WPPs Xaxis unit has began trading in Hong Kong on Monday. Working directly with sister WPP unit GroupM Hong Kong, the new outpost will offer regional marketers to utilize Xaxis’ audience-buying systems, including Xaxis proprietary data management platform.Prior to joining Xaxis, Chung served as Business Director, Hong Kong for Tribal Fusion, the world’s 2nd largest digital advertising network. In this role Chung successfully built regional coverage for Tribal Fusion by establishing partnerships with area publishers in the Greater China region. In addition to driving the Tribal Fusion business, he was also responsible for managing the team that provided suitable targeting options, data, insights and optimization methods for both direct clients and agencies including GroupM. Andy Chung has been named director of the Hong Kong operations, joining Xaxis from Tribal Fusion, where he was business director for Hong Kong for the online ad network.“The market opportunity for Xaxis to provide sophisticated audience targeting and buying services to advertisers in the Hong Kong region is enormous,” stated Chung, adding, “I look forward to working with the GroupM family to build Xaxis’ presence in 2013 and beyond.”Xaxis currently services more than 1,000 advertisers and processes more than 300 billion impressions worldwide each year.
While the average Super Bowl XLVII commercial cost nearly $4 million for 30 seconds – close to a 10% rise from last year’s price – Paul Dolan, managing director, North America, Xaxis, believes that major events like the Super Bowl actually drive ad prices lower, at least in the digital advertising space. “It’s something we’ve observed around events, and big traffic days like Cyber Monday,” Dolan said. “The Super Bowl is one of the chief among them.” The company actually started noticing this trend four years ago at the Oscars and Emmys. Dolan says that publishers have trouble getting all of their ads modified and sold when the buildup to a major event begins. That buildup of traffic eventually leads to more ads being sold on exchanges. For the Super Bowl, it was sports sites, blogs, and social media that saw the increased traffic. Dolan says, “Realistically, [those sites could see] two to three times the amount of traffic they would see on a typical Sunday.” Of course, that also means two to three times the amount of ads. But the influx of inventory is a double-edged sword. “You could overexpose your audience and blowout frequency [in just one day].” Dolan said, adding that frequency control is key. On top of the cheaper inventory and swollen consumer base, Dolan believes that real-time media technologies will allow advertisers to take full advantage of the opportunities presented during big events. “[With] the rise of RTB, we know that we can now react much quicker to trends within minutes,” Dolan said. “Not only do you have the automatic algorithms…but you can get real-time feedback and have people looking at it. Advertisers that want to drive awareness or direct response can take advantage of low priced inventory.” Dolan's observations call for people to take real-time action, not just computers. Considering an advertiser's small window of opportunity in the case of a single event, whether or not they take advantage of the cost-effective opportunity ultimately comes down to people making smart decisions in real-time.
It’s a conundrum that our industry has been pondering for what seems like ages: How can we attract brand dollars away from TV and onto the Web? For the past few years, it’s all we’ve talked about. Internet-based advertising across the desktop and mobile channels can deliver the scale of television to brand advertisers, along with better targeting and superior analytics. But for brands the online world remains a testing ground only, and it’s still riddled with concerns: viewability, attribution, fraud. We’re all aware that the Web could be an ideal place for brands. As an industry, we have already taken steps to improve the environment with new standards, new ad verification technologies and improved ad units. It’s not enough, though. The banners and buttons that make up the inventory of most ad exchanges aren’t the best medium for branding -- branding is most successful with rich media online. To attract and retain brand dollars and to elevate the industry, we need the ability to deliver rich media ads to high-quality environments in a scalable way -- and in real-time. This means we will need exchanges that can support rich media advertising. That’s no small feat, but I believe it can be done. However, it takes a village: We’ll have to work together to make our online world as brand-friendly as it can be. The agencies, the exchanges, the industry organizations and technology companies across the LUMAscape all need to come together, hold hands, and make it so. RTB as “Race to the Bottom” has to end, here and now. The answer for premium advertising is Real Time Branding, which needs to begin. Exchanges Must Support New, Brand-Friendly Formats The solution relies heavily on the IAB’s Rising Star ad units. These stunning rich media ads deliver the visual impact and engagement that brands demand online. They’re big and beautiful, highly customizable, and invite consumer interaction with opportunities to incorporate video, social media elements, relevant publisher content -- even e-commerce modules. They are built for brand advertising. And since the Rising Stars are standard units, the exchanges must adapt to support them. The problem is that exchanges, like so much of our industry, were built for easier-to-trade commodities like banners and buttons. These ad units just aren’t effective anymore -- banner blindness has effectively killed them, as evidenced by today’s dismally low click-throughs. The Rising Stars, along with other rich media ad units, are delivering dramatically higher engagement rates. If we really want to lure brands online, these are the kinds of ads we need to be able to support at scale. The exchanges won’t be able to do it alone, however. The ecosystem will have to come together to support this adjustment from every angle. Fortunately, the IAB is already on board -- they have accepted the Rising Stars as a standard. On the delivery side, there are companies in the marketplace including Flite, AdGent, OnSwipe, and JiVox are able to technically fly this type of creative. Measurement companies like MOAT, Nielsen and comScore are able to deliver key metrics for the Rising Stars. Vertical and horizontal experts like AOL, Federated Media, Martini Media and others are able to add value and sell the inventory on high-quality, brand-friendly publisher sites. And agencies that work with brands are able to engage and procure creative and content. A Happy Ending: Real-Time BRANDING as the New “RTB” By joining together in constructive partnerships, we can help the industry quickly evolve and become more attractive to brand marketers. We have all the elements: Beautiful ad units, premium publisher environments, and the technology to sell the media at scale and real-time. If representatives from all sides can roll up their sleeves and work together, we can put all the pieces together to facilitate effective brand advertising at scale. It takes a village -- and if we all work together, we can bring brand advertising online and help it thrive.
Campaign optimization is crucial for any RTB-driven campaign. However, with so many variables to consider, what are the most important factors that determine a successful campaign? To get to the bottom of the question, I interviewed Clement Chung, who holds a Ph.D. in machine learning and is the lead data scientist at Chango (full disclosure: I'm CEO of Chango). Below I outline his top-five optimization tips for RTB-based campaigns. 1) Say it three times: "The algorithm won't save me." Ironically, a Ph.D.-holder in machine learning candidly pointed out that too much emphasis has been placed on algorithms. Algorithms are obviously important, but they have their limitations. To be effective, algorithms need sufficient data -- and since each campaign can perform differently, it takes time for them to be effective. It's not uncommon for a campaign to have spent 30%-40% of its budget before algorithm-based optimization has a huge impact. Therefore, an initial setup of a campaign has a large impact on results -- and the setup needs to be influenced by human intuition. For example, choosing the right segments, or the right site-list, has a tremendous impact on the campaign. 2) Focus on granular measurement. Granularity is one of the golden rules of RTB media buying. You cannot optimize what you cannot see. The more granular a campaign can be the more performance a campaign manager and the algorithm will achieve. Try to avoid a situation where large numbers of people belong to one segment. Different platforms have different levels of granularity, and you must ensure that you can optimize at very discrete or micro-segment levels. 3) Frequency caps & data freshness - Frequency capping is a common tool that still holds a lot of value. While the algorithm should auto-tune your frequency, ensure that your starting value is appropriate for the medium. For example, frequency caps on FBX should be almost double any other exchange. The "freshness" of your data is also extremely important, particularly if you are targeting search events. Ensure that you can optimize by limiting the freshness of the data. For example, the data may tell you that retargeting anyone who has visited a site 30 days ago is a waste, since those indivduals are never going to purchase, so why waste media dollars on them? 4) Isolate your tactics - It's OK to experiment, but you need to isolate your tactics. Ensure that your daily budget is not being consumed by some experimental segments or keywords. This works differently in different systems, but the point is that no single segment or tactic spends an overwhelming portion of a campaign budget. 5) Focus on creative. The so-called "last mile" of digital campaigns is easily overlooked. Creative needs a clear call to action. Creative used for retargeting campaigns is usually very different from creative that prospects for new customers. Pure retargeting campaigns often can coast with less focus on creative because of brand association. On the other hand, prospecting creative needs to clearly explain the problem being solved and cannot rely on brand association. 6 (bonus secret) Know your goals. Ensuring that you start a campaign knowing what actual success looks like is crucial. Many clients believe they can optimize campaigns for CTR, CPA and ROAS simultaneously. What view through attribution are you going to use? Have you considered the impact of other digital marketing campaigns running simultaneously? In many respects, the rules of real-time marketing are still being written. Nonetheless, gains will be made by heeding the advice of a data scientist deeply involved in the everyday optimization of hundreds of campaigns.
The term “audience management” is beginning to bleed into email and CRM discussions as a means of better articulating the way consumers are affected by a combination of direct marketing, social marketing and media-oriented activities. Some mix the message by throwing in retargeting as a form of audience management, but it’s not. You would think more effort would be put into overlaying audience insight on traditional email segmentation and response behavior. Audience analysis is fascinating, as it’s information that spans behavioral media, social, tablet, device and contextual. Audience analysis provides real-time looks into behavioral patterns, and is applied to first-party and third-party sites. You can narrow down audiences by individual, household, buying activity, real property, interests, wealth indicators, and even take it further down the behavioral side to ascertain interests by past site usage and search behavior. It’s amazingly rich insight when conjoined with social and CRM data. The email and messaging space, is traditionally fixated on patterns, and your job as a marketer is to condition consumers to receiving your email in a format they can quickly digest on a regular basis. Success is optimizing promotional windows for those with a retail end goal. Social marketing, while not the most coveted monetization channel, has a tremendous effect on the two worlds of online media and eCRM. Social provides a real-time view of what’s happening in people’s lives and how external factors, communities and brands impact them daily. What makes this so exciting is the opportunity to marry rich audience management practices with customer management practices. The dimensional view of the consumer is a data visualization dream. Add to this the ability to apply panel data on top of audience analysis, and the output become really granular insight. Back to the world of email marketing and CRM. I typically ask three questions on this topic: What type of audience data would you use if you had it? What I love about audience data is its volume. I know you own a home, I know you own a car, I know your kids are in private school, and have propensity scores across 50 categories of consumer electronics that help me understand not just what you are interested in, but what you’ve bought and when you are most likely to be in-market to buy something. I know this because you have purchased, shopped or expressed interest in these items in the recent past. This can have a huge impact on how I apply discounting, length of promotions, timing, test strategies and which type of messages I use for this treatment (notification message, promotional message, newsletter?). How would you use audience data in an email program? I’d first overlay audience data on email response data. Say that you had a 25% higher click-through rate for Segment 1 (High Value Customers) but by adding an audience overlay, you see higher click-throughs in this segment that had several audience traits you didn’t know before, for example, Had interest in Golf, Newly Divorced, High Discretionary spend indicators. How often would you use it? I think it’s practical to think you could look at this on every campaign. Yet you’re not likely to find actionable insights until you’ve developed your own predictive propensity models over time. The value of audience data is it’s real-time, it’s not just specific about your brand and it’s the best outside-in view you will get We know consumers are basically walking mobile devices today, always on; we know their lives are non-linear, and our marketing programs are in perpetual need of adapting. You need more ways to understand how your program is affected by trends outside your control. Your ability to predict those trends while fighting the day-to-day direct response battle will be the catalyst to your success quarter over quarter.