Publishers have enough to juggle without worrying about sketchy ads sneaking in through video inventory. But with malvertising on the rise — especially those sneaky auto-redirects infecting VAST tags — EX.CO and GeoEdge are joining forces to shut it down.

This partnership is grounded in ad quality to safeguard user trust and ensure publishers’ revenue keeps flowing without the hassle of bad ads ruining the party.

The post EX.CO and GeoEdge Team Up to Shut Down Video Malvertising appeared first on AdMonsters.

In a timely session at PubForum New Orleans, Johanna Bergqvist, General Manager, The Americas, EX.CO, moderated a discussion with leaders from DailyMail.com and News Corp to find out how publishers can make their video inventory more brand-safe and appealing to media buyers so they can increase fill rates and revenue. 

Advertisers are Demonetizing News Content 

In preparing for the PubForum session, David Rowley, VP, Revenue Technology, News Corp, shared he saw a Pew Research fact that there has been an 80% decline in news monetization from 2006 through 2020. 

“There are a lot of externalities to explain that. Programmatic became a thing, the reduction in CPMs, walled gardens started taking up more of the pie, and ad blocking. Now in the present day, the Israel-Hamas War is another iteration and possibly an even bigger one around the monetization of news and how difficult it can be,” said Rowley. 

Rowley shared that News Corp’s platforms are struggling in different ways because of the Israel-Hamas War news coverage. The Wall Street Journal is primarily direct sold, and many of its blue-chip brand advertisers are pulling back and wanting to avoid running against the war’s content. On the other hand, there is the New York Post, which is more focused on programmatic and is seeing declining CPMs from news monetization.

Jeremy Gan, SVP, Revenue Operations & Data Strategy, DailyMail.com, said that advertisers had a similar reaction to his publication and pulled their advertising. 

“We understand why they pulled it, but it is also the time where our readership is the most engaged and checking the live feeds multiple times per day, and Daily Mail is trying to monetize on those,” said Gan. “We analyzed pre and post on our website. It’s 20% more in time spent on page, and they’re reading 10% more each view across the board.”

Publishers, Demand that Brands Unblock You

EX.CO is an online video platform that works with hundreds of publishers. News is one of EX.CO’s strongest verticals for its local and larger partners. Bergqvist asked Tom Pachys, Co-Founder and CEO, EX.CO, to share what his publisher partners are saying about the monetization of news content.

“We’re trying to help the publishers fight back the complexity of the value chain. We see the right news getting more of their budgets, which only shows that these kinds of decisions are not really logical decisions but their moral opinions,” said Pachys.

Rowley agreed and recommended one way to combat this news monetization challenge is to push for unblocking keywords. 

“A lot of this boils down to the fact that keywords stay on block lists forever and way past their shelf life. Publishers should go to your advertisers and agencies to unblock them and be persistent about it in order to try to get some change to happen,” said Rowley.

At DailyMail.com, Gan shared that a strategy it is implementing is doubling down on other verticals like sports or finance, which tend to be more brand-safe while still heavily investing in news content. 

“It’s diversification of revenue for us. With the cookiepocalypse aside, it’s about how we build a new flow of revenue in an environment where we can monetize at a higher CPM. The direction we’re taking is in building a more resilient revenue stream,” said Gan. 

The Halo Effect of Consumers and Trusted News Content

Bergqvist referred to the halo effect with news content. There has been a lot of research that there is no negative impact on consumer brand perception if a brand is associated with a trusted piece of news content. But brands are still blocking any ads that may be risky.

“It’s not about whether the reader associates an ad with negative content. It’s more about what my friends are going to say about me or whether the brand will see this ad close to anything negative, and I’m going to get a phone call. That’s how a lot of decisions are being made,” said Pachys.

Rowley said that no one wants to be that person at a publisher who didn’t update the block list because of something sensitive or negative in the news.

“That’s what we have to fight constantly. Because with news, especially negative news, there is the halo effect. If you are in a trusted environment, customers don’t care. This is all an internal conversation between us and our higher-ups and brands and their higher-ups and agencies. Readers don’t think this way. They’re not making that dichotomy,” said Rowley. “Plead with brands and advertisers to understand the halo effect and stay in those environments because it will help your brand.”

The post How Publishers are Monetizing News During Challenging Times appeared first on AdMonsters.

But many players throughout the advertising ecosystem have used AI and machine learning to increase productivity, create more meaningful dashboards, and serve more relevant content and advertising to audiences.

So it comes as no surprise, the EX.CO, a leading publisher-first video tech platform would boost its video offering for publishers, especially after acquiring Bibblio, an AI and machine learning company. The ad tech company’s new AI-driven content recommendations and premium video libraries for publishers will identify the most contextually relevant video for each article and the highest-yielding feed for a page on a publisher’s site.

I spoke with Tom Pachys, CEO and Co-Founder, EX.CO, to learn more about the launch, as well as how EX.CO increases value for publishers by streamlining the supply path, and how AI can help fix ad tech’s sustainability issue.

Lynne d Johnson: AI is all the hype right now because of the popularity of Generative AI. You recently launched AI-driven content recommendations, after acquiring Bibblio, an AI and machine learning company. You guys already provided content recommendations, how do these enhancements improve upon what you already do?

Tom Pachys: EX.CO as a technology company always believed machine learning should be used to solve problems that are impossible to solve. As part of our online video platform, we’ve invested years in creating AI-based algorithms to improve monetization yield. While the buy side had AI-based technology since the early days, publishers never had access to such advantages without the likes of EX.CO.

After our acquisition of Bibblio, we were able to further enhance our offering using machine learning to select the most relevant video content as well. By using such technology, we enable publishers to always show the most relevant or highest-yielding video on each page. This is one of a few enhancements to our video content capabilities, another one being a premium video library with over 50,000 videos in different verticals that will now be available to our customers.

LdJ: Why should publishers care about this new feature in your video technology platform? What are the benefits for them?

TP: Our new content recommendations have proven to increase revenue up to as much as 17% for publishers, so this is a meaningful boost. With this new enhancement to our player technology, the video shown on each page of a publisher’s site will be the one most contextually relevant to the content of the article that video is placed in, which leads to a more personalized and engaging experience. In addition to revenue growth, our contextually relevant videos have improved visitor dwell time by nearly 50% on average. We’re very excited to bring that type of innovation to the publishing industry. It’s really a win-win all around for publishers and their audiences.

LdJ: And for buyers, how does this change things for them in terms of campaign performance or campaign management?

TP: We’re equally excited about how these new capabilities will impact advertisers as we are publishers. First, we pride ourselves on representing the shortest path to the inventory; we believe in reducing mediators and increasing value to the publisher. When brands and agencies buy inventory from EX.CO or the publishers that are working with EX.CO, their video ads will be seen by the most engaged audiences and within the most relevant video content. Users that watch more personalized videos really lean in more to the content they are consuming which can only improve brand recognition, brand recall, and purchase intent. That’s really what everyone has been waiting for, isn’t it?

LdJ: As much as people are excited about AI, AI also gets a bad rap for either going off the rails, as we’ve seen with some ChatGPT examples. But also bias has been a big issue that AI has been called out for. I mean the technology is only as smart as the data it’s being fed. Can you tell us about the human involvement that goes into your AI-based algorithms to ensure that publishers are actually serving the most contextually relevant video for users without any of these issues that have been concerning about AI’s future?

TP: It’s true; the algorithms are only as smart as the data they are being fed and the investment in building them. While we could look at engagement data for a user like dwell time, frequency of visits, etc. this tells us very little about what the content (and in extension, the algorithm) is doing to a person’s emotional response.

We understand a multidisciplinary approach is needed to achieve great results. It’s not only context that is important but also, recency of the article, popular interest, semantic analysis, safety filtering,  and other metadata such as tags and categories. This makes it a very pure, contextual algorithm with very little potential to cause negative impact. The challenge is achieving the human “wow factor” of generative AI while balancing the different publisher’s needs.

Many of the issues you are referring to tend to be more prominent when the technology is working on huge data sets including UGC where the fundamental “nutritional” value of the content is obviously less controlled. Our challenge is often the opposite: how to create a good recommendation on a much smaller sized data set (library of videos) while making the recommendation both relevant and accepted by journalists and editors working under a defined set of moral and ethical standards.

LdJ: And what about sustainability? That’s a big issue in the advertising ecosystem right now as everyone is thinking about being more responsible and hitting their carbon emissions targets. Well, as AI grows, so does its carbon footprint. Are you guys thinking about doing anything to make sure your technology is not becoming part of the larger problem? 

TP: When looking at the publishing industry, one of its biggest polluting components is the inefficient use of on-page ads. Most of the industry works with a “spray and pray” approach—more vendors, more requests—which leads to more pollution. We believe AI is the solution to that. Our biggest focus is supply path optimization, making the value chain more efficient which boosts our customers’ bottom-line revenues as well as supports the environment. EX.CO is pushing that agenda in all force and I believe we’ll see big positive changes in the industry in the coming years.

The post Ex.Co Gets Into the AI Content Recommendation Business: A Chat with CEO Tom Pachys appeared first on AdMonsters.

In a recent Think Tank roundtable discussion hosted by EX.CO at Publisher Forum Montreal, a group of revenue, product, and ad ops professionals came together and discussed what they believe to be some of the biggest issues facing the industry today.

With an eye toward developing a well-rounded revenue strategy, publishers are seriously thinking about how content and technology provide them with the necessary building blocks to provide a great user experience that will also bring in more advertising dollars. It’s all about putting users first and building better collaboration across the aisles.

Page Real Estate: UX vs Revenue

To kick off the discussion, Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech, posed a query about how to properly maneuver page real estate.

“So my thought around this is that ultimately page real estate is everything right?” asked Beeler. “And it needs to serve the user or it needs to serve our revenue strategy. It really does both, but who’s involved in those decisions?”

Everyone was in agreement that Ad Ops tends to make those decisions despite their main responsibility of serving ads. In addition, the publishers in the room considered the ways Google’s Core Web Vitals could impact page real estate and how tough it is to properly consider the best page layout that balances UX and significant revenue growth.

“From my point of view, if we’re talking about real estate on a web page for us to run ads, the real estate is limited,” explained one of the publishers. “For us, self-promotion of our own different products is something that we have to take into account because obviously, we’re pulling away the opportunity for us to run a different ad from another brand. So there’s a cost associated with it. And we have to internalize and think about what that cost is today versus if we don’t push that product. We consider where we are with our revenue goals.

But also, we’re like, look, we really believe in X, Y, or Z, and we know that we’re going to take a little bit of a financial hit right now to be able to push products that we really believe in down the road.”

“Are companies diversified enough to take a revenue hit?” pondered a programmatic professional. From their perspective, most companies are not allowed to experiment as much as they would like to because they are worried about staying afloat. A majority of the publishers agreed with that sentiment.

“Earlier, they were talking about testing, and unfortunately, you know, I’m not able to test in Q4. We tested during Q3 to make sure everything in Q4 is set up and optimized. If you do some testing in Q4 and you mess up, you don’t have a job.”

Collaboration is Vital 

The conversation evolved into a much larger discussion after one publisher posed a question about Core Web Vitals.

“I run product and technology and Core Web Vitals hit our brand really hard,” said a product executive. “It created a moment of urgency that allowed my team to say to our ad and rev ops teams, this is too much. When the traffic goes away, my money goes away and you work really hard for attention. I’ve always been curious to know what other companies are doing.”

There are usually two ways to act in times of discord. The first is to act as enemies and move forward with your own agenda. The other is to work in one accord and see how everyone’s goals can be met. The publishers thought the latter was a better choice.

“I like this shift in the industry. In general, it has made it essential for products and ops to talk with each other,” said another publisher. “I actually have a meeting right after this. There is a week that we have now where the head of product, our head of SEO, our publisher and our COO all get in one room. They look at the numbers, discuss what can wait for bids in the queue and more. But there is now more collaboration than before for people to get together on the same page. Confrontation does not work and collaboration is the goal.”

“For the first time in my career, I actually have a relationship with the ops team,” added the programmatic professional. “I actually feel cohesive when we sit and we talk. They actually recommended a product that programmatic loves, and I was like, wow, like you guys are recommending something that I will come to the table with.

We recently worked on a redesign of one of our pages together in Q2.  Immediately, we saw the effects on the revenue. It literally dropped by almost 75% because they’ve removed a lot of ads on the page. However, we are now seeing a rebound with SEO. They made a conscious choice to take the revenue hit back in Q2 with the hope of seeing it rebound by the end of the year. For me, it highlighted the benefits of having a healthy relationship between revenue and ops.”

There’s a lot of work ahead for the ad tech industry as it figures out new ways of navigating privacy regulations and massive technology updates. Without a doubt, the user experience will need to be considered more thoughtfully, especially for publishers looking to thrive through the decrease in ad spend.  To keep them afloat, it will also require collabortion, not just within an individual media organization but across the entire ecosystem.

The post In an Ever-Changing Advertising Ecosystem, Collaboration Is Key to Staying Afloat appeared first on AdMonsters.

Even if Google moves the mark again, publishers in the open web can no longer rely on old monetization strategies in the consumer privacy era that we’re living in. Publishers have a golden opportunity to maintain and potentially increase revenue just by collecting data and owning data that will be far more accurate than any cookie ever did.

Given those current conditions, the top three challenges that lay ahead for publishers are:

1. How can we acquire first-party data and scale it?
2. How can we deliver our content to the right audience?
3. How can we deal with the disruptions to our revenue streams and operations that have resulted from privacy changes?

We spoke with Will Hathaway, Head of Strategic Business Development at EX.CO to learn about how his company helps publishers face those challenges head-on by leveraging content experiences to increase engagement, revenue, and CPMs.

Lynne d Johnson: You came from Vemba to EX.CO, where you now oversee North American partnerships and EX.CO’s owned and operated site. Can you talk about how your experience from working with a video distribution platform, and now your role at EX.CO, help inform the work you do with your partners on both the buy and sell sides?

Will Hathaway: I’ve worked on all sides of the media and ad tech businesses including supply, demand, operations, publisher, vendor, etc. and would highly recommend it to people who have traditionally been siloed in a single vertical.

Working on the demand side helps me more effectively communicate with the supply side about what demand is looking for, and what will yield the best results. Working as a publisher helps me communicate more effectively as a vendor by speaking the same language, being empathetic to their points of view, and cross-pollinating ideas that have worked on other sites.

When I work with publishers at EX.CO, I always try to ask questions first, understand the needs of the business, and then combine that with my knowledge across the wider ecosystem to give them the best consultation that I can, whether that is working with us or otherwise. I also do this as a publisher when working with vendors. It’s rare, but as a publisher, I actually ask vendors what I can do for them, not what they can do for me.

Vendors dedicate materially more resources to publishers who are revenue drivers for their business. If a vendor is working with publisher A who is on a 95/5 rev share and publisher B who is on a 70/30 rev share, who is more likely to get access to the vendor’s direct-sold demand? If a vendor is working with a publisher who is making $1,000 a day in profit vs. a publisher who is making $100 a day in profit, who is going to get the best developers, ad ops, and account managers dedicated to the account? I intentionally flip the pyramid upside down to ensure that I’m taking care of my vendors, and in return, they take care of me tenfold.

LdJ: Thanks for that explanation. Let’s switch gears a bit and jump into the top issue that’s plaguing the entire industry. Google offered the advertising ecosystem a reprieve saying they wouldn’t pull the plug on the third-party cookie until 2023 and then announced plans to take a different direction with their cookie replacement, veering away from FLoC towards Topics API. And privacy pressures from government and big tech are mounting. What are the top three challenges you see for publishers as they move further into 2022?

WH: It’s true that Google delayed the death of the third-party cookie but we all still have to prepare and there’s no time like the present. Focusing on new, effective, privacy-compliant data collection strategies now will help publishers in the long run. At EX.CO, we’ve identified 3 mounting challenges for publishers:

1. Disrupting Revenue Streams and Business Operations – Publishers reliant on cookies will see a decrease in revenue, and the question is how much. Not even Facebook is immune, as evident by their latest earnings report. The uncertainty around the actual drop in revenue makes yearly planning and business operations difficult to predict. It is recommended that publishers take action in advance to account for potential decreases.

2. Acquiring First-Party Data – Let’s face it: First-party data is the new media currency. Many publishers still rely on third-party cookies to collect data about their audience which is a fundamental mistake. As we get closer to 2023, it’s vital for publishers to partner with companies that have relationships with identity solution providers. This will inherently determine which publishers will survive and which will not.

   However, in addition to identity solutions, publishers must find new ways of collecting valuable data beyond the cookie. There are a growing number of new ways to gain information about an audience such as contextual intelligence, viewability, zero-party data tools, and interactive content, all of which can further enrich data sets.

3. Delivering the Right Content – More and more, audiences are expecting a personalized experience when they visit a website. Publishers with robust first-party data have the ability to activate that data by segmenting their audience and delivering different content to specific users, and truth be told, most publishers are still trying to figure out how to do this effectively. The more information the publishers sit on, the smarter they will be in establishing the right kind of value exchange – more personalized, relevant content – that will ultimately drive more subscriptions and additional revenue.

LdJ: How should publishers approach their data strategies given these challenges and do you have examples?

WH: Publishers have a golden opportunity to maintain and potentially increase their revenue just by collecting first-party data and owning data that will be far more accurate than any cookie ever provided. Google’s delays should not deter publishers from future-proofing their data strategies.

One way for publishers to consolidate these goals is to shift how they think about engagement and interactivity because if you improve your relationship with your audience, it will have a positive impact on your reach and CPMs

It’s important to examine your top goals as a company. Typically, publishers want to increase revenue, increase engagement, and increase CPMs. One way for publishers to consolidate these goals is to shift how they think about engagement and interactivity because if you improve your relationship with your audience, it will have a positive impact on your reach and CPMs. Also, when you combine engaging video with personalized content that is also contextually relevant, you are able to deliver a better experience to your audience that is content-first and people-first.

Here is an example of how EX.CO’s technology can empower a publisher’s first-party data collection strategy while supporting a sustainable ad revenue stream. Let’s imagine that you’re a car publisher with an exclusive on this year’s NY Auto Show. The editorial is amazing — you’re getting tons of hits, home page exposure, great traffic from social, but there’s also a big brand auto manufacturer that your sales team has been looking to close.

This is your opportunity to bring them an engaged, car enthusiast user but that advertiser is looking for intent to purchase. They really want to find users that are looking to buy a car this year.

A simple interactive overlay unit asks your audience, “Which 2022 sports coupe are you most excited about?” The new Ford Mustang or the latest Toyota Supra? The user makes a choice and now the question shifts to ask, “How excited are you to be seen in one?”

The user has two responses to choose from: “Where is the nearest dealership?” or “This is way out of price range.” If the latter response is chosen, users are brought to an editorial on your site about the top 10 cars under $20K. This one interactive experience can be used as a lead gen tool or to surface more content that is relevant to the user.

Although this example is fairly straightforward in its ease and approach, the benefit to this approach is that it’s only limited by your imagination and content creation skills. It can be stylized to fit the CSS of your page so it looks seamless and no experiences will ever look alike. The most important takeaway is that you now have the ability to create a user profile and it’s your own data to do with it as you please. You also now have a user that fits into a segment for the advertiser that your sales team has been chasing, all from a very organic interaction.

Here’s another example, this time based on demographics and financial profiles. Let’s imagine you’re a technology site that just published a review of the best back-to-school computers and tablets but you’ve noticed that your audience is dropping off relatively quickly in comparison to your average time on site. Because of this, you’re also not serving many ads to that same user. It’s possible that this is due to a lack of interest in the content, or that the top three computers are all Apple MacBooks, or that no parent wants to spend over $2K on a laptop.

A simple interactive overlay unit asks the user what type of laptop is right for them. This kicks off a personalized journey and asks if their child is attending college, high school, middle school, or elementary school. From here, you can build out an entire decision tree with other questions and possible answers which will ultimately direct the user to the best product to purchase.

You can make the journey as long or short as you want but you made the content easily digestible and more engaging than it was before. Depending on how you build out the interaction, you can create income profiles on your audience. Assuming your ad stack is optimized, you can also raise the page eCPM thanks to how long the user is engaging with the EX.CO experience.

LdJ: Those are awesome examples. To me, it seems that for a long time now, publishers have been chasing after revenue only and losing focus on the user experience. But that’s a catch 22, isn’t it? If you don’t focus on user experience, you will negatively impact your revenue. Why is it imperative, more now than ever, that pubs rekindle their relationships with their audiences and get back to building better user experiences?

This is one of the biggest misconceptions in publishing – that more ads equals more revenue. It’s actually the opposite.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions in publishing – that more ads equals more revenue. It’s actually the opposite.

I came into the publishing world from the arbitrage space, meaning I worked with websites that would buy traffic from sources like Facebook for five cents, and then monetize the page for seven cents and pocket the margin. We would do this at huge scale. Squeezing out one extra cent makes a big difference, and the ability to optimize RPS (revenue per session) is what kept the lights on.

So in the early days, we used to put as many ads on the page as possible and what we saw is actually RPS went down because users were bouncing from the page quicker due to the poor user experience. Also, the algorithms at Google and Facebook started taking into consideration the ad to content ratio on websites, and penalized sites that were ad heavy. So paradoxically, the arbitrage players who almost exclusively care about revenue, have some of the cleaner sites on the internet and also have some of the highest RPS metrics on the internet.

At EX.CO, we help publishers improve their site’s user experience by combining what historically took up multiple pieces of real estate on their site, and combine it into one piece of real estate. For example, if a publisher is running an EX.CO video player on their site, in the exact same real estate where it used to be just video, it can now include video and a call to action to signup for a newsletter.

This same concept applies to several other use cases, delivering the ability to collect first-party data, drive subscriptions, offer e-commerce, etc.

Put simply, we’ve combined multiple needs that publishers have and historically have used multiple pieces of real estate for (e.g. a newsletter banner at the top of the page, a subscription interstitial, a poll mid-article to collect first-party data) and streamlined those into a single, beautiful user experience, that is also lucrative.

LdJ: We heard that when LadBible partnered with EX.CO they realized a +160% increase in digital ad revenue and +40% increase in CTR. How were they able to achieve these results?

Absolutely, LadBible is a great example of how capitalizing on first-party data with EX.CO brings tangible benefits.

LadBible had been struggling with targeting audiences at scale by just relying on third-party cookie data. After partnering with us, they started to collect first-party data directly from their audience by using polls and other interactive content solutions which posed relevant questions to their visitors.

LadBible then took that data, segmented their audience, and integrated the information into their DMP. This resulted in significant increases in both revenue and CTR, as you mentioned.

From there, LadBible was able to jump-start conversations with premium advertisers, just based on the percentage of users that are now targeted through EX.CO’s technology. This is really a story about how a publisher reimagined how they interacted with their audience and tapped EX.CO to help them achieve the results they wanted.

The post Capitalizing on Your First-party Data With Interactive Content to Increase Engagement and CPMs appeared first on AdMonsters.

The more personalized and relevant to the end-user, the more time spent on site — leading to better performance and even higher yield for publishers. With advances in AI-based content paired with header bidding mechanisms, publishers can offer their audiences the right ads at the right time in a highly engaging and seamless experience that will bring in greater returns.

To learn whether when the concept of right ads, right time, right person — whent it comes to video — is just pie in the sky thinking, I recently caught up with Johanna Bergqvist, VP of Strategic Partnerships, Ex.co, to recap some of what we talked about at Ops 2021 on our panel Experience Comes First: Why Capitalizing on User Experience Is Key to a Sustainable Video & Revenue Growth Strategy with Amanda Gomez, VP, Revenue Operations, New York Post and Ryan Simone, Senior Director, Global Audience Insights, Vice Media.

Lynne d Johnson: What are some actions publishers should take to ensure that video ad units on their site won’t compromise the user experience? Is there a risk for publishers who are pursuing viewability for their partners?

Johanna Bergqvist: There are definitely actions that publishers can take to make sure a video player will not compromise the user experience. Having an ultralight video player to speed up loading times is crucial as well as placement on the page but there are many more factors that impact UX beyond the player technology itself.

Today’s audiences want (and expect) to have a personalized experience when visiting a website. The person sitting to my left may have different interests than myself and depending on what we each see on the page, we will be more – or less – willing to stay on site, click around to other pages, and even subscribe to a newsletter.

At EX.CO, we are always thinking about the user experience and how we can best help publishers grow.

Viewability has always been incredibly important for advertisers and to maximize yield. However, in the last year, we’ve seen buyers become more strict with achieving 70% viewability across their campaigns and spend. For video, the best way to achieve this metric and unlock premium demand is to adopt an adhesion unit. However, there is some tension between UX and achieving ad viewability when it comes to video.

We've found that the best approach to maximizing ad viewability as part of your video strategy is to adopt an adhesion unit; however, these can sometimes be viewed as intrusive to the user and product.

We’ve found that the best approach to maximizing ad viewability as part of your video strategy is to adopt an adhesion unit; however, these can sometimes be viewed as intrusive to the user and product. At EX.CO, we have therefore developed a native and truly customizable top sticky unit that has proven to reduce negative interaction rates by 16% and drive RPMs up to 20% higher, on average. The product looks completely native to the publisher’s site and does not interfere with UX.

LdJ: What are some of the engagement drivers to reach the sweet spot of great video content, great user experience, and highly engaged users?

JB: It’s important to first take a step back and look at the entire user experience for your digital property. From there, you can identify the touchpoints that you have with your audience and determine the most efficient and seamless ways to push them down the funnel.

Interact with your audience, ask them questions, get to really know your website visitors. Then use that information to create an appropriate value exchange. According to a recent report by Accenture, 83% of respondents said they are willing to give away personal information in exchange for offers and content. Video is inherently engaging so leveraging it as a means to enhance audience engagement rather than looking at it as an Achilles’ heel is key.

LdJ: How can first-party and contextual data be better leveraged and optimized by publishers to create better user experiences?

JB: This is a great question because many publishers are sitting on first- or third-party data but are not sure how to necessarily put this data into action, or how to effectively capture it. The more you learn about your audience, the more you can personalize the user experience.

Introducing interactivity on a site can help publishers collect valuable data about their audience which they can then use to surface a relevant piece of content, and personalize what page that user lands on when they return to the site next time. Of course, all of this leads to more engagement and ultimately, more revenue.

LdJ: Are there any benefits to using contextual vs. behavioral targeting to ensure that the right ads are finding the right people at the right time?

JB: With the cookie disappearing, contextual and behavioral targeting are top of mind for both publishers and advertisers. There are pros and cons for each of these strategies.

Contextual targeting can be very effective for publishers where the vertical naturally lends itself to certain types of advertisers, however, this type of approach can sometimes limit reach for advertisers. It really depends on the vertical, and whether or not the advertiser is endemic or non-endemic.

Contextual becomes hard when you are trying to target a very specific audience because it will limit your reach.

Contextual becomes hard when you are trying to target a very specific audience because it will limit your reach. For example, if you are an expensive hotel brand, advertising on a high-end news site may not make sense contextually, however, that audience has a high net worth and therefore, money to spend so it’s actually the perfect fit.

This is where having first-party data can complement your targeting strategies immensely, and you can easily run an interactive poll or survey to collect even more data about your audience which will help inform future campaigns you may run.

This is also where behavioral targeting becomes more effective because you can look at a user’s general browser history. In both types of targeting, data becomes extremely important because you can cater the entire experience around each user. This not only translates into higher CPMs and inventory value but builds credibility and trust with your audience who will be more inclined to subscribe to your paywall or newsletter because they recognize the value of consuming more relevant content.

The post Experience Comes First: Why Capitalizing on User Experience Is Key to a Sustainable Video & Revenue Growth Strategy appeared first on AdMonsters.