In a freewheeling conversation that touched on everything from the role of ad agencies and the adoption of programmatic media-buying systems to the emergence of new forms of data for targeting consumers that could become new forms of currency for trading with media, MasterCard media chief Ben Jankowski said while traditional media-buying values have not been abandoned by big marketers, they no longer are the dominant reasons they choose the media they do. “The CPM is not dead,” Jankowski said during a conversation with Simulmedia Founder and CEO Dave Morgan during one of its monthly “salons” in New York Thursday evening. While CPMs -- or cost-per-thousands -- used to be “the only thing we looked at, now it’s one of five things we look at,” Jankowski said, implying media valuation systems are still in flux, but are evolving rapidly as marketers find better ways of using data to define and target their audiences and measure the results based on actual business results, not just impressions-based metrics like reach and frequency. “We are still looking at CPMs and things like that, but the more we can connect our business results -- that’s going to be the currency,” Jankowski said in response to a question from audience member Doug Ray, CEO of Carat, which is also one of MasterCard’s agencies. Specifically, Ray asked whether the shift toward more sophisticated audience data and the adoption to programmatic media-buying systems was giving marketers like MasterCard the “ability to target audiences, as opposed to targeting content, and hoping the audiences are there.” Citing the “hold” that things like Nielsen audience ratings have on the ad industry’s media currency, Ray asked Jankowski whether the ability to target audiences directly might change that. While not identifying Nielsen by name, Jankowski acknowledged that big marketers like MasterCard are beginning to shift their reliance from the kinds of audience estimates it produces. Responding to another audience question from The Daily Meal Founder Jim Spanfeller, Jankowski said the trend is toward using dynamic, real-time data to measure brand impact with specific groups of consumers, not classic demographic ratings segments. “We can get a lot more granular about brand health targets,” he said, adding that data is enabling brands to measure their performance with explicit types of audiences based on their actual consumer lifestyles vs. demographic surrogates. “Before it was a big, giant cumbersome study that went out into the field once a year, and now it’s much more dynamic and I can be actionable in a quicker period of time,” he said. Aside from the emergence and adoption of better forms of consumer data targeting, much of the conversation focused on the shift toward programmatic media-buying systems. Jankowski, who leads the programmatic committee at the World Advertising Federation, noted that the trade organization released a white paper Thursday to help marketers deal with the somewhat daunting task of understanding the programmatic “ecosystem” and how they can adopt it. He acknowledged it is complex and complicated, and admitted that LUMA Partners’ infamous Lumascapes charts keep him “awake at night,” but he said programmatic media-buying is here to stay and will likely grow as a critical part of marketers’ media-buying, because it is efficient, effective and enables brands to leverage data to target audiences in a way that traditional media-buying based on audience estimates never could. That said, he said his “biggest a-ha” reaction to the WFA’s study was the fact that so many big brands are still putting their “head in the sand and waiting for people to figure this out.” “People spend way less time with it than they should,” he said. Asked whether fear-mongering from some big media agencies and ad tech players that programmatic media-buying is rife with fraud and non-viewable traffic was casting a pall on it in the eyes of big marketers, Jankowski said, “I don’t.” Contrary to some industry pundits, Jankowski said he doesn’t believe big marketers are putting a “black X next to it,” but he said they do “need to figure out how to manage in the ecosystem.” Programmatic will continue to grow in size in the marketplace,” he asserted, describing the issues raised by critics more as “speed bumps” than “barriers.” 4As honcho Mike Donahue probed Jankowski on one of those potential speed bumps -- the issue of “transparency” among agencies and trading desks that arbitrage programmatic buys for their clients -- and Jankowski more or less demurred, noting that while “virtually nobody would say, ‘Yeah, I don’t care about transparency,” he noted that “there are a lot of layers between that.” Overall, Jankowski -- a long-time agency media executive before joining MasterCard four years ago -- said he was bullish on the relationships between marketers and their agencies, and while he acknowledged that marketers have been pressuring agencies on compensation and performance, he believes agencies are changing and adapting, shifting from a mindset in which they have to “control everything” to one in which they are more of an “orchestrator.” “That’s one of the ways they can create more value,” he said.
The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) has published new guidance detailing how brands can get the most from the new programmatic landscape. The guidance highlights key steps that brands can take to improve the return they get from investment in digital advertising via programmatic platforms. The steps range from basics such as asking the right questions to the more complex process of negotiating individual contract terms. Advice is also offered on particular technology stacks that clients might choose to use. The WFA also did a survey of more than 40 major global advertisers (with estimated annual ad spending of $35 billion) which found that 10% of digital media investment is now going through programmatic channels, with 44% of that targeted at online display. That’s double the scale of investment via programmatic platforms recorded by a similar survey the WFA did last year. (The full report can be found here.) The survey also showed that marketers expect programmatic’s share of the digital budget to continue to grow significantly in the next 12 months. More than 80% expect programmatic video buys to grow and 77% expect rises in mobile activity. Much of the exposure to programmatic has been via open exchanges and real-time bidding, where 69% of respondents reported they have been active. And 42% said they have also used private exchanges with fixed prices and 31% have participated in invite only auctions on private exchanges. The survey found half of the respondents were unhappy with the way data is captured, stored and utilized, although ownership of data generated programmatically has been secured by nearly 60% of respondents, versus 33% in 2013. The WFA said it strongly urges that programmatic clients gain ownership of media investment data and its byproducts such as audience data and key insights about Return on Investment. The group also recommends that clients take greater contractual control of the technology stack they choose to use, and should consider direct contracts at every step of the chain in order to limit arbitrage and wasted commissions. The survey found that 36% of respondents are now using a Data Management Platform compared to 20% in 2013. Also, clients should approach programmatic media with a “financial investor philosophy, creating a media investment strategy based on understanding of the media asset and the psychology of the other investors.” The use of programmatic verification tools is also up from a year ago. Sixty-three percent of respondents said they use ad viewability tools and 50% are seeking to verify that placement is in a “brand friendly context.” The survey also found that the use of Agency Trading Desks (ATDs) had declined by 15% year-on-year, while usage of Independent Trading Desks (ITDs) has more than tripled (up from 8% to 30%). “Advertisers are taking concrete actions to manage the switch to programmatic and understand this new form of trading. This guidance is designed to continue that process and ensure that WFA members learn from best practice and are able to develop the transparent solutions that digital media buying requires,” said Stephan Loerke, Managing Director of the WFA. "Stock Broker Trading" photo by Shutterstock.
The amount of pre-roll video inventory available for programmatic buying increased 14% from Q1 to Q2 2014, and much of that growth was driven by high-end publishers getting on board with programmatic selling. The data comes from TubeMogul’s Q2 2014 quarterly update on the U.S. digital video ad marketplace. Per TubeMogul’s report, the amount of inventory available for real-time bidding (RTB) from “Tier” 1 publishers and comScore Top 100 sites increased by 48% and 65%, respectively. That’s down from the respective growth figures of 110% and 78% posted in between Q4 2013 and Q1 2014 -- but it still represents a clear upward trend. Private marketplace use continues to surge, with 140% more advertisers buying inventory directly from publishers via TubeMogul’s BrandAccess (its private marketplace service). The use of BrandAccess has grown 1,500% since Q4 2013, which TubeMogul calls “astonishing.” Another area of exceptional growth is mobile video. TubeMogul says the amount of mobile video available for programmatic buying in the U.S. has increased by over 1,000% in the past nine months, attributing the growth to “the addition of several major exchanges.” A TubeMogul representative acknowledged that the addition of mobile inventory sources skews the numbers, and that “while [TubeMogul] did enjoy some growth, it’s not 100% representative,” adding that it should “stabilize next quarter.” While viewability rates for inventory purchased direct from publishers increased 39% (up to 77%) quarter-over-quarter, TubeMogul notes that the overall viewability rates were nearly identical to Q1 2014 -- checking in at an abysmal 30%, just 1% better than the previous quarter. The lack of overall improvement on the viewability front was highlighted in a report form video ad management firm Vindico earlier this week. How the Media Rating Council (MRC) now-implemented standard of “50% of the video ad being in-view for at least two seconds” changes the pictures remains to be seen. The cost to buy pre-roll video inventory increased 13% quarter-over-quarter, with all types of inventory -- from “premium” to “remnant” -- becoming at least 10% more expensive in Q2.
EA Sports has partnered with Google to promote its flagship Madden football game by allowing fans to create custom GIF ads in real-time based on what's happening on the field during the game. It's part of Google's Art, Copy & Code initiative to use creative pieces and technology in campaigns. The Madden 15 ad campaign lets fans share their feelings about game play on the field as it happens in real-time. It serves up to fans browsing sports-related sites and is tied to the NFL season kickoff between the Seahawks and Packers. The ads run as short, looping video clips, or gifs, featuring specific highlights in the game. Virtual Madden players recreate the action. The gifs flash "smack talk your rivals in real time." For every NFL Game, whenever your team scores, fans choose from a variety of Gifs where they can write their own text to overlay the image in real time and share with others. Mike Glaser, marketing manager of creative partners at Google, explains how the platform creates a live stream of memes using Madden NFL 15 video game footage as GIFs, triggered by action on the field. The GIFs appear in real-time on MaddenGiferator.com, social media, and popular sports and game-related sites. "For example, if Seattle’s Richard Sherman picks off Aaron Rodgers tonight, you might see a GIF of Sherman with the headline 'Weren't you supposed to catch that? Aawwwwwkward' in the stream, alongside a real-time update on the score and game clock." Google estimates that 84% of consumers now watch TV while multitasking on other devices. Glaser points to a resurgence of search interest for GIFs on Google Trends. It's been a steady uphill march around the interest in GIFs since 2011.
Digital ad tech firm dmg on Thursday announced the appointment of Doron Ilan as its chief financial officer. The company is headquartered in London. Ilan was previously CFO at SuperCom where he led the company’s public offering on the NASDAQ exchange, per a release.
Even though we have been hearing a lot about big data, the amount we are actually gathering today pales in comparison to what is about to happen once device connectivity and sensors come into play from the Internet of Things (IoT). Nest -- bought by Google -- was just the first wave of public understanding that the connected home is just the tip of the iceberg. Of course size matters, but after meeting the challenges in capturing, storing, searching and sharing are met, the challenge lies in the analysis, visualization and taking action on the insights. Let’s take a look at the growing market size in the digital space: • YouTube users upload 48 hours of new video every minute • 600 new websites are created every minute • The New York Times processes 4 Terabytes of images daily • 100 Terabytes of data uploaded daily to Facebook The digital media space is up to the challenge. Heck, we are handling nearly 500 billion programmatic trading transactions a day. One of the newest areas growing in big data is CAMS (Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, and Social). Let’s start from the top to explain why. Cloud Despite the recent photo hacking scandal, cloud services continue to grow exponentially. Most consumers find the promise of storing content on all their devices in one place appealing. Ease of use and peace of mind create a value exchange of our data, personalization and targeted advertising. Analytics Analytics, insights, and infographics can assist in making better business or marketing decisions based on big data. In fact, McKinsey predicts a shortage of 200K of data scientists by 2018. In order to meet the demand, the industry will see more partnerships than ever before from academia and start-ups, as well as traditional measurement companies. Mobile The next few years will highlight the fact there is more to mobile than a tablet on the nightstand and a phone in your pocket. Mobile will be considered all the devices we interact with on a daily basis that are connected to the Internet. It should be no surprise that programmatic spending is shifting toward mobile, at over triple digit growth. Social Some of the most valuable marketing big data involves earned and owned media in social. There are still plenty of concerns about social media, but big data and programmatic are not areas marketers now stress about. Programmatic advertising is moving out of the minor leagues with huge marketing efforts on Facebook and Twitter. The second act in big data is to bring data-driven marketing into the programmatic environment. In order to make big data work, a strong correlation between relevance and response is needed. This is simplistically called “branded response.” As the cost of using the data and the time it takes to make decisions goes down, marketers start to see attribution more clearly and in real time. Big data from CAMS and IoT is causing an explosion of investment and innovation. With this explosion, data-driven marketing is finding a better way to target based on what is found in the cloud, discovered socially, or indicated by our mobile devices. If we are creating a new Google’s worth of data every four days today, imagine the possibilities when we are creating a Google every hour. The paradox of “size matters” is that the more data we have, the harder it can be to manage. However, we have learned that it takes large amounts of data to provide the best results.
Data descriptors like “accuracy” and “quality” have held the mobile ad spotlight for quite some time, while their corrupt counterpart -- fraudulent location data -- consistently circumvents the public eye. This creates a real problem when 100% accuracy or “high quality” becomes entirely irrelevant because an ad request is inherently fraudulent. While assessing the accuracy of location data is necessary across the mobile ad ecosystem, ad requests aren’t worth analyzing unless the possibility of fraud has been eliminated. Fraudulent location signals tend to exist within two main categories: accidental short distance jitter and intentional location spoofing. The first situation seems to occur accidentally and requires a scientific strategy for fraud detection. The second is shamelessly enabled by bad-guy publishers who corrupt mobile inventory to make money without an audience (or sell an audience that doesn’t exist). Time to Face the Fraud Short distance jitter -- which is the more complex, yet authentic version of fraud -- is when the distance between two location data sets gathered from a device is impossible to travel in the time between signals. This might be the case if one latitude and longitude data point registers at the top of the Empire State building one moment, near New York Penn Station 30 seconds later, and back at the Empire State building moments after that. Location spoofing is a different animal. Mobile ad publishers are well aware that ad requests that include location data perform better in the real-time bidding process. In order to respond to requests at the speed the industry requires, publishers provide fake lat/long data points to increase their chances of winning bids to show a targeted ad, which in reality is not targeted. This can be achieved by centroid geocoding, such as providing a lat/long data point within an arbitrary ZIP code; or through what’s called IP geocoding, where free services provide a lat/long data point for an IP address, which is notoriously inaccurate. While it’s easy to write off fraud as a rare occurrence and simply focus on accuracy when selling to media buyers, mobile ad providers that do so are at a disadvantage from the get-go. When examining the majority of mobile ad inventory (which includes lat/long data), two questions need to be answered: Are the requests authentic? (Originating from an actual device). And if so, is the location of the request accurate? (Near the actual device). It’s important to realize that the question of accuracy relies on the existence or absence of fraud. Yet accuracy of location data is often determined separately from the filtration of fraud. This is problematic when you consider that roughly 16% of requests are fraudulent. And that’s just the beginning. It has been suggested that only 34% of location data is accurate to within 100 meters of a mobile user's true location. However, this number assumes that the location data was authentic to begin with. Accuracy is only one piece of the location data puzzle. New methods of weeding out misleading and inaccurate data are readily available and are becoming increasingly efficient in recovering good data and isolating fraud -- thus leaving mobile ad providers with much more than a third of reliable location data to offer clients. So regardless of whether fraudulent location data is accidental or purposeful, on the rise or diminishing, it must be discussed alongside data accuracy, as well as actively prevented before it reaches the RTB stage. Diagnosing Phony Location Data The significant occurrence of fraudulent ad requests has led to the development of strategies that can reveal and remove these bad sources of data, as well as recognize and rid the mobile ad ecosystem of fraudulent data. One approach revolves around two indicators of true or fraudulent location data, based on how well it’s reflected in human movement within the physical world. Measuring “hyperlocality” is one way to distinguish a publisher that provides good data from one who provides fraudulent lat/long data. This is accomplished by generating a representative sample of location histories provided by that data source and confirming whether those data sets are realistic. Authentic, hyperlocal data sets should match human behavior in tandem with physical geography and popular attractions. For example, multiple points over water or thick clusters on bridges are unrealistic. In other words, the density of points should mimic population density. “Clusterability” is another tactic for discerning fraudulent lat/long data points depending on whether or not they’re truly associated with a location-enabled device. Authentic data from a single device should cluster in understandable places, or dwells (school, work, home, grocery store), rather than registering across large distances over a short period of time. While devices can reflect random movement throughout the world, the clustering of thousands of ad requests in the middle of a field or signals emitted in a grid-like formation would be clear indicator of a fraudulent data source. What This Means for Mobile Advertising The mobile advertising industry relies more heavily on impression rates than clicks, which continually triggers the ROI debate. By recognizing and removing fraudulent ad requests from mobile exchanges, the entire ad ecosystem drastically improves. Essentially, the hard work is done. The complex task of developing a “fraud finder” is well underway -- so the ability to make the industry more efficient already exists. It’s time for “fraud” to be injected into the data accuracy conversation. If fraud is eliminated -- and accuracy verified -- then ad exchanges will ingest fewer fraudulent requests and spit out a higher percentage of relevant ads. Remember that some mobile bot fraud appears to be very accurate, so while ensuring accuracy is necessary, it’s not sufficient alone in removing all bad ad requests. With a higher percentage of accurate and authentic ad requests, more mobile ads will be correctly targeted more effectively, and will produce a higher ROI.
“[Company] announces the launch of Version 3 of [Company Product] programmatic media buying APIs. Powerful, yet easily-integrated, [Company Product] provides a jump-start for application developers and agencies with an always-on, cloud-hosted, open-API platform. [Company Product] simplifies media buying across almost 30 real-time exchanges for desktop, mobile and Facebook, enabling rapid access to a wide range of capabilities including retargeting, contextual, geo-targeting and device targeting. [Company Product] combines a range of sophisticated, out-of-the-box algorithms for performance and brand marketing with on-demand access to billions of advertising placements worldwide across desktop, mobile and Facebook. Delivered on a fully-supported, software-as-a-service basis (SAAS), there are no hardware costs or complex infrastructures to maintain.”
Ken Segall, who worked on the Apple account while at TBWA/Chiat/Day, thinks a Job-less Apple has "lost its ad bite." Speaking to the The Australian, Segall said, “I feel that Apple is acting a lot like a big company now when it comes to marketing, and a lot of their recent efforts show that. Their iPad advertising is more like, ‘People all around the world are using the iPad to do amazing things.’ That may be true and that may be impressive, but people aren’t buzzing about their commercials.’’ And why is this happening? Segall goes on to say, “My sense is that they are starting to behave more like a typical large company when it comes to advertising. There seems to be plenty of competition, with a number of creative teams working on things -- the best team wins sort of thing. That isn’t the way Steve worked. He worked with a small group of people at our agency and if he didn’t like something we would do something else. We lived and breathed it and worked around the clock till it was right.’’ Has the current advertising landscape got you down? Do you hate that every friggin' brand wants to be your friend? Do you feel like a good ad campaign now consists of a Hyperlapse video posted to Vine and Instagram and then embedded in a blog post which, itself, is then posted to Facebook and tweeted out to a brand's followers who are asked to retweet that tweet and Like the brand's Facebook page so they can be entered into a contest that will award them Klout points if only they send in the best Snapchat of the brand's product? Well, Tomorrow Group CEO Tom Goodwin feels your pain. Writing in the Guardian, Goodwin says: "We’ve created the long tail of marketing, where each campaign has ever smaller budgets, ever shorter lifespans, diminishing aims, all so wonderfully cheap in execution, so wonderfully proficient in terms of outputs, but so entirely pointless. It’s this maintaining excitement for a Twitter feed of 4,000 people, or keeping the 500 subscribers on YouTube happy that is the marketing of our time. It may be cheap, but it’s a pointless distraction and it’s not solving any of the problems that are keeping our clients up at night." Amen, brother. So, of course you've heard of ad:tech, right? That conference that is sort of the mother of all ad conferences? Trouble is, it's become so big and so unwieldy that perhaps it's lost its way. But on the upside, it appears the show runners realize that and are applying a fix. That fix comes in the form of PAN Communications, a PR firm ad:tech has hired to, as the press release explains, "increase show engagement with attendees, elevating brand awareness to potential audiences and strengthening relationships with core media." And in addition, "develop sharable content, manage social channels, and build out media and influencer relations in correlation with upcoming events in New York City and San Francisco." Will PAN succeed? We certainly hope they do. And if things weren't already bad enough for ad agencies, brands are shifting away from agency trading desks for their programmatic buying needs and shifting that business over to independent specialists. According to a new report from the World Federation of Advertisers brands' usage of agency trading desks has declined from 81% percent in 2013 to 69% percent in 2014. On the flip side, usage of independent trading desks or demand-side providers has increased from 8% in 2013 to 29% in 2014. Better get your acts together, agencies.