Meet Viewify, a cutting-edge SaaS solution that harnesses the power of machine learning to dynamically optimize ad auctions, resulting in an average ad viewability of 80% or higher.

Viewify is a first-of-its-kind platform designed to help publishers instantly elevate ad viewability above the crucial 80% threshold. This achievement is directly linked to improved CPMs and increased revenue streams. The best part? It promises to offer publishers immediate results without bearing the burden on their end, as Viewify’s integration is streamlined and hassle-free, requiring just a single line of javascript.

With Viewify, gone are the days of complex billing structures tied to ad loads or refresh counts, or the controversial revenue-sharing schemes adopted by many other solutions in the market. Publishers only incur charges when the tool loads on their pages, regardless of the number of ads present, granting them the freedom to concentrate on creating exceptional content, driving user engagement, and maintaining a seamless user experience.

We spoke with Deke Hooper, CEO of diDNA to delve deeper into the features and benefits of the SSP’s new offering, Viewify. We’ll explore how this tool is reshaping how publishers implement and utilize ad tech while unraveling the broader implications for the advertising ecosystem. 

Yakira Young: In what ways can publishers witness an instant enhancement in their viewability metrics by utilizing Viewify?

Deke Hooper: The core technology that makes Viewify so effective is how it optimizes two important (yet often overlooked) metrics: lazy load and ad refresh.

When lazy load is deployed incorrectly or not deployed at all, all ads on a page load immediately, regardless of whether they are on the site, driving down viewability and reducing CPMs based on those signals. 

Enabling Viewify, which includes diDNA’s Enhanced Lazy Load with header bidding through methods like active tab monitoring and viewport proximity, allows for more efficient resource allocation by only triggering auction and render requests for ads when the user’s viewport is close to the ad location, resulting in improved performance by reducing unnecessary network requests and rendering.

Ad refresh acts similarly. While it’s a fantastic revenue opportunity when not set up correctly it can have the opposite effect by refreshing out-of-view ads, reducing viewability, and hurting the overall monetization goals. Intelligent Ad Refresh is part of Viewify that considers Google policy for TTLs, runs tests in the background, and identifies the highest revenue correlated to refresh, with smart timers that optimize by device and ranges.

YY: How does Viewify offer publishers the flexibility to tailor their approach, whether at a granular or global level?

DH: Publishers using Viewify typically fall into one of two categories:

1. Ad Ops and Programmatic Teams who want a tool that works out of the box, maximizing time to value and leveraging diDNA’s smart presets to optimize ad inventory.
2. Teams who want more control and want to customize and build their own rules to find incremental revenue opportunities.

Viewify users typically fall into the first category in the current media landscape. They’re under pressure to do more and hit ad revenue targets with fewer resources. Viewify is a trusted solution to quickly and easily get more out of their existing inventory and automatically do the work for them. 

For teams that want to dig deeper, a powerful customization layer built into the Viewify Editor gives ad tech pros ample opportunity to test and optimize specifics to their site. Users can manually set refresh ranges, lazy load settings, ad render settings, and more, and can be segmented by device type, geo, and user, among others.

Here’s a concrete example: let’s say you’re a publisher who runs a mix of programmatic open market and higher-value direct campaigns. You may want to increase your refresh time on the direct campaigns, or even disable refresh entirely. Doing so generally leads to a higher click-through rate and lower average CPCs, two common KPIs for direct campaigns. To make that happen with Viewify, you simply enter the line item and customize the settings yourself. All other line items would continue to operate with the global settings while optimizing the specific campaign as needed.

YY: We noticed a senior programmatic director in the sports industry expressing his conviction that Viewify is indispensable for his publication. Are you receiving similar feedback from other publisher partners?

DH: We’re hearing a ton of positive feedback from early adopters of Viewify. From positive viewability data and revenue trends to ease of deployment and getting started, overall feedback has been extremely productive.

We implemented Viewify on one of the largest gaming publisher sites in the country last month. The day we turned it on, average viewability increased by 86% and has held steady ever since. Fill rate has increased by 14%, and we’ve seen an average CPM increase of 24%.

One thing to keep in mind is that the core tech that powers Viewify has been packaged as part of our “full stack” monetization program for years now. Thousands of publishers have already benefited from the tool, and we hope for thousands more in the future.

YY: What sets Viewify apart from other solutions in the market?

DH: Simplicity, time to value, and how it increases the value of existing ad inventory.

Simplicity: A single line of javascript installed in the site’s header is all a publisher needs to start. It can be set up and ready to go in less time than it takes to read this paragraph. Once installed, the smart presets are enough to get started and start seeing results instantly. The default settings work so well that many publishers do just that: install Viewify, set it, see the results, and forget it.

Time to value: Viewify integrates directly with a publisher’s existing header bidding strategy and starts optimizing the ad auction the second it’s turned on. Viewability increases within minutes, followed by CPMs and ad revenue.

More valuable ad inventory:  We’ve seen a direct correlation between viewability and CPMs. Low viewability indicates a lower-quality website in both the programmatic ad auction and with higher-value direct deals and PMP campaigns. The overall goal of Viewify is to make inventory more valuable and thus drive up CPMs and revenue. We’ve found viewability to be one of the biggest opportunities to make a significant and immediate impact. Many publishers have viewability numbers in the 40-60% range. Bringing that up to 80% can make a big difference.

The implementation structure and terms are a new approach to the traditional ad tech platforms. We offer qualifying publishers a 30-day free trial to test the tool without taking on risk or long-term contracts. Once a publisher sees the results from Viewify, it’s really hard for them to hit the same performance metrics without it.

Our goal here is to offer publishers flexibility and transparency – neither of which are historically very common in the ad tech space.

YY: How do you envision the trajectory of Viewify over the next five years?

DH: Viewify is the first of a number of SaaS-style tools that complement our roadmap in the next one-five years. We want to be part of moving the industry towards giving publishers more control and customization over their toolkits.

Our new tools will follow a similar structure, focusing on simplicity, speed, and customization. 

YY: Is there any additional information or insights you would like to share about Viewify?

DH: The Viewify engine determines why, when, and how often ads will show based on performance, user behavior, and auction signals — creating a unique user experience every time. 

Minimum thresholds for high-value direct deals, open market, and PMP campaigns are typically 70%. By increasing viewability, publishers can access premium advertisers, ultimately increasing brand value and ad revenue. In addition to optimizing programmatic and open market campaigns, implementing Viewify will help a publisher’s direct sales team sell on higher core metrics, increasing deal sizes and driving more ad revenue.

The post Publishers, Get the Flexibility and Transparency You Need With Viewify appeared first on AdMonsters.

With the advertising ecosystem constantly changing, buyers are always seeking ways to improve ROI, and sellers are always seeking new ways to diversify revenue — interstitial ads are moving up on the list as a solution to both challenges. A recent study conducted by Adnimation found that the average eCPM for interstitial ads was 4,094% more than the average eCPM for traditional banner ads. 

For publishers looking to boost their revenue, new research proves it’s time they shift their perspectives and reconsider any reservations they have. Interstitial ads have high viewability, which breeds high click through rates. The high eCPM rates are also a benefit to publishers. 

The aesthetic of interstitial ads, without a doubt, instantly grabs users’ attention but is that always a good thing? 

Let’s remember that there was a time when lots of publishers turned their back on interstitial ads because users felt they were intrusive. Also, Google isn’t too fond of them, and their new Development Program Policy prohibits developers from placing interstitial ads in front of consumers while gaming. 

Despite all this, with proper placement, frequency capping, and a transparent “X” button, interstitial ads can realize their full potential. Tomer Treves, co-founder and president of Adnimation provides a more in-depth overview of interstitial ads and their ability to drive publisher revenue and advertiser ROI below.

Yakira Young: One of the most notable results from the study was about interstitial ad performance on desktop devices. The eCPM of interstitial ads outperformed banner ads by 5,173%. What makes interstitial ads perform drastically better on desktop when compared to banner ads?

Tomer Treves: Advertisers seek users’ attention, and traditional display banners suffer severely from banner blindness. This means that when they appear next to the content, users know how to focus on the content, and they just physically don’t see the banner. We have heat maps that show that this has been happening for years. 

But it’s worse than that. Without professional monetization, many of the display ads are not viewed at all. An article can have ten banners that are way below the fold, which nobody has ever scrolled down to; therefore, those ads have zero viewability. The advertiser pays for them, but users don’t see them, so the return on investment for the advertiser is zero. Some banner ads have high viewability and give a good return, for example, high-quality in-content banners, but overall, the average return for display banners is relatively low. 

On the other hand, interstitial ads on desktops cover the whole page. Sometimes it even takes a few seconds until there’s an ‘X’ button, so the users give it their full attention on a relatively big screen. This is exactly what advertisers seek, and they’re willing to pay top dollar for it. 

From the publisher’s point of view, it’s an intrusive ad, so there’s a need to balance it by reducing the number of banner ads and implementing a frequency capping so the ads won’t run too often. But you can charge a very high price for them. 

YY: Mobile devices also saw a significant performance gap between banner and interstitial ads. On mobile, interstitial ads outperformed banner ads by 3,241%. Do you project this increase to continue?

TT: Mobile devices also have a viewability issue because they have a small viewport, so the users only see a small portion of the content at any given moment. The users also learned how to scroll very fast past banners. That is why, on average, the return on regular banners is relatively low in contrast to interstitial ads, which attract the user’s full attention, making advertisers willing to pay much more.

So yes, this increase will continue. However, publishers must be cautious to use interstitial ads sparingly because they can come at the expense of user loyalty. If there are too many interstitial ads, users might not return.

YY: From my research, I learned it’s nearly impossible for a user to ignore an interstitial ad. What is it about interstitial advertisements that stand out and instantly grab user attention?

TT: Interstitial ads grab users’ attention because they cover the entire screen space. Sometimes, the ‘X’ button takes time to appear. It’s actually a good idea to change the location of the ‘X’ button occasionally, so users won’t get used to them and click on them too fast.

YY: Some publishers are still on the fence about interstitial ads and whether or not they want to use them. What would you say to those publishers who need clarification on using interstitial ads?

TT: I understand and agree with them. I don’t like ads; no one likes ads. It would be wonderful if we could have sites with no ads at all. But as long as we want to give users the ability to consume content for free while still generating income, we need to give away some of the users’ attention to the advertisers. 

That being said, Adnimation recommends fewer ads for higher prices. We don’t believe in too many banners that clutter the site and cover the content. And when you use only smaller-sized ads that are out of the viewport, you need to put a lot of them to get to the prices you need to cover your costs and make a profit. 

Interstitial ads are aggressive, but you can limit their number with smart frequency capping – per user, per time unit, and according to users’ behavior. Because you are charging an average of 4,000% more for interstitial ads, you can have a smart balance – serve some interstitial ads and fewer standard banner ads. Ultimately, you will have fewer ads, but your ad revenue will still increase. 

YY: Did any advertisers in the study experience any challenges with interstitial ads?

TT: Definitely, yes. After introducing interstitial ads for the first time, some advertisers received complaints from users. It’s not easy for a publisher to receive complaints. And whenever they do, they forward them to Adnimation, and we need to offer them an explanation.  

We explain two things:

1. True, interstitial ads are more aggressive. But when done smartly, the users will eventually see fewer ads, so the content will be much better in terms of user experience.
2. We also remind them to look at the numbers. If a publisher had 10 million pageviews that month, and received three complaints – it’s not easy, and we need to answer these three users from the bottom of our hearts and explain – but it’s three out of 10 million. That’s a good number.  

YY: How can publishers use interstitials as a revenue driver while showing fever traditional banner ads?

TT: Due to the high prices advertisers are willing to pay for interstitial ads, you can reduce the number of regular display banners while generating more revenue. But it’s more complicated than it sounds because you need to have smart frequency capping and smart decision-making in real-time to know when to show interstitial ads, to whom to show interstitial ads, and how to optimize the ads to have such a high eCPM. 

It’s not that every advertiser is willing to pay so much. They need to understand the return they get on that unit, and there is a huge gap between how much they’re willing to pay and how much they’re actually charged. That is why you need sophisticated technology and ongoing management to maximize prices to the level we can get for our publishers. 

It’s not just a small piece of code and ‘wow, I’m making so much money.’ It requires advanced technology and ongoing real-time management like the service and technology that Adnimation offers its publishers. It’s not an easy solution, but it’s a smart solution. 

YY: What do you foresee for interstitial ad placements and their ability to drive revenue in the future?

TT: Nothing is going to stay as it is today. The world of ad tech and ad placement changes constantly, and the pace of change also gets faster and faster every year. I’m almost 100% sure what I know now will not be the same three years from now. 

But in 2023, interstitial ads will play an essential part in a publisher’s ability to make money, and publishers who partner with Adnimation will enjoy this new level of revenue. 

Since most of our partners are with us for a very long time, whatever comes ahead in 2024, we will be there ahead of time to analyze the changes and ensure we have the next best solution ready for the years to come. 

The post New Study Provides Concrete Data on the Success of Interstitial Ads appeared first on AdMonsters.

A recent Digiday study points out that 67% of publishers foresee a recession within the next six months, which casts a dark cloud over those seeking new revenue streams. Many are scrambling to figure out how they will stay afloat during such wavering times.

Fortunately, diDNA, a leading publisher tech provider, released a new and improved version of its video monetization solution that will help combat recession worries.

diDNA combines its industry expertise, high-quality demand, and technical expertise in a platform that enables publishers and ad tech vendors to scale their video monetization programs.

As a top Google MCM Program Partner, the ad tech company is mindful of adhering to strict ad quality guidelines, transparency, and account structure. This will ultimately assist advertisers in competing in a fair, transparent, and competitive marketplace when looking to buy publisher inventory.

This new revenue solution quickly drives significant revenue increases and automation by using a custom rules engine that helps publishers implement, test, and iterate on the functions needed to improve performance swiftly.

“At diDNA, we recognize that programmatic has become multi-faceted and video is a huge driver of revenue for publishers,” said Deke Hooper, CEO and Co-founder, diDNA. “We’ve designed this solution with publishers in mind so that they can hit the ground running quickly with video by leveraging what we already know about what works, which configurations generate high RPMs, and what types of demand we should serve and fill to generate revenue.”

We spoke with Hooper about how this update demonstrates diDNA’s commitment to serving publishers best-in-class tools that will help them see more revenue, enhance user experiences, improve viewability, and retain higher RPMs.

Yakira Young: diDNA’s new video solution uses an enhanced custom rules engine with updates that have the power to increase publisher revenue significantly. What are some of these updates?

Deke Hooper: Our video rules engine now uses key video-specific metrics to optimize performance for video ads. These include metrics such as completion rate and skip rate. As these metrics improve, publishers are able to obtain higher-tier exchanges and become eligible for other revenue streams, such as Private Marketplace (PMP) deals, further increasing revenue.

YY: How does the new video solution help to improve automation?

DH: If a publisher’s current workflow involves manually setting rules, segments, and other manual processes, our solution will create automation where automation did not exist.

YY: What makes diDNA’s video solution stand out as a best-in-class tool for retaining a faster ROI than similar video solutions?

DH: diDNA only supports the highest quality exchanges. To maintain those relationships, we have strict guidelines based on performance. Our exchange partners trust that we will deliver high-quality websites with high-quality traffic.

Our focus on quality over quantity allows us to obtain PMP and direct deals that create a healthy advertising mix with multiple revenue streams and competitive rates across the board. Our relationship with top exchanges also significantly reduces time to revenue for publishers. Rather than having to go to multiple exchanges and wait months for approvals individually, they can go through us and be onboarded to multiple exchanges in a matter of weeks, drastically increasing the quality of their programmatic ad stack and driving fast performance increases.

YY: Publishers can connect to 70+ tier-1 ad exchanges. How does this solution allow advertisers to compete for publisher’s inventory in a fair and competitive marketplace?

DH: A fair marketplace is the cornerstone of a healthy advertising supply chain. At diDNA, we closely watch the supply chain and implement supply path optimization tactics regularly. We aim to limit arbitrage and reduce reseller channels to ensure we provide our publishers with unique demand. There’s a big difference between shifting money around in the ad stack and generating more revenue for one of our partners.

YY: Can you elaborate more on diDNA’s partnership with the Google MCM program? What is its significance to brands?

DH: MCM is a net positive for the advertising industry and our relationships with publishers. As per Google, “With Multiple Customer Management (MCM), Ad Manager publishers can earn revenue with the help of third-party providers who can consult, represent, and manage networks or inventory on their behalf.” The MCM program is a strict framework that helps us ensure compliance with a complex network of policies for publishers. When our MCM invite is accepted, publishers can rest assured knowing that industry regulations meet their needs and your ad program is compliant. Our relationship with Google also gives us access to beta testing programs that can help increase revenue for publishers before they may have access to a feature on their own.

YY: I read that this new video solution fully reveals the scale of its marketplace through daily analysis of over three billion daily ad request that leverage machine-learning based pricing models. In what ways does this benefit publishers?

DH: Imagine if every minute you could check every ad and every metric for every ad to see the slightest changes trending up or down. This is too much for a human, but something a machine learning program can accomplish. diDNA’s platform is designed to provide contextual alerts and notifications regarding performance in real-time.

We can observe what’s going wrong with an ad program as well as what’s going right with an ad program at both a macro and micro level. With tens of thousands of websites and billions of ad requests to act as data points, publishers can rest assured knowing that we can quickly see trends that deviate from the norm and act accordingly. We’re here to help increase revenue, but there’s also an important role we play in terms of helping protect revenue loss as well.

The post Publishers Can Bypass Recession With diDNA’s Amplified Video Solution: Q&A With Deke Hooper, CEO diDNA 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.

Both Mark Zuckerberg (in a statement on his own Facebook page) and Twitter (via its Twitter Public Policy handle) have come out in favor of the Honest Ads Act now. In a way, this shouldn’t be too surprising. Zuckerberg had previously said Facebook was okay with the idea of something like the Honest Ads Act—when he was interviewed on CNN in March, he said the premise behind the act sounded reasonable, but that he imagined Facebook could just self-regulate with those goals in mind. Twitter also has also raised its hand to solve transparency issues in its ad business by self-imposing certain standards—in October 2017, it launched the Ads Transparency Center to “go beyond the requirements of the Honest Ads Act.” So, in other words—in an industry that long resisted government regulation and supported some idea of “self-regulation,” major platforms are coming out in support of regulation that they insist they can top on their own. There are questions whether the Honest Ads Act is dead in the water, almost six months after it was introduced to the U.S. Senate, which makes Zuckerberg’s and Twitter’s endorsement feel kind of toothless.

IAB Open Measurement SDK for In-App Viewability/Verification Is Live

The IAB’s Open Measurement SDK is out of beta now. The OM SDK is aimed to help app providers integrate with viewability and verification vendors more efficiently—previously, they’d have to integrate with each separately, which could be challenging (providing comment to AdExchanger, Maria Breza from Pandora called the old process “impossible”). Publishers have been under fire from agencies and advertisers, who are increasingly wary of environments that don’t provide verification.

Chief Privacy Officers to the Front

AdWeek published an in-depth feature on the rise of the Chief Privacy Officer. An increasing number of big companies—AdWeek highlights a lot of major brands in this story—have either hired CPOs or elevated the role within their orgs. The feature describes the CPO as “part lawyer, engineer, businessperson, marketer and customer relations specialist.” It’s a wider-ranging set of responsibilities than those of a chief security officer, responsibilities that cover the ways in which users’ personal data is handled. Of course GDPR is a big motivator in this movement. It’s not just a matter of trying to prevent more data-breach scandals—although that’s certainly a motivator in itself.

Changes from the Top at Fusion Media

Vanity Fair reported on the state of Fusion Media, and it doesn’t look like a rosy picture in this depiction. The backstory: Fusion Media is a division of Univision, launched as a means of playing ball against major digital pure plays. It operates a bunch of web properties, some of which it acquired (The Onion, The Root), and some of which it launched on its own (Project Earth, The Takeout, TrackRecord). In 2016, it bought a bunch of the former Gawker Media brands. This year has appeared a bit rocky for the company, though. The Wall Street Journal reported Univision would be cutting Fusion Media’s costs back in March, and there are reports Univision is entertaining the possibility of selling off part of the Fusion business. There are also noticeable changes in who’s running things, with some higher-ups out the door. Isaac Lee, Univision’s Chief Content Officer, who had headed up Fusion, has now stepped away to focus on other Univision business…

Martin Sorrell Out at WPP

As of this past Saturday, Martin Sorrell is out at WPP, stepping down from the CEO position at the agency he founded 33 years ago. As a lot of us have read, he’s been under investigation for what media outlets have referred to as “misuse of assets” and “improper behavior.” WPP’s revenue had dipped recently and was projecting revenue to flatline for 2018. Until WPP appoints a new CEO, the company’s chairman, Robert Quarta, will serve as executive chairman.

The post Twitter, Zuckerberg Support (and Promise to Top) Honest Ads Act appeared first on AdMonsters.

Bonnie Kintzer has a different perspective, as President and CEO of Trusted Media Brands (the company you would’ve known as Reader’s Digest Association up until 2015). Today, she says, user experience and monetization go hand in hand–better UX means higher rates of engagement, and better engagement means more value to advertisers. There’s much to discuss about this approach, and about how UX has guided Trusted Media Brands’ whole journey from its legacy print days to its present as a multi-platform media organization. Bonnie will get into it at the upcoming Publisher Forum in Huntington Beach, CA, in her morning keynote, “Driving Revenue Through a User-First Mindset,” on Mon., March 5. (Better register for PubForum now, while seats remain.) But for now, she’s taken the time to answer a few to-the-point questions about the real relationship between user experience and monetization.

User experience has been a big concern for Trusted Media Brands for the past few years. What are some of the main UX issues you’ve addressed along the way, and where are you personally focused on UX at the moment?

We’ve been very focused on page load speed. We know from our users that if they can’t get to the content they are interested in very quickly, they lose patience. We are constantly working to improve their experience and are particularly focused on areas such as page load speed, since so much of content features incredible visual images of everything from delicious home-cooked meals to inspiring design and decorating ideas.

We’ve also been focused on navigation and making content on our sites easily discoverable through whatever form of navigation the site visitors prefer. This is another area where we believe we can improve our UX and will continue to focus on going forward.

UX and monetization are no longer in opposition. The better the UX, the higher the monetization.

What unique perspective does Trusted Media Brands bring to the table, in the discussion about balancing UX and monetization?

The days of pop-up ads and truly intrusive ads that block content (and with no obvious way to get out of the experience) are long gone. So UX and monetization are no longer in opposition.

In fact, the opposite in true these days. The better the UX (page load speed, content discoverability and interaction, etc.), the higher the monetization. This is primarily due to things like viewability, engagement, and other user metrics that become increasingly valuable to an advertiser.

Describe your vision for the optimal ad experience on a Trusted Media Brands site. What factors influence that vision?

Interestingly, we are currently redesigning the article templates on our site to incorporate our current vision. We expect the results to be extremely popular with both consumers and our marketing partners. Of course, we can’t share them at this point, but definitely stay tuned.

How do you handle conversations with advertisers who are pushing experiences that you consider intrusive?

Fortunately, we haven’t had too many of those experiences. In general, we always try to help them understand the value of how creating a better UX experience on our sites will enable us to help them drive ROI for their campaign and affinity for their brand with our consumers.

The post Driving Revenue Through a User-First Mindset: A Q&A With TMB’s Bonnie Kintzer appeared first on AdMonsters.

Adam Moser, Head of Ad Tech and Platform Operations at Hulu, will be digging into these issues in an attendee session he’s leading at the upcoming Huntington Beach Publisher Forum (March 4-7). From Adam’s perspective, publishers need to kick-start these conversations with buy-side folks to make sure everyone is talking about the same thing when they talk about the ever-broad subject of brand safety. He’ll explain to us at PubForum how reframing the discussion around brand safety is crucial to sharpening the focus on the bigger picture—budget safety. But for now, Adam shared some insight to get us thinking about the realities of brand safety today.

Which issues do you see under the “brand safety” umbrella today? And what new challenges do ad ops teams face as a result?

Part of the problem with brand safety is that the term has become buzz-worthy jargon that means different things to different members of the ecosystem. Brand safety, as defined by some, is the practice of ensuring ads only appear adjacent to content that does no harm to an advertiser’s reputation. To another, brand safety pertains to whether an ad is targeted towards relevant content and viewable. Ad ops teams find themselves in the position of having to define and defend against brand safety as a term. As a result, it can be confusing to the teams executing campaigns if they’re not aligned with ad ops and sales on what is considered brand safe for the advertiser. Without redefining the brand safety conversation, we face continued miscommunication all across the industry.

Which brand safety issues do you think advertisers get too hung up on, and which do you think they should be more focused on? Why?

Marketers want to ensure their reputation is not put in harm’s way based on where their budgets have been invested. Typically this has meant content adjacency. But there are more factors at play that can put a marketer’s budget at risk than just the content their ads appear next to. It’s no longer about where ads are delivered—it’s also about how. And advertisers need to be more focused on this to ensure they’re reaching their customers in a relevant way.

How should sales and ad ops collaborate to address challenges like brand safety?

We can start by getting our organizations on the same page. If we align internally about the definition of brand safety, we can begin to address external challenges collectively as an industry. Publishers need standardization with measurement, certification thresholds, and currencies. If we define and attack the many problems of brand safety in the same way, we can then align in how our marketers can entrust us to provide them budget safety.

The post Reframing the Brand Safety Debate: A Q&A With Hulu’s Adam Moser appeared first on AdMonsters.

Among advertisers, especially performance advertisers, lift tests are on the rise, AdExchanger reports. Performance advertiser are feeling some heat to justify ROI for all their activities, which is why they’re looking at measuring incremental lift in whatever channels they’re spending in. One reason for the newfound popularity of lift testing is that advertisers are wary of ad fraud in mobile—but they know their audience is increasingly on mobile, so they intend to up their spending in mobile channels, while keeping a close eye on performance across various partners. Will lift testing be a major new trend in programmatic? Maybe—as AdExchanger describes it, the process is complicated. Advertisers don’t always know what they want to find out from a test. Advertisers don’t always trust Facebook’s attribution methodology, and Facebook isn’t even all that keep on lift testing.

Dish Network Says Cross-Platform Addressable Advertising Is Here

The march toward addressable advertising progresses: Thanks to a partnership with comScore and its measurement chops, Dish Network says it’s now able to measure addressable ads on satellite TV, OTT devices, desktop computers, mobile devices and smart TVs. Dish Network had been measuring addressable ads on satellite TV and its OTT offering Sling TV separately. Ad Age reported that “ad experience on Sling continues to look similar to its satellite counterpart,” regardless of Dish Network’s intention to leverage “skinny TV” bundles to get really granular in ad targeting. That shouldn’t be much of a surprise—making advertising addressable is easier to talk about (and it’s talked about very often on the buy side) than it is to put into practice. Are we there yet? Well, Sling TV says they are—dunno about everyone else…

What’s Long-Form Video Mean? IAB, 4As Update Guidelines

The IAB and the 4As released new Ts & Cs for long-form video last week. The idea is to pin down a clearer definition of “long-form” video (eight minutes or longer, the guidelines say, and “professionally-produced” content with dynamic ad serving). According to MediaPost, the Ts & Cs also dig into viewability, brand safety, terminology about audience guarantees, and other issues. The language was revised to bring it closer to that of the recent MRC measurement guidelines, and to help publishers and advertisers negotiate ad transactions. It’s a long time coming—the last time the IAB and 4As updated their long-form video guidelines was in 2009.

Jonathan Mendez: Watch Out, Google, ISPs Are Right Behind You

I’ve been harping on how the next real threat to the dominance of the Duopoly could be an ISP (and I haven’t been excited about that prospect). Looks like I’m in good company, as industry vet Jonathan Mendez has chimed in with a well-considered and cogent blog post about how Google is positioned in the digital ad business today. Mendez summarizes: Google launched Chrome back in 2008 in order to have greater control over the DOM and the way ads are displayed. Smaller tech companies were helping ISPs collect user data through Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), which Google saw as a threat. Potentially, ISPs could collect data around all site visits, purchases, instant messages and searches. So Google backed a lobbying campaign that eventually blocked DPI, clearing the way for Google and Facebook to dominate the ad market for 10 years. But now, ISPs are a threat again, with net neutrality off the table, and with regulatory rollbacks allowing them to sell user data. Meanwhile, there are still companies out there providing software to do DPI, just so you know. We’ve come full circle, and in the interim, ISPs have accumulated much more tech firepower through acquisitions.

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That said, managing discrepancies can feel like a long slog. All those rows of numbers! All those data sources! One of the common refrains in ad ops today is that ops people need to reduce the time they spend on these manual tasks, so they can spend more time thinking and working strategically. But it’s not as though publishers are swimming in fewer numbers than they were a few years ago. If anything, the opposite is probably closer to the truth.

We knew the Ad-Juster crew had been developing new tools to help publishers manage this knotty process of managing reports and understanding discrepancies. So, I got in touch with Calson Lee, Ad-Juster’s Director of Product, and Product Manager Daniel Dowling to see what they have in the hopper. I was curious about Calibrate, Ad-Juster’s new tool for bringing together data from disparate sources and presenting it in one dashboard. But Calson and Daniel had quite a few other thoughts about workflow, the state of the viewability battle, and why spreadsheets themselves are not the enemy.

BRIAN LaRUE: Can you give us a quick overview of what Calibrate brings to the table that publishers don’t already have in their toolkits?

CALSON LEE: After working with so many publishers throughout the years, Ad-Juster has really gotten to know what the day-to-day workflow looks like for an ad trafficker or an account manager, managing and optimizing campaigns. We built Calibrate to facilitate that workflow—to give a clear view of what’s happening in these campaigns in a very visual way. We want to show everyone who works in ad tech, especially on the operations side, that there’s work they can do more efficiently if they weren’t bogged down in spreadsheets. So we laid out a UI that breaks down day-to-day workflow.

We’re not trying to remove Excel. Excel is here to stay, but there are some efficiencies we can gain using a dashboard like we’ve built out in Calibrate.

BRIAN: Any other publisher pain points you were looking to address with Calibrate, other than reducing that over-reliance on Excel?

CALSON: As a trafficker, you’re spending a lot of time digging through spreadsheets. But the headache is not the spreadsheet. The headache is the job itself—campaign optimization. When we look at discrepancies, we’re looking at publisher and agency numbers across all the campaigns we’re running. For large organizations, that’s a lot of rows in a spreadsheet. We want to help solve the problem of over-buffering. No one has the time to get drilled down into individual campaigns and troubleshoot discrepancies. With Calibrate, we can help speed things along and focus on this particular problem: How do I monitor discrepancies in an effective way, and then know what to do about it?

BRIAN: Excel is pretty manual, but at the same time, it’s really flexible. What’s the benefit of complementing it with another tool, then?

CALSON: The way I’d think about it is this: Excel is the Swiss Army knife of analytics tools; Calibrate is a power drill. What would you rather use to put together your furniture?

Ad-Juster already works with this raw data, and we have for a long time. We want to focus on what’s important: the pacing, the discrepancy, and the revenue and impressions at risk. We built Calibrate to focus on those four aspects.

Right now, to calculate those things, you need additional columns in Excel, and you need to write out formulas to put them together. In this dashboard, we not only calculate these things automatically just like you’d do in a spreadsheet, but also it gives you a timeline view, rather than rows of numbers. You can see when campaigns are about to end, the size of the bubble will tell you whether there’s significant or insignificant impressions and revenue at risk, and different colors will tell you what’s wrong with different campaigns. Is it over-delivering impressions because you booked it too much, or is it under-delivering impressions because it’s under-pacing and you’re strained on inventory? We wanted to visualize it all in the dashboard, rather than having someone spend additional time crunching through lines in spreadsheets.

BRIAN: In the webinar you did with AdMonsters a little while ago, you talked about the volume of data involved in understanding discrepancies. You had pointed out how the agency data needed by publishers in order to optimize campaigns is available, but publishers don’t have a mechanism for getting it. What can publishers do to pull in that data, and what’s Ad-Juster doing?

CALSON: Put in a good process for login management. Every publisher organization has its own workflow, but it’s common that the person who’s doing the campaign optimization, who’s looking at the booked impression, is the trafficker. Traffickers may not have ready communication with the agency. But traffickers can’t do their job effectively if they don’t have access to agency data. There needs to be someone in the organization on the publisher side pinpointing which agencies are giving them trouble in terms of getting access to the data.

The communication points are definitely there. When these deals are being negotiated, the account manager or sales person has to work with the agency directly. Traffickers need to know who to talk to in order to get that visibility into the agency side. And the person who will have the most leverage on the publisher side is the account manager or sales rep who sold the deal. They’ll want tell the client that in order to fulfill all of their contract requirements, they need access to the right data.

BRIAN: What’s Ad-Juster doing to pull in data—not just from the ad server, but from third-party vendors and elsewhere—into one point of reference?

CALSON: We really want to make it easier for publishers to run efficiently. For Calibrate and other workflow tools we’re looking to build in the coming year, it is a requirement that we have access to all the data we need to optimize.

I’ll give you an example. I need my publisher ad server data and my agency ad server data in order to calculate the discrepancy between the two. But if I want to talk about the pacing, or the revenue at risk, I need to know about the contract. That contract information probably does not live in the ad server. There’s another system of record storing contracts—maybe the order management system, which is where the sales reps and account managers are. So the tools we built out address the idea: Aggregate all your data first, from the ad servers, ad quality vendors, the CRM or OMS. Then you can start looking at additional insights or efficiencies, and you’re ready to do campaign optimization.

BRIAN: I saw Ad-Juster just released a new ebook. What points in the book do you want to underline for publishers right now?

CALSON: This ebook talks about Calibrate, and it speaks to why discrepancies need to be addressed. When I first started at Ad-Juster, it was very common to see highly discrepant campaigns. These days, even though there are so many more things to optimize off of, things are definitely getting better. But just because it’s getting better doesn’t mean the problem has gone away. There’s still a significant value lost through latency between platforms, or through bad tags set up by agencies. Those translate to real dollars. Also, publishers are seeing CPM rates and overall revenue going up, while inventory is more and more constrained. The over-buffered impressions—what people used to call remnant impressions—that used to get thrown away are now very valuable.

BRIAN: What else is Ad-Juster working on now, for workflow or to answer publishers’ questions?

DANIEL DOWLING: Ad-Juster has been looking at the data we manage, and the solutions large publishers tend to build and smaller publishers wish they could build. I come from the publisher side, and I know how publishers actually leverage data. We’re currently planning a follow-up tool to Calibrate, designed to bring in as many players as possible and facilitate communication. We want to align third-party data with first-party data, and play with visualizations in a high-quality, XLS-portable data representation. Again, we’re not looking to eliminate Excel. We’d like to eliminate the VBA macros, the one-off processes, the constant crunching of Excel sheets, which cause problems whenever some formatting change happens. We want to integrate the Excel in a way that provides full value and allows clients to schedule reports, move data back and forth, and view the data directly.

CALSON: I want to talk with publishers and dig into the problem of viewability — the demands of viewability are unmanageable. The way that the industry bills on viewability needs to be standardized in some way. It can get really, really confusing when you start adding all these different vendors and their numbers. People are scratching their heads already about what metric they’re supposed to be sending back to the client to collect their bill on. No one’s even looking at how to optimize it. The discrepancies for viewability are very, very high. Maybe publishers need to push back on agencies to get this process going. I’m very excited to talk about this at the Publisher Forum.

The post Discrepancies on Display: Ad-Juster Talks Visualizing Campaign Numbers appeared first on AdMonsters.

Okay, maybe we shouldn’t be bracing for a world without CPGs dollars, but maybe we should be ready for a substantial reduction in their digital spending. Procter & Gamble famously slashed its digital ad spend by $100 million earlier this year and cut off the long tail of the sites it buys from, reducing the number of those sites by an order of magnitude. And the company says its ad performance hasn’t been hurt by those moves. In a post this week on his site The Drift, Doug Weaver predicts those who had been hoping P&G’s money would come back after MRC accreditation takes effect (ostensibly helping to clear up the measurement and fraud issues the company was pushing the industry to fix) might just have to keep hoping forever. Weaver wants to know: What’s the role of digital advertising in CPGs’ efforts when Amazon is such a force in the retail market, and when Amazon demands manufacturers provide discounts on their goods? “I wonder if advertising isn’t being seen now as a cost center to be managed, and if the goal might be to buy less and less of it,” he muses.

The Duopoly Works Well for Oath

There are tons of reasons why Google and Facebook’s dominance of the advertising market is so troublesome to just about everyone else in digital–including that those two companies provide so much scale, marketers will feel less and less of an incentive to spend with anyone else. But Jay Seideman, Oath’s SVP of Demand Sales, pointed out at a MediaPost panel during Advertising Week that some of the bigger spenders in the ad world want more than two options. “Bigger buyers who want a mass market don’t want to be pigeonholed into a single solution or two solutions,” Seideman explained, adding that Oath has been hearing from ad clients expressing frustration with one or both of the Big Two. One of Oath’s benefits in this game, he said, is that it gives clients a lot of freedom to do what they want with verification. He predicted Oath will see more gains in the next 18 months. “There’s a window for another big player, maybe two big players,” Seideman said. Could it be Oath? Well, very few other players have even remotely the same scale as Verizon-backed Oath…

Hidden Ad Tech Fees in the Spotlight

Meanwhile, though, AdExchanger reported that marketers are getting more comfortable with Google and Facebook. P&G’s Chief Brand Officer Mark Pritchard himself commended the Duopoly companies for addressing marketers’ calls for brand safety on their platforms. Instead, marketers are directing more of their ire toward third-party tech vendors for sucking up a share of their ad spend.

Apparently Adobe is listening. That company wants all of its ad tech partners to disclose any fees they charge to advertisers and publishers, which will then be revealed inside the Adobe Advertising Cloud system. Disclosure will be a requirement for Adobe to play ball with those partners. Brett Wilson, Advertising at Adobe’s Vice President and General Manager, told Business Insider that his company has been committed to transparency, but about a third of the ad tech partners they work with charge hidden fees. Oath, Pubmatic, Rubicon Project, Index Exchange, TripleLift and SpotX are among the partners who have agreed to comply and disclose their fees so far.

Before the Election, Russian Operatives Bought Ads on YouTube, Too

This week Google revealed Russian entities had bought ads across all its properties–which of course includes YouTube, but also Gmail, search and DoubleClick–in efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by spreading disinformation. The Washington Post reports sources familiar with the investigation say the Russian ad spend was in the tens of thousands of dollars, but less than $100,000–roughly the amount a Russian troll farm spent on Facebook ads prior to the election, in another high-profile case. It’s unclear how many of the ads purchased through Google came from trolls and how many from legitimate accounts. At the same time, it doesn’t appear the same troll farm that plagued Facebook is to blame, according to the Post’s reporting. That indicates the Russian interference operation could be more widespread than originally expected. Google hasn’t yet said whether it’ll testify before Congressional investigators exploring the matter on Nov. 1. Facebook and Twitter have said they will.

The post Weekly News Roundup: Expect Fewer CPG Dollars, Ad Tech Tax Exposed, Marketers Mixed on Duopoly appeared first on AdMonsters.