Login
close
Login is restricted to DCN Publisher Members. If you are a DCN Member and don't have an account, register here.
Search

Digital Content Next logo

Menu

Tags containing: "supporter"

Advertising | Perspectives

Seeing the data for the trees: Overarching themes from Advertising Week

Pictured: (from left to right) Simon Whitcombe, Group Director, Global Marketing Solutions, Facebook | Jen McIsaac, VP, Retail Partnerships, Oracle Data Cloud | Paul Jankauskas, General Manager and Chief Revenue Officer, Verifone Media | Christopher Heine, Technology Editor, Adweek

I won’t lie: My positive experience at Advertising Week wasn’t that different from previous years. But, when you consider the magnitude and impact of an event such as this, that’s really no small feat.

Whether it’s brushing shoulders with some of the greatest minds in the industry, or gaining a pulse for significant topics—be they bubbling under the surface and overflowing within every category in the marketplace—there’s value to be lifted from the experience. Advertising Week is ultimately the place where crucial conversations take place in real-time about the real challenges we’re presented with at this particular moment in digital.

Nothing could be more advantageous.

The live performances weren’t anything to scoff at either, with musical acts from the likes of De La Soul, Common, The Roots, and Sting. Entertainment and networking aside, my focus was getting to the bottom of the massive data explosion in the industry and better understanding its grip on media companies, agencies, publishers, and marketers alike.

Getting on the Right Side of the Data Track
At Outbrain, a growing number of our internal marketing initiatives are being driven by data-supported research. And as a recommendation network that is powered by its own sophisticated algorithms, it has always been important for us to communicate the value of that data on both the brand side and media company side.

While more data is a huge opportunity, it is not without its complexities and challenges. This past week, our own struggles with data were echoed by leaders in the industry and solidified into some key themes:

1. Solving for Too Much Data Involves a Simplified Approach

With this new level of granularity, data is changing the conventions of how many brands have been built up until today. More importantly, it has raised a glaring issue, which was shared across panelists who have represented and worked alongside many legacy brands, including Jon Suarez-Davis, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Krux Digital:

“We’ve put together dumb pipes. And It’s not about putting in smarter dumb pipes, it’s about changing the system entirely.”

First, there needs to be a much deeper understanding of how the data has changed. Second, while data is now far more actionable than ever before, we can’t lose sight of how it drives business. This means applying clear objectives.

That’s because data can mean a lot of different things. From a user ID, to post campaign analysis, or, in our case, the consumption patterns of how audiences are interacting with our content across publisher sites.

The trick, according to Julie Fleischer, Managing Director of OMD, is simplicity and focus:

“The key is keeping an eye on what I’m trying to understand, what the best measurement approach available is, and what that mean in terms of whether it’s a complete or partial view. We need to stop looking at data as an answer, but more as an input to what we do. If we challenge where the flaws in measurement are, we can get to a better understanding of how to fill those gaps.”

When it comes to the data explosion, the challenge—and goal—is to find the metrics which are most indicative of wins and learn to measure what matters.

2. We Need to Put Data in the Hands of the Right People

A multitude of data types means a multitude of applications and outputs for data. And with that, a variety of potential business objectives that impact a variety of different stakeholders—whether it is informing product decisions, leading creative decisions, or driving better customer journey’s within the context of the content funnel.

Yet, currently, organizations struggle with interpreting and communicating all the data they now have at their disposal. Many are noticing a major talent gap when it comes to making their data actionable, due to poor cross-department translation and communication.

Charlie Chappell, Head of Media and Advertising at The Hershey Company, declared, “We need to get much more comfortable with much more data. We have to make that transition.”

Global Director of Business, Jeffrey Rossi shared similar sentiments about how data is used at Spotify, stating, “It’s not about just using data. It’s about living data. For us, the data goes into driving a product, we can market ourselves with data, and have conversations with data. It can’t be some jenky add on.”

So, while the digital advertising ecosystem is currently built to solve individual problems, we all need a much deeper understanding of the big picture to change the entire infrastructure of what we do. That means teaching up current talent and scouting the right new hires.

The only way to do it is to learn it.

3. Targeting for the Entire Dartboard and not Just the Bullseye

It’s easy to get swept up in the promise of reaching the right consumer on the right platform at the right time with the right message through data-enabled microtargeting but these insights don’t always live up to the hype. A real problem has been an over-reliance on these targeting capabilities as we try to lead with precision first. At the end of the day, though, context still matters.

In fact, that’s a large part of why Outbrain has been working with brands to better sequence the experience consumers have with their content. Overall, as an industry, we need to be thinking more holistically. Rather than just considering how we’re going to reach consumers, we need to invest in understanding all of the different touch points within the customer journey and create value for consumers at every point.


In the words of Tamara Alesi, Managing Partner and Integrated Planning Strategy at Mediacom, “You don’t always have to use the data on the front end, but to get smarter on the back end. That’s where you see your ROI.”

Looking Forward
As marketers and brands we sometimes get lost in our own worlds and forget about how our data impacts the customer experience. In order for us to not completely silo ourselves or our data; events like Advertising Week help center our work.

This week and fresh into Q4, we can all take these learnings and focus on innovation as well as better empowering the audiences we cater to online. In the quarter ahead, we will need to discipline ourselves when it comes to our data—focusing on how we want to use it and how it impacts our customers. Otherwise, all our data and tech is ultimately useless.

Eric_Hadley_Outbrain_GlobalMarketingHeadEric Hadley (@erichad) serves as Head of Global Marketing at Outbrain (@outbrain). He joined Outbrain in 2015, and is responsible for the company’s global go-to market strategy and for driving strategic value and large scale opportunities with its premium brand and agency partners. Hadley has over 20 years of experience in marketing leadership positions in consumer, media and technology companies. Previously, he served as Head of Partner Marketing at Pinterest leading the social network’s agency outreach organization. Prior to his work for Pinterest, he held roles at Yahoo, The Weather Channel, and Microsoft. While at Microsoft, he was involved in the launch of its search engine, Bing.

Industry-Research | Perspectives

Making metrics meaningful: Benchmarking engaged time

“What if we stopped focusing so much on traffic, and started focusing on experience?” I’m asked this question frequently. It’s a complex, divisive challenge for newsrooms, one I eagerly indulge.

I work directly with media companies of all shapes and sizes. I offer consultation on everything from using data to support editorial intuition, experimenting with audience development projects and honing tagging strategies. The best newsroom strategies start with someone saying to me: “It would be so interesting if we could…” and “What would happen if we tried…”. Data can provide the foundation for sussing out those new ideas while mitigating risk.

When I start to talk to clients about using engaged time, or any metric for that matter, the key is to set goals. What does success look like? But this prompts new questions: How do we stack up? Is this kind of engagement normal? Is it good? For us? For anyone?

There is no reliable comScore or Alexa rating for attention, thanks in no small part to various ways of measuring “time on site.” So if a publisher is eager to change the way they think about their audience, and their success, where could they start? I tried to find out.

How does Parse.ly measure engaged time?

First, let’s clarify exactly what we’re talking about, because Parse.ly measures engaged time differently than other analytics platforms. On your site, a visitor is considered “engaged” if they 1.) Have a browser tab open, and 2.) take an action (scroll, click, mouse-over) at least once every ten seconds.

For more details, feel free to browse this explainer on Parse.ly engaged time, or for a more technical explanation, read our engaged time technical documentation.

Analysis 1: How do we find an average engaged time for all content?

Weighted engaged time averages from a random sample of posts from 300 domains in our network gives a benchmark for engaged time.
Weighted engaged time averages from a random sample of posts from 300 domains in our network gives a benchmark for engaged time.

I first set up an exploratory analysis across our network, to see if I could identify any clear patterns. Over time, I started to see the same sites consistently outperform other outlets in average engaged time per visitor. What initially struck me though was actually the lack of pattern: each site seemed so diverse in voice and size.

To identify what made them competitive, I needed to understand the bigger picture of engaged time across Parse.ly’s network. To do this, I sampled user experiences at random for content published within one month from 300 anonymized domains to first understand, “how many seconds can you expect a typical reader to remain engaged with a story?”

Here we see how attentiveness is distributed across Parse.ly’s network. This graph shows what we can expect for “normal” attention time from any given reader, to any given article for each of the sampled domains. You can see a majority of our publishers attract an audience willing to invest roughly 40-60 seconds of their time on an article, though plenty of publishers can expect a more invested audience.

Finding engaged time in Parse.ly’s dashboard
Finding engaged time in Parse.ly’s dashboard

This provided a starting point for benchmarking engaged time, especially for my clients. Any Parse.ly user can easily find in their dashboard where their site, section or article falls on this curve. Teams can check to see if their stories and authors fall above or below the norm for their audience.

Understanding the context here is crucial though; not every article needs to outperform the average of the Entire Internet. There are better questions to ask. Where does your article fit in relation to what is expected for its section? How does that section perform in relation to the site as a whole?

Of course, there’s one more comparison that everyone wants to make: how does my site stack to the competition?

Analysis 2: How do we find the averaged engaged time for similar content?

This question helps you contextualize whether your work gets more attention than pieces that are similar to it and potentially predict how other topics, outside of your core competencies, might perform. For example, if you don’t normally write technology feature, it could help to understand the engaged time benchmark for tech publishing leaders. Here, we break down the analysis above further to understand how long a reader could be engaged on similar content.

Parsely3Broken out by publisher type, it’s easy to see how nuanced attentiveness is across different types of content. I found it noteworthy that local news sites command more engagement than major news outlets, even with undoubtedly fewer resources.

I mentioned earlier when I began investigating engagement, I was struck by how, month after month, the same set of publishers kept leading the pack, albeit with no discernible pattern among them. Broadening the analysis to the network, broken down by these categories, most of these names resurfaced at the top of their respective categories. A pattern finally became clear: the most engaging sites within each type of publisher were highly recognizable brand names.

Also, now that we’ve broken out engaged time averages across Parse.ly’s network, it’s easy to see how using homogenized data from a heterogenous group of sites to set benchmarks could do more harm than good. Certainly, the same concept applies within the newsroom; measuring the average engaged time on an article against what is expected for that vertical or topic will provide better context.

What do we know about engaged readers?

We’ll continue to explore other patterns within the most engaging experiences. In the meantime, here’s a reminder of what we do know:

  • Facebook vs Twitter. We already know from a recent study with Pew Research that, in an increasingly mobile ecosystem, referral sources on mobile were an important factor in determining engaged time. Their research found that Tumblr and Twitter generate highly engaged audiences, while Facebook audiences were less engaged.
  • Readers can be highly engaged on mobile, though infrequently. In another section of the same report, we distinguished between long-form articles with 1000+ words and short-form articles. Long-form consistently outperformed short-form, though visitors to either do not frequently go on to other articles.
  • In the analysis conducted for this post, we found no correlation between page views and engaged time. A large audience is not necessarily an attentive one.

How to navigate this brave new world

We’ve found ourselves in somewhat uncharted territory in an effort to shift away from primary traffic metrics like page views and unique visitors. How do we define what makes something “good” anymore? Why should we care about engaged time at all?

As I found in this analysis, the engaged time metric provides us an interesting exploration in how we can set a more relevant benchmark. In clinging to familiar traffic indicators like page views, perhaps we have systematically neglected not only the experience of our readers, but the nuance of our reporting. But coupling traffic metrics with engaged time helps us understand which articles create the most impact.

If your post gets hundreds of thousands of viral views, but no one sticks around to read it, did you really manage to convey anything meaningful? Increasing your newsroom’s dedication to understanding the relevancy of engagement in all its forms will lead to a deeper, better audience strategy.

Kelsey Arendt is a Customer Success Manager at Parse.ly. Previously, she worked with The Guardian’s commercial team where she managed a variety of projects for marketing and sales, including developing analytic support for sponsored campaigns and partner hubs. Kelsey is a Midwestern transplant to New York City, and is a passionate hiker, musician, and homebrewer.

Advertising | Perspectives

To mock or not to mock? Avoiding fraudulent advertising campaign verification

To mock or not to mock? That is the question frequently asked by media publishers trying to meet advertiser demands related to digital campaign success. The industry’s intense focus on viewability and transparency issues associated with ad fraud hijacks the limelight from another vital area of interest for advertisers: Are campaigns actually running as contracted?

What the advertiser wants, the advertiser gets
To justify the millions (and millions!) of dollars spent promoting products, advertisers rightfully demand proof that their campaigns execute as promised. From expected ad rendering on the page to accurate targeting by geography and behavior profiles, advertisers want to know that the right ad has been served in the right way in the right location on the right page to the right demographic. In fact, when considering the average spend of a large-scale national campaign flight, many advertisers will assert they deserve to know their campaign is performing as promised.

Authenticated ad inventory yields benefits
The advertising ecosystem is a dynamic environment processing millions of ads covering billions in spend at any one time. Considering that 5% of display and mobile ads are served incorrectly at launch and countless more break during flight, publishers need to actively monitor and protect their ad-generated revenue channels.[i]

Authenticated ad inventory helps publishers secure ad revenue by avoiding pre-planned delivery overages to compensate for anticipated discrepancies. In addition, it also reduces the frequency of misfiring campaigns, thus minimizing instances of “make good” campaigns.

Ad verification is more than good looks
Reputable publishers recognize the value of their high-quality inventory and demonstrate it by providing proof of ad delivery according to established terms. This is a complicated prospect in an age of large-scale campaigns incorporating ads of varying formats (i.e., HTML5, pre/mid/post-roll video, native, etc.) through multiple platforms (i.e., display, tablet, smartphone, gaming consoles, etc.) across increasingly granular targeting segments.

A Photoshopped mock-up or full-page capture of the ad on a screen is a start, but it isn’t enough. Presenting a “mock-up” of how an ad should look could be considered fraudulent as it’s not a true representation of how an ad performs across all formats, devices and geographies. In fact, several industries (Tier 2 automotive, pharmaceutical, etc.) and countries (especially those in Latin America) regulate advertising-based billing processes and require third-party verified screenshots upon invoice presentation.

Beyond the visual of “how” an ad looks on a device, publishers must prove that each ad is delivered as contracted with the advertiser. Continuous monitoring of campaigns at launch and throughout flight will quickly detect errors associated with targeting, creative and device-specific issues that impede optimal campaign execution.

Authentication of possibly hundreds of ad combinations—by size, format, device and geography—is used by publishers to substantiate inventory value and by advertisers to audit and measure campaign ROI.

Consider this
To verify accurate ad placement, execution and targeting, a publisher must consider these five factors:

  1. Legitimacy: Screenshots of ads in a live environment truthfully demonstrate that an ad is delivered to the right target. A “mock-up” or “test page” may display how an ad appears on a site, but in reality it provides a false sense of security for how the ad is actually executing. It also infers that the ad will render the same across all devices, OS, formats and geographies.
  1. Accuracy: Mock-ups can’t prove ad placement as many ad units only occur behind paywalls or require an IP address in order to serve the correct messaging to the individual user.
  1. Automation: Imagine scaling the manual process of verifying ads across the overwhelming number of devices, browsers, user profiles, formats, sizes and geo-locations. Without automation, the task is almost impossible. Leverage technology to streamline the process.
  1. Costs: Carefully consider the total cost of ownership when deciding between an in-house or outsourced process. While in-house resources are easier to control, it is difficult to secure funding and keep the staff engaged. On the flip side, outsourcing requires integration, training, probable coordination with targeting vendors, and continuous oversight which could ultimately be more costly than anticipated—not to mention the complications of managing a remote team, in a case of choosing a non-local entity if a non-native entity is selected.
  1. Quality Assurance: Reliance on mock-up designs to certify campaign execution will no catch errors that occur at launch or throughout the campaign flight.

Ad verification is a complex, yet critical endeavor for publishers looking to highlight inventory value. Don’t mock it.

ChrisChris Olson founded The Media Trust (@themediatrust) with Dave Crane in 2005. He currently serves as CEO, where he drives the company’s vision, direction and growth plans. Prior to establishing The Media Trust Company, he spent four years as the chief operating officer and board member at Spheric Media. From 1998 until 2000, he was the vice president, global equities at Commerzbank; and from 1993 until 1998, he was the vice president of electronic trading at Salomon Brothers, Inc.

[i] The Media Trust analysis of millions of ad campaigns verified over the course of 10 years
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion | Perspectives

On the ground in Cannes: The long road to changing gender portrayals in advertising

Every year, more and more CMOs embark on an annual pilgrimage to Cannes, forming a motley crew of Madmen and Madwomen that line the Croisette. I myself have been making the trip to Cannes Lions since its earliest beginnings, and still it surprises me that there are so few women in senior roles represented on such a global stage.

The reported figures for women among the creative ranks have seen a significant drop in the last few years and those climbing the ladder are even fewer. In fact worldwide, it’s estimated that less than 25% of agency creatives are female and just 3% are creative directors.

It’s been 20 years since I took my first tentative steps into the digital media industry – setting up netguide.live, the Internet’s very first daily guide. After launching CMP Media European licensing business, I took on an even more ambitious and challenging role as the UK MD at AltaVista, a company that was eventually taken over by Yahoo! These early opportunities cemented my love of media and tech and opened up the opportunity for me to join Outbrain.

A path less travelled
I have been fortunate enough to find a career path that I am passionate about in an area that I have become increasingly knowledgeable in. That it is in an industry that continues to advance and grow makes me extremely privileged. When I set out on my journey, I had a clear vision of what I wanted to achieve and this clarity of vision has allowed me to focus on and attain my goals despite any concern for gender stereotypes. However, as I delved into the schedule for the week ahead and began to explore some of the shortlisted work, I was not surprised to see that gender is once again a hot topic in Cannes. This year’s agenda was packed to the rafters with meet-ups, breakfasts, and events celebrating talented and creative women. You can also see a very visible shift in the amount of work geared towards transforming how we think about global gender issues and the subjects of gender disparity and identity.

Quashing gender stereotypes
IPGWomensBreakfastOn Wednesday June 22, as delegates from across the globe continued to pour into a balmy Cannes, I took my place at IPG’s Women’s Breakfast, this year titled: “A conversation with extraordinary women.” The discussions explored, among other things, how to reach women in an authentic way, building confidence and leading people. We journeyed through space (courtesy of Dr. Mae Jemison), time and politics and took a moment to celebrate a year of remarkable women with Gail Heimann. I left feeling invigorated.

Halfway through this year’s event as I write and so far it’s been a week that has challenged traditional and outdated thinking. In fact it’s led to some bold statements from the likes of Unilever CMO, Keith Weed, who has publicly vowed to drop sexist stereotypes from its campaigns for Dove, Lynx and Sunsilk and to overhaul its global strategy following research that suggests just 2% of ads show intelligent women. He is now on a mission to change the way women are portrayed in advertising.

In the same vein, JWT London tweeted:

I love the sentiment and believe these are positive steps, but given all the time, effort and investment that goes into research, gathering insights, analysing and targeting it’s been surprising to me to see so many companies and individuals questioning the output of their creative campaigns.

A sea change
This year, Cannes Lions announced that 40% of the 387 people selected to be jurors would be women, a significant increase on last year’s 31.5% and a record number for the Festival. I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but looking at the Glass Lions entries and ultimate winners, there is certainly a lot of gender-focused work that has started to breakthrough this year and earn recognition. Could it be the female factor?

One that caught my eye was the transgender acceptance campaign for Hindustan Unilever tea brand, Brooke Bond Red Label. A category introduced last year to celebrate work that addresses and seeks to have positive impact on gender inequality, imbalance or injustice, Mindshare Mumbai’s campaign featured transgender pop group the “6 Pack Band.” It was great to see them pick up a Glass Lions Grand Prix award for it.

Cannes Lions has also continued its successful ‘See It Be It’ initiative, which is designed to support and develop the industry’s underrepresented female creatives and this year, announced its first ambassador as Sarah Watson, chief strategy officer of BBH New York.

Inspired networking
I’ve also been pleased to see ‘The Girls Lounge’ back in full swing and better than ever with many lively debates from woman representing the gamut of marketing, media, advertising and technology. In fact, I’ve found myself in the company of nothing but extraordinary women since arriving in Cannes.

In my experience, building a network of smart and talented people has not only helped me perform in my day-to-day role, but has also often sparked my curiosity for new discoveries, helping me effectively navigate my career. Making connections that inspire you, even at the earliest stages of a career path, can open a number of doors that specialist knowledge and skills alone cannot: never underestimate the importance of business contacts and colleagues blazing a trail. You never know if they’ll be the ones to interview you in the future, or be critical to the future of your industry.

Let’s take inspiration from this year’s Cannes, and in the words of Anna Wintour: “Aim higher, dare to be different, use all your gold and make interesting friends.” ‪

Stephanie HimoffStephanie Himoff is the Managing Director, Northern Europe at Outbrain (@Outbrain). She is responsible for the strategic direction, business intelligence and sales operations of this leading content marketing and discovery platform. Prior to joining Outbrain Stephanie worked as the VP of Sales and Business Development at Demand Media and has a wide range of experience in working with innovative digital start-ups and world leading technology companies.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives | Video

Are 5 second ads the new Snapchat?

We live in a visual world. To make a story or campaign compelling, visuals or video are absolutely essential. In fact, it is commonly cited that the brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. People are captivated by short, instant bursts of content—even content that disappears after a few seconds like Snapchat.

Platforms like Pandora and Vine offer bite-sized video content with homegrown, organic videos that go viral in a matter of days. Recently, Pepsi announced a collection of five-second ads designed to to gratify millennials. Pepsi plans to make 100 different ads for TV and digital this summer to promote their new emoji-themed bottles. And YouTube will soon show 6-second “Bumper” ads before videos, which cannot be skipped.

The market for online video has evolved immensely. When online video first launched, brands re-purposed existing 30 & 60-second TV commercials. The ads looked more clunky, required click-to-start, and didn’t assimilate with the surrounding content.

Instant gratification has become the norm—with advertisers and publishers adapting to meet the consumption behavior of today’s shortened attention span. Video ads are easier than ever to consume with the broad installation and access to broadband on desktop and mobile. Shorter videos ads have higher viewability and completion rates since the content is near instant. In effect, shorter ads may be more successful since consumers are more likely to watch the ads and remember the advertiser.

Today, online video ads are custom-created for each channel, the ads auto-play and compete for attention with a surplus of surrounding ads. Eighty-five percent of online video ads are un-skippable. MediaRadar found that almost all of the video ads (98%) that run less than 10 seconds are un-skippable.

According to MediaRadar data, there were over 1,100 new video advertisers in Q1 2016 alone who didn’t place ads in 2015. Online video is a key driver in digital ad spend with $9.6 billion predicted ad spend for 2016. In 2015, $1.5 billion dollars shifted from linear TV to digital. And yet there remains ample opportunity to grow. Only 10% of TV advertisers bought online video ads in Q1 2016.

Publishers are constantly innovating and introducing new products or ad offerings too. From premium page takeovers to YouTube’s new Breakout Videos that will highlight the fastest-growing videos as an indicator of viral potential.

MediaRadarshortads

Todd Krizelman 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 | Industry-Research

Podcast consumption on the rise, and that’s good news for digital advertising

One in three podcast listeners expect to increase their podcast consumption over the next six months, following a similar increase in their behavior in the past six months. The results were revealed as part of comScore’s first study dedicated to podcasting, commissioned by audio on-demand network Wondery.

Significantly, among all forms of advertising on mobile devices, podcasts create the highest improvement in perception. And among all forms of digital advertising, podcast ads are considered the least intrusive.

Key findings include:

  1. Over two-thirds of online Americans aged 18-49 are aware of podcasting and nearly one in five listen to podcasts at least once a month.
  2. Incidence of podcast listening is highest among males aged 18-34, at 30%, who spend an average of more than 11 hours per month listening.
  3. About half of podcast consumption is done via mobile devices.
  4. Podcast listeners like the educational and entertainment value of the experience, and report an increase in positive emotions after listening to an episode.
  5. Two-thirds of podcast listeners say they have engaged in various research and/or purchase related behaviors as a result of advertising exposure from podcasts.
  6. More than half of non-podcast listeners say they would be interested in listening if they knew where and how to find podcast episodes.

The study was commissioned between March and April of 2016 among over 2,000 respondents in the US aged 18-49. Full results are available upon request at wondery.com/contact-us.

podcastads

Industry-Research

Evaluating content distribution channels

Publishers face unprecedented pressures in the mobile and social media dominated marketplace. In fact, according to eMarketer, mobile accounted for half of digital ad spending in the U.S. in 2015 and is suspected to reach 70% share of advertising by 2019, according to eMarketer. In response to publishers’ needs, the International News Media Association (INMA) released a report “Evaluating Distributed Content in the News Media Ecosystem” to help educate on the implementation strategies of distributed content.

As background, it’s important to note recent digital media announcements promoting content consumption on mobile and social media. Digital platforms are dominating users’ time and advertisers’ spending. Specific announcements include:

  • April 2016, Facebook opened Instant Articles to all publishers worldwide. IA is rich-media articles that open instantly within the Facebook mobile app instead of sending users away to a Web browser.
  • February 2016, Google launched Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), an open standard to speed up the mobile Web experience and Snapchat announced a new subscription option to publishers in its Discover section
  • Apple’s News app attracted 100-plus publishers.
  • October 2015, Twitter launched Moments, a magazine-like story format for curated streams of Tweets.

The INMA report identified different roles a publisher can choose to distribute their content on social platforms and classified them into three categories:

  1. On-platform hosts: Facebook Instant Articles, Snapchat Discover, Twitter Moments.
  2. Off-platform open standard: Google Accelerated Mobile Pages.
  3. Off-platform aggregators: Apple News, Axel Springer Upday.

Publishers first need identify which category can support their business strategy. Specifically, is the publisher looking to build an audience (growth), to develop an exclusive consumer relationship (content marketing) or are they interested in experimentation on multiple goals (laboratory).

Social media strategies are vital a publisher’s digital business. It allows one to distributes content beyond its property and to grow its audience base.

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

Technology guide to scale programmatic revenue

Does this describe you?

You have done the hard part of growing an audience. You have fully functional teams to sell direct to advertisers. And you even built an in-house ad-server yourself (or duct-taped a shrink-wrapped banner ad-server) that works fine (for today). It manages your manual direct-sold deals (IOs & RFPs) reasonably well. With all of these pieces ostensibly in place, you now want to build a solid programmatic revenue strategy and execute for long-term health of your business.

The first question is, “what constitutes a solid programmatic strategy?” Let us assume you are happy with what you do on direct-sold deals; there are two things that stand-out: independence and control. You choose which advertisers you want to work with, at what rates, which users to show ads, and how many times to show ads in which geographies—all the while having full data transparency that enable you to make further optimizations. For companies passionate about user-experience, independence and control are great consideration metrics for your programmatic strategy as well.

The common myth you hear is “let’s just sign up with few SSPs and exchanges and call it a day”. Wrong! (Though it is a good start.) Signing up one/few SSPs/Exchanges/Ad-Networks and putting them behind a rotation logic is only dipping your toes into the world of programmatic. This post will guide you through and highlight few core components required in order for you to develop a robust programmatic yield strategy. Many  of which might be things you didn’t even know you needed.

First, some quick Programmatic 101: Programmatic is a term thrown around to refer to various forms of bringing in ad revenue from advertisers, vendor/partners and it also describes the style of integration with those partners to reach your audience. And, for better or worse, it is a crowded programmatic vendor ecosystem.

  1. Programmatic Partner Types: DSPs, SSPs, Ad Networks
  2. Other Internal Names Used: Indirect Revenue Sources, Demand Partners, Backfill Vendors etc
  3. Integration Styles: OpenRTB API Standard, Vendor-specific APIs, JS tags, SDKs

Pro Tip: Always, always, always ask your partners to give you their API specifications so you can integrate them server-to-server. Adding JS and SDKs will bloat your apps. Engineers hate adding SDK/JS and (even more importantly) your users will hate it too when the additional code slows their experience.

Noe that, for the purposes of this discussion, we are leaving out automation part (do-it-yourself for advertisers) aspect of programmatic. This is achieved through Self-Serve UIs built by your team (think buying Google ads using ads.google.com) or a third party (think buying Google ads using Marin Software).

Following are technical modules that make for a robust programmatic yield/mediation system to manage your programmatic partners:

  1. OpenRTB Engine: Ability to broadcast to multiple DSPs using the OpenRTB protocol that an ad opportunity exists in your site/app.
  2. Server-Side Integration Engine: Many Exchanges, SSPs and Ad Networks might themselves connect with DSPs to bring ads. These partners do not use OpenRTB but instead have their own custom APIs to connect with your audience. Ability to conform to their custom specifications and making ad-calls from server side. This is the right way to integrate partners that favor Header Bidding also. The goal is evaluate all partners equally in real-time without the overhead of client side code bloat.
  3. Data Aggregation Engine: Some partners don’t prove eCPM data in real-time, so you need the ability to pull it from their dashboards as frequently as possible. An overall ability to pull data via APIs and screen-scraping from every partner. If you are getting ad revenue from Facebook, Google or Twitter; you need to make them play nice (compete at same time versus getting “first look”) because perhaps their tools are biased to their ads?
  4. Automated Inventory Allocation Engine: Using #3 Data from partners, building price models and trends to automatically adjust your priority; this is also known as the waterfall of which partner should be called at what point.
  5. Audience Rules & Targeting Engine: A lot of partners specialize in providing ad dollars for certain set of your audience (geography, gender, interests). It is best to target those partners for that audience and reduce noise everywhere else. Also remember that your team needs precise and granular controls like you have for direct-sold deals. Examples – what if you wanted to send 1st party data to Partner A and not to Partner B? Or say you wanted to monetize only certain segments of your users (who spend less than X minutes in a month) vs everyone? Or you want to roll out a policy to show maximum of only 2 ads to users in a specific country?
  6. Bidding Patterns/Price Predictions Engine: Advanced insights and recommendations based on bidding patterns/trends tied to your inventory (physical placement and at an audience level)
  7. Holistic Yield Optimization / Reverse Auction Engine: This is a very important module. Ranking partners at a global level does not do any help. You need to optimize partners at an audience level. Doing this will enable you to get the best out of each of them. Ability to take price information from OpenRTB (DSPs), custom APIs (SSPs/Exchanges) and price predictions (Ad Networks) overlaid with forecasting insights to determine the best partner for every user and every ad opportunity in real-time. Modules from #3 to #6 feed into this engine.
  8. A/B testing Framework: Ability to easily test new revenue partners against one-another using #5 Audience Rules Engine. Engineers hate adding tags, SDKs for every new partner. Neither the business teams should wait for engineering resources to test every new partner. It should be as simple as flipping ON/OFF switch.
  9. Creative Library: Full creative assets of ads that ran on your audience with full transparency from all partners (DSPs, SSPs and Ad Networks). All stored in one place forever. You can block them or better use it as a sales intelligence tool to form direct relationships with those advertisers.
  10. Cookie/User Sync Engine: ability to sync cookies/User IDs with chosen partners, so they can pay higher when they have advertisers who are looking for a specific audience that you have.
  11. Quality Control Engine: Natural Language Processing and Textual Analysis to block ads and advertisers that will hurt user-experience when shown to your users.

Think about it: How did you build your audience? You did not sign-up with a few middlemen and rotate your trust, hoping they will do all the work. Instead, you owned the process. You worked with engineers, product owners and business teams to build stuff to grow your audience. You may have hired a few contractors/middlemen to help you along the way. You likely used open-source software (e.g. Redis, Django, Android, React, SugarCRM etc) wherever possible. And finally you licensed software (e.g. AWS/Data Centers, New Relic, CloudFlare, SalesForce) for areas that are important to your business but are not your core strengths.

Monetization, whether direct or programmatic is the same: You need to own your future. Either build it yourself or find a tech partner you can license it from because you need to invest the same level of energy as you did in building that hard-won audience.

Satish Polisetti is cofounder of AdsNative. He previously worked at mobile advertising startups Amobee and MdotM and received a Mayfield Fund fellowship in 2010.

Perspectives

Ensure that your native ads are FTC compliant

From its introduction only a few years ago, native advertising has generated clicks, captured attention, and raised controversy. Native is everywhere, from Hennessy’s partnership with Vanity Fair for the original film ‘Never Stop. Never Settle’ to branded playlists on Spotify. At MediaRadar we find native ads placed both programmatically and direct. There are more than 760 websites selling native. We found 7,004 advertisers buying native ads since Jan 2015 (1,437 on DCN member websites).

Advertisers are constantly creating new ways to leverage this form of advertising, but there has been significant blurring between advertiser messaging and editorial content.

The FTC, however, has signaled that these days without regulation are coming to an end. On a quiet day on December 22, the FTC released guidelines on how native advertising should be implemented. These rules create strong separation between advertising and editorial.

So, who is impacted by the FTC’s regulation? Well, almost all publishers. Of the hundreds of sites selling native advertising, FTC violations can results in a civil penalty of up to $16,000, per count. Recently, Lord & Taylor was found to violate native ad regulations without disclosing a digital influencer campaign for Instagram.

MediaRadar found that 70% of sites will need to modify their current native advertising in order to adhere to the FTC guidelines.

Here is what you need to know in order to be compliant:

  1. Disclose Advertising. When the promoted or sponsored content mimics a website’s look-and-feel, disclosure is necessary. Readers need to know what content was influenced or paid for by advertisers.
  2. Use Precise Language. The FTC is explicit that words like “presented by” or “promoted by” are not sufficient notice. Instead use words like “Paid by” or “Advertiser.” FTC Recommended Language Accepted Language: “ad,” “advertisement,” “paid advertisement,” or “sponsored advertisement.”
  3. List the Author or Advertiser Logo. Include the advertiser’s logo in all native advertising. If an author credit is included, the advertiser should be shows in place of a person’s name. This reinforces to the reader that this is a paid placement, not regular editorial.
  4. Ad Position Matters. Location of an ad’s acknowledgement should be at the top left corner of a native ad (today, they are commonly identified at the bottom).
  5. Video or Sound. Video and sound ads are more complex—so a disclosure is needed on both the thumbnail and pop-up.

Native offers one of the highest CPM ad units and we observe favorable renewal rates on most sites. While these guidelines will create limits in how native is executed, we do not believe it poses a threat. Some of the largest firms, including the New York Times, have labeled with “Paid Post” from the start. And since the guidelines went into effect, there has been no ebb in the torrent of native ad buying. With more prominent labeling, advertisers can creatively use content to drive increased product awareness or increased sales.

Todd Krizelman 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.

Industry-Research

Tweets drive 8.5% of social traffic, so does the content matter?

Twitter drives a median 8.5 % of all social traffic to media sites across Parse.ly’s network of digital publishers. That said, Parse.ly decided to take a look at what extent publishers influence this number. In other words, they wondered if the type of content shared on Twitter impacts how readers engage. So, Parse.ly partnered with Twitter’s “firehose” data team to collect and analyze 100% of tweets that link to its customers’ websites, the results of which it has compiled in an Authority Report.

For this study, Parse.ly examined data from 200 websites, spanning 14 calendar days (January 10–24), to see what trends they could uncover. Here are some of those trends:

  • Publishers with “typical” content get about 1.5% of traffic from Twitter as compared with 11% for publishers with the “most active” content.
  • The most active content garners 18 clicks per tweet as compared with only 3 clicks for typical content.
  • Typical content is often “conversational news” such as tweets about the presidential elections.
  • Breaking news stories often drive large spikes in traffic over shorter periods of time.

According to Parse.ly, as a medium Twitter excels at both conversational and breaking news. With respect to conversational news, Twitter acts as a “public square” where ongoing conversations happen around long-lived news topics. When it comes to breaking news, Twitter is a place journalists post their earliest reports and seek immediate confirmation of reports coming from other news outlets.

parsleyrefer

Perspectives

Publishers: Prepare to meet the evolving needs of content advertisers

Creating content for brands has been a windfall for publishers. On the receiving end of advertisers’ investment in content marketing, publishers are even encroaching on ground formerly dominated by agencies. But this could change, so it’s critical publishers start to think differently about content creation, and the bigger impact these content assets can make in meeting the evolving needs of advertisers.

Content creation: too many cooks
The current ecosystem and marketer needs are breeding a growing supply of content creators fighting for a piece of the pie. First, there are holding companies and media agencies acquiring creator businesses, to fold content into their client offerings. You then have publishers like the Times’s T-Brand Studio, Conde Nast’s 23 Stories, Time Inc.’s The Foundry and the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ. Custom Studios. Next are third party creators, including studioD and Visual.ly, the latter being one of several in a field seeing hundreds of millions in venture investment. Finally, brands like Red Bull or GoPro (with the help of UGC) create their content in-house. There are a lot of content cooks in this kitchen.

Given the coming market saturation, publishers that are creating content for advertising and marketing partners must prove unique value and impact to stay relevant to their partners. This means integrating their knowledge, experience with and data about a target audience into content that resonates; as publishers should know their readers best.

Publishers: think beyond your sites
Whether a client comes to you with content in hand or relies on the publisher for content creation, they are seeking an audience.  Certainly, a targeted audience is desirable. However, many will also seek scale.

Publishers need to think about the reach and distribution an advertiser will want for their content, and address usage and related rights in their creation arrangements. Having a potential scale discussion up front enables publishers to define these terms and add corresponding fees onto a project: yielding higher top line revenue, and higher profit margin.

Creating publisher-voiced content is a big part of the value publishers can bring to the table, but to deliver increased scale, publishers may need to think beyond their sites. Advertisers will want take the publisher-related content and seek to distribute it more broadly than the publisher’s property alone.

Shutting down a distribution rights conversation will push marketers to seek out other content creators that do not limit their usage, leaving publishers to operate without an important differentiator and run the risk of missing out on renewal business. The market will start to filter out the content creators only able to field boutique opportunities, and whose value has a (low) ceiling.

Extended distribution can open opportunities
Allowing the content that publishers create for brands to live outside their own sites should be a more common expectation that publishers are prepared to accommodate. Publishers should also plan for reach extension solutions that push their content onto other platforms. Bumping up against the limits of their owned and operated scale should not always lead to arbitraged traffic, but instead beg the question: Where can this brand content meet the desired consumers?

Allowing marketers to extend reach and amplify content across other publications at scale keeps revenue in the source publisher’s pocket while making clients happy.  Publishers with targeted reach extension offerings will cultivate the publisher-brand relationship by providing transparency on where brand content is published.

Scaling distribution to the desired audience in other contextually relevant environments can also help publishers more easily meet advertiser KPIs. Learnings on how content resonates in multiple environments may then be packaged up into insights for the advertiser to inform content creation and messaging tactics – fortifying the content creation offering with knowledge sharing and making the publisher an indispensable partner.

For publishers, content creation is only an opportunity of which they will want to take full advantage. The content they create is a valuable component of advertisers’ native programs, ultimately supporting the relationship brands hope to build and maintain with their consumers. As an overcrowded market shrinks, however, staying-power depends not just on content quality, and reaching desirable audiences, but reaching those audiences at scale.

Sarah Mandato is the Director of Content Labs at Nativo, where she oversees all brand content populating the native advertising technology platform. Sarah was previously the SVP of Community at VaynerMedia. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University and Notre Dame Law School, she was a member of the New York State Bar, before decamping for the world of high growth new media and tech startups. Her writing on the native advertising space has also been featured in Ad Age, iMedia and studioD’s Content Marketing Spotlight.

Perspectives

How the industry can help mobile developers survive “Apptropolis”

As of early 2016, millions of apps are ready for download on Google Play, Apple’s App Store, Amazon, Microsoft, and Blackberry World. Elsewhere in the world, China’s Wandoujia app store adds a stunning average of 500,000 new users per day to its platform.

Welcome to a form of digital sprawl I call “Apptropolis.” While it’s not a city made of brick and mortar, Apptropolis has plenty in common with the boomtown megalopolises dotting our planet: it presents a near-constant stream of obstacles to the people striving to make a living within its prescribed “city limits,” foremost being the mobile developers who build apps in hopes of monetizing them.

In his celebrated collection of modern-day fables, Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino relates the story of the (fictional) city of “Leonia,” a city that “refashions itself each day: every morning the people wake between fresh seats, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap… And on the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday’s Leonia await the garbage truck.”

In writing of Leonia, Calvino might just as well have been writing about Apptropolis. In a digital space where anything can be uploaded, upgraded, and then just as swiftly deleted, apps become disposable almost from the moment they hit the app store. For most mobile developers, monetizing in Apptropolis remains an elusive work of fiction. If you don’t believe me, here’s a case study to consider: the Helsinki-based mobile games studio, Rovio, was actually on the verge of bankruptcy on the eve of releasing its multibillion-download app, Angry Birds.

According to Andrew Chen, Head of Driver Acquisition at Uber, today’s average Google Play app loses 77% of its daily active users (DAU) within 72 hours after initial download. In other words, unless your app is on par with the likes of Uber, Facebook or Clash of Clans, the odds of high user churn rate are almost certain. Fickle mobile users will simply dispose of one newfangled app in favor of another, newfanglier one.

A recent study, conducted by AppsFlyer, asked users to list the reasons they chose to uninstall certain apps from their mobile devices. A full 29% of respondents indicated that “Intrusive ads” were a principal reason they chose to uninstall their apps.

That’s much too high a percentile. In fact, it’s unacceptable. What should we, as an industry, do to fix it?

First, we can accelerate new mobile in-app video advertising formats like outstream. We already know that TV viewership is tumbling steadily in favor of digital devices, and that many of these new viewers access their favorite movies and TV shows via mobile apps. Unlike pre-roll video advertisements, outstream videos are displayed in a format that allows all publishers—not just video publishers—to monetize their apps successfully with video advertising. Moreover, studies show that outstream video ads increase brand exposure 10% more than their pre-roll video cousins.

In the same way that cookies track the demographics of different web audiences, new and powerful mobile analytics tools are able to analyze the actions of app users. Better mobile forecasting and analytics tools can only lead to better outcomes – and to better video ads being served. App developers ought to look at the TV buyer market, enrich their mobile outstream impressions with demographic data, and sell into video buyers.

Second, we should implement programmatic native in-app advertising on a scale that has yet to be attempted. It’s long been proven that native ads have higher CTRs than display ads, especially for mobile. But our industry should also develop new ways to use native advertising in gaming apps so that they become a seamless part of the game experience. The MRAID mobile interstitial ads of today should be replaced with outstream video, natively pre-cached into feeds.

Finally, we need to find better ways for app developers to maximize their yield. Header bidding helps display publishers improve their total yields by allowing multiple buyers bid for their inventory on a level playing field rather than via a single exchange. Having multiple bidding partners vying for your inventory means more price competition to monetize your app.

New “mobile” versions of header bidding are now cropping up in the market, allowing mobile developers to partner with multiple mobile ad networks simultaneously. Given the success of header bidding, it stands to reason that mobile app developers should adopt these new tools as soon as possible.

As an industry, we often find ourselves engaged in Herculean feats of hand wringing about the need to “create better ads,” ads able to engage and retain the interest of users across multiple digital channels. Real solutions already exist on the market that can help app developers monetize. It now becomes a question of integrating and scaling these solutions into the marketplace that’s able to provide them.

As Senior Vice President of Marketing at AppNexus, Pat drives the company’s effort to ensure that all stakeholders enjoy optimal visibility into our products, capabilities and vision. He leads the company’s corporate marketing functions, including corporate communications, branding and customer experience, and works across Business Units and product teams to ensure the consistency and quality of our communication. Previously, Pat served as Senior Vice President of Products at AppNexus and he joined AppNexus via the acquisition of Fantuition, a startup he co-founded. Prior to founding Fantuition, Pat was an early executive at Right Media and later served as Vice President of Marketing at Yahoo!.

©2024 Digital Content Next. All Rights Reserved.