AdMonsters webinars are available on-demand, so you can view them any time, on your own schedule. 2021 webinars covered the most pressing issues facing the digital media and advertising industry, from developing a scalable first-party data strategy to identity solutions and cookie replacements to OTT and CTV privacy controls to maximizing revenue in email plus more.

Give yourself a professional edge, tune into an AdMonsters Webinar On-Demand Now! Or, maybe later.

OTT & CTV Privacy Controls: Activating Choice & Transparency in Apps

The shift to OTT and CTV creates an opportunity for publishers to engage a growing audience and deliver personalized experiences – and that includes privacy controls. Tegna is on the path to providing that transparency and choice with their OTT audience. In this webinar, Chris Fehrmann, Tegna VP of Digital Products, and Alex Cash, OneTrust Consent and Preference Management Lead talked about how your team can deliver personalization, and build trust within your streaming app. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

Unlocking a Creative-First Approach to Social Display

As alternative ways to distribute social content become increasingly important, publishers are offering solutions to help brands take their social creative and run it across publisher inventory with Social Display. Celtra Senior Product Marketing Manager Nikki Gartner discussed how to apply creative effects to Social Display and showcase new workflows that allow even non-designers across account and sales teams to build and activate Social Display with no coding or design experience. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to turn Social Display content into a premium ad experience. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

How Top Publishers are Using VRM to Prep for UIDs, FLoCs and Revenue in a Cookieless Future

With all the uncertainty about the cookieless future, as a publisher, there’s really only one way to future-proof your business: grow relationships with your visitors. There is no single “silver bullet” technology — whether it’s Universal IDs, FLoCs or subscriptions — that will save publisher revenue and jobs in a post-cookie world. Join Dan Rua, CEO, Admiral, as he speaks with Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech, Arvid Tchivzhel, GM Digital, Mather Economics, Kevin Cooper, SVP, Digital, Boone Newspapers, and Derek Nicol, VP, Advertising Technologies, ViacomCBS about two visitor-first publisher efforts that should be your primary focus right now, in preparation for the uncertainty of 2022. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

Identity is a Team Sport: How Publishers & Marketers Can Move Beyond the Cookie Together

How are marketers and publishers preparing for a post-cookie world? Lotame commissioned a survey of over 1,000 marketers and publishers across the globe to find out. In this webinar, Alexandra Theriault, Lotame’s Chief Customer Officer, presented key survey findings from “Beyond the Cookie: The Future of Advertising for Marketers & Publishers” to set a baseline for our live case study discussion. Alexandra was joined by Advance Local and Rush Street to walk through how they’re actively implementing and testing identity solutions, and what they’ve learned along the way. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

Personalization & Privacy: Your Third-Party Cookie Replacement Game Plan

Chrome’s delayed cookie deprecation may bring a sigh of relief, but other browsers like Safari and Firefox already implemented blocking third-party tracking cookies, further emphasizing that it’s never too early to start planning for when third-party cookies are totally gone. It’s important to understand how the deprecation of third-party cookies could impact your website. This way, you can make the necessary changes before third-party cookies phase out completely. In this webinar Arshdeep Sood, Solutions Engineer at OneTrust, explains why it’s important to ensure that you have a CMP in place to adhere to regulatory guidelines now — while cookies are still around. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

How Pubs Are Increasing Revenue While Delivering Premium Ad Experiences in Email

By leveraging your first-party audience data, you can build a scalable ad sales program around premium ad packages. Publishers know that advertisers will pay more for premium ad experiences as they drive better engagement, and Sandow Media has seen the results. They’ve streamlined workflows while delivering dynamic ads with more granular targeting and personalization. And with fewer banner ads, the newsletter reader experience has dramatically improved. Jessica Munoz, SVP Product Marketing & GTM Strategy, Liveintent, and Bobby Bonett, VP Digital, Sandow explain how you can use Liveintent’s Native Ad Blueprints in your email newsletter program to improve operational efficiency, improve ad experiences, increase revenue and engagement. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

No Third-party Cookies, No Problem: Ranker on First-party Data in a Privacy-safe World

The need for first-party data is creating a shift in power towards publishers. Why? Because publishers have a direct relationship with their readers, giving them access to unique insights about audiences that advertisers crave. In this webinar, Lynne d Johnson, Senior Editor, AdMonsters, converses with Dana OMalley, National VP of Sales at Ranker & Lauren Kroll, Customer Success Manager, Permutive, as they dive into the goldmine that is publishers’ first-party data and why it’s so powerful. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

The post AdMonsters 2021 Webinar Replay Roundup 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.

That’s because as publishers, platforms and marketers try to figure out how to move beyond third-party cookies, the realization is that doing it together — and coming up with solutions that benefit each segment of the value chain somewhat equally — is the only sustainable way forward.

This theme of collaboration and collective ingenuity came up during a Think Tank we recently hosted with Celtra. 

Even before the cookie started to crumble, the pandemic pressured publishers to deliver eyeballs and results, and for many, that meant creating unique, outside-of-the-box ad experiences. But not all publishers have fully-staffed creative services divisions, nor is every ad ops team equipped to traffic (or track) custom campaigns in a scalable way. 

So over the course of 2020, revenue and ad ops leads increasingly found themselves needing to collaborate with new contacts within brands and agencies. They also had to come up with hacks and lean on solution providers to help create engaging ad experiences that enticed users (and drove performance). And as we continue to emerge from the post-pandemic haze (and ride out the cookiepocalypse) there are a few changes publishers expect to continue: 

1. Operational challenges on the buy-side have created windows of opportunity for publishers to innovate (and collaborate).

Hiring freezes, furloughs and layoffs meant that brand and agency teams were smaller and got tasked with doing more. For some publishers, that made the creative review process a little more challenging: 

“We [had situations where] we’d be reaching out to one person for creative approval and they were no longer there. So we had to start the process again with a whole other round of people with different preferences and points of view …” 

That created delays in getting campaigns out the door in a streamlined manner. 

“We’d have a C-suite level person taking over for someone more junior that had been in the weeds and knew more about the project, and that was a challenge.” 

Other companies leveraged these staffing shortages to bring more business in-house. 

“[As of Q3 and Q4] the agencies were back, but they weren’t necessarily full-staffed anymore. So they’d say ‘we want to get this campaign running again,’ and we’d ask for the creative and they’d say ‘Oh, that person isn’t back to work yet, or they’re furloughed’ … And that allowed us to come in and say, ‘Ok, let us help you. We can create these things for you.” 

“Suddenly, these departments were quite open to having conversations about creative … And because [custom] creative doesn’t really work well when they just send us an asset or an idea, we definitely saw an increase in the kinds of tasks around [designing and developing] creative for our clients.” 

2. Advertisers are more willing to use publishers’ content (and context) for creative inspiration.

In the era of pandemic-driven creative collaboration, publishers saw more interest in pulling inspiration directly from their content. 

“We saw an increase [in advertisers] wanting campaigns modeled after things the newsroom was doing,” said one news-centric publisher. “Early on in the pandemic we had an animated explainer about flattening the curve, and then we got lots of requests for [campaigns like that] because the newsroom was doing it so well. So, it wasn’t a ‘net new’ creative experience, just one we hadn’t had much desire for from advertisers in the past.” 

There was a more direct desire from customers to [create ad experiences] that replicate what they saw in terms of content, and that was a benefit because by helping them build the creative, we were also able to help tell the story contextually.

“There was a more direct desire from customers to [create ad experiences] that replicate what they saw in terms of content, and that was a benefit because by helping them build the creative, we were also able to help tell the story contextually,” added another pub. 

“There was definitely a pivot because we do a lot of branded content and a lot of video for our clients,” said one publisher. “And there was a pause [in physical production] so we got to do things like stop motion animation that we’d never been able to do before.”  

3. Make it cool … but make it measurable, too. 

Yet in addition to ingenuity, brands are asking for more granular metrics. 

“It definitely seemed like clients were asking for more and different things with a simple campaign, where in the past, it might have been a particularly easy sale,” said one pub. “Now, suddenly there were more reporting requirements. More requests for different metrics, more requests for tracking.” 

“If someone asks us for a custom experience [and we’re able to build it], we do it,” said one publisher. “But then the reporting part is where we often find ourselves in a bit of a challenge. And we’re very transparent with our partners to say ‘we can build this and figure out how to make it beautiful, but sometimes with reporting there are limitations.”

I'd say one of our biggest challenges is how to build something beautiful but also provide a bunch of different kinds of metrics that the client needs to determine that it was a success.

“I’d say one of our biggest challenges is how to build something beautiful but also provide a bunch of different kinds of metrics that the client needs to determine that it was a success.” 

For some pubs, delivering those results means having a conversation with the client about exactly what kinds of metrics would align with the audience (and the ad unit itself): 

“I think one of the biggest things that we’re constantly battling — especially with our metrics that we pull from Gen Z and how they react to ads — is being able to find ways to make ads more interesting and interactive, without having it scream ‘this is an ad’,” said one publisher. “That requires having a conversation though, about how to measure the interactive features in a way that’s not just clicks or view throughs.” 

4. Enabling e-commerce is now table stakes. 

Creatives that can drive in-store traffic have always been in high demand for retail advertisers, but post-pandemic, being able to drive e-commerce purchases is just as important. 

“We saw a huge spike in people strategizing how they could shift the ‘drive to store’ kinds of campaigns to e-commerce and ‘shop now’ ad formats,” said one pub. “And it was really collaborative for us, in terms of the buyer wanting to shape the experience and help us craft an ad that gots the same cost-per-interaction (CPI) in an online shopping environment.” 

Another publisher agreed. “We already had shoppable ad formats, so it was an easy transition. Where the growth came from was our customer success managers sharing this info with clients that weren’t already using them. So it drove a different kind of internal collaboration …  we had the account management team working with ad ops and sales to help craft these more compelling pitches around our e-commerce capabilities.” 

What the discussion revealed is that for many publishers, the pandemic forced their teams to develop a new level of creative agility, as well as a broader sense of collaboration (both internally and externally). And there are signs that, in a post-pandemic, post-cookie world, advertisers will continue to look for media partners that can collaborate, pivot, and help develop distinct, but scalable ad experiences. 

The post Amidst the Cookiepocalypse, Creative Agility Can Be a Rev Team’s Secret Weapon 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.

So how can publishers help advertisers maximize their existing content while offering them trusted inventory to advertise on? As alternative ways to distribute social content become more important, publishers are now offering solutions that help brands take their social creative and run it across publisher inventory with Social Display.

In preparation for our upcoming webinar, Unlocking a Creative-First Approach to Social Display, on Thursday, April 22 @ 1 PM EST (Register now!), AdMonsters Advisory Board Chairman, Rob Beeler, spoke with Nikki Gertner, Senior Product Manager, Celtra, about monetizing an advertiser’s content from social media, having a range of ad product templates in your arsenal to leverage an advertiser’s social content, and how to stand out from your competition by offering creative services.

Rob Beeler: Are publishers missing an opportunity to monetize an advertiser’s content from social media?

Nikki Gertner: If a publisher does not offer any kind of ad product that can meet a social distribution KPI, then they are absolutely missing out on an opportunity. It takes a lot of resources on the publisher side to come up with new and innovative ad products. Researching client KPIs, prototyping an idea, building a template, A/B testing, etc. You could dedicate an entire team to this, but with Social Display the majority of that ideation work is already complete. It’s just a matter of getting your hands on the right assets, and how publishers can stand out from the competition by offering creative services to advertisers.

RB: It seems to me with so many different social platforms, it would be complicated to build ad products that can distribute content for each. How can publishers manage all these specifications?

The post How Pubs Can Monetize Advertisers’ Content From Social Media appeared first on AdMonsters.

One way we did this back in June was to virtually recreate Publisher Forum Wednesday Workshops, where we let the attendees “take over” the conference. Three publisher revenue specialists led discussions on getting started with Google Data Studio; workflow hacks; and programmatic video and we published the takeaways here.

Another thing we did is make our Think Tank sessions from PubForum virtual. It’s where we bring together groups of 10-12 director-level-and-up ad ops and rev ops folks for intimate hourlong discussions on a specific topic like consent management, first-party data, and top of everyone’s minds—how to survive the pandemic.

Thanks to the following sponsors for making these happen: DV Publisher Suite, DanAds, Advendio, OneTrust, Permutive, Celtra, and Sovrn.

Below is a summarized list leading to 10 longer executive summaries we captured from those conversations.

10 Thought-provoking Publisher Revenue Think Tank Takeaways

1. Brand Safety: Tools Will Drive Transparency As fun as it is to joke about blocklists, if we’ve learned anything over the past few months, it’s time publishers stop complaining and laughing over brand safety horror stories. We need tools to get the transparency we need—and truly connect with our counterparts on the buy-side when it comes to brand safety. Read more.
2. Pubs Extol the Upside of the Pandemic It probably doesn’t seem like there would be an upside to the pandemic for pubs, but when most office employers told their employees to work-from-home following the government-sanctioned stay-at-home orders, publishers briskly began developing revenue diversification strategies and soon realized that with just a few minor adjustments they could actually be highly productive and more efficient. This, even with the challenges that come with mixing the worlds of work and home. Read more.
3. Media Quality Measurement: Finding Harmony With the Buy Side Instead of complaining about the injustice of it all, this Think Tank had been assembled to develop best practices for easing tensions over brand safety, viewability, and invalid traffic measurement—the key elements of media quality. In discussing their challenges, the publishers in the room realized they needed better avenues to communicate brand safety best practices on a site-level or even campaign basis to advertisers, as well as tools to manage fragmented data coming in from a host of media quality vendors.
4. You Gotta Sell Self-Serve “Build it and they will come” isn’t going to work for many publishers. Yes, you want that storefront open for someone to buy on their own. But if you’re looking for real revenue gains, self-serve is something you have to sell. Read more.
5. The Next Phase of Consent We’re now at a stage in the consent management and communication game where pubs can rebuild and strengthen their relationships with their audiences. Why would a publisher only ask for consent for regulatory compliance when they have a prime opportunity to educate customers about the services provided in exchange for data? Read more.
6. First-Party Data Transformation: Driving Cultural Change As damaging as COVID-19 has been to publishers’ revenues, it has presented them with an opportunity to rethink their business models with a focus on building their first-party data strategies. Publishers are finding themselves in a new world that’s been accelerated by the pandemic, as well as privacy regulations granting consumers more control over their data—and the deprecation of the third-party cookie and IDFA. Read more.
7. Pandemic Pushes Self-Service Ad Platform Adoption Forward It was slow starting for the self-service ad platform, as buyers were hellbent on using exchanges to cherry-pick their inventory. If buyers could find a seller’s inventory on the open markets, and often for a cheaper price, why would they choose to go to a pub directly? But 2020 is a very different marketplace, largely shaped by how the global Coronavirus pandemic has altered the landscape. In particular, publishers’ sales teams have been focusing on big buys, leaving the occasional smaller buy on the table. Self-service tech is growing as a preferred brand-safe option for capturing that smaller spend, even with thousands of dollars now getting tossed to self-service ad platforms. Read more.
8. How the Pandemic Got Ad Ops and Sales to Cozy Up Since the pandemic, the relationship between ad ops and sales has become far more collaborative. Now, the two teams are coming together to rethink and revise their processes, client approaches and even their workflows—and often they’re leveraging automation technology to maximize efficiencies.We recently chatted with publishers—at a Think Tank supported by ADvendio—about the transformation happening within their organizations as a result of the pandemic and how it’s impacting the overall sales process. Read more.
9. Publishers Prep Post-Pandemic Ad Product Evolution As pubs ruminated about how the Pandemic has changed their operations, they also talked about this juncture as a time for being more flexible with advertisers and empathetic to the uncertainty occurring in the marketplace. It’s also a time, they said, for presenting big ideas that win RFPs and deliver on advertisers’ KPIs, with scalability in mind. Read more.
10. Pubs Want More Financial Assurances From SSPs As we get deeper into Q4, we’re starting to experience a rebound but publishers are still concerned about payments nonetheless. Pubs are looking for assurances (and insurance) from their SSP partners that they won’t be the ones left holding the bag when there’s a default somewhere along the chain that links the relationship between advertiser and publisher. Read more.

The post 10 Thought-Provoking Publisher Revenue Think Tank Takeaways appeared first on AdMonsters.

For now, they’re living in the era of the pivot, where the most promising path to revenue stabilization is to become a more nimble, creative, and collaborative publisher. One who is willing to make data the central focus of their sales strategy, while finding that happy medium between users’ and advertisers’ needs. 

In the ad spend downturn—of Q1, Q2, and partially into Q3—publishers found the opportune moment to get their houses in order and started streamlining processes to better prepare for what comes next.

These were some of the big themes we heard coming from publishers at one of our recent Think Tank roundtable meetings, hosted by Celtra. 

As they ruminated about how the Pandemic has changed their operations, they also talked about this juncture as a time for being more flexible with advertisers and empathetic to the uncertainty occurring in the marketplace. It’s also a time, they said, for presenting big ideas that win RFPs and deliver on advertisers’ KPIs, with scalability in mind.

Flexibility is the Name of the Game

For the publishers we spoke with, collaborative approaches to working with advertisers have not only afforded buyers flexibility in modifying creative or messaging but also in adjusting optimization strategies and budgets.

“Budgets are changing so quickly and strategies are changing so quickly. This is not just from an ad products standpoint, but from an overall strategy standpoint of how we’re presenting to clients,” said one publisher. “We just need to be ready to be as flexible as possible. We’re noticing that now there’s a bit more need for that, as they’re asking for one thing one day and then when you present it they’ve already changed their minds on what they think they want to do.”

Overall, publishers have found that in times of Corona the biggest difference in working with clients is having to become more agile with package creation, which also means being less rigid with their processes. 

For instance, a local news publisher talked about how crazily things were shifting during the election cycle, especially in battleground states. In just hours or minutes, political advertisers were asking for major overhauls to their campaigns—whether it was their budgets, targeting data or creative.

“It was bananas. We’d get updates from the client saying, ‘Hey, you remember that thing we sent you 30 minutes ago? We actually need to make a change to that,’” the publisher shared. 

Can’t you just picture publishers scrambling to make these adjustments at the last minute, on the fly? It’s sort of like being in the ninth inning with the bases loaded and having to change the batting lineup because you need a batter who can hit a home run and not one who’s only going to hit a triple.

It’s worth noting, that when these rapid-fire changes are happening at the last minute and huge budgets are at stake, publishers aren’t willing to throw an error in the play and add friction to the process.

It’s also gotta be a two-way street. Buyers need to provide pubs with similar kinds of leverage when the pubs need to move things around fluidly.

“That will have a lot to do with the relationships with the sales reps and the specific clients. When we do have those relationships in place, we see they’re being more flexible with us as well and maybe giving us a little more time to go back to the drawing board,” explained one publisher.

Renewed RFP Processes and Workflows

With the slowdown, an enormous dark cloud hovered over publishers’ revenues. If there was any sunshine to be found, it came in the form of time—time allowing them to rejigger their RFP processes and workflows. 

Along with the Coronavirus, 2020 ushered in days and nights of racial unrest, and with it came advertisers attempting to address diversity and inclusion in their messaging. Some publishers have definitely begun to include more offerings that focus on diversity and inclusion to align with brands’ new focus in messaging. 

In the OTT and CTV world, on the other hand, one of the biggest pain points for advertisers resulted from the challenges of combining data segments with measurement and frequency caps. Because of this, publishers are learning to go heavy on that information in their RFP responses.

As publishers begin to streamline the RFP process, as well as new product launches, they’re looking at the RFPs coming in and figuring out where the gaps are where new products can be created to scale. A few publishers are slowing down their process entirely to collaborate more closely with advertisers and ensure that new ad products are developed really well and built to succeed and meet advertiser KPIs.

Data Driving Change

Overall strategies for building new ad products are also being reconfigured, as publishers tap into their data to focus on building out unique offerings. 

Some publishers told us that they’re expanding their market research efforts and creating surveys on the fly in response to RFPs, while others talked about working with their data teams to pull together data stories about what matters most to the brand. With data at the center of their strategy, publishers are building ad products that stand out from the norm. 

On the whole, publishers are slowly moving away from third-party data sets and putting more value into their first-party data and what it tells them about what users are doing on their properties based on contextual and keyword tags, as well as semantic targeting.

“We’re doing interesting things with geo-targeting, first-party data and contextual data and that’s where we’re headed in the next couple of quarters,” reported one publisher.

With an eye toward improving their products, another publisher is using this time to look for errors in their log-level data in real-time to see what that data can tell them about how to improve their ad products and ad engagement. 

The increase in consumer consumption, driven by stay-at-home orders, led one publisher to uncover errors in their analytics platform. Leveraging the data, the pub really dove in to understand how they could fix things with their programmatic partners. After lots of A/B testing for engagement, the publisher was able to determine the best mix for users and how it would impact consumption.

Another pub, using similar dashboards, broke down errors by partner, content and distribution platform to nail down any issues. “That’s probably the most impactful thing we’ve done as far as solving user-experience issues and driving more impressions through programmatic buyers,” the publisher exclaimed.

Can Ad Products and User Experience Just Get Along?

Traditionally at odds, the relationship between UX teams and ad ops is very complex. From a UX standpoint, too many ads could distract the user’s experience. Meanwhile, ad ops has the goal of monetizing traffic, which often happens at the cost of user experience.

But new ways of thinking are emerging within publisher organizations. Pubs feel it’s high time the industry stops thinking about the ad product as secondary to the content. 

“We need to find meaningful ways as we’re redesigning our apps and sites to incorporate the ad, not as secondary but as part of the content experience, and try to move away from just adding more ads to a page,” shared one publisher.

Pubs are starting to find their voice in their relationships with advertisers and pushing back on executions that won’t work for the user—and ultimately won’t perform for the advertiser. 

That kind of publisher-advertiser relationship takes into account what the advertiser really wants to accomplish and how it best aligns with the products and solutions that the publisher knows will resonate with their audiences. 

Executions that drive inspiration, like shoppable ad units or high-impact ads that build an emotional connection or even native executions that place the brand in the context of the vertical that the publisher is all about—and that the user has an affinity for.

This is a future that many publishers are building right now—a future where ad product and product are one cohesive entity. It’s where advertisers’ creative messaging blends seamlessly into the overall experience, while also standing out for being unique to the advertisers’ brand. In this enviable future, data will be the glue that brings it all together.

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Mobile advertising – What are some of the biggest challenges?

The biggest challenge of mobile advertising is creating great mobile ads, or from a higher perspective, creating great mobile campaigns.

That is not necessarily the challenge where the industry is spending most of its time and resources today. We are all still dealing with  numerous technical hurdles to enable mobile advertising campaigns. The good news is that the industry has come a long way since the introduction of HTML5, and is moving towards standardization, which will fully happen within the next 12 – 18 months.  

The next big challenge is to move mobile advertising beyond the imitation of online advertising by leveraging its advantages – mobility and physicality. Ads need to improve from a relevancy and user experience perspective. For instance, we are developing location-sensitive ads, which display relevant content based on location in real-time – this means we are leveraging the advantage of mobility to improve relevancy. Physicality is another advantage, which needs to be leveraged in a better way than just for shakable ads. There’s a lot of room for innovation in this area.

Do you think that standardization of mobile SDKs will happen in the near future? What do you think would be the impact?

Absolutely, this is not questionable at all. It is already happening with the IAB’s first release of the MRAID standard.

Mobile industry stakeholders are working together to standardize SDKs.  A lack of standards has made it difficult for brands to build and run rich media ad campaigns across different ad networks and mobile platforms at scale.  The challenge with multiple SDKs is that ads for one ad network may not work on another. Plus, it limits the reach of the advertiser’s creative and effectively slows the growth of mobile advertising. SDK standardization will enormously simplify ad creation and trafficking for advertisers and publishers. Much of the current work that is necessary due to the technical challenges will be eliminated. This will have a huge impact on the industry and the entire value chain. Mobile advertising enablers will need to provide the value beyond SDK integrations.

What impact will HTML5 have on the future of mobile advertising?

HTML5 helped to bring the brand advertisers to mobile, and the potential moving forward is massive.

Already, HTML5 has demonstrated that it can do amazing things with mobile ads. HTML5 mobile ads engage consumers with video, games, social media and dynamic content based on location or weather.  Additionally, it works across iOS and Android devices, so there is no need to develop for specific platforms. Nearly every mobile rich media ad in the marketplace is now built with HTML5.  

Now and in the future, advertisers will continue using HTML5 to build more sophisticated and dynamic ads, providing an even more immersive user experience. For example, a major hotel chain recently introduced a campaign targeting consumers based on location and current weather conditions. Rich media providers are leveraging HTML5 to introduce more advanced ad formats and features that will create a bigger mobile advertising pie for all.

Improving ROI for mobile ad campaigns is a top priority for marketers.  What options are there for them to increase performance?

ROI is difficult to measure when it comes to branding campaigns.

My recommendation to the advertisers is to make better ads by defining clear goals, and leveraging the unique capabilities of mobile devices. The first step is to define what you want to achieve and how you can best leverage mobile. Don’t do things just because they are possible. Mobile advertising, in its essence, is like any other type of advertising—its main purpose is to achieve your brand and marketing goals. Effective ads create and communicate the brand’s value and make it relevant for consumers. 

Lastly, determine which mobile ad formats and features will drive the desired results. People want to purchase, research, discuss, and interact with brands and their products. Expandable ads with video provide extra information so users can satisfy their research goals. Sharing via social media and gaming encourage users to spend quality time engaging with the brand. Capabilities like swiping, tilting, shaking and painting provide playfulness, richer interaction, and a human touch. Depending on the campaign goal, different features can be combined to drive consumer interaction and ultimately drive results for advertisers.

Interested in learning more about mobile advertising? OPS Mobile will bring digital advertising leaders and ops professionals together to discuss and develop best practices for operational excellence in a world of connected devices. Register today for OPS Mobile, AdMonsters’ mobile advertising conference, which will be held December 7, 2011 in New York.

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