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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

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.

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.

Industry-Research

Mobile traffic has caught up with desktop. Are you prepared?

July 9, 2018 Terri Walter, Chief Marketing Officer—Chartbeat

It is official: We are finally “mobile-first.” At the conclusion of Q2, we reached the much-anticipated pivot point when all mobile traffic (direct and referred) caught up with desktop (see chart below). But while we waited, the mobile ecosystem and what we thought we knew about mobile has evolved. Is your media company prepared?

Here are five trends to watch as media flips to mobile-first:

1. The mobile pivot point

Since January 2017, total traffic from desktop to news sites declined by 14%, while mobile traffic increased by 34%. One of the main drivers for this is the growth in referred traffic from pages using AMP. For news sites, mobile has finally met desktop.

2. The shapeshifting reader

Mobile readers are now more likely to go direct to mobile apps and homepages by typing in the URL than they are to be referred to a site by Facebook. Recent data shows that direct mobile traffic surpassed all Facebook-referred traffic as of mid-October and is steadily climbing. Despite the recent News Feed changes in Facebook which have resulted in declining traffic to publishers (-15% since January 2017), readers still seek out news news, and they are doing so on mobile devices.

3. The browser: the next major traffic source?

Are discovery tools in the browser the next main gateway to news?

We’ve seen a rise of in-browser content recommendation modules, such as Google Chrome Suggestions. And, with a rise that started last year, traffic from Google Chrome Suggestions has grown 21x. Another is Pocket, which has an integration with Firefox and was acquired by its parent company Mozilla in February 2017. Pocket may be significantly smaller than Google Chrome Suggestions, but with a 297% increase in referral traffic since January 2017, it is worth watching.

4. The next class of news referrer emerges

In looking beyond Google Search and Facebook, we see that traffic from Twitter to publisher sites has declined by 18% since January 2017 and is now at a similar traffic level to Google Chrome Suggestions. While Twitter may be off of its high, there are very strong gains in the last year from a new tier of news aggregators including the brand-new Google News app, Flipboard, Instagram, and Axel Springer’s Upday app. Here’s what we’re seeing:

Google News is quickly trending up as a referrer source, particularly since May when Google announced an all new Google News app that replaced Google Play Newsstand as well as the old Google News & Weather apps. We will be watching this closely in the next few months, particularly as Google continues to execute the next steps in its mobile news strategy.
Flipboard has had a dramatic increase in the amount of referrer traffic it sends to publishers, and it is now a meaningful leading referrer, having doubled since June 2017.
Instagram, which recently announced its billionth user, is commonly thought of as only a photo and video sharing app. However, we’re also seeing that it’s becoming a meaningful source of traffic for news sites; Instagram referrer traffic to publishers has grown 232% since January 2017.
Even more surprising is Upday News for Samsung – a news app from Axel Springer that is featured on Samsung phones. Since January 2017, Upday saw a huge tick upwards of 763% growth in referrer traffic. Upday is one of the fastest growing sources of traffic for publishers in Europe. It is also now driving roughly the same level of traffic to publishers as Instagram.

All of this indicates that the consumer demand for news via apps has strong momentum, and you should keep a close eye on the growing news app ecosystem as part of your content distribution strategy.

5. The more-engaged-than-we-thought mobile homepage reader

You may think reader attention is more scattered on mobile than on desktop. However, our data shows otherwise, specifically with regard to mobile homepages. On mobile homepages, the average visitor spends 40% more time actively engaging than their desktop counterpart (22 engaged seconds on mobile vs.16 engaged seconds on desktop). While this comparison isn’t entirely apples-to-apples (you could imagine that a reader is more likely to idle in a more information-dense desktop experience), this is a notable reversal of the reading behavior we see on article pages, where desktop readers engage slightly more (38 engaged seconds vs. 34).

Mobile readers are also 20% more likely to click-through to articles than those on desktop. Mobile homepage visitors click through to articles 68% of the time, compared to 57% on desktop. Whereas desktop homepage readers scroll more of the page, mobile readers are more engaged in reading articles by clicking from the mobile homepage into content.

What does this mean in terms of how we value the mobile reader or monetize the mobile homepage?

The Takeaway

There is no doubt that the consumer, publisher, and device-maker shift to mobile is driving growth and evolution in how and where traffic flows around content. Consumers are increasingly seeking content directly on publishers’ mobile websites and apps. They are also using news aggregators, where we see a new class of secondary traffic referrers emerging. And with mobile homepage readers more engaged in content than we thought, now may be the time to rethink what we thought we knew about mobile.

Advertising | Perspectives

The shift towards context-based advertising

June 18, 2018 Sachin Kamdar, Co-Founder and CEO—Parse.ly

The 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica scandal, and GDPR represent a tidal shift in how the ad tech and digital media industry will monetize their audience moving forward. And it’s overdue. Demographic data doesn’t define a person’s identity. People define themselves by what matters to them, by their interests, hobbies, and values, and they show this in what they read about online.

As we talk about technology in the publishing industry, we should consider what kind of tech will move us towards monetization through context-based advertising. This protects data privacy, and has the potential to finally gain an advantage over the platforms where many digital advertising dollars have shifted.

Consumer mistrust of platforms

When consumers found out that Russia played a role in the 2016 election via bots on Twitter, propaganda on Facebook, and even local events in the U.S., we were forced rethink the role social media played in our community. Were they purely a platform? If so, to what degree did they need to police the content and users? Further, if they had so much knowledge about their users, why couldn’t they prevent a malicious influence like Russia from infiltrating their platform?

The Cambridge Analytica scandal certainly didn’t help this cause, and weekly stories break about Facebook continuing to acknowledge privacy and data issues. This has planted the seed of doubt about whether these platforms and the underlying data could be trusted—not just by the general public, but by the marketers who provide the revenue stream for Facebook.

New privacy-conscious controls for consumers

GDPR was borne out of a general concern that consumers had a lack of control and transparency around their digital data—data that bore the monetary fruits of now enormous companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. That data also created the massive ad tech industry that developed complex methods to personalize and optimize ad targeting to the point where most experts in the industry still don’t quite know how the ecosystem works.

GDPR, in some ways, marks a boon for platforms and the end of an era for the ad tech industry. Any platform that collects its own massive amount of first party data (like Facebook, Google, Twitter), can relatively easily get the consent of the population. Ad tech, though, faces the burden of getting consent through 3rd parties, where the value of giving consent was not only unclear but potentially non-existent. The type of re-targeting and personalization that was prevalent before will start to change under GDPR as publisher-direct relationships with consumers become increasingly important.

Context-based advertising

So where does this all lead, in terms of current industry trends? There’s no lack of interest in moving from a programmatic model to more of a subscription-based model. But most of the innovation and investment in digital tech has been focused on ad-tech, data collection. We need to simply “do better” from an advertiser and consumer perspective given these trends.

From the advertiser side, the credibility of their 3rd party data is eroding with GDPR. There are some publishers that are large enough (or are building collectives) to create their own first party pools of data. However, none of them can reach the scale or targeting capabilities of companies like Facebook and Google. Marketers know this, and if they want the best targeting they’ll still go to the duopoly.

That said, because consumer privacy is becoming top of mind for more and more people, marketers are also worried about the experience around ad campaigns they run. They want to create an experience that doesn’t creep people out (for lack of a better term). Interest- or context-based advertising, as a result is coming back into favor for the privacy-conscious brands and marketers.

Targeting ads based on consumers’ interests or the context of what they’re reading instead of their personal data benefits everyone involved. Consumers maintain their privacy and build trust publishers. Publishers can then pass on this trust to brands who want their consumers to know that they care about their privacy. And, publishers who are armed with the right contextual data can still provide an advertising experience that’s targeted, but doesn’t violate consumers’ concerns.

Not only does data around interests protect anonymity, but it speaks to the core of who people are. Marketers who try to understand what matters to their audience through attention data—the topics and stories they pay attention to online—will have a leg-up on connecting that audience with content and products that they want.

Perspectives

Marketing to the cross-platform consumer: The art of sequential messaging

June 14, 2018 Michel Benjamin, Director of Marketing—Lotame

In today’s fast-paced world, it takes consumers mere seconds to form an opinion of a brand or product. At the same time, most consumers own multiple devices, and they move from one to the other seamlessly. In terms of advertising, this means that it has become extremely challenging to attract—much less hold— consumers’ attention. One strategy holds great promise, however: sequential messaging.

These days, we have access to vast amounts of data about reader preferences and behaviors. Sequential messaging offers the ability to harness this data to create high-performing campaigns. But how do you turn the marketing tactic of sequential messaging into an artform?

What Is Sequential Messaging?

First, let’s define what we’re talking about. Sequential messaging is a technique in which consumers are targeted with a series of ads across various devices. To engage the reader, the ads are shown in a particular sequence. These messages can come in the form of banner ads, social media posts, emails, TV ads, native, or content marketing, and beyond. In short, the goal is to tell a story over the series of messages. And this is where the artform comes into play

How Does Sequential Messaging Work?

For illustrative purposes, let’s start with an example. Let’s say a consumer is browsing a site that is running a women’s fashion ad campaign. She is shown a video ad for a new brand of women’s sportswear that happens to feature women’s yoga gear. And she watches it to the end. The video shows several busy women leading a healthy lifestyle and taking time for themselves as they practice yoga, play soccer, go running or workout at the gym.

The next time the consumer visits the site, she’s on her iPhone. She’s immediately shown a video that tells a story about a woman who becomes less stressed and gets back into shape thanks to yoga. Of course, the woman in the video is wearing clothes from the brand’s yoga line.

The third time the consumer visits the site, she’s on her desktop computer, and she’s shown an ad with a call to action to purchase yoga apparel. It could, for example, offer 25% off all yoga pants for the coming week. The consumer likes the clothes and purchases some yoga gear.

In this example, the consumer has been drawn in by a series of messages that go from general to more focused based on her initial action, which was to watch an ad featuring yoga gear. She’s been successfully targeted across a range of different devices with a series of related ads, resulting in converting into a customer.

How Do You Succeed with Sequential Messaging?

Sequential marketing campaigns are designed to tell a story that speaks to a specific consumer persona, regardless of what device is uses. In other words, they target the right person with the right message at the right time on the right screen.

To succeed, you need to be able to:

Recognize high-quality leads: These are consumers whose behavior indicates they have a high probability of converting.
Know what messaging to use: A campaign must present stories that speak to specific consumer personas.
Figure out when to show what messaging: Any successful campaign brings the lead through the sales funnel appropriately.
Target devices: It’s crucial to understand what devices the same consumer uses to access a website.

Data-driven Control

By syncing the insights gathered from your existing audience data, such as preferences and behaviors critical to informing sequential marketing campaigns, you can optimize your sequential messaging, enhance engagement, and improve your overall ROI.

Publishers only have so much control over the creative provided for any campaign. However, they do have access to data that can be passed back to the advertiser to help them succeed. The beauty of this technique lies in providing a cohesive message and experience, regardless of what device the consumer is using. Just as consumers want access to buy anytime, anywhere, your campaigns need to be able to reach them whenever and wherever they’re ready to engage. Having access to accurate cross-device technology can help make this a reality, for cohesive cross-platform messages.

Sequential marketing provides a cohesive and comprehensive customer experience. It also helps connect with consumers, because you can use the resulting data about them and what they respond to and give them more of the same type of content.

Overall, sequential advertising enables marketers to make a lasting impression and generate higher-quality leads because consumers are more engaged. For publishers, this means you can enhance campaign performance, leading to happier advertisers and a bigger ROI.

Perspectives | Revenue

Publishers: Focus on fraud

June 11, 2018 Amanda Forrester, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Programmatic and Publisher Products—IAS

I’m going to start by saying something that really shouldn’t shock you. Digital ad fraud is a crime. The word fraud is right there in the name. Fraudsters, whether they’re using sophisticated bot networks or deceptive spoofing tactics, are stealing money from advertisers. Yet the digital advertising industry has historically treated fraud as, at best, the cost of doing business or, at worst, a budget-sapping nuisance. But if the headlines are to be believed, that’s changing fast and publishers need to take steps to clean house if they want to be sure they’re protected.

Over the last few months, we’ve all seen signs that public officials are taking a renewed interest in the digital media ecosystem. While Congress has been busy trying to figure out Facebook, the New York district attorney’s office recently launched an inquiry into the business practices of Newsweek owner IBT media, saw the company’s offices raided and their servers seized. Though that investigation was wide-ranging, ad fraud was significant component.

The investigation may be part of a wider trend. FBI investigators recently attended the Rubicon Projects Executive Exchange conference where Special Agent Evelina Aslanyan reportedly told ad industry executives that ad fraud “represents a whole new world of crime for publishers and consumers.” The appearance suggests that the bureau is gearing up for a push on cybercrime and that ad fraud will now fall firmly in that category.

While fraud is often framed as a challenge for advertisers, it’s possible for even legitimate publishers to unwittingly become entangled with ad fraud. There are a handful of steps publishers can take avoiding being caught up in the wave.

Avoid traffic-sourcing schemes

It’s not uncommon for publishers to “buy traffic” in order to deliver on impression quotes and meet their obligations to advertising partners. There’s nothing inherently wrong with employing third-party services to extend or increase the audience for your content, especially if that additional audience is human and comes from a legitimate marketing activity like sponsored posts or content recommendation services.

However, some vendors who offer additional traffic can’t deliver human eyes. Instead, the impressions they deliver are from bots. It’s this kind of invalid traffic that can leave publishers in hot water with advertisers and the authorities. Thoroughly vetting traffic vendors is the best way to avoid paying for fake views or even inadvertently charging for them.

Employ a verification solution

Verification isn’t just for the buy-side. Advertisers employ verification solutions to identify, and in some cases block ads from serving on invalid or non-human impressions. For publishers inadvertently receiving fake traffic. this can be a headache requiring refunds or campaign extensions to meet impression goals with legitimate traffic. However, verification cuts both ways and ad fraud detection solutions can help publishers to clean up their inventory and supply chain.

Additionally, publishers can use verification technology to detect fraud on their own sites and pages. Verification technology can help publishers with vet traffic vendors and ensure that none of the traffic they’re serving to advertisers is invalid. Sell-side verification technology gives publishers greater transparency into the quality of their inventory allowing them to make more accurate projections of its value.

Automate optimization

Sell-side verification solutions have been available to for over a decade. They allow publishers to assess their inventory and identify potential invalid traffic before exposing it to ad impressions. However, the process of cleaning up that inventory can be time-consuming and costly.

Automated optimization gives publishers a way to remove fraud from their deliverable ad inventory. Optimization solutions integrate directly into publisher ad servers which allow them to redirect fraudulent audiences to house ads. This prevents bots from collecting cookies and carrying them to other websites and provides an added layer of protection against inadvertent fraudulent traffic from unscrupulous vendors.

The takeaway

The focus on fraud isn’t likely to let up anytime soon. While publishers may feel some added pressure to deliver fraud-free impressions, this also represents a huge opportunity for premium publishers to capitalize on quality inventory. By taking a few simple steps to ensure that your inventory, as well as your traffic generation solutions, are safe and fraud-free publishers have the potential to score ad revenue worthy of their quality inventory.

Perspectives | Revenue

YouTube growth flat as brand safety woes continue

June 8, 2018 Todd Krizelman, CEO – MediaRadar

In lieu of Facebook’s reputation struggles, as well as changes to their Newsfeed, many publishers are considering YouTube for both inventory and audience development.

However, YouTube has problems of its own – namely, brand safety. According to a brand-new study by Oath and Advertiser Perceptions, polling more than 300 advertisers, 42% say user-generated content sites like YouTube aren’t addressing their concerns over brand safety. This study comes just a month after Cisco pulled all ads from the video platform. Per Cisco’s CMO Karen Walker, in her original blog post (the piece was later edited to remove mention of YouTube), “We have pulled all online advertising from YouTube until the platform has met our standards.”

As digital video consumption rises, publishers see YouTube as an obvious opportunity. Marketers do, too – but they’re also growing increasingly weary of brand reputation across the platform. In looking at our own data at MediaRadar, the numbers bear that out. Across a sample of 70 top YouTube channel pages, advertising spend has been flat in 2018, with only an 0.2% increase YTD. Publishers and marketers alike both want to tap into YouTube’s exploding audience (nearly 1.6 billion watch YouTube content at least once a month right now). But for this to be a go-to platform, there’s work to be done.

To YouTube’s credit, they’re taking on the work. At the company’s NewFront, YouTube talked up its newly expanded Google Preferred lineup, emphasizing its top channels as premium, brand-safe environments. They also touted the increase in human reviewers auditing content. However, as the Oath study shows us, the effort to resolve brand safety and win back trust from now burned and cautious brands will be slow-burn and long-term.

As that process continues, high-quality digital publishers are in a good position either way. While YouTube addresses trust, more marketers will flock to the service. This, in turn, could boost revenue opportunities for the publishers that want to play in that sandbox.

In the interim, however, digital publishers are still the beneficiaries. The Oath report also found that 45% of advertisers are moving spend to “well-regarded premium” digital publishers — think sites like USA Today, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times — until they feel standards have improved on social platforms like YouTube. It’s a win-win for publishers, with brand safety a key theme both now and in the future.

Innovation

How Google’s News App is tackling some of social delivery’s tough problems

June 5, 2018 Dennis Yuscavitch, VP of Product Marketing—Outbrain

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai kicked off last month’s Google I/O by stating that “there is more great journalism being created today than ever before.” Pichai and Trystan Upstill, Head of News Product and Engineering at Google, went on to highlight the programs and products Google was working on to help publishers sustain quality journalism. A lofty approach by a company often on the receiving end of publishers’ ire. They are making an effort, however, by doing the work and committing the resources to change the narrative.

The core of Google’s strategy relies solely on the Google News app. Typically, social feeds aren’t aligned with publishers’ needs. This is because social lacks brand awareness, revenue opportunity, and data about the end audiences. Furthermore, social feeds are often blamed for creating “filter bubbles” that negate a holistic approach to a topic and disintermediate the publisher/reader relationship. The Google News app has put some serious work into addressing some, but not all, of these concerns.

Here are the top four concerns that they appropriately addressed.

1. Featuring the Publisher Brand

The publisher brand is well-featured and prominent in the app experience. This helps bolster publisher brand awareness and avoids the “I read it on Facebook” dilemma. (This is what over 50% of readers answer when asked which publisher authored an article they read online.)

2. Avoiding the “Filter Bubble”

The “Headlines” section of the new app lets readers view what everyone else is reading. This helps address the “filter bubble” effect that comes from a 100% curated social experience. Discovery of new content from outside your social circle or creating more engaging ways to expose interesting content is critical.

3. Delivering Full Coverage

Our favorite geek-out feature is “Full Coverage,” which is a link placed under most news topics. Full Coverage provides multiple points of view from many different sources. As stories evolve over time, Full Coverage hosts a timeline so readers can understand the changes in the storyline. To enable Full Coverage, Google uses temporal co-locality. In layman’s terms, Google can understand the people, places and things related to a story in real-time and then package them. Even tweets, fact-checking and commonly asked questions are included in Full Coverage.

4. Creating Better Content Experiences

In the ‘make it easier to consume content’ category, “Newscasts” is a new user experience for packaging content. It neatly combines articles, videos, quotes and other types of content on a single topic, no matter where you are in the app. Upstill referred to it as “a preview that allows you to get a feel for the story.”

At Outbrain, we applaud any effort that helps readers discover new content, and addresses publisher concerns. We aren’t ignoring the legitimate business issues publishers have with Google, but are more than willing to highlight a great product, we’re all readers at the end of the day.

Research

Hiding in plain sight: The HTML5 security conundrum

June 4, 2018 Pat Ciavolella, Digital Security & Operations Director–The Media Trust

In recent years, as a growing number of security woes plagued Flash users, browser vendors and developers began to flee Flash for the more secure HTML5 and other open standards. Between 2014 and 2018, the percentage of people viewing a page in Chrome with Flash slid from 28% to 8%. Meanwhile, the percentage of websites that use HTML5 has grown to 70%.

In 2015, when the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) updated its digital advertising guide with best practices for using HTML5, they cited security as the chief reason behind publishers’ adoption of HTML5. While the IAB was right that HTML5 offers far better security than Flash, it has a critical weakness. Hackers now use HTML5’s security functionality to hide malware. This should give pause to HTML5 devotees.

First identified in April, this malware appears to be part of a coordinated campaign that targets iOS devices. This is partly because they are popular, partly because they make detection even more challenging. It has produced at least 21 separate incidents affecting dozens of globally recognized online media publishers and at least 15 ad networks. Ironically, the malware by no means exploits an HTML5 vulnerability. Rather, it uses functionality that not only secures software from malicious attacks by making code difficult to understand, but also helps to deliver a rich experience.

Exploiting Weaknesses

In 2015, just as the exodus from Flash began in earnest, university researchers discovered several techniques to convert HTML5 into a safe haven for malware. The researchers found that if malware were written using the techniques to make code hard to read, it would avoid detection regardless of which browser web visitors used. When used to hide malware, these techniques were coupled with a drive-by download attack that followed these steps:

Redirection and Cloaking: The victim goes through a series of redirects that effectively hide attack’s source. The victim’s browser information is gathered and sent to a remote server. If the browser has any vulnerabilities commonly, a malware code is sent back to the client.
De-obfuscation: The malware code is obfuscated (broken into chunks) in order to prevent detection. Once vulnerabilities are found in the browser, the code is de-obfuscated (converted into clear-text and reassembled).
Environment Preparation: The malware puts together code that will exploit the vulnerabilities.
Exploitation: The malware injects the harmful code.

A Growing Problem

Over the course of the two years that immediately followed the publication of the research, malware developers appeared to make little use of HTML5. In 2016, they used a bug in HTML5 to freeze computers and obtain unsuspecting users’ phone numbers. Then, in 2017, The Media Trust malware team identified a small number of random HTML5 malware that made little to no impact on the broader digital ecosystem. It is possible that bad actors behind the malware were simply experimenting before staging a more coordinated attack in a larger scale.

What distinguishes this year’s HTML5 malware from earlier versions is the underlying campaign’s level of coordination and the style of attack. More specifically, the campaign reflects the malware developers’ understanding of the display advertising supply chain. In particular, they recognized the thousands of potential victims. They stage the attack without user interaction, relying instead on auto-redirection. The result is a quicker, much more widespread attack on numerous unsuspecting users.

The Malware Technique

Delivery: When a user visits a targeted online publication, an ad network delivers the malicious ad to the webpage.
Checking Criteria: As the user’s device meets each criterion—namely, whether it’s iOS and whether it’s connected to the user’s carrier—the code serving the HTML5 creative checks the criteria. Once the criteria are met, the malware is reassembled in a way that allows the malicious code to execute.
Auto-redirection: The redirect is executed. The user is taken to another page that requests their input of personal information.

Preventing the HTML5 Malware Spread Through Campaigns

Should advertisers and marketers stop using HTML5? The answer is no. HTML5 is still far more secure than Flash. However, the HTML5 malware, along with a burgeoning number of malware, are proving more difficult to detect and will require marketers to change how they secure their digital supply chain.

HTML5 malware fly under the radar of traditional security measures like antivirus. Thwarting it requires a more holistic approach where organizations collaborate with their digital partners and third parties on improving the security of their digital ecosystem. It also requires marketers to work with a cross section of teams outside of marketing — cybersecurity, compliance, etc. — in order to improve the security of their creatives and digital assets.

In the digital marketing and media world, hackers prefer easy targets like third parties because they often have weaker security postures than their clients. Once hackers break through a third party’s security measures, they can enter the client’s secure networks undetected through a trusted connection. Another easy target are online ads, which let hackers spread malware to thousands of users without having to compromise or infect a website.

Organizations can avoid third-party and online ad risks by putting in place a robust digital vendor risk management program to police every actor and every code that executes in their digital ecosystem. Such a program enables organizations to develop and continuously update their inventory of direct and indirect vendors.

In today’s complex, dynamic digital ecosystem, an organization’s mix of vendors can change daily. Keeping track of these vendors will require continuous, real-time scanning of digital assets. Second, it helps assess and document the risks from each of these vendors. Third, it enables organizations to share policies and work with vendors and digital partners on resolving issues. Finally, it enables organizations to terminate vendors who continue to violate policy after they have been put on notice.

About the Author

Patrick Ciavolella is Digital Security & Operations Director at The Media Trust. He has been working at the company for over 11 years, protecting clients’ digital ecosystems from the ever-evolving threat landscape. His experience gives him a unique perspective on how companies can defend against rapid, sophisticated and targeted malware attacks.