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Tags containing: "context"

Advertising | Supporter Spotlight

Content and context make premium publishers’ audiences addressable

Increasingly, consumers are opting out of targeted advertising, leaving publishers searching for ways to continue serving marketers’ desire to reach relevant audiences and to optimize ads for audiences. A significant part of the answer for many will lie in publisher content, context, and the savvy application of first-party data. To do this, publishers must capture powerful insights they have available to monetize the most relevant, high-value consumers – all without compromising their privacy.

Much of the adtech ecosystem has kept their eye trained on when Google will or won’t deprecate third-party cookies. There’s also a great deal of focus on existing and pending privacy regulation. While these are valid concerns, we do need to work in the here and now: Safari and Firefox already block third-party cookies and Apple’s ATT makes opting out of tracking incredibly easy. And in Europe, consumers already have the ability to “reject all” cookies via Chrome.

The reality is consumers are already opting out of advertising more than ever. However, publishers can still make those audiences available for advertising. With their content and their unique, direct relationships with users, publishers are the keyholders in re-establishing a connection with unreachable consumers.

Advertising powered by content and first-party data

Publishers are the keepers of a crucial component of advertising: content. Visitors to publisher sites certainly continue to engage with content, even when they’re not traditionally visible or they’ve opted out of third-party cookie tracking.

Publishers have access to a wealth of traditional first-party data. Not only is this first-party data more reliable than third-party data, but it’s also more powerful. And, because the data is owned by the publisher, they can target these known audiences on behalf of advertisers. Beyond that, they also possess a great many applicable insights from page signals created by users around categories, concepts, emotions, sentiment, keywords, and entities. The power of these data points ensures that publishers can maximize both addressability and revenue.

Traditional contextual targeting is often as simple as placing sports ads on sports pages, but that’s not enough. With the right technology, publishers can build next-generation contextual targeting that not only builds bridges between their own content but provides additional value to advertisers in terms of scale and accuracy.

Beyond simple context, publishers can learn from consented users’ data and create an affinity score for each piece of content, based on page attributes. This can then be matrixed with a publisher’s cohorts to predict how likely a given cohort is to engage with a page, compared to the site average. By leveraging their own content and the rich first-party data they have access to, publishers can deliver accuracy and scale to advertisers from first page-view. And, critically, they can do all this while respecting user consent.

Direct advertiser-publisher relationships

Advertisers are preoccupied with evolving timelines for the depreciation of third-party cookies or new regulations. However, the reality is that without the right publisher partners, they already cannot reach large swaths of audiences. The California Consumer Privacy Act, Apple’s Hide My Email and App Tracking Transparency, and Safari/Firefox are all impacting consumer choice to opt-out of invasive data collection – and even advertising altogether.

Things are different when advertisers partner directly with publishers that have consented first-party data from their audience, particularly when it is paired with contextual signals. These publishers are uniquely equipped to activate users and make otherwise unreachable audiences available to advertisers – without compromising consumer privacy.

These direct relationships provide another pathway for publishers to make desired audiences available to advertisers. They also shift power away from the data-driven duopoly and place the power back in the publishers’ hands. Publishers’ position to maximize their trusted relationship with audiences provides a viable alternative to third parties that exist only to commoditize publisher content and data.

Consumers’ increasing methods of protecting their own privacy are, ultimately, a positive for the industry – especially for publishers with strong first-party data practices. But this brighter future can only be embraced if we acknowledge the need to invest in those practices and ensure consumer data is treated responsibly.

About the author

Aarti Suri is a Product Marketing Manager at Permutive. Aarti has worked in the marketing, advertising and communications space for over 10 years, this includes experience working with OOH, Media Owners, Ad-Tech and in SaaS businesses. An advocate for a more inclusive industry, Aarti is a mentor and member of Bloom.

Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

Publishers: context is king … but traffic is queen

Are you mis-valuing your first-party data? Context may be King but your traffic is Queen so give it its due respect.

In the current environment, with vast changes in technology and regulation, there is a powerful narrative that first-party data — often derived from context — will be more valuable simply because third-party data will be scarcer. The reality here is that the value of your data is determined by the impact on marketer acquisition costs — and your traffic may have much more to offer than context confers.

Consider this analogy. Goods meant for consumption become more valuable when they are scarce. When food is scarce, it costs more. When gas is scarce it gets expensive. Marketers don’t buy data for direct consumption, though. Marketers purchase data to increase their efficiency by reducing customer acquisition costs. So, the value of that data is determined by its ability to impact those costs.

For a marketer selling a luxury auto bought equally by male and female irrespective of creative, gender data might not be worth a sou. However, a history of past Audi purchases might be worth a mint. If the marketer’s data shows that she can meet the target acquisition cost of $350 for each in-dealership test drive by touching past Audi buyers at $18 CPM, she will buy those Audi purchaser impressions for up to $18. She can’t pay $20 CPM, because that will take her over her allowable acquisition cost. If a sudden dearth of third-party data means she has many fewer Audi buyers that she can find for $18, she’ll simply have to reduce total spend.

A flawed message: scale is the only challenge in a context-driven world

In a world of crumbling cookies and increasing challenges in linking identity and data, many in digital media technology have emphasized the value of a discipline that has been around for a long time: contextual targeting.

The narrative goes like this: “With third-party data becoming more scarce, contextually derived first-party data will become more valuable. The only problem you might have is scale. When data derived from a person’s behavior on other domains isn’t so readily available, you may not have sufficient traffic to meet a particular marketer’s needs. 

Some adtech providers suggest: “Hang on. We can solve this problem too. We will build a common taxonomy of attributes and interest that layers your data with that of every other publisher who delivers the same context.” If I want to reach people who like anime, I may get those 3M profiles by targeting an anime node in the common taxonomy. I get 1M from you, and 1M from each of your two competitors.

Wait a minute. A publisher’s first-party data is more scarce and more valuable. Yet I am supposed to dump it into a taxonomy node with all my competition, undifferentiated, where I have little pricing power, and let marketers pay a single rate? Like oil in a barrel or grain in a silo? Isn’t that the definition of commoditization?

And just because a publisher operates an anime-focused property, what if their traffic is 50% luxury auto-intenders who have bought Audis? How do they get paid for that in the anime node?

An empowering message: your asset is your traffic

With all the renewed focus in the past two years on making context your primary first-party data asset, these messages may seem pessimistic. Don’t despair. They should be empowering. Your traffic is your asset. Attract the best with compelling content, and you have something valuable. Sell it for full value.

About a decade ago, programmatic advertising went from zero to around 80% of all display advertising because it enabled bidding and increased publisher yield. Despite cries of “leakage” and unequal information, the programmatic system works well for publishers and advertisers.

Going back to those anime lovers: If a bidder knows that certain traffic has a high auto-purchase intent, the buyer can bid more. Maybe she’ll offer to pay those $18 CPMs for that anime traffic. Publishers should seek the highest value for their traffic based not only on what they know, but what the market knows.

Creating a traffic value proposition

How do you get the most value out of your traffic?

  1. Do what context adherents have been saying: aggressively collect and characterize context data for your traffic with widely available collection tools. Its first party data, it has value, and more is better.
  2. Enhance your knowledge of your traffic with third-party enrichment tools. While this approach is more strenuous with more regulation around privacy and transparency, it can be worth the lift. Cookieless identity tools support this process.
  3. Get deeper insights from your authenticated traffic with the classic info-barter. Use these rich “seeds” to build modeled audiences that meet surgical needs for marketers.
  4. Expose your traffic in programmatic environments where the market may know what it’s worth. Pay attention to yield and optimize. There’s leverage here.

If the new world in digital media, marketing, and regulation has you sitting by the wayside, or placing self-imposed limits that harm your value proposition, it’s time to reconsider. First-party data derived from context is valuable, but it won’t provide a comprehensive picture of your traffic. Bulk channel sales in a common taxonomy will only serve to commoditize your work. You know that Google, Apple, and Facebook who have nearly 100% authenticated traffic won’t be limiting themselves to context. If you’re a quality publisher with valuable traffic, why should you?

Advertising | Industry-Research

Premium VOD advertising placements outperform YouTube and Facebook

Researchers continue to prove that ads viewed within a premium publisher environment drive greater advertising effectiveness. Each of the studies (here, here and here) offers insights and empirical data proving ad performance is better in premium content environments.

A new study to add to this notable library is the second phase of The Benchmark Series, the largest cross-media advertising effectiveness study conducted in Australia.

It’s important to note that the first phase of research showed that ads in premium environments offer 1.8 times better recall and 2.8 times the brand lift than short-form video on run of the internet. Further, ads in premium content also deliver 1.8 times higher recall than Facebook video. It appears that the brain processes ads differently depending on where an ad is seen. When people see ads in an environment that helps contributes to memory encoding, ad effectiveness is maximized. Premium editorial sites offer this context.

This new research supplies a unique perspective on advertising performance in premium long-form using Broadcast Video on Demand (BVOD). The VOD broadcasters’ included were 7Plus, 9Now, and 10 play. The study compares BVOD to YouTube, Facebook, and run-of-the-internet sites. It uses core ad effective measures likeability, brand recall and lift.

Both phases of the study were conducted by MediaScience, which is well-known for their expertise in neuro-measures (i.e. biometrics, facial expression analysis, eye tracking and EEG) methodologies. It included more than 5,350 participants and campaigns ran across 252 websites in Australia.

MediaScience defines premium content as:

  1. Professionally produced content.
  2. A media brand that people know and trust.
  3. Brand safe environment.
  4. Meaningful scale for advertisers.

Overall, the new research shows that ads that appear in BVOD are more effective and outperform video advertising across YouTube, regardless of whether the ads align with short or longer-form content.

Recall

Ads in BVOD environments are remembered better (1.3 times) than ads aligned to YouTube videos of any length. Further, when ads in BVOD are compared to YouTube videos shorter than 9 minutes, they generate 1.5 times greater unprompted recall.

Further, BVOD advertising delivers better unprompted recall (4.7 times) than Facebook video ads and 2.5 times better recall than run of internet short-form video.

Likeability

In terms of likeability, ads in BVOD generate 15% greater likeability compared to YouTube short-form. Dr. Duane Varan, CEO of MediaScience explains, “advertising in premium long-form video environments benefits from the content the ads sit alongside with premium content boosting their impact.” He adds, “The content is priming you for certain emotions and that benefits the ads that follow.”

The research shows that not all digital video environments are equal when it comes to advertising performance. Quality content environments matter when advertising and there’s plenty of research to support this statement. The reality is that it’s long overdue for advertisers to reevaluate where they place their ad dollars and their micro-targeted ad campaigns.

Advertising | Perspectives

Raising the bar on ad quality and transparency

In recent years, the discussion around ad quality has become much more specific and tangible. The goals have become more quantifiable and the insights easier to act on. Today, there’s a lot riding on the publisher’s business in that moment when the page loads, and all page and ad content is revealed. And, frankly, there’s more money riding on that moment now.

As the programmatic market has grown more refined and valuable to advertisers and publishers alike, buyers increasingly pay attention to the environments their ads appear in. Quality advertisers demand that they appear adjacent not only to high-quality content, but also to other high-quality ads.

Meanwhile, increasingly sophisticated users expect publishers to host trustworthy, relevant ads alongside the content they’re engaged with. At the end of the day, reputation and revenue are on the line – from the moment the page loads and the ad content is revealed.

Context matters

The simple fact is that you can’t separate page content from ad content and from the content of the ad’s landing page. The user certainly doesn’t make that separation. The user assumes every ad on the page must be intentional, and the publisher must have co-signed on any page any ad links out to. It is time publishers view the page as a unified piece while also thinking about the ad experience beyond the page.

Today’s users are sensitive to ad content that sends a noticeably different message than the page content. They are sensitive to offensive, dishonest, or salacious ad content. They are also sensitive to clickbait-style, irrelevant, inappropriately partisan, and disruptively designed ad content. Unwelcome messages like those can lead users to lose trust in (and decrease monetizable engagement with) an otherwise high-quality publisher. And clicking through to a landing page containing misinformation, fraudulent products for sale, a phishing scam, or any other type of questionable environment can ruin a user’s relationship with a publisher for life.

Let’s face it, for publishers, there’s always been a push and pull between maintaining the integrity of the user experience and opening up ad inventory to the broadest range of programmatic buyers. And the traditional QA means to verify any and all ads on the page are relevant, on-brand, and legit often comes down to inefficient and inexact methods. This requires ad ops teams to manually refresh pages, or to check samples of ads from earlier scans.

The big picture

It may sound daunting to manage. However, today’s technology solutions help empower publishers to retain user trust and loyalty far better than, say, posting a disclaimer that explains to the user the complexities of programmatic.

Now, publishers seeking the highest level of ad content quality and control can view all 360 degrees of their ad inventory in one dashboard. This allows them to solidify their brand’s content strategy, avoid ad related annoyances, and ad quality issues. Considering how elusive real transparency in ad content/page content alignment has been, it’s about time.

When it comes to content quality control, publishers, have long been familiar with categorizing ad and page content by parameters like keywords, content vertical, domain, and blocklists. However, broad categorization is not good enough and leads to an abundance of inappropriate ad experiences.

Even worse, using blunt force to block entire categories of ads will fail to make good on the full revenue potential of premium ad inventory. In fact, 91% of publishers feel blunt-force blocking is hurting their rightful earnings. And 88% think that more customizable ad quality automation would increase their revenue.

Publishers know best

As a publisher, you recognize unwanted ads when you see them. But first, you’d have to see them. Without full transparency and vision into all of the ads on your site, that can be a tough ask. It’s tricky, time consuming, and resource draining. To streamline the process, publishers should employ ad quality tools that are customizable to the requirements of their own page content and the expectations of their particular audiences and advertisers.

Ultimately, though, the publisher knows those requirements and expectations better than anyone. Publishers absolutely need to apply a human layer to their QA process, which gives them complete control over what appears on their pages. When it comes to quality, it’s best not to simply “set it and forget it.”

Publishers need an ad content management solution that provides a full, unified view of all the ads on every page on the site, and that allows the publisher to instantly remove any unwanted, off-brand ads. Content quality QA might seem pedestrian, but it has the power to accelerate a publisher’s business, revenue, and relationships. Indeed, this is the level of real transparency the digital industry has talked about for years. Now’s the time to act.  

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

Say goodbye to the cookie and hello to contextual

Understanding consumers’ wants and needs is critical for advertising success. These days, having technology that enables these insights is not just nice to have – it is a must have. However, with January’s release of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which favors consumer privacy rights and increases limitations on advertising targeting parameters, the ability to predict and target those “wants and needs” based on personal information is becoming increasingly difficult.

As a result, advertisers will undoubtedly need to adjust their strategy to accommodate new and emerging regulations. In January, for example, Google announced its plan to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome within the next two years. Rather than attempting to reach their target audience based on data collected from cookies, advertisers will need to delve deeper to define consumer preferences and behaviors. Pivoting media buying strategies toward contextual alignment and partnering closer with content creators will be paramount to reach consumers in the new data privacy regulated world.

At Integral Ad Science (IAS), we conduct an annual survey with agencies, advertisers, ad tech vendors, and publishers to get a sense of the common themes and challenges facing industry leaders in the upcoming year. In our 2020 Industry Pulse Report, data privacy legislation was understandably a point of concern for all parties. In fact, 82% of respondents listed contextual targeting as a key industry trend in the upcoming year.

Publishers have the advantage

This is where publishers are able to regain control. With new standards like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and CCPA already imposed (and Chrome’s looming 2022 deadline) a decreased ability to rely on cookies will undoubtedly take center stage globally. When it comes to reaching desired audiences, the industry shift toward an increased reliance on contextual and semantic capabilities will put publishers back on top. Not only do we foresee great power in first-party audience data and stronger than ever buyer-seller relationships, but there is also a greater opportunity for publishers to market the true value of their content.

The first step is for publishers to ask themselves: Am I monetizing all of my inventory, and how can I stand out from the crowd? Taking the time to understand their unique inventory landscape will help publishers smartly create packages with delivery guarantees that their advertisers actually want to buy. 

The media buy

According to one 2020 Industry Pulse Report publisher participant, “Data will be the single most important factor. People want to reach specific audiences and, as a publisher, we need to rely on our first party data that has been cleared from a GDPR and CCPA perspective to offer contextual and behavioral targeting for media specific buys.”

However, curating and selling these custom inventory packages by using first-party data is not as simple as it may sound. Publishers need to partner with an unbiased third-party to validate and optimize these custom packages, especially when trying to win back advertiser trust. Now more than ever, advertisers are relying on verification partners to ensure that their ads are placed in brand safe and suitable environments. When asked about the implications of data privacy regulations, a manager at a global media agency noted, “…Ensuring our media is presented in the way the brand intends is now more important than ever.”

And consumers agree: according to the IAS Ripple Effect study, consumers are 30% more likely to remember an ad found in a suitable environment. Publishers leveraging a third-party verification partner who both sits in the epicenter of the ecosystem and provides patented technology to analyze all page content will be one step ahead of the competition. 

The increasing impact of data privacy legislation means predicting and targeting consumer “wants and needs” will become increasingly difficult. Advertisers looking to reach the right consumers in the right context will need to lean heavier on publishers offering contextual and semantic solutions. Content is still king. So, publishers should continue to focus their efforts on creating quality content and then partnering with an established third-party to help intelligently package and promote it. 

Advertising | Perspectives

What advertisers really want from digital publishers

Losses due to digital ad fraud made headlines in 2019. Such staggering reports have led some marketers to evaluate their media buying processes and become more selective about where they place their investment. So, what exactly are they looking for? We recently spoke with Jeanne Finegan, chief media officer at HF Media, the media arm of Heffler Claims Group, and vice president of media solutions at Prime Clerk, to gain insight into her selection process and discover what qualities she seeks in a digital advertising partner. Here are some key takeaways:

A quality environment

Advertisers want to partner with sites that provide them with the greatest return on investment. To do this, some are creating formal processes to assess whether a publisher has created an environment that provides minimal risk of ad fraud. Steps marketers have taken include reducing the number of intermediaries through supply-path optimization, using whitelists to separate premium websites from the rest, and dealing directly with publishers for their transactions.

Finegan’s team uses a multi-step process to evaluate potential partners. “We have a pretty extensive vetting process which includes proof of service,” Finegan said. “We ask a lot of questions running various scenarios for timing, quality, responsiveness and transparency.”

Part of this process determines whether the publisher can help the advertiser reach their target audience and ensure that the audience is legitimate.

Unfortunately, bots that generate clicks and fake traffic continue to be a contributor to the ad fraud problem. However, since bots don’t provide any real interaction – such as making purchases – they don’t give advertisers any return on their investment. As a result, marketers are steering their buys toward platforms that offer legitimate audiences even if that means fewer clicks.

“Quality environments, accountability, and human engagement are being valued over clicks,” Finegan added. “There has been a long-established narrative in the digital ecosystem that more is better. Smart marketers will increasingly value quality over quantity.”

Leveraging quality

Publishers can leverage their quality ad environments in several ways:

  • Create Quality Content. Regularly publishing well-written articles and videos are likely to attract more human traffic.
  • Use Legitimate Marketing Practices. Tactics such as social media promotions and email marketing attracts real audiences. While purchasing traffic may generate an influx of clicks, it is also a large source of bot traffic on legitimate websites.
  • Prevent Bots. Implementing tools such as registration forms, paywalls and CAPTCHAs can prevent bots from accessing the site and produce more genuine traffic reports.

Implementing industry solutions

Marketers also look for publishers that have implemented a variety of industry-vetted solutions.

One such tool is ads.txt. This initiative created by the IAB Tech Lab allows publishers to list all authorized sellers of their inventory, which helps demand-side platforms detect unauthorized digital sellers in programmatic buys. DSPs crawl these files to make sure that they are buying from legitimate SSPs. 

Another solution is the use of MRC-accredited fraud detection software. There are several solutions in the market that help detect invalid site traffic.

While fraud detection tools are important for fighting fraud, human oversight is equally as important. The 2019 ANA/White Ops Bot Baseline report revealed that less than half of all ad impressions are able to be fully, transparently validated by measurement tools.

Third-party website audits add another layer of protection by examining the processes the website has in place to detect and reduce fraud. “Through third-party audits, buyers can differentiate quality sites, analyze traffic and clearly see the difference between audited publishers and those who are sourcing traffic or running fraudulent sites,” Finegan said.

A website audit demonstrates a publisher’s commitment to transparency and separates premium sites from the rest by providing evidence that the site is doing everything possible to reduce fraud risk. It also helps media buyers make more informed decisions, leading to more successful campaign outcomes.

“Proof is critical. Clients need to demand proof of where ads appeared ­and proof that the campaign resulted in specific valued outcomes and then pay for performance,” said Finegan.

A holistic approach

While there are many tools available to publishers to fight ad fraud, no single solution can solve the entire problem. It’s important for publishers to include a variety of tools in their fraud-fighting arsenal. By taking a holistic approach to reducing fraud, publishers can stand out to advertisers and provide them with high-quality ad platforms likely to deliver real audiences and results.

Advertising | Industry-Research

High quality content casts positive halo over ad perception

Over the last decade, behavioral advertising has become the dominant approach to digital media buying. Empowered by sophisticated data-driven targeting technology, advertisers have zeroed in on desirable audiences, tacitly assuming that context is of little relevance. Major adjacency scandals and other brand suitability mishaps have offered empirical evidence against this assumption since 2017.

Furthermore, media and data creation are now increasing at near exponential rates, compounding the challenges surrounding brand safety management. IDC estimates that annual data creation will nearly quadruple from 12ZB to 47ZB between 2015 and 2020. Much of this expansion is driven by a shift in media consumption habits, with the mobile share of time spent with media expected to take over TV at some point in 2019.

Research commissioned by Integral Ad Science (IAS) in partnership with Neuro-Insight, a global leader in neuroscience-based market research, highlights the impact of content over ad perception. Findings from the report showed that high quality sites produced significantly better engagement and memorability compared to low quality sites. More importantly, an ad running next to high quality content was perceived more favorably than when the same ad was viewed in a low-quality site.

The study measured the neurological reaction of participants during a 30-minute mobile experience across four key metrics: favorability, engagement, emotional intensity and long-term memory encoding. Each participant visited eight pre-selected mobile sites evenly split into high- and low-quality as defined by IAS’s proprietary brand risk score. (High quality sites include low brand risk properties and low quality sites include moderate brand risk properties. This excludes explicit adult and violent content.) Three ads from major brands spanning the auto, CPG, financial services, technology and retail industries were embedded into each site.

Quality content drives engagement

Consumers visiting sites deemed as high quality exhibited 20% higher engagement than on low quality sites. In other words, premium publishers were capable of delivering highly involved audiences, primed to engage with relevant advertisements of matching quality levels.

Publishers who offer high quality, engaging content and utilize the necessary verification tools to protect their advertisers’ reputations, stand to gain incremental media budgets over their competitors. Over half of US marketers plan to increase ad spend with partners who have taken steps to protect against brand risk specifically.

Higher quality, higher memorability

Findings from the report also showed that high quality sites produced 30% greater memorability, offering advertisers a more conducive environment for long term memory transfer.

Transference from short term to long term memory is key as it indicates brand breakthrough–i.e., brand recall. Brand recall correlates with decision making and purchase intent, thus increasing the likelihood of conversion among consumers. Wouldn’t your advertiser want to place their dollars against media that drives tangible results?

Same ad, different reaction

High quality content provided an engaging and memorable experience among consumers, thus casting a halo effect that positively influenced ad perception. Findings from the Halo Effect report show consumers perceived an ad seen on high quality sites 74% more favorably compared to the same ad running on low quality sites. Ads running were not only “liked less” when seen in low quality environments, they were actively disliked by the consumer.

You’re already producing high quality, premium content for your audience. Considering eight-in-ten US marketers plan to reduce spend with publishers who do not meet their expectations, it is crucial to make sure you have a clear brand safety strategy in place as well in order to maintain your contextual advantage. 

Perspectives

Striking the right balance: personalized and contextual advertising

As online advertising has shifted predominantly to programmatic channels, personalized advertising has also exploded as marketers are able to leverage data at scale to reach their consumers. However, user privacy has increasingly become a global focal point for both consumers and the advertising industry as a whole. Both publishers and advertisers now need to adapt their methods in reaching consumers beyond just personalized, audience or behavioral targeting.

Personalization Matters

Leveraging data to make more informed ad targeting decisions is a breakthrough versus previous methods where ads were un-targeted. Personalized ads are a win for all parties. It is better for:

  • Users (connects them to more interesting and relevant ads)
  •  Advertisers (results in higher return on investment)
  •  Publishers (delivers higher CPMs and increased revenue)

Unfortunately, not all targeting is created equal. Certain industry practices have resulted in unpleasant user experiences. Needless to say, these should be avoided (i.e. excessive/ sticky re-targeting where ads follow users around the web).

Users should have the right to avoid cookies and personalized ads via an opt-out option in ads, or via their web browser settings. In Europe, GDPR legislation that went into effect in May 2018, now gives consumers in the EU even more control over their personal data – publishers in the region (as well as global publishers with European consumers) now need user permission for cookies for advertising purposes. It is striking to see that according to our measurement (GDPR barometer) which tracks the implementation of the new legislation in European countries, an average of only 5% of users opt-out from cookies. Therefore, 95% of consumers when asked are willing to consent to data-driven marketing! Contrary to negative press, users are generally not as annoyed by personalized ads as one would believe.

This article will dive into the realities facing publishers and brands today, and how to think differently about creating a more holistic solution when targeting users that is safe, compliant, and thoughtful about user experience.

The Shift Toward User Privacy

A number of pitfalls have emerged around user privacy that could potentially challenge personalized advertising tactics in various content consumption environments.

Government Regulations
  • GDPR, The California Consumer Privacy Act, Canada’s PIPEDA have all changed the way we think about user data and consent. Teads’ barometer of CMP (Consent Management Platform) adoption reveals that approximately 50% of European publishers’ traffic is filtered by a CMP. This means that almost half of traffic today would not be compliant for personalized advertising in Europe.
  • Ad targeting leveraging user data will become increasingly difficult in the foreseeable future given the expansion of government regulation. And if you’re not a large walled garden (i.e., Google, Facebook, Amazon), you will become more disadvantaged due to a lack of first-party data at scale.
Social Media & Politics
  • As hundreds of millions of consumers leverage social media and share substantial amounts of personal information online, the risks of data misuse and even potential hacking of that data continue to increase. This risk was best exemplified through a series of scandals impacting Facebook ranging from Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting of user data, to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election through targeted propaganda on the platform, to the most recent findings that Facebook shared user data with over 150 companies.The industry is now seeing huge consumer backlash against social media platforms as well as questions from marketers alike, which could ultimately add more fuel to the user privacy fire (while also providing a window of opportunity for publishers to provide a better marketing environment).
Technology Barriers

Beyond government regulation and industry self-regulation efforts in user privacy, technology companies are also implementing measures to prevent ad tracking and hence personalized ad targeting online.

  • Apple has been leading the charge for consumer privacy and most recently introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.0 (ITP) on Safari for iOS 12 in September 2018
  • Safari now blocks first- and third-party cookies and cookie trackers are now completely, which represents 50% of mobile web browser share, rendering the majority of mobile web inventory useless for user tracking and ad retargeting.
  • Mozilla followed suit by enabling Enhanced Tracking Protection in its latest Firefox web browser.
Brand Safety

Automation and data targeting at scale also have another downside for marketers beyond violating consumer privacy concerns: brand safety.

  • YouTube, which has heavily relied on its wealth of data and scale, has had a lengthy, recurring history of brand safety violations. Ads have run in objectionable environments ranging from pedophilia videos to extremist and hateful content.
  • Hundreds of brands have pulled their ads from YouTube in the past two years.
  • Contextual targeting tools not only provide a solution to avoid these brand safety snafus, but also ensure marketers reach the right audience that they’re paying for.

The Need for Context

Given these increasing challenges, contextual advertising, in addition to personalization, should be considered in a holistic advertising strategy. It serves as an effective, complementary solution in providing the right message to the right user. Contextual advertising also provides an advantage to premium publishers, particularly those lacking their own first-party data or enough scale to leverage data targeting.

Programmatic ad delivery is now the norm, and marketers have become increasingly reliant on user data to target their audiences. This over-reliance on data now creates substantial risk in the form of potential legal and monetary punishments, loss of consumer trust, limited scale as platforms adapt and negative perceptions towards brands appearing in questionable environments.

Contextual advertising – the targeting of ads based on the context of the content that a consumer is reading, watching or listening to – is not a new concept, but it is now an increasingly relevant and important tool in marketer’s toolkit as data becomes more challenged. Publishers can leverage context to extract the most value out of the content that they create to better compete against the walled gardens (which often only provide low quality scale). Marketers can still reach the most relevant (and likely more interested) audiences by placing ads in relevant environments. Users can still receive relevant messaging even when they’ve opted out of cookie-based targeting.

Whether it’s semantic, visual or audio analysis, the tools are available for contextual targeting in almost all content outlets.

A Holistic Targeting Solution

It is crucial to think about how to create relevant ad experiences for users leveraging both personalization and context. Publishers should think about a holistic strategy including targeting via dynamic creative optimization using their first- or third-party data, leveraging interest graphs to understand what content users are consuming, and analyzing content and identifying keywords on their pages to build the right context.

In order to adapt and succeed in a quickly evolving landscape for data and user privacy, we believe publishers and marketers need to exploit both identity and interest to maximize their potential reach and deliver the most optimal messaging.

Advertising | Perspectives

If attention is the currency for advertising, what does it take to get more?

In today’s crowded digital advertising landscape, consumer attention is a much sought-after currency. The question is: Do consumers respond better to quantity or quality of advertising? I’d make the argument for the latter and many of my industry peers agree. Compelling, informative and relevant ad content – the non-interruptive kind — is what matters the most in gaining consumer attention.

Granted, the six-second video ad (blink and you’ll miss it) came into vogue at the beginning of 2017 when YouTube/Google showcased their best quickie video ads at Sundance, encouraging more brands and agencies to adopt this “snackable” format. The rationale was that consumers’ attention is so fragmented that advertisers need to pick up the pace to keep them engaged.

However, there’s a better case to be made for longer-form advertising that is well-targeted and brings value to the viewer or reader.

I had the privilege to speak on a panel on October 2 during New York’s Advertising Week called If Attention is the Currency for Advertising—What does it take to get More? My co-panelists were engaging executives from digital advertising company Acuity, creative agency BBDO and Prudential Financial.

Among us the feeling was mutual—quality matters more than quantity and giving more control to the user is paramount in gaining their attention.

Compelling, Long-Form Creative Works

There were some great examples of compelling long-form campaigns offered by my fellow panelists. I’ll choose one here: Anna Papadopoulos, VP of Advertising at Prudential described the financial company’s latest TV campaign, “The State of Us,” which included 30, 60, and 90 second commercials centered around its retirement planning services in which real people —not actors — were featured talking about their financial futures. She pointed out that “the magic about the campaign is that it wasn’t about Prudential. It was about people’s stories.”

I shared with the group one of my favorite examples of long-form sponsored content — The New York Times Magazine’s audio podcast that launched in September (to accompany its annual “Voyages” photo essay issue). The audio content was described as a “soundscape ecology project” allowing listeners to hear real sounds of moving lava in Hawaii or bats in Mozambique, for example. GE sponsored this engaging content. This qualifies as an advertising coup in my opinion because as a consumer, I enjoyed the audio so much I actually remembered who the advertiser was!

Consumers Appreciate Native Advertising

Our panel discussion also revolved around native advertising, another long form approach. I know from experience that consumers look at native ads 53% more than display ads and native ads create an 18% increase in purchase intent. It just stands to reason. If the sponsored content that is surfaced is based on reader interests and preferences, it is way more likely to capture their attention.

What’s noteworthy is that non-social native works best. eMarketer recently found that consumers trust information from advertisers on publishers’ sites 24.4% more than on social media platforms, and 69% trust publisher site ads while only 54% trust social platform ads.

Let’s not forget that context always matters. If someone is reading a news article, they are probably more disposed to reading another article that is recommended to them (even if it’s sponsored). A more natural content experience that seamlessly integrates into the media that users are already consuming has to be more attention-grabbing.

Want Attention? Give Users Control

The panelists agreed that we need to give consumers a greater sense of control. Are your videos fully opt-in? (This means no sound and no motion unless the reader proactively opens it.) If the video automatically starts playing, most people tend to “click to skip.”

However, if the advertiser allows the user to choose to open the video, it could be 6 seconds, 30 seconds, or 60 seconds. It becomes less about short attention spans and more about earning the right attention with the right people that will actually drive good content experiences, and hopefully, conversions.

Overall, advertising should be less about the brand, the agency, or the technology company, and more about what will resonate with the consumers viewing the ad. After all, in the words of digital analyst Brian Solis, “attention is a precious commodity.”

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives

Trusted environments positively influence ads

Media channels, more than ever before, need to develop consumer relationships throughout the funnel. To do this, they must focus on providing trustworthy content relevant to users as well as context relevant to digital advertisers. The fact is that not all content is equally trustworthy. Marketers who use reach and viewability as their key criteria need to factor trust into their media planning equation.

The new edition of Adtrust’s research, The Company You Keep,  offers the latest findings about consumers’ trust in media and the impact of context on digital advertising. The study, based on 4,000 Australian adults, measures consumer trust in content and in advertising being carried by the medium. The study measures the influence of the environment on the advertising on it. The greater the trust in content, the greater the trust in ads, the greater the drive for purchase intent. Yes, environment matters.

The study measures the trust net score (TNS). This measures people’s distrust as well as their trust. The score subtracts the number of consumers who do not trust content (or ads) from the proportion that do trust. For example, if 45% of consumers trust radio content and 20% do not, the net trust score for radio content is 25%.

Among all media (online and off), newspapers earn the highest trust net score (TNS) for both content (48%) and ads (38%). Among digital media sites, news sites earn the highest TNS in both trust in content (34%) and trust in ads (23%). Social media sites earn the lowest TNS in both trust in content (-20%) and in trust in ads (-28%). Importantly, consumers’ trust in news media’s content and advertising has continued to increase over previous studies.

The study asks additional trust-oriented questions about Facebook. The social platform is distrusted more now than it was six months ago. In fact, more than half of all Australians (58%) report that they now trust Facebook less than last year. Further, only one in 10 Australian adults (14%) agree that “I trust the information provided in advertising on Facebook.”

The Adtrust research one again finds that trust of the advertising environment, the place where the ads appear, impacts advertising effectiveness and purchase intent. It reiterates the importance of marketers advertising in a clean environment with trusted publishers.

Advertising | Perspectives

The shift towards context-based advertising

The 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica scandal, and GDPR represent a tidal shift in how the ad tech and digital media industry will monetize their audience moving forward. And it’s overdue. Demographic data doesn’t define a person’s identity. People define themselves by what matters to them, by their interests, hobbies, and values, and they show this in what they read about online.

As we talk about technology in the publishing industry, we should consider what kind of tech will move us towards monetization through context-based advertising. This protects data privacy, and has the potential to finally gain an advantage over the platforms where many digital advertising dollars have shifted.    

Consumer mistrust of platforms

When consumers found out that Russia played a role in the 2016 election via bots on Twitter, propaganda on Facebook, and even local events in the U.S., we were forced rethink the role social media played in our community. Were they purely a platform? If so, to what degree did they need to police the content and users? Further, if they had so much knowledge about their users, why couldn’t they prevent a malicious influence like Russia from infiltrating their platform?

The Cambridge Analytica scandal certainly didn’t help this cause, and weekly stories break about Facebook continuing to acknowledge privacy and data issues. This has planted the seed of doubt about whether these platforms and the underlying data could be trusted—not just by the general public, but by the marketers who provide the revenue stream for Facebook.

New privacy-conscious controls for consumers

GDPR was borne out of a general concern that consumers had a lack of control and transparency around their digital data—data that bore the monetary fruits of now enormous companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. That data also created the massive ad tech industry that developed complex methods to personalize and optimize ad targeting to the point where most experts in the industry still don’t quite know how the ecosystem works.

GDPR, in some ways, marks a boon for platforms and the end of an era for the ad tech industry. Any platform that collects its own massive amount of first party data (like Facebook, Google, Twitter), can relatively easily get the consent of the population. Ad tech, though, faces the burden of getting consent through 3rd parties, where the value of giving consent was not only unclear but potentially non-existent. The type of re-targeting and personalization that was prevalent before will start to change under GDPR as publisher-direct relationships with consumers become increasingly important.

Context-based advertising

So where does this all lead, in terms of current industry trends? There’s no lack of interest in moving from a programmatic model to more of a subscription-based model. But most of the innovation and investment in digital tech has been focused on ad-tech, data collection. We need to simply “do better” from an advertiser and consumer perspective given these trends.

From the advertiser side, the credibility of their 3rd party data is eroding with GDPR. There are some publishers that are large enough (or are building collectives) to create their own first party pools of data. However, none of them can reach the scale or targeting capabilities of companies like Facebook and Google. Marketers know this, and if they want the best targeting they’ll still go to the duopoly.

That said, because consumer privacy is becoming top of mind for more and more people, marketers are also worried about the experience around ad campaigns they run. They want to create an experience that doesn’t creep people out (for lack of a better term). Interest- or context-based advertising, as a result is coming back into favor for the privacy-conscious brands and marketers.

Targeting ads based on consumers’ interests or the context of what they’re reading instead of their personal data benefits everyone involved. Consumers maintain their privacy and build trust publishers. Publishers can then pass on this trust to brands who want their consumers to know that they care about their privacy. And, publishers who are armed with the right contextual data can still provide an advertising experience that’s targeted, but doesn’t violate consumers’ concerns.

Not only does data around interests protect anonymity, but it speaks to the core of who people are. Marketers who try to understand what matters to their audience through attention data—the topics and stories they pay attention to online—will have a leg-up on connecting that audience with content and products that they want.

Perspectives

Direct buys and non-blind programmatic need context to solve brand safety

The dust has largely settled after March’s brand safety scandal – however the problem hasn’t gone away. Although some brands are reported to have returned to Google advertising by May, others – including Pepsi, Tesco, and Marks & Spencer – were still waiting for solid guarantees from Google over and above what has already been promised.

The changes Google says it has already taken to improve brand safety haven’t been bedded in, aren’t sufficient for some brands, and still lack a vital component – third party verification. Google has promised to deliver such verification in the future, but before it’s implemented, marketers refusing to risk their brand reputation are opting for ad providers who can make promises on where their ads will appear as well as delivering third party verified monitoring and reporting on where ad creative actually did appear.

Third party monitoring, reporting and verification is imperative, of course, but it can really only help brands, publishers and ad tech companies to react to any concerning ad placement. Many brands would prefer a zero tolerance for any ad misplacement rather than an acceptance that misplacement will happen from time to time. Those marketers are likely to be the ones who focus their ad buying and planning on ad campaigns bought directly from ad inventory providers or, at very least, non-blind programmatic ad campaigns.

An incredibly insightful analysis by MediaPost’s Sean Hargrave identified this very issue. He suggested a correlation between the mere one in four media buyers who feel informed of their ad suppliers’ brand safety measures and the 28% who say they know where all their ads are going. He recognized quite reasonably that these buyers most likely focus on direct, non-blind programmatic buys. That means that they receive assurances of the quality of the ads. However, lumping blame on the blind buys alone fails to consider how some of the most sophisticated targeting technologies are the contemporary causes of even more catastrophically compromised ad placement.

Consider the Context

In fact, a Financial Times’ report on the aftermath of the scandal serves as a perfect case study. Their journalists’ research identified ads for Huawei, wix and even the Advertising Week Europe event displayed before a YouTube video from a UK-banned preacher. My strong hunch is that the European technology correspondent was researching those brands online for that article, other articles or other valid reasons, and the ads were behaviourally or re-targeted.

This one instance shows how dangerous it is for ad campaigns to rely on behaviourally and retargeting technology in isolation. They can be great at targeting brands’ biggest and established fans, but if those very consumers are presented with targeted ads for their favorite brands whilst browsing shocking content – which they are more likely to do because they fear it than agreement with it – then the damage is huge. Yes, that consumer might well be the right fit for the brand’s latest product. But that won’t matter if they are connecting within the most brand-damaging environment and state-of-mind. Here, the fundamental failure is one of context. Ad campaigns that do not include analysis and targeting of ad campaigns to the context of the content will always be at far higher risk of damaging their brand.

Need to Know

Being transparent about the publications which display campaigns’ ad creative, and backing that up with brand safety technology as well as independent third-party monitoring are essential qualities of any decent ad supplier. Yet even the most premium, brand safe media titles can carry compromising content. They have to. There are bad things in the world that people have a right to know. That’s why assessment of context – both its safety and relevance to campaigns – must be at a granular level, assessing not just the articles, but the keywords and phrases used within those articles.

Let’s be clear: categorization of content into buckets for advertisers to choose where to advertise is not contextual targeting. Content categorization alone is wildly insufficient, especially when users categorize their own content. Extremists don’t consider themselves “extremists”, so they might categorize revolting content as “current affairs”, “culture”, or “sex and relationships”. True contextual targeting understands the actual words used to identify content as both relevant and brand safe for advertisers.

Get the Signals Straight

Incorporating contextual does not mean abandoning other forms of targeting, such as behaviorally, demographic, or re-targeting, even when purchasing ads programmatically. There’s great ad tech available programmatically that can combine contextual signals with audience data to target campaigns to relevant consumers in brand safe environments. That said, pure reliance on computers to assess both audience and contextual appropriateness for ads will always be more risky than involving humans, even with the introduction of artificial intelligence. Ad buyers and planners know this, as nearly three-quarters of them (74.2%) say it’s more difficult to ensure brand safe environments when buying programmatically on open exchanges.

Hence managing brand safety must involve human beings. Computers just cannot match our abilities to identify the contextual appropriateness and relevance of content for advertisers. People are needed to vet publishers’ operations and content to ensure they meet advertisers’ stated quality standards. They’re needed to monitor and react to the news agenda which may introduce brand damaging content into campaigns. People are needed to operate the targeting and brand safety tech and to make sure things are going right for advertisers, publishers and consumers. Of course some ad providers rely on consumers rather than professionals to perform such functions. Not only is that an abdication of responsibility, but the horse has bolted by that point.

Doug Stevenson is the Co-CEO of contextual advertising platform Vibrant Media, and based in San Francisco. As the co-founder of Vibrant, Doug has co-led the company’s expansion with Craig Gooding from when the company began operations in 2000. Doug was awarded ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ from Ernst and Young and was a Distinguished Honoree for the International Business Awards, Executive of the Year in North America. Prior to founding Vibrant, Doug worked at AOL Europe as Head of E-commerce and has 25 years of publishing, media and Internet experience with AOL, CompuServe, Netscape, Haymarket Publishing, and BBC Magazines/Redwood Publishing.

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