Want to Save Display? Cut Supply
Many of us in this industry have been fighting the good fight for a long time now to make display advertising a better outlet for brand dollars. And, if we get it right, everyone wins. But up to this point, the focus has almost entirely been on better technology. That’s not going to cut it.
From my rough calculations, the vast majority of venture-capitalist dollars, roughly $2.5 billion of $5.7 billion in the first half of 2011 alone, and strategic exits have focused on the automation of the sales and buying process, targeting and optimization.
Improving technology obviously has its benefits, but as an industry we have a bigger problem to fix: the essence of display advertising itself. We are all so caught up on acronyms and technology that we sometimes forget what it is that we are doing: We are in the business of advertising. The problem? A lot of display ads are not noticed. Beyond click-through rates hovering at fractions of fractions of a percent, 43 percent of users say they ignore and disregard banner advertising. To fix this, we need to change the economics: fewer and bigger ads. Not just bigger ads, but fewer.
Read More: Digiday
Meet Your Audience (for the Second Time)
These days, advertising and data platforms are giving marketers a wealth of information that can be used to validate their strategies and optimize their digital campaigns for better performance. There’s a lot of data to sort through – some more useful than others. Sometimes, good campaign optimization comes down to the basics: understanding who your audience is, and why they are doing what they are doing.
Let’s look at a real-life example of a digital display campaign, run through the digital ad agency of a popular mattress retailer. The agency wanted to test new inventory sources for the campaign by running broadly on general interest sites, evaluating the demography of audiences that showed purchase intent, and optimizing over the course of the campaign to maximize impact.
A theory being tested was that older audiences, who report more difficulty sleeping than younger demographic groups, would respond more favorably to the retailer’s online display ads. Campaigns were initially skewed to sites that over-indexed against an audience composed of ages 50 and older.
Read More: ClickZ
Unruly Adds $25M In Effort To Scale Social Video Campaigns
Anxious to scale its social video advertising platform, Unruly just secured a $25 million Series A investment from Amadeus Capital Partners, Van den Ende & Deitmer and Business Growth Fund. Since its debut in 2006, the London-based company claims to have executed over 1,400 social video campaigns, while delivering, tracking, and auditing 1.34 billion user-intended video views.
“We set out to help brands capture the massive opportunity in social video,” said Unruly founder and Group CEO Scott Button.
Unruly’s proprietary technology, RAMP (Real-time Amplification and Measurement Platform) powers social video campaigns for Old Spice, Electronic Arts, adidas, Unilever, T-Mobile and Coca-Cola.
It also had a hand in spreading Evian’s “Roller Babies,” T-Mobile’s “Life’s for Sharing,” Coca Cola’s “Happiness Factory” series, and Old Spice’s “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaigns.
Profitable since 2009, Unruly reported full-year revenue of $25 million in 2011, and a current revenue run-rate nearing $50 million.
Industrywide, social video campaigns generated 2.7 billion views in 2010 and more than 8 billion views in 2011, and are predicted to generate 20 billion views in 2012, according to Unruly.
Read More: MediaPost
Rocket Fuel Powers Unified Digital Advertising Solution for Automotive Industry
Auto Booster Ad Technology Platform Integrates Brand and Direct Response Campaigns to Integrate Traditionally Isolated Advertising Efforts for Maximum ROI
REDWOOD SHORES, CA–(Marketwire – Oct 12, 2011) – Rocket Fuel Inc. (rocketfuel.com), the leading real-time ad targeting company, today officially launched Auto Booster(SM), a transformative technology platform that boosts the efficiency and effectiveness of brand and direct response campaigns for the automotive industry. Rocket Fuel announced the new technology platform today at the J.D. Power Automotive Internet Roundtable, taking place October 12-13 in Las Vegas.
What Auto Booster Does:
- Auto Booster helps automotive marketers connect brand advertising efforts with direct response campaigns — so all digital campaigns are jointly optimized to maximize both long-term national brand impact and localized campaign-attributed sales.
- Auto Booster optimizes results at every level of the funnel by collecting and analyzing synchronized learnings and data from multiple types of campaigns. No longer do auto marketers have to use proxy metrics such as click-through rate (CTR) to understand the value of branding or consideration efforts. Auto Booster can optimize digital media — in real-time, as the campaign is running — to deliver the greatest boost in awareness, consideration, purchase intent, or any other brand goal. As the only solution of its kind available on the market, Auto Booster provides automotive marketers with increased effectiveness and scale — as well as cost savings.
Read More: Marketwire
Greystripe Launches Next Generation of Mobile Ads Featuring Social Media Integration, Local Content and Deals
Ad Boosters feature industry firsts in social and vertical market targeting
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today Greystripe, the largest brand-focused mobile ad network and part of the ValueClick family (Nasdaq: VCLK), is introducing the next generation of mobile advertising with its new Ad Boosters. These new ad units were developed with the goal of making advertising more relevant, contextual and valuable to consumers.
Greystripe has developed two types of Ad Boosters: industry-focused units and social units. With its industry-focused ad boosters, Greystripe is the first company to introduce mobile ad formats focused on a specific, targeted vertical. Verticals include: retail, consumer packaged goods, automotive, travel, technology, health and restaurants. These customizable boosters allow advertisers to direct users to specific actions related to the advertiser’s need. The retail booster, for example, includes a Find Store button, a Coupon button and a Buy Now button.
Social Boosters allow marketers to enhance the impact of mobile advertising with engaging social connections including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube.
Read More: Businesswire
Ooyala Customizes Video Analytics For Facebook
Ooyala launched an integration tool Thursday that gives companies like ESPN and Miramax direct access to real-time analytics from Facebook’s 800 million active users who view and share videos. The insights provide data to serve up custom content.
Custom Analytics with Business Dimension Reporting for Ooyala Analysts allows publishers to customize and track video performance across audience segments. Publishers leveraging Facebook Connect can track demographic and psychographic statistics, such as age, gender, location and interests to create more targeted and relevant video viewing experiences for their users. Data is collected based on tags, rather than information associated with individuals.
Alex Holub, director of product management at Ooyala, said the technology supports uploaded content distributed online to laptops, desktops, mobile, tablets and other devices.
Analysis provides domain reports. When the content goes viral, the report provides information on the URLs. It also offers a graphical view of where content is consumed by country, and in the United States, by state. The platform also tracks the length of time viewers watch the videos, along with any ads that appear in the videos.
Read More: MediaPost
DataXu Unveils Value Optimization Strategy With Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
Value-based optimization delivers up to a 45% better response from high-value customers, and improves return on ad spend by up to 80% for companies in financial services and technology sectors, according to a DataXu study released Thursday. The stats come along with an emerging marketing objective from the company.
DataXu CEO Mike Baker said brands and agencies have been asking for value-based optimization. It factors in the price of the item that consumers view or purchase to identify the value of customers. The information is used to automatically optimize campaigns not only based on volumes of sales, but on the most profitable customers. The strategy relies on measuring against an aggregated baseline driving cost per action (CPA) and integrating in real time online shopping cart values and sales data.
“You now can use ad exchanges and DSPs to maximize profitable sales,” Baker said. “One brand told us that even though they drive many sales online, many of them are ROI negative because they have ad networks that they’re paying for conversions, but the conversions are a very low value. They hope one out of 10 of those conversions are a high-spending customer, but that’s a random hope.”
Read More: MediaPost
Ad Buyers Embrace Digital, Publishers Lag
While major publishers continue to drag their feet, agency display media buyers are investing big in both new ad products — from audience targeting to custom creative — as well as adopting new buying methods like real-time bidding, according to Forrester Research.
As such, Forrester analyst and report author Michael Greene recommends that publishers meet client needs by “investing in creative capabilities, complementing sales and ops teams with strong technology and focusing on developing high-quality audiences.”
This past June, Forrester surveyed agency media buyers about the current and projected state of their media-buying practices on behalf of their interactive-marketing clients.
It found that buyers rely on a range of media execution partners. “A strong majority of buyers buy through a variety of direct and indirect sales channels,” according to Greene. Indeed, 58% of display buyers reported that they buy through a mix of direct sales, ad networks and DSPs/trading desks.
Programmatic buying is also becoming a preferred buying method, Forrester found, as sales teams may be caught up playing phone tag with buyers, while buyers are quickly embracing the workflow efficiencies of programmatic buying — typically through real-time bidding.
Read More: MediaPost
