Ad Operations Online » Experts Talk

Programmatic Buying: The Advertiser’s Upside and the Publisher’s Dilemma

Caroline Watts — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:00:25 +0000

Programmatic buying is the not-so-new, technology-based form of ad buying that’s changing the game for online advertising.

Advertisers have adopted programmatic buying in droves (in the form of RTB or otherwise), because it’s faster, easier, and more efficient.

Publishers, however, have largely been hesitant to get on board with programmatic buying — some for better reasons than others. Here’s a look at how programmatic is changing the landscape, and why advertisers and publishers aren’t always aligned when it comes to programmatic:

Why Programmatic Is Changing Everything

Seventy percent of advertisers are currently using programmatic buying as part of their media-buying plan, and three-quarters of those currently using it plan to increase the percentage of their spend dedicated to programmatic over the next year. This shift is happening for a reason: programmatic buying makes media planning easier and more efficient.

As the programmatic ecosystem expands and matures, the benefits for advertisers continue to expand. Programmatic advertising has removed the lengthy, cumbersome process that’s required to complete a direct ad sale online.

Not only is programmatic efficient, it’s opened the doors for robust audience-targeting data that can allow advertisers to truly hone in on the precise audience that’s most valuable to them. Each impression can be layered with valuable data that lets the advertiser make the most of every impression.

Through both efficiency gains and the layering of valuable audience data, programmatic lets advertisers get more from less.

The Publisher’s Dilemma

The benefit to advertisers are obvious, but what about publishers? For some publishers, real-time bidding is a great way to monetize a chunk of their inventory, or in some cases, all of their inventory. (To be clear, real-time bidding or RTB is a form of programmatic buying, but not all programmatic buying is RTB).

RTB lets publishers automatically sell inventory without sales resources, RFPS, or IOs. Everything is automatic, so the overhead for the publisher is minimal. For some publishers, this is the most efficient way to monetize all their inventory. For many large publishers with expansive inventory, this is the best way to monetize a subset of inventory that isn’t sold directly. Inventory that may previously have gone unsold can be added to networks or exchanges and can earn incremental revenue for the publisher where previously they may not have earned anything.

On the other hand, RTB can have a downside for the supply side. RTB impressions tend to be relatively low priced, so even without the overhead the publisher can sometimes end up earning less money from RTB than from direct sales. Because RTB is often associated with remnant inventory, publishers with strong name recognition who rely on direct sales are sometimes hesitant to use RTB to sell any of their inventory for fear that it could harm their brand value.

In some cases, there is a fundamental misalignment between what advertisers want and what publishers need to sustain their business. Programmatic buying has changed media-buying forever, and there’s certainly no turning back now. The increased efficiency brought to the ecosystem can benefit publishers as well as advertisers, as long as the needs of both groups are met.

Interview: Chris Mann, VP Product Management at Bizo, on Targeting Business Audiences

Otilia Otlacan — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:00:26 +0000

Otilia Otlacan: Bizo has recently announced the launch of Bizo Data Solutions, enabling B2B companies to efficiently engage their target audiences across an entire marketing funnel. Can you tell us more about the type of company benefiting most from Bizo Data Solutions?

Chris Mann: Bizo Data Solutions is designed to benefit brands and enterprise companies that have heavily invested in building out their existing “marketing technology stack,” including CRM, marketing automation, web analytics, content management, data management platforms, and media channels.

Otilia Otlacan: Social platforms are notoriously difficult to integrate with. How does Bizo Data Solutions work with social media campaigns, what have you found to be the most challenging?

Chris Mann: Social media continues to hold a lot of promise for today’s marketers as companies are discovering that their prospects and customers are increasingly on social channels not only at home, but also during the workday. The way marketers use Bizo Data Solutions in conjunction with social media channels will vary across companies depending on their specific business needs. We currently have one client who is exploring how to add Bizo data to its social link shortener in an effort to determine the business demographics of its social audience. Outside of Bizo Data Solutions, we have multiple customers who are using our social advertising capabilities to reach their target audiences on LinkedIn and Facebook. I think the main challenge with social media, and any other marketing channel for that matter, will be for marketers to determine how each channel fits within the larger attribution picture when it comes to determining the ROI driven by specific tactics and strategies.

Otilia Otlacan: What types of metrics and dashboards are available through Bizo Data Solutions? Could we see a screenshot of the reporting interface?

Chris Mann: Bizo Data Solutions integrates with marketing technologies including Adobe® AudienceManager, Salesforce, Eloqua, BlueKai, [x+1], Google Analytics, and more by powering them with our demographic data on more than 120 business professionals. As such, our customers will see the value in the analytics and dashboards that reside within these systems. However, when marketers combine Bizo Data Solutions with Bizo Advertising Solutions, which provides powerful, targeted display advertising, marketers can truly begin to reach their prospects anywhere on the Web. Through Bizo Advertising Solutions, marketers can use audience analytics to determine if they’re driving their target audiences to their websites, and trend display ad campaign performance over time. Below is a screenshot from Bizo’s own audience analytics dashboard demonstrating how we’ve been increasing traffic from our own target audience (marketers) to the Bizo website since the beginning of the year—a trend that validates that our programs are indeed reaching the right audience!

Otilia Otlacan: Bizo is currently focused on the much sought-after U.S. business audiences. Is there any plan to extend the reach outside the U.S.?

Chris Mann: In addition to the U.S., we have a strong presence in both Canada and the United Kingdom. Since many of the 600+ brands we support are leading, global brands, we’ll continue to keep a close watch on the needs of our clients to help prioritize as we expand internationally in the future.

Otilia Otlacan: What’s next for Bizo?

Chris Mann: Bizo will continue to strive to be the ultimate choice for B2B marketers when it comes to reaching their target audiences anywhere online and at every stage of the marketing funnel. Our focus has always been on providing unparalleled precision when it comes to B2B targeting, and in just the last twelve months, we’ve expanded our capabilities to support this effort with social ad targeting, CRM retargeting, company targeting, and more. As for Bizo Data Solutions, we will continue to focus our product development on Bizo’s role “behind the firewall,” partnering with other marketing technology providers who will join our mission to break down information siloes and empower marketers to use their data more effectively.

About Chris Mann, VP of Product Management at Bizo
Leading product management at Bizo Chris has a passion for building new businesses. With over 20 years product management and sales experience Chris comes to Bizo from Coremetrics where he is credited with building the market leading real time product recommendation business for e-commerce. Previous to Coremetrics he held multiple product management roles with IBM’s WebSphere business unit over a 10 year span. Chris is passionate about family and all things cycling. In his free time can be found on the roads and trails of Marin County.

About Bizo
Bizo is how B2B marketers identify and reach their target audiences online. Fueled by Bizo’s audience of more than 120 million professionals around the world, including more than 85% of the U.S. business population, the Bizo Marketing Platform can precisely target business people by specific business demographic criteria. Bizo’s customers use the platform’s data management and targeting capabilities to reach audiences anywhere they travel online and engage those that come to their websites, landing pages, and social channels. Bizo has earned the confidence of more than 600 SMB marketers and large global brands including AMEX, Mercedes Benz, Monster, Salesforce.com, Porsche, Microsoft, AT&T, and UPS who use Bizo to impact every stage of their sales and marketing funnels.

3 Myths Sabotaging Your Hispanic Consumer Outreach

Zubair Talib — Wed, 08 May 2013 17:00:42 +0000

Hispanic-targeted marketing is the “Electric Car” of advertising challenges.

Like auto execs, we marketers will freely admit that our current methods are short-sighted (thanks, in our case, to a seismic shift in consumer demographics), and yet we’re hesitant to embark on a new, more future-focused path because the ROI picture remains cloudy.

Fortunately, there’s good news for fence-sitters: Hispanic-targeted marketing can be simple to implement, powerfully effective, and no more expensive than the status quo. We just haven’t been given the whole story… until now.

As with electric vehicles, there’s a host of misinformation about Hispanic consumers that’s been needlessly sabotaging our efforts. So to start, let’s debunk the three biggest misconceptions about the Hispanic market—and in the process, flesh out the contours of an “emissions free” Hispanic-targeted marketing strategy:

Myth #1: Online marketing doesn’t work well with Hispanic consumers

Proponents of this myth would have you believe that digital marketing strategies (such as Web marketing and mobile advertising) are less effective with Hispanic consumers than other demographics, when in reality the opposite is true.

On average, Hispanic Internet users spend 40% more time online than other users, and generate 50% more page views. In mobile, the numbers are even more striking: 45% of U.S. Hispanic mobile users have smartphones, compared with only 34% of the general U.S. market. Furthermore, a full 30% of U.S. Hispanics use their mobile phones as their primary access to the internet.

Hence, far from abandoning high-tech marketing methods like mobile, we should be expanding our digital efforts when targeting the growing U.S. Hispanic demographic.

Myth #2: Hispanic consumers don’t spend as much money as other demographics

This myth conveniently ignores the fact that U.S. Hispanics spent over $1T in 2011, at a growth rate twice as fast as the general economy’s. In addition, U.S. Hispanics spend, on average, more dollars than non-Hispanics on mobile products and services, while netting higher CPMs (Costs per Thousand Impressions) in online search marketing campaigns—which proves they’re more valuable than average consumers when viewing highly targeted communications.

Not only are Hispanics pouring into the middle class (e.g., 25% of the 2012 freshman college class was Hispanic), they’re quickly becoming the fastest growing and most coveted consumer group in the U.S.

As the coveted “new” customers, clients, and patients for local merchants and service providers, U.S. Hispanics represent the premier revenue growth opportunity for local businesses and national brands alike.

In other words, now is the time to be targeting this lucrative market effectively.

Myth #3: Hispanic-targeted content means regular content in Spanish

While it’s true that 80% of U.S. Hispanics still speak Spanish at home, successive generations are increasingly willing to consume Hispanic-targeted content in English.

So what do we mean by “Hispanic-targeted content”? Despite the above myth, translating content into Spanish does not make it Hispanic-targeted. Rather, both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking Hispanics want unique content with true cultural relevance.

Ultimately, this involves producing new, tailored content for Hispanic audiences, and then delivering that content in a fully bilingual fashion to satisfy both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking consumers.

Life After Myth

Now that we know some traps to avoid, let’s focus on the positive:

Because U.S. Hispanic consumers are more receptive than other demographics to social media marketing, “intent-based” inventory marketing, and especially targeted communications—there’s an enormous opportunity for advertisers to engage with Hispanic audiences in ways that maximize receptivity and ROI.

National advertisers like WalMart, 7-11, Tide and H&R Block are leading the charge on capturing and influencing U.S. Hispanic consumers. Meanwhile, online search destinations like YaSabe have found terrific receptivity from local businesses looking to target Hispanic consumers.

With more than 52 million Hispanics in the United States (and growing by more than 1M per year), the demographic shift is far too massive and widespread to treat with a status quo response. These incredibly desirable consumers account for 80% of U.S. population growth. (And a growing population coupled with rising purchasing power equals huge market opportunity.)

But don’t worry: Hispanic-targeted marketing doesn’t have to mean spending more—just spending more intelligently.

The key is focus—direct and strategic targeting. Digital marketing, search marketing, content marketing—these tactics all still apply. They just need to be tailored to meet the needs and preferences of a new market.

In other words: You don’t have to treat Hispanic consumers differently. You just have to treat them personally.

AdJuggler CEO John Shomaker Explains How the New AdJuggler Release Increases Both Brand Safety and Monetization

Otilia Otlacan — Thu, 02 May 2013 15:41:39 +0000

AdJuggler, a long-time supply-side platform has been quietly expanding it business into intelligent monetization, mobile application support, and mediation across heterogeneous demand sources. John Shomaker, CEO of AdJuggler, reports that the business scaled nearly 140% in 2012 and is tracking to similar growth rates in 2013. Earlier this month, the company released version 8.0.4, which focuses primarily on “plumbing features” that improve brand safety for its demand partners and monetization yield for its publishing customers.

Otilia Otlacan: I didn’t notice much press about AdJuggler’s recent 8.0.4 release. Why not?

John Shomaker: In general, customers and the press are most interested in user-facing features: new modules, changes to work flows, reporting, etc. Although the version includes several improvements in these areas, the primary focus of our recent development is on improving brand safety, providing greater domain transparency and yield for our customer’s inventory, and, overall doubling-down on our quality initiative.

Otilia: What’s driving AdJuggler’s quality initiative?

John: We continue to provide a globally, scalable technology platform, which historically may have been less oriented to the specific campaigns customers were running and the inventory being served. As the platform began mediating both direct and indirect demand in 2010 through its real-time bidding (RTB) channels, it quickly became clear: all dollars are not green. Quality demand requires transparent, quality inventory. Period.

Otilia: Clearly, AdJuggler isn’t alone on this mission. Do you feel the industry is finally serious about eliminating inappropriate demand and falsified inventory?

John: In other industries, we might call it the gray-market, if not illegal trade. It’s correct to consider it a tax on marketers. comScore, the IAB, and others are rightly trying to push the conversation of transparency, but the tipping point, in my opinion, is sheer economics. The margins at the bottom of the media pyramid, where the gray-market exists, have become so low that they’ve crossed the marginal cost of managing and delivering those volumes at the platform scale required to generate profit.

Otilia: So, gray-market operators and arbitragers can no longer manage their business in-house?

John: Correct. The scale they need requires truly robust, global platforms. And even though LumaScape suggests a glut of ad technology, there’s really only a few – including AdJuggler – that provide the scale. In order to grow, we and our platform brethren are increasingly motivated to eliminate the gray-market participants.

Otilia: So, can you highlight some specifics about 8.0.4 that reinforce AdJuggler’s quality initiative?

John: In short, AdJuggler Version 8.0.4 adds, shores up, or enhances a number of brand safety features, such as white listing of quality domains and black listing of malware, pornographic content, and other inappropriate sites before we pass any impression opportunity to our RTB demand sources for auction. We’re able to pass more attributes to buyers about our customers’ inventory and we’ve added new methods to detect click fraud and IP/domain impression bots. We continue to root out iFrame obfuscation, frame stuffing, over-frequent page refreshing, while also adding targeting for above-the-fold positioning. It’s a work in progress, so, in our opinion we must continue to innovate in these areas.

About AdJuggler
AdJuggler (www.adjuggler.com) enables publishers and networks to source and manage all media through one, integrated platform that maximizes yield, based on the value and preferences of each unique user. The company’s SaaS-based platform provides full-featured campaign management across display, mobile, and video formats, along with its Exchange Media Program, which monetizes non-guaranteed inventory from numerous RTB and network traffic sources. Customers also have access to AdJuggler’s rich API and mobile SDKs to integrate AdJuggler with other business applications. AdJuggler, Inc. is headquartered in Alexandria, VA.

State of Behavioral Advertising and Privacy

Tim Stoute, CTO and Co-CEO of eyeReturn Marketing — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 13:00:14 +0000

Online advertising is appealing because it is effective and measurable. The “Ad Tech” industry is a competitive and innovative space, where disruptive new techniques are frequently introduced to provide advertisers new tools, reports, and efficiencies for their advertising dollars. One of these new technologies is “Behavioural Advertising”. Online Behavioural Advertising (OBA) allows online systems to classify web-surfing habits and target specific advertisements based on the classification – this makes the advertising more efficient for the advertiser, and more relevant to the end user.

While Behavioural Advertising is both anonymous and a benefit to all parties, some people perceive the practice as intrusive and infringing on user privacy. Recognizing these concerns, the online advertising industry has worked together to form standards, regulations and opt-out systems. One of these standards – still under development – is called Do Not Track (DNT). Essentially, the DNT standard would be a feature built into all new Web Browsers, that would allow the end user to indicate their opt-out preferences. Under the standard, all members of the online advertising community and ad tech space would obey the DNT signal, and not use any behavioural classifications when deciding which ad to deliver to a browser.

Microsoft on DNT

One of the tenets of the DNT standard is that the end user be given the choice about the DNT setting in their browser. Microsoft surprised the industry when they announced that Internet Explorer 10 browser (IE 10) would set the Do Not Track to “on” by default in IE 10¹, and not confront the user with a clear choice during installation.

Microsoft’s decision to turn on the DNT signal by default goes against a standard that the majority of the industry has worked on, and gained agreement on in principal. It remains to be seen how the IE 10 issue will really play out, but some large industry members, Yahoo for example, have stated they are ignoring IE 10 DNT signals altogether². Therefore, this bold and independent move by Microsoft could simply backfire, and do a disservice to users of their web browser.

DNT in General

There are many technical details to be worked out surrounding the DNT standard, and if these are not carefully planned and implemented, there is a real risk that small and medium sized businesses in the online advertising ecosystem will be wiped out – leaving only the large internet/media companies such as Google and Facebook in the industry. The reality is that a large part of the Web is supported by advertising, and without efficient advertising the content will disappear, or only be accessible to people that can afford to pay. It’s conceivable that all quality online content will end up behind paywalls, and the Web will become a much less valuable source of information and benefit to society at large.

The IAB³ (Interactive Advertising Bureau) in partnership with the NAI⁴ (Network Advertising Initiative) and DAA⁵ (Digital Advertising Alliance), have worked together to create standards that allow anonymous and aggregate data to increase advertisers efficiencies while protecting end users privacy – see below for an outline of the IAB’s guiding principles for Behavioural Targeting.

Why DNT will hurt Small to Mid Sized Businesses

The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) stance on the DNT standard has traditionally been very conservative. In an email from the NAI, describing a meeting with W3C’s Peter Swire, the NAI stated “(we) spent considerable time explaining how DNT could disproportionately harm the third-party ecosystem, and thus how it could endanger users’ access to cost-free ad-supported content and services. We drove home the point that the DNT policy currently on the table potentially establishes new barriers to entry for small players, creates competitive advantages for a select few large players, and threatens the current diversity of today’s innovative and dynamic Internet.”

DNT places a large and growing industry in potential jeopardy, but it goes beyond just the ad tech space. Small web sites and small business will suffer disproportionately under stricter online regulations. These companies increasingly depend on advertising to generate revenue, and behavioural advertising is the most efficient and effective means of advertising. As tighter restrictions like DNT come into play, these companies will lose efficiency and the opportunity to communicate with their customers and potential customers, leaving only the largest corporations to monopolize the business space while also digesting and controlling far more than simple anonymous browsing and targeting data.

Members of the NAI, DAI – and the vast majority of online behavioral targeting companies – do not use personally identifying information. Behavioural advertising employs anonymous and aggregate data, with no names, addresses, phone numbers or precise pieces of information that permit the identification of an individual; there’s no reasonable means of identifying a specific person based on the data industry members use.

A parallel between OBA and telephone marketing is sometimes drawn, but they are very different, and here’s why: online advertising generates revenue and supports content that is not intended to be free – it is valuable, and only exists online to generate revenue. Therefore advertising is reasonably acceptable, and making the advertising as efficient as possible is also reasonable, so long as personally identifying information is not used without consent. Furthermore online advertising does not interrupt your family dinner as do telephone marketing companies – you only encounter it while surfing the Web, consuming ad-supported content or accessing ad supported resources.

DNT will fail if not carefully implemented; as we have seen advertisers may circumvent standards that are unreasonable; the standard needs to find balance between protection of privacy, the ability to monetize publisher content, and ensuring economic growth for the online ad industry – i.e. other players aside from Facebook and Google.

eyeReturn supports the IAB’s self-regulation principles, and eyeReturn is a member of the NAI and the DAA

IAB Canada Online Behavioural Advertising (OBA) self regulating principles – Nov 23, 2012

Education: participate in efforts to educate consumers and businesses about Online Behavioural Advertising
Transparency: the deployment of multiple mechanisms for clearly disclosing and informing consumers about data collection and use with OBA
Consumer Control: provides for mechanisms that will enable users of Web sites at which data is collected for OBA purposes the ability to choose whether data is collected and used or transferred to a non-affiliate for such purposes.
Data Security: principle requires entities to provide reasonable security for, and limited retention of, data collected and used for OBA
Data Sensitivity: recognize that data collected from children and used for OBA merits heightened protection, and requires parental consent

Interview: Douglas de Jager, CEO of spider.io, Explains Ad Viewability and Its Impact on the Online Advertising Industry

Otilia Otlacan — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 10:41:17 +0000

The talk du jour is certainly revolving around the seemingly endless issues of ad viewability and how to best measure viewable impressions across various environments. spider.io - a London-based ad tech company – has just announced the launch of the first service to measure iframed ad viewability across all major browsers. Dr. Douglas de Jager, CEO of spider.io, has kindly answered a few questions for us, explaining in further detail why ad viewability is such a hard nut to crack.

Otilia Otlacan: Why has ad viewability become such a hot topic recently?

Douglas de Jager: There have been whisperings about ad viewability for a very long time, but without much action. The flurry of recent activity, I’d suggest, is largely down to Google.

On April 18th of this year Google announced to the industry that it would be rolling viewability measurement out across Google AdX. The implications for the industry are profound.

If other networks and exchanges don’t provide similar viewability measurement, then the publishers with the highest viewability rates will migrate to AdX — where they will be rewarded for their higher viewability rates. Leading advertisers will similarly migrate. With typical CTRs of only 0.08% (and typical mouse-movement rates of only 3%), information about ad viewability allows advertisers to optimise their buying across the long tail in a way that they have never been able to before. The publisher and advertiser migrations will lead to further migrations. Through this vicious circle of migrations the importance of the other networks and exchanges will quickly erode. And without a healthy ecosystem of competing exchanges and networks, the DSPs and SSPs become markedly less important. The ancillary service providers, similarly, will tend to irrelevance.

The talk in the industry is about how to defend against Google’s push for total dominance.

Otilia Otlacan: There are now several viewability measurement companies, all making competing claims about their accuracy across different browsers, particularly in unfriendly iframes. How different are the offerings of the different companies?

Douglas de Jager: As things stand, there appear to be only two ways to measure ad viewability.

The first way to measure ad viewability is by the geometric approach, an approach used by almost everyone in the industry. This approach typically involves comparing the position of the four corners of the ad relative to the host webpage and then comparing the position of the four corners of the browser’s viewport relative to the host webpage.

With these two comparisons one may say whether an ad is within the viewport. A variant of this approach involves comparison with the screen rather than the host page. Comparison is also sometimes made between the ad and the mouse cursor, and then the mouse cursor and the viewport.

comScore controls a key set of patents which govern the geometric approach to measuring ad viewability.

Because of a browser security policy — termed the same origin policy — the geometric approach is limited in its effectiveness when ads are embedded in unfriendly (cross-domain iframes). When ads are served in unfriendly iframes then any viewability script will typically be unable to communicate with the host page, meaning that the relative position of the ad to the host page cannot be retrieved. In particular, the position of the ad relative to the host page cannot be determined across Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari. This difficulty has compelled several companies to exploit a notable security hole in Internet Explorer in order to provide viewability measurement. When ads are embedded in unfriendly iframes there is currently no geometric solution for WebKit-based browsers, like Chrome and Safari.

The second way to measure ad viewability is to monitor browser optimisations. With the rise in rich internet applications and mobile browsing, browsers have been under increasing pressure to do more with less processing power. By monitoring how a browser allocates resources to render an ad, one can determine what proportion of the ad is in view.

Because no appeal is made to precise geometric position, the browser-optimisations approach does not suffer the limitations of the geometric approach. The browser-optimisations approach may be used to measure the viewability of ad impressions across all major browsers even when the ads are embedded in (nested) unfriendly iframes.

spider.io has an international pending patent for the browser-optimisations approach dating from June, 2011.

Otilia Otlacan: What is your opinion on the IAB’s Safe Frame Initiative? How will it impact on the way ad viewability is measured?

Douglas de Jager: The IAB’s Safe Frame Initiative is aiming to produce an open-source code base that will allow information to be passed from the host webpage to scripts embedded in unfriendly iframes.

If safe frames come to be adopted throughout the industry, then the information passed from the host webpage should allow advertisers to use the geometric approach to measure ad viewability across iframes in all browsers — to achieve the same level of coverage that the browser-optimisations approach provides. It is important to note: whilst the safe frame code-base is intended to be open-source, any use of the geometric approach via safe frames would still probably be subject to comScore’s patents.

Are safe frames likely to be adopted at the necessary scale? There is reason to think not. Consider Google’s AdX, for example. Google has unfettered access to the host webpages across which AdX ads are included. However, Google locks AdX ads up in DoubleClick iframes. This means that Google can determine ad viewability using the geometric method, as Google can see out from its own iframes, but advertisers who advertise through AdX cannot use their own independent scripts to measure ad viewability via the geometric method. It would be very surprising if Google chose to change DoubleClick iframes to safe frames, thereby giving up control of viewability measurement across AdX.

Finally, there is the small matter of misaligned incentives. The Safe Frame Initiative requires advertisers to trust publishers not to try skew the information passed to scripts, and thereby the viewability classifications. Advertisers are essentially trusting publishers to tell them whether their ads are in view. It is difficult to see how this might happen without creating advertiser demand for a new class of service provider which polices deviant publishers.

Otilia Otlacan: Do you have any recommendations on best practices for publishers who are looking to minimize the impact of ad viewability issues upon their ad revenue?

Douglas de Jager: Independent of any publisher efforts, advertisers are already starting to measure the viewability of their ad impressions. Advertisers are then using these measurements to optimise their ad buying. My advice to publishers would be that they try perform internal viewability audits, and they try increase viewability rates. This is how publishers will retain existing ad spend, and it’s how publishers will win more spend.

A further point worth noting: Google’s efforts will soon make advertisers come to treat ad viewability as a requirement. This is going to mean that publisher are ultimately going to have to provide their direct-sales advertisers with viewability reporting—either directly or through a trusted third party. The more proactive publishers may want to push this sooner rather than later.

About Dr. Douglas de Jager

Douglas is the CEO of spider.io. He is a poacher turned gamekeeper, having previously founded BytePlay Ltd, a VC-backed company which provided content scraping as a service to clients including: DMGT, Trinity Mirror, Archant Media, Zoopla, Fish4 and the Evening Standard. He has been an invited speaker at Google and Microsoft. He has published papers on performance analysis, Web information retrieval and asynchronous algorithms.

He received his PhD in Computing from Imperial College London, following an MSc in Computing (Imperial) and an MA in Mathematics and Philosophy (Oxford).

About spider.io

spider.io is a London-based technology company which identifies when display ads are legitimately seen by human visitors.

spider.io distinguishes when human website visitors are interacting legitimately with web content from other types of visitor interaction with web content—often by automated or systematic visitors and also often as a result of deviant publisher activity. When a human visitor is legitimately accessing content through a web browser, spider.io also accurately identifies when content is viewable within the browser’s viewport.

More details may be found here.

Interview: Ed Haslam, SVP Marketing at YuMe, Brings More Insights into the New Mobile Flip Ad Format

Otilia Otlacan — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:26:39 +0000

YuMe, a US-based advertising platform and provider of video advertising technologies has recently launched the Mobile Flip, a new ad format that helps brand advertisers create highly interactive, immersive advertising experiences. Ed Haslam, YuMe’s SVP Marketing, has kindly agreed to give us a closer look into the Mobile Flip.

Otilia Otlacan: Congratulations for the launch of the Mobile Flip ad unit – what made you look into a new ad unit in the first place?

Ed Haslam: Thank you. We’re very excited to roll out YuMe Mobile Flip for brand advertisers. The fruition of YuMe Mobile Flip started with growth of tablet ownership and demand from brand advertisers around unique and engaging interactive video ad experiences and innovative ways to drive brand lift on tablets. In case of YuMe Mobile Flip, it leverages a tablet’s (or a smart phone’s) touch-screen capabilities to enable user interaction with the video ad. From the consumer standpoint, we considered how users interact with touchscreen devices and determined that this interaction is a natural extension of how they currently interact with content – so why not extend it to video advertising?

Otilia Otlacan: The mobile ad marketplace is still display-driven; some new formats were launched and tested in the past years but few, if any, made it mainstream. What does the YuMe Mobile Flip bring to the table?

Ed Haslam: Video content is consumed throughout the day on various digital screens and brands depend heavily on video advertising to drive brand awareness. Tablets are on the growth when it comes to digital video consumption as well as mobile app usage, and with YuMe Mobile Flip, we can now offer interactive video campaigns on Tablet screens for brand advertisers in both inside digital video content as well as in mobile apps in interstitial form. Mobile Flip is composed of two slates that uses can switch back and forth during the course of video ad duration with either a tap on the “Flip” button or “Swipe” their fingers on a tablet screen. One slate is always a video where the other slate could be either an image or another video (short or long-form). Existence of two slates is just the perfect opportunity for an advertiser to push their marketing message via video and branding image or secondary video. A “one-two punch” branding experience on a tablet device, if you will…

Otilia Otlacan: Can you tell us a little about the availability of the Mobile Flip?

Ed Haslam: Mobile Flip is now generally available for brand advertisers looking to run interactive video ad campaigns on tablets as well as to complement their multi-screen digital video advertising initiatives. Also, YuMe is now offering brand advertisers the ability to run tablet-only campaigns featuring all of our interactive mobile video ad units. YuMe’s mobile ad unit portfolio can run on iOS and Android based tablet screens at scale and delivers a unique branding experience with the power of sight, sound and motion.

Otilia Otlacan: In terms of driving adoption for a mobile ad unit, who would you see as having more power: the advertisers or the users?

Ed Haslam: Both audiences are influential in driving mobile ad adoption. The massive growth around video consumption and app usage on tablets, turn this screen into a perfect branding opportunity for advertisers. Mobile video advertising is not new to YuMe and we’ve put our data and video ad receptiveness insights to work as we designed YuMe Mobile Flip. It was perceived very well by mobile publishers, app developers as well as initial user testing conducted by our ad lab. Especially, TV creative formatted for digital screens that are interactive, not only deliver a consistent branding experience but also drive brand lift that simply cannot be achieved with TV advertising alone.

Otilia Otlacan: What are the main metrics one should look at when it comes to highly interactive ads?

Ed Haslam: Interactive video ads – agnostic of screen type and size – are instrumental in driving brand lift. Main metrics that brand advertisers closely monitor are video completions, engagement rates and brand lift metrics such as awareness, attitudes, favorability, intent and preference.

Otilia Otlacan: Is there anything else you would like to share with us?

Ed Haslam: We’re excited to offer brand advertisers a unique, engaging branding experience on tablet devices and adding YuMe Mobile Flip to our rich portfolio of our interactive mobile ad unit offerings. We also recommend TV advertisers amplify their brand message with their video creative on all digital screens and get their brand message in front of their target audience on the right digital screen at the right time of the day.

For more information and samples of the YuMe Mobile Flip, please visit the YuMe ad gallery at http://www.yume.com/content/ad-gallery-mobile-us-mobile-flip.

About YuMe
YuMe is the software infrastructure provider powering digital video and the next generation of television with its operating system for TV 2.0. Its video advertising technology and services seamlessly connect advertisers, app developers, content distributors, consumer electronics manufacturers, and publishers across the globe. YuMe’s patent-pending Relevance Engine powers its premium in-stream video ad network, the YuMe Connected Audience Network, and its industry-leading advertising management solutions, ACE for Publishers and ACE for Advertisers. The YuMe Relevance Engine matches the right ad to the right audience on whatever screen they are viewing—PC, mobile, or connected TV. YuMe is a privately held company headquartered in Redwood City, CA with its European headquarters in London. The company is backed by Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures, Intel Capital, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung Ventures, Translink Capital and WestSummit Capital. For more information, visit www.YuMe.com, follow @YuMevideo on Twitter (www.twitter.com/YuMevideo), or like YuMe on Facebook at www.facebook.com/YuMevideo.

Interview: James Avery, Founder and CEO of Adzerk, Explains What the Adzerk adOS Platform Can Do for Publishers, Networks

Otilia Otlacan — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 15:00:38 +0000

I came across Adzerk (www.adzerk.com) by accident and stayed on their website by choice, for nearly an hour. The adOS platform, centered around publishers and networks, has some unique offerings on the market and I definitely wanted to hear more. James Avery, Adzerk’s founder and CEO, kindly agreed to clarify some of my questions.

Otilia Otlacan: It’s been two years since Adzerk went out of beta and welcomed its first publishers. Before getting into what’s new at Adzerk, would you mind giving our readers an intro to the company and what it offers?

James Avery: Adzerk’s core mission is to help publishers get the most revenue from the great content and resources they are creating. We do that through the adOS platform which is built to make optimizing both direct sold inventory as well as ad networks and remnant sources like Rubicon and Pubmatic as easy as possible. The adOS platform is at it’s core an ad serving platform that aims to be the fastest, easiest to use, and most flexible platform available on the market.

Otilia Otlacan: I’ve been following the Adzerk blogs (Product Blog, Team Blog, Run of Network Blog) and couldn’t help but notice how fast the platform is expanding. Which of the recent launches and updates are you most proud of?

James Avery: Our new ad code was a long time in the making and is definitely the feature I am most proud of from the last 6 months. It took an incredible amount of development and testing time to launch a completely new version of our ad delivery script – you have to test it in every version of browser and operating system and with our focus on speed we spent a huge amount of time performance testing different variants and making sure it was as fast as possible. The new ad code is not only faster than any other ad code out there – it is also easier to read and use. It’s rare that you have time to go back and do something over – so when we had the chance with our ad code we really made the best of it.

Otilia Otlacan: Not too long ago, the ad servers market was dominated by just a handful of players; it’s a radically different scene nowadays! Where does Adzerk position itself, what is it best at?

James Avery: We want to be the core platform for online publishers and ad networks – not just an ad server. Ad servers have always been viewed as this commodity that just puts ad code on the page, but we believe your ad server is much like your CMS or CRM – it should be the core of your media revenue and have the features to play that role. This is what led us to develop the marketplace to make your ad server more of a hub between your different technologies (and we have some other awesome features coming down the road with the same goal in mind). We feel that we are the best choice for publishers who are doing at least some direct sales and especially for ad networks looking to automate more of their business.

Otilia Otlacan: I see an Adzerk for Networks white label solution in your offering – could you tell us more about it, its availability and pricing?

James Avery: Adzerk was originally started as a solution for the vertical ad networks that I was running so we know what networks need when it comes to management and ad serving. We have a comprehensive solution that includes full white labeling, payment calculation, and an extensive publisher portal for your publishers. We have networks as small as a couple million impressions a month (who can get started for $150/month) to networks serving 100s of millions of impressions (pricing based on volume).

Otilia Otlacan: In my experience, many publishers – particularly the small & medium – sized ones – stick with ad servers such as DFP Small Business or OpenX for the easy monetization of any remnant inventory. What options are available in Adzerk in this regard?

James Avery: Absolutely – I think this is an area where we actually provide more options than DFP or OpenX. Both of those systems lock you into their monetization network (AdSense or OpenX Market), at Adzerk you can choose from the dozens of ad networks and enterprise level SSPs like Rubicon Project or Pubmatic. Normally small publishers don’t get access to tools like Rubicon or Pubmatic – through our app store publishers of any size can use their technology to get the most from their inventory.

Otilia Otlacan: Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

James Avery: We are always looking to talk to publishers and networks and hear about your current solutions and what you would like to see improved – it helps drive our product forward and it inspires us to hear from people and companies we can help. So reach out to us on twitter at @adzerk or email us at contact @ adzerk.com.

[cb type="company"]adzerk[/cb]

[cb type="person"]james-avery[/cb]

Interview: John Capano Speaks About His Recent Appointment as CMO at SocialVibe

Otilia Otlacan — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 16:00:17 +0000

Following recent announcements from engagement advertising leader SocialVibe, we spoke to John Capano, newly appointed CMO, about his new role.

Otilia Otlacan: Congratulations on your recent appointment as CMO at SocialVibe! Why SocialVibe?

John Capano: I’d been hearing more and more about SocialVibe in the market, and last year I had the chance to work with them on a client engagement. I came away very impressed with the team, the network and their vision for the future of our business. As a marketing executive that has spent the better part of my career focused on helping clients’ realize value in the digital space, it was an exciting opportunity to join a team with a shared vision and a dedication to evolving how digital media engages consumers.

Otilia Otlacan: You’ve been with Wunderman, a top ranked digital agency for nearly 3 years. How do you feel about joining an ad tech start-up, what would your main challenges be, if any?

John Capano: Well, SocialVibe isn’t so much a start-up. We’re young but we’ve been around for over 5 years and we’re a leader in the space. There’s no other company that I’ve come across that does consumer engagement better than SocialVibe. So, coming from the world’s leading “consumer engagement agency” to what I consider to be the world’s leading consumer engagement media network wasn’t as much of a leap as you’d think. Another key point about why I joined SocialVibe, versus any other company in our space, was the fact that we developed and leverage our own platform, unlike many of the other networks that are just serving inventory on someone else’s platform. This has enabled us to deliver more value for the client because the platform is designed to be flexible and enable the type of creativity that cuts through the clutter and gets results.

Otilia Otlacan: SocialVibe works on a pay-per-engagement model that is still uncommon in many agencies. What do you see as a main hindrance in adopting this model on a larger scale?

John Capano: Ultimately, bringing any innovation to a mature market is a challenge. With SocialVibe, our challenge is to help agencies and brands better integrate us into their business models. Selling the concept and benefits of the engagement model and showing how much more efficient and effective it is in the digital space is easy. We have over 500 client engagement campaigns with global brands that show how well this type of marketing works. So, we’re focused on helping clients better integrate us at the planning and strategic level. There’s no arguing with the results. Our job is to help clients translate those results into terms and metrics that they are comfortable with. That said, any brand or agency who cares about results is going to want to have SocialVibe in their media plan.

Otilia Otlacan: Could you share with us what your priorities will be at SocialVibe?

John Capano: My priority at SocialVibe is relatively simple because the current team has done such a great job on the product and on delivering value to the brands and agencies. I’ll be helping the company to evangelize the value exchange model and to continue to deliver this model to more brands, agencies, and publishers as we continue our rapid growth in the marketplace.

Otilia Otlacan: Is there anything else you would like to tell us?

John Capano: I’d just reiterate how excited I am to join the world class team at SocialVibe. To be able to play a part in helping to evolve the marketplace toward more effective marketing and more measureable results is very exciting for me as a technologist and a marketer.

About John Capano

John Capano joins SocialVibe’s Los Angeles headquarters as its Chief Marketing Officer, bringing to the company a unique combination of marketing, brand-building and technology experience. Capano was most recently the Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy at Wunderman, one of the world’s top ranked digital and marketing services agencies, where he advised clients such as Toshiba, Southwest Airlines, and Invisalign on digital and social strategy. Before joining Wunderman, Capano was head of digital strategy for RiechesBaird, a business-to-business brand development agency, and he was the co-founder and managing partner of Mead, Coen & Pure, LLC, an entertainment and emerging technology consulting practice in Los Angeles helping clients like Pepsi, Visa, and General Motors leverage emerging technology and entertainment to solve marketing challenges.

About SocialVibe

SocialVibe is a digital advertising technology company that powers engagement advertising for some of the world’s top brands. In today’s online landscape where consumer attention is hard to capture, SocialVibe’s interactive engagement ads guarantee active attention to a brand’s message across premium sites, and its pay-for-performance model assures that advertisers only pay when a consumer engages with the ad. As the pioneer of the value exchange advertising approach for brands, SocialVibe enables advertisers to engage with consumers when they are most motivated to interact with a brand experience, such as while playing a game or seeking access to premium content. SocialVibe is based in Los Angeles, California with offices in New York, Chicago and London. For more information, visit www.socialvibe.com or check out twitter.com/socialvibe.

[cb type="company"]socialvibe[/cb]

5 Key Considerations for Addressing Website Speed

Paul Cook, CEO & Founder TagMan — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:00:17 +0000

Delivering a satisfying online experience these days is no easy feat. On the one hand, consumers demand rich graphics, video, and a wealth of information – presented in a clean, non-cluttered way. On the other hand, with an ever-increasing shortage of time, website visitors want pages to load extremely fast. Yet all those rich graphics – as well as the popular social media plug-ins people like – contribute to latency. And just a one- or two-second delay means they may jump to a competitor’s site, possibly never to return.

One study by KISSMetrics estimates that 40% of visitors abandon a site if it takes more than three seconds for its pages to load (1). And site speed has an impact on SEO, as Google factors website speed into its ranking algorithm. It’s important to address page load speed to improve the customer experience while also ensuring your site isn’t dinged by the search engines. But it’s also important to include the types of multimedia and other content people expect.

So how do you find the right balance between a site that is sophisticated and visually appealing and one that loads ultra-fast?

In a recent survey we conducted, 80% of respondents admitted they are concerned or very concerned about page load times, yet only 14% feel they have optimized their site speed; and 25% of respondents said they have not taken any steps to improve site speed, while the majority have taken some steps but feel they could do more. The reasons most site owners and marketers haven’t taken adequate measures may include a deficit of time and resources, and budget constraints that prevent them from purchasing tools and technologies. Most likely a general lack of understanding about what corrective measures to take is also a contributor.

As you work toward addressing these issues, below are five considerations to keep in mind as you devise the right strategy.

1. Is speed important to my online conversion rate?

For some types of online businesses, like travel sites, a slower website may not have much impact on conversions. For example, if visitors are conducting a search involving lots of information, such as for planning a trip, they may understand the extra time needed to process information. But for industries like online retail, the impact on conversions can be significant.

In a recent study we did with our own customer and leading UK glasses e-tailer GlassesDirect, we saw a strong correlation between page-load time and conversions. When measuring the average page load speed for converters and non-converters, we discovered that page-load time for visitors who abandoned the site was three to four times higher than it was for those who made a purchase.

Since new visitors to your site will likely have higher expectations (since they aren’t familiar with the quality of your service and products), it’s important to make a good first impression. (Be sure to keep site speed in mind when launching new campaigns intended to generate new customers and lots of traffic to your site.)

2. Where are my customers and what browsers are they using?

Visitors in your backyard may have a much different experience than visitors from across the country or even overseas. You should use testing services that show site performance for various access nodes and paths, so you can tell if your site performs well for local traffic but is quite a bit slower for traffic coming from other, far-off places. This might tell you that you need to have platform servers in other locations to accommodate those visitors.

Also, look at how quickly pages load for different browsers and on different devices. You can work with your web designer to overcome some of those problems. Be sure to also look at the variations in traffic load that your site can accommodate, and when are you more likely to see peak traffic numbers. If you can pinpoint certain times of day when traffic volumes spike, you can enact temporary adjustments to improve performance just during those times – but keep your site intact during other, less busy periods.

3. How many 3rd party tags are on my site, and what is the impact on latency?

Every online marketing application or campaign includes a tiny piece of tracking code – or a “tag” – that sits on your site. There are tags for display ads, paid search, SEO, retargeting, and site analytics, as well as for social media plug-ins – like Facebook “likes” and Google “+1s” – that contribute to viral sharing of your products and content.

As marketers invest more in online marketing, their need to accurately track performance has increased the proliferation of tags, which contributes greatly to latency in site performance. The average e-commerce website has more than 20 different tags, and five to seven per page. Each individual tag can take up to 100 milliseconds to load.

Rather than reducing or removing tags altogether, which compromises the valuable tracking data they provide, a better approach is to optimize them.

There are several ways to optimize your tags; for example, you can set limits so that any tags exceeding a certain amount of time to load can be timed out, and set your system so that only tags relevant to particular visitors are loaded, rather than loading them all every single time. (You wouldn’t want to load a retargeting tag if the user has already been given a cookie.) Finally, you should make sure any old tags that are no longer in use are removed from your site. Often, tags get put on a site and are then forgotten about, and the accumulation of them can drag down performance.

4. Should I consider a tag management system?

As stated above, the average website has 15-20 marketing tags. When this is the case, a tag management system can provide significant performance benefits – in addition to better campaign management and tracking, reduced involvement from IT, and the ability to reduce costs on less effective marketing campaigns. Websites that have a high number of tags along with a high volume of traffic should consider tag management. Analyst firms Forrester and Gartner have more recently taken a closer look at tag management systems and vendors, validating the importance of this type of solution, and can also offer guidelines on how to determine if one is necessary for a particular site.

5. Does the web analytics supplier guarantee a certain speed, and if so, how do they ensure it?

In looking at your marketing tags, it’s important to ask your current and potential suppliers how long their tag takes to load and what guarantees they offer – as many do not. This applies to all your marketing tags, like: affiliates, display, email marketing, paid search, retargeting, shopping comparison engines, website optimization, web analytics, and more.

Also, when looking at adding a tag on your page, be sure to ask if the vendor provides “asynchronous tag loading,” which means tags load independently of other tags in order to avoid traffic jams. When tags load synchronously, if one tag is taking a long time to load, it holds up all the rest, which means the entire page loads much slower. Not only does the ability to offer asynchronous tag loading directly impact page load speed, it also can have an impact on how effective your other efforts are. In other words, if you’ve taken steps to remove the causes of latency on your site but your marketing tags still cause bottlenecks, then your efforts won’t amount to much.

If your suppliers don’t offer asynchronous tags, check whether your tag management system can help. We just signed an exclusive agreement with DigitalFulcrum so now we can load all vendor tags asynchronously – but not all tag management systems can do this.

As you work out your plan to speed up your site, be sure to measure your site’s performance regularly, particularly when you’re about to launch a new campaign – as well as for different browsers and different locations – so you’re able to ward off problems before they arise. This will ensure you’re optimizing performance of your site for everyone who comes to your site, and that as your campaigns drive new customers to your site, they’re more likely to become repeat visitors.

1. Source: KISSMetrics, “How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line,” April 2011

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