Tags containing: "supporter"

Another content “recommendation” source from Google takes off

September 18, 2018 Clare Carr, Vice President of Marketing—Parse.ly

Whenever we see a chart like this:
our analysts quickly start asking questions. Big spikes usually mean some sort of change, new product, or initiative at at platform that affects journalists and media companies. The problem is, usually the platforms don’t bother to mention it to you.

In this case, the data led us to something called Google Quick Search Box. As our Senior Audience Development Solutions Manager, Kelsey Arendt, explains: “GQSB was previously understood to be only organic search from the search bar widget on mobile devices, but now it’s a blend of search box and recommended content.”

The referrer now sends traffic from:

“View Related Pages.” This appears in a Google webview—not Chrome—on both AMP and non-AMP pages.
“Check out your feed” at the bottom of search inputs. This takes you to “interest-based” content cards.
Left-of-home swipe cards. (Note: These cards aren’t related to the googleapis referrer, and we’ve clarified that in this post.)

And so another Google initiative could be affecting how your content gets shown to audiences. Though there might be benefits this time around.

Considering the effect of personalization on readership

Beyond the fact that we see (again) the power of platforms to influence how audiences find premium content, the data also shows what an impact personalization of content can have.

According to Parse.ly data, internally referred traffic sends more views to articles than all of social media. This includes home and sections pages, as well as any recirculating traffic sent from article to article. Increasing these views by showing even better personalized articles has huge potential.

So when it comes to content, what kind of personalization works, and how do you test it?

Adapting personalization to your audience

Personalization can mean a lot of things when it comes to tactical execution. Does it mean that each reader sees content uniquely based on their reading history? Or maybe based on the section or article the user is seeing that moment?

There isn’t a one-size-fits all solution for this, and media companies should be testing and adapting their personalization strategies for their audiences. Much like technology developers test user experience, this should not be a static choice that is made once for all audiences.

Last year, Setareh Baig, a then graduate school intern from NYU’s Studio 20 program, tested how this would work in practice. She interviewed the product teams at The New Yorker and The Intercept and did user testing.

Setareh found that first-time visitors to these sites were most interested in reading more posts when they knew these articles had been the most shared. From her research:

“These readers are very interested in what’s being shared. They valued personalization tailored to stories that are relevant in conversations with peers. They want news stories that other people want to know about and take proactive action on. Whereas time on page is passive, they want to be given stories that other people were inspired and driven to do something about.”

Since The New Yorker team cares deeply about subscribers as well, other user tests could be implemented, testing whether returning visitors had the same behavior, or whether they were more likely to want to read a story they knew other subscribers had spent time with.

We’re keeping our eye on the trends and traffic that Google sends publishers’ way. We’re also encouraged to see publishers take what works and adapt to their own readers. Here’s to seeing more spikes of interested readers in the future.

Perspectives

Monetizing data: 6 ways to make money without selling your data

September 11, 2018 Michel Benjamin, Director of Marketing—Lotame

Publishers keep hearing about monetizing their data to drive revenue, but there are many ways to achieve this. Selling data, whether through a data exchange or a private marketplace, is perhaps the most obvious option to increase revenue. But if you’re already taking advantage or not interested in that option, selling your data isn’t the only way to make money with your customer data. In fact, there are many creative ways in which publishers can monetize their data. Here are six opportunities to monetize data – without selling it.

1. Sell Audiences, Not Site-Sections

When you’re collecting data on your readers, you can use that data to make their audiences more sellable to advertisers. By collecting and organizing audience data from across various sites and properties, you can sell audiences instead of pages or site sections.

Say, for instance, you have an advertiser who sells kitchenware. The first place you would think to put those ads would be in the recipes section of your site, since the people who visit that section most likely enjoy cooking. With a data management platform (DMP), however, you could create an audience of users who have a lot of interest in cooking and kitchenware. The you can display those kitchenware ads across your entire site aimed specifically at those users, rather than just in your recipes section.

Since your DMP allows you to access information about your audience’s interests, you could sell ad space to a kitchenware company even if your site has nothing to with cooking, appliances or home goods. A DMP gives you insights into your audience’s interests beyond your specific site, which provides you with the opportunity to work with advertisers you never could before.

2. Increase Average CPMs

If you’re focused on selling ads, increasing the price of each one will obviously help increase your revenue. But how can you do this? Offering advertisers the ability to target their ads to the exact audience they are trying to reach means they will be willing to pay more to reach that engaged audience. Better-targeted audiences are more sellable. When advertisers know they are reaching an engaged audience on your site, they’ll pay more to have their ads there.

3. Expand Your Overall Audience

If you’ve got large advertisers signed on for big targeted campaigns, you need to be able to fulfill those campaign targets. If you’re lacking enough uniques to make the campaign a success, 2^nd or 3^rd party data may help you expand your targets.

It might seem counterintuitive to pay for data to make money. However, if you’ve got gaps in the data available, you may need to spend more upfront to be able to attract more visitors to your site. More visitors means more impressions, which means more people who see the ads.

4. Get More Subscribers

For subscription-based publishers, reducing churn is of utmost concern. And the key to keeping subscribers engaged is serving the content they want. You can use your DMP to access insights into the characteristics of the people who subscribe to your site. You might find that your regular readers have various interests in common, beyond what you would expect based on the content of your publication. Perhaps, for instance, you run an online golf magazine, so you know your readers are interested in golf. Your data might show you that large portions of your audience are also interested in fine wine, bowling or apparel. By offering content that fits your readers’ interests, you can keep them engaged and coming back for more. Alternatively, you can essentially become a marketer yourself by promoting your content to people who are most likely to engage. From the previous golf example, this might include targeting golf fans on wine sites or pages to bring them back to your pages.

5. Reducing Remnant Inventory

Ideally, you’re already selling all of your ad space as premium inventory. However, that often doesn’t happen. It’s possible, though, to convert more of your remnant inventory to premium, which leads to a substantial increase in ad revenue. As the value of your ad space, and the value of your website as a whole, go up, your inventory will sell faster and for high prices. As a result, more of it will be considered premium.

Data is what drives this increase in value. With data, you can sell audiences rather than sections of your site and reach advertisers you wouldn’t otherwise sell to without audience data. This boosts the overall value of your site to advertisers and puts your ad space in higher demand, making it easier to sell ad space. As a result, you’re able to sell more space as premium rather than remnant.

6. Customizing Content

Your editorial team probably has a pretty good grasp on the type of content that performs best on your sites. And as the old saying goes: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But if you’re looking to keep visitors on your site longer, you’ll need to offer them content recommendations that match their interests, so that they can view more content and see more ads.

Once again, the data can guide you by revealing what kinds of content are performing the best with your audience. Your data will tell what a particular reader’s interests are, allowing you to show them content that deals with those interests. If they read a lot about fashion, for instance, you would serve them content related to fashion.

Data is powerful. And, if used correctly, it can help you increase your revenue, even without selling it directly. They key is understanding who your readers are, so you can serve them appropriately. Data is a powerful tool. Ensure that you are using it in every way possible to strengthen your revenue streams and improve your site overall.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Revenue

Programmatic spend continues to surge in 2018

August 29, 2018 Todd Krizelman, CEO – MediaRadar

It’s predicted that more than $46 billion in ad dollars will be spent on programmatic advertising in the United States this year, with 86.2% of all digital display ads bought programmatically by 2020. But who is spending the most on programmatic? MediaRadar dove in to find the answers. By analyzing thousands of brands, with ads placed programmatically in Q1 of 2018, we discovered which companies are spending more, which are spending top dollar, plus so much more.

75% of all brands running ads online buy programmatically

A whopping three quarters of brands studied had purchased some form of an ad programmatically in Q1 of 2018. Findings such as these prove that, despite transparency concerns, advertisers are continuing to invest in programmatic.

Even more compelling is that, in the wake of major brand safety controversies (e.g. YouTube’s controversial content woes), advertisers are still purchasing programmatic video. In fact, the number of brands running programmatic video have nearly doubled compared to the previous year.

Amazon leads the way in programmatic ad buys

Big brands are buying programmatically and Amazon is leading the space. Amazon was found to be the biggest programmatic spender by far. The online retailer alone accounted for 10% of the total spend of the top-50 programmatic advertisers in Q1 of 2018, spending one and a half times more than the next biggest programmatic spender, Microsoft.

In order of high to low, the top-10 programmatic advertisers in Q1 of 2018 were:

Amazon
Microsoft
Wayfair
TaxAct
Charles Schwab
Weight Watchers
Sprint
Coors Light
Geico
Dell

Amazon has always been a big spender when it comes to marketing efforts. In 2016 it was reported that Amazon spent more on advertising than Walmart Inc., Best Buy Co. Inc., The Home Depot Inc., and The Kroger Company combined. A large portion of that ad budget was dedicated to programmatic too.

The players remain the same

An impressive 94% of the top-50 programmatic spenders in Q1 of 2017 ended up buying programmatically again in Q1 of this year. The list of companies that renewed include Walmart, Microsoft, and Verizon Wireless.

Despite escalating talk about brand safety, the programmatic market has remained mostly stable, year-over-year. Significant changes in the form of exits or reduced spending have been few and far between. Not to mention, the implementation of safeguard tech like whitelist and blacklist technologies have shown brands that programmatic is actively changing for the better; becoming more brand safe and transparent with every update.

The bottomline is that most advertisers prefer programmatic for transacting online media and that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon. No matter the controversy, brands appear to value the rewards of programmatic more than they fear the repercussions. Amazon’s increasingly large investments in programmatic are a testament to its popularity and power in the advertising market.

About the Author

Todd Krizelman (@ToddKrizelman ) is Co-Founder and CEO of MediaRadar (@MediaRadar). Growing up near the epicenter of technological innovation in Palo Alto, California encouraged him to become an entrepreneur and co-found of one of the world’s first social media sites, theGlobe.com. Krizelman also held leadership positions at Bertelsmann’s Gruner + Jahr and Random House. With his expertise in ad sales and innovation, Krizelman joined veteran web architect, Jesse Keller, to found MediaRadar in 2007.

Perspectives | Revenue

What happens when you take “publishing” out of the “publishing business”

August 20, 2018 Dennis Yuscavitch, VP of Product Marketing—Outbrain

In May of 2017, Bill Simmons, former ESPN personality and creator of The Ringer, made an interesting decision to move his successful sports media empire to Vox Media. Simmons maintained editorial independence but relied on Vox for all the non-content creation requirements of a traditional publisher. This included all revenue and product development because as Simmons said “they are great at sales and technology.” The plan, it seems, was to offload the “publishing” part of the publishing business. This allowed Simmons to focus on content creation for his widely popular podcast and website.

This wasn’t a viable model 20 years ago when publishers had established oligopolies by controlling distribution in their respective geographic regions. As a result, the publishing needs of the business, HR, printing press, sales, and distribution existed to support editorial and content creation. Now that the internet has driven distribution costs to near $0, and oligopolies no longer exists, there is little need to combine traditional publishing sales, product and HR overhead with the journalism it is intended to support.

Even so, content creations like Simmons still need to make money. To do so, they rely on content management platforms like Chorus, the purpose-built platform Vox created to manage content and revenue. As of July, Chorus supported 350 media brands. The system includes “content management, data-informed multi-platform content distribution, integrated advertising, and a suite of publishing tools.” Media brands that strip away activities not directly related to content creation establish a sustainable model that allows them to create even more great content, a reinforcing cycle of success.

In his May 2017 post, Ben Thompson covered the changing business model while referring to platforms like Vox’s as the “Faceless Publisher.” The platform handles all the monetization, resources, and infrastructure, which allows journalists to focus on creating amazing content.

The term “Faceless Publisher” might be a misnomer in Vox’s case given they have established several great brands in the market including SB Nation, Vox and Eater. However, it is clear that this federated group of journalistic brands, supported by a single business platform, creates great efficiencies. This efficiency will deliver what readers and content creators need: a sustainable business model that delivers amazing content.

Uncategorized

Policing third-party code is essential to digital vendor risk management

August 17, 2018 Chris Olson, CEO & Co-Founder—The Media Trust

Some of the biggest companies including Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord and Taylor, Best Buy, MyFitness Pal, and Applebees have been the victims of breaches due to third party code. Third parties provide services around content recommendation engines, ads, customer identification platforms, data management platforms, social media widgets, and video players, to name a few.

Oftentimes, these third parties turn to their own third parties to help deliver their services. When unknown third (or nth) parties become part of a website’s support structure, they can introduce more risks than they were brought in to reduce, because they lie outside of a formal IT organization’s control. Gartner predicts these “shadow IT” will be the root cause of 33% of security problems by 2020.

Throwing light on digital shadow IT

Last year, one of the world’s largest magazine publishers was shocked to find their sites were supported by over 1,000 third parties. This year, they were able to winnow down that number to 100 of the most trusted. In July 2018, random sample of 350 of The Media Trust’s publisher clients showed that each of their domains was supported by an average of 140 third parties, which provided anywhere from 50-95% of each site’s code. For the magazine publisher and those in the random sample, most of these third parties (much less their activities) were unknown to them.

Recently, The Media Trust digital security and operations team found and foiled a malware campaign that affected close to 60 major publishers whose audiences span the globe. These publishers’ trusted digital advertising partners had unknowingly served an ad with malicious code that would replace the legitimate creatives of a globally recognized brand. The code would redirect visitors to a Facebook popup informing victims that they had won a prize and encourage them to enter personally identifying information.

What sets apart this campaign from other redirects is its scale and its targets: some of the world’s most popular online publications that deal only with reputable digital partners. While the campaign was effectively halted, it spotlights the growing challenges of managing the risks third parties and their own vendors can introduce to today’s ever-more dynamic, complex digital ecosystems.

Third-party code putting companies at risk

Third parties can pose risks in several ways. First, they tend to have weaker security measures. This makes them ideal attack vectors for bad actors. The headline-grabbing breaches of Target, Equifax, Ticketmaster, and, more recently, Adidas, prove how popular third parties are to exploit because of their vulnerabilities. In this scenario, when taking on a large organization, hackers will first target a third party and use it as a gateway to enter the larger network.

Second, third party code operate outside the website operator’s cybersecurity infrastructure. Their activities, authorized or otherwise, can neither be monitored nor remediated by the publisher’s marketing and IT departments. As a result, user experience can deteriorate and erode a publisher’s topline and reputation.

However, another, more serious consequence is the unsanctioned collection of user data, which in the EU will expose the publisher to the risk of infringing the GDPR and, soon, the ePR, whose scope is expected to be broader and penalties equally stiff. In fact, the ePR could potentially override the GDPR. Non-compliance is therefore a risk, and will figure prominently in other sought-after markets like Canada, which will enforce PIPEDA later this year, and California, which recently passed the California Consumer Privacy Act.

Reining in risk

Unless they have the tools to actively monitor third party-code, website owners will likely remain unaware of the broad range of code that execute on their sites and of how unexpectedly and frequently new, unknown code appear. The ability to identify, document and authorize these ever-changing vendors is critical to properly mitigate risk. Not only do most enterprises not know the full scale of vendors executing code, but they would be surprised at the amount of consumer data collection activity, i.e., cookie drops, pixel fires, device fingerprint, etc.

Continuous monitoring from your customers’ points of view helps IT teams pinpoint how these vendors and their actions—specifically the domains executed and cookies dropped—change according to user geography, browser, or device. Collecting this type of vendor intelligence provides clear insight into third party behavior to protect customers and brand reputation from cyber threats.

Working with third parties toward strong security posture

Third-party application security is essential for today’s IT security compliance, especially now that regulations are proliferating. Even if the security risk resulted from a third-party compromise, the legal responsibility falls on the primary organization. Therefore, it is crucial that organizations take sufficient steps to manage third-party risk and ensure a safer online environment for themselves and their users.

To do that businesses need to ensure that both their systems and those that look beyond their perimeter to third and nth party codes are secure. First, they should carefully vet all third parties by conducting a risk assessment before bringing any third parties on board. Second, they should maintain a continuously updated inventory of their direct and indirect third parties. Third, they should spell out security policies and standards and use contract clauses and SLAs to enforce them. Fourth, they should follow through by conducting periodic audits of third party security measures. Finally, they should conduct continuous, real-time scanning of their websites to identify any unauthorized code and activities and then compare their findings with what is executing on their visitors’ browsers outside their firewall.

These steps will help to mitigate risk and lock out bad actors from digital ecosystems. Taking a proactive approach to cleaning up and protecting websites will improve the company’s security posture, ensure customers’ safety and protect organizations from the high, upcoming fines of the GDPR and other regulations that follow it.

About the Author:

Chris Olson co-founded The Media Trust with a goal to transform the internet experience by creating better digital ecosystems to govern assets, connect partners and enable Digital Risk Management. Chris has more than 15 years of experience leading high tech and ad technology start-ups and managing international software development, product and sales teams.

Perspectives

Do more with less: 3 opportunities using more relevant data

July 30, 2018 Clare Carr, Vice President of Marketing—Parse.ly

Every day we’re reminded about the limited resources facing our industry, from the time people have to produce stories to the lack of insights we have about decisions made at the big platforms. There’s an irony then that it feels like there’s more data available to us than ever before. Yet many people still aren’t sure how to make the most of it.

Trying to improve business models, audiences, or content simply by adding more data doesn’t guarantee any success. Now, more than ever, the answer is finding the most relevant data—and making sure we’re uncovering all the available opportunities the data we have can provide.

Historically, some of this data has been hard to get to. The major technology platforms see it as theirs to wield. So, without major undertaking, it can be hard to piece the different types of data that audiences coming from Facebook, Google, your own editorial efforts, and untrackable sources actually show.

The Parse.ly data team, using Currents, looked at a recent major news story, immigration, as an example, to uncover opportunities for media companies that might have been missed in other data sources.

Finding the under-covered angle of the story

When Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy separated children from parents, #KeepFamiliesTogether picked up steam on social media. But how did that translate to attention for the articles publishers wrote, and what did people want to know more about?

Over the course of one week, June 18 – June 25, there were 590 articles about immigration getting attention in our network. And that attention was vast: 16 million views.

So many articles means the topic was well covered, right? Not necessarily. Take the topic of “asylum seekers” for example.

Only 20% of these stories were related to asylum seekers. However, they received over 30% of the attention. High traffic per story suggests this angle was potentially under-covered and under-promoted.

Understand the differences between referral types

So where exactly were people finding stories about immigration? The biggest source of traffic was social media, which drove one-third of traffic to immigration stories. Given how much the media industry talks about Facebook, this may not seem surprising. But this is actually about double the typical traffic the network sends to any given story. It also bucks the trend of Google as the dominant source of traffic.

Other important ways readers learned about this issue? Directly from news sites, no platforms needed. About one-quarter of the overall traffic to immigration articles was from editorial promotion: site homepages, section pages, and links within articles.

For the specific topic of asylum seekers, we looked at where else people talked about this topic:

Twitter sent almost as much traffic as Google to stories about this topic. And Instagram shows as a significant referral – one of the more surprising results of this data to me. With data about what’s relevant to readers right now, and where, teams can be more pointed in how they spend precious resources, including their time.

Narrow in on what topics matter to different localities

Where people are paying attention to stories doesn’t just apply to places on the internet—search, social, etc. Readers’ physical locations impact attention, too.

For stories about immigration, attention wasn’t at the same level across the entire country. Certain areas, including parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, over-indexed, represented by darker colors on the maps below.

Geographic data can also inform where a story gets distributed. If you’re pushing your immigration story out on Facebook and Instagram, geo-target cities or states where attention, and therefore interest, is already high. Or if your newsroom is part of a network that spans multiple regions, this information can help guide syndication strategy.

Don’t get more data. Get relevant data

It would be amazing if organizations had more of everything: more staff, more resources, more time, more universally accessible sources of data and information. But the reality is you have to pick and choose your data wisely. You need to use sources that can find opportunities for your site, instead of accessing the same list or information that everyone else uses can make the most of that data.

In the absence of time and resources, focus on making sure you have the right data at your fingertips. Pay attention to the data that’s relevant: what audiences care about right now, where they’re finding that information, what stories are related, and where the gaps are.

Advertising | Revenue

Here’s how to maximize the value of your PMP

July 30, 2018 Mike Kim, VP Product Management, Optimization—Integral Ad Science

For publishers, programmatic offers the opportunity to monetize and package inventory more efficiently than traditional direct deals. For some, it is a place to more effectively sell run of site (ROS) inventory. Others place blocks of premium inventory up for auction to generate revenue without the time, expense, and overhead of negotiating a direct sale. However, while programmatic has opened the door to greater efficiency and a new stream of incremental revenue, it’s also created challenges for premium publishers who want to protect user experience and exercise some control over the type of creative that appears on their pages.

For a growing number of publishers, this means turning to private marketplaces (PMPs). PMPs offer the efficiency of programmatic exchanges in a more controlled environment for premium advertisers. In this post, we’ll attempt to offer some tips to help publishers take advantage of what PMPs have to offer. But first, just what is a private marketplace and how is it different from an open exchange?

What’s a PMP?

Private Marketplaces are exclusive inventory packages offered to buyers via a deal ID. This Deal ID acts as a key to a private auction, or automated access to an inventory pool with pre-negotiated terms. PMPs make it easier for publishers, sell-side platforms (SSPs), and networks to set aside specific inventory packages and sell them to a pre-defined group of buyers. For advertisers, PMPs offer access to premium inventory in a closed environment before it’s made available to the open market.

Through a PMP, publishers can work more directly with advertisers without sacrificing the efficiency of programmatic automation. They also offer publishers the opportunity to build tailored packages of premium inventory and bundled custom audiences, which can fetch a higher price from advertisers than the same inventory might elicit on an open exchange. Most importantly in the age of ad blocking, PMPs give publishers a chance to offer their inventory to a vetted selection of premium advertisers. This ensures that quality content is matched with quality ad creative that won’t compromise user experience.

A PMP can be built and curated by a single publisher, or parent company of premium publishers, and can offer different deal types including first-look offerings or pre-negotiated rates. Supply-side platforms (SSPs), on the other hand, provide premium publishers with lower scale for video with an opportunity to monetize their inventory at a higher CPM by grouping it with like properties. Often how the deals are packaged and the specific inventory they contain can impact publishers’ bottom line. Below are some best practices for maximizing the value of your PMP.

Tips to make the most of your PMP

Use an automated solution to optimize for viewability

A growing number of buyers are turning to PMPs to meet stringent viewability requirements. Major media-buying powerhouse Group M has gone so far as to release its own custom viewability standards, which are more rigorous than those of the MRC. Inventory that meets these more rigorous standards is the gateway to securing advertising dollars from premium brands like Unilever and Volvo. Optimizing your inventory to meet those viewability demands and building PMP packages around viewability thresholds is a great way to maximize incremental revenue and ensure that you’re able to charge buyers for the true value of your inventory.

Optimize for brand safety to score global brand dollars

A tumultuous news cycle, the rise of fake news, and the proliferation of unsafe content on social platforms has led to a major industry-wide focus on brand safety. Buyers across the board have prioritized brand-safe inventory for their digital campaigns to avoid finding themselves on the wrong side of a social media mob. UM Worldwide recently appointed a global brand safety officer, elevating the challenge of finding brand safe inventory to the C-suite. However, brand safety is subjective. Different brands have different sensitivities, and different regions have different ideas of what constitutes a risky placement. Using an optimization tool to create content category packages allows publishers to capture diverse brands and global advertiser dollars with their featured content.

Work directly with buyers to understand their needs

PMPs combine the efficiency of a programmatic transaction with the intimacy and trust of a direct deal. That means the publishers who value user experience can control which advertising partners have access to their inventory. However, that communication and vetting is a two-way street. Work directly with the buyers participating in your private marketplace to identify their needs. Just because your PMP focuses on high-viewability inventory packages doesn’t mean that advertisers aren’t also looking for packages that are low in fraud. Understanding these needs and packaging your inventory toward them can provide a competitive advantage in securing additional premium brand dollars.

Advertising | Perspectives

Three inventory quality trends to watch in digital advertising

July 24, 2018 Eric Bozinny Director, Inventory Quality—PubMatic

Ensuring the high-quality of inventory across the PubMatic platform, as it flows from sellers to buyers, requires strong policy, which standardizes compliance enforcement and operational coordination across account teams so that we spot issues early and often. It also requires a strategic focus on identifying what lies ahead for quality.

I’d like to share my thoughts on a few growing trends I expect to see regarding inventory quality. These views come from an amalgamation of inputs: my 10 years of experience in managing inventory quality, the signals and other clues arising from my daily quality operational work, and deep-dive investigations. Buyers have shifted their emphasis to quality and are focused on working with other quality-centric professionals across the industry.

Here are three major inventory quality trends:

Over-Reliance on Fraud Detection Technology

The industry has clearly spoken – third-party fraud detection is now considered “table stakes” for any large player, buyer or seller, in the digital advertising ecosystem. Though fraud detection vendors play an important role in helping to identify and avoid invalid traffic (IVT), I would advise treating this service as one tool among others to help improve quality.

Why?

No vendor measures quality the same way, yet many of them share the same MRC certification for Sophisticated IVT (SIVT). PubMatic uses a combination of IAS and White Ops to monitor invalid traffic rates and identify problematic pockets of inventory. However, many buyers use different fraud detection vendors and they may report very different results for the same inventory. These variances can be explained by unique proprietary methodology and differences in sampling where one vendor may look at a completely different subset of the same inventory vs. another vendor.

For example, if “Buyer A” is reporting their inventory is 100% IVT, while PubMatic’s White Ops reporting is showing 1%, the promise of fraud detection technology as a standalone method to identify non-human traffic breaks down. Yet, when stepping back and viewing fraud detection as a starting point, conflicts between buyers and sellers are more likely to come to an agreement. I believe this because both parties can recognize that even with big differences in fraud reporting, a deep-dive investigation will uncover other signals that likely support one report or the other.

In this specific example, I may find other evidence supporting the buyer’s claim and could come to a mutually agreeable conclusion (e.g. refund, blacklisting, termination of supplier, etc.). However, as often as not, my investigation might raise no other red flags to indicate poor inventory, and thus I would propose limiting access to that inventory for this buyer.

Growing Importance of Content and Audience

GDPR has impacted the ability of marketers to fully utilize the targeting potential of cookies and audience profiles in EMEA due to the regulatory changes in consent and privacy. One could argue GDPR is a direct consequence of the rise of ad tech and the lack of self-regulation concerning how the data of consumers are used in the targeting of advertising. Therefore, it is not unlikely that similar consumer data privacy and consent laws will spread around the globe. This will further reduce the efficacy of cookies and precipitating the return of contextual targeting for online advertising.

What does this mean? An increased focus on the quality of content—addressing fake news and brand safety concerns—as well as the quality of the audiences who consume this content as important quality trends in the marketplace.

Recognizing the importance of content and audience to buyers, PubMatic evaluates domains and apps not only on the level of IVT but also on the value of the audience and originality of the content. For instance, an organic, loyal audience is preferred to consumers acquired from other sources. We also avoid content farms and look-a-like sites that exist only as a necessary backdrop to sell ad impressions.

The Importance of Whitelisting and Ads.txt

Since ads.txt was introduced in 2017, adoption has been accelerating. Pixalate reports that as of March 2018, more than 50% of the top 5,000 programmatic sites have adopted ads.txt.

While ads.txt is a valuable tool to combat domain spoofing, it provides no inherent protection against IVT (bots and fraud). Further, it does not guarantee the quality of a domain’s content and audience. For example, a domain created solely for the purpose of driving bot and/or acquired traffic through pages filled with content stripped from other sources can have an ads.txt file, but still be a bad source of inventory.

Thus, working with a whitelist of trusted domains is the single best practice for both buyers and resellers of inventory. Being familiar with the domains on which ads are running, and avoiding all other domains, is the best prevention.

I strongly suspect that most of the behavior leading to poor quality inventory comes from the point where money changes hands—the domains and apps where advertising is consumed. By wisely choosing which domains to work with and working with only whitelisted domains, many quality issues will be avoided entirely. Alternatively, when a small group of domains isn’t enough to meet inventory requirements, working with trusted partners can also provide improved inventory quality and improved brand safety.

Perspectives

Double, triple, quadruple your high performing audiences with lookalike modeling

July 23, 2018 Haley Adam, Product Marketing Manager—Lotame

Marketing professionals, sales teams, and business owners are constantly chasing new audiences to target. This is only natural, as the more your grow your business and the more customers you reach, the greater your success. It is the core element of all business: the need to achieve stronger and greater consumer support.

But we all know that it’s not a “piece of cake” targeting new audiences, especially when they are beyond who you normally encounter or engage with. There are a lot of unknowns in increasing your audience targeting size. And marketers and publishers need to evolve with the technology around them.

While Lookalike modeling isn’t a term that is new to the marketing technology industry, it is still widely misunderstood. It is a tool that has been used by companies to expand their digital audiences while maintaining clear and relevant targeting practices. This piece will take a look into what Lookalike modeling is, how it works, and why it is so important for advertising campaigns.

What is Lookalike Modeling?

If you are looking to increase your targeting efforts with high performing audiences, the answers don’t lie in a mass chain of random messaging to consumers who have zero interest in your product. Instead, your focus should lie on your high performing audiences. What is it about your highest performing audiences that set them apart from the rest? Do they have common interests? Are they from the same geographic area? The best way to acquire new, high performing visitors is to focus on users who resemble your existing visitors, the users who have already shown an interest in your product or service.

Lookalike modeling is a process that utilizes machine learning to statistically analyze a given seed audience (already high-performing audience), identifying the demographics, characteristics, and different combinations of those and other data points. This creates new audiences composed of users that match these learned insights, which are continually updated.

For example, let’s say you’re are hoping to target people who are more likely to click on your ad or watch your video. Lookalike modeling uses machine learning to find more users who will take that specific action. This means your campaigns can scale to reach more people, with a high engagement rate.

How does Lookalike Modeling work?

Let’s say you are a clothing brand looking to boost online purchases for an upcoming sale. The first step would be to place a pixel – a small segment of tracking code – on your purchase confirmation page. This will allow you to track the behaviors of purchasers – during the current sale – as they move throughout the web.

The demographic and behavioral data points of anyone who completes a sale and makes it to the confirmation page can be ingested into a DMP platform and analyzed to identify which behaviors and patterns are most common among the audiences. Once those customer characteristics and data points are identified, you can use them create your new seed audience and ultimately engage with an even greater target audience.

It’s a truly incredible process that uncovers the hidden attributes that can optimize your performance for future campaigns. Icing on the cake? It’s all done in a centralized platform.

Why Use Lookalike Modeling?

Well, I guess the question would be, “Why not”? As an advertiser, when consumers within a specific audience converts, it’s a fulfilling feeling. And while you want to hold on to that high performing target audience, you still want to ensure you are growing your brand following.

By using a lookalike modeling tool, it helps you to identify a larger pool of possible customers. You can use the tool to seek audiences with behaviors that match up to your target audience, and so you have a greater chance to convert them. It’s essentially the same as building a robust profile of existing customers, only you are doing it for the audiences you have yet to reach out to and engage with.

In summary, Lookalike Modeling offers marketers and publishers a valuable approach to reaching new or current consumers in a cost-effective way, ultimately helping companies to grow the scope and reach of their businesses. Why not take advantage of your already high performing audiences and increase your brand awareness? As the industry continues to look for new and innovative ways to reach new consumers, lookalike modeling will help marketers stay true to their core and use what they already know to improve campaign success.

Advertising | Revenue

6 Business questions to consider before investing in programmatic advertising

July 17, 2018 Margaret Farmakis. VP—Sovrn Services

Having worked for an email data company in a previous life, I’m used to the predictions that people love to make about the death of a specific marketing channel. Remember when Slack was going to kill email or Google+ was going to kill Facebook? We all know how those worked out.

With GDPR now in effect, I’ve been hearing a lot of predictions about the impending demise of programmatic advertising. What’s ironic is that greater transparency and protection of consumer privacy rights are very positive steps forward for the industry. So, for publishers who’ve never invested in programmatic, now is actually a great time to do so.

That being said, as with any investment of time, money and resources, companies should arm themselves with as much information as possible; consider what’s best for their business (instead of focusing on what everyone else is doing); and make sure that they understand the potential benefits and drawbacks of making such an investment.

Here are six business questions for publishers to consider before investing in programmatic:

1. What are your goals?

This may seem obvious, but beyond making money, it’s important for publishers to clarify exactly what success looks like and define their desired outcomes. In addition to a new revenue stream, do your programmatic goals include: gaining insights into your audience data and behaviors? Exposing your inventory to a new set of buyers? Expanding brand recognition? Gathering data to build a business case for a larger investment? Or perhaps you are considering using programmatic to drive ecommerce activity? Each of those goals requires a different approach, so it’s important to define the “why” before focusing on the “how.”

2. How much does the user experience matter?

Too often we see publishers making trade-offs with the quality of their user experience in favor of displaying more ads or using ad formats that aren’t in-line with IAB or Coalition for Better Ads standards. It can be tempting to forgo best practices when revenue is the only metric that matters (which it shouldn’t be).

Your users—and their willingness to visit and spend time on your site on a consistent basis—are even more valuable. That’s why it’s important to ensure you have a responsive site with load times of three seconds or less (Google shows quicker-loading mobile pages higher up in its search results) and a design that is uncluttered and easy to scroll and click-through. Don’t let first-order thinking trump what’s best for your users.

3. What is your biggest fear?

Before investing in anything new, it’s a good idea to go through a fear-setting exercise. Tim Ferris has a great template that he designed to be used for working through personal and life decisions, and it can also be applied to business decisions. This includes:

Defining your fear (what is the worst thing that could happen);
Outlining what steps you could take to prevent the worst possible outcome;
If the worst outcome happens, defining the steps you would take to repair the damage; and
Determining the short- and long-term costs of taking no action at all and sticking with the status quo.

For most publishers, this exercise would likely involve fears related to ad quality or fraud issues. If that’s the case, consider using anti-malware software (like Confiant), which can help prevent malvertising. It’s not foolproof, so to repair the damage, publishers should have a plan for investigating and taking down these ads. For example, have a segment of super users you can rely on to report issues and test fixes. And work with reputable partners who have rigorous approval standards in place and will be responsive to your support requests.

4. Are you taking a collaborative or siloed approach?

If you’re a larger publisher, you may have the budget to invest in creating fully-staffed teams to focus on sales, ad ops, and editorial. If so, don’t make the mistake of running those teams in silos with little to no opportunity for cross-functional collaboration.

When it comes to programmatic advertising, everything is connected, and shared goals are critical for successful outcomes. Decisions involving how your inventory is sold and trafficked and the page(s) it’s displayed on require ongoing and frequent communication between the sales, ad ops and editorial teams to ensure the best possible results. For successful collaboration to take place, it’s important to define the dependencies between teams and how each individual team contributes to the bigger picture of increasing user engagement through producing original content that also displays relevant advertising.

5. How important is testing and optimization?

I don’t know of a single marketing channel where the marketer doesn’t gain performance improvements by adopting a learning cycle of testing, adjusting, and optimizing. Often, the whole point of investing in a new channel is to gather data you didn’t have before. Then you can use the data to test a variety of hypotheses that result in varying degrees of ROI. This means it’s important to consider if you have the tools, resources and tolerance for continually tweaking what’s working (and what isn’t) to produce the best possible results and get the highest return possible on your investment. It’s an art and a science and it takes time to perfect, but it’s worth it.

6. What type of company do you want to work with?

The ad tech space is full of companies providing a wide variety of products and services for publishers. Not all of them will suit your needs or align with your business practices, so it’s important to do your research. Pay particular attention to claims that seem too good to be true (for example, promises of 100% fill rates). Ask questions about a company’s support model (for example, what are the average response times, how are requests prioritized, and what is the coverage model on weekends and holidays).

It’s also important to understand how each company is (or isn’t) compliant with the various US and international data collection and privacy laws governing digital advertising (i.e., GDPR, COPPA, PIPEDA, CAN-SPAM, etc.) and whether they’ve implemented the bare minimum for compliance or adhere to both “the spirit and the letter” of the law. For example, Sovrn is the only exchange offering a free Consent Management Platform (CMP) to help publishers with GDPR compliance, instead of putting the burden on the publisher to figure out how to be compliant on their own.

According to eMarketer’s “US Programmatic Ad Spending Forecast 2018,” almost $47 billion will go to programmatic advertising this year. And, by 2020 programmatic will account for 86.2% of digital display spend. Now is a great time to explore if programmatic is worth investing in for your business. Start by focusing on what makes your content and audience unique, your tolerance for risk, your desired outcomes and what you want to learn.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Revenue

Post-GDPR impact: Programmatic remains strong in the U.S.

July 17, 2018 Todd Krizelman, CEO – MediaRadar

Long before GDPR took effect in May, both publishers and advertisers tried to install safeguards to prepare for its impact on industry practices. We’ve seen some of the effects already. Email marketing distribution lists have shrunk. Companies are re-evaluating and optimizing the data they collect to increase data privacy and consumer trust. Some publishers are even blocking access to EU-based residents altogether.

But how has GDPR affected the ways advertisers buy? It’s been reported that programmatic purchases have plummeted in the EU since GDPR has gone into effect. Companies now need to prove they have user permissions, which becomes tricky if you’re selling advertising on websites where you have no ownership or control. We’re aware of certain firms whose revenues are down from 33% to 50%, in just the past 30 days, presumably due to lagging compliance.

Here at MediaRadar, however, we evaluated programmatic ad spend in the U.S. The impact isn’t nearly as drastic as some may have believed.

Number of brands buying programmatic is up

Surprisingly, our own data found that the number of brands purchasing programmatically in the U.S. has increased since April. This shows that brands still value the convenience of programmatic purchases, even with the new regulations. It’s important to note that this increase in programmatic interest actually came prior to GDPR. From January to May of 2018, we saw 86,695 brands purchase programmatic ads, with the number of brands increasing month over month.

Direct buys are increasing at an even greater rate

From January to May of this year, digital advertising has surged. During this period, the number of brands that purchase programmatically increased, yet direct buying also grew, and at a much faster rate. Because of this, the total percent of programmatic purchases among all digital ad buys has actually decreased. In Q1 of 2018, 61% of ads were placed programmatically. Since then, that percentage has dipped to 59% in April, and to 58% in May, despite programmatic strength.

In looking at the big picture, we found that the rate of programmatic ad buying has been largely flat in the U.S. year-to-date. Digital advertising as a whole is thriving, regardless of GDPR implementation. This proves that the increase in programmatic spend can be attributed to the overall popularity of digital, as opposed to programmatic itself. We believe this trend in the U.S. will continue. Programmatic will remain popular among advertisers, barring a wave unexpected GDPR violations as a result.

About the Author

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

Thinking differently about outstream video ads

July 10, 2018 Dennis Yuscavitch, VP of Product Marketing—Outbrain

Assaulted by a sudden rush of sound while surfing the web, you probably have found yourself asking “where is that audio coming from?!?” We’ve all been there, frantically searching for the video ad that auto-played with sound. This negative video experience has become so problematic that leading browsers now stop video that auto-plays sound. Without a doubt, this should have us all asking how can publishers gain the revenue benefit of video without annoying readers?

Marketers enjoy video because it creates a deeper connection with the audience. And publishers are willing to push the boundaries of an acceptable video experience in the name of improved RPMs. That said, there are three things publishers can do to take advantage of these improved connection and revenue opportunities while creating a healthy and friendly user experience:

Personalization is Relevancy

Video ad content must be personalized for the reader. The over-abundance of video demand shouldn’t be a license for inundating the reader with whatever demand meets the viewability (vCPM) completion rate goals. Make video ad content relevant and users will engage and stay through completion.

Video signals are important

The experience must be customized based on reader habits. If the reader has shown a propensity to engage with video, make the video experience more prominent with more entry points to accommodate their preference. Gather signals like time of day, device, and user’s preference to consumer short and long-form ad content to help tune their session.

Interruption is non-starter

Allow video ad content to become ‘native video’ and non-interruptive. On mobile this works best by emulating a feed experience through inline play. Alternatively, by placing it at the end of an article in non-feed formats, you can show at the exact moment the reader is deciding what content to consume next.

These strategies are required for a successful and user-friendly auto-play video experience. However, there’s another powerful alternative: enabling click-to-play outstream video ads. Publishers can put the control back in the hands of reader while proving to marketers that lean-in, long-form video ad content and immersive storytelling experience they’ve been looking for.

Outbrain’s Click-to-Play solution, which we launched earlier this year, has averaged view times of 37 seconds, 49% completion rates, and 10% conversion rates for 60 second videos. This proves that amazing engagement stats can be achieved while giving full control to the viewer.

Lots of value can be extracted from auto-play video ads for both publishers and marketers. But we need to think differently and invest in the right mix of video experiences. If we do, we’ll all be able to forge a relationship with our readers that keeps them coming back.