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Perspectives

Defining Bricks to Build the House of Time and Attention

This year may go down as one of the most pivotal years in the digital Jason Kintrevolution as we transition into an AV world (After Viewability).

Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff-Davis and Chairman of the IAB did a terrific job earlier this month at IAB MIXX and in a WSJ op-ed reinforcing why viewability is critical, while also explaining the important work that still needs to be done. This coincided with the reconvening of the  Blue-Ribbon Committee (which I served on in its first phase to define the standard). It also led to the MRC’s advisory to media, which included these important guidelines:

  • If an impression’s viewability can’t be measured, then it doesn’t mean it’s not viewable or worthless;
  • It is not realistic (or even possible) to expect 100% viewability so there needs to be a more a measured set of expectations during this complex transition. As Vivek stated, no other media has attempted this level of measurement.

Publishers can’t bear the cost of the entire transition and, as such, the agencies using this opportunity as a price-negotiating tactic are doing a great disservice to the industry, their clients and publishers. Additionally, any marketplace confusion is not helpful in establishing this new currency. It’s why a group of advertisers, agencies and media companies agreed on the standard of 50% of a display ad for a minimum of one second.

Let me illustrate why these points are essential in evolving viewability with a personal story: I have a bedtime routine with our two toddler boys where they can ask dad any question they want to. Any parent reading this will realize that dad often doesn’t know the answers to their questions. Last week, our five year old made some significant inquiries into the nature of bricks: What are they made of? Why are they all the same size? Why do they sometimes have holes in them? How are they so strong? And like many parents out there, after a kiss goodnight, I headed straight to Wikipedia so that I could have better informed answers ready at the breakfast table. It turns out bricks are the same size so that they fit in the mason’s hands and are interchangeable. The mason’s craft shapes these bricks into something useful and enduring.

Viewability is our brick. If we–marketers, publishers and everyone who serves their interests–don’t get it right and make it as strong as it can be, then our building will crumble. Our first go at building this digital landscape was built off of impressions defined by pings of ad servers. It turns out that those ads served weren’t viewable as much as 80% of the time. When technology improvements allowed us to see this problem, the need for a different standard for an impression became clear, preferably one not based on clicks and direct response metrics that undervalue the trust and equity of brand marketers and high quality content companies. The good work of the IAB, ANA and AAAAs has now given us a standard for our brick that is fair to everyone. Rolling it out won’t happen overnight and we all need to share equally in that effort.

But if we can agree that viewability is the brick, then what are we going to build? I believe the answer is the house of time and attention.

I was thrilled with all of the discussion and positive reaction to my column during Advertising Week on Why Attention is Worth More than the Click. Transacting on time was something that we discussed early on in 2012 as the natural next step of viewability and it is clear that, in the intervening years, progress has been made on this front. Here at Digital Content Next (formerly the Online Publishers Association), we conducted research among our members to examine time-based measurement and just last week we released a whitepaper “How time-Based Measurement is Grabbing Digital Publishers’ Attention,” which explores the results. We also had the opportunity to discuss the topic with industry leaders at a private member event.

And the evidence is clear: The time is right to build a more robust and resilient digital ecosystem in which we evaluate engagement and measure impact on something sturdier than crumbling clicks. Viewability is the brick from which we can build meaningful time-based measurement. This will require both strategic and technological changes. At DCN, we recommend that organizations reassess their measurement capabilities; implement viewability (if you’ve not already), report the total attention time on campaigns, whether advertisers ask for it or not; and equip ad operations and yield management teams with the tools to understand the value of the time your audience spends with your content. As Mike Donahue, EVP, 4A’s noted to me recently, this isn’t a quick fix but we know the steps: “Once we have the opportunity to see (viewability) nailed as a first step cross-platform currency, the sequential next step currency is engagement. Short of scalable, affordable neuro measures (of emotional response), time is the best surrogate to measure engagement.”

Perspectives

New Weather Company Resource Forecasts a Marketing Opportunity

Today’s digital marketers must be adept at search strategy, social strategy and now it seems they’ll be needing a weather strategy as well. Increasingly, companies of all types are leveraging data to aid in planning and decision making; The Weather Company has been at the forefront of leveraging data and analytics not only to predict the weather, but to anticipate its impact on consumer behavior. This week, Weather launched a blog called Forecast Factor to help marketers better understand how to use the weather as a business advantage.

The Forecast Factor site will provide weather-based consumer forecasts, proprietary insights and real-world best practices to help marketers implement and execute weather-centric media strategies to best promote their products and services. Forecasts and weather impact analysis will be provided by The Weather Channel’s on-air business and weather professional Paul Walsh, a leading expert on the effect of weather–and weather forecasting–on consumer behavior. Walsh, who considers himself an evangelist for the topic, got his start as a meteorologist in the US Air Force where his role was to provide weather-based intelligence support to war fighters and mission planners. While in the Air Force he developed a keen eye for the strategic value of weather information.

It’s big news how much the weather is changing. For marketers, Walsh says this increased weather volatility represents a risk, but it also represents an opportunity. For example, the Polar Vortex in late 2013 and early 2014 initially caused a 2% contraction in the US economy however, as soon as the weather improved, the economy rebounded. The opportunity, says Walsh, is to leverage technological advancements such as big data to understand the impact weather has on consumers.

Not only has the weather changed, but the way in which people consume weather information has also radically shifted. Gone are the days when people watched the evening news for an iffy forecast. Walsh notes that today weather predictions are overwhelmingly reliable but even more significantly, people are connected to the weather more than ever before. According to Walsh most of us check it multiple times a day on our mobile devices and use the information to plan not only whether or not to wear a jacket, but a wide range of decisions such as where to make lunch plans and what to eat, whether or not it is time to buy a new car and whether or not it should be an SUV or a convertible. The effect of weather on retail and spending is greater than people realize, says Walsh who points out that research shows that the impact of weather on the economy every year totals in the billions.

Weather believes that by providing Forecast Factor content they can educate advertisers to proactively adjust their media plans to align with the expected impact of the weather and to execute strategies that are more relevant and effective. “The marketing community has looked at weather as a tactical tool,” says Walsh “We really look at it as a strategic tool and want to help them see it that way as well.” And, as a trusted provider of this useful information, Weather hopes that these same advertisers and marketers will turn to their WeatherFX team to produce campaigns that can leverage these insights with weather-triggered messages to consumers in real time across all screens.

“People consume weather information everyday but they don’t think about the weather the way we do, Walsh says. “We’re pretty confident that we’ve got the audience, reach and technology to do what we’re talking about. There’s lots of people out there that don’t have the same knowledge or understanding.”

Innovation | Revenue

DCN Panel of Early Movers Sheds Light on the Evolution of Time-based Measurement

From the threat to cookies to inventory-glut, banner advertising was already in enough trouble when the dire statistics about viewability started to come in. In 2012, AdSafe Media found that, on average, 20% or less of all ads were in view for 15 seconds or more prompting the Media Rating Council (MRC) to issue a viewable impression advisory in November of 2012 aong with a call for the industry to develop intelligence around non-viewable ads.  Though momentum was building. In June 2013, comScore still found that 54% of display ads were not seen at all, creating even more pressure on the marketplace to deliver solutions that factored in viewability.

And the industry responded. This March, the MRC lifted its advisory of viewability  and industry interest in buying and selling on this metric began to heat up.advertisers became able to buy and sell display ads based began in earnest. The standard for a viewable online impression was set as 50% of its pixels remaining in-view for one continuous second or two for an online video ad. While there are differing opinions on where this bar should be set, a viewability standard is a solid start in developing digital advertising metrics that demonstrate effectiveness. Seeing an ad is certainly a step in the right direction given that the goal of advertising is to capture the attention of an audience long enough to make an impact.

So while viewability sets a baseline, many believe that that the true measure of ad-effectiveness is time-spent. Our research shows that 60% of premium publishers are already considering transacting based on time and 8% will begin testing it this year. And 4% of those participating in the research are already testing time-based measurement.

Among the early leaders are Gannett and FT.com, both of which participated in a panel on time-based measurement at a Digital Content Next  members-only event on October 22nd. The program featured a panel of experts that included Josh Schwartz, Chief Data Scientist at Chartbeat; Jonah Goodhart, Founder/CEO of MOAT; Daniel Rothman, US Director of Marketing & Insight at the Financial Times; and Steve Ahlberg, Vice President, Advertising Solutions and Product Management at Gannett Co. Inc. Ad Age reporter Michael Sebastian moderated the panel.

Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint noted in his opening remarks, “I’ve never seen a topic pick up this kind of momentum in the market. Viewability is part of our world going forward but time based measurement will absolutely be part of that future.”

Gannett was early on board for viewability, implementing validated impression measurement and guaranteed viewability in 2012. However, as Ahlberg pointed out, “We still have a long way to go before there’s value to everyone in the ecosystem. This problem has been going on so long that it has caused a lack of trust.” In fact, he predicts that it will be another 18 months before the advertising world is widely transacting on time. “Engagement isn’t something we see in DFP [DoubleClick for Publishers] right now,” he said, making the point that all of the components of forecasting, billing, etc. must be designed to incorporate engagement metrics, of which time-spent is a telling factor.

This summer, the Financial Times began to test a method of buying and selling inventory using time-spent. The company believes that viewability is a positive development, but that it doesn’t go far enough. During the panel, Rothman outlined FT research which found that the tipping point for ad engagement is not one or two seconds. “We can prove that five plus seconds matters,” he said.  Ad recall, familiarity, association and consideration all get between 51% and 58% uplift at the five second mark according to Rothman. Thus, he is piloting a program in the New Year that will guarantee 100% viewability for five seconds.  “We recognize that not all impressions are created equal. The research has proven that this is not opinion. This is fact. We need move the conversation on from quantity metrics.”

The FT works with Chartbeat, which got its start by providing real-time insights on content for editors and reporters. The editorial side of the house, according to Schwartz, “got it immediately. They want people to spend time with their articles; that’s why they write them. And, with the advent of viewability, it starts to matter to the business side of the house.” To his mind, monetizing on time better aligns both sides of the content business.

While Schwartz said he would be “highly surprised if the exact model that companies Gannett and FT are using right now is what we end up with,” he applauds the experimentation so that the industry can move towards metrics that provide value to the entire ecosystem. MOAT’s Goodhart cautions against counting on any publisher’s solution (or any single metric) dominating the industry. “It is a mistake to make it about one nuance of the idea of attention. We believe in attention, but we think it might be a combination of time and other things. We need to move people away from impressions and clicks, but give them options.”

Certainly, this transition away from CPMs will not happen overnight. At the FT, Rothman says that all of the agencies and partners they are working with “find this interesting and exciting” however they also hear that time-based measurement doesn’t fit in with how they are already buying media. “There’s a need for them to look outside their spreadsheets.”

Goodhart reports that, in just a matter of months, he has seen a huge shift in the understanding of viewability and finds CMOs are asking for it and that for 2015, he believes that a large number of agencies will “put a stake in the ground here.” And when that happens, Schwartz predicts that programmatic will take a big hit and that “publishers that redesign their sites around viewability are going to benefit.”

And, referring to the new Digital Content Next Research “How Time-Based Measurement is Grabbing Digital Publishers’ Attention,” Ahlberg said “For the five percent that said viewability that doesn’t matter, go back and tell your business leaders it is here. Educate your sales teams about the metrics that work and be confident in your story.”

 Other coverage of this event and the related research:

Survey: 80% of Premium Publishers Want to Sell Ads Based on Time (Ad Age)
Online Publishers Are Serious About Selling Ads Based on Time (WSJ)
Survey: Publishers embracing shift to time-based metrics (Capital NY)
DCN: 80% Of Pubs Using Time-Based Metrics (NetNewsCheck)
80% of Publishers Interested in Transacting on Time: Digital Content Next Report (Chartbeat)

Perspectives

Seeing Your Audience Through Big Data

The only way any of us can “see” online audiences is through data. Companies like Nielsen and comScore have traditionally done this by tracking a sample over time. However, increasingly, what we know about audiences comes to us through servers.  Servers collect vast amounts of information on what users are doing online every second of every day.  To some, these “big data” speak for themselves and offer a crystal clear lens with which to see and manage audiences. But much of the buzz surrounding big data is “irrational exuberance.” To make effective use of these new resources, you should know their strengths and weaknesses. Here are four questions to keep in mind if you find yourself seeing the world through big data:

Census or Sample?
Big data are often thought of as a census. If that were true, it would be great. You wouldn’t have to draw a sample and carefully “weight” individual responses to reflect the population. But frequently big data really means a big sample. For example, some claim that gathering data from digital set-top boxes (STBs) and create a census of the TV audience. But in practice, STB ratings are based on samples that are cobbled together and extensively weighted to resemble the total TV audience. Those samples are large enough to offer a lot more granularity than traditional methods, but they’re not close to a census.

In fact, most big databases are adjusted in some way.  You might think that the things trending on Twitter reflect a simple headcount. But trending metrics are tweaked in ways that aren’t widely reported. Providers of “currency” measures are typically audited, so it’s easier to know the recipe behind the numbers. But it’s a mystery how many of the newer metrics are cooked up. If you use them, you should assume you’re not getting an unadulterated look at the audience, you’re probably wearing corrective lenses.

Preference or Behavior?
Social media platforms can capture comments that reflect people’s likes and dislikes, but most big data measure behaviors (e.g., views, downloads, shares, purchases, etc.). It’s tempting to interpret behaviors as an expression of preferences. In fact, economists use choices as a measure of “revealed preferences.” But people do things for all kinds of reasons. Ask yourself: Do people view something because they like it or because they just stumbled into it? Do they share something because they approve, disapprove or want to build their personal “brand?”

Even the meaning of “likes” can be a puzzle. Is it really about liking, or social affirmation, or just plain fraud? Big data are often a by-product of using digital platforms to deliver media or provide services. Their great appeal is that they’re cheap and abundant and seem capable of providing valuable new insights. But there’s also a danger in trying to wring too much out of data that weren’t designed to measure motives or states of mind.

Local or Global?
Any online publisher has a treasure trove of data. They can generally see how many visitors they have, how visitors move from page to page, and how much time they spend on each. But this is local on-site activity. It’s often harder to see what visitors are doing the rest of the time, and that could be important. For example, there’s interest in using “attention minutes” as a measure of engagement and perhaps a kind of currency. But are visitors who spend time on a site loyalists who are otherwise hard to reach or are they just people who spend a lot of time on the web? Without a more global source of data, it’s hard to know. If they’re heavy web users, they’ll be easy pickings for programmatic buyers who don’t care about editorial context.

Insight or Currency?
Even if you can’t necessarily see what your visitors are doing off site, there are plenty of insights to be gained by what a publisher can see. One powerful tool is A/B testing. Among other things, publishers have used it to assess the attention grabbing power of headlines.  But using big data for insights and using it for currencies are two entirely different propositions.

Changing currencies – even a modest, commonsense change – is as much about politics as data. Reaching an industry-wide consensus takes time. For example, shifting to “viewable impressions” took IAB well over a year to orchestrate. These negotiated currencies may be less than optimal for any one player. So most online publishers will have to reconcile two sets of metrics, those that provide insights and those that provide money – and they’re not always the same.

Big data offer valuable new ways to see audiences, and we should use them for all they’re worth. But like all data-driven decision making tools, they have biases and blind spots. The best way to use those tools is to know what they can and can’t do for you.

SONY DSC

James Webster is a Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age (2014, MIT Press).

Webster studies audience behavior and measurement. He’s on the editorial boards of the Journal of Communication and the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media.  He also works as a consultant to audience measurement and media companies.  For more information and copies of selected work see his personal website.

Innovation | Revenue

Meredith Begins Performance-based Ad Solution Rollout with Relaunch of Fitnessmagazine.com

With the relaunch of Fitnessmagazine.com and the introduction of native advertising, Meredith Corporation is signaling a new phase of innovation for its sites that are aimed at improving experiences for end users and advertisers alike. According to Andy Wilson, Meredith Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer, the company has had an adaptive design strategy for some time however, given that sites like Fitnessmagazine.com derive as much as half of their traffic from mobile, it was time to make a more significant shift.

The new site is tailored to their users’ media consumption habits and advertiser objectives.  It features a responsive design that’s fully optimized for users across devices and screen sizes. Fitness was an optimal place to start within the Meredith suite of brands, says Wilson, because “we are finding that certain brands, like Fitness, are more attractive to the millennial target. The way they are accessing our sites has changed. They use the content at different times and are doing much more on mobile devices.”

Increasing mobile consumption was not the sole motivation for the site redesign, of course. Creating better opportunities for content discovery, and better aligning content consumption with advertising were also significant factors. The site includes enhanced social sharing and new features like infinite-scrolling category pages that allow users to easily discover the brand’s deep content in areas like workouts, healthy eating and diet and weight loss.

The new design not only helps increase content discovery, but has the added benefit of improving ad viewability. “This relaunch not only gives consumers a mobile-first experience, but it also allows us to develop richer integrated opportunities for our advertisers to drive better performance and viewability to meet their goals,” says Wilson.

MeredithNativeMockupWith the relaunch of the site, Meredith Digital also introduced its Native “Buzz” Platform. Buzz units will integrate marketers’ messaging into trending and highly contextual content areas. According to Wilson, Meredith is rolling out native advertising with its newer sites and leveraging a cross-platform approach for ad sales and ad distribution. “It simplifies things versus selling each individual platform. But more importantly, it lets us focus on performance, regardless of platform.”

Buzz is the first in a suite of performance-based ad products that will soon rollout across 10 Meredith owned and operated websites. “We are very excited about delivering a line of performance ad products that will let us tap into search and content marketing budgets.” The new products will allow Meredith to capture new ad revenue streams and go head to head with the big players in search and social. “Our offering will be compared against the Google and Facebook ad spend but we provide a contextual environment and engaged audiences and we are 100 percent audited. We are going look good in these comparisons.”

Innovation

Q&A: Jonathan Hunt, VP, Global Marketing and Partnerships, Vox Media on Media for Millennials

Q: In your opinion and experience, do millennial readers have brand loyalty as a rule? How do you develop brand affinity/loyalty with them?

A: Yes and no. Above all else, young people (and frankly everyone) value quality and honesty. If another media brand can come along and offer a superior product then they have an opportunity to usurp loyalty. The fact is we live in a time when we’re getting our information from hundreds of different sources — publishers, social feeds, mobile apps, our friends and family and coworkers — all day every day. This is referred to as an Attention Economy. So more so now than ever qualities like utility, entertainment, honesty, and personality can easily trump loyalty.

But what happens when you consistently provide premium, honest stories to your readers? You can create loyalty. It’s easier said than done, but that’s our approach to every aspect of our business and why we’ve been on an explosive growth trajectory.

Q: Do you approach the development of user experience or content differently for the millennial audience?

A: We have to, but again I wouldn’t say this is relative to Millennials only–it’s a fundamental shift in how we all discover and share content, it just so happens that young people are quicker to experiment and adopt new ways of getting what they want when they want. At Vox Media, we’re platform and content agnostic. We’re not precious when it comes to how we get in front of as many people as possible; this is how we’ve been able to scale so quickly. So you may experience a Vox Media brand through one of our responsive sites, or on Tumblr, or as a video or a cinemagraph, through Xbox or Yahoo, or on a partner’s mobile app. As long as I can reach you and give you a reason to care about what we have to say, I know I have a better chance of getting you to experience our brand through other more premium experiences that impact our P&L.

Q: When working to attract and retain millennial media consumers, what would you say are the most important things to consider?

A: This is a question with no single answer. You want to cater to consumption habits (you going to them vs. them always coming to you); content formats (speaking to them through the types of content they create and share themselves); and providing them stories or news that have utility, are unique and entertaining, aren’t pandering, and don’t attempt to frame your brand as something that it’s not. This is the smartest generation ever, and they know it, so the best litmus test when building something for this audience is to ask yourself, “Who cares?” If you can’t answer that question unequivocally then there’s a good chance the answer is, “No one.”

jonathan-hunt-vox-headshotJonathan Hunt is the Global VP of Marketing at Vox Media where he leads audience development and distribution, co-sales partnerships, paid media strategy, and comms. Prior to Vox, he was the Global Marketing Director at VICE Media.

Advertising | Innovation | Revenue

Cox Launches Gamut, a New Company Addressing Evolving Needs

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

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

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

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

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

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

OPA to DCN Header
Perspectives

Why Rebranding Is Different For Non-Profits

Pity the folks at Isis Wallet, the mobile payments consortium created in 2010 by Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. They had no choice but to completely rebrand after the rise of their violent namesake (Islamic State In Syria), which is why they just relaunched as Softcard.

A clash of trademarks will always force one side to rebrand, but rarely is the impetus this dramatic.

More often, a new brand identity emerges at the end of a long-planned merger or restructuring process, as when Bell Atlantic combined with GTE to become Verizon, or when Andersen Consulting was spun off to become Accenture.

And sometimes a rebrand is necessary because of shifts in the marketplace, or changes in industry vernacular that can render a brand name obsolete. You see that most often in fluid categories like information and technology. For example, TV Guide Media is about to rebrand as Pop to shake off its lingering magazine roots, and Clear Channel has just changed its name to iHeartMedia to convey its evolution from terrestrial radio broadcaster to multi-platform media company.

It’s part of a wave of legacy media companies shedding ‘analog’ identities as they move to a digital model. These same forces are influencing non-profits in those sectors, per the recent rebrand by the Online Publishers Association to Digital Content Next, a project that I was involved in.

What’s different about rebranding a non-profit is its flat hierarchy of stakeholders. Change tends to be more challenging in a consensus culture, where executives and board members often have equal says. And when change meets brand, just about everyone weighs in with an opinion!

There’s only one way to channel so many opinions into a common mission: listen. At the Online Publishers Association, we started by holding in-depth interviews with every individual who had a say in the approval process in order to establish shared expectations for the new brand name. There would be no rebrand without nearly every board member and executive being on board.

It had to be an inside-out framework that embraced the consensus culture. Agreement on the specifications of the brief set in motion a very efficient renaming process that took us from Online Publishers Association to Digital Content Next.

Non-profits are ‘people-powered’ organizations, for whom rebranding simply won’t work without taking all leadership stakeholders through these three essential questions at the outset:

• What are the prevailing forces?
Exactly what’s changed in the marketplace that makes the current name less relevant? What are the expectations that drive key stakeholders now and in the coming years?

• How should the new brand name behave?
Define the desired role of the brand and the attitude you want to project. What are the semantic building blocks for the new name? Should it be it futuristic, emotional or functionally descriptive? Should it be a neologism or a real word?

• Who is responsible?
When all is said and done, the new brand direction may require multiple approvals, but someone has to be the final decision maker. The ground rules on who has the final say need to be set loud and clear, or else the project may never make it out of committee.

The strength of a non-profit lies in its humanity of professionals, volunteers and supporters. Done right, the brand should help convey the organization’s mission from the inside out. Which is why, if you’re managing the rebranding of a non-profit, start by engaging the leadership in common purpose around these fundamentals of the brief, or you’ll never get to the creative solution.

MichaelRowlandMichael Rowland was the marketing consultant who led the rebranding process of Online Publishers Association to Digital Content Next.

Michael is a seasoned “brand safecracker”. As director of brand strategy for ad agencies such as Eisner Communications in Baltimore and Kirshenbaum Bond in New York, he developed highly successful marketing campaigns for Cablevision and the Kingdom of Spain.

MIchael has a particular passion for non-profit brands, with a track record of success for clients like YMCA, Johns Hopkins and JCCs of North America.

Michael has taught marketing courses at Johns Hopkins University and Loyola College, and has been a frequent presenter at marketing conventions around the country. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Advertising | Perspectives

Q&A: Justin Choi, CEO, Nativo on Ad Viewability

JustinHeadShot

Q: Is “Viewability” ready to be used as a measurement of ad performance?

A: We see Viewability not as a measure of ad performance, but as a measure of ad viability and quality of ad placement. The technology to measure Viewability exists and should be used by marketers to hold digital ad providers to the most basic quality standard for ad placement, i.e. ensuring ad creative renders within the browser and can be seen. Further, as publishers move to feed-based and infinite scroll design layouts, Viewability will become increasingly important to extracting fair value for inventory that exists far below the fold.

Q: How do you work to ensure that ads are viewable and to provide marketers with appropriate and accurate measures for the performance of their digital advertising?

A: As a true native advertising provider, Nativo inventory placements render directly within publisher editorial feeds, exponentially increasing the likelihood of a marketer’s ad creative being viewed. Furthermore, Nativo approaches measurement in three distinct ways:

  1. Nativo provides proprietary analytics for viewability that adhere to MRC standard measures
  2. Nativo supports all third party ad verification for viewability including MOAT, Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, etc., and
  3. Nativo has been a pioneer in efficiency, always charging marketers on a viewable CPM (vCPM), which means advertisers are only charged when the native ad unit comes into view of the browser.

Again, our point of view is that Viewability is not a performance metric, but a necessary quality standard for paid media placement. Viewability should be table stakes for paid media. Ensuring ad creative can be viewed enables brand advertisers to better ensure their paid media, at the very least, has a chance to make an impact with consumers. Without viewability, marketers are forced to measure quality in clicks; a challenged metric that works for direct response advertisers but not for brand advertisers.

Q: Is achieving a standardized measure and method for viewability important?

A: Yes, standardized measures for viewability are important for our industry, provided they are not so rigid that they can only be applied to IAB display and video units. Too rigid a standard will only inhibit advertiser adoption of innovative ad creatives, and slow publisher expansion of non-standard inventory placements.

Native is a prime example of non-standard ad creative (content) and placement (in-feed) where marketers are seeing some of the most exciting consumer engagement and KPI performance in years. That said, it is important that industry organizations and governing bodies establish an accepted understanding of what it means for an ad to be viewable, as well as guidelines and definitions for marketers, publishers and ad providers to follow, including accepted technical methodologies for measurement.

Justin Choi is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Nativo, the premier native advertising platform for digital publishers and brand marketers. Nativo works with major brand advertisers and more than 250 premium publishers and was named “Hottest Startup in LA”. Prior to Nativo, Justin was the founder and CEO of Cie Games, a leading producer of top-grossing mobile and social games, which was acquired for $100MM; and founder and Chairman of Cie Studios, a growing and profitable, award-winning interactive agency focused on digital marketing and custom app development for top brands.

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Perspectives | Revenue

Why Your Attention Is Worth More Than Your Click

Without a doubt, the quantity of content available online is at an all-time high. One hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and 500 million tweets are sent per day. But human attention is a finite resource. If nothing else, there are only so many waking hours in the day. So as we seek to create a media ecosystem that is vibrant and viable, we must recognize that attention is a true measure of success.

As Jon Slade, commercial director of global digital advertising and insight at the Financial Times, said, “It’s about time we stopped counting quantity and looked instead at quality — specifically for brand campaigns. Attention is what matters, not pings from an ad server. Let’s look at outcomes that matter!”

In a survey conducted for a forthcoming report by Digital Content Next, which represents the top digital publishers, 100 percent of the participating members indicated that they either already use time-based metrics or plan to do so in the future, and 80 percent demonstrated interest in transacting on the basis of time…

Read more on the Huffington Post

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

Holistic ad serving will keep native inventory premium

Today, one of the biggest opportunities for publishers are native advertising formats–provided they roll out a native ad stack with caution. Publishers might fail to realize the true potential of native formats if they follow the path of fragmenting their monetization stack between the core ad serving platforms and real time bidding systems like they did for banners.

Centralizing the decision on which campaign/creative to be served will generate the highest revenue for publishers. However, in today’s banner ad-stack, the decision is broken into two systems: DFP/first-party ad server and network optimizers. For premium formats like native inventory, publishers should not break the above decision in the way that they did for banners because this will fail to achieve the full revenue potential offered by native advertising.

Let’s take a look at why with a little bit of history and math:

How did banner ad technology evolve for publishers?
First there were ad-servers for managing campaigns directly sold to advertisers. Publishers quickly realized they couldn’t sell 100% of their inventory so they started building relationships with networks.

Running a network isn’t rocket science (after all, it’s just media arbitrage) and, consequently, hundreds of networks popped up. It became one hell of a job to manage multiple networks until SSPs (network optimizers) came along to rescue publishers.

While publishers were optimizing their inventory, advertisers started to buy publisher’s inventory through Real Time Bidding (RTB) exchanges in addition to the old school process of cutting manual IOs and RFPs. In the process, publishers fragmented the final decision of which ad creative should be served into two completely separate silos.

Publishers would first use their own ad server to fill inventory with direct campaigns and then let the exchanges try to fill the remnant inventory. They assumed that the yield from exchanges would never exceed the yield from their direct business. If that’s always true, it makes sense to serve direct sold campaigns over indirect campaigns. Unfortunately, it’s not always true.

Where do native formats fit in?
Native inventory is premium. Assuming direct campaigns are always more lucrative could be costly and require a new ad serving model. Native formats need a modern ad stack that lays the foundation to ensure publishers make premium eCPMs irrespective whether they are selling it direct or indirect.

The ad stack should allow publishers to run direct campaigns but also auction every impression (to multiple demand sources) to compete with direct campaigns. This holistic ad serving approach optimizes a publisher’s yield by serving the right creative for every impression.

Here’s an example:

Let us assume a Publisher A has 100,000 impressions for her native formats and she can directly sell 25% of them. She wants to backfill the rest from networks & exchanges with a backfill CPM floor of $2.

1. Silo Ad-Server

The first ad-server runs through 25,000 impressions with an eCPM of $10.50 and the indirect backfill is given an opportunity to fill 75,000 impressions. The backfill exchanges monetizes at a $3.40 eCPM with 80% fill-rate.

See the revenue and breakdown below:

AdsNativeFig1

2. Holistic Ad-Server

But if both direct & indirect were served from the same system — a “holistic ad serving” approach — they could realize that the fill at any given price level is a direct function of how much inventory is made available, rather than the absolute impressions.

Let’s imagine the indirect backfill could monetize the publisher’s inventory at $6 CPMs. That could end up being 15% of the overall inventory they can make available. In other words, the publisher would fill more impressions at this price from indirect campaigns than direct campaigns.

Now that the system knows the eCPM from every source for every impression, it can prioritize to serve $6CPM in-direct demand than $5 direct demand.

AdsNativeFig2

Note: Indirect demand still has a $3.40 eCPM as in the previous case, but the publisher could realize an overall lift of 10% in this example.

Conclusion
The ecosystem around native formats is evolving very fast. It is a wonderful time to be a publisher: Advertisers want to buy direct from publishers and the number of native networks (backfill partners) are growing.  Publishers should maximize revenue by executing strategies to roll out an ad stack which helps them integrate the first party ad serving with programmatic for these premium ad experiences. And it’s going to be big!

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 | Revenue

Is Digital Advertising Ready to Ditch the Click?

Views Have Long Been Digital Advertising’s Currency. Those Days May Be Numbered.

It was a was a throwaway line on the 50th slide in a PowerPoint deck. But that seemingly innocuous bullet point — “Time as a currency to trade?” — stands to upend the digital-advertising industry.

In March 2013, Jon Slade, commercial director of digital advertising and insight at the Financial Times, presented the idea to the paper’s Asia sales staff. Next month, the London-based paper will roll out ad rates based on time rather than impressions, charging some advertisers by the number of hours their ads appear in front of targeted groups of readers. The measurement — cost per hour, or CPH — shatters a decades-old media pricing model that values volume above all else…

“We’re definitely challenging the status quo. No one has come up with
a new currency in digital advertising in — a while.”

This moment matters for publishers like the FT, according to Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, formerly the Online Publishers Association. “We’re in a medium that’s fast changing and evolving,” he said.

“I’m hoping we’ll look back a decade from now and see this
as a critical milestone.”

Read more at Advertising Age.

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