Tags containing: "programmatic"

How to Use Programmatic Campaign Optimization to Your Advantage

June 9, 2015 DCN

When a national advertiser launches a programmatic ad campaign, they typically start by placing ads across hundreds of sites. Campaign optimization begins almost immediately culling, refining the list of sites, based on real-time response rates. This looks like a lot like a seismograph during an earthquake: a frenzy of peaks and valleys that then quickly diminish. Campaign optimization is surprisingly formulaic and, as a result, can be tracked and deconstructed.

Marketers use programmatic buying to make purchase decisions, based on a set of criteria. For example, if a user doesn’t spend enough time engaging with the site or the ad itself, or click-rates are very low, a site will be cut for the ad schedule. This process is called campaign optimization. Being optimized out is a technical way of say a site has been cut out. Optimized in, conversely, is when a buyer includes your site.

A year ago, we began working on this to see if it was possible to visualize the process of campaign optimization. The results are fascinating and we have some insights to share. The punchline: Closely follow campaign optimization and use it to your advantage to increase your ad sales.

Key Insights

If you’re being optimized in, raise price. Programmatic buyers dispassionately make buying and selling decisions based on performance. Sellers should do the same, automatically raising price when they’re performing better than their competition. Fearing programmatic buying underpricing their rates, many publishers we know create a minimum floor on price only.

Convert programmatic buys to direct. If you’re consistently being optimized in, and the advertiser also buys higher CPM units direct, upsell them. You have an authentic, data-based story to explain why an advertiser should be working more closely with you. Use it to your advantage.

If you’re competition are being optimized out, use this to your advantage. Create a story demonstrating that your brand is being optimized in. This reinforces your audience is an excellent fit, even if direct competitors didn’t make the cut. This is particularly convincing to advertisers because you’re able to establish your leadership over the competition based on the actual optimization results.

Use campaign optimization to prospect for opportunities. Pull a list of all advertisers where you’re winning deals programmatically. This is a great list to market to. You have a concrete story.

Identify advertisers optimizing out of your site, and find out what the problem is to put things back on track. Why are you losing these deals? Look for trends. Are all of your opt-outs coming from a particular vertical

Which deals are migrating from direct to programmatic in your website specifically? Which clients are moving in programmatic, but also how, is the evolution unfolding? Review velocity. Are you being optimized out more than in the past? For you to stay competitive, you need to know what’s happening in the market around you!

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

4 Tips for Improving Programmatic CPM

May 27, 2015 DCN

The premise that the rise of automated buying and selling through programmatic technology would have a negative impact on a publisher’s’ ability to increase—or even maintain—their CPM rates is continuing to erode. Many were surprised to learn that the 2013-2014 CPM trend for social, mobile and display across programmatic ad platforms was one of growth, not decline.

As the click declines from its position as the metric of prominence, contextual data, viewability and high impact opportunities for engagement have become increasingly valued and sought after by brands. Today, marketers increasingly realize that “you get what you pay for” but they expect that price tag to come with the same scale and efficiency programmatic technology delivers. So how can publishers use data and technology to command premium pricing for the premium experiences brands want—and consumers expect?

Here are four strategies publishers can adopt to not simply survive, but thrive, in a programmatic world.

Make your audience and contextual site data available and visible to buyers. Move beyond offering standard cookie-reliant targeting with contextual technology. Real-time, page-level contextualization of your content increases the likelihood that a person sees an ad that’s relevant to them—delighting your audiences and the buyers who want to reach them. Contextual analysis at the page-level will enable you to offer audience segments interested in that content at greater scale, beyond 1^st party and 3^rd party cookie pools. Contextual data can help increase yield and revenue by showing the value of inventory buyers would normally overlook.

Upgrade your site to support more advanced ad functionality and cross-screen delivery. Large-format, high-impact ad sizes are designed to help brands get their ads noticed and have been shown to improve interaction rates, increase time spent and improve brand recall. The IAB recently released research showing that consumers find Rising Star ads more engaging and more informative than standard units. This makes them especially valuable to brands, who tend to bid higher on these formats. With an estimated 60% of web traffic coming from mobile, it goes without saying that your site should be mobile optimized. It’s worth spending the time and money to upgrade your site internally, or many technology partners can help you integrate new ad formats and optimize for mobile experiences quickly and easily.

Understand how much of your content is viewable—and make sure you can deliver against it. Viewability is moving from “nice-to-have” to “must-have” in a buyers mind. Make sure you know how much of your inventory is viewable and provide transparent reporting against that number to clients. Publishers who can offer a pricing model that incorporates viewability (e.g vCPM) will emerge the winners, as brands will pay a premium for guaranteed viewable inventory. An easy way to get started is to ask your monetization partners if they have viewability-tracking and reporting tools to layer on your current offering—some even offer this as a value-add service.

Adopt a “test and learn” approach to programmatic partners. Don’t accept the status quo from your current monetization partners. As the programmatic landscape matures, earlier pain points of integrating new technology partners are starting to subside as onboarding and operational processes have become standardized. There’s no such thing as a “one size fits all” programmatic partner, so don’t be afraid to test multiple providers concurrently to compare performance; leverage the real-time nature of programmatic to find the right solution that will help ensure a premium for your unique audience and content.

This isn’t the first time publishers have been forced to evolve alongside major industry change, and it most certainly won’t be the last. By 2018, more than 80% of display ad dollars will be transacted programmatically. Publishers that adapt to this new way of doing business and embrace the innovation it spurs will be the ones to reap the benefits.

Darline Jean is the Chief Operating Officer for PulsePoint, responsible for shaping product strategy focused on enhancing the company’s premium programmatic and content marketing solutions. Before joining PulsePoint, Darline was President and Chief Executive Officer of The About Group where she was responsible for the strategic direction of the business unit of The New York Times Company that includes About.com, CalorieCount.com and ConsumerSearch.com. During her tenure as President and CEO, she significantly increased the company’s revenue and led the sale of About.com from The New York Times Company to IAC in 2013. Darline has also held the title of Chief Operating Officer of About.com and Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer of the About Group.

Prior to The About Group, Darline held various financial leadership positions with Thomson Media, a division of Thomson Financial. She began her career with Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising in New York.

Perspectives

3 Marketing Takeaways from Day 1 of Collision

May 6, 2015 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

This week nearly 7,500 people from 89 countries made their way to two airplane hangars in downtown Las Vegas for Collision, a “new kind of tech event,” in which tech is approached as an intrinsic part of every aspect of business. In addition to sessions on four main stages—Center, Enterprise, Builders and Marketing—the event attracts speakers and attendees from Fortune 500 companies to nascent startups, along with no small number of VC and Angel investors. What they all have in common is a focus on what’s next and driving the innovation that will take us there.

While tech was undoubtedly the underpinning of the vast majority of sessions and conversations, marketing was also central to many discussions—given that few of the “big ideas” brewing at Collision will go far without it.

Here are my three marketing takeaways from Day 1 of Collision:

eMarketer founder and CEO Geoff Ramsey

Programmatic with polish: Without a doubt, speaker after speaker confirmed the growing dominance of programmatic. In fact, eMarketer founder and CEO Geoff Ramsey kicked off the day with a slew of stats, including that we can expect to see $15 billion worth of advertising bought programmatically this year, comprising 55% of all display. And while Digiday’s Ricardo Bilton pointed out that “The promise of programmatic is that it is intensely efficient,” a number of people throughout the day made clear that they were looking forward to the continued evolution of programmatic to be more creative and contextualized. Howard Pyle, VP of Marketing at IBM, said that while programmatic is “a convenient way to make marketing function more like a machine” he remains focused on creating customized experiences that best suit his different customer segments. Thus, he is exploring how he can create “unique experiences at scale.” And Anthony Mazzarella, SVP, Agency Sales, at Celtra says that this creates an opportunity to “bring marketers and the media closer together,” which can only make the experience better.
Data is a game changer: “The job of marketer is changing” according to Paul Berry, founder and CEO of RebelMouse, who believes that there used to be a lot more guesswork and intuition around which aspects of customer information would help them make good business decisions. However, giving the influx of real-time data and increased ease of use, “today’s marketers can swim deeply in all of the insights,” emerging with information that they can readily apply to their strategies. At L’Oréal Rachel Weiss, the company’s VP of Digital Innovation, says they’ve moved way past Facebook Likes and are focused on really getting to know their customers. To do so, the company recently began to hire data scientists, who help shape all aspects of customer experience and marketing.eMarketer’s Ramsey also emphasized the incredible potential that wearable data offers marketers though he noted that marketers are “struggling to manage the torrents of data pouring through all of these different devices.” But with the rise of increasingly personal data, Vivek Sharma, CEO of Movable Ink says he sees a rise in “data-inspired creativity.” And of course, there will remain the responsibility to use “data in a way that’s not creepy,” as Tariq Shaukat, EVP and chief commercial officer of Caesar’s Entertainment Corporation put it. “Data offers an amazing opportunity to do better things for customers,” he said. “You give your data in exchange for a great experience. When you explain it to customers and do it in a way that adds legitimate value for them, you will find that customers really do appreciate it.”
Rachel Weiss, VP of Digital Innovation, L’Oréal and Paul Berry, founder and CEO of RebelMouse

Customer experience and marketing collide: Pyle of IBM believes that it is essential for marketing to emerge from its corporate silo and be better integrated into the entire business so that the insights marketers have about customers are better reflected in product development and so that marketers can better create customized content experiences that fuel business objectives. L’Oréal’s Weiss noted that customers believe “they are their own brand first, and that every product they use should be built around them.” At Movable Ink, Sharma finds an increased demand for “personalization on the fly” because customers expect messages tuned to things such as location and weather. He sees content marketing intersecting with context to create value for the customer. “Rather than asking someone to buy trainers, tell them about road races around them. Then, when the time is right you can offer them the right shoes.” Berry at RebelMouse observed that “it turns out that it is very hard to capture people’s attention” and that brands must continually focus their marketing tactics on serving their needs. “Today, there’s no tolerance for a mediocre experience.”

Advertising | Innovation | Perspectives | Revenue

Programmatic: Both the Villain and the Hero

April 30, 2015 Jason Kint, CEO – DCN

Nothing makes a narrative more compelling than a villain: evil that must be overcome so the hero can prevail. Maybe that’s why every few years a new nefarious buzzword arises that both energizes the digital media industry and rattles the cages of the establishment. But the business of digital media is just not as tidy as a formulaic series. The real problems are complex. And the bad actors aren’t parading their final 15 minutes of fame on Dancing with the Stars, they are lurking in the shadows, profiting from marketers’ best intentions and the great content created by others. While the story of programmatic is barely a few years old, the plot lines are deep and we’re clearly still early in the first season.

It wasn’t too long ago that programmatic was referred to as the latest chapter in digital media’s “race to the bottom.” The word was associated with everything bad in the digital advertising supply chain because it started off as a murky pool of third parties offering marketers an easy way to reach massive (if dubious) audiences and for publishers to offload “remnant” inventory at bargain basement prices. Unsold inventory from great brands mixed with a whole lot of garbage—the old ad network model. This (thankfully brief) period in the story of programmatic did little for anyone besides intermediaries—though it did help draw attention to the fact that digital advertising processes were ripe for change.

The reality is that programmatic emerged as a response to the complexity of the digital ad buy and has evolved into a way to automate as much as possible, making digital media easier for marketers to buy and potentially more profitable for publishers. Our research shows that forward thinking media companies have wisely jumped into the programmatic fray in order to address marketers’ desire for efficiency while also leveraging their first party audience data to deliver highly targeted, efficient and impactful campaigns.

Yes, a whole lot of programmatic inventory is still remnant but that is starting to change as more premium inventory becomes available for programmatic buys. In fact, a growing number of our members are starting to see programmatic guaranteed and preferred deals that rival direct deals in terms of CPMs. The big difference is that the programmatic deals—those that have pre-agreed prices and guaranteed high-quality inventory—offer automation of the back-end processes.

As representatives for the digital content brands that marketers trust, it is our responsibility to shine a light on any “trust parasites” in programmatic and to work with advertising and agency partners to maximize their confidence in the value they will receive when they put money into programmatic. The rise of programmatic direct and private marketplaces offer an example of how this is taking shape. And right now, buying direct from a trusted premium publisher is the best way to execute a programmatic campaign without risk.

Villain’s and heroes aren’t what we need to focus on in the story of digital media. However we do need to recognize that there’s a lot at stake here if all of the players don’t work together to educate the market, given the predictions that programmatic will dominate digital advertising within a few years. If you are one of the few still debating whether or not to embrace programmatic: Stop now. Automating the bidding, buying, securing and execution of an ad campaign in real-time using machines rather than paper and humans is a no-brainer.

If you put on your marketer cap, it’s fairly obvious. Do you want your ads to be viewable meaning actually show up in the active window? Absolutely. Do you want your ads to be in front of humans rather than bots? Um, of course. Do you want your ads to run in a clean, well-lit brand-safe environment? Yes, please. Do you want all of the above as easily as possible? Bring it on.

With every change, every challenge comes an opportunity to step up and “save the day.” And there are few better examples of the opportunity for digital innovation than programmatic. Get on board and let’s drive this narrative forward.

Image credit: kosmolaut.

Advertising | DCN-Research | Research

Practical Tips for a Programmatic Future

April 29, 2015 Research Team—DCN

Digital Content Next (DCN) released insights into the future of programmatic advertising based on in-depth interviews with executives at 10 digital content companies from DCN’s membership including Vox, The Weather Company, Business Insider and CBS Interactive. “Practical Tips for a Programmatic Future” offers a behind-the-scenes peek at these organizations and details how they have prepared for a future with an expected continued rise in programmatic spend. DCN’s key takeaway—that programmatic is not a channel but a broad set of automation and efficiency tactics that can be employed across a range of inventory—is one of the valuable insights from the white paper.

Vendor partnerships are important

Integration with constantly-evolving players in the ad tech stack is what makes building ad technology in-house prohibitive; all interview participants said they are not pursuing internal solutions and will instead rely on vendors.

Learn and grow with the buy side

Most executives interviewed stressed the need to proactively talk to clients about their programmatic capabilities, as they are often unaware of them or how they can benefit their marketing campaigns.

Enable and incentivize your sales team to embrace programmatic

Automation will not diminish the importance of sales relationships. Half of those interviewed said they are starting to see large buys that include some programmatic component; therefore, it is important to educate and enable account executives to have conversations about programmatic with clients.

Designate programmatic expert(s) on your team

Digital content companies interviewed have created new roles for programmatic specialists. Broadly there are two types of functions that programmatic specialists will have to perform: (1) supporting the direct sales team; and (2) managing vendor and platform relationships.

Leverage first-party data and other organizational resources

Programmatic specialists will need to work closely with engineering, analytics and data science teams to build out data capabilities and products.

To view the White Paper, click here.

To view the Press Release with a longer summary, click here.

Industry-Research

A Look at the State of Programmatic Buying and Selling

April 21, 2015 Research Team—DCN

PulsePoint recently released its Global Programmatic Platform Intelligence Report. The global data in the report examines trends and changes in inventory, ad spend and contextual categories on mobile and desktop in 2014.

Key findings include:

Programmatic Continues to Move Mobile: Mobile programmatic inventory and ad spend increased significantly in 2014 and will continue to grow exponentially in the next three years.
Contextual Targeting Will Move RTB Beyond the Cookie and Up the Funnel: Contextual targeting is a fundamental building block of advertising and will be more critical than ever. Why? Because together, contextual and programmatic data technology will enable smarter audience targeting where 1st and 3rd party cookie data is less prevalent.
North American Market Share Will Shift To Europe & Asia: As Europe and Asia ramp up programmatic buying, they have the benefit of learning from early challenges and innovations made in the US, including targeting options beyond the cookie. Both markets are in a prime position to benefit from programmatic and will continue to capture more of the market share in 2015.

eMarketer examines PulsePoint’s research in its post Programmatic Sellers vs. Buyers: Who’s More Hooked On Mobile?

Perspectives

Nielsen Acquires Ad Tech Company, eXelate

March 5, 2015 Danielle Block, Director, Agency & Advertiser Relations - DCN

According to a Nielsen statement

Nielsen [has] announced that it has completed its acquisition of eXelate, a leading provider of data and technology to facilitate the buying and selling of advertising across programmatic platforms. This acquisition allows Nielsen to enable its clients to make better and faster marketing and media decisions.

With the acquisition of eXelate, Nielsen clients gain the ability to activate in real-time Nielsen audience insights as well as eXelate’s aggregated consumer segments from over 200 data providers. eXelate’s advanced technology leverages data to inform the highest quality programmatic buying decisions in the marketplace…

eXelate aggregates and distributes third-party online data, composed of premium demographic, interest, and intent data from over 200 online and offline data providers. Nielsen intends to further develop and expand eXelate’s already rapidly-growing data marketplace and innovative technology solutions.

Nielsen’s acquisition raises a couple of key issues:

This move may have a significant impact on data-driven programmatic for television. The acquisition brings Nielsen closer to being able to transact based on measurement and data.
It will enhance measurement capabilities from Nielsen, answering questions about who’s watching and what they’re doing post exposure.
It will be interesting to see if comScore responds with an acquisition of its own in order to keep up (though there are few independent DMPs left out there, such as Krux and Lotame)

Coverage of the acquisition:

MediaPost: Nielsen acquires Exelate for undisclosed terms

AdExchanger: Nielsen Acquires Data Platform eXelate For Estimated $200 Million

Advertising | Revenue

Edmunds Signals Advertising Shift With Programmatic

February 19, 2015 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Edmunds.com had an enviable problem: A wide range of brands wanted to advertise on the site but were being crowded out by big-pocketed automakers who love to spend on their highly-contextual pages. It’s no surprise that car makers wanted access to the Edmunds audience; according to Datalogix, 59% of U.S. car shoppers use Edmunds.com, and more than half of visits to its website result in a purchase. To increase opportunities for non-endemic brands to reach its desirable audience, Edmunds began to experiment with programmatic last year via private exchanges. And 2015 has brought a partnership with Krux – a data management platform (DMP) – to help them deliver across all digital screens and sources and continue to expand Edmunds’ advertising and content capabilities.

According to CEO Avi Steinlauf “Edmunds has embraced audience-based marketing by redefining our entire premium ad product offering.” This includes everything from page-based placements to audience-based placements for all of the company’s directly-sold, guaranteed onsite ad inventory. A key aspect of its new offering is the ability to reach the Edmunds audience offsite on other websites.

To establish this “audience-based advertising platform,” Edmunds.com turned to Krux to enable real-time tracking and audience segmentation of its audience. Krux also provides a platform to safeguard against the unauthorized use of audience data including strict adherence to industry standard consumer privacy policies.

Consumer protection is an essential component of this initiative. As Krux CEO Tom Chavez put it, “Like any publisher with valuable people data, Edmunds doesn’t want their data cast into the winds or transacted in dark rooms by frenemies who take liberties.” As such, Krux focuses on providing fine-grained controls that allow Edmunds to provision its data only to named players on times, terms, and conditions of their choosing. According to Chavez, “This requires an end-to-end approach that first detects and monitors if and where their data is leaking, and second enables them to point and send it to trusted partners in a friction-free, policy-managed fashion.”

The shift in its ad strategy is in response to what Steinlauf describes as “the ad industry’s increasing need to reach relevant audiences and provide more effective, tighter messaging to consumers.” This is achieved by offering marketers who directly buy ad inventory on Edmunds, a license to retarget those same audiences by activating them for retargeting on their programmatic buying platforms (DSPs).

As a second-party data provider for automotive OEM clients, Edmunds is able to work more collaboratively with these OEMs as well as with agencies to develop new types of ad campaigns or to increase the ROI of current ones. And, for dealership clients, Steinlauf says using these audience segments overlaid with geo-targeting data “provides an exciting opportunity to serve as a key component in their cross-channel digital marketing efforts.”

Perspectives

The Biggest Challenges Digital Media Faces in 2015

January 5, 2015 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

We asked a few of our members:
What do you think will be the most significant challenge for the business of digital media in 2015?

Here’s how they replied:

In 2015, I expect that most brands with a mobile presence will create offerings that better meet customer needs on the go. Presently, most mobile experiences simply mirror the desktop experience, but when we’ve reviewed customer insights we can easily see that behavior is different on the mobile platform. I predict that there will be a marriage of “big data” and mobile that allows marketing and product development departments to really grasp the opportunity to create meaningful and relevant mobile moments. This will require innovation, skill and the thoughtful application of user data, but it will be well worth the effort as it will generate more loyalty for the brands that do it well. Especially as mobile continues to grow to its inevitable domination of the online experience, we all need to be paying special attention to what more we can be doing to meet customer needs in this unique space.

—Michelle Denogean
CMO, Edmunds.com
@michadv2000 @Edmunds

According to the ANA, the marketing term of 2014 was Programmatic. There is no doubt that Programmatic is important and here to stay; however, consumers don’t follow programmatic. They don’t get excited about programmatic or curl up with programmatic…they do that with content. In 2015, it is time for content to get back in the driver’s seat. Premium content should never be viewed as a commodity and top publishers should be sending that message in every meeting they have.

—David Morris
Chief Client Officer, CBS Interactive
@CBSi

The biggest challenge for the digital industry is proving the efficacy of display advertising. Digital still remains the most measurable and trackable form of mass media and with the right metrics and methodology, it can provide marketers with much more insights than other media. But due to the oversupply of ad inventory, unscrupulous tactics by publishers and marketers to force feed ads down users’ throats, and the lack of progress the industry has made to show effectiveness beyond sheer click thru rates, we are at a critical juncture where we need to change how we do business. The scale, efficiency and targetability of digital still makes it an incredibly powerful tool for marketers. But publishers need to work harder to prove that digital ads “work’” and rethink some of the age old practices that have led to user blindness.

— Brian Colbert
CRO, About.com
@aboutdotcom

The challenge in 2015 will be around standardizing measurement for ad viewability. Right now, there are so many different sources to obtain campaign data, much of which lies with agencies; however, some of this lies with publishers and with third parties. There’s no real consistency on how the overall industry measures results. The publishing industry is working hard to deliver the maximum value to advertisers for their investment. The issue we all face is how to move forward efficiently without getting bogged down in the act of reconciling the various measurement services.

—Mark Howard
Chief Revenue Officer, Forbes Media
@markdhoward @Forbes

Finding the right way to structure the product management function in the organization. As we saw several times in 2014, media companies struggle with this. It’s easy to see why: product management works across editorial and commercial, to focus on the users’ needs, the business’s goals and the organization’s capabilities. Helping editors understand product managers and vice versa and teaching them to work well together is absolutely essential for the success of digital media.

—Eric Hellweg
Managing Director, Digital Strategy,
Harvard Business Review
@ehellweg @HarvardBiz

The most significant challenge for digital media advertising in 2015 will continue to be dealing with the operational issues that need to be addressed as more advertising moves through programmatic channels. Publishers need to understand how to get the greatest yield from this channel of demand while evolving custom programs that can deliver value and performance beyond what can be bought and sold on the open market—with enough scale to make it worth the marketers time to consider. Marketers need to master the tech stack and techniques required to get real value from programmatic buying but not become so consumed by the complexities that they miss out on other digital advertising opportunities that can offer greater value.

—Mike Kisseberth
CRO, Purch
@mikekisseberth @PurchGroup

Industry-Research | Perspectives | Revenue

Content Marketing + Programmatic: Opposites Attract

December 3, 2014 DCN

Content marketing and programmatic. Arguably two of the hottest terms in digital today, with more than 370 million Google search results between the two. For the most part, when we think about content and programmatic we think of opposites, of incompatibility, of contradictions. After all, they are used to execute strategies on opposite ends of the marketing funnel (upper vs. lower), deliver against opposite objectives (brand awareness vs. conversions), are measured with opposite metrics (time spent vs. CTR) and are delivered with opposite mechanisms (manual vs. automated). It’s the ultimate oxymoron.

However, the future of advertising depends on these two polar opposites fusing together to deliver meaningful brand engagement to the right consumer at more cost efficient scale. CMOs will demand more from their advertising and content marketing will help to fill the current void between the value ads are providing and the value CMOs want. And when content marketing programs are targeted, distributed and optimized programmatically, brands will be able to achieve a higher return on their investment.

In a recent report, “The Future of Programmatic: When The Art & Science of Advertising Collide,” PulsePoint partnered with Digiday to survey over 335 industry professionals on both sides of the buy and sell aisle, from agencies and brands to publishers in order to understand how close our theory is to becoming a reality. Is the industry ready for the art of content marketing and science of programmatic technology to finally collide? In short, yes.

The research uncovered a strong case for a more creative, more custom programmatic future. Over 83% of respondents believed that content marketing will go programmatic by 2017, indicating the desire for art and science in advertising to collide much sooner than expected. So what’s driving this?

Programmatic has been generally confined to lower funnel objectives. But the days of direct response objectives dominating the programmatic landscape are nearing their end. In fact, 71% of respondents thought programmatic technology best supports mid-upper funnel campaign objectives. Additionally, high-impact, custom ad formats will begin to give standard display a run for its money as the proportion of respondents expecting to buy sponsored content placements programmatically in just one year’s time will grow 114%. Respondents also reported that in the next 12 months, the amount of TV bought programmatically will increase 45%, and custom rich media bought programmatically will increase 43%, while digital video will see a 29% increase.

This shift could not come at a better time. Nearly every respondent (about 97%) said that either they or their clients are using some form of content marketing and anticipate increasing programmatic ad spend by 62%.

We’re excited by these results and are confident that what we once considered to be an oxymoron will soon become the industry norm: rich content served programmatically exactly when and where consumers are ready to engage with it.

Download the full report here: http://goo.gl/Ktb3rS

Lindsay Boesen is the Director of Marketing at PulsePoint, a global advertising technology platform focused on fusing the efficiency of programmatic technology with the engagement of content marketing. At PulsePoint she oversees the companies marketing, communications, and creative team. Lindsay has over 10 years experience as a B2B digital marketer and was previously Senior Global Marketing Manager for Vibrant, the pioneer in to contextually relevant native advertising. She has also held marketing & creative roles at media companies like Select NY and Condé Nast. Trained in brand strategy, copywriting and art direction at NYC’s Adhouse, Lindsay holds a B.A in Communications & Advertising from Loyola College in Maryland.

Advertising | Innovation | Revenue

Cox Launches Gamut, a New Company Addressing Evolving Needs

October 14, 2014 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

These days, media leaders are betting on a cross platform future. Reading signs from advertisers and publishers alike, CoxReps recently launched a new company, Gamut, to offer a full spectrum of support and media solutions. Gamut combines the assets and strengths of what were formerly Cox Digital Solutions and Cox Cross Media to offer a suite of capabilities and a streamlined service for publishers, advertisers, agencies and small-to-mid sized businesses.

Gene Pizzolato, president and general manager of Gamut, says that Cox Media Group started as a group of publishers and that the new company will stay true to that foundation. He adds that the company recognizes increasing convergence in the marketplace and, with the launch of Gamut, will better provide “expertise, efficiency, data, audience and innovation by combining these two aspect of our business.” Pizzolato says the company has seen growth in cross-platform demand, “Brand advertisers are increasingly asking for multiplatform solutions, they want TV but they also want solutions that includes display, digital video and mobile.”

Gamut is comprised of four channels of solutions: Programmatic+, which enables publishers to maximize yield for their inventory with a real-time pricing engine; Reps+, featuring an experienced team that guides campaigns through the full lifecycle; Reach+, a turnkey wholesale product for publishers to generate cross-channel ad revenue; and CrossMedia+, offering custom solutions for integrated, multimarket television-driven campaigns, complemented by digital solutions at a local, regional or national scale.

Programmatic has been a touchy subject for digital media companies. However Cox — and others — are taking an approach that allows them to offer programmatic as part of a range of solutions that leverage its efficiencies while providing other services to enhance marketing outcomes and publisher revenue. “From a revenue standpoint, if you look at our Programmatic+, Reach+ and Reps+, those are pure digital solutions that offer value to both the publisher and advertisers,” says Pizzolato. “We see a big opportunity in our programmatic solution to offer private exchanges and premium direct programmatic solutions to agencies and marketers in 2015. We have a quality base of supply on publishers’ side that is very attractive to advertisers.”

Gamut’s programmatic offering will “cut across three screens,” according to Pizzolato who emphasizes that it will be enhanced by direct sellers through Reps+ and by the organizations’ complementary TV solutions. “We sit in a good place with our publishing partners. The technology we offer is designed to drive yield for publishers, not secure lowest yield, which in turn pays off by them providing us more premium inventory to offer advertisers. Other channels give us the opportunity to drive demand for our publishing partners.”

As the media industry continues to migrate towards the digital landscape, Pizzolato believes that there will be a greater role for both technology and human service in the media buying and selling process. Gamut represents Cox Media’s vision for the future, which is “to continue to offer a spectrum of services that provide best-of-class innovation that adapts with the needs of our clients. This may manifest itself in several forms, but will remain rooted in our core belief that powerful technology, deep expertise, cross-channel capabilities and a streamlined process will provide both our publisher and agency partners maximum benefit.”

Industry-Research

Forrester Research: U.S. Online Display Advertising Spend Forecast 2014-2019

October 6, 2014 Research Team

Forrester Research expects a 90 percent increase in online display ad spending in the US between 2014 and 2019. Growth will be driven by video, programmatic and mobile display.

Click here to view AdWeek coverage.

Click here for full report.