Viewability is at the center of every digital media buy. It’s the metric that assures consumers have an opportunity to see a digital advertisement. The Media Rating Council (MRC), an independent third-party, has established a framework for measuring and reporting viewability. The MRC’s standard for viewability includes two factors: the amount an ad is shown on screen and the amount of time the ad is viewed on screen. A display ad is considered viewable if half its pixels are on the screen for one second. A video ad must be on screen for at least two consecutive seconds. The standard is meant to be a minimum threshold for determining an “opportunity-to-see.”
Not surprisingly, the research shows that the more viewable a digital ad is and the more screen time it has, the more likely it is to be effective. The more viewable campaigns are, the more likely they are to lead to a consumer action to buy, click or register, etc.
However, viewability is one of many factors connected to a campaign’s success. Additional metrics such as ad interaction also show a positive relationship with conversions. Specifically, Magna reports a direct relationship between consumers who interact longer with ads during exposure and their conversion rates. For example, the longer consumers interact with ads during exposure, the more likely they are, at some point, to convert to an action.
The research provides confirmation that the MRC baseline of viewability is clearly connected to ad effectiveness. It is significant to note that the research also proves that higher levels of viewability required by some agencies (80% to 100%) has no additional impact on ad effectiveness.
It’s important for marketers to experiment and test viewability rates and engagement levels to find the best performing combinations. Importantly, measurement of campaign success should include metrics that relate to performance goals. Other metrics such as such as cost, conversion task, target audience, ad format, frequency and others may also to the story of an ad’s performance.
The number of brands placing ads programmatically dropped 17% in April compared to the same period last year. The reason? Brand safety.
Left to Right: Tanya Dua, Business Insider; Joe Barone, Group M; Mike Caprio Sizmek; Matthew Hogg, LinkedIn;, Ryan Pauley, Vox; Kathleen Comer, The Trade Desk; Todd Krizelman, MediaRadar
Brands are more concerned than ever that their ads are being displayed next to offensive content. Things have escalated in light of the most recent YouTube scandal. As a result, some are beginning to shift programmatic spend. But is this the right move? How can agencies and brands better control quality? How can the industry improve?
Earlier this month, my company, MediaRadar, hosted a panel discussion around these questions and the future of programmatic. Panelists included top experts from GroupM, Vox Media, The Trade Desk, LinkedIn, and Sizmek.
Here are their thoughts.
Who’s to blame?
When asked who was at fault for the distrust within the programmatic supply chain, Joe Barone, Managing Partner, Brand Safety Americas for GroupM cited the system as a whole.
“I think it’s the programmatic supply chain,” Barone said. “Brand safety means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. One of the issues that’s very emotional for the client is brand equity associated with negative content. And it’s not even the biggest issue from a financial standpoint. There’s a lot of issues, which is why there are so many different ways to try to fix it.”
Similarly, Kathleen Comer, Vice President, Client Services at The Trade Desk, thinks it’s up to the industry as a whole to fix it. “I might focus less on blame and more on missed opportunity,” she said. “There are a lot of big-spending advertisers who are starting to reevaluate the transparency of our supply chain. And they’ve scrutinized us. To me, it’s all of our responsibility to fix it because that means there are budgets on the sidelines that haven’t been leveraged yet.”
How to fix it
The panelists also offered up solutions on how to make programmatic more transparent in the future. Mike Caprio, Chief Growth Officer at Sizmek, says that the company plans to deliver more transparency via one of the company’s recent acquisitions.
“We just made a recent acquisition of a company called Rocket Fuel,” said Mike. “And one of the big initiatives that we’re undertaking over the next couple of weeks is moving to a 100 percent transparent marketplace. For us, that means that we’re going to disclose every fee, every bit of inventory that’s blocking our platform, the viewability rates – everything that’s available. That’s the starting place where we can make sure buyers know what they’re getting from using our marketplace, by working with our supply partners to make sure everything is being disclosed, including fees.”
Matthew Hogg, Head of Programmatic at LinkedIn, believes it’s a complicated issue without a single solution. “With this kind of space, there’s no silver bullet. There’s no ‘hey, we’ve done this thing and it’s going to fix all of your transparency and trust needs and wants.’ But we’re trying to think very strategically. Big on our list of priorities is ads.txt, which I think is a step in the right direction.”
What still needs to be done
The discussion concluded with the panelists commenting on what they think still needs to be done. “I think the first thing that needs to be done is a behavior change,” said Ryan Pauley, VP, Revenue Operations & General Manager of Concert, Vox Media. “There’s enough technology and solutions today to make a real difference. Publishers need to make sure the inventory is viewable and leverage the ads.txt file. DSPs should do the same as trade desk. Marketers and clients need to assess the level of risk they’re willing to tolerate because they can manage it too. There are enough solutions in place that I think a few behavior changes can make a difference.”
Barone thinks that better attribution is the solution. “One of the biggest problems is that we give credit to things that never happen,” he said. “When this happens, you don’t even know what drove your business. If we could build better models and know what is working, it will be a huge benefit. Better attribution is a big part of the answer.”
At the end of the day, programmatic buyers are demanding a more transparent and brand-safe environment than ever. And while there’s no single, clear-cut solution, the industry will keep taking measures to mitigate the problem.
As Facebook continues to amass enough force and influence to rival a superpower, its ad targeting is not only the social giant’s biggest liability, but also its forte. Entire countries, global populations, legislators, and advertisers both seethe and marvel at its prowess. And Facebook finds itself caught in a conundrum created by its own success.
One thing is clear: Digital advertising on Facebook is skyrocketing. Most advertisers haven’t been dissuaded by the company’s negative press — because the crisis has yet to directly hit them. However, history shows that brand safety isn’t a given on the internet. Facebook needs to rein in its own power – not just in testimony, but also in practice — so that it can placate regulators and a very concerned public before the next scandal hits.
Targeted propaganda… and eavesdropping?
Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election is obviously one of the biggest examples of what ad targeting intended to spread propaganda and misinformation can do if left unchecked. Some 3,000 ads reached nearly 146 million people with a paltry $100,000 ad buy. And some ads had the explicit aim to exploit contentious issues like gun rights and illegal immigration. Coordinated campaigns operated by fake accounts liked, shared, and commented on these posts. If you spend any time on Facebook, you know intuitively what this means: More interactions increased the chances someone would see these post.
Russia may be the biggest example, but it’s certainly not the only one. Take China. The country may ban Facebook within its borders, but Chinese companies purchase thousands of dollars in Facebook advertising every quarter to help spread its state-sponsored propaganda. That means the typical news you’d see on Chinese television, which touts the country’s prosperity and stability relative to global crises and is subject to massive censorship, reaches far beyond the average worker in China. It’s a digital extension of China’s own foreign policy and entrance into other countries.
Facebook’s recent face-off before Congress has prompted even more attention among politicians on what’s possible on the platform. Two U.S. senators, Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) recently created a Facebook page for a fictional political group, paid Facebook to target content from the page toward thousands of journalists and staffers on Capitol Hill and found, as one of their aides told Axios’ Mike Allen, “there was literally no mechanism on [Facebook] for us to [prove] we were who we said we were.”
Here’s the deal: Facebook’s ad targeting is so scary because it works so well. In the middle of this political mess (and consumer concerns about sacrificing our data and ourselves to Facebook) it’s likely that there are marketers who interpret the Russian campaign as impressive. It’s basically a selling point for cheap targeted advertising on the social giant.
“For better or worse, one key takeaway from this is how effective Facebook can be as an advertising medium,” Kyle Bunch, managing director of ad agency R/GA’s social practice, told BuzzFeed News. “Many advertisers are probably asking themselves, ‘How can I make better use of data to have my campaigns get those kind of results?’”
Who’s who
Any type of post can be promoted on Facebook. Should Facebook, which largely requires people to use their real names (unlike Twitter), create more restrictions on who buys ads and sets up Facebook Pages, requiring more information and verification? One would assume that an up-and-coming restaurant would be willing to invest the time to apply for verification. However, there are those who will grumble at the tediousness. Other critics might wonder why Big Brother Facebook must have the responsibility of verifying the credibility — and by extension, morality — of these buyers.
But as frightening as it may be for some to admit, Facebook is already a Big Brother. Advertisers, or anyone who wants to promote their brand to the world, for that matter, can’t afford to sacrifice the unparalleled scale the company offers. There may be other tech companies, but there is no other Facebook. The social behemoth has pledged more transparency and more hiring of ad reviewers, but that will never be enough as long as scandals continue to come to light. Congress may not be satisfied with self-regulation alone. And ultimately, Facebook will have to rein in its overwhelming power and set up checks and balances – even if it takes a short-term hit on revenues – to satisfy an angry public.
Brand safety measures are a key concern for advertisers given recent headlines highlighting safety limitations in the programmatic advertising buying process. Advertisers and brand marketers often resort to open exchanges and ad networks for large volumes of inventory and to reach demographic targets. As a result, their ads may be found next to offensive or inappropriate digital and video content. The CMO Council, in partnership with Dow Jones, examines the impact of unsuitable ad placement on consumer satisfaction and perception of digital advertising in their research report “How Brands Annoy Fans.”
To provide context, the research also provides insights on the consumers’ view of the digital content environment. A full three-quarters of the 2,000 consumer respondents surveyed in North America and in the UK report that they are concerned with the growing number of fake and biased news sites. Further, consumers surveyed rank social media last among their five most trusted information channels, following friends, TV, search engines and newspapers. As a result, 60% of respondents now seek their content from brand sites with trusted content.
These findings indicate that environment impacts the overall advertising experience. Most consumers (88%) state a negative advertising experience may make them think differently about the advertised brand. Nearly half of all consumers (48%) indicate they would rethink purchasing brands or would boycott products whose ads appear alongside digital content that offends or concerns them. Further, 38% report they would lose trust in a brand that advertises next to objectionable content.
Importantly, ad placement in specific channels has a direct impact on how consumers perceive those brands. Additional findings on the effect of ad placement on consumer intent include:
64% of consumers state they respond better to ads delivered from a trusted news site than those that appear on social media or search.
If ads are near to objectional content, 37 percent report it changes how they think of the brand, and 11% state they will boycott the brand.
Advertisers and programmatic platforms need to take these findings to heart as consumers are ready and willing to their business elsewhere. Importantly, where marketers run their ads is just as important as the ads themselves. Brands need to ensure their ads are adjacent to appropriate content among trusted-brand websites in well-lit environments.
The alignment of new laws, reader advocacy, and technology has opened up a challenge to user tracking tools. While some express concern that an end to unbridled tracking will hinder the digital ecosystem, this is an enormous opportunity for publishers to take the lead in building the next generation of personalization technology. However, this evolution in personalization will need to be built on a foundation of editorial metadata, which will drive everything from video playlists to targeted advertising.
A new door opens
A new type of personalization that eschews user-based targeting is coming. In part this will be driven by the fact that many analytics, ad tech, and personalization-tech companies will be deeply affected by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). An AdAge headline once proclaimed that the GDPR will “rip global digital ecosystem apart.” While that may be a bit alarmist, the GDPR will force companies operating within the EU, and the third party tools they use, to adhere to a strict opt-in for all tracking. It will also levy severe penalties on those companies within EU jurisdiction that fail to do so.
The omnipresent motivation behind the law, though, has failed to prompt the development of similar legislation in the U.S. Despite results and sentiment that suggest otherwise, targeting remains central to many marketing strategies. Brands have found user targeting programmatic campaigns less effective than they expected. Consumer groups have formed in protest of the functionality of user tracking in action (such as ads appearing with no regards to the content they appear on). Individuals on social networks find retargeting approaching some sort of uncanny valley — a point at which its very accuracy is becoming deeply discomforting. And we’re even seeing the start of a conversation around user targeting happening in Congress.
A victory for publishers
Publishers have a mission to treat their readers and viewers ethically. The good news is that smart publishers can (and do) run user-targeting related tools on that basis. The personalization of ads and news has become a significant trend, one that many are still chasing. However, the fundamental underlying technology is challenged by the GDPR. Even if publishers never conduct any business outside of the U.S., the vendors who power personalization tools do. We operate on literal reams of data but must face a future where comparatively little is available.
These oncoming shifts in the marketplace shouldn’t frighten publishers. They are likely to hurt the thousands of middleware third-party ad tech companies that have failed to deliver on user targeting for years now while skimming profits. A push to decrease both publisher and advertiser reliance on user targeting is an opportunity.
Metadata to the rescue
Publishers need to take a look at the new generation of tools that can provide the data needed for personalization on-page without ever tracking a user. Metadata standards are improving and adding detail. Our current tools consider article relationships mostly in keywords and categories but new ways of telling the story about a story could bring about a revolution in personalization.
Almost by accident, social media has pushed thousands of sites to adopt Open Graph, an RDF-based standard built to provide detailed site data. Search engines have long supported and rewarded structured data like hCard. Improvement in the Schema.org project, along with increased support of JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) by a variety of platforms, has made it an increasingly promising standard. Unfortunately, The Schema Project, which is complex and lacking good documentation and in-action examples, has been challenging to adopt. Publishers have also lacked a clear reward for use. However, that is changing with the announcement of support by Google for the use of structured data for fact checking.
Regardless of how successful the fact checking markup project becomes, it demonstrates that page-to-page relational metadata is joining other complex metadata systems as part of the future of publishing. With privacy concerns on the rise, it behooves publishers to start considering these systems as part of the future of personalization.
A structured future
Beyond keywords and tags, there is an embarrassment of new options for metadata that can create a unique experience on each webpage more tailored to the moment the reader encounters an article than following them with cookies ever was. While a reader might have been shopping for shoes yesterday, what they read today may put them in a very different mindset. And the reader of today is a more useful target for personalization than the reader of yesterday.
What can we build on using enhanced metadata? Geographic coordinates could drive a set of recommendations even more relevant than attempting to geotarget the user. Article authorship has worked well for media companies where the byline promises a particular voice. We can build playlist systems that find their next videos through more than title keywords, looking at producer credits, length and related affiliate offers. Types of content or referenced urls in the body of an article can allow personalization tools to recommend other articles that share a particular format, or ads that sell the referenced type.
Planning beyond keywords
Taking advantage of these opportunities will require different ways of thinking about what everyone creates and how it breaks down. It won’t just be up to an SEO expert to drop tags on a page. News organizations will find that optimizing for search, social, or ads will require taking advantage of all the opportunities that complex metadata provides and operating within a larger plan for how metadata should be handled. The editorial and business sides will need to work together to consider the whole of outlets’ output, prioritizing approaches, and building out tools that automate and suggest metadata structures.
Owners of this process will need to consider personalization on a variety of factors that describe form, format, key ideas and digital objects. They’ll have to build out a framework on how articles connect to each other that will describe small universes of content. A site that takes full advantage of metadata structures can promise a richer experience for readers, viewers and listeners than any provided through cookie-based tracking, an experience based on in-the-moment intent.
Our current generation of overly-targeted ads and recommendations don’t just fail to perform, they’re creepy and overpriced. Our audiences deserve more and our ethics require that we provide it. We have the technology and industry pressure to deploy successful alternatives. Understanding, expanding and adapting the use of detailed metadata across the web will build better media companies and a better open and well-connected internet.
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.
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.
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’sa 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 aproductcalledZeus 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 PostCards, 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.
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.
To evaluate the impact of viewability and measure its effectiveness, Magna, IPG Media Lab, Moat and The Trade Desk joined together to analyze ad viewability rates as related to overall campaign performance. The research specifically focused on direct-response advertising. While the MRC set the standard, Magna’s research focused on better understanding the relationship between how viewable an ad is to how effective it is.
