Tags containing: "halo efffect"

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.

Featured Post | Industry-Research | Marketing

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

August 1, 2019 Rande Price, Research Director—DCN

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.

Industry-Research | Marketing

Trusted environments positively influence ads

July 11, 2018 Rande Price, Research Director—DCN

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.

Marketing | Perspectives

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

June 29, 2017 Jason Kint, CEO – DCN

“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?