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Let’s just call it “Merger Monday.”

From Yahoo’s billion dollar deal to acquire Tumblr, to Seamless North America’s merger with GrubHub, it’s been a day of big deals in mobile and social.

Adding to the mix of merger news is a deal just announced by payvia, a leader in direct carrier billed mobile payments.

This morning, pavia announced its strategic acquisition of Mogreet, a mobile video and rich media messaging engagement solutions provider that is already used by thousands of marketers, retailers, small businesses and developers.

We’re told “the full Mogreet team” will join payvia, with Mogreet Founder and CEO James Citron serving as payvia’s Chief Marketing Officer.

The acquisition is significant as it will set payvia apart from the rest of the mobile industry with a simplified solution that increases revenues for businesses through highly targeted mobile payment transactions and relevant ongoing engagement via branded communications, offers and mobile relationship management.

“Our mobile payments offer resonates strongly with the market because it is built on our proprietary carrier connected technology that gives us a unique ability to understand consumer mobile usage,” said Darcy Wedd, CEO of payvia in this morning’s announcement.

“Our clients have told us they also need a simpler way to link targeted mobile transactions to their marketing campaigns,” Wedd adds. “By integrating Mogreet’s solutions on our platform we answer that need. As the only company to solve a known disconnect between traditional mobile commerce and engagement solutions, payvia is well positioned to increase mobile’s share of the $252 billion e-commerce market.”

Source:Mobile Marketing Watch

The music publisher preaches quality over quantity and engagement over eyeballs. “Our goal is to be the best music magazine in the world, not the biggest.”
Via digiday,com

The banner ad apologists are fighting a losing battle, argues AdContrarian Bob Hoffman.
Via digiday,com

Native ads continue to gain an upper hand on traditional banner ads. That’s the suggestion from a new report by Sharethrough and the IPG Media Lab. Based on available research, native ads are far more engaging to consumers than banner ads. The study, Benchmarking the Effectiveness of Native Ads, relied on surveys and eye-tracking technology [...]
Source:Mobile Marketing Watch

CP+B’s new role aims to embed technology deeper in the creative process.
Via digiday,com

So, we’re all pretty happy with how online measurement works. Right?

Ask a digital marketer why your marketing pounds should be spent online and, among the many (good) reasons they will come back with, will be its unrivalled accountability and targetability (not actually a word, but who cares).

They will tell you that you can find your likely customers (users who look like your existing customers), target them with your message and, best of all, see how many of them buy something from you as a result.

All of that’s true and, when put together well, it results in incredibly powerful marketing activity. The problem is that, with all of the data that’s available, it’s become a very easy system to manipulate. Online exchanges and DSPs have become very adept at ‘playing’ it so that everybody always appears to be doing an awesome job.

Thanks to the last-click model, in particular, running display advertising that looks good is actually pretty easy. Simply develop a method of finding users who look (for whatever reason) as if they are likely to convert, serve them an ad (and a cookie) and then take credit for this group’s higher than average conversion rate.

As such, serving an ad in an undesirable location (but to a desirable user) below the fold (where it’s nice and economical) has become a successful way of cheaply dropping a cookie on a user who looks likely to convert anyway.

Thus, taking all the credit for a conversion it had little, if any, role in driving. Think of it as the kid in the school playground smashing the ball into the net from two yards out when it was going in anyway and then running off to celebrate.

No one liked that kid.

The world of online display is increasingly becoming a battle to continue to look efficient by dropping the final cookie. I’ve written about the causality issue when evaluating online marketing here on ExchangeWire (link) before, and also about how we deal with those issues here at Havas Media.

The market is well aware of these problems I’m sure, I’m certainly not the first person to point them out. So, why is this still the way it’s done?

Because the prevailing opinion seems to be that the last-click model provides a good proxy for site-placement and keyword performance, even if the overall ROI figures are inaccurate. So, whilst not perfect, it should still allow for analysis of relative performance.

That’s not true though. The last click model assumes that every user who sees a display ad then converts did so purely because of that ad. This means that, inevitably, display ends up taking credit for conversions that would have happened anyway. So, every piece of display is starting from a base conversion rate, the likelihood of the user converting whether or not we serve them an impression.

Without taking this base into account, analysis is measuring the incidental rather than the incremental effect of the activity. ROI analysis inevitably benefits cheaper placements in this model because, with everything starting from a high base, incremental effect makes up only a portion of the overall ROI.

This base conversion rate effectively gives cheaper placements a head-start when it comes to ROI and CPS and the incremental effect is rarely enough to compensate.

As a result, demonstrating the effect of any innovative and different display activity is extremely difficult. Branded online display still hasn’t really taken off because, no matter how good the creative, in a last-click-wins model it can never compete with dropping cookies on people who already look likely to convert.

Marketing is not supposed to (only) be about preaching to the converted, it should also be about changing people’s minds and introducing them to things (brands/products) they’ve never heard of.

The thing is though, stuff aiming to do that (rich media, brand building-display activity, etc.) never does well at driving the last click. People usually like to do a bit of research, particularly for high-value items, before they convert. So by the time they do eventually buy something, they’ve often been hit by some piece of opportunistic retargeting that steals away the credit.

To honestly evaluate display advertising would mean an inevitable reduction in ROI. Econometrics shows this to be true by continually assigning less credit to display than the last-click model.

In order to be able to make display campaigns be better, we need to accept that they will have to look a bit worse. Who’s brave enough to take that jump?

Source: ExchangeWire

However the report also states that in 2012 40% of consumer goods campaign spend on the Millennial Media platform was attributed to at least one of the many forms of real-time location-based targeting.

This included rich media location-aware banners that use a device’s GPS to show nearby store locations where a product could be purchased. An unnamed beer brand used this technology to show users the closest bar that sold their beer.

The findings come from Millennial Media’s new Mobile Insights report that looks at how consumer goods companies are using mobile advertising.

It compares the post-click actions of consumer goods companies to all other advertisers, revealing that on average consumer goods advertisers are far more likely to use video (44% vs. 16%) and social media (34% vs. 18%).

They are also apparently far less inclined to use mobile advertising to drive app downloads (15% vs. 37%).

The types of brands investing in mobile

The report also looks at the type of consumer goods companies that are currently investing in mobile advertising, though of course it only relates to data from the Millennial Media platform.

Six different sub-categories contributed to the overall total, with beverages making up the lion’s share (43%) followed by cosmetics/hygiene (28%) and food brands (14%).

The authors note that household product brands maintained their mobile spend throughout the year, but adjusted their messaging to target different seasonal home needs. 

Similarly the amount spent by alcoholic beverage brands increased slightly in the third and fourth quarter of 2012, possibly attributed to multiple sports seasons and the holidays during these months.

The data in this report is taken from Millennial Media’s global platform observations across thousands of mobile ad campaigns.

Source: Econsultancy

Online advertising network Chitika has just released its latest Chitika Insights usage share data report for tablets. The report, which covers the March 2013 period, shows an acceleration of the already well-established trend of increasing tablet usage among residents in the U.S. and Canada. With tablet user engagement reaching all time highs, mobile marketers are [...]
Source:Mobile Marketing Watch

Coca-Cola has had a long history of successful, innovative advertising in many media. Last summer, Coke ran a campaign in Hong Kong that successfully combined the reach of TV with the engagement of mobile to create a true phenomenon across the region. (more…)

Source: MobiAD

On March 20, thirty leaders from a variety of industries, stretching from finance to pharmaceutical to ecommerce gathered for Econsultancy’s Digital Cream London 2013, one of the landmark industry events in the world of Digital Media.

From this year’s gathering, questions over the definition and significance of ‘Big Data’ arose, as did concerns over data integrity, best practices for consumer journey tracking and the implementation of Big Data to enable Big Marketing.

Sector specific challenges

Big Data means different things to different sectors. Large pharmaceutical enterprises possess the necessary resources and funds to implement a macro scale data processing system – where colossal volumes of figures are comprehensively analysed and verified.

In the resource-rich pharmaceutical sector, time, human resources, and funding are made available to build the infrastructure needed to collect, crunch, cleanse and analyse huge volumes of data from multiple systems.

Therefore the enhanced capabilities allow “big pharma” to glean unprecedented insights and effciencies from the data they collect.

At the opposite end of the scale, smaller ecommerce operations are looking for new ways to condense and harness simply the data they need to allow them to invest in driving more sales through the best performing marketing channels.

For businesses such as this, the specificity and applicability of the data processed is essential. Although the interpretations of Big Data vary depending on the industry, the end purpose is the same – to utilise the findings in order to make informed marketing decisions and drive ROI.

Clean data

The focus of the discussion on Big Data, which was chaired by Marketing Week’s Michael Barnett turned to the validity of the data available to marketers.

For genuine insight to be derived and successful, informed actions to be made based on data intelligence, marketers must feel confident that the data which is dictating their spend has been scrupulously checked and verified.

This is where choosing a respectable vendor becomes vital. A vendor must always be able to prove the validity of their sources and practices without hesitation.

Inundated by streams of data, it can become easy to forget that the consumer is the heart of Big Data and that they are the group that marketers are looking to better serve, influence and endear using data to better inform their consumers’ entire online journey from start to finish.

Using informative data can provide relevant insight into specific consumer habits and permit the  enrichment of the consumer’s journey with targeted, personalised content. 

Big Marketing doesn’t refer to the scale of your engagement with your consumer but rather the resonance of your contact: investing in the right channels delivers a lasting impression as opposed to a cold bombardment.

These focuses and concerns discussed at length throughout the duration of Digital Cream, and although the above topics are crucial to understanding Big Data, it was clear that Big Data in itself is not enough.

Simply possessing stores of data does not automatically distribute your marketing spend into the right channels and generate an impressive ROI.

Data needs to be understood in the context of its relationship to pragmatism and human input and is best appreciated as the raw ore, that when sculpted with human insight and an intelligent approach paves the way towards making perceptive and powerful business decisions.

Our Big Data Trends Briefing: Key takeaways from Digital Cream London 2013 is free to registered users and focuses on the key themes related to big data as highlighted by client-side digital marketers at the event. 

Source: Econsultancy

Regional – adidas has awarded independent creative network iris Worldwide its social media duties for Southeast Asia.
Source: Marketing Interactive

Sky Go 

There are opportunities for different players in this space to generate revenue or defend existing revenues from rivals. Sky Go is a great example of combining both.

Sky’s second screen app allows their customers to consume Sky content on a range of connected devices away from the main screen in the home, or on the move outside of the home.

This ‘TV Anywhere’ model allows Sky to generate additional incremental revenue through advertising on the second screen service and to increase its ARPU (additional revenue per user) through its Multiroom subscription option.

It also enhances customer retention by providing a valued additional service that leads to increased TV content consumption through Sky services. Non-Sky customers can also subscribe to Sky Go, or pay-to-view, without signing up for a dish installation.

This opens up opportunities in the 16million non-Sky homes.

Sky is committed to using its customer data to support a new addressable advertising product in 2013 which will use household level data to deliver relevant ads.

The personal nature of the second screen experience, be it on smartphone or tablet, where the consumer is signed-in to the service, allows for advertising to be targeted to the individual, rather than at the household level.

This should result in more effective advertising as consumers receive adverts they feel are relevant to them, which should lead to better advertising rates for the broadcaster.

Providing seamless ‘TV Anywhere’ services and addressable or targeted advertising is one approach for broadcasters to increment their advertising or subscription revenues, and defend against churn.

Another is to give consumers second screen experiences which enhance specific programmes or events and raise revenue incrementally through in-app advertising.

CBS’s Super Bowl 2013 companion

CBS’s Super Bowl 2013 companion (second screen) app provided consumers with features they desired. Five different camera angles viewers could choose from provided unique content for viewers watching the game on TV.

One was voted for by fans and changed throughout the game, another  - the “all 22” camera angle – allowed football fans to see the entire field of play for the first time, footage that previously had only been available to NFL teams after games.

A pause and replay feature allowed viewers to replay moments they wanted to see again, rather than only those chosen by the broadcaster. Providing detailed stats in the app gave fans access to a wealth of realtime stats that the main TV experience could not deliver.  

Showing all televised adverts and Beyonce’s half-time performance on the second screen provided content which viewers outside of the sports audience could also consume without being in the home sports TV ‘arena’.

These enhanced services attracted viewers to engage with the second screen application and allowed CBS to charge rates for second screen advertising estimated to be between the high six and low seven figures. It was expected to generate between $10 and $12m. 

New Look

In 2011, an ad funded programme (AFP), New Look’s Style The Nation ,successfully enhanced key brand metrics and generated purchases via an integrated second screen experience.

The live reality fashion show was commissioned for C4’s T4 weekend youth strand and was developed and delivered by TwoFour Productions, Monterosa Productions* and Mother.  

Though New Look product placement within the show had to be diluted with products from rivals, the second screen featured exclusively New Look items and rewarded increasing levels of engagement with increasing value discount vouchers.

Viewers were encouraged to put together themed outfits and submit them to the show for a live catwalk, as well as participating in a competition and voting for contestants on a weekly basis.

Using an interactive mannequin, viewers ‘tried on’ over 700,000 New Look items. They could also ‘Get The Look’ at specific moments in the show as the second screen app integrated with New Look’s ecommerce site, and deep links in the app allowed the purchase of any item.

Online purchasing was complemented by discount vouchers to drive in-store purchasing. The primary goal for this AFP was in fact not sales, but brand fame. After a six-week run key brand metrics were shown to have improved by up to 20% in independent research by SPA Future Thinking.

However, significant sales were generated.

Coca-Cola Chase

Returning to this year’s Super Bowl, 30-second TV spots were estimated to cost $3.75m. Coca-Cola extracted the maximum value from its spots by extending the adverts via an engaging second screen application.

The Coca-Cola Chase advert kicked-off with a slapstick race through the desert by Showgirls, Badlanders and Cowboys to win a giant bottle of Coke. Viewers were pointed to the CokeChase.com website, which was optimised for smartphones, and encouraged to back one team, and sabotage the others.

The silent second-screen clips were ideal for the football game focused viewer environment. The pay-off for participants was a final TV spot at the end of the game that showed the ending that won the most votes.

TV Anywhere services, enhanced second screen programme features and second screen extensions of TV ad spots are a few of the ways in which the connected experience is being successfully monetised.

* During my time as Head of Production for Monterosa at the time, I played a key role in the development and delivery of the TV format and second screen experience.

The show was developed in the light of Ofcom regulations changing to allow paid-for references to brands and services in programmes for the first time, i.e. product placement. There were some invaluable lessons learnt, so if you’d like to know more drop me a line at tony.duarte@fluxx.uk.com

Fluxx’s white paper explores other monetisation options already in practice, and points to future models for monetising the increasingly popular second screen.

Source: Econsultancy

On Tuesday, IDC published an eye-opening new report highlighting that large mobile publishers like Facebook, Pandora, and Twitter are consistently gaining control over the display advertising market. The aforementioned names – along with other industry heavyweights – now claim ownership of 52% of this space. According to IDC, this reality understandably notes a major shift [...]
Source:Mobile Marketing Watch

An EGO system has existed for some time within display advertising. I call it that because it’s a subjective process, not based on logic, but on whom a campaign has been sold to, or sold by. On ad operation teams, certain campaigns can receive a “first look”, a special treatment to improve results or get a higher volume of premium positions within a publisher’s stable of what’s available, and in online media those are the ones that count.

Somewhere in the evolution of the industry, agencies determined that hitting a user with an ad early in their session was more valuable to an advertiser than later in that same session, a strategy aptly named “first impression” or “first look”. This is a practice constructed by the industry to incur higher fees for early impressions, and publishers have been selling their inventory like this ever since. This “first look” approach is what we call the EGOsystem, and its time is over. It would be prudent industry-wide to look at how and why these impressions are bought the way they are.

In an ECOsystem, your entire inventory, regardless of campaign goal, is made available to the buyer and technology is able to assess the best price for a publisher. Rules and controls can be put in place by the publisher, such as price floors, to take control of their inventory. One of the great benefits of real-time selling is that a publisher can better evaluate each individual impression. Arguably, the effectiveness of an ad is the summation of the creative, the site and the length of time the ad is viewed.

How does a publisher operate in an ecosystem?

The more progressive publishers are typically the ones who are executing in an ecosystem, and many of these are PubMatic clients today: publishers who are embracing programmatic selling. The sales team directly sells takeovers, sponsorships and new ad units and programmatic trading is employed for standard IAB ad units. Their impressions are sold to the highest bidder, whether it’s through the direct sales channel or programmatic. They allow all available inventory to find its natural place in the inventory chain through programmatic selling. So, the key for publishers is to serve their direct sold campaigns and embrace holistic programmatic spending. In order to maximise every opportunity to trade effectively, publishers need to be trading programmatically as a complement, not a conflict, to direct agency spend, the very thing some are trying to protect.

To accurately price an impression, a publisher must quantify the user data for all impressions using a holistic platform. This will allow any publisher to price every impression across all platforms. Once each impression has a known value, the publisher can incorporate this price into either direct or programmatic selling. This will, in turn, empower the publisher to engage in Private Marketplaces driven by the very rules the publisher sets, based on impression and client value.

This is the basis of a sound programmatic trading strategy, this is also an ecosystem, not an egosystem — every impression existing is traded for its real value, not an inferred value based on its newness.

A publisher will now have several campaigns bidding for each impression — this is when the magic will happen. Every returned eCPM from each trade will be evaluated, and at the same time all of the data will be crunched: creative, financial, campaign and user information. This data decides which campaign is served and closes the circle on moving publishers from an egosystem to an ecosystem.

Source: ExchangeWire

Home and Away was the second television show to enter the list, coming in fourth place overall, and was one of the most talked about fan pages in February. MasterChef Australia followed as the next most popular television show, coming in at fifth place. 

When it came to clothing brands Lorna Jane, Bonds, JayJays, Supre and Cotton On all represented in the top 30 list, while Simple skincare was the only beauty brand to make the list. 

Despite Alcohol – Beer, Wine and Cider representing one of the least popular industries on Facebook, [yellow tail] came in at 11th place in terms of fans, accounting for 719,826 fans out of the industry total of 1,097,918.

The report, which was released recently by digital agency The Online Circle, looks at how consumers and brands use Facebook across the country, analysing data collected during January and February 2013.

Top industries on Facebook

In Australia, television is the top rated industry on Facebook, pulling in more than 9 million fans in total. This is approximately 4 million more than the nearest rival, Retail – Fashion, which had 5.5 million fans when the report was conducted.

In third place was the FMCG snackfoods industry with 4.8 million fans, followed by FMCG beverages with 3.9 million fans and Quick Serve Restaurants with 3.6 million. 

Unfortunately, Banks & Financial Institutions ranked last with just 534,778 fans. Universities also ranked poorly with 830,305 fans and Telecommunications was just a step above with 918, 489 fans.

Most engaged industries on Facebook

While radio may not have reeled in the most fans, the industry definitely displayed high engagement rates (15.6%) during February 2013. This number was only topped by the FMCG beverages industry, who had engagement rates of 36%. 

Similarly, despite low fans in the Telecommunications and Alcohol – Beer, Wine & Cider industries, engagement levels were quite high at 8% and 7.2% respectively. 

In contrast, television had the most fans but one of the lowest engagement rates at 6.9%, perhaps a representation of the typically quieter summer TV months when regular shows are on hiatus. 

Most other categories fell between 1% and 7% engagement rates. 

List breakdown – Top brands by fans

Airline: Qantas (293,698 fans)

Alcohol – Beer, Wine & Cider: Rekorderlig Cider – Australia (216,966 fans)

Alcohol – Spirits: Wild Turkey Australia (208,936 fans)

Automotive – Manufacturers: Holden (339,360 fans)

Banks & Financial Institutions: Commonwealth Bank (285,608 fans)

Department & Online Stores: CatchOfTheDay.com.au (404,269 fans)

Electronics: Kogan (385,551 fans)

FMCG – Beverages: Coca-Cola Australia (882,306 fans)

FMCG – Snackfoods: Pringles Australia (1,259,733 fans)

Health & Beauty: Simple Skincare (574,671 fans)

News & Magazines: Better Homes and Gardens (753,950 fans)

Quick Serve Restaurants: Domino’s Pizza – Australia (797,320 fans)

Radio: triple j (571,487 fans)

Retail – Fashion: BONDS (791,220 fans)

Retail – Grocery: Woolworths Australia’s Fresh Food People (434,782 fans)

Sporting Clubs: Brisbane Broncos (262,458 fans)

Telecommunications: Telstra 24×7 (257,824 fans)

TV – Channels & Networks: [V] Music – Channel [V] Australia (774,523 fans)

TV – Programs: Bananas in Pyjamas (2,032,296 fans)

Universities: UNSW (The University of New South Wales) (190,898 fans)

[Image credit: west.m]

Source: Econsultancy

It’s little more than a fashionable title for a tech role that has existed for years.
Via digiday,com

The third Ad Trader Conference is now only weeks away. This year’s event in Berlin on April 18 will focus primarily on how the key constituent player, namely Sales Houses and brand advertisers, are building strategy around programmatic buying. In the run up to the event, we will be speaking to a number of senior execs about the burgeoning market. Here we speak to Oliver Weiss, Sales Director DACH at Turn, to get the buy-side perspective.

With the growth in digital ad spend via real-time bidding (RTB) validating its place as an established method of media buying, the debate has now turned to the likelihood of premium display inventory coming into the programmatic trading environment at scale.

RTB has proven itself to offer greater efficiencies in targeting and return on ad spend for advertisers who have invested in it. On the sell-side, however, publishers still question its ability to maintain, let alone increase their CPMs for premium inventory. In Germany, premium inventory is still traded in much the same way as it was 10 years ago, through direct relationships between the publisher and agency/client, with most of it bought for ‘brand’ campaigns.

Looking at the German market from the outside, it may appear that by our nature we are risk averse. In fact, Germany is dominated by about 10 sales houses who are of course aware of RTB and automated trading. However, the problem is that by its nature, programmatic buying disrupts the status quo and questions established positions, and that’s not an easy transition.

We have also learned that increasing spend within RTB is not only a question for the sell side. In less than 50 milliseconds, our system is able to analyse more than 50 attributes, with thousands of data points for each impression, and make a decision on behalf of the advertiser as to whether that audience is right for their campaign. However, in Germany, advertisers are wary of talking about using data for targeted advertising, and this hesitancy may mean that brands are not maximising the opportunities provided by using a demand-side platform such as Turn Campaign Suite, that has the ability to integrate first- and third-party data to optimise audience analysis and segmentation.

Additionally, whilst advertisers of course like the idea of automated buying, they also want the right type of inventory that fits with their brand values, and the right measurement model that will allow them to optimise both brand and performance campaigns via RTB.

Private marketplaces, which fulfill objectives for both publishers and advertisers, look to be the answer here. Facilitated by five exchanges (Rubicon, Pubmatic, Improve Digital, DoubleClick AdExchange and Admeld) who connect to demand-side platforms such as the Turn Campaign Suite via a key called Deal ID, private marketplaces enable publishers to have some control over which advertisers are invited to bid, and a minimum floor price is set against the premium inventory which they make available. Contrary to some publisher preconceptions, we have actually seen on average a five-fold increase in eCPMs paid on private marketplace inventory in Europe through the Turn platform, compared with RTB open markets, for the period of Q1 2013.

On the demand side, interest is also growing, with month on month increases in European private marketplace media spends over the same period. Advertisers are enthusiastic about private marketplaces because they enable the brand to be associated with premium content in a brand-safe environment, whilst at the same time benefiting from the automated execution of the campaign on an impression-by-impression basis. This improves overall spend effectiveness and optimises across media buys in one central platform.

Whilst currently still in its infancy in Germany, I believe that once publishers see the benefits of private marketplaces, increasing amounts of premium inventory will be sold this way, driving brand spend through the RTB sector and cementing its position within the overall German media landscape.

Source: ExchangeWire

Q&A with Mikko Kotila, Statsit CEO on display ad tech trends.

Source: ClickZ Asia

The resounding success of Netflix and Kevin Spacey’s online-only series, House of Cards, has been heralded as precedent-setting by expanding the reach, exclusivity and cachet of content streamed online. This is part of a broader trend, as users are voting with their feet where it comes to watching on-demand services, as opposed to making sure they are on the sofa on time for their favourite show, at the original air time. YouGov released findings in 2012 that found that 41% of 18-24 year old viewers in the UK are more likely to watch VoD than linear TV services, a number that advertisers are more than 41% likely to be taking notice of!

Although advertising budgets are following viewers online, many publishers are, paradoxically, struggling. Why? The bulk of video ad spending is tied up in direct deals with a few top publishers, who do not have enough video inventory to meet demand. Meanwhile, viewing patterns are as diverse and spread out as the web itself, with viewers watching everywhere from YouTube, to a broadcaster’s site, to niche blogs.

The result is less revenue for all involved. At top-tier publishers, sales executives complain that they do not have enough video to sell, and that there is no money in display (indeed, CPMs for display ads are declining in real terms, to £0.69 in 2013 according to TubeMogul data, while CPMs for video ads are increasing). Others do not meet demand but have huge, loyal audiences.

Programmatic buying offers a way out, allowing top-tier publishers to sell existing advertisers on an ‘extended audience’, retargeting their viewers around the web and serving them relevant ads. For instance, if an advertiser offers up £50,000 to buy video ad space, but the publisher only has £30,000 worth of impressions, rather than leaving the extra money on the table, publishers can offer advertisers the option of reaching the exact same viewers on other sites, complete with standardised reporting on the results.

As with any online or offline transaction, the target customer or viewer doesn’t cease to exist, they just move. Although this ability – driven by cookie-laden browsers and retargeting – has existed for a long time, it is still relatively nascent in video, especially among publishers.

Within online video, the margins are high – advertisers will pay a publisher seven times more to deliver a pre-roll video ad than they would to deliver a conventional display ad. It is, therefore, attractive for publishers to be able to offer up ever more pre-roll inventory, if what’s available on their site falls short of demand.

For publishers, the mechanics are fairly simple. On every video stream, a publisher fires a small line of code (a pixel) – usually powered by a data management company or a buying platform – and uses the resulting segments to retarget and buy ads across video ad exchanges. As a campaign proceeds, publishers can easily report on the results to advertisers in a transparent way, with real-time statistics on cost, completion rates, viewer message recall and much more.

If an audience sale is integrated into a platform that evangelises full transparency and accountability for where an ad is placed, the advertiser will still be able to pinpoint where they do or don’t want their ads to be shown to make sure their message is still being placed in the ‘right’ areas of the web for the brand.

To advertisers long-accustomed to using content quality as a proxy for audience demographics and engagement, this is likely a familiar proposition taking on a new form. Judging by the numbers of publishers jumping on the audience segment-buying bandwagon, this trend has staying power.

Source: ExchangeWire

Google announced last week that it was making a number of changes to its DoubleClick Ad Exchange, as it continues to add the functionality of Admeld’s SSP solution to its core publisher product suite. Scot Spencer, Director of Product Management, Google, described it as an evolution of the Ad Exchange on the DoubleClick Publisher blog, but what does that mean? Is this conversion on the sell side? Do you really need a SSP and an Ad Exchange when they can both carry out the same yield management/optimisation task? How does this benefit the publisher? Here we discuss these subjects with Neal Mohan, VP Display Advertising Products at Google.

What new features is this offering publishers? How does it differentiate from other existing solutions that offer the ability to monetise yield across direct and non-direct (RTB)?

We’ve spent the past year bringing together the best elements of Admeld and Google, and the result is an offering that we think is unique–combining the robust, publisher-centric capabilities of an SSP with the massive pool of demand in AdX. In many ways, this represents an evolution of the exchange as a platform for publishers. In the coming weeks we’re rolling out a series of new features in AdX focused on giving publishers deeper transparency into advertisers’ buying and bidding behaviours, making it really easy to control which ads show up on their sites, and helping them increase yield.

Approaching yield management holistically across direct and indirect is so important that we’ve built DoubleClick’s whole publisher platform around it. This manifests itself in two ways. First, we’ve put a lot of work into making sure that AdX and DFP work seamlessly together so that publishers are never leaving money on the table. Second, as programmatic emerges as a channel for premium and direct sales, we’re also launching new ways for publishers to sell higher value inventory in AdX. For example, one new feature enables publishers to import their first-party data directly from DFP to AdX, and then sell inventory enriched with that data to select buyers in a private auction.

You mention this is the convergence of separate parts of the stack from a publisher perspective. Will this trend continue to the point where an ad server and monetisation platform are one and the same thing?

Though the lines between these two solutions will blur as we make them increasingly interoperable, there’s still significant functionality within each of them that’s purpose-built to meet the needs of large, premium publishers. From our perspective, our job is to make sure these solutions work together beautifully so that publishers can get a holistic view of their business and work efficiently across all channels, formats and devices; and we’re investing heavily in that.

Part of the additional transparency and control you’re offering to publishers is more insight into bidding/buying behaviours. Are there specific tactical use cases that are leveraged by this increased insight?

There are a bunch of use cases, but I think the one we see most commonly, and that our publishers are most excited about, is using information about which advertisers are bidding on your inventory to create new sales opportunities. It’s not just a way to develop new leads for direct guaranteed sales, but to start a conversation with these advertisers about what their goals are and how you can use all the tools at your disposal (programmatic and non) help them meet those goals.

You mention that publishers will be enabled to bring first-party datasets into private auctions, are there additional benefits/opps for publishers that do not exist within some of the ‘PMPs’ (private marketplaces) being executed right now?

Yes, this capability is in beta testing right now and we’re excited to bring it to market because we think it’s indicative of where programmatic is headed. For many premium publishers, first-party data is one of their most valuable and under-monetised assets. There are some ways to use it in the auction, but they’re very cumbersome. Our goal with this feature is to help them put this data to work in a safe, but easily scalable way. The ability to import first-party data directly from DFP to AdX, and then use it in private auctions, doesn’t just help raise CPMs for publishers, but it’s compelling for buyers as well.

Source: ExchangeWire

Display advertising isn’t a wasteland of creativity. Here are five campaigns that showed it’s not the box that’s important but what you put in it.
Via digiday,com

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Todd Sawicki of Zemanta, and David Parker of McCann Worldwide share concerns over banner ads and talent.
Via digiday,com

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Successful digital engagement in China comes down to five key points.

Source: ClickZ Asia

The Adtrader Conference is now in its third year. After two successful events in Hamburg in 2011 and 2012 we are taking the show for the first time to Berlin.

Technology is changing the digital advertising market in Germany, Europe’s largest display market. Buyers and sellers of digital advertising are moving towards automation, and are increasingly looking at programmatic strategies to buy and sell campaigns. This not only changes the processes of marketing services, but also affects the make-up of digital advertising products.

The majority of German premium marketers in 2013 are actively making programmatic part of their business strategy; and partners and third-party buyers are investing heavily in tools and strategies to deliver data-driven buying solutions.

The main theme of this year’s AdTrader Conference will focus on technological innovation around the premium strategies of key constituent players in the local market, such as marketers, agencies, advertisers and sales houses. Special topics such as ad-viewability, video, mobile advertising, and socio-demographic targeting concepts for real-time media will also be addressed on the day.

The Adtrader Conference is a joint venture between leading German trade publication, ADZINE and ExchangeWire. The conference in Berlin will be the first in a series events this year hosted by ExchangeWire, which include Singapore, Moscow, London and Paris.

The Adtrader Conference in Berlin this year is expecting up to 500 participants from Germany, neighbouring European countries, the US and globally. Association partners include Association of Digital Economy (BVDW) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Switzerland. This year’s conference is supported by the following companies: German post, DataXu, Rubicon Project, AppNexus, Turn, IPONWEB, PubMatic and Evidon.

Tickets are now on sale on the AdTrader Conference site. We look forward to seeing you all in Berlin.

Source: ExchangeWire

• Set the mission, vision and strategy. This is central to the CEO’s role and something nobody else should be doing, otherwise the CEO is abdicating their job.
• Need to live, breathe, and share core values of the company. Core values are the actions that are rewarded internally, they’re the reason people are hired and why they’re let go.
• Hire and manage the executive team. The executive team determines how the rest of the company operates; they set the culture within their individual teams.
• Ensure the business is properly capitalised.
• Allocate the company’s resources.
• Be the brand’s chief evangelist. If they aren’t, the company doesn’t have good marketing.

Why should the CEO do the marketing themselves?

It’s important to note that Rand’s definition of marketing involves being in the spotlight and being a public figurehead for the company.

To this end, he looked at why he thinks a speaking at a conference with an audience of 1,000 marketers has more impact than writing a blog post that achieves 20,000 page views.

1. Nobody knows the business as well as the CEO. The CEO is in a unique position in terms of their knowledge of the company, its products and its strategy.

2. Nobody else has the CEO’s reach of coverage. Press and public interest is always drawn to the person in charge. For example, even though Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has been in the press a lot lately due to her book tour, people are still far more interested in CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

3. Nobody else has the CEO’s authority. They are the ultimate decision maker, and much of what makes CEOs great leaders also make them great marketers, e.g. strategy, vision, charisma.

The three kinds of great CEO marketers

Fishkin identified three kinds of CEOs that make great marketers, but for very different reasons.

Richard Branson

Ordinarily Brits tend to be quite reserved, but Branson uses his celebrity to get phenomenal marketing and brand exposure.

Another example of this kind of CEO is Ben Huh , who is very successful at using his celebrity to help Cheezburger earn massive amounts of press and brand awareness.

Danielle Morrill

Referly’s Morrill is a very involved CEO. She participates in online discussions and has a very popular blog, as well as a huge social media following.

Another example is Ray Grieselhuber from Ginzametrics. He participates and comments on things online, thereby earning press attention for being helpful and well informed.

Jeremy Stoppelman

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman maintains a relatively low profile, but is passionately involved in his company’s marketing success.

Fishkin said that seven days before Yelp’s IPO, he received an email from Stoppelman in the middle of the night asking for SEO tips, which shows how much he cares about the company.

10 tactical tips for the CEOs engaging in inbound marketing

Finally, Fishkin came up with 10 tips to help CEOs master the art of inbound marketing.

He said other types of marketing aren’t worth the CEO’s time and efforts, as they don’t scale as well or make use of the unique advantages that CEOs possess.

1. Understand how your funnel works. CEOs need to know how attribution works, where traffic is coming from, and what’s getting you sales.

2. Be proactive in your industry. Write blog posts, tweet, write a book, or get involved in industry events.

3. Use the press wisely. CEOs can be creative with internal policy to gain coverage, such as Full Contact’s ‘paid paid vacation’ benefit.

4. Empower your marketing team with developers. SEOMoz has an ‘inbound engineering” team that focuses exclusively on marketing-related development.

5. Get good at one or more forms of content. Be it webcasts, blogging, slide decks, or Q&As, learn to be really good at just one thing that can help move the needle.

6. Recognise marketing accomplishments the way you do product, engineering and financial milestones. Shout about marketing accomplishments publicly to make the team feel loved and show what matters to the business’s culture.

7. Optimise your online biography and update it frequently. A CEO’s online biography will likely get shared a lot, so pack it full of links.

8. CEOs amass favours, so don’t be afraid to ask for links and shares.

9. Make use of your contacts to amplify messages. You can do this manually through email, or by using Followerwonk to export and search for social followers who might be able to help.

10. Embrace authenticity. Fishkin said that in the past as people became rich they wanted to be associated with that wealth through big brands, but today the emerging wealthy class wants to be hipster. They want a watch that nobody recognises or shoes that nobody has ever heard of. 

This stems from a strong desire for authenticity. We care more about the story of the brand than what the brand actually sells.

Source: Econsultancy

P&G taps Sitecore to power customer engagement strategies lnkd.in/GGD9Vc

Petteri Vainikka is CMO of Enreach.

Call me crazy, but I believe the biggest problem premium publishers face in better monetising their digital content is that they don’t know what business they are in. In other words, they are selling the wrong product.

Allow me to explain.

Since 2011, all conversation on publisher ad revenue and yield management has revolved around RTB. Only very recently has anyone dared to remind the ad tech seminar loyalists that, in fact, something as unsexy as direct guaranteed sales actually make up the cornerstone of publishers’ ad sales. Not RTB. (There is now also a healthy amount of innovation around direct guaranteed sales taking place, but that is a different discussion…)

For publishers, the disproportionate RTB debate (i.e., the debate around the sales channel and transaction model) has unfortunately distracted them from addressing a more fundamental question: What should they be selling to create a sensible and sustainable business in the digital age? (Not how should they be selling what remains the wrong product.)

I believe that selling gross ad impressions is the wrong product, regardless of the transaction mechanism applied. Why? Because essentially anyone with a website can create and multiply ad impression inventory, there are as good as no entry barriers to the market — and what is even worse — the market as a whole is irreversibly crippled by order-of-magnitude over supply. Just ask yourself:

Would you want to be in the (RTB or not) gross ad impression business as a premium publisher?

So what business should premium publishers be in then? The answer: in the audience business. To be even more precise, they should be in the audience persuasion and audience understanding business.

The audience persuasion business consists of two elements. (Audience understanding business, on the other hand, is simply the integrated analysis of audience persuasion, and takes the form of insightful reporting.)

The first is obvious: the audience. To really make things simple, the audience needs to be defined in a currency native to those you want as your customers. In the case of premium from-print-to-digital migrating publishers, these are probably the large offline brand advertisers. Their language is dead simple: demographics (such as gender, age, HHI, education, etc.). Publishers are encouraged to augment demographics with other audience characteristics, but demographics should form the common foundation and language.

The second is perhaps less obvious (as it operates largely on a subconscious level, influencing you without you noticing it), but is equally well-understood by people familiar with brand building and media planning: the context. The context in which a branding message is shown to a user influences the way the message is perceived, interpreted, and acted upon (in many cases subconsciously). The very same marketing message will have a different brand impact on the very same user depending on context. In other words, media’s own brand association, and the quality of the editorial, impacts the effect of the branding message itself.

So, in practice, as a premium publisher, your advertising products should consist of your your audiences (e.g., male, HHI >€150k, 25-45), sold by reach and frequency, and complemented by your context’s positive influence (contact price of a user being dependent on where in your network the user is contacted). When selling your audiences this way, there is natural scarcity of supply. You simply don’t multiply your high-value audience reach as easily as you multiply your (unsold) ad impression volumes. Also, building and maintaining a media brand that inspires trust and yields positive brand association, takes time and provides a natural entry barrier.

The second hallmark of a solid high-value audience business is providing rich analysis of the effects of audience persuasion. This should take the form of audience segment-by-segment reporting. For example, if the target audience is defined only by gender (e.g., male), then as a premium publisher, you should report on how young men responded versus older men. How affluent men responded versus less affluent, and so on.

Response metrics should not end with clicks, either, but include view-times, brand-recall, etc. Selling audience persuasion simply falls short, unless it’s combined with selling audience understanding.

So, isn’t the ultimate product still a display ad campaign? Yes, in terms of audience delivery vehicle. No, in terms of what you sell and report. When you sell audience persuasion and understanding, you sell guaranteed exposure to a defined audience segment — in a guaranteed positively impacting context — and measure the effects meticulously. This kind of a service is something not every publisher can support or deliver, and should be the defining element of a premium publisher. (Selling display ads on exchanges is perhaps the world’s most commoditised business.)

Finally, publishers who are in the audience persuasion and audience understanding business have the perfect platform to grow their native advertising business. As it turns out, native advertising — to be successful — relies on the very same audience, context and analysis foundations.

On the other hand, you can of course continue selling gross ad impressions on exchanges, and hope that (deus ex machina) CPMs will start increasing.

Source: ExchangeWire

On Friday, the team at Salorix – the smart social engagement platform – released a social media report that looks at Twitter conversations centered on the Samsung Galaxy S4. The report reveals how Samsung dominated Twitter with more than a half-million Tweets on Thursday when the new flagship smartphone was unveiled. Among the highlights from [...]
Source:Mobile Marketing Watch