Reliance on the click means delivering unfathomable amounts of ad impressions to users, which has hyper-inflated the value of the pageview. This has led to a broken advertising system that rewards quantity over quality. Instead of building audiences, digital publishers are chasing traffic, trying to lure users to sites via clickbait headlines where the user is assaulted with an array of intrusive ad units. The end effect is overwhelming, ineffective ads adjacent to increasingly shoddy content.

However, the rise of digital video and viewability have injected linear TV measurement capabilities into the digital space. By including time in its calculation, viewability has opened a conversation into the value of user attention. It has introduced metrics with the potential to assist premium publishers in building attractive audiences; better quantify exposure for advertisers; and ultimately financially reward publishers with more engaged audiences.

This is a new and fast developing area, but one where a little education can go a long way. In addition to describing current attention metrics, AdMonsters’ latest playbook, Understanding Attention Metrics (sponsored by Chartbeat) will dive into what you should look for in an advanced metrics partner and how to use these metrics in selling inventory and optimizing campaign performance. We’ll discuss working with editorial to improve site experience in general and touch on how to transact based on attention and active time in-view.

Once the impression served as the chief proxy for exposure, to be replaced by the click as a proxy for engagement. Now time-based metrics have the potential to play proxy for arguably the most valuable commodity in digital advertising: attention.

There’s no time to waste!

Download Playbook

The post AdMonsters Playbook: Understanding Attention Metrics appeared first on AdMonsters.

Those of us in the trenches of the digital advertising world have become immune to the lure of buzzwords, no matter how many times and in how many contexts they are repeated. But at some point our curiosity bests us and we have to ask, “How much of this is the real deal and what’s sheer hype?”

AI is an even more unusual case—sure, chatbots and virtual personal assistants are neat, but how does that relate to the digital media world, and more precisely digital advertising and media monetization? 

In the end, it’s all about UX—AI has the potential to be the ultimate user experience tool. But to see why, we have to take a step back and consider the roots of AI, or really—and pardon the philosophical turn—intelligence itself.

Roots

At it’s most basic, intelligence is a three-step process: the ability to acquire information, distill it into knowledge, and then apply it to behaviors in a variety of contexts. Even simpler: the capacity to record data, analyze them and then act on the findings.

Artificial intelligence is a subset of machine learning, itself a term that has been repeated to the point of mockery in digital advertising. While many companies claim to apply machine learning for “better ad targeting,” in truth a lot of humans are behind the scenes manually adjusting algorithms based on perceived trends. That’s pretty organic intelligence right there. 

Most software and algorithms are at heart based on rules written by humans—if this happens, then do that. With machine learning, the software itself begins writing the rules based on its experience and knowledge extracted. At a primary level, this can greatly simplify the automation of mundane tasks.

Getting more complicated, as John Cole of Ezoic explains, “Artificial intelligence is technically a sub-vertical of machine learning that takes this data and ‘learns’ in the way a human brain does, mimicking the behavior of neurons.” Probably the clearest example of this is Google’s search results, which are now primarily driven through artificial intelligence rather than algorithmic updates.

Getting Personal

And that highlights the central opportunity for AI in the digital media world: personalization. On the advertiser side, this is an extension of what programmatic traders have been trying to do with data-fueled real-time bidding markets for years–precisely deliver the most relevant ad to the right person at the right time. With its lightning fast processing power, AI theoretically could iterate the targeting process at warp speed.

For publishers, it’s a bit more complicated. Site content personalization comes first—instead of just adjusting algorithms to give a seemingly custom experience to each visitor, AI would learn from user tastes over time to create truly personal experience. And this is true for advertising too as part of the content experience, which is why the “native” trend has pushed for more integrated advertising. 

Research from Ezoic suggests what many of us in digital media monetization implicitly know—the more time people spend on a property, the higher the revenue return. The great potential of AI is linking user experience to user engagement on multiple levels—yes, even through the advertising.

Ezoic specifically outlines the direct correlation between improved user experiences and revenue per 1,000 visitors (EPMV). The data show that extended user sessions—more true pageviews and users spending longer times engaged on site—results in higher revenues for digital publishers; as EPMV is a metric that can allow publishers to measure the impact of UX on overall revenue. 

This demonstrates the value of trying to affect these experiences on a per-user basis; as you can see in the study, additional pageviews—specifically on mobile—have an exponential correlation with greater revenue when a user session extends into those next two pageviews. 

Take a Test Drive

While it’s not exactly early days for AI, there’s certainly a lot of development still to come—you can’t magically hook an AI into your site and expect highly personalized experiences to instantly indulge your audiences.

The name of the game now is experimentation, mainly via multivariate testing (at great speeds!). This could be as simple as judging effectiveness between a variety of creatives, juggling site layouts to stimulate user reaction, or testing the engagement aptitude of the ads coming in from your various demand partners.

There is a lot of hype around AI, and certainly ad tech folks recall that not all technology is created equal. So this is actually an opportune time to wade in the waters to not only get a better feel for how to use the technology, but also which emerging players show the most promise.

The post Understanding AI’s Potential in Digital Media appeared first on AdMonsters.

Publishers need to access and process data in order to optimize their header bidding strategies. To understand the challenges at hand, and to get a sense of how pubs can find some relief, I called up Shareably Cofounder Peter Kim and Roxot Marketing Director Alex Kharitoshin. Peter’s background gives him a compelling perspective with these issues–he’s running Shareably’s ad ops efforts now, but prior to the company’s founding, he had been an engineer. Throughout this conversation, we talked about the engineering issues in acting on data from header integrations, the Prebid.js environment and Roxot’s interest in solving problems within it, the data challenges server-to-server integrations pose, and a few other related topics to boot.

BRIAN LaRUE: Peter, where are you seeing discrepancies in your reports and what do you do to resolve or otherwise account for them?

PETER KIM: As we’ve added more demand partners into our ad stack, we started seeing discrepancies in revenue. In the past, we looked at reports from our demand partners and tried to reconcile them with what we could pull out of DFP. What Roxot provides is client-side data collection, a second way of consolidating data with the demand partner. We can dig down and see whether a discrepancy in revenue was a discrepancy in impressions or in bid prices.

ALEX KHARITOSHIN: When you have data from multiple sources, it’s really hard to compare. Every demand partner tags even country or mobile device differently. Even with timeouts and response times, demand partners don’t know whether they’ve reached the client side—they just respond with their bids. Publishers simply don’t have a source of reliable information.

BRIAN: When you look at the data from your demand partners, how does that data help you make decisions that helps Shareably’s bottom line?

PETER: What we’ve been able to do with data from demand partners has been very limited, because of resource constraints and how we prioritize solidifying our own data versus the partners’ data. Also because of fragmentation—there isn’t any standard of how data is structured across partners. Collecting all the data and transforming it into something publishers can make business decisions off of requires one-off integrations. That’s an intensive engineering task. Before we go into extracting data from our demand partners, we first want to solidify data we can control—client-side header bidding data going through DFP. With DFP server reporting, the data is always structured and there’s an accessible API. Then go into the unknown—client-side header bidding data. The third frontier is looking at demand partners’ data to see if we can bring that in.

BRIAN: What kind of solutions were you looking at to analyze your data before you got to a point where you decided you needed some vendor assistance?

PETER: When Prebid.js first came out, the solution they offered was that you could integrate Google Analytics and piggyback off that. But we found Google Analytics data unreliable, because of Shareably’s volume and scale. A lot of the data coming in was getting lost, getting sampled, getting throttled.

BRIAN: When Roxot was developing these tools, what complaints were you hearing from publishers that made you think of a solution you could offer?

ALEX: The biggest problem was the ability to make data-driven decisions on ad stack optimizations. If you don’t know how your ad stack is doing, how do you know if adding a partner is going to help you or not? In the Prebid environment, there are so many moving parts and variables that you can’t maximize your effectiveness by simply turning on and off bidders based on revenue they report. The problem that we were trying to solve with Prebid Analytics is recency, quality, and availability of ad auction data for every Prebid publisher. We have good experience with the data; we work with machine learning. We used the skills we had to provide publishers with a solution like Prebid Analytics. The goal with the product was to make each element actionable and easy to understand,  according to the publisher’s needs. Each dashboard provides you with a unique perspective on your prebid data. You can spot an issue on Total Dashboard and move around other views to dig deeper.

Prebid Analytics provides publishers with client-side data for header bidding performance, and it’s an official partner of Prebid.org. Integration is very similar to plugging a new demand provider into Prebid.js.

PETER: Prebid.js is the most-used open source header bidding client tool out there, and they’ve released the API where you can switch out the internal analytics with whatever third-party tool you want.

BRIAN: Peter, how has your engineering background influenced the way you approach revenue optimization?

PETER: Coming in from an engineering background, I’ve found the space to be especially fascinating because of all the opportunities in programmatic—any optimizations you do in programmatic are scalable. It doesn’t required a lot of manpower, my optimizations will be there to stay, and it doesn’t cost anything to run—it’s just code running on the client or server. Right now we primarily make our revenue off programmatic display.

BRIAN: How does your stake in programmatic inform who goes into the header versus who goes into the waterfall?

PETER: We only run eight to 10 bidders and evaluate very stringently how much they affect our bottom line. We’re a very small team, and going through that business development process of adding a bidder is something we don’t take very lightly.

Programmatic is moving very, very quickly. We want to make sure we’re working with demand partners who are moving as quickly as us. That maintains our flexibility to adapt in the market.

BRIAN: How does the service you’re getting from Prebid Analytics now help you toward your goals of managing, processing and taking action on data?

PETER: Consolidating reporting from our demand partners and DFP manually, we found a lot of discrepancies. Prebid Analytics helped us identify certain bugs. After that we started digging into the data a little bit more, looking at individual bidders and statistics such as average bid price, winning eCPM, win rate and timeout rate. We saw the timeout rate for a lot of bidders was a lot higher than we were expecting. That information helps open up the conversation with our demand partners to work together to resolve the issue. When you have more data, you have leverage.

BRIAN: Server-to-server is becoming more widespread. How does that affect publishers’ ability to access data and act on it?

PETER: It depends. Client-side header bidding came to be because there’s a lack of transparency in the marketplace. Server-to-server is a little different. When you’re working with an enterprise solution, you have to make sure they’re providing the data you want, and trust them enough that they’re not going to use the data to unfairly optimize their own goals. In the market today, the trust between SSPs and publishers isn’t the greatest. As of today, we still aren’t on a server-to-server solution.

Prebid Server, just announced recently, promises you’ll be making the calls in the server, but all the bids are returned to the client, where the auction still takes place. You still have control of the end data. That hybrid solution could be a happy medium, but it’s early. Right now, we’re bearish on enterprise server-to-server solutions. We’re cautious of entering a one-off agreement with one demand partner when we should be fairly competing all the demand partners.

ALEX: With server-to-server, you have to make sure that data is transparently accessible and not hidden in the vendor’s black box. Passing back all the data to the client is the only way to get transparent and clear data on your whole stack.

BRIAN: What needs to be done, either in-house or through partner support, to present server-to-server bidder data together with data from client-side header bidders, so publishers can make impactful decisions?

ALEX: The ideal option is when the server-to-server solution passes all of its data back to the client side, they still have to connect in one place all the data tied to one impression. This way the data is completely transparent and actionable—you don’t have to go to different data sources and combine everything manually. Prebid Analytics will collect the data as it does with demand partners in the header without additional manipulations or dev work. With this data, publishers can use Prebid Analytics to identify which partners should go to the cloud and who should stay in the header.

PETER: When you go with an enterprise server-to-server solution, and they only show up in Prebid.js as one bidder, you have to go to the demand partner and have them split the data, then merge that data with what you’re getting from Prebid.js in order to have a full picture. If that partner eventually goes away or you realize they weren’t the best solution, you have to rebuild that same integration with another partner. Even when you know there’s consolidation coming in the marketplace, with an open source solution you can know the structure is still going to stay intact.

The post Feed Your Header: Talking Data for Header Optimization With Roxot and Shareably appeared first on AdMonsters.

Here’s how it plays out: The ad comes through the pipes looking like any ad, but this one is hyper-aware of its environment, actively analyzing every data point it can access at every stage, actively hiding while you let it do its thing. When it’s scanned by an ad security vendor, the ad loads a nondescript domain pretending to belong to one of the name-brand measurement platforms we all know. But then, when that smart piece of Javascript built into the ad picks up characteristics of a mobile device that it knows the scanners can’t spoof, then that “A-OK” measurement script morphs into a user’s worst nightmare: a malicious domain. The bad domain can then pick its favorite attack undisturbed: instead of the measurement script, some will serve a redirect, others may pop up an alert informing the lucky user about a prize, and some try to infect the device directly. Regardless of what the malicious ad is trying to do, one thing we know for sure is that user isn’t going to be happy—no one ever calls their mother with that funny story of how they got phished!

More Than Just a Nuisance

It’s a wily little trick and not even the most technically sophisticated—just an incremental improvement on bad actors’ well-worn methods that have allowed them to consistently stay ahead of the ad security scanners. The criminals behind this most recent innovation are so confident they had it right that they didn’t stop at the standard one or two platforms to launch their attack—this malicious redirect campaign was spotted in ads coming from eight platforms in the same week.

In the end, we have to remember this is not about annoying the user. Suddenly being directed away from the content you want, to an entirely new page where it appears impossible to x out or return to the previous page is not just a weird cyber-prank—it’s criminal activity.

It’s important, then, we understand what the malvertisers might want to accomplish through mobile redirects. Sometimes the goals are not so severe—the user is sent to the app store, to a particular app—a game, or anything else that costs money. If the user ends up either convinced or forced to download it, the entity behind the redirect gets a cut. In two words, that’s affiliate fraud.

The outright criminal incentives are exponentially more problematic for the user—the user may get a fake notification on their screen that their phone has become infected, telling them they have to download a file, which then actually infects their phone. The most sophisticated criminals go straight for the attack, inserting a script into the browser that tries to steal the user’s personal information if the user is in a logged-in environment. That’s malware, straight up, and it’s a critical security risk publishers run every time you accept an unverified impression from the programmatic open marketplace.

Malvertisers, They Grow Up So Fast

Bad actors in the digital space are very active in mobile right now. Some years back, there was widespread concern about exploit kits targeting the user’s desktop. More recently, over the past two years, ransomware was the threat of the day. Now mobile is where the action is. The smartphone’s browser is overall more secure than the desktop browser and the Flash ad creative the industry used to rely on, though, so now criminals reach the user through phishing, faking an interface and driving the worst type of actions.

One might expect cost to be a barrier to entry for malvertisers—their activity would presumably be limited by whatever they’d have to pay the platforms for impressions. The intuitive defense for many publishers has been to set floors for bids. But in reality, the more sophisticated malvertisers using redirects seem to be evading paying for impressions, too. As a vendor source explained, it’s all about timing. If the malvertiser triggers the redirect before the platform has a chance to trigger their pixel, then they can win the auction with a very high CPM, beating out even premium buyers who would bid on the high side themselves. As long as the bad domain loads before the platform has registered the ad is loading, then the malvertiser can execute their payload freely. So the malvertiser gets their chance to phish the user, doesn’t get charged by the platform, and naturally the publisher doesn’t get paid. No one knows just how many discrepancies are actually intentional!

More Power to the Pubs

Today, the industry has gotten to the point where the publisher has the most incentive to solve this virulent redirect problem, for multiple reasons. For one thing, the publisher bears the brunt of the user’s ire, because most users don’t care that the publisher is just one end of a long and often tangled ad supply chain. Going forth and declaring to your audiences: “This is the DSPs fault!” will have little impact on users who have no idea what a DSP even is. They know you, the publisher, though, and they know their phone got messed up when they went to your site.

For another thing, publishers also bear the most financial burden. Malvertisers rob publishers of revenue they could get from trustworthy, premium buyers. The platforms are still getting paid by their advertiser clients. It’s not as though the platforms overall don’t care. It’s just that where malvertising is a quality control issue for the platforms, it’s a bottom-line revenue issue for publishers.

While there’s been plenty of talk over the years about how quality control in the digital ad industry should be spread out across the supply chain, with the weight borne by everyone involved, publishers have an opportunity to take the lead in this discussion. The impressions and the audience are the publisher’s, and the publisher ought to take ownership of them. From that point, publishers can dictate how the responsibility for malware prevention could or should be distributed up and down the chain.

Also, if publishers are worried about the negative ramifications of making demands of buyers, let’s remember there’s value in premium content, and premium advertisers care about that value. Chase recently cut basically the entire publisher long tail off of the sites they buy from—almost 99% of those pubs—from 400,000 to 5,000.  Champion the user experience, get rid of the criminals, and the real advertisers will take their place.

Looking for the Now

But how? As it stands, the prevalent industry solution for malware prevention is to scan ads. There are weaknesses to scanning, though, including three notable ones.

First, scanners can be evaded—like in our earlier example, the domains being served to scanners weren’t the same as those being served to your site. Second, scanning isn’t a real-time solution—it is a sandbox-based sampling testing process that can only draw conclusions on what it sees, not what your user saw. Third, scanners, by their nature, can only scan, not actually block the bad ads they do detect.

So, though scanning certainly has a place in an overall industry-scaled ad security solution, scanners clearly have limited value for programmatic-enabled publishers. Detecting malware and other security risks pre-auction? Sure, scanners work for that. Blocking mobile redirects once the auction has been won? Nope. When bad actors are aware their behaviors are being scanned for, and as such actively evade, the platforms detection methods, it becomes pretty obvious scanning is neither comprehensive enough nor fast enough to fully protect publishers in the current programmatic era.

So, let’s back up, and acknowledge as an industry we can’t afford to be less than comprehensive anymore. If the platforms are not delivering on their promise to protect users, publishers need to hold platforms, and therefore themselves, to a higher standard. User experience matters–just go ask your neighbor’s kid about which ad blocking software they find most effective. Publishers need the industry to drive home that they demand security and protection for their users, with standards that align with both their short-term and long-term needs.

Get Ahead of the Problem

This starts by identifying the optimum security processes for each layer of the ad ecosystem. Buy side platforms have their own needs and environments, different from exchanges and ad networks, which are in turn different from publishers themselves. One lax publisher with no security controls who drives a user to install an ad blocker hurts the industry just as much as the DSP that let in the bad ad in the first place. Instead of working top down from what the DSP wants, towards the sell side, and eventually to publishers, let’s work backwards from what the ideal publisher solution looks like. That’s pretty straightforward: An ideal solution starts and ends with mobile redirects and other malicious ads being blocked before they affect users, full stop. Scanning may have a role for the buy side pre-auction, and the exchanges in-auction, to verify bids that haven’t won impressions, but if an impression is occurring, the publisher (as the owner of the users’ experience) needs to be able to verify it doesn’t bring any uninvited guests. A real-time, post-auction, impression-level verification is a logical starting point.

Publishers have been using price floors and vendor partner choice as proxies for effective malware prevention, but neither is a complete solution, and both impact revenue generation. To take on the most dangerous and audacious malvertisers out there, publishers need real-time insights and the ability to effectively block compromised ads—and those are the only capabilities that could help enforce their rightful position as the authoritative drivers of the industry-wide conversation about malware prevention. Coupled with targeted point solutions for pre-auction & in-auction verification, and eventually even open channels to law enforcement, real-time verification could help make the fight proactive rather than reactive.  That’s a world in which we, as an industry, are two steps ahead of the malvertising criminals instead of 10 steps behind.

The post Through a Scanner Frequently: When Malvertisers Evade the Scanners appeared first on AdMonsters.

Of course, that process is about as complicated as it is exciting. You have to track and manage orders across all channels, analyze and optimize yield–there are a lot of component parts involved in getting complete view of your inventory’s performance. Order management as publishers know it quickly grows into something broader–revenue management.

AdMonsters recently had a chance to talk with Clayton Tarics, FatTail‘s VP, Product Management, about this idea that order management done correctly is, more accurately, revenue management. Clayton’s entire focus right now is FatTail’s core AdBook platform. He started out by explaining how AdBook’s continuing development, and the functionality publishers have demanded of the platform, has pointed toward this revenue management concept.

BRIAN LaRUE: Can you fill us in on the AdBook product and what you’re doing currently to keep up with publishers’ evolving needs?

CLAYTON TARICS: FatTail started with an ops tool to help publishers manage orders. From there we grew the platform building in components for pricing, inventory management, ad server integration, and wrapped it into a workflow management and reporting suite.

From there we developed sales enablement tools for sales teams. AdBook Direct brings sales extension into the AdBook core platform, helps to power automated guaranteed marketplaces, and facilitates connections directly into buying systems. We’re rebranding all of that as the AdBook Plus revenue management platform.

The core mission is to help publishers execute sales and optimize yield, and to execute forward guaranteed transactions from any channel.

BRIAN: You’ve said the key differences between order management and revenue management are the use of analytics to drive strategy, and things like integration and scalability. Can you elaborate?

CLAYTON: Order management, for publishers, is a bit of a misnomer. An order management solution is more like a system that you’d run on your web store for T-shirts and funny coffee mugs. Airline pricing systems are the textbook example of revenue management, but I also think of that gate that I have to go through in the parking garage at work—that’s a revenue management system in the parking industry. The heart of digital advertising revenue management is a platform that connects all the disparate systems in the publisher tech stack that contribute to the generation of revenue and yield optimization. It drives the comprehensive, cross-channel sales and execution strategy.

Revenue management needs to present insights from analytics in an actionable manner. That influences how sales happen, product packaging and mix, pricing, downstream ad campaign optimization. There’s a business workflow control element, like the parking garage gate, that manages and puts controls around the end-to-end process. A new horizon for us is extending the publisher’s sales reach.

BRIAN: When did you come to realize order management was maybe not the most accurate term for what you needed to do?

CLAYTON: I was having a conversation with the dev team here, thinking, “What if there was no Save button on the order page?” That led us to some reflections. Why do we call it order management? What makes digital advertising so uniquely complex?

For one, publisher supply forecasts fluctuate heavily. Second, inventory is perishable, and it has only milliseconds of shelf life as you’re bound by expectations around user experience to make decisions on how to complete the transaction. Third, delivery is non-linear—you’re responding to every single ad call. Fourth, audience segmentation is fluid, and those segments are worth different things to different people at different moments. Lastly, forward guaranteed transactions get complex quickly. Some of our publisher clients put together orders with a thousand line items and complex flighting and targeting requirements spanning multiple months. So, the need is beyond what a system for a T-shirt store can offer.

BRIAN: Can you explain the various systems that need to be connected within a revenue management system? What’s under the hood?

CLAYTON: We’ve offered integration to CRM platforms, inventory forecasting systems, DMPs, billing systems, ad servers and other fulfillment systems. A fulfillment system could be a DSP for an audience extension. We’ve also facilitated integrations for BI and reporting systems as well as for delivery reconciliation systems. We’ve built a robust set of APIs to connect components of the ad tech stack and for electronic buying systems to facilitate sales extension. On the horizon is data synching technology that would allow buyers to forecast and buy their own audience segments directly from publishers, in addition to proprietary publisher segments.

BRIAN: In differentiating an OMS versus an RMS, there’s this implication that not everyone is doing revenue management. So why is not everyone doing it, and what’s the barrier to entry?

CLAYTON: You’ve got to have data and an opportunity to make the insights from the analytics on that data actionable. In the typical publisher ad tech stack in 2017, it’s really difficult for a standalone RMS to not have an operational component to it. Trying to build a business influencing processes across six or eight very different connected systems remotely is a massive investment. Another barrier to entry is the rapid pace of emerging technology.

BRIAN: That said, there’s obviously a demand. Publishers have tried to implement hacks and workarounds with order management. What does FatTail see with those customizations, and how do those inform the RMS?

CLAYTON: A lot of times, we don’t get to talk to a company until they’ve gotten desperate around a particular problem. When we do talk, often we see sub-optimal use of other systems in the tech stack, or point solutions bolted on to anchor systems in the stack. Tell-tale signs of the struggle are elaborate swivel-chair processes — read: duplicate data entry between systems — or offline trackers to manage sales, pricing and operational components. In-house dev teams often try to solve revenue management gaps on the nearest available dev platform—we see a lot of crazy solutions built into Salesforce, the billing system, or their in-house operational platform.

After we get the publisher’s lay of the land, we talk about how to re-position the systems in the stack for their best uses. If a particular workaround isn’t accommodated for by a feature on AdBook today, we look to integrate with the system that does solve that problem, or build a custom solution. For example, one of our clients uses an internally built order management system, tailor-made for a subset of products. Part of our partnership with them included building an integration so that they could assemble a single order with lines from their order management system and lines from products managed in AdBook. That’s two order management systems united by a single revenue management system.

BRIAN: So how can implementing an RMS versus an OMS affect the overall efficiency and resource management for a publisher?

CLAYTON: That’s the million-dollar question, or many millions of dollars. It’s impossible to quantify perfectly. But with the case studies we’ve performed, we would say an OMS could allow you to save 20-25% of revenue through efficiencies yielded, whereas a revenue management system would allow you to double that or more, depending on levels of sophistication around inventory management or pricing, and on optimizing sales channels.

BRIAN: How does a good RMS help a publisher understand and optimize yield across all their direct and programmatic channels? Is there anything a less-robust OMS can’t do that an RMS can?

CLAYTON: You have to be able to connect to all of those systems and channels to be able to execute that comprehensive strategy. Also, business controls—the parking garage gate—are an important component. You have to be able to allow other systems to connect to you and further amplify the process. You have to be able to see the world in terms that make sense to that particular publisher based on key dimensions like site or platform or size.

BRIAN: In building out the product, did you experience any challenges in pulling together information from multiple points of entry throughout the publisher org?

CLAYTON: Integrations are hard because in most cases you’re trying to marry together two fundamentally different systems. We see some patterns: Every ad server has dates, an impression goal, and similar targeting capabilities, for example. On the other hand, not every system is ready to be integrated with. Beyond that, we try to balance the desire for a nirvana state of things—full integration, full automation, business control in all the right places, campaigns flowing cleanly from sales to ops, no late creative, etc.—with our experience tackling those problems. We try to be as consultative as possible with process, integrations, and alignment of people and technology.

Cultural change can be equally challenging. The level of the desired change for management and the organizational readiness to make that change are usually not aligned.

The revenue management need, from the perspective of the organization, sits across the whole tech stack and all teams involved, from quote to cash, configuration to monetization. The goal is to put all of those systems and people and processes in harmony with each other and optimize for the best yield. You can’t look at one or two solutions or people or processes in isolation and expect to hit a home run.

The post Raising the Gate on Revenue Management: A Talk With FatTail on Going Beyond Order Management appeared first on AdMonsters.

While programmatic and other indirect channels have proven ops as a serious revenue center, it’s also forced the department into highly unfamiliar territory such as creative development and user experience. And this more prominent role attracts the interest of other groups across the organization such as legal, IT/security and privacy/risk.

AdMonsters has long noted that ops professionals are the gatekeepers at digital publishers when it comes to advertising—nothing gets on the page without their (sometimes forced) approval. However, the the digital advertising industry is at a unique intersection: publishers’ revenue teams are eager to try any and every monetization resource as traditional digital revenue streams wane; however, creative has also never had such a high potential to be annoying, intrusive, alienating, downright threatening (e.g., malvertising) or prohibited (e.g., violating government regulations).

The situation is exacerbated by the disconnect between advertiser goals, publisher capabilities and audience acceptance. In response, digital readers are increasingly embracing ad-blocking extensions across platforms and governments are penalizing non-compliant activity.

While it may not seem intuitive, ops must do more than act as site gatekeepers who only follow publication-specific quality assurance guidelines. They must also actively analyze and strategize around how specific revenue efforts affect user experience.

This includes protecting the end user (and the site) from malware and other security concerns; validating all tech partners involved in advertising on the site; ensuring ad creative meets a certain standard; mediating the effect of ads on site speed and page weight; and complying with federal regulations around data privacy and other matters.

The AdMonsters Playbook: User Experience (developed with the support of The Media Trust) will examine these areas and more in an effort to help ops form an optimal user experience strategy.

Download Playbook

The post Admonsters Playbook: User Experience appeared first on AdMonsters.

Funny how quickly things change. As increased spend hits digital channels and the people holding the purse strings don’t feel they’re getting their money’s worth, brands have upped their interest in the mysterious workings of digital advertising. 

Yes, they seek the grail! I mean… transparency!

The biggest sign of movement is the now infamous, gauntlet-laying IAB Annual Leadership Meeting speech by P&G’s Marc Pritchard. In a nuanced talk where he admitted brands don’t have the greatest understanding about how digital media executions work, Pritchard set a rigid list of demands mainly aimed at media agencies, including disclosure of rebates and all transactions made auditable. Finally, Pritchard contended that any company in touch P&G dollars needed to be accredited by the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG). 

Then last month, brand safety became the topic du jour again after a long period of flying under the radar. A few advertisers and agencies made a big show of ditching Google’s advertising platforms—including the Google Display Network and YouTube—after their creative appeared on extremist sites and other content.

While no one else pulled their spend, advertiser outcry was loud enough that Google offered public apologies and promised enhanced buyer controls. This renewed interest in brand safety comes at the strange intersection of heightened public awareness (including worried advertisers) of extremist publications and hate content on the Internet, and brands becoming more insistent about where they want their ads to appear. 

Taken alongside increased brand efforts to become programmatic media buyers, it’s clear advertisers want a lot more control in the digital space. After several high-profile measurement snafus, advertisers have also managed to force Google and Facebook to crack open their walled gardens to let third-party measurement crews in.

Believe it or not, premium publishers, brands caring about how the sausage is made is quite good news for you: the days of blindly chasing cookies all over the web have ended, and the so-called race to the bottom in programmatic has been canceled! Though in his speech Pritchard lamented the “crappy media supply chain,” the opportunities are there to show that your sites are not part of it.

You see, advertisers have grown to love the power of buying programmatically, and why wouldn’t they? They can target their highly valuable first-party data or even do ID-syncing with publishers. The desire for transparency and brand safety will push them even further into private marketplaces with premium publishers they believe they can trust.

Oooh—that’s the rub, isn’t it? How do your prove you’re trustworthy in the age of obfuscation? Well, first be forthright about viewability and invalid traffic figures with your partners. Also, avoid buying traffic if you can; if you must, make sure you are monitoring the amount of bot traffic coming in from each partner. Then work on removing as many intermediary bumps as possible between you and your advertiser partners to try ward away arbitrage. Oh, yeah—make sure you’ve got a malware scanner keeping the bad ads out.

But even with all that, you should be looking into registering with TAG. (You might remember when we wrote about their malware prevention guidelines a little while ago.) This joint effort of the IAB, ANA and 4A’s offers certifications against fraud, malware, and piracy in order to create a registry of digital advertising players yearning for transparency. Basically, it’s creating an easy way for advertisers to determine who is serious about playing clean.

I know some of you are thinking, “Aw man—one more certification I have to get?” Well, if the world’s biggest advertiser—that would be P&G—is pushing for certification of its whole supply chain, you can bet others will follow suit. 

Sovrn CEO Walter Knapp suggests in a blog post that this movement has momentum: “Any responsible supply-side participant that drags their feet or ignores these industry requirements is doing nothing more than leaching from the common asset of consumer trust. Any marketer or advertiser that doesn’t vote with their wallets is just feeding the problem. This is within our control to solve, so let’s get on with it already.”

Oh, and pubs should be using the registry as well to check on their ad tech partners. Because transparency isn’t just about the pub—it’s a group effort. TAG potentially offers an opportunity to pre-validate partners before you begin working with them. (This does not, however, replace the vendor certification process for your pub. TAG certification would be more like a handy addendum.)

With brands demanding transparency throughout the supply chain, publishers will have to be pickier about their providers, especially when advertisers insist on direct relationships between DSPs/SSPs straight to pubs rather than through a network or other intermediary. 

Trust is at an all-time low in digital advertising; it’s kinda fortuitous that brands are diving in now with serious transparency demands… Because someone needed to, and an initiative was only going to be effective coming from the top. 

And even though it may seem like the dreaded Duopoly is towering over ad spend, their lack of transparency is a huge structural weakness, especially as inventory quality becomes important than quantity.

The post Transparency Is a Team Sport appeared first on AdMonsters.

What kind of issues? Take the right to erasure, for example. If a user can show consent to process their personal data was not given, or that the data is outdated or irrelevant for whatever purposes it was collected, that individual can force the data holder (e.g., website operator) to erase that offending data and prevent any third parties from processing it. In Europe, this is a tightening-up of an older idea—the “right to be forgotten”, which has been on the books since 2006. Google claims it received at least 385,000 requests to be digitally forgotten in a two-year period. But to U.S publishers, these privacy efforts might seem arcane and counterintuitive to effective marketing or advertising strategies.

New E.U. Privacy Laws Have a Global Reach

Publishers and vendors alike who are looking at these changes tend to agree the overall impact of GDPR will be felt on a global level. Anyone who operates a website—not just-ad-supported publishers—is liable to feel some kind of reverberation, and responsibility will extend beyond revenue operations (ops) and throughout the publisher’s business, e.g., risk, legal, IT, etc. What’s new with GDPR is that E.U. residents (aka “data subjects”) are protected regardless of what data is collected or where it goes as long as they are physically within the EU.

Ecommerce sites and publishers that require logins or registrations should be on particular alert. GDPR broadens the scope of what could be considered “personal” information, which involves a combination of information the user willingly enters (registration, preferences, etc.) and collected/compiled/associated behavioral data that could be used to target a user.

Approved in 2016, and set to go into effect on May 25, 2018, GDPR effectively replaces or updates the 22-year-old E.U. Data Protection Directive (a/ka/a the “cookie directive”). GDPR goes several steps further than the earlier directive—it requires the user’s “unambiguous” consent before their data can be processed; users need to purposely provide it. Users will likely need to set their opt-in or opt-out preferences at the browser level. Therefore, the onus will be on publishers to manage these browser-based privacy preferences and take responsibility for determining what data gets passed along to upstream partners. If there’s any type of breach or data mishandling, the publisher (or website operator) is liable unless they have the documentation to prove otherwise.

To be compliant with GDPR, publishers need a comprehensive opt-in/opt-out system that explains to the user what data is being collected and for what purpose. Fortunately for publishers, revenue generation and direct marketing activities are considered legitimate reasons for data collection, per the E.U.’s language.

Tough Talk on Enforcement

GDPR sets up a new apparatus for reporting and enforcing potential data violations. Every E.U. nation will have a Data Protection Authority (DPA) to mediate—when improper data handling is suspected, an E.U. citizen reports to the DPA in their own country, rather than an authority in another country, i.e., the home country of the entity under suspicion.

The penalties for violating GDPR are stiff. The E.U. itself administers those fines, and at their maximum, they can reach 4% of the company’s annual global earnings or 20 million Euro, whichever is greater. Fines are set at various levels (percentages of earnings or straight fees) based on the severity of the offense. As a word of warning: authorities are not shying away from levying large fines.

Tech vendors who collect and process a ton of data (e.g., ad networks, DMPs, DSPs, SSPs, etc.) appear less anxious about GDPR than publishers, likely because publishers are the public-facing front line. In fact, most consumers don’t even know those major data players even exist. GDPR addresses this shortcoming. The mandate to protect consumer data not only applies to a publisher (data collector), but also extends to any vendor in their digital ecosystem with access to it.

One question that can be raised at this stage in the game is where liability would fall in a complaint wherein the publisher and a third-party vendor BOTH claimed full compliance. There’s an opportunity for the publisher to mitigate the penalty by demonstrating an active GDPR-compliance process and has made every effort to adhere to it. In this scenario, it’s possible for the publisher to push liability upstream to the offending party that actually attempted to track a consumer, e.g. cookie drop or device identification. U.S. companies should be familiar with this mitigation concept, which has proven beneficial when working with the FTC and other stateside authorities.

How Publishers Can Get With the GDPR Program

Right now, many U.S. publishers find themselves wondering if they need to take precautions for dealing with GDPR, or whether their E.U. audiences are too small for them to sweat it. Like we said, the language of the regulation could be more specific, and it doesn’t feel intuitive to companies accustomed to U.S. data policies.

At the same time, it’s clear that the implications of GDPR are far-reaching. It expands the definition of personal data to include location data, online identifiers, IP addresses and more. You can’t simply use geolocation to determine how to apply your data policy and opt-ins or–outs—you need to be prepared to apply that policy to any EU-located consumer accessing your website. This condition applies to any website that employs registration data, payment data and other methods of targeting individual users.

But as one vendor-side source explained to us, publishers need to ensure that perfectly “safe, unidentifiable” data, e.g., metrics or functionality enablers, cannot be married with each to create personally identifiable information, which would run afoul of GDPR. For example, a German resident books a train ticket from New York to Philadelphia and experiences a couple cookies drops that facilitate the online booking process. That’s totally fine, but if their cookies were then tied to a device ID or device fingerprint, that data is now subject to GDPR as a device ID is considered PII and could be used for retargeting without the user’s explicit consent. On the flip side, if the German resident executes the online booking while physically located in the U.S. GDPR does not apply. Confusing, right?

GDPR is serious. Another publisher—one that has audiences of significant size in both the U.S. and Europe—brought on new staff to help sift through E.U. digital law and properly educate their U.K. team where applicable. That same publisher is experiencing increasing challenges in revising existing contracts to address the whole scope of possible international legal issues. They are considering adoption of regional-specific contracts for upstream partners and buyers and are also insisting vendor partners take more responsibility for compliance.

Sources on both the publisher and vendor side agree GDPR compliance presents a mammoth task for publishers. However, there’s been little open objection from publishers. Surely, quality assurance issues ought to be distributed across the digital supply chain, not concentrated at the publisher’s level. It’s a matter a time before publishers advocate regulatory due diligence requirements for their partners.

Waiting for 2018

Questions remain for how GDPR will be applied and enforced, so it’s not easy to make a compliance checklist just yet. At the moment, if you’re concerned about getting on the wrong side of the regulation, keep an eye on the news headlines, talk to your DPO (or designate one), and update your website privacy policy accordingly.

Create lines of communication throughout your organization. Ops, legal, commercial, data privacy, IT and upper management all need to be in the same loop. Talk to your tech vendor partners—they need to understand your GDPR approach and you’ll also need to make sure they act on the opt-ins/-outs you pass along. Document processes to show what data your website collects and how and to whom it gets shared with other parties. Be prepared to contact any partner and request information regarding their controls regarding your customers’ data.

The geographically broad implications and high penalty structure require further clarity from Brussels about what GDPR will mean for publishers and the overall digital ecosystem. This is especially true for U.S. publishers that previously haven’t had to worry much about the E.U.’s historically more stringent data laws. But that doesn’t mean they should wait to make sure transparency and accountability is in place with their data policies once 2018 arrives.

The post GDPR Hiding Around the Corner: Answers and More Questions About the Far-Reaching E.U. Data Policy appeared first on AdMonsters.

OAO recently issued an ebook on mobile page performance for publishers, which presented a fine opportunity to grab some insights from their team. AdMonsters sat down with OAO President Craig Leshen, Director Fairy Pardiwalla, and VP, Ad Operations Jennifer Hill to talk about page performance, the customer experience, and other hot and trending developments in the ad ops realm.

BRIAN LaRUE:  Let’s jump right in. Why is page performance such a hot topic right now? Why is it so important for publishers?

CRAIG LESHEN: Page performance, or page load speed, is essential to publishers so they can ensure they’re creating a better customer experience and delivering their optimal amount of ad impressions. If a user is frustrated by how long it takes a page, site, or app to load, they might go somewhere else instead, or even worse, might not go back to your online property anytime soon. For a top-tier site, brand name might get the users to return regardless; but if you’re not, people might stay away if the experience is frustrating. For smaller publishers, or publishers who rely on their content being promoted virally or via social channels, slow page performance can spell disaster. It’s very easy to hit the back button. It’s easy to open a new app. It’s easy to go back to your Facebook news feed. If the page loads slowly, your chances of losing the reader increases; speed is always going to be important.

The good news is, your ad ops and dev teams can help mitigate this problem by monitoring and managing page–and ad–load speeds. If your page loads quickly, you can log more impressions, which can lead to higher viewability scores, lower bounce rates, happier users and increased revenue.

BRIAN: Okay, makes perfect sense. What are the initial steps a publisher can take to gauge page performance?

CRAIG: In order to optimize page load speeds, the first step is to measure performance. There are a variety of tools to help with this, though there is not one specific tool that works best for all online properties. Page Speed Insights, WebPageTest.org and Think with Google help address the page load challenge. OpenX has a new chrome browser extension that compares the load speed of a given page with industry benchmarks. It’s the job of your ad ops and dev teams to make sure the information generated by these tools contributes to your understanding of how things are performing and identifying areas for improvement.

BRIAN: There are subtle and possibly stark differences between these tools.

FAIRY PARDIWALLA: There are. At OAO, we use a number of tools and then compile the results, rather than just testing with one. This allows us to review and evaluate a variety of data points, while also streamlining the process and creating a benchmark that can be used to evaluate performance over time. Our goal is to figure out where problems exist and fix them.

That said, if you had to choose a single tool, it would depend on the specific problem you needed to address. TestMySite is really quick and easy. It provides a free report that’s easily downloadable, so it’s kind of a one-stop test. WebPageTest.org gives much more detailed feedback — you can see how long each call from the page is taking. It’s particularly useful if you’re utilizing header bidding or if you have a stack of networks serving in a waterfall, resulting in a large number of calls. It’s a pretty powerful tool for identifying the culprit when ads from specific networks or SSPs are taking longer to load than expected.

BRIAN: Are there common mistakes publishers make with their mobile websites that they could address pre-emptively, before running through more technical analyses?

FAIRY: It’s not so much common mistakes as it is just understanding best practices and then constantly performing maintenance updates, or optimizations, to ensure optimal load times. Publishers understand how important this is. We’ve seen a huge increase in the number of AMP [Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages] integrations we’re doing for publishers. It’s only a year old, but it’s becoming extremely popular now. The same goes for Facebook Instant Articles– publishers are trying to do anything they can to get the content–and the ads–to load quicker.

JENNIFER HILL: I would say I think there are a lot of publishers who are working to make their presence really responsive, from an ad side as well as the content side. There’s a mismatch sometimes between content and ads when it comes to optimization. Most of the publishers that have come to us with those questions have been concerned about the separation between content and ads. We try to analyze both together in order to make it seamless, so it’s not ads against content but both together, delivered at speeds that work.

BRIAN: I wanted to get into Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles. I’m curious how the guidance you’re giving to publishers lends itself to compliance with Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP standards.

FAIRY: AMP handles load speeds through a set of very specific requirements. It uses a specific version of HTML, minimizes Javascript and caches many page elements to improve load time. A lot of the pain points that Page Speed Insights catches can be addressed by adhering to the AMP requirements.

JENNIFER: AMP is so scaled down and so specific, there’s a very narrow path for publishers to follow. It takes away some of the flexibility you have with a full Javascript library, but AMP also takes away a lot of the weight and latency. It is really efficient, and after you get through the templates and set up a few pages, it’s actually very simple and data-driven in terms of implementation.

BRIAN: It seems like a lot of publishers are feeling this pressure to be compliant with AMP and Instant Articles.

JENNIFER: I wouldn’t call it pressure. It forces the creative people to get even more creative when it comes to development. You have to develop to load optimally and when you do it right you get and keep more of your traffic. You’re basically saying, “I have to do it a certain way, I don’t want to sacrifice on design – what can I do to make it better and stronger?”

CRAIG: Exactly. Over the years, I’ve worked with all kinds of creatives. When we were designing AOL sites in the mid ‘90s there were some really interesting design tactics used to make the content look fantastic; a major necessity as people typically accessed online content using dial-up modems–i.e., slow speeds. We’re in a similar situation today when it comes to Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP. You have to get more creative with the way that you’re building your content to keep it as light as possible.

FAIRY: Now publishers and creatives have to be that much more focused on the constraints put in place by AMP and Facebook Instant Articles. They need to tease out the performance without sacrificing quality or look and feel.  They need to squeeze everything they can from a page so they can keep people on it to deliver valuable ad impressions.

BRIAN: So, all that said, after publishers have run these tests and diagnosed these performance issues, what does OAO bring to the table for them in this optimization process?

FAIRY: These tools are often not as simple as plugging in your URL, seeing the problems and fixing them. There’s more analysis that goes into it, especially when you look at individual calls on the page. The first thing we do is to use all of the tools we mentioned earlier to give the publisher a clearer picture of what could be done better to speed up page load. Then, once we compile all of those results and send them to the publisher, we can work with their developers to make sure the fixes we’re recommending are implemented correctly.

BRIAN: How do you gauge success after OAO completes their mobile web optimization projects?

FAIRY: One way is that we measure page load speed at the start of a project and again when all the fixes are in place. Ad revenue is affected by a number of factors, but it’s worth measuring it too at the start and end of the engagement to see if we’re able to tie page load back to an increase in revenue.  For the more traditional, or direct sales publishers, we’ll hear things like, “we used to have 20 million ad views served in a month, and now because we’ve optimized I have 25 million,” and/or,  “we sell our ads on a CPM basis with a high sell-through percentage, and now we made that much more because I had 5 million additional impressions to sell.” That is something that you can track to a T.

CRAIG: We also look at viewability, and that’s a pretty big topic for a lot of publishers interested in improving their page load speeds. They’re under pressure to make sure their viewability scores are as high as their advertisers expect, or require.

FAIRY: Correct, and this goes a long way toward improving viewability scores.

BRIAN: This all sounds terrific. How would you like to sum it all up for our readers?

CRAIG: Bringing it all together, it’s important for publishers to pay close attention to the fact that the faster your pages and ads load, the better the user experience will be and the more impressions you’ll have to sell. If your pages or ads load slowly, and you’re relying on direct deals, your sales team will have fewer impressions to work with, making it tough to hit sales goals. If you’re relying on programmatic ad dollars, the more impressions you’re able to serve, the more revenue you’ll generate. It’s important to work with your ad ops and dev teams to clear this hurdle, constantly monitor metrics such as load speed and viewability, and make updates or maintenance as necessary.

Further reading: OAO’s Guide to Understanding Mobile Web Optimization, the ebook referenced throughout this article.

The post Built for Speed: A Conversation With OAO About Mobile Web Optimization appeared first on AdMonsters.

We’ve spoken with LiveIntent fairly recently about how publishers can ply their audience data toward the kind of one-to-one, people-based marketing advertiers crave. Earlier in 2017, LiveIntent teamed up with self-styled “identity resolution provider” LiveRamp to provide deeper people-based marketing solutions across digital channels. We called up LiveIntent COO and “identity programmatic” vet Dave Helmreich to learn more. Dave explained how the LiveRamp partnership can give publishers certain advantages the major platforms don’t, and how LiveIntent as a company has grown past its roots in email advertising.

BRIAN LaRUE: LiveIntent and LiveRamp announced a partnership in January. Tell me about where publishers can see the greatest benefits in that deal.

DAVE HELMREICH: Publishers have been consistently increasing their focus on not only acquiring data on their customers, but capitalizing on email newsletter programs that are performing beyond their expectations. We’ve had a number of publishers investing heavily in customer acquisition and subscriptions, especially since the election. We find when we look at publishers that they have a very large amount of logged-in, authenticated users. Powered by identity, these audiences monetize significantly higher, because addressable campaigns want to go after specific groups of people.

Email has evolved into this core asset for identity and marketing: reaching people, not devices. The products that we build, largely at the request of publishers, have evolved as well. LiveIntent is no longer just about email. It’s about marketing to people wherever they’re paying attention in this mobile-first world.

Meanwhile, brands are getting smarter about the opportunities to take their customer data and reach specific people with specific messages. On our platform, you can take everyone that perhaps didn’t open a promotional newsletter, then drive high-quality demand customized to those people across our publishers when that audience does open an email from the publisher (we call it “ride-along”). That’s one of the things we’re able to do better with our partnership with LiveRamp. Publishers benefit from this scenario directly—not Facebook or anyone else riding on the back of the publisher’s editorial teams and investment.

BRIAN: About Facebook and Google. The “duopoly” term is already borderline cliché. What’s your advice to publishers trying to show the value of their unwalled gardens?

DAVE: Most publishers haven’t invested enough in audience insights. In programmatic, the prevailing wisdom is that more impressions equates to more revenue. But ultimately, a highly-curated, smaller audience is more valuable, because those audiences monetize better. If you understand the makeup of your audience, you’ll understand their value to certain brands pursuing specific demographics and lifestyles.

Brands are desperate for what they term custom audiences, or what we call live audience—logged-in environments where people are paying attention. That’s one reason why social media initially became so attractive, but the engagement in email is significantly higher than in traditional social media channels. I would advise publishers to not just hand over all their articles and inventory and emails to Facebook and expect them to drive traffic and monetization for you. Take more of the effort on your own. Email and authentication can help combat the power swings publishers experience in the market.

BRIAN: What trends do you think are not getting enough attention right now, and what should publishers be looking toward regarding data?

DAVE: Two or three years ago it was okay to focus on total impressions. You would hear publishers say, “We’re going all in on Facebook.” The benefit to a publisher using Facebook is you could easily post an article, look at its organic reach, boost it and create a sponsored post to then drive higher engagement. But you were wholly at the mercy of Facebook’s organic and paid sponsored algorithms.

Now, platforms like Facebook want brands to send the data to them directly. Publishers need to pay more attention to the quality of their audience—that’s what’s not getting enough attention. In Facebook’s publisher tools, you can monitor effectively who you reach, who they shared with and who engaged. The most successful publishers have found a way to overlap those three curves, which maximizes their engagement.

With this business and with our partners like LiveRamp, we’re providing a valuable alternative at scale to Facebook and Google. That’s beneficial in two ways. One, publishers will drive more benefit from the revenue that brands and agencies are sending to them. Two, we have the ability to give feedback on reach and engagement, because we’re not a walled garden. That data is very valuable for publishers to put in their DMPs or attribution platforms and really understand return on ad spend. The email address is their opportunity to be independent of Facebook “likes.”

BRIAN: While identity marketing is great for advertisers hunting down their current customers and users who have shown intent, how can it be better used to inform prospecting?

DAVE: The industry has historically viewed ad tech and martech as disparate and separate entities. Advertising has been a cookie-based world, where a very small percentage of the universe has been “known”—that is, addressable. Mar tech is 100% known. AI and machine learning, core to advertising technology, have never been available in many marketing channels.

All the stuff that brands love about advertising—sophisticated data management, AI, machine learning, customer acquisition, retargeting—is available everywhere, using identity as a common key. A brand can give LiveIntent a list of 10,000 people with high lifetime value and low likelihood to churn, and ask us to find more people like them. We deliver to the brand more people that behave like, perform like and are more valuable to them. Then our publishers benefit because those brands are willing to pay a premium.

BRIAN: Scale seems like a consistent issue in identity-based marketing. I’m curious how you and your clients have worked around scale issues.

DAVE: Scale is a fascinating thing. Eight years ago, if you had told someone, “I want to reach a quality audience,” their quick retort would be, “How much quality do you want?” You can buy quality by the yard; it just depends how much you’re willing to pay for it.

Today, I think people are smarter, brands are smarter, and we live in a highly deterministic world. In any given month we’ll see around 145 million unique individuals. We’re seeing almost two devices per unique person, so that 145 quickly becomes 290 million possible end points per month.

When we take our Identity Graph, a combination of all unique users across all devices, we can leverage it outside the email inbox, onto publisher websites. Historically, this would have been very hard.

BRIAN: About this multiplicity of devices: I’m curious how publishers are using the Identity Graph for mobile revenue.

DAVE: Safari comes with third-party cookies disabled by default on iOS, the predominant operating system. The majority of the ecosystem uses cookies to target people. So, mobile is a big problem for publishers using traditional demand sources and targeting. But with our Identity Graph, where the key is this anonymized email address provided by the publisher, there are no restrictions. That identifier that works on mobile and all devices.

BRIAN: What are some of the signs you see that identity marketing is affecting  programmatic?

DAVE: I chatted with Joe Zawadski, who’s the founder and CEO of MediaMath, about this last year. He said he believes the majority of impressions purchased over the next few years will be known by some form of anonymous key—a hashed email address, a hashed mobile advertising ID—but not a cookie. That seemed like a pretty bold statement.

At the same time, I talk to a marketing cloud, a data cloud, a DMP and a DSP every week, each wanting its own identity graph, messaging to people not devices. That’s overlaid with a huge push toward native. In this era in programmatic, this is a boon for publishers: Onsite registrations coupled with email newsletters to subscribers are a gateway to identity that brands continue to look for. I don’t think it’s going away.

BRIAN: More personalized marketing brings the specter of privacy concerns. How are publishers addressing consumer data security before it gets scandalous?

DAVE: In a wave of publicized data breaches, publishers have to be strict about privacy, provide consumers clear choice and clear notice, and protect users’ data at all cost. Everything comes to LiveIntent from publishers an anonymized form—we don’t see any plain text, personally identifiable information. We don’t touch PII. Only the publishers can email their customers. And publishers need to be careful, and never give away their consumer information in a plain text form, period.

The post The Unwalled Garden: LiveIntent on Scaling the Identity-Based Market appeared first on AdMonsters.