As the daughter of a first-generation Cuban mother, it’s been vital for Sofia Santiago, Senior Director of Global Pricing & Inventory at Match Media Group, to “reclaim the culture.” We had the honor of chatting with her about the importance of reclaiming her cultural roots and preserving her Cuban heritage, as she puts it.

Santiago’s desire to honor her roots stems from her deep appreciation for her family’s history. By tracing her family tree, learning Spanish, and cooking traditional Cuban dishes, she’s actively built her cultural identity and hopes to pass her Cuban traditions to future generations.

Join us as we explore this digital media and advertising veteran’s journey of embracing her cultural roots, navigating her identity, and achieving remarkable success in the media industry.

Cuban to the Bone

Although Santiago is only half Cuban, in her eyes, since her maternal side is of Cuban descent, it’s enough to be considered full-blown. Even though her father is Irish American, much like myself, she feels that a child is always more of their mother than their father.

Getting in tune with her Hispanic roots is something she takes pride in. Santiago has even visited Cuba and brought her daughter, who is now eight, to explore and learn about the country’s rich cultural heritage. Her trip to the largest island of the West Indies was filled with excitement and lots of family activity, where she got to learn more about herself personally and the people she comes from. The trip also served as an eye-opener for her.

Let Santiago tell it: Cuba is not the place for vacation. Why, you ask? Necessities are scarce. “It was tough just to get the basic necessities, and that’s going there as a tourist with money to spend,” she explained. “So you can just imagine the people actually living there.”

In the same breath, she pointed out that not a single person asked her for money and that when they saw her with her baby, they showered her with offerings like baby clothes and candy, which is a testament to the hearts of the natives she came in contact with, no matter their circumstances. Witnessing the resilience and strength of the Cuban people in the face of adversity profoundly impacted Santiago. It further deepened her appreciation for her heritage and the importance of embracing cultural roots.

Professional Success in the Realm of Online Dating 

Much like the experience of dating app users, Santiago’s career path has been one representative of being selective, setting clear intentions, embracing opportunities, and forging one’s own path. From early on, she’s always been a fan of numbers, as they came easy to her as a child, which continued into adulthood. 

“In​​ professional roles, I like being able to tell stories and make cases with those numbers,” she shared. “I like being on the publisher end of media, but I was always more interested in how I could support operations internally versus a client-facing role. So pricing and inventory always made sense to me.”

Ironically, the operations professional doesn’t consider her employer, Match Media Group a publisher, considering they don’t publish content like a traditional publisher does. Match Group owns the largest global portfolio of popular online dating services, including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OurTime, and other dating global brands. And since marketers can leverage the aggregated audience, data, and insights from millions of global users across the company’s portfolio, the company is a great partner for advertisers looking to reach diverse audiences.

How do ads work on dating apps, you’re wondering? They mostly come in native ads, mainly geared towards men. Female users hold the most value on dating apps, and Match Media Group is cautious about messing up the user experience for women. As a digital ad sales professional in the dating app world, having a unique perspective on user experience has been a valuable tool for Santiago. 

Her career growth and dedication reflect her professional satisfaction and the positive impact she has made at the company. After all, she has been at Match Media Group for eight years.

The Future is Bright for Sofia Santiago

As we celebrate Hispanic American Heritage Month, Santiago’s story is a testament to the importance of hard work and consistency while working towards elevating your success. 

She recognizes the importance of mentorship and pays it forward and has been fortunate to have exceptional mentors throughout her career who have guided and inspired her along the way. She is committed to mentoring junior professionals, sharing their experiences, and helping others navigate their career paths. She also advocates for diversity and inclusion, contributing to a more equitable and welcoming workplace environment.

“I’ve been really lucky to have had great bosses throughout my career in this industry, and I think the common thread amongst them is that they entrusted me and given me the autonomy to make my own decisions,” Santiago shared. “I think I’ve just been fortunate in that regard. It’s impacted my desire to mentor others in more junior roles and share whatever knowledge I can with them based on my experience.”

The post HHM: Match Media’s Sofia Santiago Says Her Career and Online Dating Have Two Things In Common: Numbers appeared first on AdMonsters.

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.

In preparation for our webinar: How Pubs Are Increasing Revenue While Delivering Premium Ad Experiences In Email, on Wednesday, September 22, 2021, @ 1 PM EST (Register for the free webinar now!) — featuring Jessica Munoz, SVP Product Marketing & GTM Strategy, LiveIntent and Bobby Bonett, VP, Digital, SANDOW — we spoke with Nick Bolt, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Publisher Solutions, LiveIntent, about how native ads can help publishers grow their business and revenue, as well as how they can significantly streamline their workflows and gain back resources with dynamic ads and sophisticated targeting options.

Lynne d Johnson: Native advertising is one of the fastest-growing areas of digital display when it comes to ad spend. I think eMarketer is predicting native will account for $57.27 billion of display spend this year. But a lot of that money is going to the walled gardens, primarily social networks. What other opportunities do publishers have to cash in on this native advertising surge?

Nick Bolt: While there are plenty of native opportunities publishers can tap into on the web, email poses a valuable option for publishers. Native ads garner high engagement rates for advertisers, and in turn, high CPMs for publishers — which only increase in the opt-in environment of email.

Native ads also enable publishers to diversify their media kit with premium ad units that elevate digital experiences. Furthermore, with native ads in email newsletters, publishers can transform their newsletters into a channel for first-party data collection. With more premium options publishers can attract a larger array of advertisers and acquire more data to continue growing their business and revenue. 

Lynne d Johnson: Native in email sounds great, but how can publishers capitalize on native ads without undercutting the work they’ve put into cultivating their display inventory options? 

Nick Bolt: Native ads and banner ads both play an integral part in monetization and advertising strategies. While native ads may garner higher engagement rates for advertisers, they’re designed to fit the look and feel of the publisher’s branding; an advertiser may prefer an ad unit that provides them with the opportunity to showcase their branding and logos instead, as is the case in brand awareness campaigns. The key is to have one’s native and display inventory work together as a multi-format buy where advertisers can purchase both types of inventory for a full newsletter sponsorship. 

Lynne d Johnson: One of the many benefits of native ads in email is that publishers get to use data to make advertising extremely relevant for readers, which of course is a win-win for buyers. What are some of the other benefits?

Nick Bolt: With native ads in email, but more specifically LiveIntent’s Native Ad Blueprints, publishers gain more control and greater flexibility. Native ads enable publishers to monetize their email newsletters while maintaining their brand identity. As publishers work to increase their subscription and retention efforts, native ads are a valuable way to improve subscription experiences with highly-curated, premium ad units powered by reader behavior and interest data. 

Lynne d Johnson: Besides monetization opportunities, what are some of the publisher benefits of using native ads in email newsletters?

NB: With Native Ad Blueprints, publishers can go beyond guaranteed deals committed to a single advertiser and instead can run multiple deals across several advertisers that serve the most relevant ad to readers. Publishers and their ad ops teams can do this while significantly streamlining their workflows and gaining back resources with dynamic ads and sophisticated targeting options. Furthermore, our Native Ad Blueprints solution enables publishers to leverage their email newsletter inventory for their own marketing needs, targeting their audiences with ads that will help them achieve their own marketing goals and objectives.

Don’t forget to sign up for our free webinar with LiveIntent: How Pubs Are Increasing Revenue While Delivering Premium Ad Experiences In Email, on Wednesday, September 22, 2021 @ 1 PM EST (Register for the free webinar now!)

The post Pubs Are Increasing Revenue and First-party Data Collection With Native Ads in Email appeared first on AdMonsters.

And while everyone in the advertising ecosystem is lamenting the total annihilation of the third-party cookie in browsers, it has presented an amazing opportunity for publishers to regain control.

Publishers are already using what they know about their audiences to fuel their editorial, but those very same insights can be used to power advertising and revenue as well. 

Leveraging your first-party audience data, you can build a scalable direct-sold program around premium ad packages that resonate with your audience while driving deeper engagement for buyers by combining two powerful tactics: Native advertising and email newsletters.

Native advertising is now the preferred premium ad format for both publishers and brands, and email newsletters are a critical component of publishers’ monetization strategies. When you bring the two together as native advertising in email newsletters, they become a mighty content distribution channel providing a direct connection between authenticated audiences and advertisers. 

And with solutions like LiveIntent’s Native Ad Blueprints, your native advertising blends in with the surrounding newsletter environment, making it far less intrusive than other forms of advertising, while garnering higher CPMs.

Best Practices for Monetizing Native Ads in Your Email

Show Me the Money

There are a few ways that native ads in email can open up the revenue floodgates for publishers, including direct-sold, open exchange, and newsletter promotions.

Direct-sold campaigns work well for content sponsorships, affiliate product promotion, and brand partner deals. There are three main ways that publishers can sell native ad email inventory. 

1. Guaranteed (aka sponsorships) — Just like selling sponsorship deals for your web inventory, with guaranteed campaigns, you can sell exclusive impressions over a given time for a predefined price and run them across publications, newsletters, and ad slots.
2. Non-Guaranteed — Unlike a guaranteed campaign where you’re offering impressions to one sponsor, non-guaranteed deals empower you to have multiple advertisers compete for impressions in an auction. These campaigns can have branding or performance KPIs, optimized to impressions, clicks, or conversions. Opening up inventory to the open exchange allows publishers to increase bid density, revenue, and overall yield.
3. Curated — You can also group combinations of native inventory (publications, newsletters, and ad slots) into packages, creating premium bundles that spotlight your readers to advertisers. You can create your packages based on content, audience, and seasonal, grouping around reader interests or seasonal events. Once you’ve created your native packages, you can activate them at scale through curated deals, enabling advertisers to target your premium packages through their preferred buying platform.

It’s also important to note that if you work with LiveIntent’s Native Ad Blueprints, you can also tap into exchange demand from the likes of The Trade Desk, DV360, Xandr, and more. By utilizing both native direct and programmatic you can monetize all of your impressions with a range of premium advertisers like Liberty Mutual, Rue Gilt Groupe, Wayfair, and much more. 

Publishers and brands can also leverage native ads in their email newsletters for their own content uses and brand promotions. Being able to personalize email offers without having to set up separate sends for every segment of your email list is a much more efficient way to do business — especially when you need to run multiple campaigns at one time to different segments of your audience.

Designing Your Own Native Ad Blueprint

Now that you know the various means of monetizing native ads in email, you might be pondering exactly how best to implement native ads in your email newsletter for optimal results. Maybe you’re wondering, “How will native ads fit into my email newsletter design and layout without compromising my brand identity or interfering with my readers’ experiences?” Well, lucky for you, you’ve come to the right place for answers.

Before you begin, you’ll want to ask yourself a few questions How should advertiser messaging appear within my newsletter content? Should my native ad placement lend itself to a high-visibility sponsorship? Should my native ad placement exactly match my newsletter content? Am I currently hardcoding ads into my newsletter within a standard layout? Will a standardized design work for my native placements?

While the answers to these questions depend on each individual’s brand needs, the general best practice is to go with a single-column design when you add a native ad slot to your email newsletter inventory. This way, you also won’t have to completely redesign your newsletter and your native ads can blend seamlessly within the natural “scroll” of the content. Also, if you have no booked campaigns or house ads to run, LiveIntent’s Native Ad Blueprints will automatically collapse. Having a single-column design will ensure an uninterrupted user experience when that occurs. 

Once you’ve decided where your native ad slot will live within your email newsletter, you’ll want to think about what elements you’ll require from advertisers. Typical ad requirements include a headline or header, body copy, CTA, image, and a sponsored by field displaying your advertisers’ company name or logo. 

You can set specific elements as recommended or required to inform the number of advertisers eligible to bid on your inventory. For example, if you’re opening up to a wider audience of advertisers, you might want to only make the headline and image required and all of the other elements recommended to maximize bid density.

No Hard Coding Required

One of the greatest barriers to publishers leveraging the opportunity that native ads in email provide — in terms of building first-party data and growing revenue — has been the heavy lifting required. Ad slots are most often hard-coded, with code having to be added or removed from templates for each individual campaign. Publishers with limited resources might forgo this amazing opportunity altogether, while others get caught up in a coding time suck that could be better used on higher-value tasks.

Thanks to the wonders of standardization and automation, those days are long gone. If you never believed that set it and forget it could be a reality, it’s time to think again. With the ability to hyper-segment audiences and improve operational efficiency, isn’t it time you ran your native campaigns smarter?

To learn more about Native Ad Blueprints, visit LiveIntent.

The post Best Practices for Monetizing Native Ads in Your Email appeared first on AdMonsters.

While the rest of digital media is changing all around us, email newsletters are holding steady as the best way to reach an audience, with deeper engagement, plus an amazing ROI. But when it comes to monetizing email newsletters, especially from a programmatic standpoint, many publishers have been leery about damaging user trust by potentially serving them low-quality, irrelevant advertising. 

Perhaps that was a worry long ago, but native programmatic advertising in email has come a long way. It’s growing as a significant source for diversifying programmatic revenue, and as the third-party cookie crumbles, it offers publishers inventory that won’t be impacted by its demise.

With that in mind, LiveIntent recently launched Native Ad Blueprints, a solution for publishers to create scalable premium ad experiences, streamline their native ad operations, and better target, optimize and measure their native campaigns. We spoke with Nick Dujnic, VP, Marketing, LiveIntent to learn more about this new product, as well as why publisher preparation for the coming cookiepocalypse should include programmatic advertising in email to help future-proof their revenue strategy. 

Lynne d Johnson: As we approach third-party cookie annihilation, publishers are turning to various solutions to increase their first-party data, and as well to secure incremental revenue in anticipation of lost CPMs. Email newsletters and logins are at the forefront of those strategies. You guys are planning for this with your new product Native Ad Blueprints. Why should publishers be thinking about native in email now?

Nick Dujnic: I think there are two sides to how publishers are thinking about the third-party cookie deprecation. There is obviously fear over the loss of programmatic revenue, which primarily relies on third-party cookies to identify audiences. And when you can’t identify audiences on your website, it decreases the value of those audiences. That’s why the focus is on email, not just as a way of collecting and building out your first-party data, but also as a way to supplement and future-proof your website audiences and tying that data to the bids that are happening on your website. 

But it’s also that email is a logged-in media channel that does not rely on third-party cookies. Many publishers are thinking about how to build this out more. This inventory isn’t impacted by the third-party cookie’s deprecation from a programmatic advertising standpoint. They’re also looking to mitigate the impact of potential loss in revenue by building out premium experiences with their direct advertising partners and give them more options. Native advertising in email newsletters combines the two.

With native advertising in email newsletters, publishers can offer their advertisers curated premium sponsored content within this logged-in channel, making it the best of both worlds. There are newsletters doing this in a custom way, like Morning Brew and the SKimm, that have content teams working with advertising partners to build out specific content that can be offered at premium pricing. But not every publisher can create sponsored content from that standpoint. Part of why we made Native Ad Blueprints is to provide publishers with a scalable solution for creating those custom experiences within email newsletters without all of that work.

LdJ: How does this new tool impact user experience? For instance, we have a premium content newsletter called the Wrapper, that we work with our partners to craft the content and provide recommendations on their ad unit, and then we place it manually.  We want the sponsored content to flow seamlessly within our content. We fear giving up control over the look and feel because we know our audience. I’m sure other publishers are concerned about UX as well. 

Why do you think many publishers are wary of programmatic native ads in email? 

ND: When a lot of people think about programmatic native, they tend to think about it in terms of those sponsored content pieces that sit along the bottom of an article, like “Ten Ways Celebrities Stay Thin” or “You Won’t Believe What This Person Looks Like Today,” which is the equivalent of the headlines you see when you’re checking out at the supermarket. 

With native advertising in email newsletters, publishers can offer their advertisers curated premium sponsored content within this logged-in channel, making it the best of both worlds.

Those ads are typically sold at very bottom-of-the-barrel prices and the images that are associated with them can be classified as risky. They’re usually not super customizable and are pretty much the same format across the board — square image, 30 character headlines, CTA. These pieces are the opposite of what native ads were intended to be—seamless and not disruptive. Unfortunately, this perception doesn’t reflect a true native ads experience. 

Publishers want the ability to manage the ad experience without affronting their readers with something they find either distasteful or offensive. Up to this point, publishers have had to maintain control by manually creating these experiences themselves, hard coding ads into their web pages, and email newsletters to get the brand-safe experience they want. 

But that’s hard to scale. And it’s also hard to personalize these ads, beyond just the email send list. You can’t work with multiple native advertising partners, serving two campaigns at the same time with the same level of targeting and optimization that you would with display in a programmatic sense. And these are the problems we’re trying to solve with Native Ad Blueprints.

LdJ: If you had to provide an elevator pitch for what you guys are trying to do with native in email, what would that be?

ND: With Native Ad Blueprints, we basically want to make it so anyone who sends an email has a way to make customized ad spots and ad slots and make them a natural part of their newsletters. We want to streamline native ad operations, saving time and effort with real-time ad serving, and provide access to targeting, optimization, and reporting features that you get from other ad serving technology that you’re working with. 

LdJ: Why is native in email ideal for programmatic and how do you make it scalable?

ND: When we talk about scale, we’re talking about really creating and delivering more of these premium ad experiences. 

Suppose you’re a large media company with a broad and diverse audience, and a portion of that audience reads your Morning Alerts newsletter. You’re working with an advertiser partner, and want to offer them a native ad spot but only within your Morning Alerts newsletter. Basically, without Native Ad Blueprints, you can only offer one massive sponsorship that reaches across your entire audience instead of those subscribed to that specific newsletter. The programmatic element comes in with Native Ad Blueprints because it gives you the ability to target audiences at an impression level, at the time the email is opened, rather than at the time of send. And you can have multiple campaigns running at the same time.

So you can have a campaign with a major sneaker brand reaching one particular audience and you can also have another campaign with a major electronics brand. You can set up and serve both campaigns across your entire newsletter inventory — wherever you have these ad slots active — and know that they’ll appear in a way that is complementary to your newsletter, aligned with your brand guidelines, and without having to hard code every single one of your newsletter templates.

LdJ: How does Native Ad Blueprints help tie native into your display strategy?

ND: I would say it’s more complementary, but it can operate in the way that you might be used to serving display. With display ads, you fill a sponsorship, and then once that sponsorship runs out, you might also open up that inventory to third-party demand sources. So you’re just driving incremental revenue down the line with the same level of customization and control that you would have if you were hard coding it yourself.

With Native Ad Blueprints, it could work similarly for your direct-sold campaigns. There is obviously a little bit more from the customization standpoint on the front end. But once it is set up correctly, it’s basically the same — you can dynamically target, serve and optimize. 

LdJ: So to sum it up, LiveIntent wants to make publishers’ lives easier when it comes to creating premium ad experiences?

ND: Right. Publishers are investing more in their email newsletters and see them as more than just a website traffic channel, but instead as a content experience in itself. Publishers want to create more innovative, more premium ad experiences. But as they look to do more, they realize there’s limited scale.

This is something that they want that’s important to them and is critical to their direct sales strategy going forward, so we’re trying to solve it for them as best we can.

LdJ: What can you tell us about the publishers you’ve tested Native Ad Blueprints with thus far? 

ND: I can tell you that their ad operations teams are coming back to us and saying, “You have saved us so much time. This is so much easier than what we were doing before.” 

The tests we’ve run so far are small-scale, but we just reached general availability for this product and we predict — since this is such customized and valuable inventory — publishers will drive a lot of revenue from it. 

The post Native in Email: Blueprinting the Future for Publishers appeared first on AdMonsters.

Anyone reading the state of affairs would wholeheartedly believe that the Coronavirus completely obliterated ad spend. If you’re one of those folks, I’mma let you finish but, we’re starting to see some data analysis come in from the past few months and I gotta tell ya there are definitely some bright spots.

First, in response to consumer’s stay-at-home behaviors, we saw a hike in gaming TV spend, along with esports. More recently, we learned that as consumers continued to shop for clothing, that category has topped paid ad impressions. Coincidentally, digital ad spend is set to eclipse traditional for the very first time and we have programmatic to thank for that advancement.

We even discovered that brands were heavily investing in mission-based marketing, because it builds trust.

The latest deviation from the advertiser pause on ad spend that we’re hearing about is in the financial services category. For the last couple of years, the category has lead in digital ad spend and during the pandemic, even when loads of people are out of work, it seems to be no different.

As you can guess, I was a little skeptical. To gain a better understanding, I spoke with  Rachel Tuffney, EVP, US Operations for Dianomi, an advertising platform for financial services, to learn about the current trends within financial ad spending and how premium publishers could take advantage of this shift, as well as the future of advertising.

Lynne d Johnson: It seems that while ad spend is down across the board, digital is doing a lot better than traditional. But it only appears that a few categories are actually spending. There’s gaming because, well, that’s what quite a few people are doing with all of their time now.

And then there’s clothing because people are still buying—probably for their Zoom meetings and they’re catching fitness fever. But when I heard that financial brands were spending I was a little baffled. With tens of millions of people laid off, are they really digging deeper into financial products? What’s going on here?

Rachel Tuffney: It is interesting to think that financial brands would be increasing spend during these unprecedented times, but we are seeing spend on our platform increase. In Dianomi’s marketplace, which encompasses 600 blue-chip financial brands, such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and Charles Schwab, we’ve seen ad spend increase during the height of the pandemic in the U.S.

In conversations with our clients, we’re hearing that there is an increase in personal investors engaging with the stock market, as they either have more time on their hands or perhaps need to create an income during a period of less work or furloughs. Our clients are focusing on engaging their professional and personal client bases to ensure they are present and proactive in providing help with important choices in uncertain climates. For financial brands, this is an opportunity to lean in, educate and be a resource on complex and often high stakes financial topics.

The reason we’re seeing the spend increase on our platform in particular is because we’re able to align their ads natively with premium content environments right next to the very content the consumers are seeking out. So that means the ads get placed right into the correct environment and that leads to great engagement. For example, a fund manager reading an article about a new ETF investment vehicle will be likely to be receptive to a financial brand’s white paper on that subject.

LdJ: So this sounds more like a B2B play than a B2C play. What kind of numbers are we talking about? Are you seeing growth from last year or are your numbers relatively the same?

RT: When comparing April 2019 to April 2020, we saw ad spend increase by more than 70% in our marketplace. We’ve also seen our advertiser network grow by nearly 20% this year, signifying that financial and professional service brands are looking to invest more in advertising, especially native and contextually relevant advertising. I also think that our platform is breaking through the clutter due to the unique and premium nature of the publisher partnerships.

LdJ: How can premium publishers take advantage of this trend?

RT: It’s a tough climate for media brands and publishers, even the premium publishers are struggling with their cost-base. So revenue is important and connecting your supply with quality platforms like Dianomi has been a great way to develop new revenue streams with premium brands.

In the past, a lot of publishers partnered with native platforms who drove revenue but delivered questionable ad quality. This is not a fair pay off and so we’ve seen a lot of the big publishers lean into our philosophy of quality and aligned content and brands. The winning formula is to prioritize premium brands and ads that not only enhance the financials (for the business) but also the experience for their readers.

In simple terms, if you’re looking to better understand ETFs, you’re not looking for cat food.

LdJ: Contextual targeting is gaining an attention revival as government and big tech have become staunch consumer privacy advocates. For instance, the enforcement date for CCPA just passed and Chrome is sunsetting the third-party tracking cookie soon. Let’s not forget that usage of the third party-tracking cookie led to a lot of fraud, which brings me to another issue.

In the era of COVID-19 and with growing concerns about racial injustice, we’re seeing blocklist approaches to brand safety hurting both publishers and advertisers. Legit pubs are missing out on revenue opportunities and brands aren’t reaching all of the audience segments they need to reach. How does contextual targeting benefit both advertisers and publishers when it comes to privacy and brand safety?

RT: First of all, let me say that this is a great question. Raising awareness of what blocklists (and term blocks) can do to important causes and journalism is important. At a macro level, there is a lot of focus on supply market places specifically designed to help brands support journalism and BLM type content which is fantastic.

Furthermore, contextual targeting, especially considering CCPA concerns and uncertainty around the future of targeting, is an exceptionally effective way for technology companies and publishers to work hand-in-hand to help brands engage the right audiences in the right place and at the right time without drifting into privacy issues.

Context is the most effective proxy and getting it right always leads to the best ROI. It ensures advertisers are reaching precisely who they want to reach–whether its financial planners, to lawyers to healthcare administrators–creating adjacency with the content that those bankers or lawyers or those healthcare execs are actively leaning into–such as the latest medical device for treating the coronavirus or the latest ETF options for financial planners. That’s what an optimal native, contextual content strategy really delivers.

LdJ:  There’s been a rise in native content marketing in recent years. Why does native make sense for financial brands and publishers alike?

RT: I think the answer is simple, native and contextual technology helps publishers and consumers because it leverages the inherent benefit of quality publishing which is to give consumers the very best content and experience possible—linked exactly to what the reader or viewer is interested in.

The simple fact is that if we as an industry can more accurately match advertising to the content that consumers (both professional and individual) are looking for—then we raise vs diminish the experience. That benefits everyone and in my opinion, that’s the future of advertising.

The post Financial Ad Spend Is Surviving the Pandemic, Says Dianomi appeared first on AdMonsters.

“The truth is there’s always been continued growth. Email was never dead,” says Kupietzky. “Email is still the most effective channel for converting customers and reaching an engaged audience. It is one of the few channels where publishers can completely control the frequency and content of the relationship with the end user. And, I think because of that, people are rediscovering it. So, it never really went away. It just wasn’t invested in and we forgot how great it was amid all the social media noise.”

When consumers flocked to social media, publishers and advertisers followed them, but soon realized they had no control or ownership over the relationship with their audience.

“Email uniquely allows a direct connection with an end user in a world where Facebook and Google have limited how much traffic to send back to publisher sites,” he shares. “Publishers need a better way to control and capture their traffic. That makes email an important and growing channel because it provides a one-to-one connection completely owned by the publisher. There’s no third party that can get in the middle of that relationship. And, since people are more likely to change their physical address than their email address, this makes them very sticky users.”

Helping advertisers and publishers offset losses from investing heavily in social media is a major focus for Kupietzky and his team at PowerInbox. They recently expanded their technology and biz dev teams to include three new email and adtech experts aiming to grow alternative one-to-one engagement channels that put advertisers and publishers back in control.

I sat down with Kupietzky to gain a better understanding of native and programmatic advertising in email and why email is such a strong revenue option for publishers. (And we’ll learn more about all of this, as well as how adults consume and filter information, at the upcoming Publisher Forum in Miami March 10 – 13.)

LYNNE D JOHNSON: So, with your recent business expansion, what are the top three priorities for the year?

JEFF KUPIETZKY: Our strategy has always been to focus on making email really work at scale for publishers. That means giving them the right level of monetization, the right type of engagement, and providing a good product for advertisers. Our vision for this coming year is to do that by expanding on three fronts.

First, we’re looking at how to expand the demand side of the equation and look for alternative sources of campaigns. It’s generally been hard for programmatic players to access email inventory because email doesn’t fit the same technology model as the web, like JavaScript or cookies or other ways that advertisers buy traffic today. Our company is investing in creating a model that enables advertisers to buy placement inside of email in a way that’s easy and automated, just like they do on the web right now.

The other big push is on the supply side — expanding the places that we can place an ad. The world is moving toward additional messaging channels beyond email, like push notifications in mobile and desktop. These are all opportunities for publishers to engage a known user base and draw them back to their website. That’s a very easy technology to implement, traffic growth happens very quickly and there’s an opportunity to monetize that inventory.

The third: as we’ve expanded our supply and demand, there’s become a great opportunity to invest in identities —really the data and user profiles. We’ve built up 150 million unique profiles across our network, and we’re just scratching the surface of how best to leverage that to support targeted advertising or the monetization that our publishers want.

LDJ: Let’s talk about the issues in programmatic that everyone talks about like viewability and ad fraud.

JK: It’s definitely a concern and that’s where a lot of publishers have to invest their resources. Since we are 100% direct, we screen every ad. There’s no self-service on our platform. The only way someone can place an ad inside our network is by going through one of our ad ops experts. As we turn to programmatic, we obviously can’t escape the risk of fraud and quality, so we’ve developed some tools to help. We’ve implemented some automation to help us be more efficient, but we perform manual screening as well. The biggest barrier to programmatic expansion into email is first getting a solution in place that allows for control and screening of ads. Of course, part of that depends on which partners you pick.

LDJ: You talked about user profiles tied to real identities. That’s a topic of interest as privacy regulation ramps up.

JK: Absolutely. We are big believers in that you don’t want to market to a cookie. You want to market to a person, with a known identity. The email address is the best proxy for that. With my email address, no matter which device I’m using, it will know that it’s me–the same identity. So, for an advertiser looking to target a specific audience, that’s really powerful because it allows me to connect browsing activity to a known identity and make sure that the ads are as relevant as possible for that user.

Our strategy on privacy is to hash all the information we have, sort of de-identifying it. I’ll know that the user is unique, but I won’t be able to identify that it’s lynne@gmail.com. I’ll only know that you’re unique with different interests from jeff@gmail.com that I can market to. Yet, I can’t recreate that email address in my system. That allows us to provide a layer of protection to the individual. And, even if using that data for targeting, it’s being used appropriately.

LDJ: How important is audience segmentation or audience extension to email?

JK: I think ultimately, it’s very important because it brings us to an audience of one. Now, you can deliver the specific content that specific user wanted. But the reality is, it’s expensive to build something like that. Instead, what we find are companies that can generate enough scale to invest in that technology and offer it as a service, so that publishers don’t have to own that whole technology stack internally.

LDJ: There are a lot of trends we’re hearing about with personalization in omnichannel and with AI.

JK: Email is a tried and true channel that’s been around for a long time. It’s very effective and we find engagement rates are relatively high. Where’s that messaging relationship going to move? I mentioned push notifications as one example. I think chatbots are also a very interesting space because it allows a publisher to control when and at what frequency content is revealed to the end user. By using AI, every user will interact with that content differently at different times of day on different devices.

The ideal system would be to deliver the right piece of content on the right device at the right time to the right user. Achieving that is very hard, so you need an investment in technology that allows you to capture all of those behavioral data points—on the web, in email, in app, in chat logs—look at a composite and then recommend a piece of content at the right time over the right channel. I think people have been working in silos because the channels have been so distinct, and now they need a way to bring all of that data together.

LDJ: What about the influence of social media and video on email formats?

JK: Email is now moving into snackable content. People check their email 18+ times a day. Maybe you’re on line at Starbucks, so what should the sender aim to do in just that 10-15 seconds of interaction? Is it better to give the reader a lot of content in one send, or one or two pieces of content that’s really relevant?

If you want them to take action, the correct answer seems to be more frequent sends with a lot less content. As a result, that creates more opportunities to monetize that relationship. This increases engagement because users appreciate a piece of content that’s relevant to them at that moment, and they don’t mind receiving email more than once a day.

Video is a little harder because video doesn’t run natively in email. We’ve tested ways to place a teaser that’s basically an animated gif as opposed to a full format. This seems to be effective at enticing a click through to a browser-enabled full video player. Using rich media in ways that conform to the limitations of email will be a trend that we’ll see grow.

Also, people continue to consume more content on mobile than desktop, so considering the form factor of mobile will change the way you present the content. Publishers who recognize that people are consuming email on mobile more than desktop and create email for mobile-first viewing have a much better engagement rate than those who just took their desktop content and made it responsively to mobile.

LDJ: What should publishers be thinking about in terms of making email work?

JK: There are three big things to consider. First, how much have you prioritized capturing that relationship with your audience, whether on site or through programs to build your list?

Second, you must get to know your audience. Once you have a relationship, look at what they engage with. If you’re sending them five pieces of snackable content and they only consume two, that tells you what they like. Give them more of what they like and less of what they don’t.

Finally, on what other channels do we see that same behavior? A messaging environment? A push notification? Do you do anything with chatbots? Analyzing this integrated data provides even more insight into customer behavior. We’ll see all these things come together in the future as a comprehensive, core approach for publishers to engage with their audience.

LDJ: So, exactly which group of people are most receptive to email and is there a certain time of day that will bring higher engagement?

JK: There’s been a perception that, demographically, older generations use email more. But we have some new research looking at specific age groups and their interaction with email that tips that conventional wisdom a little bit on its head.

We also looked at the best time of day and day of the week for sends, and also discovered an unconventional conclusion that weekends might actually be the best time to send email, rather than during the week when the inbox is more cluttered. When you focus on clicks and not just opens, there are some sharp differences on the weekend vs the weekday.

Get even more insight into best practices for monetizing email and how adults consume and filter information at Publisher Forum in Miami, Mar. 10-13, 2019. Conference passes and hotel rooms are selling out fast!

This is the third article written in a series with the support of PowerInbox: 

1. The Future of Email Monetization: A Conversation With PowerInbox’s Jeff Kupietzky
2. In Email We Trust
3. Get Closer to Your Audience: The Value of Push Notifications (Plus, Best Practices)

The post The Future of Email Monetization: A Conversation With Powerinbox’s Jeff Kupietzky appeared first on AdMonsters.

But diving into native can be trickier than it appears. The point of native is that it’s integrated into the overall appearance and tone of the page, and there’s a lot involved in doing that. The fact there are six distinct IAB-recognized categories or formats of native advertising complicates matters even further.

As native moves to the front of a publisher ad strategy, the prospect of building out solutions in-house can start to feel prohibitive of both engineering and monetization resources. As such, there’s increasing demand in the marketplace for the services of native-specific SSPs.

However, publishers need to look at a number of factors they didn’t have to consider with traditional SSPs. A native SSP needs to bring the demand for the formats the publisher supports, be it highly visible custom units, in-feed, recommendation widgets or anything else. Many publishers are going to want to ensure native partners deliver ad creative that pertains to the content on their pages, while also maintaining the ability to create blacklists to keep certain creative off their pages entirely.

With all the variants in play in native as we know it, there are obviously some concerns about how to do it at scale. It’s irresponsible for publishers to take an ad hoc approach to native. Native should be approached with a strategy in mind, and with appropriate tools.

Preparing for Liftoff

There are basically three phases in making native “happen” industry-wide and at scale.

Phase One is market development, or education. Advertisers need to learn about what native is; that it’s not a monolithic thing and what different campaigns can accomplish using different formats. The promise of native is that it’s more engaging, thereby more valuable, than traditional display. So, for example, having in-feed units available implies having enough quality content to have a feed in the first place. That communicates value to the advertiser. Advertisers need to know the difference between recommendation carousels at the bottom of the page, versus units that fit seamlessly into content near the top of the page.

Phase Two is where publishers sell native advertising as a distinct monetization channel rather than as backfill. This is basically native as the “interesting addition” we’d mentioned at the top of this article—it’s on the page, but it’s not necessarily available on the open marketplace. Sales teams need to understand on value, and how native can work other monetization channels.

Phase Three is native programmatic, recently facilitated by OpenRTB 2.3. This current phase necessitates educating trading desks and the broader programmatic buying community, who in turn can inform their advertiser partners on the value of what they’re getting and the efficiency with which they can get it.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

In a word, native is not the same as display. There are more moving parts, and there’s more sensitivity around the way the ad meshes (or not) with the rest of the page content. As one publisher source summarized it, there’s room for different entities to disagree on the “right” formats. A lot of people want to have a say about the text (a headline, for example) that appears in the ad, and the best practices are still emerging.

AdMonsters has gotten deeper into the question of transparency in native elsewhere. In short, different publishers have different ideas about the proper terminology to disclose that a native unit is an ad, and about the type of ad creative that should or shouldn’t appear on the page. It’s a fine line at times, because the publisher wants the unit to bear a look consistent to the rest of the site, but to be properly highlighted as separate from editorial content. Advertisers have their own expectations.

Providing ad units that match the form and function of the site is a matter of template management. The native SSP’s role here is to manage the template layer, which often varies in style and function across the site’s various pages.

The SSP also manages the programmatic pipes, links up with DSPs, communicates native specs, and ensures delivery. But in native, it does bear calling out—since native programmatic is still such a new prospect, it’s important to watch and make sure native SSPs are delivering consistently, in a standardized way. The various partners between publisher and advertiser may be working across multiple sets of specs, not all of which include native.

On a technical level, the native SSP needs to support delivery of a headline, an image and a description to the publisher’s page. Other intermediaries, like trading desks or creative agencies, need to deliver on the right specs. The SSP needs to coordinate and streamline these process so the publisher can focus elsewhere.

The New Quality Control

Previously, native advertising had been largely the domain of publishers who had the engineering resources to build the units, which limited scale. With native SSPs in play lifting some of the weight off of publisher in-house development resources, long-tail publishers may have a new opportunity to monetize. It’s reasonable to expect advertisers will see more publishers they’ve never heard of suddenly putting native inventory on the marketplace.

But premium publishers still have an advantage, and can keep their rates up: They have premium content and more engaged audiences. In a premium environment, the user trusts the content, and by extension trusts the ads they’re seeing. Native programmatic might open up some channels for advertisers to buy into long-tail sites on the cheap, but premium publishers need to point to the engagement on their own pages, and to how they’re doing their due diligence to give their users the best ad experiences.

If publishers needed to provide quality control with traditional display, then, their responsibility increases with native. Part of the promise of native is that it’s more engaging, that it’s a solution for the old problem of banner blindness. By that token, if native inventory is of greater value, the creative in it should be at least as relevant as with traditional, if not more.

Anything so integrated into the look and feel of the page should be there for a reason. If the user is scrolling and reading or viewing, they’re remembering, even if they’re not clicking on the ads. Publishers and vendors need to communicate to buyers the value of that engagement, which can’t be measured in clicks alone.

A native SSP partner, then, should be able to provide publishers the ability to dictate what kind of ads go with what content, and what kind of ads (particular brands, verticals, etc.) should be blacklisted. Publishers will need an SSP partner that can work with them to audit the creative coming into the native units on their sites, to assure relevancy and, by extension, value to advertisers.

Beyond that, if a publisher is looking to work with multiple native demand partners, those partners need to work well together. The native SSP ought to provide tools to help manage the waterfall: acknowledging and prioritizing existing partnerships, handing targeting appropriately for different digital properties. Native programmatic is relatively new, so the publisher should test demand sources, experiment with floors and waterfall configurations, and monitor jumps in the mediation layer.

Plan for the Long Game

If it’s true that native advertising derives some of its value from the perception that it’s difficult to do right, that the best inventory is relatively scarce compared to traditional display, and that it’s not found everywhere… will advertisers see less value in it once it’s easier to tap into in the programmatic marketplace?

Sources we spoke to on the publisher and vendor sides suggested probably not. Programmatic has scale, and scale drives value, because advertisers want to reach their audiences everywhere. That said, advertisers’ perceptions might change as programmatic native continues to open up. Premium publishers may have more of an obligation to demonstrate why they can charge higher CPMs for their native inventory than other publishers.

That obligation may play out in a couple areas, and if traditional display has set a precedent, we can predict how it might play out. For one thing, as we’d already discussed, advertisers are going to need to know what they’re buying is what they think they’re buying. Depending on the advertiser and the campaign, they’ll want to assure they’re buying into certain formats and staying out of other formats. The process will continue of educating advertisers on which formats will drive the best performance for each type of campaign they’re running.

Publishers will need to keep in mind they’ll get different types of campaigns and different grades of advertisers trying to buy into different formats. Publishers may see real differences between the advertisers that want to buy highly visible units near the top of the page, versus advertisers that buy into recommendation widgets at the bottom of the page. Publishers and advertisers will both need to guard against negative perception of their brands, and doing so will require communication between the buy side and the sell side.

For native to scale, publishers need to communicate their needs to SSP partners, and publishers and vendors together need to communicate their capabilities and the value therein to advertisers. By strategizing well and remaining transparent through the process, publishers can help drive the value of native while ensuring it’s as nimble as it needs to be for the modern programmatic marketplace.

The post Native SSPs Gain Steam: How Native Is Steering Into Programmatic Channels appeared first on AdMonsters.

9:10: Greg is running down his history in agency ops, building out tech stacks and running digital marketing in New York, California and Detroit. He oversees the Hyundai/Kia brands at Initiative.

9:13: “Over the last couple years, we have seen an absolutely unprecedented amount of change and an unprecedented amount of pressure. This is all over the place.” More business is in review right now than ever before, he says. “These are the things that make agency people like me very unhappy.” And on the publisher side, consolidation is happening. Generally, the hundred-plus-year-old exchange of attention for free or subsidized content is falling apart.

9:15: “Brands have a tendency to do too much sometimes.” And advertising started to change when broadband became widespread and then became ubiquitous in hand-held form. Now, “Nobody is not on their phone at any given time.” And ad dollars in digital have exploded. This is a great thing for us “as digital practitioners,” he says. We’re in “a digital gold rush,” and from one perspective the sky should be the limit. So then, why are things changing, and why are we “fighting for advertising?”

9:17: A few answers to that question. First is overload. Consumers feel overwhelmed with advertising. We see the effects in the mainstreaming of ad blocking. Consumers are also becoming wary of data theft and “well-attuned to the creep factor” that comes from retargeting and other data-driven advertising. And now, increasingly, users are paying for digital content, which was previously “unthinkable.” They’re doing it, he says, “simply to avoid ads.”

9:19: All this puts pressure on marketers, who pass the pressure on the agencies, asking agencies to do more while being paid less.

9:20: The ad industry as we know it right now was based on the 30-second TV spot, and strategies were “not worried about targeting, just worried about tonnage.” Targeting in digital attracts the attention of investors, each one looking for “the next Facebook.”

9:23: There are so many players in the field, coming in from so many angles, that we have a complexity problem. “The complexity doesn’t scale with spend.” Comapred to TV, the cost to service digital media has always been significantly higher. Tools for measurement are reaching the end of their significance, with cookies becoming less meaningful, especially as mobile becomes essential to measure.

9:26: The workload has surpassed the amount of digital talent in the marketplace. Meanwhile, there are more eyes on digital than ever before, including more marketers and buying. We end up with a trust problem coming from buyers.

9:27: We used to worry about click fraud. Programmatic opened up way more things to worry about. “All of a sudden we’re dealing with massive amounts of impression fraud, non-human impressions.” That brings even more questions: “Even if that traffic is real, is anyone even seeing my ad?” Enter viewability, which has “turned this world upside down” for publishers. Agencies, who are demanding to transact on viewability, are making those demands because they’re worried. Add to that the idea that there are kickbacks and pay-for-play between agencies and advertisers.

9:30: Greg says the environment is so cutthroat that right now, these kinds of kickbacks should be expected, even though they are not necessarily inevitable. The hammer could come down on one of the major agencies; if a company the size of Enron could be held accountable, so could an agency.

9:32: Consolidation has ramped up signficantly since 2013. This reduces the number of companies in the ecosystem and “reduces the chance for thing that endanger trust.” This is a good thing. Also, ad tech isn’t the only thing buying ad tech anymore. Entities like Oracle want end-to-end solutions. This is also a good thing. Consumers are thinking about which brands they trust.

9:34: Complexity could get wore before it gets better. But digital people are rising up in the ranks of their organizations. The idea of an exec who doesn’t “get” digital “is not cute, and it’s not happening anymore.”

9:35: There are benefits to doing less, and marketers are coming to understand “the benefits of doing five things well instead of doing 25 things.” This changes the logistics, it extends throughout the system and it will “reach the shore of operations.”

9:36: “Once we rebuild trust, advertising will be on the right foot for us all.”

9:39: Agencies could be shrunk a bit without affecting output. What makes an agency valuable in the future may be a lot like what made an agency valuable in decades past — creative content.

9:41: You can come up with the best ideas, but if your competitor undercuts you, they’re probably going to get your business, Greg says. Digital has led to situations where agencies have to cut costs.

9:43: An attendee asked Greg whether the tonnage model will continue to apply. Greg says it still will in certain verticals, like theatrical, for example. But in retail — “these are some of the most savvy marketers on the face of the earth” — you have marketers who are really good at the short-term loop and trying to gauge the long game. Even the smartest marketers are seeing challenges in attribution, but they are incentivized to sort it out.

9:50: We’re talking about ad blocking a bit. Gavin asked what happened to “Do Not Track,” anyway. Greg answered that people aren’t going to take a measure like that on their broswers “if it’s even remotely hard.”

9:53: To be competitive, you need to “de-commodotize what you’re doing.” You need to highlight your differences, from a marketing perspective.

9:55: Gavin’s asking about “Reviewapalooza.” What’s this mean for ops? Greg says we need to get rid of bad behaviors in general, to solve problems on your own “instead of getting someone to jump on the phone and solve those problems for you.” That trickles down from advertisers to agenies to publishers. Agencies “are very much responsible for creating the viewability problem to begin with,” but they’re under tremendous pressure from advertisers threatening to put them under review.

Now Joanna Foyle of AOL is going to present AOL’s State of Online Video study.

9:59: AOL reviewed about 300 people in the industry. Its focus was on shifting ad budgets, mobile video, programmatic adoption, programmatic TV and branded video.

10:01: eMarketer is predicting 42% growth from 2014, and now nine out of 10 buyers are shifting budgets from TV to digital, at an average of 10% of those budgets shifting over. Half of mobile vide buyers have increased their mobile video spend since 2014. For publishers, 24% of their 2015 digital revenues are coming from mobile video.

10:05: “Mobile is the greatest beneficiary of this budget shift.” But buyers are having trouble with attribution, measurement and cross-device targeting in mobile. Mobile optimization and scale are other challenges of note.

10:08: 68% of brands say they plan to bring programmatic in-house. But it’s easier to say they want to take it in-house than it is to actually take it in-house. Joanna says it’s not uncommon for clients to lean on her for an assist when they start taking these practices in-house for real.

10:11: Now 88% of publishers are selling video ad inventory programmatically. “Some of you would say being forced to,” Joanna says. In any case that adds up to 42% of publisher video inventory being sold programmatically, and 41% saying they’re going to increase their amount of inventory in programmatic.

10:14: Sellers have fears about this. More than anything, there’s “a perceived risk of content commoditization,” a sense of losing creative control. Around 41% of publishers are using video private marketplaces at the moment, where they feel they can worry less about their CPMs falling by putting inventory into programmatic.

10:18: Gavin asks what AOL’s definition of programmatic TV is. Joanna says they aggregate local inventory into a broader pool, allowing brands to buy inventory locally with added data.

The post Liveblogging La Jolla: Day 2 appeared first on AdMonsters.

Native advertising has developed quite the cachet in digital advertising in the past year, with even the Federal Trade Commission jumping into the debate on proper labeling. Indeed, some of this channel’s growing pains are borne right there in the name itself – “native.” 

Native advertising seeks to emulate a publisher’s platform – it has to ensconce itself in the discussions and conversations endemic to a publisher’s content, and, more important, it has to equally extend and profit from consumers’ desires for said content. 

Creating native advertising that’s harmonious to a site’s user experience – as well as creating native ads agreeable to a publisher’s reader base – can be a backbreaking task for many brands, especially larger ones concocting multichannel campaigns. But as brands blitz their way into the native ad fray, the burden seems to be falling on publishers themselves to implement branded content as seamlessly as possible.  

At the same time, brands don’t often like to relinquish the creative-building process. And with brands (and agencies), sales and ad ops all in one native ad kitchen grabbing at the same skillet, the already demanding task of creating a stellar native advertising campaign can be compounded. 

With native advertising being such a large stake in publishers’ future revenue efforts – the Online Publishers Association suggests that 90% of its members will offer some sort of branded content product by the end of this year – and with no user manual in sight, I sat down with The Huffington Post and Gawker Media to shed light on how branded content is shifting ad ops’ roles and relationship with sales, as well as where ops falls in the creative-making process.

Where Does Ops Go?

The success of a publisher’s native efforts depends on its proactiveness towards educating its team and its ability to adapt. As native advertising becomes an even larger slice of the digital ad arsenal, ad operations teams will be a big part of the puzzle as publishers readjust their ad strategies and rethink brand relationships. 

Educating (and re-educating) ad ops teams is a crucial task when it comes to native advertising. And ad ops teams at larger publishers may find themselves working to reeducate sales teams whose bread and butter is display. 

“A big challenge that we face is education,” said Tessa Gould,  Director of HuffPost Partner Studio. “And this is definitely more of a problem for us because we have a massive sales force that’s supported by AOL, and for many, many years, they really only sold [premium-format] display advertising.” 

For ad ops teams, such as HuffPost Senior Manager of Ad Ops & Monetization Jeff Turner’s, there’s also still the hurdle of figuring out how to package and productize the seemingly endless number of native ad permutations. The IAB has even gone so far as to build a native product categorization guide with the goal of streamlining transactions. 

“Having that ad ops role is important in the creation of native,” Turner said. “Especially because one thing that we’re finding [is] that the actual banners on the content are performing better if they’re aligned with native versus non-native. 

“Where the sale comes in is in terms of that content, and that’s really where ad ops is needed, not just for the automation of the ad, but also the generation of the content and tying that to the ad and how it matches the audience of the publisher.” 

With so many ways to develop and implement a native ad campaign, it’s often up to a publisher’s ad ops team to keep brands and agencies on the right track. And, the most effective way to do that is with a solid set of best practices. 

Fitting in All the Cooks

With many agencies playing monkey in the middle, reaching out to brands directly can sometimes be a burdensome task for publishers. Laying out a native blueprint for advertisers that outlines both how to best engage with a publisher’s audience and how to create content that jibes with a publisher’s website is crucial to building efficient native ad offerings. 

“They’re looking for that conversation with our audience,” said John Price, Director of Ad Operations for Gawker Media. “We want to be able to stimulate that. We, as the publisher, can steer them in the right direction.”

HuffPost Partner Studio and Studio@Gawker act as native ad colanders, helping brands filter ideas and develop content that will increase engagement and resonate with the publishers’ audiences. 

“If anyone is going to pitch native, be it the Huffington Post or the AOL sales team, they loop in our team, and our team will actually provide thought-starters,” Gould said. “It’s sort of the first step that we take to ensure that what we’re pitching is in our voice and is not only brand-aligned, but actually, more importantly,  makes sense for our platform.” 

Ultimately, working hand-in-hand with brands and agencies helps create effective and engaging native content. Having the resources on the ad ops side to extend the reach of native ad campaigns through targeting, impression goals and more may be the key to a successful and scalable native ad strategy. 

“We view native as one of our differentiators,” Price said. “To us,  it’s our premiere offering as a product. It ties back to everything we stand for as far as creating an environment for conversation. Having that ability for our users to communicate directly with a brand really goes back to our core.” 

Where Ad Server and CMS Collide

There’s a fair deal of overlap between the traditional ad server and the traditional CMS; but, it’s where they don’t overlap that’s the key to the future of native ad, according to Todd Sawicki, CEO at Zemanta. For the past two decades, there’s been little change in how publishers serve ads onto their sites, Sawicki noted during his Publisher Forum Sonoma keynote, arguing that it’s time to work with platforms that meld the ad-serving and content-managing processes – a sort of “content-marketing server.” 

“As native evolves, using an ad server to deliver [it] is definitely the beneficial way to go because it gives the advertisers what they want,” Turner said. 

And, although still a work in progress, Gawker’s Kinja seems to be answering Sawicki’s call. 

With the publisher’s almost-one-year-old content platform dubbed Kinja, Gawker’s ability to target, schedule and optimize native advertising allows brands to fit almost seamlessly into the publisher’s editorial workflow.

Giving ad-serving capabilities to editorial content allows Gawker’s native-ad content to be sold by real-time impression and engagement metrics, which allows its ad ops team and Studio@Gawker to worry less about implementation and more about quality. 

“[Native] is not really custom to us. It’s something that’s standardized. They’re literally using the exact same tools,” Price said. “That lends to more scalability in that it’s turnkey.

“We can invest more time in making awesome content and doubling down on that. For us that’s more important than anything. It’s the quality control of it.

“Having those tools allows us to scale quality,” Price added.

Quality assurance of native content is important to ensuring branded content’s fittingness with a publisher’s platform and voice. While some publishers like Gawker and the Huffington Post may have specific in-house teams to walk brands through content creation, for others, the task often lies with ad ops. And although Kinja may be on the cusp of some big native-ad superserver revolution, the pursuit of creating engaging and effective branded content arguably lies in human hands. 

“I definitely think that there is the potential to invest more, and not only on the ad-serving side, but actually [in] what those native ads look like, so it’s a little bit more user-friendly or advertiser-friendly,” Turner said. 

The post Answering the Call: Ad Ops In a Native World appeared first on AdMonsters.

I believe I flinched a bit as the agency executive made that blunt statement. We were chatting in the wake of a heated conference session about viewability, where the chief concern among the publisher quotient had been are agencies really going to pay more for viewable impressions? Supply side representatives seemed unanimous in their disbelief. 

Even as publishers struggle to bring in meager CPMs by tacking on audience segmentation, offering audience extension programs and now adding viewability metrics, digital media is still considered too expensive by the buy side. Is there no pleasing them?

Of course, it was more surprising to see how many publisher revenue strategists agreed that, yeah, digital media is overpriced – not all, but a healthy number candidly shrugged and nodded their heads when queried. An aggravating amount of manual processes go into producing generally mediocre-performing campaigns.

Wasn’t audience targeting going to be the industry’s savior? While advertisers are increasingly demanding data-driven ad products from their publisher partners, audience has been commoditized – every site may have a distinct audience, but they can be reached through a variety of channels. It is no longer a differentiator for publishers – it’s simply the new normal, another line item expected by advertisers. 

So if both sides understand – and dislike – these mundane steps, why do we keep up this same dance?

Well, many publishers are changing the music. It made sense that as soon as audience was commoditized, the focus would turn back to content and context. Publishers like BuzzFeed and Gawker are boasting tremendous results through their native advertising programs – custom, integrated solutions that place advertising directly in the content stream rather than juxtaposed. This streamlined method seems better suited to digital rather than the box approach hastily transferred from print or the interruptive style that has brought in bank on TV.

Basically, native is a substitute term for premium, and the concept is equally as vague. During the recent Native Advertising Summit, a great deal of talk was dedicated to trying to define native and figuring out if it’s scalable. But when premium is in the eye of the beholder, how can you slap a simple definition on it? Should native be a one-size-fits-all solution? Should premium be scalable, or [gasp] a commodity?

Rather than figure out what it is, it’s easier to say what native is not: standard IAB units, the majority of which we will be handled on a programmatic basis in the near future.

Which returns us to question we attacked in the last round of articles on this subject: Is programmatic premium an oxymoron? Like everything else in this industry, the answer is complicated.

Widespread adoption of channels such as programmatic guaranteed and private marketplaces will push programmatic into the realm of what is now considered premium inventory. However, that’s the catch: this widespread adoption – alongside the rise of native advertising and viewability – will destroy that outdated concept of premium, the one where anything that’s sold directly is, and what’s indirectly sold ain’t.

We are in the midst of a major shift in how digital advertising is bought, sold and served. Viewability, native advertising and programmatic proliferation are all coming to a head to seriously shake up the industry and introduce a new, more effective form of premium digital advertising – one that will prove far more beneficial to both the demand and supply sides.

While this may seem like quite a grand end goal, we have to understand where we are regarding this transition – the promised land is still a ways away. However, the road ahead is getting clearer and clearer, especially if you comprehend the machinations underlying the shift. 

Streamlined Media Planning 

The solution is not a pricing algorithm that is tuned to make decisions in less than 30 milliseconds. The problem is streamlining workflow for humans – site discovery, RFPs, document management, negotiations, plans, presentations, approvals, implementation, optimization, reporting, billing, collections, and all that messy stuff that happens in the back room. Joe Pych, Founder and President, NextMark

A few months ago I found myself in the middle of a tense phone call. A certain state of which I had been a resident many years ago claimed I owed them back taxes and demanded I fax them my tax returns immediately.

“Fax?” I asked, trying to recall the last time I used such an archaic device. Did our office even have one? “Why can’t I email them to you?” 

“I’m afraid we can’t allow that, sir,” the tax department said. She’d been testy since the beginning of our conversation, but now seemed to have passed into the realm of pure annoyance.

“But the returns – they’re PDFs. They’re electronic documents.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I didn’t even need to print them to file them – I used e-filing.”

A loud, exasperated exhalation on the other end. “Sir, I need you to fax them. That is final.” 

Rather than further incur the (misguided) wrath of the state government, I dropped the argument. While I was relieved that an e-fax service saved me from uselessly printing and scanning a bunch of sheets, I was annoyed by having to pay for this seemingly unnecessary service. A petty inconvenience to be sure, but still a useless extra step employing outdated technology.

No matter how much we brag about super-efficient real-time bidding growing at a 98% rate year over year, somewhere around 80% of digital media is acquired through guaranteed insertion orders. And this process involves fax machines, spreadsheets and other vintage tech that should embarrass an industry supposedly on the cutting edge of digital.

The lack of efficiency and manual busywork in the direct sales process has long been a perennial sour subject at AdMonsters Publisher Forums. But inefficiency in guaranteed digital media has also plagued the buy side. According to NextMark’s hand-dandy digital media planning workflow calculator, creation and execution costs account for around 8% of a campaign budget, a number the company believes is low – apparently 10%-12% is a more typical gauge for agencies. 

So in a $500,000 campaign, $40,000 is associated with creation and execution of the media plan – NextMark has a headache-inducing diagram of this 42-step process as well. About $19,000, or 47.5%, of the cost alone is associated with implementation, execution and reporting. A great deal of this is mindless processes that can ­– and should be – automated.

As agencies are increasingly squeezed in demonstrating their value – especially with brands digging their toes in programmatic waters and working directly with publishers on native advertising efforts – the imperative to cut costs and build efficiencies is higher than ever.

Companies such as Mediaocean, NextMark and Centro are answering calls to ameliorate the planning and buying process. For example, Centro was kind enough to give me a demonstration of its recently introduced digital media planner. This cloud-based negotiation platform offers a straightforward, step-by-step process for building digital media RFPs. When completed, RFPs can be sent to 13,000 media contacts – the sell-side representatives follow a URL back to the platform and reply to the offer. The complete negotiation is saved within the platform; notifications appear when RFPs are answered.

Currently, Centro’s Media Planner is hooked into DFA’s ad server (additional ad server integrations are forthcoming) allowing for an IO at the click of a button. Planned enhancements in the coming year include trafficking and optimization controls as well as a financial application.

Toss out the fax machines, lose the spreadsheets – this is the future of media planning and it’s streamlined. As even trading desks are experimenting with guaranteed buys, the need to be executed at  – and the sell side needs to answer in kind.

Supply-Side Enablers

Essentially what’s happening is that the order-taking process, the RFP, and the inventory avail “look up” that have been intensely manual for the past 20 years are being automated. And APIs between systems have opened up that allow all these various tools to communicate directly and to drive through the existing roadblocks. Eric Picard, CEO, Rare Crowds

If the digital mediascape is a laboratory, indirect sold inventory has been the consummate lab rat. Publishers initially just plugged these spots with house ads before experimenting with their monetization through ad networks. A quintillion belly fat ads later and this “tier 2” inventory was walking the exchange maze, jacked up on special formula RTB.

And what an experiment that was: take the lowest of the low, the unwanted masses, the unsellable inventory, the vast remnant, and make it attractive to buyers. The RTB test aimed to find a way to make the unsellable palatable – through machine-based trading and audience targeting. Say what you will about RTB, but the experiment has been a success. The underlying technology works like a charm.

As Foundry Group Managing Director Seth Levine commented in “Paths to Programmatic Premium,” “Economics drove remnant adoption [of programmatic trading] first – because the risk of getting it wrong was lower on marginal CPMs.” As programmatically traded non-guaranteed inventory has only raised CPMs incrementally, the time has come to push into guaranteed territory – to bring automation and workflow management to direct-sold inventory. 

Third-party programmatic guaranteed providers have done just that. “Bill-to-fill” solutions from the likes of isocket, Shiny Ads and AdSlot offer publishers guaranteed buys without any of the challenges around implementation. Endless RFP negotiations banished, click to approve the creative QA and the provider even takes care of the financial transaction.

These providers are offering the ability to set it and watch it bring in cash. If something in this offering whiffs of ad networks, there are two big differentiators: complete transparency and the guaranteed label. One publisher representative mentioned that its third-party programmatic guaranteed service actually notifies his team when it sees an opportunity for the direct sales team to approach an advertiser.

Third-party programmatic guaranteed providers have put the heat on supply-side technology like ad servers and SSPs, and they appear to be responding. Already ad servers and SSPs are forging the programmatic premium path by enabling private marketplaces and preferred deals. (Interestingly, audience trading desks like Xaxis are also pushing into this territory by building their own private exchanges with “preferred partners.”) While there are plenty of hiccoughs to overcome on that front – e.g., necessity for a separate IO for every campaign – they realize the next step is bringing a similar level of efficiency to guaranteed sales.

“Pubs should be able to push out info about all classes of inventory into different buying systems – RTB, network, direct sales, etc.,” comments Sam Bell, VP of Business Development for OpenX.  “These various execution models should all be competing – and in order to do that effectively it must be done in the ad server.  This means that the ad server is going to be required to manage those demand channels and also manage the information that flows to each of those buyer systems.”

Ideally, each sell-side technology platform could offer the ability to seamlessly sell and execute direct, programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals through a single platform that covers multiple channels – display, mobile, video. Of course, you can also serve display, mobile and video from the same ad server, but many publishers still go with multiple providers. However, just having the ability to offer such capabilities – at scale, no less – speaks volumes about the progress of the digital advertising industry.

Adapt or Die 

But are these shifts toward the fabled programmatic premium? Well, it’s actually what Upstream Group Founder and CEO Doug Weaver calls “automated process reform”: “bringing machine-based precision to the act of trading ads for money.” Leveraging automation to streamline guaranteed sales is an essential step toward a future in which the vast majority of standardized inventory is traded and executed through programmatic channels.

In the same column, Weaver laments the overuse of the “intellectually lazy” term programmatic, but this is standard operating procedure in this industry when we try to comprehend amorphous concepts and shifts in behavior: we invent a neat-o marketing term. (Maybe we picked it up from those PR people we keep in close company.) Unfortunately, that term tends to slide down the slippery slope from cool to confusing to abhorred.

If “banner” ever had any hipster cred, that was well before my time; that catchall phrase for standard IAB display units has been abhorred since this side of forever. “Native” is another one of these terms that seems to have quickly glided into the confusing zone, perhaps teetering on the border of abhorred.

As I mentioned in the beginning, defining native seems to be a Sisyphean task, but at its core is the idea that content and advertising are being thrust into the same stream, which is seemingly the optimal monetization strategy for digital media. This is not to say the banner is in its death throes (though hopefully it will stop making appearances on smartphones) – especially online, interruptive display units are ideal for fulfilling audience targeting and frequency initiatives.

But should the banner still be considered premium? Or sold and executed in that manner? Should direct sales teams be actively selling guaranteed banners, or rather as complements to highly customized, integrated campaigns (cough, native) – similar to how private marketplaces and audience extension deals are arranged?

When I brought up programmatic guaranteed to an industry luminary recently, he commented, “That’s about publishers trying to dwindle down their direct sales teams.” Purveyors of third-party programmatic guaranteed have long highlighted that they are not in business to kill direct sales teams. However, the goal of programmatic guaranteed is indeed (to use another icky industry term) to disrupt them.

Publishers are notoriously slow to adapt new technology – how many are still trusting black-box ad networks with their unsold inventory? – and processes. If the voices at AdMonsters’ Publisher Forums are to be believed, direct sales teams are notorious sticks in the mud when it comes to embracing change. But the development of efficient workflow practices and the programmatic trading evolution are rapidly reaching a tipping point – members of direct sales teams must adapt or face oblivion.

Because efficiency is not the be-all, end-all of successful digital media monetization – it’s merely the next milemarker on the road to the new premium.

In the next installment of this series, we’ll examine where purely programmatic channels currently fit within publisher ad operations and why the programmatic guaranteed and private exchanges may become increasingly competitive. In addition, we’ll peak at viewability’s effect on the shifting landscape and the potential of audience futures.

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