and Newspaper (5%).

Among Reuters’ key findings:

In terms of accuracy, TV is still viewed as best (36%) source for accuracy versus Online (30%).
Overall, U.S. news consumers are still skeptical of the news media at large – 32% trust in general and 56% trust my sources.
The paradigm for access shows Smartphones as essential for news consumption – at 41% from 31% in 2014.
In fact 26% of U.S. news consumers claim their smartphone to be their main device for accessing news. In contrast, tablet usage at 21% only grew 2% from 2014 and only one in 10 cite as their main device to access news.
Growth in mobile news alerts doubled, 13% in 2015 from 6% in 2014.
14% of news lovers, the heaviest user group, access news content 5+ times per day.
Interestingly, video news consumption is flat at 30% compared to last year.
Top barriers to video notes “I find reading more convenient (39%)”, “I would like to watch on a bigger screen and Pre-roll ads tend to put me off (23%, respectively).”
The minority of news consumers (11%) pay for digital news access, averaging $10 (median) per month. It is important to note that just over than two-thirds (67%) report that they “would not pay whatever the price.”
Not surprisingly, social media plays an important role on how news consumers find news (35%) from 30% in 2014. In fact, 35% use social media as their starting point for news.
News consumers feel plagued by digital advertising resulting in almost half (47%) regularly using ad-blocking. As digital news try new creative ad models such as native and sponsored ads, there is concern among users of blurring the lines between editorial content with brands.

Download the full report for greater depth, a range of country-specific data and access to a great essay (page 101), “Attitudes to Sponsored and Branded Content.”

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

4 Tips for Improving Programmatic CPM

May 27, 2015 DCN

The premise that the rise of automated buying and selling through programmatic technology would have a negative impact on a publisher’s’ ability to increase—or even maintain—their CPM rates is continuing to erode. Many were surprised to learn that the 2013-2014 CPM trend for social, mobile and display across programmatic ad platforms was one of growth, not decline.

As the click declines from its position as the metric of prominence, contextual data, viewability and high impact opportunities for engagement have become increasingly valued and sought after by brands. Today, marketers increasingly realize that “you get what you pay for” but they expect that price tag to come with the same scale and efficiency programmatic technology delivers. So how can publishers use data and technology to command premium pricing for the premium experiences brands want—and consumers expect?

Here are four strategies publishers can adopt to not simply survive, but thrive, in a programmatic world.

Make your audience and contextual site data available and visible to buyers. Move beyond offering standard cookie-reliant targeting with contextual technology. Real-time, page-level contextualization of your content increases the likelihood that a person sees an ad that’s relevant to them—delighting your audiences and the buyers who want to reach them. Contextual analysis at the page-level will enable you to offer audience segments interested in that content at greater scale, beyond 1^st party and 3^rd party cookie pools. Contextual data can help increase yield and revenue by showing the value of inventory buyers would normally overlook.

Upgrade your site to support more advanced ad functionality and cross-screen delivery. Large-format, high-impact ad sizes are designed to help brands get their ads noticed and have been shown to improve interaction rates, increase time spent and improve brand recall. The IAB recently released research showing that consumers find Rising Star ads more engaging and more informative than standard units. This makes them especially valuable to brands, who tend to bid higher on these formats. With an estimated 60% of web traffic coming from mobile, it goes without saying that your site should be mobile optimized. It’s worth spending the time and money to upgrade your site internally, or many technology partners can help you integrate new ad formats and optimize for mobile experiences quickly and easily.

Understand how much of your content is viewable—and make sure you can deliver against it. Viewability is moving from “nice-to-have” to “must-have” in a buyers mind. Make sure you know how much of your inventory is viewable and provide transparent reporting against that number to clients. Publishers who can offer a pricing model that incorporates viewability (e.g vCPM) will emerge the winners, as brands will pay a premium for guaranteed viewable inventory. An easy way to get started is to ask your monetization partners if they have viewability-tracking and reporting tools to layer on your current offering—some even offer this as a value-add service.

Adopt a “test and learn” approach to programmatic partners. Don’t accept the status quo from your current monetization partners. As the programmatic landscape matures, earlier pain points of integrating new technology partners are starting to subside as onboarding and operational processes have become standardized. There’s no such thing as a “one size fits all” programmatic partner, so don’t be afraid to test multiple providers concurrently to compare performance; leverage the real-time nature of programmatic to find the right solution that will help ensure a premium for your unique audience and content.

This isn’t the first time publishers have been forced to evolve alongside major industry change, and it most certainly won’t be the last. By 2018, more than 80% of display ad dollars will be transacted programmatically. Publishers that adapt to this new way of doing business and embrace the innovation it spurs will be the ones to reap the benefits.

Darline Jean is the Chief Operating Officer for PulsePoint, responsible for shaping product strategy focused on enhancing the company’s premium programmatic and content marketing solutions. Before joining PulsePoint, Darline was President and Chief Executive Officer of The About Group where she was responsible for the strategic direction of the business unit of The New York Times Company that includes About.com, CalorieCount.com and ConsumerSearch.com. During her tenure as President and CEO, she significantly increased the company’s revenue and led the sale of About.com from The New York Times Company to IAC in 2013. Darline has also held the title of Chief Operating Officer of About.com and Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer of the About Group.

Prior to The About Group, Darline held various financial leadership positions with Thomson Media, a division of Thomson Financial. She began her career with Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising in New York.

Advertising | Perspectives | Research | Revenue

Bad Ads: Research Shows They May Cost More Than They’re Worth

May 14, 2015 Jason Kint, CEO – DCN

No one likes to click a link on a tantalizing bit of content only to be assaulted by a barrage of intrusive and annoying advertising. That fact is as in your face as a blinking pop-up ad prompting you to punch a monkey to win an iPad. And unless it’s the result of fat fingers, you aren’t clicking these annoying ads; you are hitting the back button as fast as you can to find a more pleasant place to consume content. And here’s the part that should send a chill down the spine of premium content publishers: Microsoft research has found that they’re not just bad in customers’ eyes; there’s also a high cost to be paid by the publishers that run them.

The research, The Economic and Cognitive Costs of Annoying Display Advertisements, set out to better understand the cognitive impact of annoying ads on users, and also to quantify the economic cost of annoying ads for publishers. Let’s just say their findings are more than a little jarring. The research shows the economic cost of “annoying” ads is about .153 cents each (for the revenue wonks, this works out to a $1.53CPM). Given that Turn reports that more than 53% of all online ads sell for between $.10 and $.80CPM and we know premium publishers typically earn around $1.35CPM from open exchanges, a little math paints a disturbing picture. We’ve always known digital ads can impact users and the bottom-line but not in the wrong direction.

If you believe the research—undertaken by an impressive team of researchers whose experience includes work for Yahoo, Google and Microsoft—then publishers need to know that running ads which site visitors find to be irritating, annoying, inappropriate or offensive has a significant net cost, both to brand value and the bottom line. Private marketplaces reinforce this need for brand safety for all. Chasing page-views and impressions at scale has diminishing returns and makes a sites more vulnerable to bad ads. What this means is that by running these ads, often to maximize sell-thru rate of your inventory, you’re actually chasing short-term revenue rabbits without understanding where that rabbit hole leads.

The Microsoft researchers conclude that “the practice of running annoying ads can cost more money than it earns.” That’s right: a site might be better off not running ads at all because of the net loss they will incur if some or all of their ads are perceived as bad by their users. A site or app actually needs more quality content and premium ads to make up for the economic loss from bad ads.

As is the case with bad advertising, we all know great ads when we see them. And research shows that there is a “halo effect” to advertising that is positioned within the context of a strong media brand with quality content, so it only stands to reason that the reverse would be true: that there would be a negative effect to a media brand associated with bad advertising. Microsoft’s research confirms this, finding not only that people notice annoying ads and complain about them, they are more likely to abandon sites on which they were present. Interestingly, in the presence of annoying ads, people had to work harder to understand content that contains annoying ads. In other words, they’re distracting and a general nuisance to user experience.

Again, it’s very important to note this isn’t simply about low-quality dating ads, yellow-teeth and belly-fat ads. Media companies need to consider the subtle and long-term effects that any ad running on their sites may have on user retention and revenue. The alarming rise of Adblocking software adoption makes clear that customers are fed up with poor advertising experiences. And once customers are driven to this extreme, they are taken out of the ecosystem for everyone, good and bad advertisers alike. Already 41% of 18-29 year-olds in America have opted-out of digital advertising altogether by installing an adblocker.

But we can’t simply take the lazy position that “people just hate ads.” It simply isn’t true. And the Microsoft research backs that up. We can also clearly see examples of superior advertising and content experiences on Vox and Conde Nast sites, among many others. Premium publishers like the members of DCN who focus on high-quality content, premium, well-lit experiences and brand-safe environments should be well-served as this all shakes out because they are laser focused on creating great customer experiences that are only enhanced by the relevant, quality advertising experiences that support all of the terrific content that they enjoy.

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

NewFronts 2015: It’s All About the Video – and Tech

May 7, 2015 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

There was a time when the NewFronts were considered a side show to the Upfronts, almost a joke. What’s the point of buying digital ads “ahead of time” when there is infinite inventory online and no real schedule?

But things have shifted considerably in the past few years. The NewFronts, now in their fourth year, were a serious blow-out party, with 33 presenters – up more than 50 percent since last year – threatening to outshine the Upfronts. And what has been the catalyst? Video, of course. Because now everyone from Yahoo to WSJ to Vox has their own video shows. So that makes the NewFronts much more like Upfronts, with seasons for shows – even if those shows can be binged instantly, in some cases.

And the numbers can back them up. Numbers always help. For instance, more than 68 percent of marketers and agency executives expect their digital video ad budgets to increase in the next year. And guess where that money is coming from? That’s right, from the Upfronts, with money moving away from traditional cable and broadcast television. But IAB honcho Randall Rothenberg argues that it’s our understanding of and relationship with television that’s changing — not “television” itself.

“The princeling that’s replacing television … is television,” he wrote in a piece for Adweek.

“Linear TV” and “Internet TV” may be two sides of the same coin, but a definite theme coming out of this year’s NewFronts is that digital is a “better ad buy” than ordinary television, especially among the coveted millennial audience. Research firm eMarketer expects digital video-ad spending to grow by 30 percent and hit $7.8 billion in 2015.

Original Shows and Tech

So just like at the Upfronts, many NewFronts presenters announced new series – a whole lot of them. Time Inc., for example, announced four new streaming-video series. And Yahoo announced 18 new series, in part to help attract interest to its digital magazines, which have lots of native advertising. Conde Nast also announced plans to release more than 2,500 new original videos in the coming year. Even Vox Media announced several new digital video series, as well as a few renewals for current popular ones.

It seems the key to monetizing digital video is to first have enough of it before you can really reap the benefits. But Vox went further, licensing its content management system — already well known in media circles — for outside use. That’s a huge incentive for an agency like DigitasLBi, which announced both a production partnership with Vice and a deal with Vox that will allow it first dibs on Vox’s native ad platform, Chorus for Advertisers.

Native Ad Ideas

But it’s not enough to just to sell shows. Many publishers also pushed their native ad tech solutions. Yahoo talked about its native-video ad program that can help it “integrate sponsored-video segments into its homepage, digital magazine and apps.” Yahoo also announced video-app install ads through which marketers and developers can promote apps — both on Yahoo and thousands of other apps.

Meanwhile, BuzzFeed announced its new technology, Pound, aimed at demystifying social sharing habits and how content goes viral. As BuzzFeed wrote in a blog post about Pound, “traditional web analytics are fundamentally unable to capture what actually happens on the social web today.” Not only would Pound help BuzzFeed better figure out stories you’d share with your friends and families, and the stories they’d be most likely to share, but it’s also a chance to see how the data collected from Pound could help produce more shareable sponsored content.

And maybe that’s the approach that will really set apart the NewFront digital folk from the Upfronts – offering not just some original web shows, but also the technology to help advertisers reach and engage those audiences. TV isn’t dead by any means, but the digital upstarts are making serious inroads.

Advertising | Innovation | Perspectives | Revenue

Programmatic: Both the Villain and the Hero

April 30, 2015 Jason Kint, CEO – DCN

Nothing makes a narrative more compelling than a villain: evil that must be overcome so the hero can prevail. Maybe that’s why every few years a new nefarious buzzword arises that both energizes the digital media industry and rattles the cages of the establishment. But the business of digital media is just not as tidy as a formulaic series. The real problems are complex. And the bad actors aren’t parading their final 15 minutes of fame on Dancing with the Stars, they are lurking in the shadows, profiting from marketers’ best intentions and the great content created by others. While the story of programmatic is barely a few years old, the plot lines are deep and we’re clearly still early in the first season.

It wasn’t too long ago that programmatic was referred to as the latest chapter in digital media’s “race to the bottom.” The word was associated with everything bad in the digital advertising supply chain because it started off as a murky pool of third parties offering marketers an easy way to reach massive (if dubious) audiences and for publishers to offload “remnant” inventory at bargain basement prices. Unsold inventory from great brands mixed with a whole lot of garbage—the old ad network model. This (thankfully brief) period in the story of programmatic did little for anyone besides intermediaries—though it did help draw attention to the fact that digital advertising processes were ripe for change.

The reality is that programmatic emerged as a response to the complexity of the digital ad buy and has evolved into a way to automate as much as possible, making digital media easier for marketers to buy and potentially more profitable for publishers. Our research shows that forward thinking media companies have wisely jumped into the programmatic fray in order to address marketers’ desire for efficiency while also leveraging their first party audience data to deliver highly targeted, efficient and impactful campaigns.

Yes, a whole lot of programmatic inventory is still remnant but that is starting to change as more premium inventory becomes available for programmatic buys. In fact, a growing number of our members are starting to see programmatic guaranteed and preferred deals that rival direct deals in terms of CPMs. The big difference is that the programmatic deals—those that have pre-agreed prices and guaranteed high-quality inventory—offer automation of the back-end processes.

As representatives for the digital content brands that marketers trust, it is our responsibility to shine a light on any “trust parasites” in programmatic and to work with advertising and agency partners to maximize their confidence in the value they will receive when they put money into programmatic. The rise of programmatic direct and private marketplaces offer an example of how this is taking shape. And right now, buying direct from a trusted premium publisher is the best way to execute a programmatic campaign without risk.

Villain’s and heroes aren’t what we need to focus on in the story of digital media. However we do need to recognize that there’s a lot at stake here if all of the players don’t work together to educate the market, given the predictions that programmatic will dominate digital advertising within a few years. If you are one of the few still debating whether or not to embrace programmatic: Stop now. Automating the bidding, buying, securing and execution of an ad campaign in real-time using machines rather than paper and humans is a no-brainer.

If you put on your marketer cap, it’s fairly obvious. Do you want your ads to be viewable meaning actually show up in the active window? Absolutely. Do you want your ads to be in front of humans rather than bots? Um, of course. Do you want your ads to run in a clean, well-lit brand-safe environment? Yes, please. Do you want all of the above as easily as possible? Bring it on.

With every change, every challenge comes an opportunity to step up and “save the day.” And there are few better examples of the opportunity for digital innovation than programmatic. Get on board and let’s drive this narrative forward.

Image credit: kosmolaut.

Advertising | DCN-Research | Research

Practical Tips for a Programmatic Future

April 29, 2015 Research Team—DCN

Digital Content Next (DCN) released insights into the future of programmatic advertising based on in-depth interviews with executives at 10 digital content companies from DCN’s membership including Vox, The Weather Company, Business Insider and CBS Interactive. “Practical Tips for a Programmatic Future” offers a behind-the-scenes peek at these organizations and details how they have prepared for a future with an expected continued rise in programmatic spend. DCN’s key takeaway—that programmatic is not a channel but a broad set of automation and efficiency tactics that can be employed across a range of inventory—is one of the valuable insights from the white paper.

Vendor partnerships are important

Integration with constantly-evolving players in the ad tech stack is what makes building ad technology in-house prohibitive; all interview participants said they are not pursuing internal solutions and will instead rely on vendors.

Learn and grow with the buy side

Most executives interviewed stressed the need to proactively talk to clients about their programmatic capabilities, as they are often unaware of them or how they can benefit their marketing campaigns.

Enable and incentivize your sales team to embrace programmatic

Automation will not diminish the importance of sales relationships. Half of those interviewed said they are starting to see large buys that include some programmatic component; therefore, it is important to educate and enable account executives to have conversations about programmatic with clients.

Designate programmatic expert(s) on your team

Digital content companies interviewed have created new roles for programmatic specialists. Broadly there are two types of functions that programmatic specialists will have to perform: (1) supporting the direct sales team; and (2) managing vendor and platform relationships.

Leverage first-party data and other organizational resources

Programmatic specialists will need to work closely with engineering, analytics and data science teams to build out data capabilities and products.

To view the White Paper, click here.

To view the Press Release with a longer summary, click here.

Advertising | Perspectives

Viewability 100% Guaranteed from Nativo and Moat

April 23, 2015 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Viewability concerns have sparked a flurry of discussion, particularly around what should qualify as a viewable ad impression. The current standard, as established by the Media Ratings Council (MRC) last year, is for 50% of the ad to be in-view for at least one second. Not surprisingly, many marketers are calling for 100% viewability, despite the MRC’s expressed opinion that this is not yet feasible. Well, maybe not feasible for everyone, but some organizations are already striving to deliver.

Native advertising technology company Nativo has just teamed up with SaaS analytics and intelligence firm Moat to guarantee 100% viewability on native advertising for brand advertisers. According to Chris Rooke, Nativo’s SVP of Strategy and Operations, viewability has always been one of Nativo’s unique differentiators and this partnership is in keeping with that value proposition. Rooke says the company has traded media on a viewable CPM (vCPM) basis for years and built its technology stack to support both vCPM and CPM charge metrics from the start, which allows publishers to transact on whatever definition of viewability the client dictates.

The Moat partnership, he says, “represents the next step in this evolution by allowing third party verification. This closes the loop and ensures that equitable value can be realized by all stakeholders.” While Nativo’s standard offering aligns with the current MRC standard, the company can provide 100% viewability guarantee, verified by Moat, for a premium.

Not surprisingly, Jonah Goodhart, CEO and co-founder of Moat says that he hasn’t come across an ad buyer yet who “who believes they should be buying ads that are not there.” He points out that viewability is not format- or platform-specific and that it is clearly “reasonable that marketers want their ads to be seen across all formats and platforms.” The good news for native advertising content, says Goodhart, is that it is one of the most likely formats to be viewable.

Rooke says Nativo opted to partner with Moat because it was an early mover in the area and the first vendor the MRC accredited to accurately track viewability on dynamic in-feed units. The move is intended to be proactive by allowing brand advertisers to track viewability and reconcile against Nativo’s internal data. Nativo has also fully integrated Moat attention analytics into its platform, which Rooke believes “provides massive value to both sides of the supply chain.”

Though Nativo exclusively offers viewability pricing to its clients, the company currently sees only a small percentage of marketers buying the rest of their media on a viewable basis. However Rooke predicts that an increasing number of marketers and agencies will transact on it as more inventory is accessible on a viewable basis and third party verification becomes more broadly reliable.

Goodhart finds that content providers—from native to mobile, to video and even connected TV—are increasingly “pushing for viewability metrics.” He also sees signs that they are looking for other meaningful metrics, such as attention. And on the buy-side, he emphasizes that viewability doesn’t guarantee a successful campaign.

Rooke agrees, saying that “viewable units obviously perform better than non-viewable, but we find that it’s the quality of the promoted brand content and its contextual alignment to the surrounding editorial that ultimately determine how well a client’s initiative will perform.” Goodhart notes that marketers and publishers must continue to drive toward a world where viewability is a given, “that’s where we’ll get into effectiveness and solving for larger goals. Viewability—and humanity—are first,” says Goodhart, “but what comes next is where it will get very interesting.”