It’s no secret to everyone that the ad tech ecosystem has become highly commoditized. Much of the commoditization stems from the ease with which we white-label technology to spin up an ad exchange. And we’ve seen a proliferation of MFAs — aka websites that are manufactured for advertising (MFA) with the sole intention of engaging in ad arbitrage. This has led to a plethora of low-quality ad units in the open exchanges.

“In today’s environment, it’s critical to differentiate in some way shape, or form. The consolidation we’ve seen, and the rampant commoditization means publishers and tech platforms need to find a way to stand out,” advised David DiAngelo, Global Vice President of Marketplace Development at Emodo.

He recommends the following best practices for surviving in the new open markets.

#1: Think About Your Post-cookie Strategy

Cookie deprecation has been a hot topic since the moment Google announced it would cease to support third-party tracking cookies on Chrome. Several delays later, many publishers and tech platforms have come to believe that a cookie-less world isn’t something they don’t need to worry about. “A surprising number of publishers haven’t formulated a plan. This is a mistake because they need to know how they are going to monetize their business once this identifier finally goes away next year,” said DiAngelo.

In short order, however, publishers will need to find new ways to make advertising relevant to their users, so that it’s not a wasted ad unit. “As we lose data signals, publishers need to give serious thought to what the advertising experience looks like so that it’s still relevant for the consumer and the publisher’s marketing partners.”

#2: Think Native

According to an Emodo study, 76% of publishers that offer native inventory say it delivers better CPMs. Native ads also offer better experiences for the consumer and better performance for the advertiser. Creating native inventory doesn’t need to be a heavy lift for most publishers, as new technologies now allow any display ad to be converted to a native ad at the exchange level. If there isn’t a buyer interested in that native ad, it defaults to a display unit. 

“The benefits to publishers go beyond higher CPMs,” DiAngelo said. “Converting display ads to native means the publisher can offer a far more consumer-friendly ad experience. It will match the look, feel, and function of the website and app, which will drive more engagement.”

This isn’t to say that publishers should only sell native ads, but they should find ways to ensure all their ads have the clean and friendly experience of native ads.

#3: Leverage Generative AI to Improve Ad Experiences Further

Once the publisher (or partner they work with) has created ideal ad environments, the next step is to up the quality of the ads. The combination of generative AI and creative dynamic optimization can lead to captivating advertisements that adapt to individual preferences and optimize their impact. The industry has talked about personalized advertising experiences for decades, but never really delivered it. Generative AI puts the goal within reach.

“Depending on the user and the scenario, we can start to do things like bring in animations to an ad if we see signals that the user would be open to it,” DiAngelo explained. “We can think about adding a pulsing call to action, or a different logo treatment, based on the individual user who sees the ad.”

#4: Know Your Audience

For decades we’ve talked about the importance of knowing your audience, but all too often those discussions addressed the needs of the consumer only. However, it is equally important for publishers to consider marketers as their audience. “The consumer experience and value of the content is obviously the publisher’s top priority, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t think about what would be valuable to marketing partners. The idea of creating engaging, high-quality content that your core audience appreciates and loves and understanding what is valuable to marketers does not have to be a mutually exclusive endeavor. Great and relevant advertising can enhance the reader experience,” said DiAngelo.

#5: Lean into Seller-Defined Audiences

Speaking of the consumer, publishers have a great deal of first-party data and knowledge of their audience demographics, interests, and behavior, and they should use that insight to create target segments. These segments will help their advertisers reach their desired audiences effectively.

Another interesting option is geo-location signals or location as intent. In other words, we measure engagement as intent, but there’s a big difference between visiting a website for an auto manufacturer and visiting a dealership. Location data — i.e. the presence of a mobile device at a dealership — is a stronger indication of intent.

#6: Update Your Partner Evaluation Process

Many publishers continue to evaluate partners based on relevant criteria from five or ten years ago. But the commoditization of the open markets means publishers need to work harder to find premium buyers, and that means they need to differentiate. Ask: can this partner help us differentiate our property? Are they offering innovations that will attract premium advertisers? Are they curating marketplaces that will drive CPMs and reduce fraud? 

“We see a lot of SSPs that are plugged into the same DSPs, which means they’re not offering differentiated demand. Partners are instrumental in building audiences. If they’re not helping build audiences, they’re not helping the publisher to succeed in the post-cookie world,” said DiAngelo.

One final consideration: Does the SSP have a sales organization that is actively sourcing differentiated demand for the publisher? If not, find one that does. Collaboration in the new open markets is essential. If a publisher’s partner isn’t willing to work through problems with them, who will?

The post Best Practices for Publishers to Survive the New Open Markets: How to Differentiate Your Brand in an Age of Commoditization appeared first on AdMonsters.

Just last year, Liveintent found that 87% of publishers and marketers were actively investing in email and 94% were prioritizing scaling their email programs. 

Truth is, publishers have been deploying email newsletters as audience generation tools for their O&O properties for eons. So email is not some brand new shiny thing, but it has mostly played a value-added background role in publishers’ revenue strategies. 

This recent surge can be attributed to all sorts of things from the cookie crackdown to looming privacy regulations to publishers needing to diversify their revenue. I spoke with Rachel Rubin, Vice President, Customer Success, Liveintent to dive deeper into these topics and especially focus on how email newsletters can come out of the shadows to play a leading role in a publisher’s direct-sold program. 

You can watch or listen to the full conversation, or just check out this edited version below.

Email Newsletters Are the New Homepage

Lynne d Johnson: Interest in newsletters is surging. It’s been said that email newsletters are the new homepage for digital publishers, and quite a few large-scale pubs seem to be doubling down on the channel. Is this more than just a trend?

Rachel Rubin: Publishers and marketers have been using newsletters to engage with their readers and their customers for well over a decade now. 

With that said, the focus on newsletters definitely surged over the pandemic. Over the last two years, we’ve seen that email marketing engagement rose by 200%. And the best part is that new readers who started reading newsletters at the beginning of the pandemic are staying in the inbox. 

This spike helped more companies see the value of newsletters as a trusted channel for building and engaging with their audience. Users are opting in, raising their hands, and saying, “Yes, I want content from this publisher — from this marketer.” It’s a really engaged audience. 

Another main driver is email’s growing role as a means of collecting first-party data, which is so important right now. But for the email environment to remain a viable solution, publishers and brands need to continue to provide value to their newsletter readers and be transparent about the value exchange. Email is here to stay. And it’s really exciting to see that everyone is understanding the value now.

Direct-Sold Makes a Comeback

LdJ: We’ve also heard that direct sales are back in style, and PMPs and PGs are trending. What is LiveIntent’s thinking on this?

RR: With the death of the third-party cookie, the future of targeting is kind of in limbo and direct sales are gaining serious momentum regardless of what pipes the execution is coming from. 

LiveIntent is integrated with all the external DSPs — DV 360, The Trade Desk, you name it. We also have a managed service for executing direct deals. And we see priority PMPs coming up more in the environment. We don’t yet have the capabilities for PGs, because, unlike the web which is constant, email has ebbs and flows 

At the end of the day, advertisers want to reach their relevant audience, and publishers who engage with readers on a daily basis know these audiences better than anyone. Publishers who can articulate what makes their audiences and content unique — they’ve really branded and conquested that market. 

Email is a unique snowflake because we don’t rely on cookies, we rely on email hashes. That makes it easier for advertisers or publishers to target their own first-party data.

Increasing Yield With Native Ads in Email

LdJ: In the past, pubs didn’t focus on email because they felt it was too much work. But with your product Native Ad Blueprints, they can build a scalable premium ad experience with little effort and increase the yield of their direct-sold program. Is that correct?

RR: LiveIntent has made newsletters easy. Historically, if you wanted to do native in newsletters, that took a lot of time and bandwidth because you needed someone coding HTML every single time you wanted to switch out your ads.

We’re making that easier without the operational drag of hard coding every single campaign. Publishers can add native ads to their media kit and increase their yield by directly selling native.

And since native ads are designed to look and feel like newsletter content — they drive higher engagement, helping advertisers build brand equity. So they’re a win-win all around. Advertisers get higher CTRs and more performance, and publishers can justify more premium CPMs.

We’ve also recently brought Native Curated Packages to market. This is our version of native demand for publishers. We want to give publishers the control to pick and choose which advertisers run natively in their email newsletters.

Creating New Products and Bringing on New Advertisers

LdJ: In the future, it looks like there won’t be just one thing to replace third-party cookies. Besides being able to collect and activate first-party data, what are some of the other benefits for pubs?

RR:  Pubs can use their newsletter content and ad engagement data to build audiences to segment out audiences by interests — like sports fans, health and wellness enthusiasts, or finance enthusiasts, for example.

Newsletter content and ad engagement data can also lend insight into reader behavior. By examining metrics, you can glean which readers are taking action and then segment those users. You can also create first-party data right in the email environment. 

Tying this all back to your direct-sold and direct-deal question from earlier; this approach helps publishers bring on new advertisers. And they’re able to do that by showcasing their unique offering — captivating content and highly engaged audiences.

Leveraging CRM Data to Increase Reach

LdJ: What about the convergence of martech and adtech — taking first-party data out of silos? How can pubs leverage their CRM data to increase their reach with email newsletters? 

RR: Publishers can utilize CRM data in the email newsletter to target new subscribers, suppress subscribers, target content clickers, or utilize it for marketing campaigns right across the email channel. This is not just within their owned and operated email, but extending their CRM data to target the exchange of emails we have.

Also, leveraging CRM data is not all about targeting. It’s also about suppression. When you are targeting users, it does limit your reach. With suppression, it’s the opposite. You know, who you don’t want to target. 

MPP Isn’t Really Hurting Revenue

LdJ: What about Apple’s privacy changes in the inbox. Is this scary for publishers?

RR: This is something else that requires education. Before MPP launched, we researched and became really educated about it so that we could educate our publishers and ensure they understand what it means for their email newsletters and especially for their metrics. 

We’re not seeing revenue decline, we’re just seeing that the metrics we once loved and held on to are not so accurate anymore. So now we’re in a period of transition and working hard to come up with adjusted metrics so that our publishers and our advertisers can still understand their newsletter performance outside of just the revenue metric. 

Top 3 Takeaways: Direct-Sold in Email Newsletters

LdJ: We’ve touched on so many fascinating topics here. What are your top three takeaways that you want publishers to know about direct-sold in email newsletters?

RR: One, it’s a really easy channel to utilize your first-party data. Two, it’s a really easy channel to create first-party data and create the proper segments to use within your email environment, but also extend it to all of your other channels. And then third, leaning into native can only help increase your yield from both a programmatic and direct-sold standpoint.

The post Unlock Direct-Sold Revenue With Email Newsletters and Native Ads: Q&A With LiveIntent’s Rachel Rubin appeared first on AdMonsters.

75% of people spend up to two hours a day consuming short-form video content. It is quick and easy, and many of us have the attention span of a 6-year-old, so we naturally gravitate towards it.

In the new eBook “The Science of Video Viewability and Beyond: A Publisher’s Guide to Maximizing Ad Revenue,” Ex.co deeply dives into the ins and outs of retaining viewability and even presents a carved out periodic table that outlines the steps to reaching video engagement and revenue highs. 

There is most certainly a science to this ad tech stuff. The alphabet soup alone is a little nerve-wracking for beginners, but “The Periodic Table of Video Engagement” is so simple that anyone will understand it. 

See “The Periodic Table of Video Engagement” link above for a more detailed view.

Why Is Viewability Important?

If no one sees your ads, then there is no way for you to retain revenue, which would be pointless for a publisher. Viewability is everything because, of course, you want your videos to be seen!

Within the periodic table, there are 21 elements presented, ranging from Algorithmic recommendations (AR) to Player placement (Pp) to Verification (Ve). These elements can help publishers increase their viewability, strengthen audience engagement, and maximize ad revenue.

“Advertisers want every chance to succeed. So, partners must meet minimum viewability requirements,” said Tito Flores III, Group Director, Digital Investment at MediaCom. “That’s your general admission ticket to be considered. But the minimum won’t equate to real success. Maximizing viewability is how you navigate your way into VIP (very important partner) status.”

Ex.co’s “highly viewable” video players help increase engagement on all devices. The brand can help publishers increase average viewability by 70%, lower negative interaction rate by 30%, and increase RPMs vs. static by 40%.

Video Is the Future

Video is like a pot of gold for publishers.

Who is logging onto YouTube to find information and learn about something that a 60-second video can teach them?

In terms of viewability, video content is re-shared 12x more than text or pictures, so your ad will go viral if you have the proper creative backing and a resourceful video player. It’s larger than TV, too, as research shows that one-third of people spend their time on their internet consuming videos.

The eBook even hashes out the real from the fake when it comes to myths surrounding the “pseudoscience” of video, like VRPM’s being the future, for example, but we don’t want to spoil it for ya!

“Although viewability has been top-of-mind for several years, publishers and advertisers are still looking for new ways to maximize it. As verification technology has evolved, attention-based metrics are more important than ever before,” said Johanna Bergqvist, vice president of strategic partnerships at EX.CO. “This ebook takes a giant leap forward by clearly defining the steps that publishers can take to achieve the highest engagement possible, and we’re excited to make this resource available to the industry at large.”

The post Video, Viewability & “The Periodic Table of Video Engagement” appeared first on AdMonsters.

AdMonsters webinars are available on-demand, so you can view them any time, on your own schedule. 2021 webinars covered the most pressing issues facing the digital media and advertising industry, from developing a scalable first-party data strategy to identity solutions and cookie replacements to OTT and CTV privacy controls to maximizing revenue in email plus more.

Give yourself a professional edge, tune into an AdMonsters Webinar On-Demand Now! Or, maybe later.

OTT & CTV Privacy Controls: Activating Choice & Transparency in Apps

The shift to OTT and CTV creates an opportunity for publishers to engage a growing audience and deliver personalized experiences – and that includes privacy controls. Tegna is on the path to providing that transparency and choice with their OTT audience. In this webinar, Chris Fehrmann, Tegna VP of Digital Products, and Alex Cash, OneTrust Consent and Preference Management Lead talked about how your team can deliver personalization, and build trust within your streaming app. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

Unlocking a Creative-First Approach to Social Display

As alternative ways to distribute social content become increasingly important, publishers are offering solutions to help brands take their social creative and run it across publisher inventory with Social Display. Celtra Senior Product Marketing Manager Nikki Gartner discussed how to apply creative effects to Social Display and showcase new workflows that allow even non-designers across account and sales teams to build and activate Social Display with no coding or design experience. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to turn Social Display content into a premium ad experience. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

How Top Publishers are Using VRM to Prep for UIDs, FLoCs and Revenue in a Cookieless Future

With all the uncertainty about the cookieless future, as a publisher, there’s really only one way to future-proof your business: grow relationships with your visitors. There is no single “silver bullet” technology — whether it’s Universal IDs, FLoCs or subscriptions — that will save publisher revenue and jobs in a post-cookie world. Join Dan Rua, CEO, Admiral, as he speaks with Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech, Arvid Tchivzhel, GM Digital, Mather Economics, Kevin Cooper, SVP, Digital, Boone Newspapers, and Derek Nicol, VP, Advertising Technologies, ViacomCBS about two visitor-first publisher efforts that should be your primary focus right now, in preparation for the uncertainty of 2022. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

Identity is a Team Sport: How Publishers & Marketers Can Move Beyond the Cookie Together

How are marketers and publishers preparing for a post-cookie world? Lotame commissioned a survey of over 1,000 marketers and publishers across the globe to find out. In this webinar, Alexandra Theriault, Lotame’s Chief Customer Officer, presented key survey findings from “Beyond the Cookie: The Future of Advertising for Marketers & Publishers” to set a baseline for our live case study discussion. Alexandra was joined by Advance Local and Rush Street to walk through how they’re actively implementing and testing identity solutions, and what they’ve learned along the way. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

Personalization & Privacy: Your Third-Party Cookie Replacement Game Plan

Chrome’s delayed cookie deprecation may bring a sigh of relief, but other browsers like Safari and Firefox already implemented blocking third-party tracking cookies, further emphasizing that it’s never too early to start planning for when third-party cookies are totally gone. It’s important to understand how the deprecation of third-party cookies could impact your website. This way, you can make the necessary changes before third-party cookies phase out completely. In this webinar Arshdeep Sood, Solutions Engineer at OneTrust, explains why it’s important to ensure that you have a CMP in place to adhere to regulatory guidelines now — while cookies are still around. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

How Pubs Are Increasing Revenue While Delivering Premium Ad Experiences in Email

By leveraging your first-party audience data, you can build a scalable ad sales program around premium ad packages. Publishers know that advertisers will pay more for premium ad experiences as they drive better engagement, and Sandow Media has seen the results. They’ve streamlined workflows while delivering dynamic ads with more granular targeting and personalization. And with fewer banner ads, the newsletter reader experience has dramatically improved. Jessica Munoz, SVP Product Marketing & GTM Strategy, Liveintent, and Bobby Bonett, VP Digital, Sandow explain how you can use Liveintent’s Native Ad Blueprints in your email newsletter program to improve operational efficiency, improve ad experiences, increase revenue and engagement. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

No Third-party Cookies, No Problem: Ranker on First-party Data in a Privacy-safe World

The need for first-party data is creating a shift in power towards publishers. Why? Because publishers have a direct relationship with their readers, giving them access to unique insights about audiences that advertisers crave. In this webinar, Lynne d Johnson, Senior Editor, AdMonsters, converses with Dana OMalley, National VP of Sales at Ranker & Lauren Kroll, Customer Success Manager, Permutive, as they dive into the goldmine that is publishers’ first-party data and why it’s so powerful. Watch this webinar on-demand now!

The post AdMonsters 2021 Webinar Replay Roundup appeared first on AdMonsters.

But how about the fact that email newsletters offer pubs a solid additional revenue stream, especially as the cookie crumbles and CPMs are expected to dwindle?

That’s right, pubs. Imagine building a scalable direct-sold program around premium ad packages that resonate with your audience while driving deeper engagement for buyers. Well, publishers like SANDOW Media are using LiveIntent’s Native Ad Blueprints to combine native advertising and email newsletters to do exactly that. But that’s not all.

In a recent AdMonsters webinar with LiveIntent, How Pubs Are Increasing Revenue While Delivering Premium Ad Experiences In Email, Bobby Bonett, VP, Digital, SANDOW shared how SANDOW streamlined workflows while delivering dynamic ads with more granular targeting and personalization, and most importantly how they’re realizing 15X greater CTR than with display ads. 

According to eMarketer native advertising is expected to reach $57.27 billion this year, and with recent technological advancements, native programmatic advertising in email is proving to be both efficient and effective, contributing significantly to publishers’ programmatic revenue. 

Native ads in email no longer require hard coding and they can also be served dynamically, opening up the revenue floodgates and delivering a seamless and personalized user experience. Native programmatic ads in email can be just as engaging as a publisher’s newsletter content, if not more so. 

“The format garners 53% more engagement than display ads,” explained Jessica Muñoz, SVP Product Marketing & GTM Strategy, LiveIntent. That’s a huge opportunity that publishers just can’t ignore.

LiveIntent’s Native Ad Blueprints can help publishers streamline their workflows to support adding premium ad inventory to their email newsletters.

Case Study: SANDOW Media’s Metropolis Magazine Customizable Ad Formats 

Metropolis Magazine partnered with LiveIntent to create a Native Ad Blueprint designed to promote sponsored content in their newsletter, allowing them to escape from display ads being their primary source of revenue for this channel.

“What’s really important to our clients is not a monumental impression share, it’s contextualization alongside premium content,” said Bonett. “And the best way we feel to contextualize an advertiser next to our premium content is elevating them to the level of our content and have that ad content blend in natively.”

Selling advertisers on the concept of their ads blending in with premium content was the easy part for SANDOW. What was tricky was selling it on the operational side. The publisher wanted their small but mighty ad ops team, across their various media brands dealing with 100s of opportunities per week, to: 

• easily traffic approvals
• stand up campaigns
• edit ads on the fly without the assistance of a web editor 
• and manage an inventory efficiently

“Being able to do all of this from a programmatic sense with the LiveIntent backend allows us to be more efficient with our time and allows that team to operate in a much more seamless way without involving unnecessary intermediaries along the way,” shared Bonett.

As well, being able to deploy reader-relevant ad units like these on time, twice per week, with approval from the client is hypercritical to the campaign’s success and high performance. This allows a publisher like SANDOW to run more campaigns more efficiently.

Personalization Wins Every Time

According to data from a recent Advertising Perceptions survey, in partnership with LiveIntent, advertisers say the quality of a publisher’s content and the quality of their first-party data are the most important criteria they use when deciding which ones they choose to partner with for sponsorships. 

“They want to know that you’re putting the same care into getting their messages in front of your readers as you do with your own content,” said Muñoz. “LiveIntent can help you tap into that personalization.”

This is precisely how SANDOW Media increased revenue and CTRs with premium ad experiences in email.

“Protecting the sanctity of the native ad content and its quality is important,” said Bonet. “If you’re backfilling with low-quality ad content readers are going to start filtering you out and it could also change their perception of your editorial content. By prioritizing relevant advertising content we have newsletters where the top-performing content is the native ad unit. You’ll never get that from a banner ad in a million years.”

Besides, don’t you want to sell beyond your current guaranteed deals and be able to run multiple campaigns with multiple sponsors and serve the right ad to the right reader at the right time?

As you should all well know, dynamic ad serving in email is not possible if you’re hard coding your ads. But compared to traditional static ad units, Native Ad Blueprints allows pubs to run simultaneous native campaigns with options to apply targeting parameters (such as locale, date, and time), as well as first-party data to fill impressions and boost yield. 

And because Native Ad Blueprints can be used across multiple ad slots, publishers can scale their native ad inventory into additional newsletters if warranted. This technology is zooming publishers’ newsletter revenue strategies light-years beyond those guaranteed deals they’re currently selling.

Sounds like a win for publishers, their advertising partners, and their readers as well. With Native Ad Blueprints publishers no longer have to worry about limited resources holding them back from providing advertisers with customizations or negatively impacting the user experience with irrelevant native ads. Talk about balancing ad quality with ad revenue. 

Below you can check out the full webinar:

The post How SANDOW Media Increased Revenue and CTRs With Premium Ad Experiences in Email appeared first on AdMonsters.

In fact, eMarketer predicts spend for native advertising to reach $57.27 billion this year.

But leveraging native ads for monetizing email newsletters isn’t as easy as it is on the web. And in case you haven’t heard, email newsletters are booming. So it’s a good thing that with technological advancements, native programmatic advertising in email is proving to be efficient and effective, contributing significantly to publishers’ programmatic revenue.

Publishers like SANDOW Media are using LiveIntent’s Native Ad Blueprints to leverage their first-party audience data to build a scalable ad sales program around premium ad packages that resonate with their audiences while driving deeper buyer engagement by combining native formats for email newsletters and programmatic advertising.

Check out this video from our recent webinar — How Pubs Are Increasing Revenue While Delivering Premium Ad Experiences In Email — with Jessica Munoz, SVP Product Marketing & GTM Strategy, LiveIntent and Bobby Bonett, VP, Digital, SANDOW.

• How SANDOW streamlined workflows while delivering dynamic ads with more granular targeting and personalization
• How SANDOW is seeing better CTRs than with display ads
• How Native Ad Blueprints helps pubs improve operational efficiency
• How Native Ad Blueprints helps pubs increase revenue and engagement
• How to employ robust targeting to easily execute multiple direct campaigns simultaneously
• How native programmatic ads can be just as engaging as content, and even more so

The post Build a Scalable Ad Sales Program Around Premium Ads in Email appeared first on AdMonsters.

Publishers know that advertisers will pay more for premium ad experiences as they drive better engagement, and Sandow Media has seen the results. They’ve streamlined workflows while delivering dynamic ads with more granular targeting and personalization. And with fewer banner ads, the newsletter reader experience has dramatically improved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Practices for Monetizing Native Ads in Your Email

Show Me the Money

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

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

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

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

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

Designing Your Own Native Ad Blueprint

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

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

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

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

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

No Hard Coding Required

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

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

To learn more about Native Ad Blueprints, visit LiveIntent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But ROI has long been the bane of content marketing. Marketers know they need it, but understanding how it’s being used and figuring out how it’s moving consumers down the funnel has long been a challenge.

Senior Editor, Lynne d Johnson, spoke with Peyman Nilforoush, CEO and Co-Founder of inPowered about how marketers can solve the long-standing ROI issue with content marketing and where he sees content marketing headed in the future.

Lynne d Johnson: How can AI solve the content marketing industry’s ROI problem?

Peyman Nilforoush: When industry standards for ROI metrics look at only “CPM and CPC,” it’s challenging to gauge tangible business outcomes and real return on content marketing spend. How can true ROI be determined when data lacks anything besides clicks and impressions?

inPowered uses an AI-powered platform to deliver business outcomes with content marketing. We built this company to empower brands to gain measurable data points as to how their content is really resonating with consumers, in order to create highly impactful digital marketing strategies that drive results.

With the simple drop of a Java Script tag across all pages of a brand’s content, our AI-powered Content Intelligence is able to test various calls to action targeted to achieve higher-funnel business outcomes; optimizing the time and placement of an intelligent “Next Action” across all content and driving consumers further down the funnel of consideration to take action.

 LdJ: Exactly, what is Content Intelligence?

PN: Content Intelligence is a unique offering created to solve content marketing’s ROI problem. In March of 2020, as COVID hit, we had somewhere around 2/3 of our Fortune 500 advertising clients essentially pause their campaigns overnight.

This was due to the uncertainty around COVID-19; but it quickly became clear that there would be some time before life returned to ‘normal,’ and our clients had to figure out from a content marketing standpoint how to retool their messaging and entire digital strategy.

They also had to figure out what content is resonating and is most helpful to their consumers during this time of transition, as well as understand what content is driving real ROI and business outcomes. If you’ve done any work in marketing, you know that is already a difficult thing to accomplish—to provide content that’s not only resourceful but driving the real results that your business needs.

In response to this, we developed Content Intelligence, which uses AI to decipher what content is resonating most with consumers, while also driving them down the funnel of consideration to take action and deliver real ROI. Instead of focusing on metrics such as clicks or impressions, Content Intelligence is able to drive larger business outcomes for brands such as positive brand perception, high-value actions taken on site, lead generation and increased user engagement.

 LdJ: Do you have any real-life use cases of Content Intelligence?

PN: On average, we’ve had clients who’ve implemented Content Intelligence see an average of 12% CTR for the content’s call-to-action with some articles driving as high as 40% CTR.

One of our major insurance partners drove 6,000 incremental clicks to their insurance calculator within 30 days and saw a 119X increase in their content’s click-thru rate.

Their agency partner also commented how those clicks are more likely to result in sales because people who have already landed on the insurance calculator are 40% more likely to engage with the next piece of content from the insurer, like a unique quote for life insurance.

LdJ: Where do you see content marketing heading in 2021 and what should publishers be thinking about?

PN: We see three key trends in content marketing for 2021—AI implementation, leading with empathy, and driving business results as opposed to soft metrics. If we learned anything from 2020, it was that consumers won’t pay attention to sales pitches in a pandemic. They engage with brands that lead with empathy and provide tangible value. Brands that have successfully implemented AI to understand the needs of their consumers are able to optimize their content marketing efforts to drive real business results as opposed to clicks and impressions.

We see 2021 as the tipping point for using AI to connect top-funnel content strategies to real ROI and that is a game-changer in a year that every single dollar will need to work harder for companies to hit their goals.

This also includes both B2B and B2C publishers, as AI will also be key for them to scale up their traffic, conversions, and ad revenue.

The post Can AI Solve Content Marketing’s ROI Conundrum? appeared first on AdMonsters.