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With mobile games responsible for some of the highest rates of user engagement seen in the mobile world today, it’s no surprise that advertisers are growing fond of in-app ads and a host of other mobile advertising tactics optimized for the mobile gamer’s smartphone screen.

Mobile games are on the minds of many mobile advertisers this week thanks to App Annie and the IDC.

A special new issue of the App Annie & IDC Future of Mobile Gaming Report for E3 charts the worldwide mobile and portable gaming installed base, as well as revenue by business model, average revenue per user (ARPU) and top grossing genres and countries for gaming-optimized handhelds, iOS and Google Play.

The data shows that the installed base of mobile and portable gaming devices is expected to grow 55 percent over the next 18 months, to more than 1.2 billion.

Equally impressive, however, is that total game software and direct advertising revenue is on track to top $12 billion in 2013.

Growth drivers include the trending freemium business model used by mobile gaming publishers. Emerging markets in Asia also suggest a pronounced opportunity for both mobile and GOH hardware and software.

“Although the audience for smartphone and tablet games has grown larger than that of gaming-optimized handhelds, devices like 3DS and Vita continue to realize significantly higher ARPUs,” explains Lewis Ward, IDC’s gaming research manager. “As smartphone and tablet games get more sophisticated it will be interesting to see if the genre preference distinctions that exist today will close.”

To read the new report in full at no charge, click here.

Source:Mobile Marketing Watch

On Monday, Social Media Today published an interesting new infographic from Demand Metric.

Although content marketing has always existed, it’s no longer produced and delivered as it was in the old days.

“Companies have long created white papers, articles, charts and graphs, videos, and reports to position their brands as thought leaders and industry experts deserving of loyalty, with the goal of generating leads and sales,” today’s report reads. “It’s the delivery model that has changed — mailboxes used to be chock full of ads of every type, from sales circulars to envelopes full of coupons, while newspapers and magazines consistently ran ads for consumer products, clothing, attorneys — you name it.”

That content is now delivered digitally via search engines, email, social networks, and corporate websites.

Based on the information presented, 90% of organizations now market with content. On average, marketers spend more than 35% of their budget on content marketing today.

To learn more, check out the infographic below.

Source:Mobile Marketing Watch

The top remains the only market position Google is familiar with when it comes to mobile advertising.

According to the latest data and projections from eMarketer, Google will do more than just secure half of all mobile internet ad spending this year, Google will also represent over half of total U.S. mobile ad spending.

Google’s share of mobile ad revenues is predicted to reach 52.1% this year, climbing incrementally each year through 2015, when it will secure a 55.7% share.

Google, however, isn’t the only powerhouse in this market seeing exponential growth.

eMarketer says Facebook, which nabbed a 9% share of U.S. mobile ad revenues in 2012, will see its share approach 15% this year. “That gives it about three times the share of the US mobile market as the next-closest publishers eMarketer analyzed—YP and Pandora,” eMarketer’s new report reads.

Twitter will pull in just 3.5% of US mobile ad revenues this year and will increase that amount slightly in coming years.

In total, mobile ad spending will hit $7.65 billion this year, up substantially from $4.36 billion in 2012.

Source:Mobile Marketing Watch

With hardly an utterance of mobile advertising on stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center yesterday for the start of Apple’s 24th annual Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple came up short on articulating how iOS 7 will benefit the mobile advertising needs of the very developers that have populated the Apple App Store with some 900,000 applications.

“It’s like they’ve raised the white flag,” says Dane Keelghan, an iOS application developer who admits to having grown frustrated by Apple’s apparent “lack of concern” about how developers get paid in an environment where it’s getting harder to sell apps.

“They talk about how much they’ve paid out in total to developers, and it sounds like a ton, but there are so many of us making so many apps that we’re really not feeling like we’re sharing in the riches,” Keelghan says.

According to the veteran developer, Apple’s introduction of its new ad-supported iTunes Radio service is further evidence that the company is scaling back its original mobile ad ambitions now that Apple has largely failed to make a dent against Google Inc. in the $4.11 billion domestic mobile ad market the search giant still dominates.

Keelghan says he is among the rapidly expanding number of app developers seeking and finding optimal mobile monetization opportunities away from Apple and the entire iOS ecosystem.

So, when it comes to mobile advertising today, where is all the action? The evidence continues to point to Android.

During the first quarter of 2013, Android claimed more than half of all ad impressions on the Millennial Media ad network. Android accounted for 52 percent, compared to just 39 percent for iOS.

“In the world of mobile advertising,” says Erica Ogg of Gigaom, citing data from Opera Mediaworks, “Android phones reached a significant milestone during the fourth quarter of 2012: they drove more mobile advertising impressions than iPhones during a quarter, for the first time ever.”

Prior to the major Android-related mobile ad achievements that filled the 2012 calendar year, a massive segment of the developer community did not view Android as a potential cash cow for mobile advertising. Even today, despite the undeniable progress Android has made, most believe the platform is yet to even scratch the surface of its ultimate mobile advertising potential.

“Google still thinks of Android as very young, even though it has been on the market for nearly five years and in development since 2005,” said Dan Rowinski of ReadWrite after Google’s I/O last month. “If Android itself is a baby, that makes the developer tools and monetization techniques Google has been pushing nearly newborn.”

The smartest developers poised to earn the most, Keelghan argues, are those with their eyes trained squarely on Android’s maturation.

“Google realizes it still has developer issues with Android, from app discovery to user retention to the fundamental act of getting developers paid,” Rowinski adds. “But if we learned anything at I/O last week, it is that Google is aware of these problems and working hard to address them. In fact, almost every Android announcement at I/O last week was aimed at boosting Android’s standing among developers by addressing its perceived shortcomings vis-a-vis iOS.”

Source:Mobile Marketing Watch

Capitalizing on Google’s forecast that annual online display ad investment will reach US$200 billion globally by 2020, the media trading provider aims to offer advanced tech solutions to advertisers.

Source: ClickZ Asia

To find out exactly how this worked, I spoke to digital marketing and planning manager Simon Swan…

Please briefly explain the problem you were trying to solve?

A key requirement of the Met Office is to disseminate our outputs as widely as possible to ensure that the public can take action for impactful weather and climate outcomes through all channels the public interact with, in my case pre-dominantly through www.metoffice.gov.uk. 

In 2009 we were the first government website to introduce advertising and sponsorship, and with this reach targets (measured through analytics) were defined for the team to meet.

How did you identify which parts of the site weren’t performing as they should?

In order to monitor, measure and manage our performance, we have an internal analytics dashboard set up to keep track of specific parts of the site. 

80% of visits to the site refer to our weather forecasts where we offer individual pages for 5,000 UK locations including severe weather warning content.

We also create separate pages to support our content plan, which aims to cater for people with specific weather interests (e.g. the pollen forecast) as well as supporting our social media activity with explainers, infographics, blog articles and video. 

We also created new pages to support targeted weather related content. For example, we have our events calendar, which has received sponsorship over the last three years.  

The calendar is used to promote tailored weather content for key target audiences and at the same time to drive incremental traffic – all linked to KPIs associated with the online marketing strategy.

What were the main areas that you identified for improvement?

A Gaps & Opportunities program has helped us understand where the Met Office is missing content, or has not optimised the content based on search volumes. 

It provides a good indicator where new content is required or existing content needs changing. We created Gaps & Opportunities reports for us to identify types of content that we needed to focus on. 

Merging this with our social media listening tools, it helps us to look to provide timely, relevant and authoritative content.

How has your content strategy changed since working with the new analytics platform?

It’s provided us with an external viewpoint in a rapidly changing weather sector and gives us insights to assist us in creating digital personas and to know our audience better. 

The reporting is used across our digital in a number of ways:  

• Clickstream analysis assists our digital sales team to identify prospects to approach within different sectors for advertising opportunities. Clickstream also assists in identifying websites for us to syndicate our content out to.
• Search data assists the development of our SEO strategy and helps us to monitor changes in search terms and phrases entering the weather sector. It also allows us to divide our brand and non-branded search terms.
• Content planning – we’ve created seasonal content dashboards, helping us understand the different types of search terms that users search for, associated with the weather at certain times of the year.
• Data from Experian Hitwise helps us measure marketshare. Growth in the weather sector (visits) means it’s essential we understand new entrants and what we can do to be proactive in growing our own marketshare.

Have you experimented with different types of content, and what kind of things have you found to be most successful?

Targeted content created for a targeted audience always achieves better results in terms of analytics measurement. Take the example of a pollen forecast – it is a seasonal content piece that drives search demand and social media coverage generally from April to September each year.

We begin to make a plan for this content in advance, ensuring our existing pages have been optimised, supporting social media activity is in place and necessary syndicated content has been created, such as video, infographics and weather widgets.

Do you produce all the content in-house or do you work with an agency?

The digital marketing team operates in-house and last year we created a cross-office, holistic content team involving our science, communications, press office and technical team. So there is a team of eight of us working off an editorial plan. 

The tactics deployed to launch and promote the content is managed and created in-house including SEO, videos and design.

Everyone is encouraged to add ideas to the content plan and from here we then begin to scorecard the content based on whether it will assist our reach, revenue or brand reputation. 

Each bit of content is then measured through analytics and this is shared across the content team so we’re all getting an understanding of performance. 

What changes have you made to your search strategy? How much have you changed your technical on-page SEO?

The Met Office is a well-recognised brand within the UK and to get a true reflection of success within a search campaign, it is important to segment the percentage of search traffic that comes from brand and non-branded terms. 

This provides us with a series of benchmarks to drive our content and means we don’t have to rely purely on the Met Office brand.

Our SEO strategy is managed in-house and involves several different teams across the business.

How has the increase in traffic impacted advertising revenues?

The growth in traffic has had a direct correlation to the growth in our advertising revenues. Advertising is run across our digital channels (apps, video and website) offering run of site opportunities through to targeted advertising for certain brands that want to align their brand with specific content (e.g. Pollen Forecast sponsored by Benadryl).

We operate in a highly competitive industry where we are constantly looking to differentiate our offering from the competition.

Rather than just providing CPM based advertising we look to build relationships directly with the brand by creating campaigns around their requirements and within our full digital mix (website, apps, social media, blog) – it’s proven to be a recipe for success with a number of our advertisers retaining their relationship.

Source: Econsultancy

Data, and how to manage it, has become this year’s hottest topic. The concept of companies, or organisations, crunching data sets from multiple platforms, both on and offline (and being able to enhance brand communications, stock control, asset management, you name it) has leapt from the trade media into mainstream consciousness.

Everyone in the marketing space has a view on data, where to host it and how to use it. The solution is a data management platform – a DMP; if you’re a client aiming to invest in a DMP, there are a few basic scenarios to consider, and with a view to opening a debate on the issue, here is my take on the options are clients facing.

Any client-side marketer with digital marketing budget control will need to review whether a DMP sits best with an agency, a third-party advertising technology provider, in-house or partially mirrored as some kind of combination of these.

There is a rationale behind each option, but I think these are best understood and evaluated in the context of how each has added value to brands during the evolution of the ad tech space.

The Issue With DMPs Supplied by Agencies
We have agencies that have spent the last five years testing the many ad tech point solutions on offer, and building agency infrastructure to cope with the ever-changing range of solutions available, while maintaining some semblance of spend and return reporting.

Some agencies have tried to build their own ad tech solutions, but this is very expensive and could have the tendency to become a somewhat closed system, potentially isolated from further valuable innovations going on in the wider market, which doesn’t sit well with the vendor agnostic/interoperability that agencies like to support.

The Issue With DMPs Supplied by Point Solutions
There has been a huge amount of investment in the ad tech industry in recent years, and this has driven a lot of innovation. However, it has, as we all know, created a hugely fragmented supplier-side marketplace. This fragmentation of suppliers has also resulted in the fragmentation of advertiser data.

This is a bad thing for advertisers because data analysis and attribution of influence and action cannot be meaningful in silos, it can only be meaningful at the budget-level, which is across all paid or earned media.

Tag management solutions have emerged to handle the many vendor pixels and scripts that these point solutions need in order to get access to a brand’s conversion data and valuable intent data, outside of their specific digital solution silo. So, we have point solutions inviting advertisers to expose their pixels and scripts on advertisers’ content to get access to audience and intent data.

Some of these companies are offering a DMP to make this flow of advertiser data more complete, but brands should consider how their first-party data is being used by these point solutions – is it possible for these suppliers to use that data to sharpen the performance of other advertisers?

Some of these suppliers are even making a virtue of data pooling and establishing a competitive landscape to maximise their yields. Buying display for your site visitors doesn’t have to be like buying search, and, well, you wouldn’t support Google Analytics tags on your site if it meant you paid more for warm prospects in Google Adwords as a result of sharing that first-party data!

The Issue With DMPs Supplied by Third-Party Buy-Side Marketing Stacks
Third-party technology providers that offer a point solution for every digital channel, built on a single technology platform, have enjoyed great success recently. It is easy to see the benefits of a complete buy-side marketing stack; one throat to throttle, all data in one place and accessible to the media delivery systems of the buy-side stack.

This is a potentially virtuous circle, but marketers would do well to ensure:

The chosen buy-side stack is an ‘open stack’ that accommodates integration with emerging technologies from other vendors.

– The chosen buy-side stack is flexible enough to take import/export data with the brand DMP and other key partners (server to server and other workarounds according to cost/benefit/speed considerations).

– The chosen buy-side stack is one you would consider giving a view of your most valuable asset – first-party customer or prospect data and ROI data. Can the buy-side stack also be a media owner taking a significant percentage of the brand’s media spend?

– In the spirit of transparency, this is where Mediaplex sits in the mix; we’re omni-channel and own some media, but are primarily focused on pure, high-end analytics.

The Issue with Brand-Side
There are third-party suppliers of brand-side data management platforms and, depending on from where these products evolved, they can easily integrate with parts of the digital ecosystem. For example, a third-party data provider’s DMP will have good cookie syncing with external data, and an offline DMP provider will have insight into typical offline data structures.

Brands are building their own brand-side data management platforms, consolidating many databases and considering how this data can be utilised across the business. This takes a long time and a significant financial investment, so there is clearly a case for interim solutions wherein a client’s first-party data is sync’d with a third-party DMP that is native to the tools that execute digital media campaigns.

Brands are waking up to the value of their first-party data and will not give it away in exchange for access to third-party technology. Brands are taking control of technology decision making and many procure direct relationships with technology providers that are willing to support brands with the ambition to own their own data and control the technology that activates it.

There Are Some Universal Qualifiers That Can be Used to Evaluate Any DMP Offering
The DMP should receive and associate the data the moment it is generated. Speed is critical, because of temporal context, and also it’s the only way to cut through the data gradient (if everyone had access to all data then the competitive data advantage is lost).

The data captured should be high-quality, with all the richness of metadata, available in a point solution that delivers the media. The DMP must be designed for data syndication (it must be able to both eat data and spit it out).

The purpose of a DMP is to centralise, control and activate brand data, so clients should qualify any DMP supplier they are considering by understanding their role in the ecosystem and how the brand data will be used.

Data should be keyed on an advertiser data point to maintain its portability. As this space evolves, advertisers will need the option to move to other providers in a timely way and without losing everything that’s been logged and learned in the past.

Every brand will have different objectives, marketplace contexts and agendas. At least when it comes to choosing the best DMP solution, we in the ad tech world are spoiling them for choice.

Source: ExchangeWire

As seismic shifts continue in the ways in which audiences consume media, advertising is traded, channels converge and targeting evolves, today’s digital marketer needs to be ready to understand this new media landscape.

This course offers a comprehensive look across all media, including display, search, affiliate, email, mobile & social, to give delegates the broadest view of digital media opportunities, challenges, buying methods and key considerations around the complexities of planning, buying and executing online campaigns.

Source: Econsultancy

Following an announcement this afternoon from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who affirmed that Facebook “is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers,” Google is making a similar statement through company CEO Larry Page.

Page confirms that Google also has nothing to do with the top secret surveillance program known as PRISM.

“First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government — or any other government — direct access to our servers,” Page said. “Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a ‘back door’ to the information stored in our data centers.” As Apple did, Page claimed Google had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.”

Page added that Google provides user data to governments only in accordance with the law.

“Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process,” Page wrote today. “Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.”

To read the full announcement from Larry Page and David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer, click here.

Source:Mobile Marketing Watch

Google is gushing about its mobile ad sales. You would be too if yours tripled in only six months.

YouTube Vice President of Sales Lucas Watson tells Bloomberg that the video sharing platform has never before seen mobile ad sales this strong.

“The commercial business has exploded,” Watson said. “It’s a huge part of our business, and we know that’s where it’s headed.”

He added that YouTube is taking steps to make it easier for advertisers to run ads inside the company’s mobile applications, giving them the option to automatically split airtime between mobile devices and the desktop. Marketers may also opt out of multiscreen advertising.

As of this writing, YouTube generates approximately 10 percent of Google’s total annual revenues.

Bloomberg estimates that mobile video ads now drive as much as $350 million in annual sales. But this growth isn’t unique to Google.

Mobile video ad sales across the U.S. are forecasted to reach $2.69 billion in 2017, which would represent a tenfold climb over 2012, eMarketer estimates.

Source:Mobile Marketing Watch

Course benefits

MARKETING is proud to launch the first world-class certificate in digital Marketing programme in Malaysia catering to senior managers and marketing professionals who want to understand digital marketing effectively in the shortest time possible.

Complete a 2-month weekend certification programme and get awarded the certificate in digital Marketing (powered by econsultancy) and Google adwords Qualified individual certification.

The double certification programme is uniquely positioned to deliver these benefits:

• Course content and curriculum provided by econsultancy of uK, the world leading digital marketing best practice community and publisher with 200,000+ subscribers
• Certification in Google adwords, a highly sought-after professional qualification by Google for digital marketing professionals
• Short 2-month course conducted over 6 weekends. designed for busy professionals who need not take annual leave to attend the course
• Practical and real-life training by certified digital marketing practitioners
• Conducted locally in Kuala lumpur with ‘live’ face-to-face training, and not webinars or online learning

Complimentary 1 Year Econsultancy Silver Subscription (worth USD495 or RM1,500) for every course participant. This single user subscription offers unparalleled access to econsultancy’s rich resources of digital marketing reports, guides, stats,events, blogs and forums.

Details of Silver subscription here

Course Details

This double certification course is a 2 months part-time programme for working professionals who intends to upgrade their knowledge in digital marketing. Upon successful completion of the programme, participants will obtain a double certification, and are awarded the Certificate in Digital Marketing (powered by econsultancy) and the Google AdWords individual Qualification. This is a part-time programme with 64 contact hours spread over 6 weekends. participants will only be certified after passing the Google adwords exams and the digital marketing project, and complete at least 52 contact hours.

The 2 months programme covers topics ranging from the overview of digital marketing, customer acquisition channels to social media marketing. 

Start Date: 17 August 2013

Admission: RM10,000 / Pax (Early bird 20% discount is available to paid registrations before 31 July 2013)

Venue: IACT College, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia

For more information and to register, please click here 

For enquiries, please contact James at +6 012 329 1038 / +6 03 7803 6191 or email james@ClickAcademyAsia.com

Source: Econsultancy

The Yahoo! acquisition of Tumblr has occupied the attention of every digital media blogger and wannabe trade journalist over the past few weeks. We were subjected to endless pieces on the reasons for the deal: Social. Mobile. Millennials. Native. Porn. The list goes on. $1.1 billion dollars is a lot of money – and those journos and professional observers, who will never truly understand the mechanics of this deal, ultimately demand satisfaction.

ExchangeWire is not here to second-guess the thinking of Marissa Mayer. She is a very capable lady, and there are so many reasons why she is the CEO of Yahoo! and none of the rest of us will ever be. We will say this briefly, that this could well be a massive opportunity for RightMedia to offer programmatic ‘content sponsorship’ (or native, bah) on both Yahoo! and Tumblr properties. A comeback is potentially in the cards.

The Tumblr deal aside, the other recent big M&A action has been the Accenture acquisition of Acquity. The deal was only for $330 million dollars (three times revenue) – a ridiculous multiple given the amount of money paid for Tumblr, which did $15 million dollars in revenue last year. VCs can argue whatever crazy economic model they want, but the price paid for Tumblr seems like lunacy. What was so significant about Accenture’s acquisition was that it bought an agency.

It is just another example of how consultancy firms are encroaching on traditional agency territory. As the enterprise marketing and ad tech worlds collide, Accenture sees massive opportunity in growing its digital marketing business – but why now? What has changed to make companies like McKinsey and Accenture move into traditional agency territory?

Data-Driven Planning: Automating Core Media Buying Functions

It might not be publicly admitted by Agency Trading Desks, but the process of media buying and planning is becoming automated. The rise of programmatic buying means that increasingly buyers/planners at the coal face are actually being divorced from the execution/optimisation process. Maybe this has always been thus, given that ad networks have been doing the heavy lifting on behalf of agencies over the last ten years.

With the introduction of programmatic buying, that ad net function has either been replaced by specialist agency units (ATDs, etc.) or even by – recently-pivoted – buying platforms like AudienceScience. Let us also not forget about the enterprise players making inroads into ad tech, such as Salesforce and Oracle. The $2.5 billion dropped on an email solution provider, Exact Targeting, shows how serious Salesforce is about owning the enterprise marketing stack.

Accenture has been looking on as this part of the media buying process has undergone significant technological evolution. If the process does become even more automated, is there a chance that Accenture could go to a Google, AppNexus, MediaOcean or Turn and outsource this buying/planning function. Buys informed by data and tech would allow Accenture to sidestep an increasingly low-margin business. This is what media planning/buying has become – increasingly a race to the bottom.

So, why would Accenture move into this business? Its recent deal with BMW suggests that Accenture wants to deepen its relationship with existing clients. Owning the entire relationship (including the ‘automated’ media buying process) would allow it to upsell high-margin business, like analytics and tech integrations. Acquity was an inroad into the e-commerce consultancy business – and really one of the big groups should have bought it.

Accenture: The New-Age Agency With Tech & Data at its Foundation

We, as an industry, have been throwing around terms like ‘big data’ and ‘data-driven’ for the past three years, as if we had made some massive leap forward. This could not be further from the truth. Traditional agencies have been actively trying to build this capability into its DNA, but it is not an easy task.

It takes many years for this transition to happen. Accenture is fundamentally a tech and data company. You cannot say this is the case for the likes WPP and Publicis. These groups are led by accountants and traditional agency men/women. The change required will need to be significant – a top down approach.

When some of the top-tier finally step down, maybe agencies will need to hire a CEO/COO who truly understands tech and data at its very core. If they are to successfully compete, they will need to hire someone from IBM, Google or McKinsey who can effect a cultural change within the organisations.

This is not a slight on existing talent within the agency world, but just a reality check on how the advertising game is changing. We are now at a crossroads on how data and tech is fundamentally changing the process.

RTB and programmatic might not have significantly changed the buying chain within ad tech (we still have media plans, we still have networks), but outler players are now seeing the opportunity in automation. If and when TV finally goes down the programmatic route, we will see even more aggressive moves.

How Do Agencies Protect & Grow Their Business?

In fairness, many agencies have been attempting to transform their models over the past three years. Analytics and data-specialisation have been given priority. New business units built on data-specialisation and outsourced tech have become important features at the big groups.

Is it enough, though, to meet the changing requirements of marketers, as their goals and objectives become increasingly informed by offline and online data? How customisable is this proposition? If this function becomes more integrated into the enterprise marketing stack, can the agency really compete with the likes of Accenture, without having the core in-house tech capabilities required?

This will need to be addressed. How this is done is for another post (…or highly-paid consultancy gig…?). Acqui-hires or acquisitions could work. Buying in talent and locking them into performance payouts could well infuse agencies with the requisite talent and skillset. The recent purchase of Elisa DBI by Havas was a smart move, giving the agency access to strong tech and data capabilities. A start, but agencies also need to foster a tech culture to attract the staff that will help evolve the agency model.

Local Digital Buys Shifting to Global Execution

The one area that seems to be overlooked by the industry is globalisation. Traditionally, much of the buying processes have been done locally. Now, big brands like P&G want to use a central platform to manage all P&G data and make the buys. P&G let agencies plan, but do not actually execute/negotiate the buys on a global basis. Witness the recent Accenture deal with Ford – consolidation of local strategies into one central process. We will see more of this. How prepared are agencies – or even the ad tech industry – for this shift in strategy in digital buying?

In many respects, ad tech exists in a bubble – oblivious to the core requirements of marketers. We talk to ourselves for the most part. However, the next evolution in programmatic and data-driven advertising will be the intersection of marketing tech and ad tech. This is something we cannot ignore.

Agencies are not to be written off yet, and invariably have a knack of surviving significant changes in the industry.

ATS London will explore these themes in greater depth and will again bring together the key constituent players, including those that will ultimately shape the enterprise marketing and ad tech space over the coming years.

We only have a handful of early bird tickets remaining for ATS London – so be quick to grab them before they sell out.

Source: ExchangeWire

As speculation mounts that Apple will unveil its rumored “iRadio” streaming music platform at WWDC next week, Apple is reportedly redirecting its advertising strategy to capitalize on businesses looking to reach consumers through the planned Internet radio service.

Sources close to the change in advertising tactics indicate that Apple has directed iAd engineers and sales staff to aggressively support its music streaming service, even though the formal launch is likely still months away.

The music service won’t be publicly available until later this year, when Apple’s iOS 7 mobile-operating system is released, one person said.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is searching for new ways to bring in advertising revenue after iAd largely came up short in making a significant dent in the lucrative mobile ad market still dominated by Google.

“Apple intends to make its new radio service free to users and supported by advertising, similar to how Pandora’s mobile app works,” Bloomberg reports, citing knowledgeable sources. “The new service will be different from Apple’s iTunes in that the songs played won’t be limited to what a user has purchased, and listeners won’t own the songs they stream for free.”

Source:Mobile Marketing Watch

In case you missed it, here are some of the top stories in mobile marketing we’ve been following this week.

• MMA Announces Agenda for July Mobile CEO & CMO Summit

The Mobile Marketing Association will host its Mobile CEO and CMO Summit this year from The Chateaux in Park City, Utah. The event, which spans July 21-23, is the 3rd annual for the MMA.

• Google Inks ‘Sweet’ Mobile Marketing Deal with Mondelez International

Today in Deerfield, Illinois, Mondelez International – a globally recognized maker of chocolate, biscuits, gum and candy – announced that it has inked a worldwide strategic agreement with another pretty large company in its own right… Google.

• Mobile Marketing, Payments Destined for Mass Integration at Mealtime

From national chains to corner bakeries, dining establishments of all shapes and sizes are embracing mobile marketing with open arms.

• Webinar: Turning Mobile Marketing into Consumer Purchases

The Mobile Marketing Association put out a reminder today that it isn’t too late to register for next week’s webinar.

• Mobile Advertisers Brace for Smaller Smartphone Screens

It’s been a primary concern for many marketers and advertisers on the fence when it comes to mobile: are smartphone screens too small for campaigns to truly be attractive, engaging, and effective?

Want to get the latest MMW news and insight delivered straight to you inbox every morning?  Click here to sign up for our free newsletter.

Source:Mobile Marketing Watch

Today in Deerfield, Illinois, Mondelez International – a globally recognized maker of chocolate, biscuits, gum and candy – announced that it has inked a worldwide strategic agreement with another pretty large company in its own right… Google.

The deal, we’re told, will exclusively focus on mobile search, mobile display and mobile websites.

This “mobile only” media deal is part of Mondelez International’s commitment to invest 10 percent of its global marketing budget in mobile activations across the entire consumer journey.

“Mobile is a means to reach consumers where they live and interact,” said Bonin Bough, Vice President of Global Media and Consumer Engagement at Mondelez International.

“The phone is the one device that consumers have with them at all times,” Bough explains. “By 2016, 67 percent of the global population will have a mobile phone and nearly half of the population will have smartphones. This is driving us to think differently about consumer engagement.  Our goal is to become one of the top mobile marketers in the world, and this collaboration with Google will help us get there. It provides us with a competitive advantage, particularly in fast-growing emerging markets.”

Source:Mobile Marketing Watch

“17 years ago, less than 1% of Europeans used the internet,” noted EU Justice Commission Vice President Viviane Reding. “Today, vast amounts of personal data are transferred and exchanged.” These comments were made in January 2012 and they introduced the Commission’s intention to reform the EU Data Protection Rules. In the time since those comments, the Commission has been working diligently to move forward with its General Data Protection Regulation. This vocal regulatory attention has kept online privacy squarely in the public eye and reason would suggest that such a close watch on the data collection industry would not make a fertile landscape for that industry’s growth.

However, despite impending legislation and public attention, the number of unique technologies encountered by individuals in the EU grew by over 40% in 2012. Even as increased requirements for disclosure and user control seem to be closing in, the data collection industry grows more complex, both through introduction of new companies and by the actions of the industry’s giants.

Big Moves from Big Players
For an early indication of how the legislation might impact online businesses, one could look at large companies like Google and Facebook, who are in the best position to afford a cautious, measured approach should they find it necessary. In March of 2012, however, Google put into effect a new privacy policy, essentially unifying the data it collects from all of its services – including web tracking scripts like its Doubleclick and AdSense products, as well as its nearly ubiquitous analytics pixel. While this doesn’t increase the amount of data the search giant collects (that was massive and stays massive) – it allows for new uses of more data about individuals. Google’s reaction wasn’t completely dismissive of coming requirements, however. As recently as April, cookie consent notices began appearing to EU users of Google’s search pages, with a link to a video explaining how the company uses cookies in the course of its wide variety of web services.

Facebook, for its part, was also bullish on expanding its use of data, launching the Facebook Exchange (FBX) – a real-time, cookie-based bidding platform for advertisers to compete with each other based on a user’s interests. Those interests are collected from activity on Facebook and around the web, as discovered by the use of Facebook ‘Like’ buttons, the Facebook connect login service, and new FBX pixels that the social network has begun to spread across the internet at large. Facebook has also been looking to actively influence the process, particularly around the proposed ‘Right to be Forgotten’ clause, which will allow users to totally remove their online data. Facebook has said that this rule, “raises many concerns with regard to the right of others to remember and to freedom of expression”, and suggested that if the rule includes responsibility that extends beyond Facebook’s site itself, it may have to increase tracking in order to comply.

Niches Upon Niches, All Filled Immediately
Smaller companies in the data collection industry are not to be outdone by the biggest of their ilk. New technology companies enter the space all the time, introducing new, focused ways of collecting, compiling, or applying user data. Acquisitions and mergers also mean more unified, monolithic data sets that, when taken together, can reveal more about users and be used in direct ways. This elaborate innovation may help the advertising bottom line, but it can also work against compliance with legislation. Evidon studies show that 55% of tracking scripts that appear on a site are placed there by someone other than the site owner – usually as a ‘guest’ of other scripts. Site owners very rarely have visibility into these companies and may be completely unfamiliar with their practices. Web users (and perhaps more importantly, privacy-focused regulators) do not take ignorance as a valid excuse. A web page is the user-facing portal to the internet and, if data is collected, then the responsibility for that collection is laid almost exclusively at the feet of the publisher of the site itself.

Clarifying the Grey Areas
At Evidon, we frequently hear site owners ask which companies have acceptable practices and which are doing something underhanded or shady. That’s always a difficult question to answer because each organisation has different levels of sensitivity about its user data, and the line between acceptable and unacceptable practices can vary. What’s important to understand, however, is that the General Data Protection Regulation is meant to address above-board industry practices, not criminal computer activity. In terms of compliance, site owners should think less about what is good data collection and what is bad data collection, instead focusing on transparent methods of doing business while giving consumers clear and meaningful choice. It’s not enough to count cookies or put up a consent message and hope for the best. Effective privacy-sensitive operations require a working knowledge of the data collection industry, a clear understanding of how to apply that technology and concise disclosure along every step of the process.

The Economics of Compliance
Dissenters often invoke the economic impact of legislation when advocating for caution. But in the case of the GDPR, following the general procedures required by the legislation can also bolster the bottom line. The kind of auditing that can lead to proper disclosure also reveals areas where a site is at risk for leaking data to otherwise undetected tracking companies. Slow load time is a leading factor for loss of audience on a website – and these scripts also frequently add unwanted latency. The worst offenders added, on average, 1.7 seconds of additional load time on the sites where they appeared. Even when considering the best performers, scripts that are typically added without the consent of publishers bring 518ms of latency, on average. By carefully examining the trackers that appear on the site, and the path by which they arrived, site publishers not only put themselves into position for compliance, but they can also increase efficiency and data sharing revenue.

Forward-thinking business are not waiting to quibble over the definition of user data or cookie consent pixel sizes. Instead, sites all over Europe are seeking to answer the cultural demand for transparency that the Justice Commission seeks to codify into rules. Actionable intelligence about the activity on their sites is leading to definitive disclosure of that activity, and web operators are able to smile across the conference room at their legal teams and confidently suggest that whatever the rules look like, they’re on the right path to compliance.

Source: ExchangeWire

Every business aims to acquire and retain customers at a price that drives profit. For years, business people and marketers have grappled with this task. Many business areas claim they are key to driving success; ‘advertising persuades consumers to buy our products’, ‘our product is the best on the market’, ‘our reputation is solid because we serve our customers with respect’, ‘our manufacturing is better than our competitors’, ‘we secured the best store location’; the list goes on. Clearly, all have a role to play, but a highly debated topic is, ‘how much value does marketing really add’?

Marketers who are tasked with generating revenue from a sizeable budget are at the frontline of accountability, and have a variety of levers they can pull. Before the dawn of the internet, much of the intellectual debate focused on how to best sell the consumer promise between influential media: from TV, to newspapers, to direct mail, and other ‘traditional’ media choices.

Today, with the rich tapestry of choices that the internet offers, the world is frustratingly more complex for marketers. Do they invest in a mobile app, should they risk their Google search word investments for Facebook opportunities, how should they think about Twitter, is it economical to buy key ad spots on AOL if so few people click on the advert? All of these are the types of questions yet to be answered with confidence.

Lay people may find it curious that digital marketing can be difficult to figure out, “Surely the internet is full of tracking technologies?” Marketers share their feelings of bemusement. Marketers typically have 8 – 10 tracking technologies: website tracking from Google Analytics, to advertising tracking from Doubleclick, to reports from Facebook and Twitter about their advertising campaign successes, to email reports, and many more. Each has a deep view of the services they provide. The problem is that these vendors’ reports do not integrate into a single view of the consumer.

The crux of the problem is that tracking vendors can only ‘see’ what they are practically permitted to ‘see’. Internet browsers, such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, govern the practicalities. The dominant tracking mechanic is the ‘cookie’. The rule is that the tracking vendor can only see the cookie that they injected into the consumer’s browser. No one vendor, not even Google, covers all the bases of digital marketing, and this is why every vendor can only see a small piece of the consumers’ interaction with advertising and websites.

The double whammy challenge for the marketer is they are left holding high-quality reports from each vendor, but do not have a single view of the consumer journey. Without data integration there is no way to assess if the person who opened the email is also the person who bought their product two hours later via their website. This reality has led marketers to adopt very direct thinking and marketing strategies, typically known as last click marketing. Some of the biggest companies in the world have been built on the back of this strategy, the biggest of which is Google’s search advertising business.

The interesting thing is that even before digital marketing was an arrow in the quiver of the marketing team, the belief was that influencing a consumer’s purchase required multiple marketing touch points. Ford would never think of just running television adverts because they knew they needed to have influence through newspapers, magazines, the dealer network, local radio adverts and so on. The point is that the marketer knew that the consumer needed to hear the orchestra not just the violin to fall in love with the song.

With the birth of the Tag Management System (TMS) there came a solution to the fragmented view of the consumer. A ‘tag’ is jargon for a digital marketing vendor’s tiny piece of software – a JavaScript code – that is embedded into web pages, mobile apps and advertising to collect data. Advertisers need tags so vendors can help make advertising and other digital campaigns more compelling to consumers. With billions of tags across the internet, a TMS allows marketers to control and manage these vast numbers of tags on every page and every advert, without having to change any code on the website. A direct result of managing all vendor tags through a TMS is that the marketer can see how the consumer is touched by all marketing channels: from email, to mobile apps, to buying a product on the website. The marketer now has a unified view of the consumer journey.

A paradox of having a unified view of the consumer journey is that the digital world becomes a three-dimensional landscape for the marketer. Important marketing questions can finally be addressed: does Facebook drive consumers to purchase, does search create a sales opportunity or act as a navigation tool only, are consumers influenced by banner adverts, does targeting adverts to specific consumer categories make economic sense, which affiliates are performing better to drive conversions? These are the big questions that have vexed digital marketers for years. By having a unified view of the consumer, the ‘facts of behaviour’ are established. From the ‘facts’, hypotheses can be created and tested and digital marketing can be redefined.

Another quantum leap in the world of marketing driven by a TMS is known as ‘auto-optimisation’. Before digital advertising, marketers would make a plan, execute the plan, review the plan and then refine the plan. The whole process could take a year and many long lunch discussions. Today the opportunity lies in ‘auto-optimisation’, where a marketing vendor uses the marketers’ unified view of the consumer journey to optimise their services on the fly, and in real-time. Behind the scenes, the vendors’ data centres consume, crunch and make sense of their place in the consumer journey to auto-optimise their delivery in lightning speed. The TMS is crucial to this process in two ways: firstly, to collect the unified view, or ‘facts’, and secondly, to pass the data to the vendor. The TMS is uniquely able to do this because their core competence is collecting and connecting data across millions of pieces of software in the blink of an eye.

The early results have been impressive, with stories such as Air New Zealand, a global long-haul airline that grew revenue 15% by reducing search and increasing adverts in display; or a leading European retailer who grew performance 200% with their display advertising vendor, myThings, by passing data points from multiple channels and combining them to provide a unified view of the customer journey in real-time. Marketers are actively refining hypotheses, optimising strategies and putting vendor hype to the test now that they have access to the right tools. The impact will be felt on Wall Street as well as Main Street, welcome to web marketing 2.0, less hype and more data-driven decisions.

Source: ExchangeWire

Time will tell if Yahoo’s Tumblr deal eventually produces a similarly disappointing fate, but in the meantime, advertisers might want to take note because the acquisition says a lot about how Yahoo views them.

To start, it pays to understand what Tumblr is and isn’t. What it is: a hugely popular blogging platform with a young, hip audience. What it isn’t: a profitable blogging platform with an audience craving ads.

But ads are just what Yahoo’s Mayer has in store. While promising “not to screw up” what the Tumblr team has created, on a conference call discussing the acquisition, Mayer made it clear that Yahoo already has definite ideas for monetizing a service that reportedly generated just $13m in revenue last year.

“Tumblr already does some advertising, though minimal, in [its dashboard] feed. We would like to look at them and understand how we could introduce ads — in a very light ad load — where the impact is really created, because the ads really fit the users’ expectations and follow the form and function of the dashboard,” she told listeners.

Also on the table: running ads for bloggers who want to monetize their Tumblr blogs. If there are any.

While some suggest that Tumblr could become Yahoo’s YouTube, there are some glaring differences. YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley perfectly timed the explosion of online video, and helped propel demand for it to new heights with a great product.

And while YouTube’s financial viability was hardly assured when Google paid nine figures for it, YouTube was just two years old at the time and there were few indications that Chen and Hurley were opposed to monetization.

Tumblr, on the other hand, is just one of numerous popular blogging platforms, and has been around for more than six years. To boot, it sports a quirky audience and is run by a twenty-something who doesn’t like advertising.

Oh, and one more thing: it has lots of porn. According to one source, NSFW content makes up over 11% of the service’s top domains and is the leading driver of referral traffic.

While Yahoo will almost certainly be able to address advertiser concerns about content that isn’t brand safe, Yahoo’s official announcement of Tumblr, written by Mayer, states, “The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo! could grow Yahoo!’s audience by 50% to more than a billion monthly visitors, and could grow traffic by approximately 20%”.

Translation: forget the makeup of the audience and traffic, and all the dirty and weird content that attracts a non-negligible portion of that audience and traffic.

Tumblr could dramatically increase our audience and traffic figures! And herein lies the message for advertisers: it’s all about numbers. Yahoo’s numbers, of course. Bigger is better because, well, bigger looks better in a media kit, right?

Yahoo may be buying growth with Tumblr, but will advertisers actually benefit from that growth? In other words, will they gain access to higher quality ad inventory? Will they have new avenues for reaching consumers who might buy their wares? It wouldn’t be fair to state that the answer is, unequivocally, ‘no’, but it wouldn’t be realistic to state that the answer is likely to be ‘yes’ either.

With that in mind, advertisers should consider that Yahoo has effectively bet more than a billion dollars that advertisers won’t care and will buy up the company’s hip new ad inventory anyway.

That says a lot about how highly one of the web’s biggest media sellers thinks about media buyers today. The question for advertisers: will they finally give Yahoo a reason to think differently about them?

Source: Econsultancy

When Facebook initially made its move to monetise onsite inventory with foreign datasets (foreign, meaning an advertiser’s first-party data), it divided opinion. We took a somewhat negative stance on the strategy.

With the launch of newsfeed ad formats being made available to RTB, does this require a new approach as to how the paid-for element of the Facebook platform will be leveraged, perhaps pointing to the future of RTB?

ASU Gold Rush

The initial FBX launch turned into a retargeting frenzy. Predominantly used to help drive greater cost efficiencies for businesses running existing RTB campaigns (FBX on numerous occasions was found to be unsurprisingly cheaper) and also to prop up the volume of click-based acquisitions that made the overall click-average-to-impression-conversions on RTB campaigns healthier.

Since then, Facebook has obviously seen enough data to inform its decision to open up more desirable real estate, such as the newsfeed. The fact Facebook saw higher yields from the ASUs in RTB is hardly surprising. By leveraging advertiser-side data, users are more likely to click and buy.

In turn, this drives greater bidding appetite—as well as leveraging impression bidding versus click bidding. Previously, social buying teams bid and bought on a CPC basis. Whereas now, trading desks bid and buy largely on a CPM basis.

Considering the CTRs are also probably higher (due to more relevant creatives matched to data sets), the eCPM and eCPC are likely to be much higher. Flipping it to the newsfeed was a no brainer.

Unlocking Greater Insights

An often discussed subject with regards to RTB protocol is the inability of a DSP to translate the information sent on a bid request. The current open RTB spec includes many parameters which are optional. For an exchange, or SSP, aggregating supply across 1000s of sites, obtaining and sending the same information on every bid request is somewhat of a challenge.

However, and according to Facebook’s developer reference documents, the parameters sent out on every bid request contains details which, a) can be extremely insightful from a reporting perspective, but also, b) enable more customised ways of bidding for inventory and building more advanced models on inventory.

Some <a href="https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-api/RTB_thrift_file/”>examples of what FBX seemingly pass on a bid request include deep insight into page context, including whether it is canvas page, search page, event page, group page, photo page, home feed or messenger page.

Why does this matter? It means buyers will be able, in theory, to map out the associated performance metrics via the above values (via matching successful bid request IDs to the parameters sent to on that request to the corresponding success of that impression).

A DSP having FBX log access is key to this, but it means not only will advertisers understand the relative difference on reaching a user within a search page, versus group page or home feed, but that buying models and algorithms can be adjusted accordingly.

There is a preconception that because Facebook represents a single buying point that only one buyer should execute a performance campaign on it. The argument could easily be made that if you are able to ingest all the feeds, process it and model out bespoke ways of bidding for different impressions in different page environments, then you are adding value above and beyond simple retargeting strategies. Paving the way, potentially, for more than one buyer on FBX per client; the above modelling could be so unique, the prospect of bid conflict is highly unlikely.

Ushering in Upper-Funnel RTB

Back to the newsfeed. Facebook may well be on its way to redefining how RTB is leveraged. There is a legacy approach to how a campaign strategy is segmented: retargeting and prospecting.

Prospecting invariably is measured in the same way as retargeting (with perhaps a slightly higher cost-per-acquisition target), which is at odds with the principle of prospecting for new customers and users.

The newsfeed, made available to RTB, may start enabling the programmatic industry to provide value in the ‘upper funnel’ space which is really where prospecting should be fulfilling its objective.

The newsfeed is a canvas for what is essentially targetable and optimisable content marketing. The newsfeed ad units are essentially sponsored content. Whether FBX buyers are able to cookie-match third-party data sets (an Exelate or Bluekai model) or is strictly just pixels placed on advertiser’s sites, this is something  ExchangeWire is unsure of.

At best, the newsfeed through RTB becomes a prospecting playground, targeting via rich third-data providers. At worst, it becomes a way of re-engaging existing customers, helping to develop a robust, ‘always on’ CRM strategy where the user is given something tangible: more relevant content where they most expect it. If the newsfeed is purely used as an acquisition tool, it will be a hugely missed opportunity.

Making Native Scale

The last thing that the newsfeed on FBX represents is a genuine example of ‘native advertising’ becoming scalable—through RTB. The only way that native will truly scale is when the execution onus is placed on the procurer. The data signals it kicks off are also more useful than clicks and dwell time.

The purpose of a content marketing strategy is likely content propagation. If this becomes a readily available reporting metric, then native advertising just got a lot more relevant to the buying community, with predictive optimisation to users more likely to share content.

So why should this not be extended to other platforms? Why would Twitter not do the same? The newsfeed ad unit is not a standard IAB unit, nor is the ASU. Will Yahoo! seize the Tumblr opportunity and make the ‘spotlight ads’  available through RTB? The RTB community have already moved to incorporate non-standard ad units into their workflow and the money has subsequently flowed.

This should be a message to all other prospective new-age social platforms. Don’t fight the money. Do what Facebook is doing and make your native scale by making it RTB’able.

Source: ExchangeWire

The discussion was prompted by Stefan Tornquist when he asked, “What are the internal, organizational challenges to Integrated Marketing?”  

Here’s a wrap-up of our collective response:

Too many large organizations are using incentive structures that foster (dis)integrated digital marketing by issuing bonuses to individual teams based on the performance of the marketing channels they are responsible for.  

Because each team (search, social, email, display, etc.) must prove their own channel’s performance for compensation, they’re thrust into internal competition and left to seek metrics and attribution models favorable to their particular channel. This creates both operational and data silos.

As Tom Cunniff put it,  ”each data plume creates more smoke to hide behind”.  

He cautioned marketers to “beware of glowing reports, because everyone has incentive to make it look great” and joked that you’ll find “everything’s working, but sales are down!”.  

While the joke brought laughs, it highlighted a serious organizational flaw that introduces a channel bias that often turns attribution into politics.     

It’s no wonder that Econsultancy found that 61% of organizations spending more than $5m on marketing a year said “internal cross-team politics” was holding them back in a recent survey.  

So what needs to be changed?

In order for organizations to execute effective integrated marketing, their marketing teams need to be integrated internally.  

Jim Sterne was quick to point out that there has to be a culture change and adjustment of incentive structures to ensure teams are functioning in synergy towards a common goal, rather than to satisfy individual objectives.

Sterne suggests incentive structures be based on group profitability.  If all teams are given bonuses according to aggregate success, each is incentivized to operate and spend in a way that drives overall marketing performance.   

With a singular goal, teams would be more willing to cut back spending and shift to areas where traffic is more profitable and better integrate on multichannel campaigns. 

According to Cunniff, this change would “break down silos and demand programs that are harder to attribute individually,” leading to better integrated marketing and creating the need for integrated attribution.  

The best marketing is so well integrated that you can’t tear it apart to see which thing worked the best, so you have to attribute channel performance by how well it syncs with your entire marketing mix to drive sales.

Without the pressure to use reports provided by vendors with an equally-vested interest to prove their singular channel’s performance, an integrated marketer incentivized by group profitability can (and should) assess their channel’s performance using independent attribution tools and unbiased models. 

Organizations focused on successful integrated marketing don’t want their marketers asking “how does my channel drive sales?”  They want them asking “how does my channel interact with others to drive sales?”  

Will a change in incentive structure breed a more integrated marketer?  We think so.   

See the full discussion on Econsultancy’s Youtube page.

Source: Econsultancy

We’ve known for some time that it’s coming. But on Thursday, the app finally arrived.

Facebook has just rolled out a version of its app for Google Glass.

If you’re lucky enough to be among the early testers of Google Glass, the Facebook app is certainly poised to occupy some of your time this weekend.

Built by Facebook, this app allows you to upload photos from Google Glass directly to your Facebook timeline. You can also add an optional photo description, just by speaking it.

“We look forward to exploring Facebook experiences across new types of mobile devices,” Facebook’s Erick Tseng says. “This is only a first step.”

To learn more about Facebook for Google Glass, click here.

Source:Mobile Marketing Watch

Adap.tv held a half-day event in London this week to discuss the themes around programmatic video. The agenda was packed with eclectic speakers coming from different ends of the media buying jungle: from programmatic traders to traditional TV buyers. Here, ExchangeWire sketches out the afternoon’s key themes.

End-to-End Platforms

Adap.tv is clearly trying to position itself (and doing a solid job) as an agnostic platform player that connects buyers and sellers. Amir Ashkenazi, CEO of Adap.tv, spelled out the challenges that the video industry has encountered to date: too many middlemen, rogue behaviour and practices and too many layers diluting the flow of investment.

In doing so, Amir painted the picture of a consolidated end-to-end video buying stack, unsurprisingly what Adap.tv are able to offer.

Removing layers and improving data transparency are, of course, positive developments for advertisers and publishers alike. We should take a look at the past to see how it might impact the future. Data-driven advertising, computational advertising or programmatic buying (however you define the digital advertising industry) was disrupted by innovative startups five years ago.

Continue reading »

On Wednesday, BugSense – creators of a leading mobile app monitoring solution – announced that the company will be participating at Google’s I/O developer conference this week.

BugSense says it will demo its Mobile App Quality monitoring at the Developer Sandbox, where a select group of innovators are invited to showcase solutions based on Google I/O-featured technologies.

Team BugSense will be on hand to give demos, discuss how the company keeps mobile moving, answer questions and exchange ideas. This marks BugSense’s third appearance at Google I/O.

To coincide with Google I/O, BugSense has unveiled a live infographic at that highlights Android app errors and crashes around the world in real-time. You can check it out here.

“Google I/O is an important event for us from both sentimental and business perspectives,” BugSense CEO/Co-Founder Panos Papadopoulos explains. “BugSense was soft-launched at Google I/O 2011. Two years later, being here represents how far we have come with the help of the Android community and how far we can take them by helping make their mobile apps better. In the two years since launching here, we have exceeded our roadplan and continue to work hard to help our customers deliver a better mobile experience.”

Source:Mobile Marketing Watch

Please describe your job! What does a Head Of Performance do?

I always receive quizzical looks, followed up by a lot of explanative detail from me, when I mention I am Head of Performance at independent media agency, Total Media. Fundamentally, however, my role is to oversee the digital direct response output across the agency.

Traditionally, this would have meant that I managed the typical direct response digital disciplines within the agency such as DSP trading and PPC, however over the last 18 months I have found myself working more with the brand and social teams. 

As the industry becomes a lot more data centric and clients begin to look into how they can drive incremental conversions, it has become absolutely key for us to function and integrate as one team at Total Media. I think there are still distinct skillsets required cross discipline, however, they do need to sit a lot closer to one another.

Whereabouts do you sit within the organisation? Who do you report to?

I sit in the digital team, primarily working with the Display and PPC teams. The display team was brought into the digital fold earlier this year. Being mindful of the amount of publishers and new technologies in the market, it made sense to ensure we were ahead of the game and planning effectively and efficiently.

I report into the Head of Media Operations – Celine Saturnino. This is another evolution within the agency. Celine originally managed the digital department, but was promoted to oversee both the digital and TV department. There is clearly huge synergy between the two disciplines and when we can all afford connected TVs in the not too distant future they will effectively be one and the same.

What kind of skills do you need to be effective in your role?

Working at an independent agency with more than 100 clients to service means that the skills required are probably distinctly different to other agencies. One day I might be talking about how the publishing industry is being impacted by Amazon, the next day could be about how we can drive sales of a robotic vacuum cleaner! Therefore being able to adapt to different verticals, challenges and objectives is absolutely key.

As well as this, I am a firm believer that having your head screwed on when it comes to technology is massively beneficial. During the time I have been in the industry, the increased focus on technology has been stark: people who are able to combine technology with creative flair will do best – creativity can be fuelled by data. 

Tell us about a typical working day…

The day generally kicks off with a trip to the gym for a quick pick me up – I’m commonly known as a fitness super freak – followed by a download of the latest gossip from the team. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some really talented forward thinkers, but they don’t half get themselves into some awkward situations outside of work!

When in the office, the key things for me are looking over what major briefs are currently being worked on across the agency and understanding how we can make our planning work harder for these clients through optimisation or new technology within the market.

Away from briefs I try and catch up with the different digital teams as much as possible to find out what they are working on and identify ways in which we can integrate further. Where we are finding most traction with clients is where we can bring together a variety of disciplines and make these all work to common accountable goals. It’s not a new idea at all, but I think it is one that is difficult to get right.

What kind of goals do you have? What are the most useful metrics and KPIs for measuring success?

The metrics that we look at in order to measure success are rapidly changing. As different companies try to perfect the idea of attribution I think that this will be an on-going discussion.

Fundamentally, there are no set metrics or KPIs that we use to define success, as ultimately it is dependent on what we want to achieve. However, there are metrics such as engagement and ad visibility that we are experimenting with to understand how these can be utilised more effectively to build a greater picture of success.

As an industry, I feel we are still a little way off effectively using engagement metrics and agreeing on set benchmarks, but I am confident that these will have a big impact on how we report and trade on campaigns going forward.

What are your favourite tools to help you to get the job done?

Tamper Data – Just a standard tag tracer, however, this has saved me so many headaches when people have come to me with floodlight tag issues.

Jing – A very simple screen grab tool but I use it every day.

Google Docs – Has made workflow across the teams a lot simpler.

Google Tag Manager – Has helped save a lot of time with numerous clients.

Trello – Works fantastically for projects spanning multiple teams and for keeping visibility on team workload.

Total Media Data Team – Granted not a tool, but the data infrastructure the guys have put together helps me massively from automated reporting through to micro-analysis.

Spotify – Sometimes you just need that special song to keep you motivated though a late night in the office.

What do you love about your job? What sucks?

There are actually a lot of things I love about my job, ranging from the amount of input that I get on key agency decisions to new products through to key plans. Total Media has a habit of empowering its staff and this is highlighted by the amount of autonomy given to staff.

The thing that sucks the most is that no matter how many times I explain it to her, my mum will never really understand what I actually do for a job!

How did you get started in the digital industry, and where might you go from here? 

I can’t say that I always dreamed of working in digital media as a kid. In all honesty I kind of fell into it as I furiously applied for any marketing role after finishing university.

I initially started working for a digital consultancy as their first employee. It was quite daunting starting out, but fortunately the two guys running the company were really passionate and forward-thinking in everything that they did, which really helped me bed into the industry.

Do you have any advice for people who want to work in the digital industry?

Having met a number of people looking to get into the industry recently I was astounded by just how much knowledge a lot of them already had. The skillset that many graduates are bringing with them at the start of their careers is already so advanced.

The best advice I can impart for anyone trying to get into the industry is just to keep researching and reading around your subject. Learn as much as you can about your particular discipline and then learn some more. 

Which brands do you think are doing digital well?

I recently took a trip to the Telegraph Experience Room. This is essentially a room that houses lots of amazing techy goods and it overlooks their massive editorial team.

I was hugely impressed by the way the Telegraph is incorporating digital media into so many different elements of what it does. This ranges from the fact that its social media editor is the first person who talks about the key editorial pieces, the increased use of video on its platforms, through to the widgets it builds for key articles online.

The way it has adapted to digital means that it is in an incredibly strong position to react quickly to news as it breaks, across multiple devices – ultimately getting the content in front of its readership in real time. 

Source: Econsultancy

ExchangeWire wrote a piece recently on why local publishers should build out the SME platform, leveraging the already existing relationships that they have with local businesses.

It is interesting to see 1&1 in the UK really aggressively going after the local SME market with a blanket TV campaign. Owning the digital relationship with SME is a huge opportunity, and scale in this market is a massive untapped opportunity. Google makes much of its search revenue from the SME sector – but display thus far has failed to really open this market segment. 1&1 is now trying to offer social media management tools to its current clients so clearly owning the platform can allow you to upsell advertising and marketing management solutions.

By building the CMS as well as a media buying platform, we made the point that local media publishers could be the digital gateway for local businesses. Building another undifferentiated PMP is a good idea but it only addresses the buying needs of a finite number of big national/global brands – and budget especially when you are competing with big media and platform businesses. But how exactly can you execute a localised ad strategy?

Don’t build, borrow

Local media companies do not have the resources or the cash flow to build out platforms for the new SME marketing platform? And why should they when they can re-purpose or white label existing solutions on the market – as well as leveraging your local sales network?

Building the CMS on existing solutions

Building a platform is difficult. Local media planners trying to build the new CMS for SMEs should not entertain anything like this. Use the existing tools on the market. WordPress is the best CMS tool on the market. Built on PHP and the best open-source CMS on the market, it could easily be re-purposed for the basic requirements of the SME. A development team would be required, but could also be out-sourced. Push the new solution through your existing media channels to get adoption from local businesses. Once they are on-board, you can then begin to up-sell the media buying and digital marketing business. Or you could just call 1&1 and partner.

Self-service advertising the key for local marketers

It will be extremely difficult to manage and execute 1000s of small display campaigns, and it wouldn’t be a very efficient business. A self-service business is, as Google have shown, an effective way to sell to small and medium sized businesses. How would you do this in display – without trying to build a flawed ad technology solution? A tool that truly addresses the requirements of local marketers needs to be properly tested. Don’t assume what this market segment wants. Be mindful of the lean start-up thesis: build, test and learn.

What would this self-service tool look like? You could easily bucket everything initially into display. Tag up local business sites. Licence DSP. And execute retargeting buys (prospecting could be outsourced) via the DSP/platform you have partnered with.

A UI will be required to allow marketers to pick and choose audience buckets to buy from and track campaign performance. Many of these tools are already available on the platforms that have an open API and Apps strategy. Many of these apps are available, but a customised UI for local marketers is a requisite.

If this sounds too complicated, then simply whitelabel a vendor like PaperG, who offer a self-service marketing and retargeting solution for SME. Still based in the US, this company has identified a massive opportunity in the fat middle and long tail of display advertising. That newspaper advertising has to go somewhere, and why should it all go to Google? Much of this solution offering is re-targeting, and this type of display targeting has proved it can compete with non-branded search on performance.

How this SME-focused solution hasn’t been replicated in Europe (particularly Germany) is a mystery, given the market penetration of pure play platforms. Yes, it would be more difficult then simply selling into agencies, and aggregating unsold inventory in a PMP (not a bad idea in itself) – but the upside of a local marketing strategy would certainly yield more revenue and growth over the long term for cash-strapped local media companies.

Will getting more innovative help local publishers unlock new revenue?

The old media model is fundamentally broken, and is in decline. Matthew Ingram wrote a great piece recently on Paidcontent about why mass media is now not feasible in a world of platforms like Twitter, Facebook and in the case of local publisher localised search solutions like Yelp. Maybe the publisher needs to stop thinking like a legacy media company. Will selling more ads to big media buying agencies make up for declining print ad revenue? Not likely. It might yield single digit growth, but won’t stop the bleeding. A new type of thinking is necessary here.

The local publisher needs to start thinking like the new platform businesses who are looking to own this new local marketing spend. By becoming the SME marketing platform of choice, this could well open a massive ad revenue opportunity for these media companies. Let’s see if local display can think outside of the box.

Source: ExchangeWire

Our approach action change through data-driven decisions and we use AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) as a key part of our testing process to facilitate this. 

With ACE, we run keyword A/B positional tests that are contained, measurable, protected from seasonality and as a result, provide clear actions to drive incremental value. 

Firstly a quick recap, what is ACE?

ACE is testing functionality within AdWords itself that allows advertisers to test two different Max. CPC bids simultaneously for the same keyword.

The advertiser selects a traffic split – this could be 50/50, 60/40 and so on.  Once a split is in place, a Max. CPC percentage multiplier for the experiment version of the keyword needs to be determined. 

Example: 

I have a keyword with a Max CPC of £1 and set up an experiment with the following conditions:

• Traffic split = 50/50.
• Experiment bid multiplier = +50%.

That means for 50% of auctions the keyword’s ad rank will be calculated with a bid of £1 and the other 50% of time with a bid of £1.50.

How do you track it?

Web analytics software, like Google Analytics, Omniture or Coremetrics, is usually the norm for client reporting and therefore it’s necessary to track ACE within them in order to calculate accurate last-click, conversion rates and ROI. The {aceid} AdWords ValueTrack parameter allows you to do exactly that. 

Simply append this to the destination URL of a keyword that you are experimenting on:

Example: www.mywebsite.com/?ace={aceid}

A unique ID number will then be dynamically inserted into the landing page URL. This ID can be linked to either the control or experiment version of the keyword.

Why use ACE? 

To make data-driven decisions, you need data where the context is known and the conditions are the same. When comparing performance from two different time periods, a common issue is context, due to the need to ensure both are accurately comparable.

To know the context of a situation, you need to know the conditions and circumstances. Examples of these are: 

• Paydays
• Sales
• Weather shifts
• Seasonality

In order to avoid different conditions affecting the keywords, we need to test them simultaneously. The context can always be known because the same conditions apply, and as such, ACE ensures a fair test and therefore provides actionable data.

Case study

A keyword for one of our clients had a high ROI. It was in position two and we we wanted to push it into position one but required insight into the cost/reward implications before making the change across 100% of auctions.

There are some results you can fairly accurately predict. For example, CTR will likely increase and that CPCs will rise, but what about the conversion rate?

This will be the key metric when considering whether this tested bid can be profitably executed in the long term.

With the above hypothesis, the following conditions were applied:

• Traffic split = 70/30 
• Bid multiplier = +15% 
• Duration = two weeks

Results:

• CTR rose by 18.5%
• CPCs rose by 8% 
• Conversion rate increased by 71%!  

Consequent actions

The test ran for two weeks and consequently the experimental bid was applied to all traffic after it came to an end.

Two weeks after the experiment conclusion we compared 7 days of top line performance to the equivalent week in the previous month; it was clear that the experiment had been a success.

Top-line clicks for the keyword were up 12% with a 4% increase in CTR. Cost had risen by 24%, as expected.

However, most encouragingly, conversion rate was up 36% and revenue up 39%; this equated to a 12% improvement in ROI.

Summary

We expected more traffic volume, which we got, but also expected to have to sacrifice efficiency in order to gain it. In fact, the opposite happened, and we were only able to determine this through ACE.  By testing different variations of a keyword in the same conditions, the data that is gathered is accurate and actionable.

To keep an experiment within the same context is to remove speculation and replace it with certainty. Certainty, in a landscape that changes as rapidly as search does, is an extremely valuable commodity. 

Source: Econsultancy

You have a variety of ways to improve your first impression for your business in the search and social environment.

Source: ClickZ Asia

There are a lot of ad technology sleeping giants out there. Facebook. Amazon. Ebay. Twitter. Most of these usually pop up in breathless op-ed pieces about future dominating vendors. All have unique data sets, and all have their owned and operated inventory – but all are effectively media companies, now battling to capture agency/marketer budget. It’s interesting that the enterprise players, who are now encroaching onto ad technology’s traditional territory, are rarely ever spoken about. The Adobe’s and IBM’s are obvious examples. But Salesforce could well be the dark horse to emerge from the enterprise side.

It’s all about the platform play

There are very few independent pure play advertising technology platforms out there. Most are conflicted – due to competitive media businesses. Agencies and marketers want access to multiple audience and inventory sources. The fact that Google won’t be integrated with Facebook or Twitter any time soon is an indication that independent ad technology players are going to grow a bigger slice of this media buying business. And given the increasing cynicism of some marketers around black box solutions there could be a shift to transparent platforms. Salesforce wasn’t even in this game until it bought BuddyMedia close to $700 million last year. Now it has a Facebook platform for its CRM clients.

BuddyMedia’s agreement with WPP also gave it an “in” with the biggest marketing and media buying organisation globally. Rebranded as social.com and built into the Salesforce CRM, it has also recently integrated with Twitter to allow customers to buy across the social media channel. This is an important development, as it now positions Salesforce as a viable platform for marketers and agencies to execute social buys. You never really thought as Salesforce as anything but an incredibly powerful CRM, but now the SAAS solution is moving from the enterprise marketing layer into traditional ad technology country (whilst at the same time, the ad tech incumbents are trying to move up the value chain). When cornered at the recent SalesForce conference, Mike Lazarus also admitted that FBX functionality was coming.

Salesforce, The New Acquirer of Choice

This segues neatly into the another key reason for Salesforce’s new found status as ad tech giant, namely that it is in the market to buy companies. The traditional buyers in our space have been Google, Yahoo and AOL. All three look like they are not going to spend hundreds of million on this new crop of ad tech companies. Google has more than likely done its buying in the space. In fairness it has enough engineering might to cover any blind spots it might have (although the pace at which it develops is of course slower than a start up). AOL is a media company, now interested mainly in bolstering its content business through the acquisition of scaled media web sites. And since Mayer took over at Yahoo, we have seen nothing but small mobile app based acqui-hires – and that trend is likely to continue until the company unloads its Asian assets and its share prices collapses. So who is left? Adobe? The company hasn’t done a multi-hundred million dollar deal since acquiring Omniture and Efficient Frontier. But the company gets mentioned prominently in high-level M&A discussion.

Now that Salesforce is looking to move into real-time trading with a FBX integration imminent, you wonder what Salesforce will do? Will it build its own bidder and necessary infrastructure to make it work? Or will it kick the tyres of some of the solutions on the market, and buy to integrate into the platform? There are a lots of DSPs looking to IPO. Not all of them will go to market. If Salesforce does look to acquire, will Adobe or IBM follow suit? Or perhaps there is something to look into with Adroll? Salesforce themselves use Adroll for its retargeting, perhaps they’ll go the full nine yards and take it off the table for presumably a more sensible price than some of the other, larger DSPs? And why would Salesforce stop at FBX, when it could buy biddable media across Display and Search. A Kenshoo could be just as attractive to Salesforce, as it continues to build out that enterprise advertising / marketing stack.

Plugging Into The Coveted Marketer’s CRM

Salesforce is the CRM of choice for tens of thousands of paying companies (87,000 and growing), with the majority of blue chip marketers using it.  This means that Salesforce is the gateway to the coveted CRM of many marketing clients. Now that Salesforce is looking to build on that key data store, they are in a powerful position to unleash the targeting potential of the CRM. Granted they will have to figure out how to segment and target users across devices without using PII, but the opportunity is too significant to ignore. March Beinhoff has been aggressive to move into to other areas to diversify the revenue streams for Salesforce. He saw an opportunity in social, and now that BuddyMedia is integrated into the platform there is now a big opportunity in data-driven media buying across multiple platforms. And Salesforce is sitting in the sweet spot to make that happen.

The March of the Enterprise SaaS Players

You can’t do a piece around Salesforce and not mention players like SAP, IBM and Oracle (or even the likes of Accenture and McKInsey). Accenture, in particular, has been very active in our space. Its recent deal with BMW suggests that the consultancy giant is looking to move its core competencies of implementing infrastructure projects into wider functions functions like marketing and media services. Both in its view are intertwined. So is this an opportunity or threat to the existing players in the space? It depends how you look on it. Consolidation is inevitable – and this could be a threat to current vendors in the space (namely agencies), as we’ve pointed out in a previous post. But if Salesforce opened up its platforms to non-competing vendors it could open up a whole new raft of opportunities for traditional ad tech vendors.

Building on top of the Salesforce platform with direct access to its clients’ CRM could enable deeper integrations, better insights and ultimately better targeting. Ad tech and marketing tech are converging. Forget the ad tech landscapes that have come to define our industry. The canvass is now a lot larger – with more room for growth. This will be key area of discussion at ATS London ’13 (25% of early bird tickets are already sold). This is the future of our industry and we’d better be prepared for the march of the enterprise marketing giants.

Source: ExchangeWire

Before it could even reach the masses, Google Glass captivated the fascination of millions after its official preview earlier this year. A sleek technology designed for the human face, Google Glass delivers a killer augmented reality experience that will undoubtedly have profound implications on how we interact with the world around us. Although its release [...]
Source:Mobile Marketing Watch

On Friday, comScore published data from its MobiLens service, reporting key trends in the U.S. smartphone industry during the three month average period ending March 2013. For the reporting period, Apple ranked as the top smartphone manufacturer with 39 percent OEM market share. Google’s Android, however, led as the top smartphone platform with 52 percent [...]
Source:Mobile Marketing Watch