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Advertising | Perspectives

Honest truth about the Honest Ads Act

Concerns about fake news  and potential Russian involvement in the U.S. 2016 general election is reaching fever pitch that was highlighted last week with multiple congressional hearings, and, digital advertising is in the crosshairs. And, like many challenging discussions about digital advertising, transparency is at the heart of the issue.

Digital compliance for political ads

The proposed Honest Ads Act, a bipartisan effort to govern digital advertising according to the same rules followed by traditional broadcast media regarding political advertising, and is the one tangible fallout from the investigations.

The act calls for all politically-oriented digital ads to be declared at purchase, clearly labeled in the creative, and available for consumer access via a searchable interface. Among other things, the buyer must disclose their contact information, candidate and/or campaign, ad flight duration, number of impressions/views, and targeting criteria. The platform must collect this information and retain it for at least four years. It applies to digital platforms with at least 50 million unique visitors a month for the preceding 12-month period that have political ad buyers who spend at least $500 within a calendar year.

In a nutshell, it requires publishers know their ad buyers, ensure ads comply with (regulatory) policies and provide consumer access to these ads and any associated targeting criteria. Sounds familiar?

Transparency starts with the buyer

As The Media Trust announced a few short months ago, our Digital Vendor Risk Management (DVRM) platform provides real-time visibility and insight into non-compliant activity and threats operating in an enterprise website and mobile app environments. More than a risk management framework, DVRM operationalizes client-specific digital asset policies, continuously evaluates digital partner compliance, and actively facilitates the resolution of violating behavior.

The crux of this solution is the ability to identify and manage an enterprise’s digital ecosystem participants, from ad tech up to the source buyer, and authorize their presence. In addition to privacy regulation and escalating security concerns, the Honest Ads Act is just another reason why enterprises need to know their partners.

DVRM – A simple solution to a complex problem

Applying a political lens to DVRM it’s evident that the platform is already satisfying most of the requirements to enable transparency and accountability. Advertising supply chain partners register via an online portal; ads are uploaded and continuously scanned according to targeting criteria; client-specific policy violations are flagged; and, ads are stored for historical reference.

Self-regulation forces a new digital approach

Major platforms have announced their approaches to address congressional concerns and hopefully stave off the vote, let alone passage, of the Honest Ads Act. However, this self-regulation will need to extend to others meeting the requirement threshold, like ecommerce and media publishers.

Regardless of Honest Ads going to vote, changes are in the air. As an industry that has largely grown via self-regulation, the signals are obvious. It is incumbent upon the industry to embrace these changes, especially with the DVRM platform as an easy way to codify and operationalize your policies.

Chris Olson founded The Media Trust (@themediatrust) with Dave Crane in 2005. He currently serves as CEO, where he drives the company’s vision, direction and growth plans. Prior to establishing The Media Trust Company, he spent four years as the chief operating officer and board member at Spheric Media. From 1998 until 2000, he was the vice president, global equities at Commerzbank; and from 1993 until 1998, he was the vice president of electronic trading at Salomon Brothers, Inc.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives

The state of programmatic native in 2017

Over the past year, advertisers have devoted more dollars to programmatic native than ever before. And it’s easy to see why. Programmatic native gives native scale, while bringing more efficiency and data-targeting into the equation. Nativo, TripleLift, Sharethrough, Unruly, and Bidtellect are some of the most well-known players/programmatic native exchanges in this space.

To get a clearer picture of today’s programmatic native ad market, my company, MediaRadar, pulled together some of the most pressing trends on the year so far.

It’s a growing market

The number of advertisers placing native in Q1 2017 was nearly identical to Q1 2016 (2,318 vs. 2,326 brands). However, there was a sharp increase in Q2 2017, where the number of advertisers grew 42%, from 2,100 to 2,981 native programmatic advertisers. Why the surge? Good performance. As I have shared previously, programmatic native is generally evaluated on the same KPIs as display. In a contest against most standard IAB ad display units, programmatic native scores well with high click-rates and engagement. And it can scale.

Penetration is low

Despite the fast rise in programmatic native, 122,241 brands were buying advertising online in the first half of the year. This means that as a% of total, only 2.5% of those brands buy native programmatic. We are only scratching the surface here. Even though large national brands make up the early adopters, there is still significant room for programmatic native to grow. This is welcome news for native exchanges that sell this kind of advertising. They know the opportunity is poised to grow substantially.

Renewal rates are mixed

While total numbers are strong, quarterly renewal rates on programmatic native remain challenged, with only 20% renewing. Specifically, the brands buying in the first half of 2017 share just 20% of the same brands from the first half of 2016. So, for programmatic native to continue its expansion, brands will have to recognize its benefits and make a long-term commitment to the format.

Campaign duration varies

Campaign duration remains short, with most native campaigns lasting a median of one month. In Q1 and Q2 2017, 14% and 20% of advertisers ran multi-month campaigns, respectively. During this time period, renewal rates on longer campaigns were much higher than shorter-term campaigns. This is why renewal rates and campaign duration are often tied together tangentially. Longer campaigns mean more of an opportunity to tweak and amend programs, which feeds into higher renewals.

Programmatic native is on the rise. And while there are some challenges – namely measuring performance of programmatic native and no definitive, standard set of metrics, as well as some market confusion about what programmatic native can offer – the benefits outweigh them. Yes, the market is still in its infancy – relative to its potential – but it’s becoming increasingly popular. And it has a lot of room to grow.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives

Buyer beware: Programmatic advertising report emphasizes the importance of brand safety

For the past several years, marketers shifted digital ad budgets “gleefully to programmatic engines that promise efficiency and hands-off effectiveness.” These days, as much as 80% of all online display activity is transacted through technology-based exchanges that offer promises to “hyper-define, hyper-target and hyper-engage with minimal human monitoring.”

In retrospect, it all seemed to just a little bit too easy: superior targeting, engagement and tracking—and all for lower costs. However, in response to significant concerns around fraud and brand safety, the advertising industry is taking a collective pause on programmatic.

That’s not to say programmatic won’t continue to play a meaningful role in the advertising ecosystem, but its flaws have been exposed. There is a dark underbelly associated with with programmatic advertising (see: the 2016 US president election and Facebook-fake news aftermath. So, today many big brands, experienced marketers, and agencies are in the process of carefully reevaluating their adtech-enabled digital media buying strategies.

During the summer of 2017, the CMO Council interviewed hundreds of brand leaders to gauge their thoughts about these issues and recently published Brand Protection From Digital Content Infection report.

Here are the key findings that media executives and marketers need to be thinking about:

 

Digital can be a dangerous place

“Buyer Beware” might be the best sign to hang outside of the digital advertising gates. Of the marketers engaged in programmatic advertising buying, more than half (52%) are focused on risk and reputation management across ads placed on social media sites. Marketers are also aware that issues like ad fraud plague brand safety.

Guilt by association

The overwhelming majority of marketers believe that inadvertent association or negative adjacency has had a direct (and negative) impact on their brand. Some 78% of respondents say that unintended associations with objectionable content, images, topics, audience or conversations have hurt their brand’s reputation.  

Reputation management problems lead to  lost dollars

Brand safety and integrity in advertising are not simply reputation issues anymore; they can directly impact the bottom line. When consumers were asked about their reaction to seeing the brands they love being associated with inappropriate or questionable content, the answer was clear: Customers will walk away with their wallets—even if it means walking away from their most beloved brands.

Marketers not waiting for industry solutions

Marketers are taking specific steps to ensure the integrity of digital ad placements and, by extension, the integrity of the customer’s experience. First and foremost, marketers are developing stronger digital advertising guidelines for agencies and buying networks to adhere to. And many are choosing to move to programmatic direct buys and private exchanges rather than having their programmatic dollars spread across open exchange networks.

Core recommendations focused on proactive governance & adjusted KPIs

Marketers are taking specific steps to ensure the integrity of digital ad placements and, by extension, the integrity of the customer’s experience. First and foremost, marketers are developing stronger digital advertising guidelines for agencies and buying networks to adhere to. And many are choosing to move to programmatic direct buys and private exchanges rather than having their programmatic dollars spread across open exchange networks.

The programmatic advertising train has left the station and there’s no risk of stopping it or even slowing it down in a meaningful way anytime soon. The actual and perceived benefits are simply too powerful. As well, with deep-pocketed and influential behemoths Google and Facebook so thoroughly dependent on the category’s health to grow and be successful, its likelihood of continuing as a force for years to come is practically guaranteed.

But it’s emerging from the shadows, and marketers are getting more sophisticated about how they assess its performance, and how they plan its role in broader strategies moving forward. While this trend should cause companies like Google and Facebook to at least pause, it’s hard to imagine how it doesn’t translate positively to both tightly controlled ad buying networks and premium publishing brands. At the end of the day, it is about targeting and engagement, where premium properties continue to hold sway.

Tim Bourgeois (@ChiefDigOfficer) is a partner at East Coast Catalyst, a Boston-based digital consulting company specializing in strategic roadmaps, digital media audits, and online marketing optimization programs.

Advertising | Perspectives

Google and Facebook must do more for brand safety

With the great power that Facebook and Google have accumulated in online advertising comes great responsibility. For years they tried to play it neutral as platforms and not make editorial decisions. That’s now changed dramatically as they have had to take actions on many fronts, from fake news and spammy websites to Russian interference in the U.S. election. But have they done enough?

The explosion of fake news on Facebook and its potential interference with the U.S. election last November initially put the social media giant on the defensive. But now, Facebook has admitted that it found about $100,000 in ad spending from June 2015 to May 2017 on the platform connected to inauthentic accounts that likely operated out of Russia. Google too faced loads of backlash after brands realized their advertising was appearing alongside racist and extremist videos on YouTube and other sites, thereby marking them as supporters of hate.

It’s no wonder then that Facebook and Google are making bolder moves to restrict algorithmic ad targeting. However, ongoing eruptions of how their advertising is backfiring casts a stronger light on the pitfalls of programmatic and self-service ads, and the checks necessary to ensure brands maintain their safety.

Targeting racists with ads

ProPublica’s damning report of how Facebook enabled advertisers to reach audiences who had specified interests in “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or “History of ‘why jews ruin the world’” cast an international spotlight on the company, which was already under intense scrutiny. Acting on a tip, ProPublica reporters spent $30 on Facebook’s automated advertising platform to target these audiences — admittedly tiny, though Facebook did suggest additional categories that might boost the audience size. And Facebook’s automated platform approved the targeted ads within a span of 15 minutes. Facebook then immediately censored the anti-Semitic content after ProPublica informed the company.

BuzzFeed’s Alex Kantrowitz then piled on and discovered that Google allowed advertisers to target people who had been typing racist, bigoted, and derogatory terms into its search bar. It would also suggest similarly loaded racist and bigoted terms within its ad-buying tool.

Given that Google’s Adsense only monitors content at the page level and not the site level, brands also run the risk of their advertising appearing on so-called “safe” pages of extremist sites, despite Google’s efforts to monitor hate speech.

Are current restrictions enough?

The tech giants have taken action, including removing those search terms from ad targeting after those stories ran. But they are in a Catch 22, because the more they restrict, the more they become arbiters of free speech vs. hate speech. And not even they want that kind of role.

Facebook, for one, said it was adding new standards — enforced by a combination of human and automated review — to ensure fake news videos and objectionable content had nothing to do with advertising, and vice versa. Facebook has 5 million advertisers on the platform. And its newest ad opportunities will come through its new video section, Watch, as the company pivots more toward video and in-stream video advertising.

Facebook has announced “monetization eligibility standards” to offer clearer guidance on what kind of content, publishers, and video creators can profit from advertising. It has also stated that it will start releasing “post-campaign reports” to advertisers outlining where their ads actually appeared, as part of an overall effort to monitor their monetization.

Google too has insisted that a video channel now must reach a 10,000-view threshold in order for it to make money from ads. It hopes that this will better police extremist and hateful content, and calm the fears of advertisers. After BuzzFeed’s report, Google senior vice president of advertising Sridhar Ramaswamy admitted it had to step up. “In this instance, ads didn’t run against the vast majority of these keywords, but we didn’t catch all the offensive suggestions. That’s not good enough and we’re not making excuses. We’ve already turned off these suggestions, and any ads that make it through, and will work harder to stop this from happening again.”

Not to be outdone — especially since news reports revealed ad campaigns utilizing derogatory terms appeared on the platform — Twitter has also announced it has fixed what it calls the “bug” that allowed some advertisers to use racial epithets and offensive terms.

Finding the right guide

But the elephant in the room is whether these companies themselves should be doing the policing, or whether a third-party group (or even the government) needs to step in to ensure accountability. More human oversight is an obvious answer to the problems of automated advertising. But consider this: What might have happened had not ProPublica, BuzzFeed, and other news organizations stepped in to counter-check the kind of ad targeting possible? These ad campaigns would likely very well still be in use is the probable answer.

Google, Facebook and other major advertising platforms have incentives to keep themselves in the clear only when their own brand safety comes into question. Creating more collaborations with third parties, as the platforms have done in the fight against fake news, seems all the more necessary to ensure brand safety for everyone.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Revenue

Consumer publishing is changing: Which advertising methods are working best?

With the introduction of new advertising formats, ad types, and methods of buying and selling inventory, consumer publishing is undergoing some big changes. To get a closer look at what’s working,  MediaRadar conducted the “2016 Consumer Advertising Report,” using our data science-powered platform to review these trends for 2016 and Q1 2017.

Here’s a look at some of the most notable findings.

Native advertisers up 74 percent.

High CPM ad placements are surging. Native ad buyers, in particular, are up, rising three-quarters (74%) from Q1 2016 to Q1 2017. This represents the largest growth in buyers for any ad format. Looking back further, we found that demand for native has nearly tripled since January 2015, which had less than 1,000 buyers (981). In January 2017, there were almost 3,000 (2,882). Consumer advertising is shifting as audience consumption patterns evolve. We foresee advertisers will keep spending more on native because it often outperforms traditional ad units.

Print ad spend declined 6 percent.

The number of print ad pages in Q1 2016 was 117,551. Compared to Q1 2017, the number of print ad pages has decreased 8 percent year-over-year to 107,698. Similarly, estimated print ad spend has declined 6 percent from Q1 2016 to Q1 2017. However, even with this decline, there are still a considerable amount of pages being bought. We notice niche and enthusiast titles are on the rise, with some regional titles flourishing.

Programmatic buyers down 12 percent.

According to our data, 45,008 advertisers purchased ads programmatically in Q1 2016. In Q1 2017, however, the number of programmatic advertisers dropped substantially, falling 12 percent year-over-year. On the quarter, more than 5,000 fewer advertisers (39,415) bought programmatically.

After years of growth, the decline in programmatic buyers is likely attributed to concerns around brand safety – especially given the recent problems for companies like YouTube. This form of advertising continues to evolve as brands seek more control over where their ads are running. We expect to see programmatic rise as more brands move to programmatic direct models.

Our report showed that native is surging, and buyers are investing accordingly. Print ad spend is declining as a whole, but is buoyed by vertical subject matter and titles. Publishers can also expect to see programmatic rise as more brands shift to programmatic direct models. It will be interesting to see how these developments play out in the second half of 2017.

Advertising | Innovation

How thinking like a tech company has transformed innovation at The Washington Post

When you think of The Washington Post, you probably think newspapers, not software company. But the reality is that the company operates a lot more like the latter. Under the influence of owner Jeff Bezos, The Post has been trying innovative approaches to everything it does and is experimenting with new ways of doing business.

That includes running an ad tech startup inside the company, one whose job is to use The Post as a sandbox of sorts to come up with new ways to deliver ads and then market the technology they produce to other publications. It’s not the kind of project you expect to find inside a publication like The Post, but it’s one of the qualities that attracted VP of commercial product and innovation, Jarrod Dicker several years ago.

Dicker says he originally reached out to The Post in 2015 about a job because he was seeing the continuous trend of media companies’ reliance on third-party companies for things core to the business, such as ad technology.

Seeing RED

After he came on board, Dicker helped form the RED team, which stands for research, experimentation and development. The group, which consists of software developers and product managers, began to look at the ways the company did ad tech.

As with any attempt to change the way you do business, Dicker ran into the “that’s just the way the industry works” attitude. His idea was to look at it fresh. What if you didn’t have any preconceived notions about how ad tech was supposed to work, how would you build it from scratch?

What he knew for sure was that users didn’t like the way ads were being delivered to them. So the first thing he decided to do was focus on improving the user experience. When consumers ignored ads—or worse, blocked them—Dicker recognized that the approach the industry had been taking needed to change if publishing was going to survive and thrive moving forward.

Thinking Like a Startup

“My pitch to The Post early on was—and it was me coming in as an individual contributor at the time—how do we take a startup mentality and really think about our focus as a media company and figure out how to differentiate ourselves,” he said. The problem as he saw it was that most media companies were focusing so much on building the content side of the business, they were forgetting about innovating on the revenue side.

So, he said they took the approach: “What if we actually applied an effort to build products that we think would be perfect for user experience, knowing how our consumers engage on The Washington Post and apply those to what we know brands and marketers want.” And that may just have been the key that unlocked the strategy. Dicker and the team he helped form wanted to create products that worked for marketers and brands as well as users who were fed up with online ads.

Getting talent to come in and work on ad tech proved to be a challenge at first precisely because it had such a bad reputation. “People didn’t want to work on ad problems because of the association with fraud, blocking and bad user experience. And the people who could apply [for these positions] and make the change didn’t want to be a part of it. They assumed that things couldn’t change or be better,” he said.

Those were precisely the people Dicker wanted however. Solving these issues requires people who could look at ad tech problems with fresh eyes. One of the problems they found was related to ad load time, so speed became a priority. The result was a product called Zeus that has the fastest ad load times in the industry, faster even than Google, according to Dicker.

Revenue Revisited

The RED team developed Zeus and other ad tech products at the Post including PostPulse, FlexPlay, Re–Engage, Fuse, InContext, and Post Cards, and then began licensing them to other media companies, such as the Los Angeles Times, Toronto Globe and Mail, and Chicago Tribune. He found that providing a way to potentially improve ad technology across the industry, while producing another revenue source, was a happy side effect.

Dicker isn’t under any illusions that the tools his team has created are going to supplant the content/ad/subscription revenue model. However, he does see it as a viable additional form of revenue for the company, and he finds it exciting that his team is helping the core business grow and thrive.

“We now also have a Software as a Service model where the Washington Post is no longer solely reliant on advertising or subscriptions. We are actually becoming the technology vendor for other publications.” And that not only helps them diversify revenue, but has created an internal culture of innovation, which should help drive long-term success.

Advertising | Innovation | Perspectives

Inside the dystopian vision of the IAB’s new AR and VR advertising formats

You’re half-way through a gaming session and the world is breaking apart around you as you run from attacking aliens. Firing as you go, you turn a corner and suddenly your view is filled with the sight of a brand new sedan. You see a cute dog at your local coffee shop. When you lean down to pet the dog an ad pops up next to your hand inviting you to buy puppy food. Sounds dystopian? No, it’s just the latest in advertising technology guidance from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are exciting technologies, but they are far from mature. Early adopters have paid a lot of money for expensive devices but the future of both the hardware and software for AR and VR is still uncertain.

New Advertising Opportunities

This murky future hasn’t stopped the IAB from pushing out guidance in its latest “#IABNewAdPortfolio” on advertising formats for both platforms. The enthusiasm for new advertising opportunities is understandable. However, these new ad formats could easily kill off these infant platforms.

Worse, it is unlikely that early AR and VR advertisers will strictly adhere to the IAB’s guidelines. The reality is most ads have a tendency to step over the already permissive restrictions laid out in IAB documents. It seems likely that will also be the case with AR and VR.

The IAB has specified ad formats that could turn their hosting technologies into a wasteland. Advertisers could display any ad format onto a virtual wall or billboard. Considering the current state of display ads, that alone is a troubling concept. The IAB offers almost no restrictions on interactive objects, only recommending that a branded can of soda shouldn’t take up the whole view. One innovator in VR advertising provided their own horrifying example of a virtual landscape infested by Despicable Me’s Minions.

This image was proudly supplied to MIT’s Technology Review by MediaSpike as an example of just how great VR ads can be.
MediaSpike’s website provides the view from inside the Minion blimp, complete with three Minion ad placements and one Pepsi can.
Disruptive,  And Not in a Good Way

According to Crunchbase, this mission to create a world where every flat surface and vehicle stares at you through the dead goggled eyes of a Minion garnered over 5 million dollars in funding, surely a sign of the future to come.

The IAB guidance specifies an opportunity for interstitials as well:

360-degree video placed as an interstitial ad between different VR scenes. 360-degree video MUST completely fill the VR scene with video ad.

It is hard to imagine a more disruptive experience than being in one world and turning around into a 360 ad embodying an entirely different one. Such an ad format would be easy for less ethical content providers to exploit, with every virtual head turn or gaze providing a chance to fall into an ad.

I’m Looking at You, AR

Then comes the horror that is the IAB’s ad guidance on Augmented Reality experiences: AI that watches everything you glance at and triggers ads accordingly. Here’s the guidance on what happens when Orwell meets Ad Executive:

For example, a brand may choose to associate a product or service with dogs. When the AI system on a device “sees” a dog using the device lens, the AI system can associate the familiar concept with the previously known concept of a “dog.” The unknown visual of a dog that the AI system scans may be either an image of a dog or the three-dimensional animal. Once recognized, the system can trigger the display of brand content.

This is a terrible concept. First, eager marketers would likely train AI to trigger on even vaguely associated objects. Second, the guidance allows for display ads to be either attached to physical objects or stuck to your viewport until… I don’t know, you go crazy? The concept is so obviously terrible that it was satirized 17 years before the IAB even came up with it.

 

Tracking the Trackers

This doesn’t even touch on consumers increasing opposition to the tracking currently deployed in display and video ads on the web. Ads run by AIs that track every gaze would only compound that invasion of privacy.

Considering the low-quality technical performance of ad tech and the heavy battery use of AR devices, the platforms themselves would probably not be capable of supporting the ad space effectively. Endless popups assaulting an Augmented Reality user’s view is sure to destroy any chance the technology has to make it into the general consumer market. While current ad tech may have damaged the viability of publishers on the web, this may be the first time ad tech destroys a whole technology category with its urgency to monetize.

Slow Down and Get it Right

If AR and VR are to bring advertising dollars, it isn’t by replaying the mistakes of the last decade on new formats. The first step will be severely limiting the possible locations where—and amount of time when—advertising can appear. The next, in any guideline or best practice we must recommend against the invasive tracking of ‘Advertising Intelligences’. This is not the world we want to build and we cannot open the door for this type of tracking tied to these platforms.

This does not mean that there aren’t opportunities. Product placement is, without a doubt, a clear trade-off that most consumers have already accepted. Another option is that sponsors of VR and AR experiences could provide opening areas before users encounter the content, a more appropriate type of pre-roll.  If the technology is given the opportunity to mature, many other opportunities will certainly emerge.

Whatever the future brings, if we wish for it to include AR and VR in our everyday lives—and in the lives of the consumers whose trust is essential to our success—we can’t allow these types of proposals to go unchallenged. If we need ads to fund these platforms, we will have to find more creative options, ones appropriate to the technology and user experience. No matter what business model supports AR and VR, we don’t want to create an untenable experience before these emerging formats have had a chance to develop and capture audiences.

Aram Zucker-Scharff is the Director for Ad Engineering in The Washington Post’s Research, Experimentation and Development group. He is also the lead developer for the open-source tool PressForward and a consultant on content strategy and newsroom workflows. He was one of Folio Magazine’s 15 under 30 in the magazine media industry. He previously worked as Salon.com’s full stack developer. His work has been covered multiple times in journalism.co.uk and he has appeared in The Atlantic, Digiday, Poynter, and Columbia Journalism Review. He has also worked as a journalist, a community manager and a journalism educator.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives

Google’s dominance in digital ad spending continues, though challengers have emerged

Spending on search engine advertising is trending up — increasing to 22% growth in Q2 on Google, an increase from 9% last year — according to Merkle’s Digital Marketing Report Q2 2017. Search ads delivers the best bang-for-buck when it comes to “low-in-the-funnel” prospective customers, across both the B2C and B2C categories, and the ease of use makes it accessible to companies of all shapes and sizes.

Experienced digital marketers know that search engine marketing, primarily Google, has served as the bread-and-butter of online lead generation since the early 2010s. And this category’s continued expansion can be seen as good news for everyone in the digital marketing ecosystem. Though Google remains the bellwether player, brands are looking to expand their digital advertising footprint, and are looking for options beyond Google.

This is partially represented in this analysis, which includes Bing Ads and Yahoo Gemini. Given the sustained efficacy of Google search ads — and breathtaking profits realized by Google — over the past decade or more, it’s notable that it’s taken several years to attract formidable competitors to the category. But it’s great to have Bing (Microsoft) and Yahoo (Verizon) show up for the party. Even though genuinely competitive offerings may be years away, their scale and ability to offer relatively discount price products will help the category as a whole. Digital marketers are also cautiously optimistic that others will be attracted to the category as well, as Google has held sway over the market for too long,

Back to the data. The following are the most pertinent data points from Merkle’s recent research report, and what digital marketing professionals need to understand.

Key takeaways:
  • Q2 2017 saw continued strength for the two major digital marketing platforms as Google search spending growth accelerated to 23% year-over-year (Y/Y) and Facebook budgets continued to grow much more rapidly than the online ad industry as a whole.
  • While mobile continues to be the main engine of spending growth across digital ad platforms, desktop has been pulling more weight for Google in recent quarters; this resurgence began soon after Google began allowing search advertisers to bid separately for tablet traffic and the better performing desktop segment in Q3 2016.
  • Bing Ads and Yahoo Gemini combined search ad spending fell 3% Y/Y in Q2 2017, an improvement from a 14% decline in Q1. Though in absolute terms this news does not optically serve Bing of Yahoo well, this is a relative improvement in a growing marketplace, and excited digital marketing professionals, who have grown weary in recent years of their reliance on Google.
  • Facebook ad spend increased 56% Y/Y in Q2 2017, in line with Q1 growth. Facebook CPC fell 3% Y/Y, while CPMs jumped 57%. A relative new entrant on the scene, Facebook is a force to be reckoned with, especially in the B2C category. Based on CPC rates, Facebook is more than willing to “buy market share” and for good reason. It’s only a matter of time before Facebook figures out how to makes its mark in the B2B sector, where it’s already a significant force outside of the United States.
The Bottom Line

Through their spending, brands continue to  reinforce their estimation of the value and efficacy of text-based search engine marketing advertising. Consumers, both in the B2C and B2C categories, look to search engines to seek out vendors for their needs, ranging from new shoes to cars to enterprise software applications that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And companies continue to push more advertising dollars to the medium because of the success they experience in the channel.

Tim Bourgeois (@ChiefDigOfficer) is a partner at East Coast Catalyst, a Boston-based digital consulting companyspecializing in strategic roadmaps, digital marketing audits, and online marketing optimization programs.

Advertising | Innovation | Revenue

Bringing measurement to podcasts

The lack of metrics and tracking in the world of podcasts has kept many advertisers away from the space. However, podcasting has been a boon for direct response advertisers like Squarespace, BlueApron, and Samantha Bee’s favorite, MeUndies. Apple recently announced that it will finally share analytics on listener behavior in aggregate. This is a tremendous advancement for podcasting. The data will help producers understand what content hooks listeners and where they drop off. But, beyond measuring listener behavior, Slate wants to answer one big question for brand advertisers: Do podcasts work?

To answer this question, Slate Group Studios partnered with Prudential Financial Inc. on a program called Wealth Wits and paired it with the first study of it’s kind to assess the impact of a branded podcast program.

Slate was an early pioneer in podcasting and has been a leading force in the space for more than 12 years. As listeners flock to the medium, brands are keen to experiment. In 2015, Slate created its first branded podcasts with HBO, GE and Prudential. However, the lack of measurement has hampered aspirations to build out robust, long-term podcast marketing strategies.

Our Wealth Wits Investigation

The Prudential Wealth Wits program offered a customized content experience powered by the listener’s own financial behavior. The capstone of the campaign was an interactive self-assessment quiz, promoted on Slate, that served up a personalized podcast. The branded podcast was created in partnership with Prudential and hosted by journalist, comedian, and author Faith Salie. Wealth Wits intended to help people of all walks of life think about their retirement and plan for the future.

Slate Group Studios created a custom methodology in order to understand and assess the overall impact of the Wealth Wits campaign on Prudential’s brand favorability. The study looked at overall brand awareness, favorability and consideration. GFK Research measured the results.

For the study, control survey responses were collected prior to campaign launch to ensure no exposure to branded podcast. Exposed survey respondents were collected via a host-read at the end of the podcast to ensure exposure to branded content. The survey was hosted at an easy-to-remember vanity URL.

Measuring the Results

One positive result was that nearly 20% of survey respondents reported that they were very or somewhat likely to recommend Prudential to their friends and family.

Because this was a cross-platform program with interactive, display and audio elements, the study allowed us to compare the impact of different media types. These comparisons produced the most exciting findings, offering up valuable, statistically significant evidence of podcast advertising’s effectiveness. In short, the study found that podcast units were more than twice as successful than banner ads in driving statistically significant lifts in Brand Awareness (+14%) and Ad Recall (+21%).

In addition to finding that podcast units were more than twice as successful than banner ads in driving statistically significant lifts in Brand Awareness and Ad Recall, the units’ display creative also led to statistically significant lifts of 7% in Favorability and 8% in Consideration.

It was encouraging to see the success of Wealth Wits reflected in meaningful metrics. However, it’s even more exciting that the results offer up much-needed data on the effectiveness of branded podcasts as a medium. While the creativity afforded within the podcast space and the deep engagement have made branded podcasts desirable, the data to support the investment has often been elusive. With our custom methodology, the industry at large now has a model to follow and hard numbers to measure against.

We can now say emphatically that, yes, podcasts do work.

About the authors

Charlie Kammerer is Chief Revenue Officer of Slate, where he focuses on developing ways for brands to tap into Slate‘s audience through editorial content, podcasting, video, and custom programs. Kammerer joined Slate in 2017 after spending twenty years at Time Inc., where he was a brand builder and revenue generator across a diverse portfolio of brands, including Real Simple, Fortune, Food and Wine, Cooking Light, Golf, and This Old House. He’s based out of Slate‘s Brooklyn office.

Jim Lehnhoff is Vice President at Slate Group Studios, Slate’s in-house branded podcast agency. Formerly, Jim was Director of Advertising Strategy at Gawker Media, where he was responsible for overhauling the company’s go-to- market strategy while managing a team of six strategists. Prior to Gawker, Lehnhoff cut his teeth at Serious Eats, Curbed Network, and The Onion.

Advertising | Innovation | Perspectives

Is virtual reality advertising about to take off?

With all the moves by brands and publishers to use virtual reality for immersive storytelling, it was only a matter of time before true VR advertising would follow. But this being a relatively new form of advertising means that the rules and standards haven’t been written yet.

While recent VR launches by Google, Adobe, and Nokia show the potential of ads in VR, the momentum has yet to start catching on for audiences. And with current audience limitations — and what’s viable given industry trajectories — it seems that VR advertising remains a niche reality for now, despite exciting new experiments.

Pioneering Ventures into VR Advertising
Google is experimenting with VR advertising.

As part of its Area 120 internal incubator, Google recently announced its foray into VR advertising: Advr, an ad prototype that’s essentially a cube of content. Viewers are able to see an ad by clicking on the cube or staring at it long enough to generate a video ad pop-up. It’s an almost telekinetic use of your eyes to open a jack-in-the-box of advertising. The viewer can then either watch the ad or close the player.

In a blog post announcing the prototype, which is currently in testing with VR game developers, Google stated that VR ad formats — and its work within this space — ought to follow a few key principles:

  • easy for developers to implement
  • native to VR
  • flexible enough to customize
  • useful and non-intrusive for users

Adobe also has a VR advertising venture that creates a “theater-style experience” for 2-D videos, rather than 3-D or 360 degree video. Think of it as a video clip pausing for an advertisement to take over a whole theater before slowly fading out and the clip starting again.

It’s a bit more intrusive than Google’s effort, but Adobe says it could get this kind of advertising solution out to publishers in the next six to 12 months, and could eventually offer the same attributes of video advertising, including consumer targeting and detailed analytics. Adobe also says it wants to prioritize mobile VR as opposed to higher-end headsets, to make use of what’s more affordable to audiences.

Nokia’s OZO camera

Not to be outdone by competitors, Nokia is boasting a VR advertising experience as well. Technically a 360-degree video , the ad allows people to people virtually walk around a house to see how the its new line of digital health products by are used. It’s also a not-so-subtle way for Nokia to advertise its VR-creating hardware, the OZO camera.

Destination Advertising

While the potential for VR ads to boost retail and e-commerce (as Nokia is doing) is certainly on point, travel is another promising area. Cathay Pacific has partnered with the VR and 360-degree advertising firm OmniVirt to deliver such an ad experience. Marriott Hotels has also used 360-degree video to transport people to exotic destinations.

While these brands are trying to be forward-thinking and innovative in the advertising space, they’re also able to tap into the emotional longing for anyone considering a vacation. It’s no wonder that a recent study by Vibrant Media on VR and AR advertising shows consumers are interested in experiencing travel destinations before buying their tickets.

Niche Footholds = Niche Outcomes

Still, the same study by Vibrant Media lays out the harsh truth to new pioneers in VR advertising: There are tough hurdles to building audiences. The study found that consumers don’t want to have to worry about additional software and hardware. They also worry about getting charged for overages with cellular data.

Given that VR headsets have yet to expand beyond gaming and entertainment, it’s tough to imagine VR advertising expanding beyond these same kinds of consumers in the short term. Data from Forrester Research indicates that 46% of online adults in the U.S. in 2016 didn’t see themselves using VR and 42% of online adults hadn’t even heard of VR headsets. Mass consumer adoption of VR technologies is at least five years away, according to the research.

Meanwhile, a January 2017 report by Yes Lifecycle Marketing found that few advertisers are currently delving into VR or have plans for it. More than half of marketers surveyed said VR or AR advertising didn’t apply to their organizations, and only 8% of them were currently using VR advertising (7% AR advertising). The current marketers in this space are definitely on the cutting edge.

It’s important for publishers and advertisers to experiment with virtual reality and immersive storytelling, because they can truly be awe-inspiring experiences. But so far, the moves into VR advertising are baby steps and the standards and best practices are still a work in progress. While there is a load of potential, we have a long way to go for it to be a reality for the public at large.

 

Advertising | Perspectives | Video

Three key advertising takeaways from Cannes Lions

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity wrapped recently, and there was plenty for advertisers and marketers to chew on as they departed the French Riviera. Throughout the event, several themes emerged that seem poised to shape the rest of the year. Here’s a closer look at three in particular, based upon conversations we had with attending clients and partners.

Advertisers want more brand safety.

In the digital environment, which is a relatively open ad ecosystem, brand safety has always been top-of-mind for advertisers and agencies. Recently, given very public challenges for some platforms, brand safety is now front-and-center in conversations between brands, agencies and their technology partners. We saw this dynamic emerge at the NewFronts. And it continued – and accelerated – at Cannes.

Many platforms have responded by touting Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities for weeding out offensive content. But that’s only part of the solution. The most practical fix is for advertisers to work with trusted sources of premium inventory that can combine their supply with leading-edge quality control tools and technology. This is the most effective means of delivering true peace of mind for advertisers and boost brand safety.

Trust and accountability remain hot topics.

Trust and accountability were part of every discussion at Cannes. It’s clear that advertisers want and deserve deeper insight into how agency and technology partners act on their behalf. They want to know how their money is being spent. P&G is a good example. It announced a review of all media agency contracts this year to extract a broader transparency commitment and more granular data insights from “murky” agency and publisher relationships. That resonated at Cannes, where every buyer was calling for greater accountability across the digital ecosystem. Candidly, we think we led the discussion in how to get there.

It starts with the technology vendors and platforms. Advertising technology is the backbone of the industry. So, as supportive partners and category stewards, we have to take the lead and build and refine our services to deliver accountability. Third-party verification of inventory sources and attribution metrics is a first step. But beyond that, platforms need to be proactive, providing buyers with greater access to attribution data, making their technology stacks both vendor and media agnostic, and offering more programmatic transparency in areas like fees, CPMs and bids.

Immersive experiences are taking off.

Brand safety and accountability are critical. But at the end of the day, helping an advertiser engage their core audience effectively matters the most. To that end, “immersive experiences” were a centerpiece of this year’s event in Cannes, with an emphasis on mobile video.

Smartphones continue to grow as a screen of choice for video, rivaling desktop viewership consistently year-over-year. At Oath, we recently conducted a global study that found nearly 60%  of all consumers watch videos on their mobile phones every day. We are very close to the tipping point where mobile will soon be the number one video screen. What’s more, the rate at which consumers are adopting immersive, mobile-enabled video formats like VR, 360-degree video and live video, are surging. These types of experiences help brands reach their audiences in new and unique ways, through interactive storytelling. The technology to deliver immersion at scale has also improved, just as the audience’s appetite for immersive content has exploded.

Brand safety, accountability, and immersive experiences will continue to dominate industry discussions over the next several months. It will be interesting to see how they shape the ecosystem in the second half of the year.

Currently President, Ad Platforms at Oath, Tim has more than 20 years of online advertising experience living in Asia, Europe and the United States specializing in digital advertising platforms, data analytics and programmatic exchange-based technology. As President of Adtech Platforms, Tim’s role is to oversee all of the Demand and Supply Side engineering, product and business divisions that comprises of One by AOL, Brightroll, Flurry and Convertro, among others.

Tim came to AOL from the acquisition of Vidible where he was the founder.  As CEO, he oversaw the Video Content Exchange Platform that streamlined the way video content owners syndicate their content to publishers. While incubating Vidible, Tim was an Entrepreneur in Residence with Greycroft Ventures, advising portfolio companies such as Klout, Livefyre, elicit and Collective Media.

Advertising | Perspectives

What will it take to wake digital advertising’s sleeping giants?

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Digital media veterans may find solace in this passage from Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises.

“Gradually” could best describe the glacial change to the mobile web we witnessed from 2000 through 2007. But then Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone and “suddenly” we couldn’t move fast enough to keep up with consumers.

In every case of digital transformation, there have been “Sleeping Giants” offering premature and often prescient hints that turn into rapid change seemingly overnight. This acceleration is normally brought on by a significant tipping point whether it be a disruptive technology, competitive move, or a provocative press headline.

In digital advertising, Marc Pritchard’s January speech demanding independent accountability didn’t really cover new ground. His points were issues that the industry had discussed many times over the previous years. But it certainly mattered when Pritchard said it (and the press covered it). At that moment, in that room, in his voice, to that audience, to the IAB he said: “The days of giving digital a pass are over.” He urged the rest of the ad industry to follow P&G’s lead. “It’s time to grow up. It’s time for action.”

By virtue of the ad dollars he controls, Pritchard is a giant in the industry. While the issues he called out are far from new—particularly to a savvy industry vet like him—the very fact that he so directly addressed them shook the industry.

However, despite his call to arms, alarm bells continue to sound. Just this past Monday, Digiday reported that up to 80% of Facebook’s video advertisements weren’t viewable. We first heard this more than a year ago. Facebook tried to fend off the whispers for as long as it could —going so far as to state last year, “we have our own measurement and how we measure.” Yet these whispers have risen to a general outcry. And independent measurement coupled with industry press will carry the message far and wide.

Many have called out issues of brand safety over the years, including the more recent renegade Sleeping Giants Twitter account. However, the March headlines out of the UK that reported on extremist content on YouTube changed things overnight. Major advertisers pulled their campaigns. UK and French governments surfaced regulation discussion. Chase Bank began individually whitelisting the sites where its ads could appear. Premium publishers have long highlighted the brand halo that respected content confers on the ads that surround it. But this chorus of major advertisers decrying the effect of negative contexts triggered a precipitous escalation of the issue.

DCN has led the “Duopoly” discussion since 2016 regarding the lopsided competitive environment with Facebook and Google. But it was Margrethe Vestager’s $2.7 Billion decision out of the EU that will drive Google to change its business behavior going forward. (Side note: Read this and be highly skeptical of the motivations of anyone who argues this decision is EU “protectionism.”)

But there is a much larger sleeping giant about to rise and roar.

DCN and its counterpart organization for the marketers, ANA, have been systematically documenting the issues of building a quality advertising supply chain over the past three years. We started with the shift to viewable impressions. Both organizations have intensely studied invalid traffic and bot fraud across the web. The ANA also recently studied financial transparency and the economics of the ad tech tax. And comScore studied the value of environment and, in turn, brand safety.

But documenting the problem does not go nearly far enough. So DCN’s board bravely accepted ANA’s challenge and, in Sept 2016 began to build out a premium digital marketplace called TrustX.

We set out to answer to these demands:

  • 100% premium publisher inventory in an open RTB private marketplace. Check.
  • 100% human and viewable ad supply, or advertisers don’t pay. Check.
  • 100% priority on brand safety and campaign efficacy. Check.
  • 100% trading transparency down to the publisher URL. Check.
  • 100% financial transparency from bid to delivery, reporting and billing. Check.

If you do the math, digital advertisers are wasting away more than $10 million per day on overpaying for a murky digital advertising supply chain. I can’t imagine this sort of waste is escaping a CFO or CEO these days. And let’s not forget the ripple effect caused by their dollars and brands being associated with criminal ad fraud or extremist material on predominantly user-generated content experiences like Facebook and YouTube. It is clear that the market demands a solution to these problems—one with scale, simplicity, efficiency, and accountability.

On behalf of the premium publishers, we have stepped up and built it: TrustX. I’ve been informed by the TrustX management team that nearly every major agency and brand is leaning into TrustX as exactly what our market needs.

So, the only remaining question is who are the Sleeping Giants that will ensure that digital advertising grows up – not gradually but now, suddenly ?  Which advertisers and partner agencies will take a stand at scale making the true economic commitments necessary to drive the transparency and accountability priorities that TrustX represents and the industry needs?

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