Jumptap: Android, Apps Up Traffic Rates
While both iPad and Kindle traffic increased over the holidays, Kindle jumped from holding a 10% share of tablet traffic at the beginning of December to a 30% share at the start of 2012. At the same time, the iPad’s share over December shrank from 59% to 44%, while that of Android and other tablet platforms dropped five points to 26%, noted mobile ad network Jumptap.
Thanks to the proliferation of Android-powered smartphones, however, the Google platform strengthened its position as the dominant mobile operating system overall on Jumptap’s network, which reaches 95 million U.S. mobile users per month and 142 million worldwide.
Android’s traffic share jumped 21 percentage points in 2011 to finish the year with a commanding 59% piece of the market. That gain came at the expense of both Apple’s iOS, which dropped seven percentage points to 22%, and BlackBerry, which fell 11 percentage points to 15.7%.
Throughout 2011, however, iOS outpaced Android in ad click-through rates. For its year-end report, Jumptap compared click rates among the latest three versions of the rival platforms in wide use. While the rate for iOS has improved with each successive release, the opposite is true for Android. Apple’s new iOS 5 release had a click rate of .91% compared to .74% for iOS 4 and .61% for iOS 3.
By contrast, Android 3.0 had a rate of .59%, down from .69% for Android 2.0 and .75% for Android 1.0. The study didn’t evaluate click rates for Android 4.0, the latest version of Google’s mobile platform, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich.
The report also shed light on another long-running mobile rivalry — apps versus the mobile Web. While many predict HTML5 adoption will ultimately make the mobile Web triumphant, the Jumptap data showed apps actually narrowed the gap in traffic share last year. The two formats ended 2011 in a virtual dead heat after the mobile Web began the year with a 55.1% to 44.9% advantage.
Jumptap says marketers don’t necessarily have to have either a mobile site or app to advertise in mobile, however. Roughly one-third of its advertisers don’t have either, but are using mobile landing pages in their ad campaigns. Of course, if an ad is meant to drive traffic to a company’s own site, it’s best to have one optimized for mobile devices.
The study also looked at the effectiveness of data-targeted campaigns in the fourth quarter. The company works with third-party data providers, including Acxiom, TargusInfo, Datalogix and Polk, to provide information about consumer demographics from purchase history to income level to what cars people own.
Read more: MediaPost
Time Matters: The Role Of Real-Time Bidding for Publishers
Perhaps no single technology has as much potential to disrupt the advertising ecosystem of online publishing as Real Time Bidding (RTB). For an imperfect but simple 30 second visual primer on what RTB does, click here. There is a shift happening and the surge of inventory that flooded onto exchanges in 2011 attests to it. As Demand Side Platforms (DSP) became ever more an executional tool of choice for many advertisers, the supply side has been pushed to follow suit and make their inventory available through marketplaces. Thus, the tried and true world of direct and network sales is threatened with disruption and the potential commoditization of inventory.
For small publishers, the advent of real-time, exchange-based marketplaces has been nothing but good. In many cases, it allows their impressions to compete on a level playing field against much more established titles, fueled by the individualized audience and interest information readily available through online data providers.
Large publishers, however, should be concerned that the growing importance and availability of targeting data on RTB platforms separates the importance of context from determining the value of the impression. In other words, if you can know what a person wants specifically, it matters less where you serve the display ad because you do not have to infer quite so much about them from where they are.
The impression transparency inherent in RTB environments causes some in the industry to fear that their use will cause CPMs to begin a “Race to the Bottom” as inventory becomes commoditized. Others think it a natural progression towards efficiency, especially for impressions that will always generate less demand such as those for remnant inventory. The Rubicon Project recently published a study that concurs with the latter and this study from Ignition One offers evidence for the former. Obviously, the jury is still out.
So, if you represent a large publisher, what are you to think about the potential role of RTB in your organization? Is it friend or foe? There is no “one size fits all” answer to this question, but I do have some considered advice on an approach to find your own:
Read more: AdExchanger
Deutsche Telekom Selects AudienceScience for Digital Marketing Solution and Data Management Partner
Telecom Powerhouse Adopts Gateway Technology as AudienceScience Continues Leadership Position in Global Audience Delivery Solutions for Marketers
NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire – Jan 31, 2012) – Digital marketing technology company, AudienceScience®, today announced that global telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom is now using the AudienceScience Gateway as its audience delivery solution. The Gateway allows the group to monitor its own information, define and engage with relevant audience segments, and use this knowledge for managing targeted advertising campaigns.
This partnership with Deutsche Telekom is further illustration of AudienceScience’s continued growth and momentum within key international markets. AudienceScience’s global presence is helping partners focus their digital campaigns through its technology, expertise, and data, delivering universal access to digital audiences at scale across multiple channels for the world’s largest advertisers, agencies and publishers. Deutsche Telekom will leverage the Gateway technology to enable Interactive Media and Scout24 Group to provide more targeted and relevant messages via online campaigns to the appropriate audience at the right time of engagement.
“Deutsche Telekom is a blue-chip global company well-known for its excellence in customer service and technology infrastructure,” said AudienceScience CEO Jeff Pullen. “We’re very excited to be their technology partner, helping them to achieve their marketing objectives.”
Read More: Marketwire
Brands Must Empower Consumers Or Risk Alienation
Consumer empowerment poses several marketing challenges for brands and agencies, not the least of which is simply keeping up. Also, some brands pay lip service to transparency when it comes to serving customers — but they don’t follow through.
Those were two of the insights delivered by a MediaCom-sponsored Webcast Tuesday featuring Dell’s Tiffany Bissey, head of global digital and emerging media for the computer giant; Matthew Mee, director of strategy for MediaCom’s Europe, Africa and Middle East region and marketing consultant Martin Lindstrom.
“The difference now,” from just a few years ago, said Mee, is that consumer expectations [of satisfactory brand service] are constantly edging ahead. They’re setting the pace–Twitter is a good example — and we’re trying to keep up.”
They better make sure they do, Lindstrom said of brands. Brands that don’t fulfill promises or otherwise let down consumers in the digital age will receive a massive and immediate push back, he said. Lindstrom even predicted the emergence of a “WikiLeaks for brands,” which could be devastating for companies that “don’t keep their houses in order.”
Read More: MediaPost
Fox News Is Full Steam Ahead With Audience Buying And RTB Offerings Says VP Steinberg
Jeremy Steinberg is VP, Digital Sales & Business Development, FOX News Network.
Late last week, Steinberg offered an update to AdExchanger on his company’s efforts in the online audience buying space.
AdExchanger.com: Last May, you discussed with AdExchanger.com some of the things you were doing on the product side to address audience buying. How has it worked out?
JS: Really well, and – within the next couple months – we’re going to be rolling out a fully-revamped audience insights suite of services for our advertisers, which will provide enhanced targeting opportunities for audience, as well as context.
It’s equally important to marry the two together and is a key differentiator for us. This is a big investment in our business and in our future.
We’ve known for quite some time that we have by far the most engaged audience in news, and the numbers in comScore really speak to that. We’re investing in new technology because we want to prove it to our advertisers that our advertising works.
We’re doubling down and offering robust segmentation of our audience so advertisers can dive in deep to reach their targets, or, even better, to find out who their ads are performing best against, and then optimizing accordingly.
Will the focus of this product be on PC-based display? Mobile, video?
It’s focused on [PC-based] display to start. We’re certainly going to explore expanding it to other channels down the road.
Any trends you can share that you’re seeing with display today in your business?
There’s a lot going on in this area. There’s the direct, and indirect.
On the direct side, we’re seeing increased demand from the prior year, and one of the reasons for that increased demand is my team is out in the marketplace proving the value of our inventory. We’re doing that through our investments in custom solutions, and in ad technology. We’re talking about audience targeting about real‑time bidding. That’s something that has been of keen interest to our clients.
In addition, my national team is out there talking about how we can activate campaigns socially. We believe all of these solutions are differentiating us from the competition and the general Web. That’s why we’re seeing great demand.
Videology: Connected TV Ads Have Great Completion Rates — And High Prices To Match
Given the nascent quality of connected TV advertising, it’s hard to really offer a substantive comparison between the value of such placements versus the comparatively more established PC-based video and mobile ads.
But you have to start someplace and Videology (the video ad network recently formerly known as TidalTV) has a few stats that appear to offer further evidence of the complementary quality of connected TV media buys as part of a larger video ad strategy.
Since there’s currently no uniform way to “click” a connected TV video ad the company’s study (pdf) discusses the value of video completion rates (VCR) for ads seen on wifi-enabled televisions.
The number that jumps out about connected TV ads is that it has a 110 percent video completion rate over regular online video. As if that we’re special enough, mobile video’s completion rates are around 10 percent lower than ones seen on PC-based web video ads. And the prices for ads across those devices tend to reflect that.
As Videology notes, the divergence in completion rates between mobile and connected TVs make obvious sense: mobile phone users tend to be on the go and given 3G buffering, people give up on a video that doesn’t load in a matter of seconds. With wifi-TVs, users probably are planted on their couch and home connections tend to be infinitely better than access a user can get on a street or a moving bus/train.
For an advertiser looking at click-through rates, mobile is still a very good addition, as smartphones deliver a 350 percent CTR increase for an average price increase of 30 percent. That’s a very strong, over 10 to 1 ratio.
If ”engagement” like video completion is the main aim, connected TV delivers improved completed views at a ratio of 2 to 1 compared to cost increases, which is roughly 54 percent higher than online video prices.
But do these improved rates equal the cost required to reach them?
Videology just looked at eight campaigns — it doesn’t identify them further — and found that using multiple screens showed brand lift
increases between 70- and 300 percent, while the online video campaigns showed brand lift in the 15- to 130 percent range.
On average, multiple screen campaigns using online video, mobile and connected television screens showed average brand recall rise 9 times higher than those relying solely on online video.
