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Advertising | Featured Post | Perspectives | Policy

Apple and California are pushing advertising to adapt. That’s a good thing.

For far too long, many have falsely equated the value of digital advertising as the ability to track consumer behavior. This belief, and much of the marketing strategy it inspired, eroded consumer trust, which hasn’t been a win for anyone. Regulation is catching up and efforts are now being made to align business practices more closely with consumer expectations.

Regulation is catching up and efforts are now being made to align business practices more closely with consumer expectations. Unfortunately, this has a lot of pundits opining about the negative impact of privacy governance on marketing. The reality is that digital advertising has much more than tracking to offer consumers, marketers, and media companies. The changing landscape is a necessary evolutionary step, and an opportunity to get things right.

CPRA in effect

Later this summer, California regulators will spell out draft rules for how companies should comply with the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), which builds on and strengthens existing California privacy law. One of the biggest changes will be the ability for consumers to opt out of being tracked with a single click. The CPRA specifically requires companies to honor an opt out signal generated from a global privacy control in a browser or device.

Interestingly, this new provision in the CPRA mirrors Apple’s approach with App Tracking Transparency (ATT), which it rolled out in 2021 as part of its update to iOS 14.5. Under ATT, apps must ask consumers for permission to track them. The results have not been surprising: 81% of consumers have chosen the option not to be tracked.

So, what will happen when Californians have the same ability to opt out as Apple users have today?

It’s not unreasonable to assume that Californians will opt out of tracking at similar rates. Given that there are more than 39 million California residents, an 81% opt out rate translates to 31,590,000 people. And really, if even half that opt out, it is not a small number. Advertisers will understandably want to find new ways to reach these consumers. The industry is already feeling the impact of consumers’ privacy preferences and advertising must evolve accordingly.

Dominant companies dented

Since the launch of ATT, companies that depend on web-wide tracking of consumers have suffered. Facebook warned investors that Apple’s improvements to privacy will cost them $10 billion in revenue this year.

It’s interesting to note that ATT’s impact is felt solely in Apple’s platform, which has provided Google with the unique calling card to advertisers of being the operating system and browser still “all-in” on tracking. However, CPRA will apply to everyone. Given that Google, like Facebook, has built an advertising empire based on invasive tracking, it seems inevitable that the company will see an impact on its ad revenues as well.

Some have noted that Apple has also seen revenue climb from its own App Store search ads. However, they are quickly reaching capacity constraints in the app promotions category, so this is unlikely to serve as a major growth category for Apple.

Ad innovation

Of course, despite limits to tracking, Apple users still see display ads as those ads just aren’t targeted using behavioral profiles. Apple allows ads to be targeted to cohorts or by using first party data. So, I believe that we will start to see more innovation in how advertising is targeted to consumers. First party targeted ads seem like an obvious winner. In particular, ad innovation on Apple platforms could yield significant success because those audiences have long been seen as a more valuable consumer demographic than Android users.

Premium advertising alignment

Consumers frequently complain about creepy ads that follow them around the web. Those kinds of ads are not subtle. In fact, they are viewed by many as the digital equivalent of junk mail. And, as such, they don’t match well with premium content.

However, ads that are based on first party data might be better suited to a premium environment. For starters, the consumer is likely to realize that they are seeing a certain ad because of data they shared with the publisher. They are also likely to have a more favorable view of that ad because of the context. That’s because – instead of focusing solely on targeting a user at the lowest cost – the advertiser has instead intentionally aligned themselves with the relationship the publisher enjoys with the consumer. The ad is, therefore, likely to leverage that premium context to greater effect. In a world where third-party profiling is restricted, we could start to see higher quality ads in premium contexts – and ads that are more effective as a result.

Valuable consenting consumers

While it is a relatively small number, the 19% of consumers that intentionally opt-in to data sharing with sites and companies they trust will become extremely valuable. Trusted, well-respected brands promise to be the main beneficiaries as they are those most likely to gain consent from consumers. Obviously, advertisers would pay a premium to reach these audiences. It’s also interesting to consider how premium publishers could find new ways outside of advertising to monetize their most loyal consumers.

If past is prologue, big tech lobbyists and lawyers will forebodingly warn that the CPRA will cause irreparable damage to the advertising industry. They will bemoan the impact on small businesses and diverse voices. However, it is critical to remember that their real goal is to blunt the hit to Google and Facebook’s bottom lines, which is already driven by upwards of 70% of the digital advertising market.

The future is good advertising

Ultimately, we need to focus on the fact that consumers want, and will get, more control over how their data is shared across the web. As Carnegie-Mellon economist Alessandro Acquisti points out: When consumers are empowered with more privacy, welfare doesn’t evaporate, it shifts and reallocates towards a new set of winners.

The adaptation required from ATT and CPRA are likely to shake up digital advertising and shift advertising revenue from current channels. Like Apple’s tracking prevention last year, CPRA is poised to have a huge impact on the companies dominating digital advertising by logging every aspect of a consumer’s behavior. At the same time, these shifts promise to expand opportunities for trusted, premium publishers; They will stand out to consumers by offering something consumers actually want: valuable news and entertainment, delivered in a way that respects them and their wishes.

Advertising | Industry-Research

Premium VOD advertising placements outperform YouTube and Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

MediaScience defines premium content as:

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

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

Recall

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

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

Likeability

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

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

Advertising | Industry-Research

Checklist for effective advertising environments: brand fitness, quality, trust

It is essential for marketers to question the efficacy of the outlets where they place their advertising campaigns. They must choose channels that provide a positive impact on the brand message the audience receives. Past industry studies from comScore, WGM and IAS have all found that  that brand effectiveness and brand lift are highly correlated to the quality of the content channel. In fact, the consensus is that running ads on premium publisher sites had significantly higher brand effectiveness and brand lift compared to non-premium sites. The positive lift is attributed to the “halo effect” from the premium environments.

New research, Signally Success, from Richard Shotton and house51, looks at the halo effect across different media platforms (TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, social media, and video sharing sites). However, it is important to note that while social media and video sharing sites are included in the research design, digital publisher sites are not. That said, the research does expand on the halo effect, offering characteristic details about brand lift and the how they differ between advertising channels.

The findings include:

Optimum signals for brand advertising

Signaling is the driving force in every advertising campaign. Therefore, it powers each consumer purchasing decision. Shotton’s analyzes showcases advertising’s ability to drive fitness and social signals.

  • Fitness signals show signs of financial health, product confidence and overall brand quality. Communicating strong fitness signals informs the consumer about the financially viability associated with the brand.
  • Social signals include brand fame, popularity, and success. Social signals allow consumers to assess if they will form a  relationship with a brand.

Each media brand’s ability to communicate these signals varies greatly. Quality content, representing financially independent and socially successful brands should be top choices for campaigns. Again, selecting the right channel for the right brand is a critical part of the equation.

Emotional trust is a brand asset

Building and maintaining emotional trust is crucial for any brand. This creates the connection point between consumer and product. Moreover, the emotion of trust is stronger than rational thoughts and can often last beyond one experience. Consumers with high levels of emotional trust are willing to give a brand a second chance even after a negative brand experience.

Brands build their reputation and deep emotional trust through years of positive product experiences (including advertising) and nurturing relationships with their consumers. Media channels must compliment the emotional trust sentiment and not distract from it.

Shotton’s research calls our attention to human behavior and the influence of psychology in media planning. It questions the methods of hypertargeting, personalization, and the cost-efficiency practice of buying low-quality content channels. It calls for marketers to identify and advertise in quality and trusted media brands. Importantly, it recognizes the positive lift from the premium environments as a key driver of necessary brand signals.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Video

Premium context and 30-second spots dominate video advertising right now

It’s shaping up to be a defining year for the video advertising landscape. Notably, 2019 was marked by the primacy of connected TV, an embrace of the value of premium content adjacency, and a return of the good old 30-second ad for brand storytelling.

We will reserve full judgement for our year-in-review report after the close of 2019. However, our Q3 report — based on video ads served from our asset management platform, AdBridge— reveals relatively stable trends this year in how marketers are using digital video to build business. This absence of wild swings indicates that the industry is settling into its new, CTV-based reality.

Perhaps what’s old is new again? And by this we mean that maybe things we always believed to be true are still true but in new and better ways.

Here are some noteworthy video trends:  

CTV Delivers the Big Screen TV-like Experience But with Consumer Choice & Control

In Q3 2019, it happened. CTV became the majority destination for impressions served, tallying in at 51%. Sure, this may fluctuate a bit quarter to quarter based on the supply of inventory. But it’s striking to see that figure relative to where we landed in 2018 at 38% of impressions being served to connected TV destinations. The steady march in CTV share from Q1 (49%) to Q2 (50%) to Q3 (51%) leads us to believe this is a true, predictable trend and not another shiny object phenomenon.

Premium Content Adjacency Clearly Works for Brands

All three quarters of 2019 showed a strong embrace of premium content destinations vs. media aggregators. In fact, the average mix in 2019 to-date is 81% premium/19% aggregators. This is certainly driven in part by the rush to leverage CTV but there is also a solid increase in impressions going to premium online content as well.

Spoiler alert: Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) brands really like premium content as evidenced by the vertical specific data in that category. In Q3, DTC brands delivered 93% of their impressions to premium inventory. But a preference for aggregators is one way in which auto advertisers show markedly different trends from the broader group. The 57% of impressions served to media aggregators in Q3 is a 10 percent increase from the prior quarter and nearly triple the overall rate.

Brands Need 30 Seconds to Grab Us by the Hearts and Minds

Brands need all shapes and sizes of ad formats to truly navigate the consumer media landscape today. And while that portfolio will surely include experimentation in the super short category (:06 ads for example), we saw a move back to more :30’s in 2018 and 2019 after a move to go shorter in years prior. For example, the share of :30’s served in 2015 was 41%.

That dipped to 38% in 2016 and hit an all-time low of 33% in 2017. In 2018, :30s jumped to 54% and in Q3 of this year, they accounted for 66% of ads served. Perhaps short stories can become too short to be effective and a mix is what’s needed to affect consumer behavior today. This seems to be especially true in the Auto and DTC verticals, which both showed an even larger investment in longer ads. For auto, 30-second spots accounted for 84% while in the DTC category they rose to a whopping 97% of impressions by length.

Our research, which has tracked video advertising trends quarterly for almost four years, finds that despite the innovative nature of the streaming wars, many video industry fundamentals still apply, or are back in style.  Context matters, both in the sense that premium placements are popular and longer ad formats provide more in-depth messaging. The heating wars are heating up and its critical to keep a close eye on the emerging trends and opportunities in this market.

Advertising | Uncategorized

Compete or collaborate? Two approaches to dealing with walled gardens

Publishers are rightfully concerned with the fact that huge search and social companies dominate today’s digital advertising market. Typically, they have reacted to this state of play in one of two ways: by either trying to compete with these so-called walled gardens, or by joining forces with them.

But which approach leads to the best results for advertisers? Should publishers give in meekly to the “can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality that’s been lining the pockets of these companies for well over a decade? Or should they take stock, take a stand, and find profitable ways to compete against them?

We’re in a unique age of digital domination

The advent of digital has brought with it a dilemma for publishers and their advertisers. It is possible to reach a wider audience than ever before. In most cases, that means they need to pay for exposure with the globe’s biggest and most influential big tech firms, Google and Facebook.

However, many publishers are embracing the challenge of taking on these closed publishing ecosystems. They have confidence in their methods, and they want to prove to their customers that their brand is in fact in safer hands when it’s away from the monopolistic claws of the duopoly.

Others, however, believe that the walled gardens created by such companies make it nigh on impossible to compete for reach in the wider market. And some of them look to inter-provider collaboration as a way to guarantee results for their customers (and keep their business afloat).

The case for competition

A growing percentage of today’s publishers are hesitant to collaborate with big tech because they’ve been burned by them in the past. And many they don’t trust platforms to deliver the exposure and brand-safe contexts that their advertisers need.

The topic of trust has come to the fore in recent years. A series of antitrust investigations have been exposing the monopolistic practices of big tech, particularly in the US, where 50 state attorneys recently opened general investigations into Google’s advertising policies.

High fluctuations in traffic from these providers hasn’t improved their reputation for stable, consistent results, nor has the withdrawal of many features from these platforms that were intended to help publishers share, and profit from, their content. Facebook’s Instant Articles, for example, died a rather untimely death after just two years thanks to inconsistent reporting and a lack of opportunity for monetization.

The technical challenges involved with cooperating with these companies are also proving to be barriers to successful collaboration. Many big tech firms, not least Facebook, expect publishers to build their own separate content injection API, a process that is costly, time-consuming and inconvenient.

Data driven

In fact, walled gardens are notoriously cagey with their data as a whole, making it difficult to remove and activate key information from their own systems and thereby rendering it incompatible with other aggregation platforms that might have better (read: more relevant) features for publishing houses.

This has led to many publishers relying heavily on their own primary data as their main insights to the market. Doing so might be restrictive, but the upside is, at least the company in question has complete control over how much of this data is released, and who sees it.  

Experience matters

When considering the case for competition, we also need to look at the way in which the buying public respond to ads from various channels. Research has proven that people are sick of screens covered with paid search ads, but are receptive to advertising in the context of trustworthy content. A report from Nielsen goes so far as to say that local media receives three times higher consumer trust and 2.5 high positive sentiment compared to ads from high market-share platforms, suggesting that ads from magazines, TV and newspapers are less annoying to (and thus more successful with) consumers.  

The case for collaboration

Google and Facebook not only dominate the publishing space, they’re directing it. It could be argued that they are doing a lot of the hard work by blazing the trail. Thus, all collaborators need to do is keep up – and use the features and innovations delivered via their marketplaces to the advantage of their advertisers. A key argument for collaboration is that shared data equals better data. Having access to the insights shared by walled gardens benefits the whole of market. That is, if this data hasn’t been manipulated for these companies’ own gain, of course.

And here we are, back to the elephant in the room. The issue of trust. Those who are still keen to collaborate should be encouraged by the fact that some big tech CEOs, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, do appear to be addressing publishers’ concerns head on.

Yes, more needs to be done when it comes to levelling the playing field for publishers. (And proposed policies such as the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act are going to go some way to alleviating publishers’ concerns.) But the fact remains that these companies lead the market because they have nailed a model that, for the most part, works. According to a survey from Adform, some 13% of publishers even believe that walled gardens simplify revenue generation and the distribution process. Despite the bad press, there are publishers out there who are happy with what’s on offer and who will keenly collaborate.

Finding the best approach

Both approaches have their own merits. The only way that publishers can decide whether they want to compete or collaborate with Google and Facebook is to consider their long-term goals, then determine how the features on offer from each platform will help them achieve them. They also need to think about where they stand on content sharing and control, data ownership, and the availability and accuracy of their reporting metrics.

And there’s no reason why publishers can’t adopt a dual strategy that allow them to compete and collaborate in equal measure. After all, collaboration doesn’t mean giving in to big tech. It just means keeping their biggest adversaries onside – and using access to big tech’s products and policies to better inform their own strategy.

Can we really compare news publishers with big tech firms?

Regardless of the relationship they have with Google and Facebook, smaller publishers must remember that they offer something different to the tech giants of today. They’re unique from big tech in three important ways:

  1. Advertisers trust them, because they have control over where their ads appear.
  2. They can not only prove campaign ROI, but also deliver recommendations that add value to their offering. It’s an element of personalization that Big Tech struggles to emulate at scale.
  3. Crucially, they the capabilities to deliver omnichannel campaigns in a much more agile way than the bigger firms. This is key in a market that’s increasingly embracing the combined power of digital, print, OOH and events advertising channels. 

There is most definitely an argument for publishers to focus to their own strengths, not big tech’s well-documented weaknesses.

Advertising | Industry-Research

High quality content casts positive halo over ad perception

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

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

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

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

Quality content drives engagement

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

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

Higher quality, higher memorability

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

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

Same ad, different reaction

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

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

Advertising | Featured Post | Industry-Research | Perspectives

The halo effect is real: New research confirms that ads perform better in quality contexts

Media companies have long declared that it matters where advertising campaigns run. Unfortunately, when the ability to micro-target users at scale became available, particularly on massive social media platforms, it was simply too attractive for advertisers to ignore.

Despite countless media reports on the risk for brands running alongside toxic, user-generated content on YouTube or Facebook, behavior has never changed for the long-term. Instead, many advertisers used unsophisticated keyword blocking strategies or stopped advertising in the news category and considered themselves “safe.” Regrettably, that something amounted to little more than throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Last week, however, two new research studies released last week clearly demonstrate why this short-sighted strategy needs a serious rethink.

Reports from World Media Group (WMG) and Integral Ad Science (IAS) found that digital ads viewed on trusted editorial sites generate a more engaged audience for advertisers. These reports confirm comScore’s 2016 research that showed ads viewed within a premium publisher environment drive significantly better advertising effectiveness, particularly for mid-funnel consideration.

comScore’s independent research came at a time when the industry was in the midst of proving the basics to the market: that ads were being delivered to real computer screens and being seen by humans, not bots. comScore’s empirical research showed that running ads on “premium” publisher sites had significant impact on brand effectiveness and the lift to advertiser brands was attributed to the “halo effect” from the premium environments.

Quality context delivers real results

Fast forward to 2019 and WMG, a global alliance of a dozen leading news and media companies (e.g. The Atlantic, Bloomberg Media Group, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post) commissioned Moat, a digital marketing measurement service, to conduct research on the quality and engagement towards premium inventory across desktop display, mobile display and desktop video.

The findings showed that premium digital inventory running across quality content brands in Q3 2018 outperformed Moat’s benchmarks by between 13% and 144%. WMG’s research also concludes that the primary driver of increased engagement is the “halo effect” that comes from the value of the contextual environment in which the ads are seen.

Key performance metrics

  • Desktop display ads viewed achieved an active page dwell time of 66 seconds, 39% higher than the industry average. The in-view rate (where 50% of the ad is viewable for 1 second) and in-view time both exceeded Moat’s benchmarks by 27% and 25% respectively.
  • Mobile display performed 35% more interactions than average. Viewability rates were 32% higher than the benchmark and engaged consumers for 13% longer.
  • Desktop videos viewed achieved 22% higher-than-average rates for viewability. Consumer attention to videos was also high, with audible and visible completion rates at 144% higher than the Moat Q3 2108 benchmarks.

People react to context

Additional biometric research by IAS, a technology company that analyzes digital advertising placements, identified the impact of high quality and low quality mobile environments on people’s reactions to digital ads. This neurological research – looking at the brain centers responsible for positive and negative affinity – further substantiates that the environment in which an ad appears has significant impact on consumers’ reactions to that ad.

IAS’ research found that ads viewed in high-quality mobile web environments are perceived 74% more favorably than the same advertisements seen in low-quality environments. Advertising in high quality content environments resulted in 4% greater favorability, 20% greater engagement, 7% greater emotional intensity, 29% memory encoding detail, and 30% memory encoding global.

For several years now, advertisers have struggled to use digital advertising to grow demand and desire for their products, particularly as direct-to-consumer brands and other low-cost, “brandless” options (see Amazon Basics) are starting to flourish. Like the earlier comScore Halo Effect research, these new studies prove that advertising on high quality content sites drives higher brand attention and engagement for both display and video advertising. Context matters and research continues to prove this: Ad performance is better in a premium content environment.

The only question is when brands will act.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives

Trusted environments positively influence ads

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advertising | Perspectives

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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