Digital advertising is becoming increasingly complex, and honestly, this won’t change for some time. While the advertising ecosystem is strategically preparing for the long haul, peak season is upon us and before you know it, summer will be gone.

With transparency and media quality at the top of publishers’ minds, it will be interesting to see how Q4 plays out. External factors such as Google’s decision to maintain third-party cookies are only further complicating things.

For brands, brand safety is a major concern, especially during election season like this one where advertisers are projected to spend over $12B on ads across all channels. With brands opting out of placing ads next to election content, or news entirely, the question arises, what do brands have to be afraid of?

At the recent AdMonsters Publisher Forum in Boston, Jana Meron, the newly appointed VP of Revenue Operations and Data at The Washington Post, challenged the conventional wisdom around news and brand safety. Speaking to a packed room of publishers and tech vendors, she questioned, “Why would you avoid reaching this audience when they’re most engaged?”

A few years ago, an IAB study found that 84% of consumers trust brands they see in the news, which highlights the importance of addressing misconceptions about news content. Yet, despite this trust, Resonate’s Fall 2024 Consumer Trends Report tells us that consumer spending is down, which is no bueno for publishers, brands, and agencies already grappling with declining ad revenue and sales.

“The challenge continues for advertisers trying to navigate trust and brand safety,” said Jonathan Neddenriep, co-founder and CTO of Postie. “This also puts pressure on the large tech platforms to double down on ad and content safety tools, something that isn’t always a popular or easy investment (see the Meta CrowdTangle shutdown, for instance.)”

So, what’s a brand to do during times like these?

I recently moderated a webinar with Neddenriep and Bethany Bollenbacher, Customer Success Senior Team Leader at Postie, where they dropped a ton of jaw-dropping gems to help brands stay afloat. If one thing is for sure, and two things are for certain, brands should definitely incorporate direct mail into their strategies. With Postie, direct mail now offers digital capabilities like real-time reporting, website re-targeting, and targeting that exceeds even digital channels. 

Here are some insights and strategies to help brands navigate holiday and election campaigns.

• Election Season: The Catalyst for Surging  Ad Rates
  During election years, the surge in political ad spending significantly impacts ad rates on major platforms like Meta and Google. The bid-based nature of these platforms intensifies competition for ad slots, driving up CPMs and CPAs. This situation is particularly challenging for ecommerce brands looking to grow during the holiday season. To navigate these fluctuations, brands should develop conservative forecasts for CPMs and explore alternative channels with more stable performance metrics. Implementing digital campaign levers like cost-capping can also help protect your budget from being drained by the rising cost of ad slots.
• Leveraging Direct Mail for Stability
  Direct mail offers a stable and predictable alternative amidst fluctuating digital ad rates. Unlike digital channels, where ad placements can be unpredictable and subject to sudden rate hikes, direct mail provides a consistent and reliable medium. Its ability to lock in rates and deliver steady results makes it an attractive option for brands looking to diversify their advertising strategies. Additionally, direct mail’s physical separation from digital noise can enhance brand safety—a key concern during politically charged periods.
  
• Develop Strong Personalization and Creative Strategies
  Personalizing direct mail is key to maximizing engagement and conversions. While basic tactics like adding a recipient’s name may have limited impact, tailoring offers relevant to the specific needs of each household can significantly boost engagement. For example, offering loyalty rewards or promoting local pickup to save on shipping can make direct mail more enticing. Additionally, tapping into the nostalgic and emotional appeal of the holiday season in your creative strategies can strengthen consumer connection and drive purchasing behavior. As Bollenbacher puts it, “Keep it warm, fuzzy, and cheesy!”
• Hone in on Your First-party Data
  First-party data remains a vital brand asset, especially as third-party data faces increasing scrutiny and regulation. By leveraging first-party data, brands can gain deeper insights into consumer behaviors and optimize their marketing efforts. Retail media networks, which capitalize on this data, are gaining traction to support both retailers’ and brands’ growth objectives. This data-driven approach enables precise targeting and personalization, enhancing overall campaign effectiveness. During a session at AdMonsters Ops titled “Retail Media In-Housing: It’s the New Wave,” speakers stressed how crowded the retail media space has become. To stand out, one strategy for RMNs is to tap into direct mail, a far less crowded medium in RMN.
• Remain Flexible to Keep up With Consumer Habits
  To run effective holiday campaigns, it’s crucial to understand and align with consumer habits. Different industries follow unique seasonal patterns, so your marketing should reflect these trends. For example, gift-giving behaviors ramp up in early Q4 while sectors like home services decline — no one wants to start a home improvement project on Thanksgiving when everyone is focused on eating. Brands can optimize their campaigns by targeting consumers at the right times and revisiting CRM strategies to encourage multiple purchases during the holiday season, boosting lifetime value.
• Understanding Publisher Concerns
  Publishers are facing a host of challenges, with transparency and diversity in advertising being especially critical for niche publishers striving to stay afloat. Media quality verification remains is also a hot topic, with industry experts debating its effectiveness. At Publisher Forum Boston, Claire Atkin from Check My Ads highlighted these issues, calling for ongoing dialogue and efficiency improvements. In this challenging environment, publishers need strong strategies to maintain and strengthen their market positions.

A Worry-free Approach to Surviving Q4

Navigating holiday campaigns during an election year requires a multifaceted approach, balancing digital and traditional channels, and better leveraging first-party data, while understanding consumer habits. 

Brands and agencies must stay agile and prepare for fluctuating ad rates while optimizing strategies to cut through the political and holiday noise. Direct mail offers a stable, effective alternative, and personalized, emotionally resonant creative strategies can drive consumer engagement. Ultimately, a well-rounded, data-driven approach will empower brands to succeed even in the most challenging advertising landscapes.

Don’t sleep on the power of direct mail. To watch the full discussion click here.

The post Deck the Halls With Votes and Direct Mail: Mastering Holiday Campaigns in an Election Year appeared first on AdMonsters.

To date, however, “attention” has been thought of as site placement + ad unit. Should the creative format itself be considered in attention calculations? What is the impact of creative innovation on critical attention metrics, such as brand recall, ad recall, and attention rates? 

To answer these questions, Emodo teamed up with Persuasion.Art to create a new attention metrics methodology, called Creative Attention Effectiveness. This methodology allows advertisers to measure the impact of both ad slots and creative formats on ad effectiveness.

Let’s dig in.

The partners began by testing the effectiveness of animated ads and found they delivered strong performance on key metrics:

Digging deeper, the researchers tested the animated ad format against static units across three different ad sizes. The animated format outperformed static ones across all units.

Next, the researchers tested the impact of creative format by site category, looking at four categories: gaming, news, weather, and productivity properties. 

The chart below shows that animated ads consistently did better on all Attention and Memorability metrics, across the site categories. The highest lifts were seen on brand recall (61.8% lift) and ad recall (56.4% lift) in the News category.

Ad Format vs. Site Selection: Which Affects Campaign Performance More?

Current attention metrics tend to focus solely on the impact of site and ad unit, not the actual ad format. This, according to the researchers, misses a critical opportunity to drive campaign performance with innovative creatives.

The chart shows that site selection had a modest  impact on performance, as there were small variations across site categories:

Next, the researchers compared the best and worst performing creatives and the best and worst performing sites. The results show that creative formats play a critical role in optimizing all metrics.

“Our tests conclusively show that creative has an impact on attention and memorability, often more than site. Optimizing only for ad slots, not creative, is a missed opportunity. While optimizing creative formats boosts performance, the real opportunity to drive Memorability and compound effectiveness lies in a combined optimization of creative and media,” said Megan Saunders, SVP of Global Marketing & Growth at Emodo.

The Connection Between Attention and Memorability 

Finally, the researchers wanted to explore a potential correlation between attention and memorability at an ad and campaign level. Unsurprisingly, the study found that the more time a consumer spent looking at an ad, the greater the likelihood of recalling the brand.

The data showed a consistently positive correlation between attention and memorability at a campaign level. Specifically:

• We see a strong 0.6 correlation between time spent on an ad (attention) and brand recall (a key measure of Memorability) across all 9 tests at the campaign level 
• We also see a 0.52 correlation between attention and ad recall.

This means that by driving attention, advertisers will consistently drive better brand metrics. Even if the lift itself is modest, such as when the creative format is held constant (as the chart above illustrates), it is consistent. When optimizing to creative formats that are more attention-grabbing, however, the lift in recall is far higher.

Learn More

Download the complete report here.

The post Memorability Matters: The Role of Creative Innovation in a Post-cookie World appeared first on AdMonsters.

So what’s the best way to improve user experience and engagement (and by extension ad revenue) in these days and times?

Give them personalized, relevant, and interactive experiences to keep them hanging around and even coming back for more. How about offering them an experience like they’ve never seen or heard before?

Undertone’s High Impact Sound (aka Binaural Sound) provides an immersive, surround-sound experience within High Impact display ads.

It’s a 3D sound effect built into an ad, that is sure to capture the attention of any user who encounters it. But don’t worry, this ad experience is not invasive. In fact, users have to initiate the sound for it to play and there is a mute button included, just in case. Brands can even supply Undertone with individual soundtracks to include in their ads, as long as the audio is client-owned or licensed.

We spoke with Undertone’s President, Daniel Aks to learn more about High Impact Sound, which types of advertisers make the best use cases for the feature, and how it increases the effectiveness of ad campaigns.

Yakira Young: A benefit of High Impact Sound is that it makes High Impact Ad formats even more immersive. How does the feature accomplish this? What makes it “special?”

DA: Adding a thoughtful second sensory experience to users who engage with the ad allows a richer overall experience — as the sounds are carefully considered based on the uniqueness of the creative. 

The sounds allow the audience to picture themselves at the destination — within the experience and bring to life the overall brand message. Normally in ad experiences, people can “passively” view the promotion and then move on — this will help truly engage the audience and make them want to be a part of it. 

YY: With High Impact Sound, how does wearing headphones enhance the experience?

DA: Wearing traditional headphones, Airpods, or any decent quality device can elevate the listening experience for users as it allows the sound to be focused on each ear separately but also together while also blocking out any external sounds. However, the listening experience is extremely immersive without headphones as well and can be enjoyed by using desktop or mobile speakers.

YY: Which categories of advertisers can make the best use of this feature? I know you mentioned that travel/tourism, entertainment, and auto are the industries where you’ve seen the most success. What about these industries has led to High Impact Sound’s success?

DA: There is something unique about Travel & Tourism that takes a user on a journey to a different location. Sounds are unique to an environment that can immediately be identified by conscious and subconscious – think of oceans, forests, auto races, and sports entertainment, for example.

Our high-impact units consistently amplify and showcase the beautiful imagery that our clients have to offer. Adding sound can elevate these experiences, for example allowing users to hear the ocean waves as they browse photos of a beachside resort. Also, sound is energy. Think about how films enhance their gate with fabulous soundtracks, because music powers the mind.

YY: Who are some of your current clients? What companies are currently working with High Impact Sound?

DA: We’re currently working with Space Coast Tourism for an upcoming campaign that will focus on the local activities of watching rocket launches to other beach activities. 

YY: Have you seen any results in the world of DOOH/OOH?

DA: We have not dived into this space (yet),  but it is on our radar as a potential way to stand out in this space. We have zero doubt that closing the promotion loop within home, office and outside promotional messages delivers variability, a key to driving memorability. Message repetition with degrees of variation and environments drives communication effectiveness.

YY: What do you see in the near future for High Impact Sound?

DA: There is emerging research about how sound impacts the brain, and lots of attention is being put into this area. We know that brains “light up” differently depending on audio exposure variations. We see High Impact Sound becoming a popular add-on to our already robust High Impact creative suite. Adding immersive sound like this will help increase attention, and brand recall and give you the ability to connect with your audience like never before.

We think brands will really gravitate towards it and see how it helps them stand out in a cluttered “muted” space. Additionally, as we continue to innovate and explore new advertising mediums as a company, there are future opportunities to expand High Impact Sound into a standalone, impactful audio capability. Finally, well-crafted audio can drive a user to repeat an advertising message if the experience is enjoyable. That would be a huge forward step for advertisers.

To experience a live demo of High Impact Sound click here.

The post Pump it Up: Increase Campaign Effectiveness With Undertone’s High Impact Sound appeared first on AdMonsters.

The challenges are great, and in a recent Think Tank hosted by Celtra, publishers came together and discussed their individual challenges and how to rectify them.

First-party Data and Letting Go

“We sit on a wealth of first-party data, and quite a high percentage of our ad revenue is data enabled,” said one publisher.

“Targeting is heavily utilized. In terms of the intersection of data with creative, there are places where we’ve been really strong and done a really great job, and we’ve had to sort of prioritize what we focus on. We have really strong first-party multicultural data, and we know that our advertisers really needed some guidance about what is the right way to message these audiences: ‘When should I deliver an ad in Spanish versus English? When should I have cultural nuances or words inserted that show the audience that I’m aware of who they are, and they’re more receptive to the message.’ So I would say multicultural is a place where we focused because we saw that there’s a huge opportunity.”

Letting go is hard in all aspects of life; in love, in death, and in business. More times than not, it’s the right call.

“It’s okay, to throw things away,” added another publisher. “I think a lot of times we forget that. It’s fine if you tried a product and you learned from it and now you don’t want to use it, you want to sunset it or phase it out. And I think sometimes it’s easy to say, ‘well, we put so much work into this, so now we have to keep doing it because we spent all this time and money and resources doing it.’ But then you end up supporting too many things and maintaining too many things.

We did that recently. We phased out a pretty big product that just never worked the way we wanted it to work. It was like, okay, we tried and we tried, and it was too hard and too expensive to make it better. And it was disappointing but it was the right move.”

Template Is Not a Bad Word

Everyone wants to feel special, have that custom, unique experience, whether it’s as an individual or a business looking for that “wow” factor. Advertisers can still have that wow factor with the use of templates on the back-end. Templates work, for starters, and they are also easy to set up and ease the burden on an already stretched-thin ad ops department. 

“We try and make sure that the client understands that even though it’s a template,  it’s going to meet their KPIs,” said one attendee. We try to make these templates as simple as possible for clients. And, it’s repeatable. The agency loves it because for some of our units, it’s three assets, video and image and maybe a poster thumbnail and the pixels. And then we can just crank that out. If agencies want to rotate five different titles or five different versions of creative for the same unit, depending on it, we’ll throw it in for them, because it’s so simple to do, and they know exactly what they’re giving us every time.”

“Template can almost be considered a bad word from a sales perspective, because sales wants to sell customized experiences,” added another participant. “Advertisers want to want it to feel custom, want it to feel special.

But on the back end, you can use a template, and the output can still look and feel like it is custom for that advertiser.”

The post Things That Keep Publishers up at Night appeared first on AdMonsters.

In a recent AdMonsters Think Tank hosted by Celtra, publishers shared how they define success, upgrades made through the years, and what works best.

Countless creative options sound great on paper, but when an advertiser is faced with 15, 20, even 30 ad options, choosing what’s best can be overwhelming. 

Less Is More

“We went through this ad product cleanup exercise where we sort of doubled down on what we say is ‘less is more,’” said one publisher. “We’re trying to shift away from standard IAB to more high impact. We adopted a portfolio of close to 30 different formats that we offer, which is too much, to be honest. So the challenge is trying to strike that balance between which ones actually work, and which ones are being well received by clients.”

“And the sellers understand because that’s part of the problem; if you have too much, they get lost,” continued the publisher. “We measure success around interaction, hovers, view time, watch time, time spent, any of those types of stories that we can tell with the formats is what we strive for.”

Another publisher noted the conundrum of making money on the publisher side but ensuring it hits KPIs on the client side. 

“It may be a great ad product from the publisher point of view,” they said. “It sells. It makes a lot of money. But on the flip side, is it doing what it needs to do from the buyer’s KPI? And if their [advertiser’s] goal is bottom of the funnel, maybe it’s not doing what it should do. So how do you judge? I make money and then it’s also good for them because it meets their KPI.”

Programmatic, Programmatic, Programmatic

It may not be sexy, but it brings home the bacon. It’s not automated, it’s not industry standard, it makes life challenging for programmatic teams, but it’s a profitable requirement for publishers.

“We want our advertisers to have a destination, for it to feel natural, but it makes my team’s job harder, as programmatic is not necessarily industry standard,” one publisher said. “But at the end of the day, the programmatic team is driving the bulk of the revenue. And so no matter how much they don’t like it and it doesn’t fit the future vision, it’s a necessity.”

Programmatic creative is having a renaissance of sorts, with more dynamic options available for advertisers. 

“It [creative within programmatic] took a step back initially because it had less features and functionality available for rich media,” chimed one publisher. “We’re starting to climb back out of that. We’re starting to see a lot more rich media being transacted programmatically. And there are many publishers where anywhere between 50 to 100 percent of their revenue comes through programmatic. Now we’re always trying to be thought leaders of what is the next step that we can do within programmatic.”

“There is going to be an evolution of rich media within programmatic,” remarked another publisher.

Less is more seemed to be the resounding response regarding ad product strategy given that so many things must work together harmoniously to succeed and remain seamless.

Shop [in This Ad] ’til You Drop

The pandemic saw the use of store locator functionalities decline significantly and brought an uptick of shoppable ads. Until this format is standardized, feelings about it remain mixed.

“E-commerce has become huge,” one publisher said. “We helped strategize with a lot of our clients that were getting hit because there was no use of location-based data. Once location came back, they now had the shoppable, e-commerce solution and they had a location base. So it’s actually helped with overall growth.”

Another noted that they feel a “little uncomfortable buying something in an ad because [they] work in the industry and see enough going on with malvertising and data leakage.”

“There’s nothing in that [ad] window that says ‘this is a secure buy.’ There’s absolutely nothing. And there’s no way to prove that they’re secure.”

As publishers continue to be seen as trusted spaces, additional data needs to be analyzed to further elevate the need/use for shoppable ads.

“Advertisers like them because they’re interactive, and something different beyond standard, but do they actually work,” concluded one publisher.

The post Evolution of the Ad Product Suite appeared first on AdMonsters.

During our April 22, 2021 webinar, Unlocking a Creative-First Approach to Social Display, Nikki Gertner, Senior Product Manager at Celtra and our own Rob Beeler dug into why publishers should look for more functionality — whether that’s the ability to make content “shoppable” or even just build out time-saving templates — in a social ad solution.

Nikki and Rob also covered a few tips and best practices for how publisher ad teams can turn social content into a premium ad experience that entices both users and advertisers.

Key Takeways:

• The beauty of social display is its ability to mimic the social media experience that both users and advertisers have come to expect: Gorgeous creative with rich functionality, like video, parallax scrolling, and other animations.
• It’s all about the remix: Social posts contain high-performing assets like copy and images that advertisers are eager to repurpose.
• Without the right tools, efforts to resize and otherwise modify social content can be time-consuming for publishers’ ad sales teams (especially teams without in-house designers).
• “Template” doesn’t have to be a dirty word when it comes to social ad creative — in fact, using templates can help streamline workflows and give your team more time to ideate.
• The “half-life” of social content on platforms like IG and Snapchat is short, but using templates that easily port it to the display channel can drive more engagement with that content over time.
• Premium social display experiences feature-rich media capabilities like parallax scrolling and image transitions that encourage interaction.

The post Webinar Replay: Unlocking a Creative-First Approach to Social Display appeared first on AdMonsters.

After twenty years in the game, from getting his start as The New York Times first rich media hire to his latest role as Executive Creative Director, Experience Design at VMLY&R, Geer has developed a knack for seamlessly melding the worlds of story-telling, design, technology, data, and research.

With an eye toward innovating digital advertising, he’ll be sharing actionable takeaways for publishers looking to change the industry in his AdMonsters Publisher Forum Virtual Keynote, “Resolving the Great Disconnect,” on August 25.

We caught up with Geer to learn about how he’s connected the dots between what he learned in his early ad ops days to now being an agency creative and how ad ops is a breeding ground for innovation and the jumping-off point for a range of careers within digital media and advertising. As well, we talked about the importance of diversity and inclusion in advertising.

Lynne d Johnson: So, we heard you just switched shops from your role as SVP and Group Creative Director, Digital Experience and Innovation at TBWA/WorldHealth to Executive Creative Director, Experience Design, VMLY&R. What are you most excited about with this new opportunity?

Walter T. Geer: I think what excites me is the opportunity to go someplace that has been long known as a digital powerhouse and working in the health space. Going over there really gives me the ability to take what I do best, which is innovation and creating compelling experiences for brands and level it up on a scale that I haven’t been able to do before.

For the first time in my career, I’ve actually felt as though the work that I’ve done has made a real impact on people’s lives, and it made me really rethink a lot about how I approach my work, my voice, and my platform to help people of color.

It gives me the opportunity to continue doing that but also being able to work across other brands like New Balance and to really lead the innovation—it’s the best of both worlds.

LdJ: You also worked as an ad ops guy back-in-the-day at a publisher. What from that experience has been most helpful throughout your career? 

WTG: Ad ops folks are the ones who have to get it right 100% of the time, and just one small mistake—they get beat down. People need to realize there’s a benefit to working closely with ad ops because they’re at the forefront of everything.

They truly understand the technology and how things work and how things are delivered, so these are the people you should partner with to actually figure out how to innovate and how to create better and more engaging opportunities. These should be the people that also have a greater insight into what brands should or should not be doing. They should be integrated at a greater level into things like the sales process, the creative process, and innovation. Unfortunately, they aren’t tapped into as much as they should be.

As we move forward with issues of privacy and other things in the space, we’re going to see publishers start doing bigger and better things with inventive solutions. With programmatic, the ad ops role has been kind of diminished but I think we’re going to see that role start to expand more as we go back to this place of leaning on them to build and create more engaging opportunities.

LdJ: And what advice would you give ad ops folks about their career ambitions?

Ad ops is the nucleus of how brands reach people.

WTG: My first job in ad ops was at The New York Times 20 years ago. I was their very first rich media hire when Flash was just starting to jump out and become a thing—like, “Wow, we can use Flash for ads and we can do DHTML overlays.”

That kicked off my career in a great way because it allowed me to gain an understanding of the delivery of ads and understand the technology and how it all works.

That has been the crux of my entire career—ad formats and solutions and deliveries and how this is built out and how do you utilize technology. Now we’ve moved to a place of delivering with data and taking third-party data and finding—I hate to use this term—the right person, right place, right time, and that all sits within ad ops. Ad ops is the nucleus of how brands reach people.

There’s so much opportunity beyond that in terms of going in the direction of a creative technologist on the agency side—being that creative person that understands technologies and how to bring them to life and how to work with different clients in that space. There’s also the data side, now that data has become such a big thing.

It’s an incredible starting point to learn many of the things about this business that not many other people get. There are so many directions you could move to from out of the ad ops world—creative, technology, data. It all starts with the question, “Where do I want to be?” and the opportunities are endless.

LdJ: A couple of years ago, you wrote a now-famous article about being a Black creative—”Tackling the ‘Black Quarterback Problem’ in Advertising.” With all of the light shining on racial injustice right now, have you seen any changes when it comes to inclusivity at agencies? Or maybe even with advertisers?

WTG: I wrote that article about two years ago, and to be 100% honest with you I don’t think that we’ve seen enough change. I think that we are now, as of recent, in a bit of a moment.

But I also feel that for a lot of companies as a whole, it’s about joining in and tagging along with the conversation as opposed to actually doing the work. So the work to me looks like more than just talking about these issues but providing action. Action, when we talk about the agency world, is about your Black leadership. I want to make sure that we have a seat at the table because for so long we have been told to wait our turn to have these opportunities and it’s unfair.

I think that we’ve seen some changes from some agencies and some companies as well, but not at the pace that we saw for things like the #Metoo movement and white women. I want to see change happen that fast.

LdJ: You’ve provided a platform to help agencies in this regard. Can you tell me about the project, DiverseCreatives, you launched with Ron Lewis, VP and Creative Director at McCann Health? What was the impetus behind it and what has been the reception so far?

WTG: It’s funny because we didn’t know each other a little over a year ago. At the same time, we had both been working separately on creating a list of Black creatives. My intent was to find other Black executive leadership on the creative side so that I could network with them. In my entire twenty-year career, I’ve only worked with two Black creatives, and it was in my last job and they worked for me—they were both engineers.

Ron reached out to me and told me he was working on this list and I said, “I’m working on this list too. Let’s put them together and see where we get.” We were both on one another’s lists. At first, we weren’t sure what to do with the list. But now with all of these agencies trying to make moves—and we’re both trying to get other people of color a seat at the table—we kept hearing that talent is so hard to find. Even with our small list of just 80 or 90 people, we knew that wasn’t true.

I did one post on Linkedin asking people to sign up on a Google Doc. From that one post, we got 1,600 people in about four or five days. Within the next week, we launched a site. And we strategically launched the site with press in AdWeek and Forbes, which gave us the opportunity to show all of the recruiters that we’re out here in high numbers. Now we have like 2,271 people on it—we’re getting like 10-to-15 people added every day. I’ve had every agency reach out to me to ask me about it and it’s been filling jobs.

LdJ: Another interesting point that came up earlier was about brands putting their money where their mouths are. With the pandemic and the racial unrest in the world, we’re seeing consumer behavior shift and people are leaning more towards brands that are mission-based or values-based in their messaging. Have you seen this new wave of messaging in your work?

WTG: It’s interesting you brought that up. I think everyone was jumping on the bandwagon with the Black Lives Matters posts and Black Tuesday posts and what we saw happen really quickly is that a lot of these companies got called out. So what we’re seeing people do is taking advantage of the opportunity by going out and making statements but not really doing the work internally. I think it starts internally first before you go externally to show off work of what you think you should be doing.

It’s about creating an environment where your employees feel safe, where your employees feel welcome, where your employees feel they have an opportunity, and where your employees feel that they can succeed.

If you work at a publisher, brand, or agency, you can hear more insights from Geer in his Publisher Forum Virtual Keynote, “Resolving the Great Disconnect,” on August 25. Register now!

The post Walter T. Geer III: Ad Ops is the Nucleus of Digital Advertising appeared first on AdMonsters.

“Media now means comparing prices on the high street, sharing jokes with friends and booking your next holiday, opening up new opportunities for brands to connect with consumers,” said Jonathan Barnard, Head of Forecasting with Zenith.

Mobile ad spend is increasing too, with US advertiser spending on pace to reach two-thirds of their digital budgets this year—of which $16.41 billion is expected to go to mobile video advertising (45.6% of total digital video ad spend).

If you’re thinking it’s time to invest more resources into getting your mobile creative on point, you’re absolutely right. With mobile, it’s really easy to rely on data and targeting strategies to meet business needs instead of creating high-quality mobile ads that truly resonate with audiences.

We spoke with UnSun Lee, VP Global Creative, GroundTruth and learned seven ways mobile advertising could become more interesting, relevant and effective. These seven best practices hold just as true for publishers with their own in-house studios or who develop house or native ads as it does for brands working alongside agency partners—and especially in the realm of programmatic creative.

1. Keep Your File Size and Copy as Light as Possible

Lynne d Johnson: We hear a lot about latency being a killer to user experience (UX) when it comes to mobile advertising, especially once you throw programmatic into the mix. What should publishers and their agency partners focus on to make sure people are paying attention?

UnSun Lee: Mobile user attention span is short—there’s always the risk of distraction and interruptions from the outside world as consumers commute, stand in line, or simply kill time on their phones—so it’s important that your ads load quickly. All publishers prioritize their own content to load first and ads are the last item on a page to load, so it’s important to keep those file sizes small.

Speed is an issue with ad exposure, too. It takes consumers about 400 milliseconds to react to a mobile ad. Are your ads equipped to pique their interest? We know that ads with copy that are five words or fewer perform 67% better when it comes to visitation rates. In other words, keep messages short and sweet and let the visuals do the talking.

 2. Add Images to Increase Engagement

LdJ: So, it looks like less words mean more if agencies and publishers are looking to optimize creative for better performance—and higher engagement. Is that correct?

UL: Yes, that is true. Studies showit only takes 13 milliseconds for our brains to process an image. Neuroscientists at MIT found that subjects were able to see new images “more than 20 times as fast as vision typically absorbs information.”

The right creative image can mean the difference between an ad that’s overlooked and one that incites a consumer. The visuals you choose will, of course, depend on the nature of the messaging and campaign objectives, but one thing’s for sure: Including a human or product image performs 55% higher in visitation rate than not having any image at all.

With this in mind, it’s best to pick a picture that’s more likely to intrigue potential customers.

3. Always Include a Call to Action

LdJ:Given that no one in the industry agrees on how to measure viewability, shouldn’t mobile ad creative do more than just cause a user to look at an ad?

UL: Of course, you’re going to want your users to be engaged with your advertisers’ ads. We all know the value of a strong call to action—yet not all mobile ads include this key component. Featuring a CTA with the words “buy now” improves visitation rate performance by 51% over the average, so depending on what you want the user’s next move to be—watch a video, learn more, and so on—you always need to encourage them to take action. This is something that publishers, advertisers and agencies all need to be thinking about.

4. Spice up Creative With GIF Animations

LdJ:But it’s not always so easy to get people to click on ads nowadays. Are there any special creative tactics that should be considered?

UL:Sure. According to GroundTruth data, adding a subtle GIF animation improves Click-Through Rate (CTR) performance by 25%. What’s more, it boosts visitation rates by 44%. Even a simple animation has what it takes to help your ad stand out.

Just because most mobile ads are simple in nature, that doesn’t mean they have to be boring. Whether you pronounce it “gif” or “jif” — we’ll save an argument about the merits of each for another article — GIF animations should be on your radar during the ad design process.

5. Use Location as a Traffic Driver

LdJ: Everyone knows that one of the greatest advantages that mobile ads have over desktop is location targeting, especially when it comes to driving foot traffic. At GroundTruth, you did some research that highlights how certain creative considerations that use location data prove this, right?

UL: Right, our research shows that including dynamic distance overlay to the nearest store improves visitation rates by 53%, so leveraging that physical data is key for marketing.

When a mobile user is mere steps away from a store that offers products relevant to their current wants and needs, they can make a visit without disrupting their day—and you can make it easier for them by providing directions on the creative.

Create a seamless message by combining the distance overlay with branded copy. For example: “Dinner is just 1.23 miles away.” Be sure to make the font as large as possible too, as this will make it legible at a glance.

6. Deploy Ads at Opportune Times

LdJ: Are mobile ads like social media posts—are there certain times of day when they perform better?

UL: Devising a successful mobile ad campaign isn’t just about what the ad looks like and where it’s placed, but also when it’s received. Our data shows ad engagement is at its highest at 2 PM on Saturdays. This type of information can help you understand the right days and times to run your campaigns. But it’s also important to use logic too.

If you’re trying to help your advertising partner promote Black Friday sales, then you won’t want to wait until the weekend.

7. Target Audiences With Personalized Messages

LdJ: We’ve been hearing a lot of ruminations about the death of the cookie and the rebirth of context. This means that publishers (and advertisers) will have to do a better job at leveraging their first-party data. Also, impending 5G networks will enable greater personalization. What should publishers and agencies be thinking about when it comes to helping their advertising partners with mobile ad personalization?

UL: Well, personalized ads definitely produce results. Recent research shows 44% of consumers will consider switching to a brand that does a better job of personalizing its marketing communications, and 90% say messages that aren’t personalized are “annoying.”

It’s easy enough to create two different versions of an ad that speak to two different audiences, like these examples targeting millennials and parents. Doing so stands to improve response rates and create a more appealing ad experience.

Make Your Mobile Ads Suck Less

Publishers who don’t think of themselves as being in the creative business might think these practices don’t apply to them, but as programmatic becomes the norm, it’s become increasingly important to monitor your mobile ads for content, placement and quality. That is unless you want to turn your users away. The quality and delivery of ad creative have a huge impact on the effectiveness of campaigns, so use these seven best practices to your advantage. Not only will they improve your campaign performance, but your audience will appreciate your more engaging and relevant ads.

The post 7 Best Practices for Better Mobile Ads appeared first on AdMonsters.

Opportunity is knocking. The proliferation of platforms—from mobile to social and even connected TV—has advertisers leaning more on publishers for creative solutions at scale. A solid creative offering can win additional business, drive better ad performance, and improve user experience.

On September 18, 2019, AdMonsters brought together an illustrious panel (Time to Get Creative), featuring Derek Gatts, Vice President, Ad Product, CNN, Katie Spagnuolo, Associate Director, Media Strategy & Distribution, TripAdvisor and Ron Duque, Senior Director, Revenue Operations, GroundTruth, to discuss how to leverage the latest breakthroughs in creative technology, scaling creative development, effectively integrating ad design into workflows, using creative services to up-sell advertisers, smart formats for different platforms, evaluating and optimizing creative performance, transferable skillsets for creative, what to look for in a creative management partner and more. The Meetup was sponsored by Celtra at GroundTruth’s lovely office at 1 World Trade Center.

Following are some of the highlights from the AdMonsters Meetup: Time to Get Creative, Sponsored by Celtra:

Derek Gatts, Vice President, Ad Product CNN

“There are two KPIs in digital media: conversion… and job retention.” #Meetup

— AdMonsters (@AdMonsters) September 18, 2019

In his work with ad products at CNN, Derek Gatts works closely with data intelligence to develop deeper insights that lead to unique ad format capabilities. When it comes to creative trends like AR, he says that one of the challenges for most publishers’ ad products is going after the one-off shiny object, when media companies should start thinking like SAAS companies, bringing things to market in a cohesive way. How can a publisher take something that’s been done in the past and build something unique that specific to an advertiser, KPIs and use cases?

For a large publisher like CNN the transition from scale to quality isn’t an easy one, but the road there includes looking more closely at what users are doing—looking at positive attributes from social like FB and Twitter as an example in terms of how they develop an ecosystem around what the user is doing on their platforms. CNN is looking at what signals they can create in relation to how users interact with advertising that can allow the publisher to serve users better, perhaps through content recommendations or ad creative. “It should be less about assets and more about ‘I know this is how this user engages with this type of format,'” he said.

We have to examine our data in terms of the experience in our entire environment—just like the social platforms we sneer at/envy. The creative affects the ads/the ads effect the creative. #Meetup

— AdMonsters (@AdMonsters) September 18, 2019

Katie Spagnuolo, Associate Director, Media Strategy & Distribution, TripAdvisor

Do you have to worry about the creepiness factor in data-driven creative? Oh yes—it’s a balance between personalized vs stalking. A/B testing can be extremely helpful in drawing that line. #Meetup @CeltraMobile

— AdMonsters (@AdMonsters) September 18, 2019

As the Associate Director, Media Strategy & Distribution at TripAdvisor, Katie is tasked with managing and further developing their platform monetization fueled by data. She’s looking at leveraging first-party data, creating audience extensions to target users even when they’re offsite, and most important, making sure creative is relevant.

“Travel planning is complex,” she said, “There are multiple touchpoints. We want to make sure we’re engaging users in their travel planning by following their consumer journey.” For TripAdvisor it’s about providing that extra value to clients with dynamic creative that pulls in data and personalizes messaging. Advertisers rely on the trust the brand has built amongst their audience and then leverages their voice when it comes to creative. “We look at how we can take what’s core to TripAdvisor like ratings and reviews and incorporate those elements into their messages so that its authentic to their brand,” she explained.

When it comes to workflows and processes, TripAdvisor has a Core Experiences Team that works across the organization to ensure that everyone isn’t working in silos. A program will have a consistent pre-sale, KPIs will be known, and creative needs will be holistically met. The processes are streamlined to provide triggers across the journey of the program from pre-sale to flight to post.
 

Ron Duque, Senior Director, Revenue Operations, GroundTruth

“It’s not about creative that’s in your face—it’s about personalization and relevant to context.”

— AdMonsters (@AdMonsters) September 18, 2019

Ron Duque and GroundTruth fuel a lot of what makes weather app WeatherBug work. Everything about the app (and by extension advertising in-app) has to be relevant to location and weather. Location is a very important ingredient in the creative process.

Latency is a big challenge for mobile in-app advertising. “We were at 9 seconds, then we got it down to 4 seconds, now we need to get it down to half of that. We needed to find the technology and partners who could help us reduce latency and better service consumers so they don’t get pissed off,” he said. It’s hard to find that in the header space with a rich media company who can help you accelerate your tech and offerings.

The company has a consumer-first philosophy and Ron and his team are even willing to pushback on sales. “We’re being very strategic in what we show people. It can’t be intrusive. We have to think like them and ask ourselves, ‘Is this something I want to see?’
 

Interesting question about whether publisher (particularly ad tech team) can get more involved in the storytelling element of creative—where do the performance metrics fit? @AdMonsters @CeltraMobile #meetup

— Gavin Dunaway (@AdMonsterGavin) September 18, 2019

 
All three speakers talked extensively about how important it was to have a creative management partner that works seamlessly with you like Celtra to provide effective and efficient cross-channel creative workflows, powered by data and analytics, as well as the ability to deliver dynamic creative, at scale across the entire media plan, in real-time and connect creative to media, measurement and data infrastructure to bring about adops simplification and value enhancement of the tech stack.

The post Meetup Debrief: It’s Time to Get Creative appeared first on AdMonsters.

Digiday’s “Confessions” series most recently brought us a chat with a programmatic buyer at an ad agency. For publishers who fret over how much valuable data they’re losing to wily buy-siders, this more or less confirms several of their fears. The buyer explained how they’re able to pick up publisher data from ad exchanges, without paying the publishers directly. Pubs are selling this data about their users to ad tech partners as it is. Then, says the buyer, “we can buy a few impressions [from exchanges], and layer over some third-party data we purchase from Acxiom or Oracle to build our own audience segments that we would pay publishers a big premium for if they had better control over their data and sold this information to advertisers directly.”

The buyer also gave an example of how there are consumer-facing publications with substantial B2B audiences, but those pubs don’t separate the B2B audience as such, leaving a valuable opportunity on the table. Instead of going to a B2B pub that charges high CPMs, the agency will pinch data from the exchanges, build lookalike models and go back and buy inventory to reach that B2B audience on the cheap.

Sure, third-party data can be less than reliable, but it allows buy-side companies to build these audience segments—if the segments test well, they’ll often perform well. And the source says publishers act this way at least as much out of habit as out of wariness about the cost of tech investment: “If publishers put as much effort into getting their data in order that they do in taking 25-year-old media buyers to lunch, they would figure this stuff out.” So have pubs lost the data leakage war? We keep saying there are opportunities for publishers to monetize data in itself, but why should marketers pony up when they can get what they need with some cheap data and some improvisation?

YouTube Aims to Trim the Long Tail

The brand safety discussion is spreading out: Nothing says “long-tail” quite like the UGC free-for-all that is YouTube, but now controls are tightening up in the more “premium”-ish corners of YouTube. The platform is going to have humans review video content on popular channels to make sure it’s “ad-friendly.” Not all video content, let’s note—just channels marked as “Google Preferred.”

And there are new requirements for video creators to join the YouTube Partner Program, which gives vloggers and other video creators tools for promoting their videos and revenue shares from advertising. Those video creators now need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours’ worth of views over a one-year period, in order to join YPP. Previously, they had just needed 10,000 views, since whatever date they had started their channel.

While some vloggers are up in arms that this could dramatically impact their ability to monetize their content, YouTube execs suggested few would notice much of a change. They said that of the video creators who would be demoted from YPP, the overwhelming majority had been pulling in less than $100 per year anyway. So is this about optics, mollifying marketers while they recognize they should be looking out for brand safety? Maybe it is, but it’ll likely do the trick, until the next hot-button issue manifests.

Roku Adds a Measurement Platform

Roku launched a new service, Ad Insights, for advertisers to measure OTT campaign performance on Roku’s media and its network of apps. AdExchanger explained Roku’s gets its measurement intel from its first-party registration data, plus data about streaming behavior collected via pixels and automatic content recognition, plus survey data from Ad Insights that Roku says that gives them “real-time” capabilities to measure campaign performance. AdEx reported the measurement capabilities also get a boost from Roku-supported measurement vendors. The measurement platform serves to help gauge performance on a host of brand metrics of importance to its big brand advertisers.

Report: Video Ad Campaign Activation Is Harder, Slower Than It Has to Be

This should be surprising to approximately no one, but research conducted by Advertiser Perceptions for Extreme Reach finds “friction” in the activation of video ad campaigns. This study surveyed 150 video ad ops people at agencies, and found “insufficient lead time, lengthy searches for appropriate assets and overwhelming variety of specs/formats required by media plan participants” are common issues. A whole 93% of those ops professionals said they have problems getting creative assets sourced and readied for video campaigns, and over half said those problems lead to campaigns launching later than scheduled.

The respondents found campaign activation to be really manual, and they don’t think clients understand the workflow involved. (The executive summary says workflow is “years behind” media buying capabilities.) The catch is, as the report says, we have the technology to make workflow easier by managing creative assets efficiently, but the tech hasn’t picked up steam with video. In short: Multi-platform, multi-screen video campaigns are hard, and the creative, which is the thing that makes it all possible, is often considered late in the game. Or, to put it another way, video campaigns are having problems because stakeholders sometimes aren’t anticipating the problems everyone already knows to be problems.

Report: Measurement, Transparency, Fraud Top Programmatic Media Buyers’ Concerns

Worth mentioning this one, even though we shouldn’t need to elaborate on it: Research firm London Research, working in conjunction with media agency Truth, surveyed media buyers and found 49% considered “lack of consistent measurement/metrics” a concern in programmatic. Other major concerns included “lack of agency transparency” (42%), “lack of visibility on third parties” (39%) and ad fraud (37%). But those media buyers are still gung ho on programmatic because it allows them to reach their target audiences at scale and with an ROI they’re on board with. Right—just want to say, these are common enough discussion points at AdMonsters events, so buyers and sellers alike are trying to sort this out. They ought to seize opportunities to get in the same room to sort it out, though.

TAG Requires Ads.txt for Anti-Fraud Verification

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) now says publishers must implement ads.txt if they want to receive verification for being”certified against fraud.” Ads.txt, ramping up in adoption over the last several months, can dig in its heels a little deeper with this statement. Google already had said they would require publishers to implement ads.txt in order to support their ad deals on its exchange.

But there’s been pushback from publishers. Many aren’t clear what they stand to gain after putting in the hours and the resources required to meet TAG’s guidelines. Let’s remember what Rob Beeler wrote on that subject not too long ago: “Part of the pushback on TAG by ad operations has been the fact that it’s not a technical solution, which is understandable. Ads.txt and now ads.txt Plus, while simple, does allow for buying platforms to automatically select ads.txt-enabled publishers to be considered. TAG does none of that. What it does is give brands and agencies a choice of selecting solutions and publishers that agree to the same approach to reducing fraud. That alone is a step forward.”

The post Data Leakage Is Real, Video Ad Activation Is Complicated appeared first on AdMonsters.