Thinking About The Future Of Ad Verification

There appears to be good momentum in digital advertising for ad verification solutions, but where does it all end up?   Can a “point solution” evolve into a sustainable, long-term business within the ad technology stack?

I’d argue more “points” will need to be added – especially if these companies want to “exit.” But first, let us review…

A Brief History

When pure-play ad verification companies arrived on the scene nearly two years ago, ad networks and publishers rejoiced.

[Record scratch sound here!]

Hardly.  Agencies have been the happy ones.

As you may know, ideally with third-party ad verification solutions, agencies get to verify what they’re buying from ad networks and publishers as it’s stated on their insertion order (I.O.) agreements. For example, ad verification might confirm that a particular geographic requirement has been met (“target U.S. users only”) or that the context of the content in which an ad runs is deemed in or out of context.

Another benefit for agencies is that it allows them to say to their marketer client that they are insuring brand safety for the marketer’s campaign. With marketer’s hesitant to put their ad spend into digital, ad verification helps overcome the traditional mindset.

To date, it appears challenges still remain around ad verification being reactive rather than proactive. Rather than preventing an ad from being served before it hits a page, the technology may find out after the ad is served that it was an inappropriate placement. No doubt agencies want to prevent the phone call from the marketer: “I just saw my cell phone ad in a Gawker story about Brett Favre’s latest misstep.”

Read More: AdExchanger

AdMeld On Data

Close the blinds, publishers, as the AV club nerd sets up the film projector (wheezing the whole time): today’s educational film comes from revenue optimizer AdMeld and is called, “Data Is the New Black.” There’s a lot of confused and fearful chatter in the hallways these days about data, but do you actually know the many things that comprise user data? Or what collectors do once they get data? The video talks about real dilemmas such as data leakage, but also offers smart ways to make data selling work for you, including conversing with data buyers to learn more about your audience – all to a hip soundtrack made on space-age synthesizers. We hope everyone is mature enough to watch this video because, no, you don’t need a permission slip from your parents to view it on YouTube.

Read More: AdExchanger

Do You Have What — and Whom — It Takes to Compete in a Digital World?

We live in a world that’s increasingly connected, digital and mobile, and influenced by social networks. The shopping and media-consumption patterns of consumers are evolving at a dizzying clip. Entire industries such as travel and music have been largely reshaped almost overnight. Multibillion-dollar, digitally enabled companies evolve in a few short years.

All of this has the management teams of all sorts of companies asking a key question: “Are we prepared to operate in an increasingly technology-driven world?”

Companies that have the right leaders in place will be able to answer with a confident “Yes.” Spencer Stuart recently completed a global and multisector study to provide insights into this very issue. Through 50 interviews with top-level executives in nine industry sectors across North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region, we honed in on a series of best practices for companies building their organization’s digital capabilities. Here are the top four pillars for solving the digital-leadership challenge:

Senior-level buy-in. Investments in digital require the appropriate buy-in and support of the board, CEO and top leadership because of the breadth of digital’s impact on the company. Digital is about more than simply a new approach to marketing campaigns; success ultimately will be measured by the seamless integration of technologies across advertising, direct response marketing, sales, supply chain, public relations, employee communications, and supplier and vendor relationships.

Read More: AdAge

Why The Future of Online Advertising Includes Ad Verification

Imagine you are a major (or minor) brand advertiser. You wake up in the morning, brew some coffee and, still in your PJ’s, break out your laptop to see what is happening in the digital world.

You are a happy person this morning. It’s 7am, the sun is out, no phone calls or meetings for another few hours, the coffee is starting to kick in and you know that out there in the internet world your ads are reaching millions of people while you sleep, while you’re in the shower and, in a few hours, while you’re in your car on your way to work.

You sliced and diced your target audience with the newest tools from behavioral, semantic or contextual online advertising networks or platforms, you produced the most engaging online ad creative with the most expensive digital advertising agency that has racked up more AAAA, ANA, IAB, ARF awards than the competition, you went on a digital media buying spree that ensures that your slick interactive ads will be seen by tens of millions of people in the right demographic across hundreds of relevant online publications.

And then, if you’re a marketer at ExxonMobil or Sprint, you see your motor oil and cell phone ads wrapped around an article about a kid who was killed in a motorcycle accident, like two giant book ends that scream out, “look at me, I have no tact.”

Read More: ScribeMedia.com

Fantasy Football Opinions and Online Marketing

This post is going to be crazy because I am going to deep dive on fantasy football draft strategy and, in tribute to my loyal fan base, which is no doubt sick of this new football thread, include a reference or two to online marketing. It is going to be sick!

Let’s get started.  Most people doing fantasy drafts simply make a list of who they think the best players in the league are and bang, bang, bang, draft.

Let’s call that “Old school media planning strategy”.  Or let’s call it “People who evaluate campaigns based on CTR“. Or “people who don’t love math”.  Or “people who suck!”  Or “me”, most years.

Anyway, here is what I think you are supposed to do.  First, recognize that there is data and there are algorithms.  Algorithms take data and tell you what you should do, hopefully.  If you feel as though what the algorithm is telling you to do is wrong, the problem could be that the algorithm is bad or the problem could be that the data is bad.  Figuring this out is absolutely critical.

There are three algorithms in fantasy football draft strategy, one of which is simple and perfect, one being the most interesting algorithmic challenge, and one being shear poker madness.  Here is the model I use when I think about optimizing the fantasy football draft process:

Read More: Cogmap.com

AOL Or Microsoft Could Buy Ad Startup AppNexus, Say Gossipers

Microsoft and AOL are both rumored to be looking at AppNexus, a New York City real-time bid (RTB) advertising startup, for a possible acquisition.

RTB — in which advertisers pay for ad impressions to particular consumers based on tracking data at the moment a new web page is loaded — is growing incredibly quickly right now.

As RTB appears set to take over a large portion of the display market over the next few years, major advertising players are building, acquiring, or partnering their way into the market. Most recently, Google paid a reported $70 million for Invite Media, a demand-side platform that helps advertisers trade in the RTB market.

AppNexus is run by a couple guys who sold Right Media to Yahoo, Brian O’Kelley and Mike Nolet, as well as ex-Googler Michael Rubenstein. Souces from the company dimiss all this gossip as just that – “rumors.”

Read More: BusinessInsider

Is Ad Blocking the Right Approach?

A couple of months ago I read an article by Tom Hespos called “Is our ad delivery infrastructure overtaxed?“ Besides doing a good job highlighting the growing issue of complexity and latency issues in our ad delivery infrastructure, it reminded me of a debate that we’ve had here at Adometry: is ad blocking the right approach?

A number of companies have sprung up to block ads that would appear next to objectionable content. From a brand protection point of view, we understand the appeal of ad blockers. If you could ensure that you could stop your brand appearing next to inappropriate content 100% of the time, why wouldn’t you adopt one of these services? But when you look more deeply at the reality of what these services deliver and the potential unwanted side effects, the value proposition becomes less clear.

Additional Latency

Ad blockers work by inserting themselves in the ad delivery chain.  Ad blockers need to make a decision whether to allow or reject an ad on a particular page without delaying unduly the delivery of the page.  Most of the time, they do this by matching a URL in their cache. For a new URL, they schedule the page for examination in an “offline” queue.

How much extra latency is acceptable? While opinion varies, 100-150 milliseconds would be an upper limit, and most publishers would prefer to see something in the 40-50 milliseconds range or less.

How much latency do ad blocking vendors introduce into the ad delivery path using today’s technology? Our measurement of one of the leading ad blocking vendors indicates that they add an average of almost 500 milliseconds to the ad call.  Perhaps we measured them during a bad month; I’m not claiming we have enough data to be accurate about someone else’s technology. I am saying that if you’re thinking of adopting ad-blocking technology, you should measure for yourself the delay to the ad call.

Read More: iMediaConnection

ShareThis Puts Value on Shared Content

ShareThis plans to release two analytics tools that allow advertisers and marketers to determine the value of content being shared across Web sites. Through both, Social Reach and Audience Index, brands have an opportunity to understand the value of social traffic.

Social Reach measures the true value of shared media across the Web by looking at inbound social traffic and outbound sharing, valuing the responder of a share as much as the sharer. The analysis aims to provide more data than buttons on Facebook, Twitter and Tweetmeme buttons that measure outbound sharing.

Audience Index measures and segments a publisher’s audience by influence, so it identifies who has shared, responded and viewed content from their site. It indexes the information by category and matches it against other sites across the Web.

Some early data shows that social traffic engages consumers more than search traffic, according to ShareThis CEO Tim Schigel. “It measures the social reach and allows publishers to measure it by article,” he says. “They also can index their reach from the articles on their site against the rest of the network.”

Read More: MediaPost