Sprouting from just a laptop and a little bit of code in 2015, AMA, previously known as A Million Ads, has grown into the leader in dynamic creative for digital audio advertising. And by using data to make each listener’s experience more contextually-aware and personalized, they create a more compelling experience for listeners and deliver better outcomes for advertisers. 

Whether listening to podcasts on Spotify, iHeart, or Audacy, the ad experience can now be enhanced and personalized by AMA’s ability to dynamically serve the most relevant ad for each listener. 

What does AMA mean by dynamic? Dynamic is the ability to change the voiceover, music, and sound effects of the audio ad based on data about each listener, such as the time of day the user is listening, the device they’re using, the weather, the pollen count, or any other data the creative ad platform can access in a privacy-compliant way.

“Our studio tool is a platform for scriptwriters, producers, and creatives to design and build these dynamic ads”, said Steven Dunlop, CEO and Founder of AMA. “We have a serving infrastructure that can serve dynamic ads into platforms like Spotify, iHeart, and Pandora, automating the process of serving the right message to the right user, all through a single tag.”

Yakira Young: Are selling ads on podcasts a struggle? What are the main challenges that publishers and advertisers face in the space?

Steven Dunlop: The podcast industry is growing but not evenly. For podcast creators, if you’re a new podcast that no one knows about yet, it’s tough to get monetized because you don’t start to see any money coming in until you reach a critical mass or a scale that’s interesting, so it is a game of marketing and SEO to get known.

For advertisers, the biggest challenge with podcasts is effectively spending money on the channel. It’s tough for big advertisers with big budgets because the inventory is fragmented, and the format is difficult to scale.

These are symptoms of the first phase of podcast monetization, and we are approaching the tricky transition between the first phase of podcasts and monetization and the second phase.

Phase one:

The first phase was characterized by a few hit podcasts being sponsored by a similar type of advertiser, brands like Casper mattresses, Squarespace, Better Help, Hello Fresh, and other Direct -to -Consumer (D2C) businesses that are prepared to try different types of advertising.

Podcasters were often famous people who would turn to podcasts, often names you’d recognize or coming from prominent publications like NPR, BBC, and the Economist, places where listener trust and audiences would naturally migrate, and then the ad creative itself was host read.

The host would go from discussing a True Crime Murder in a sleepy suburb to telling you about Casper mattresses. That was the first phase of podcasting. Not a lot of ad tech or technology involved. 

The podcast ecosystem has been built around that, gathering up a lot of the podcasters into groups so they can be managed and sold collectively. But then also applying ad tech to the scenario rather than the baked-in-host read ad.

Phase two:

The second phase is about being able to buy and sell programmatically, like all other forms of digital advertising. This does not include baking in content linked to that host or that podcast.

This allows more budget to be spent across many different podcasts. So rather than just Squarespace sponsoring five podcasts, Squarespace can buy based on the podcast’s audience, topic, or genre rather than just the title.

Say you have a discussion format podcast whose first topic is about science news, the second story is about sports results, and the third might be about politics. With topic-based programmatic ads, an advertiser could pick and choose where to place their ad based on the content of that segment, whether they want to buy just that sports segment, science, or all three. 

YY: What does this mean for the creative?

SD: In this second phase, there’s an opportunity to build a new, more flexible creative format.

Imagine you’re a podcast network with 1,000 podcasts in your catalog. Getting all 1,000 hosts to read the script for one advertiser is already labor-intensive. But, more likely there are 100 different advertisers, so now you’ve got 100 times 1,000 different scripts to read, which is an incredible organization and logistical challenge. 

So, the answer isn’t making everybody do a live read. The answer is finding a creative format that can fit in the middle, with some of the benefits of live reads, like the authenticity, but can scale to the kind of dimensions that the bigger podcast networks are working at. 

YY: How important is it for an ad to relate to the content? I attended the IAB podcast upfront, and one takeaway is that listeners prefer when the ad flows into what’s already being discussed.

SD: When people think about programmatic advertising on podcasting, they immediately associate it with a particular type of creative; the 30-second ad is trying to sell air conditioning.

This makes people nervous in the podcast industry because we all hark back to radio, where there are 18 minutes of ads an hour, which doesn’t make for a great user experience in podcasting.

So there’s a strong and justified fear of a race to the bottom in the podcast industry. The lowest common denominator is that we all get programmatically delivered spots. I encourage everyone to see programmatic as a way of trading the creative, the payload that goes once you’ve won the bid in the programmatic auction. It can be host-read or the middle ground.

NPR has announcer voices for all of their commercial spots so that announcers could know it’s being placed in this podcast and therefore reference it. It feels like it’s native content.

Native content is prevalent on many websites, newspapers, and radio stations. ​​In radio, they call it the live read, which is the presenter opening up the mic in the middle of their show and reading a script.

That concept is a huge opportunity for podcasting and solves the multidimensional 100 by 1000 logistical challenge. It gives the premium feel that a host- read ad would get but avoids the fear that everyone has of these lowest-common-denominator spot pods.

YY: What are the main differences between podcast advertising and other forms of digital advertising? How do you see these differences impact the buying and selling process?

SD: It’s about where podcasting has come from, which is that first phase. I was a radio producer in 2007 and worked on a breakfast show at a rock music radio station in Manchester. I made the breakfast show podcast, and we got about 100 weekly downloads. It was a complete labor of love.

And then we had a Serial effect if you remember the Serial podcast from This American Life. That first series brought podcasting onto the front pages and into everyone’s media consumption diet.

Back when I was making podcasts for radio stations, there was no advertising technology or a thought of monetization. It wasn’t until much later that podcast sponsors came along. Now it’s that transition from the first phase into the second phase that’s the main difference.

Display advertising has been around since 1996, and video advertising has been around for a long time. Now, with businesses like Google and Facebook pushing the envelope and all of the advertising technology built around display and video — those formats are further ahead than podcasting. Podcasting is playing catch-up, and it will get there because everyone is incentivized to bring more money into the industry. These creative challenges are just a growing pain. Ad tech is already there and working, there are lots of vendors who are already making podcasting an equivalent digital channel.

There are some issues around measurement. If you have a plan that includes TV, CTV, social, display, search, and podcast, sometimes it’s hard to compare metrics across all of those channels because other digital formats have better attribution metrics or click-through rates.

Podcasting is getting there, but it’s not quite that simple if you’re in an agency and trying to plan a cross-media campaign and want to check a box for podcasting. There are still growing pains in the planning and buying phases, from an agency perspective as podcasting is going through this transition. 

The post AMA CEO Reveals Podcasting and Ad Tech’s Seamless Future  appeared first on AdMonsters.

Michelle Kim emphasizes that she has often encountered preconceived notions about her leadership style. Overcoming these barriers has necessitated her adoption of diverse approaches tailored to different individuals. As her career advanced, this experience nurtured her innate capacity for empathy and collaboration, enabling her to cultivate a more harmonious and cooperative work environment.

We’ve all come face to face with not realizing our greatness, and Kim is living proof that there is nothing but positivity on the other side of those thoughts. By stepping out of her cultural comfort zone and into a management role, she realized she needed to be vocal and celebrate her accomplishments to better serve herself and her team of direct reports.

According to Kim, being a leader means ensuring every team member understands the value of their work and that they’re truly making a difference. Learn more about Michelle and her leadership journey in the Q&A below.

Yakira Young: How have your experiences as an Asian American impacted your career, both positively and negatively?

Michelle Kim: I used to find it challenging to vocalize my accomplishments because I grew up believing that success and recognition came from putting your head down and working hard. I was expected to tackle every situation humbly, and praise and reward were not a given.

I’m not saying to start going on a roadshow with every single accomplishment, as there is always a time and a place. But I’ve learned that it’s important to stand by your work and not assume that someone is championing your wins for you. I recognized that taking pride in a job well done isn’t boasting and needed to exercise this muscle.

On the flip side, being Asian American has had an immensely positive impact on my career. It has helped me become adaptable. There has often been a preconceived notion of my leadership style. Breaking those barriers sometimes requires different approaches with different people. It’s helped me become more empathetic and collaborative as my career progressed.

YY: What advice would you give to Asian American individuals pursuing a career in programmatic and analytics?

MK: It’s never too late to get into programmatic. It’s a constantly evolving, fast-paced industry, and there’s definitely a learning curve. But what I love most about it is that you’re always learning, and there’s a genuine collaborative spirit with your peers across the industry to find solutions to major challenges in real time together.

The world of data, CTV, and programmatic is always changing and growing, and it truly is an exciting space to be in. This environment sometimes comes with situations where making an important business decision is accompanied by a lack of precedence. Leveraging analytics and business intelligence to make the best data-driven decision truly puts you at an advantage.

YY: How do you balance your identity as an Asian American with your role as a Vice President in a predominantly non-AAPI industry?

MK: Balance is the operative word here. Good leadership isn’t being aggressive and pushy. It’s about shifting that paradigm and fighting the narrative that I am just a hard worker lacking confidence or ambition. That stereotype is not who we are; that leadership model is not who we must strive to be.

YY: How have you seen the AAPI community evolve and grow in the ad tech industry throughout your career?

MK: When I joined the ad tech industry eight years ago, I struggled to find Asian representation amongst my peers, let alone in leadership positions. As time passed, I saw a noticeable growth in numbers and a concerted effort to make networking easier and more organized in the Asian American community.

I’m also grateful to my non-Asian peers and mentors for the introductions they’ve made. The willingness to help make that connection is greatly appreciated because they recognize the value of connecting people who will benefit from it and can relate in more ways than just work.

YY: What are some of the proudest moments of your career, and how have they shaped your perspective on being an AAPI leader?

MK: It sounds cliché, but my proudest moments are when I can be a sounding board to other Asian Americans in the workplace and be someone they can relate to. The obstacles won’t always mirror each other, but I hope that bringing a level of empathy and listening to anyone who is having a challenging time in the workplace as an Asian American is helpful. I was lucky enough to have incredible mentors and peers to talk through situations with, and seeing the community’s growth is encouraging.

The post Celebrating AAPI Month: NBCU’s Michelle Kim Cracks the Code on Shattering Self-Doubt appeared first on AdMonsters.

This is a serious issue given the high cost of recruiting, hiring, and training campaign traffickers. It’s a situation that begs the question: What can we do to make these jobs more attractive so that experienced team members stay longer in their positions?

The answer is to eliminate the tedious and manual tasks that take up so much of their time, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks instead.

Consider this: According to research by Central Research Inc., AdOps teams spend about seven hours each week performing manual, repetitive (and, let’s face it, boring) tasks. That’s a full day out of the work week. In an industry that prides itself on smart automations and efficiency, that’s just unacceptable. But there’s good news on the horizon.

When Automation Works Well

Recently I met Daniel Opler, CEO of Adwallet.io, which is a Danish company that has automated one of the most mind-numbing jobs that AdOps spends several hours each week doing:

• Taking screenshots of ads as they appear in real environments.
• Packaging them into a PDF or PowerPoint.
• Sending them to the advertiser, agency, or both.

Screenshots are the modern-day tear-sheets that show clients that their ads are in working order.

I was a bit surprised by how much time taking screenshots required, but I quickly got an education. “It’s ludicrous that here we are in 2022, and AdOps teams in large publishing houses must manually take hundreds, sometimes thousands of screenshots per month, then insert it into a PowerPoint deck and email it to their clients,” he told me. “And because it’s so manual, these publishers can’t provide screenshots to all their clients, as much as they’d like to. Only the biggest clients get screenshots of their ads as they appear on their sites.”

Opler did what any entrepreneur does when they see a gap: He launched a company to automate this task. Think of it as a platform for programmatic screenshots. 

Here’s how it works: Before a campaign goes live, the AdOps user determines which campaign screenshots to provide for the client — banner ad desktop, mobile, interstitial ad mobile, etc. Once the campaign goes live, the platform takes the screenshots automatically and stores them in a folder for that campaign. The platform takes screenshots of campaigns sold directly and those that appear “in the wild,” as Opler refers to programmatically placed ads.

AdOps user then selects which screenshots to send to the client. The platform then inserts them into a PowerPoint or PDF that includes the publisher’s logo and branding elements and sends it off. Some clients would rather import those screenshots into their internal systems via an API, which AdWallet.io easily supports.

What is the impact of this automation on AdOps teams? “In the world of AdOps, screenshots can be a pain point,” explained Sharon Goldsmith, Manager of Digital Advertising Operations for Tribune Publishing, Inc. “Eliminating a manual and mundane task, such as screenshots, has opened up time for growth opportunities. This has led to higher job satisfaction for our employees.” Now that process is automated, Goldsmith’s team can focus on optimizing and booking new business, a more rewarding task for all involved.

The Democratizing Effects of Automating AdOps Tasks

Automating repetitive tasks has a democratizing impact on everyone involved in the ecosystem.

The AdOps teams within publishers and agencies are relieved from repetitive tasks, like taking screenshots, essentially giving them back a full day of work to concentrate on other high-value and more personally rewarding work. “Nobody goes to university so they can take screenshots all day,” Opler said.

Conversely, employees who feel valued and engage in more meaningful work are far more likely to stay than look for another job. In addition to saving on recruitment and training costs, publishers or agencies benefit by keeping that hard-earned experience and industry knowledge on their payrolls. And their clients benefit from continuity.

It also means premium services like screenshots of ads appearing on a publisher’s website or in programmatic land can be made available to all advertisers, not just the ones with the million-dollar ad spend.

The post Let’s Get Serious About Automating the Last of AdOps Tedious Tasks appeared first on AdMonsters.

Who you partner with for monetizing your video inventory across screens can mean the difference between success and failure for publishers. With your CTV inventory, you want a partner who can also fix issues around brand safety, fraud, frequency, ad pods, and publisher yields. This is especially true when CTV feels more like TV for viewing audiences. 

Take the flourishing partnership between TMB (Trusted Media Brands) and Unruly, a leading CTV and video advertising platform. TMB selected Unruly as one of its preferred SSP partners following TMB’s acquisition last year of Jukin Media, a top streaming and social video company.

Following the acquisition, TMB found itself with more than two billion minutes of video watched per month across its brands like FailArmy, Taste of Home, Family Handyman, Reader’s Digest, People Are Awesome, The Pet Collective, and WeatherSpy, and the company was seeking partners to help it more efficiently monetize its inventory.

We spoke with Mike Richter, Vice President of Global Revenue Operations for CTV and Digital at TMB, to learn more about the importance of working with the right CTV partner, addressing programmatic concerns, and what’s next on the horizon for CTV.

Emily Dalamangas: Trusted Media Brands’ acquisition of Jukin Media last August quadrupled its monthly audience reach. How has this extended reach opened more opportunities for brands looking to advertise on CTV or OTT?

Mike Richter: Jukin Media didn’t have a strong digital offering, and TMB didn’t really have a CTV offering at all. So, the combination of efforts has greatly opened the door for both entities to have more access to users across newer platforms that they’ve never touched on before in a detailed way.

It is exciting to see and to be able to drive growth and investment in new original programming, platforms, app distribution, and possibly new website distribution opportunities. There are tons of ways with the new collective audience to go to market with a very strong value proposition for agencies and buyers worldwide. 

ED: Unruly was selected by Trusted Media Brands as a preferred SSP partner. How does partnering with Unruly fit into Trusted Media Brands’ future plans in the CTV and OTT space?

MR: Across the board, Unruly is a company that TMB likes to partner with. That’s because a strong supply-side partnership not only lets us properly merchandise our inventory but also allows us to be exposed to a multitude of buying angles for CTV and OTT. 

Advertisers need brand safety, and at the same time, we are trying to attract viewers to our video content. We want viewers to stay in the content we’re delivering and if the content doesn’t fit within their values, they will go away from the site. Publishers are constantly focused on the quality of the content from a programming perspective and also on the nature of the ads served. And that quality assurance for both ads and content is key in choosing an SSP partner.

Unruly has proven to be one of those partners that we don’t have to police and can trust with the demand they are sourcing through their sales efforts—unruly hits all the spots. We can be confident in the demand they are trafficking our way as well as how they are representing themselves in the market as a steward of our content inventory. 

ED: It can be challenging for media companies to find the right strategic and creative content partner for their CTV and OTT needs. What criteria should publishers be looking for in a successful partnership?

MR: It’s well-known that most of the video content you see is not built by those channels. It is built by various studios and syndicated because the amount of money it takes to create shows is very expensive. To get any decently supplied CTV or OTT channel off the ground, you need hundreds of hours of content, and it should be a mix of new, syndicated, and older content. At TMB, we’re one of the few FAST channel operators that produce our own original half-hour series, but we wouldn’t attempt to program an entire schedule only with originals. It needs to be a mix.

To get any decently supplied CTV or OTT channel off the ground, you need hundreds of hours of content, and it should be a mix of new, syndicated, and older content.

There is tons of valuable content out there that has been on the shelves for years. Just because it wasn’t made this year doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to a user. I’m constantly re-binging shows that have been off the air for decades, and there is opportunity in content stored inside vaults that are barely being tapped into.

Figure out the semantic nature of the channel you’re programming for and the right experience for the viewer that’s going to keep them engaged. You want the viewer to keep wanting more of the experience to build on the publisher’s revenue generation, which lets the publisher either license or buy syndicated content or create content on its own. It creates more or less a circle of life that we all know within this industry.

ED: According to eMarketer, 70% of CTV is purchased programmatically. But with, with programmatic, ad ops and brands have concerns about brand safety, data privacy, and ad fraud. How are CTV platforms addressing these concerns, and in what areas can they do better?

MR: For those that are truly concerned about brand safety, data privacy, and ad fraud, take a look at who you’re buying from. Is anyone who pops up hawking TV inventory like a cheap watch on the street? You must take ownership of your verification and make sure what you’re buying is accurate. 

At TMB, we focus on ensuring that our content is delivered across platforms we can trust with real viewers and real distribution points. So, we can guarantee an advertiser that if you go through any of our preferred partners, like Unruly, and verify the supply path optimization, there’s nothing to be concerned about, which means doing the homework of your programmatic buys. 

We can do better if we are more open and transparent as an industry. We can address brand concerns about programmatic by taking steps to provide a positive experience for both users and buyers equally; one is not more important than the other. But we must be willing to ask those vetting questions of our partners, and buyers have to be ready to stop using untrustworthy platforms because when you stop giving them the money, they will dry up.

ED: CTV has rapidly evolved with consumer adoption and platform launches. Can this rapid rise be sustained, and what CTV trends do you foresee in the next six months, one year, and beyond?

MR: CTV will continue to evolve as users demand more control in their experience. A few years ago, we went very fast to the diversification of delivery systems, and we’re now circling back to unification. Users who wanted to go a la carte now realize they like a group package. 

When we look at the development of delivery systems for video, we had black and white, color, cable, and satellite TV. CTV is still called CTV because it’s new, but soon it will be called TV. Eventually, there will be no screens; it’ll all be virtual. I know that sounds crazy, but the reality is that’s where we’re heading. For example, glasses are not sustainable, but it may be some sort of implant or lens on the eye. 

All that means is we’ll likely have to change the way we’re buying and consuming content. Right now, we’re going through unification but give it a year or two, and we’ll be going back to diversification because some new way of watching TV will change. We need to keep up with the technology development, the desires of the audiences, and the value for the buyers because, without those elements, none of this will exist.

The post Finding the Right Partner Is Key to CTV Success: A Conversation With TMB’s Mike Richter appeared first on AdMonsters.

On Sundays, we hear about Tom Brady or Drew Brees, but they are the first ones to take their offensive line out to a steak dinner after a game. They get it.

The advertising industry also has its pit crew or offensive line and they are equally critical to success, yet often not discussed as intensely as the world’s coolest creative director’s latest idea or the CMO unveiling the next big ad.  They are the advertising operations, technology and revenue leaders for the world’s largest brands, news outlets and social media companies.

Last week, I had an opportunity to speak at the AdMonsters Publishing Forum in Austin on the subject of “Forget Advertising: Let’s Talk Storytizing”.

What really hit me was a rather simple observation.

We spend an enormous, perhaps you could say “monstrous” amount of time on analytics, data science and what it can bring to the table. This is smart. However, we’re missing a major piece of this puzzle that will lead to the next breakthroughs in our industry.

The “other geeks” of the media world are equally important. They are the “engineers” of the advertising publishing world.  They understand why opt-in videos are leading to increased engagement or they can explain how mobile SDKs are critical to mobile app success for brands or what advanced programmatic will look like or why location data is no longer the right term and we should start referring to it as movement science.

This audience knows exactly how the media world runs.  They see all of the data and they can see trends that could lead a next generation of algorithms, machine learning and practical uses of AI.

And this gets me to an “A-ha!” moment.

The biggest lesson I have learned, thus far, is that you can innovate when you go deep with the people who understand what the problems or unmet needs are in the marketplace. You don’t have to know the solution, but you do need to be swimming in the sea to understand what is relevant and missing.

Every model we have created in digital media was born this way.

The AdMonsters audience knows exactly how media is working, where the opportunities are, what is failing and what should be built, but doesn’t exist today.

It’s kind of been bugging me to figure out where the next big wave of innovation will occur.  At AdMonsters, I believe I just saw it up close. Data science will progress, as will technology. And because of this awesome progress, we are now ready to listen with both ears to what the technical experts of the media world are saying.

They know what is missing with a level of granularity that data scientists and creatives can’t see as clearly. The next models aren’t far away… if we get to know the “engineers of the media world”.

For me, that was a monstrous insight that will drive what I focus on in the years ahead.

The post The Unsung Heroes of the Advertising and Media World appeared first on AdMonsters.

But again, you might both be right. Media and tech are complicated that way. Ops puts you in the same room as all these other people whose work is similar to yours, but different. You hear a lot of voices, and you can make decisions about who’s really speaking your language.

I was thinking about this while we were organizing this Ops panel discussion about demand partner evaluation. I had recently written a playbook on the subject, and the playbook was informed in part by a publisher survey we’d launched. One of the takeaways from that survey, and also from conversations I’d heard at AdMonsters Publisher Forums this year and last, was that publishers were getting more assertive, kicking aside (or at least pausing) demand partners who were too much trouble to work with, at too low a reward.

And in the first phone call we had with all the panelists (Jana Meron from Insider Inc., Jim Hischfield from the panel and playbook’s sponsor GeoEdge, Stephanie Layser from News Corp and Ron Duque from WeatherBug), that first takeaway was challenged straightaway. For premium publishers, was it even a new thing to hold demand partners to a very standard? Maybe, then, the marketplace has evolved so that more publishers can make the demands the super-premium pubs have been making all along.

But certainly other things have changed. Here’s some of what I heard from that panel at Ops itself. None of these takeaways alter what was in the playbook, but they certainly add to it:

• Sure, this current crop of redirects can seem more severe and more disruptive than certain malvertising attacks we’ve seen in the past. If it’s true that publishers today are quicker than they once were to put misbehaving demand partners on hold, the severity of these attacks may not be the primary instigator. Header bidding, and the transparency it opened up, has been a major driver in giving publishers a new understanding of their demand partners’ performance. By opening the header and allowing publishers to measure bid analytics, it’s easier to see which of your partners are adding quantifiable incremental value.

• In spite of the panel’s subtitle  positive user experience and overall ad revenue are not necessarily opposed to each other (but we’ve been talking about this for a while). Good user experience can foster a more loyal audience. Poor user experience will drive the audience away. It’s pretty simple.
• Publishers need to push back on their demand partners when they’re served poor-quality ads—not only for their users’ sake, but to aid their broader business strategies. No publisher wants to develop a reputation among vendors and other publishers as “the one that doesn’t care about quality.” You have to keep your house in order, too: The ops team doesn’t want other teams within their company coming after them for messing with the ad stack. And no one wants to get an email about a bad ad over the weekend from a senior-management-level person in their company… not again, that is.

• When publishers have the ability to integrate a bunch of demand partners in the header, that means putting just one partner on pause may not affect their own bottom line very much. The downside is, it’s the same on the vendor’s side. The barrier to entry is lower for integrating with publishers. They can make up the lost business elsewhere if one publisher cuts them off.
• Cutting partners off entirely isn’t necessarily the way to go. If a publisher is unsatisfied with the response they’re getting from a partner, they can think of it as putting the partner in the penalty box. Give them time to respond in full and to fix the problem.
• There is a difference between a publisher and just a vendor. A partner keeps communication open, understands your goals, clearly responds to problems, and gives you access to the data you need to understand the value they’re delivering. Sometimes a partner’s value is less in the demand they deliver, and more in the tools they bring to the table.

The post How Ops 2018 Added Nuance to Demand Partner Evaluation appeared first on AdMonsters.

The paper, “How Digital Branding Drives B2B Demand,” drew insights from 2,000 banner campaigns on the TechTarget platform, and came out with numbers that both debunk and reinforce some of the intuitive assumptions that are commonly made about how B2B advertising works. In short, the paper argues branding has an important place in a B2B campaign.

Branding matters because it helps customers understand what the advertiser is and what they do. That gives B2B advertisers a competitive edge once their prospects get to the point of reaching out to potential vendors. Advertisers with a consistent brand presence over the course of a year lifted their consideration rate by 25%. And that’s after running not millions of impressions per quarter, but running 250,000 impressions and up per quarter.

But, according to the paper, this works because it’s not just a banner campaign alone. It’s a coordinated effort. The campaign targets the same prospects with banners and emails at the same time, with the same message or offer. TechTarget had better results when they developed the targeting to consider the behavior of an entire team at one company or another, not just individual users. The paper talks about synchronized messaging—using integrated (cross-channel) marketing, plus audience insights and timing. TechTarget uses the example of syncing a cross-channel message to people buying cloud backup, at the same time. You’re hitting a smaller set of people, but you’re hitting a bunch of them at once. What the advertiser gets is more qualified leads. Leads that don’t go anywhere aren’t hard to gather. B2B branding isn’t necessarily best approached with a maximalist, spray-and-pray approach.

Okay, great—so what’s in it for publishers? Well, that’s where data comes into play. The more insights a campaign can draw about its target users, the more certain the advertiser or agency can be about hitting their intended marks. And you can’t pick up that data just anywhere on the web. This is the kind of data publishers have, and it’s valuable. The specificity and the stakes in B2B advertising can make data partnerships a neat little side business for the right kind of publishers.

Programmatic can be an important part of a B2B campaign, because programmatic brings the focus to finding the audience. But with B2B, it’s really important that you have quality data. Brand safety is a concern, and quality data can help address some of those issues, but quality data really helps with personalization. The targeting is narrower, and conversions mean a heck of a lot more money changing hands than in B2C. In a TechTarget video series, Nina Shea talked about “premium data”—and honestly, why not start thinking about rich proprietary data that way? That’s the most valuable stuff, and the shortest in supply. Publisher first-party data can help advertisers understand what their prospects are researching, and that knowledge can inform campaign strategy.

The move toward personalization in advertising has been opening publishers’ eyes to this idea that their data could be a veritable revenue stream—as long as they understand its value, communicate its value to advertiser clients, keep it secure and safe for their users’ sake, and don’t turn it over to just anyone. We’re seeing that in B2B, where finding the needle in the haystack is often so much more complicated than in B2C, publishers really have an opportunity to put their data to work for them.

The post Branding Is Key in B2B Campaigns, But Data Rules appeared first on AdMonsters.

However, brands are finally bringing programmatic controls in-house, but the long-term picture looks different from those initial prognostications. To understand why, let’s take a look at the major developments.

Programmatic In-Housing: The Past

As programmatic advertising continues to mature, usage models around these complicated technologies are also evolving. When programmatic first burst onto the scene, most of the buying was done via media agencies. The CPMs were low, the ability to target audiences was exciting, and the results drove rapid growth. Fast forward a few years, and self-service platforms became commonplace. Agencies stood up large, centralized trading desks on these platforms, and brands continued to ramp spending. A few enterprising brands launched in-house initiatives, but the vast majority of programmatic dollars still flowed through agencies.

Then the ANA’s Media Transparency Report was released in June 2016. By that point, fee transparency was already an issue in programmatic, but the major attention was on other issues, including rampant ad fraud, low viewability, and challenges with brand safety. The report shifted focus and threw a massive amount of fuel on the transparency fire. Over the following two years, transparency has become one of the industry’s most important challenges, and now we’re in the midst of a transparency revolution. Brands have employed a range of methodologies to try to achieve transparency, and the associated increase in working media and programmatic in-housing has rapidly become one of the most popular.

The Present

With major programmatic spenders such as Netflix, Electronic Arts, and ABInBev touting the benefits, the in-housing trend is no longer just a fad. A December 2017 ANA study showed that 35% of brands have increased in-house programmatic capabilities, up more than two times over a similar survey just a year before. There are a variety of in-housing models, but the common thread is that the brand, instead of their agency, owns programmatic technology contracts. On that foundation, service models ranging from fully in-housed to fully outsourced are applied. Most brands seem to land somewhere in the middle, thanks in part to a talent shortage. Agencies absolutely have a place in the mix, but brands, often driven by procurement, are realizing the most effective way to reduce cost and improve control is to directly own technology contracts.

The Future

As the in-house contracting process becomes the norm, brands will start to shift their focus from pure cost reduction to improved strategy. So much time and energy has gone into reducing cost and improving ad quality, and now that attention can shift. Marc Pritchard, P&G’s Chief Brand Officer and ever-vocal industry bellwether, has recently talked about reinvesting media savings, generated from transparency and quality improvements, into data and analytics with great effect. Other marketers are following suit and are investing in data centers of excellence, data strategists, and hyper personalized segmentation strategies. These moves are all possible because in-house technology moves brands closer to their data.

The notion of data being a brand’s most valuable asset is becoming commonplace, and the ability to leverage that data with precision and control will only become more important with time. Strong data strategy, customized attribution models, and better data science and analytics will all help marketers get closer to achieving programmatic’s true promise of reaching the right person, in the right place, at the right time. That narrative has been told for the last decade, but it’s only just starting to become reality.

Of course, there are challenges to this vision. Customer privacy concerns are at an all-time high, spurred by impending GDPR implementation and the recent Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal. In parallel, many marketers have data spread across a myriad of systems, siloed and underutilized. These challenges further point to the need for marketers to take more control. New technologies, like the hot CDP category, are helping solve for these needs by marrying martech and ad tech to form a single view of the customer, but there’s still work to be done.

In-housing is an enabling model change that’s transforming our industry, and we’re just getting started. As we move into the second decade of programmatic, transparency will remain the foundation of success, but the brands that win will go beyond cost reduction to focus on leveraging their data to tell relevant stories to their customers. A better customer experience is something every marketer should be focused on in a constantly connected world. We may be focusing on in-housing today, but in the future we can use this model shift to focus on our customers and ultimately to focus on growth.

The post Let’s Take This Inside: The State of Programmatic In-Housing appeared first on AdMonsters.

At PubForum earlier this month, I moderated a breakout panel on “advanced programmatic,” with distinguished panelists Masha Kutilova from BabyCenter and Jay Glogovsky from the New York Times. We also opened up the discussion to the whole room—anyone who had either questions or answers was encouraged to speak up.

Having been in that room with so many publishers who have so many opinions on the subject, it seems like this is a good time to catch up on where we’re at with programmatic. Some thoughts:

EBDA kind of is S2S right now, at least for a lot of pubs. There was a lot of talk around the end of 2016 that server-to-server integrations were going to be the next stage in the evolution of header bidding—a way to add more demand partners without also adding to page latency, ideally. The question was always going to be about who controlled the server-side connection. About a year ago I had some conversations with vendor-side folks about how their clients just weren’t flocking to their S2S solutions as they’d hoped. At Ops NY in June, I moderated a discussion where some folks said EBDA seemed interesting, but they were wary of Google overseeing the server-side pipe.

Now we’re hearing much less wariness. For pubs who are using EBDA, it’s generally delivering the desired results, with limited extra effort on their part. Pubs are interested in other S2S offerings, sure, but that proposition can seem exhausting. They want something that feels familiar and that works. And for many pubs, that’s EBDA, as much as they enjoy beating up on Google in their free time. There’s still some question about how much pubs want to trust Google’s reporting, but that’s a tradeoff they’re willing to work with now.

We understand what programmatic guaranteed is now. I’d written about this only a few months ago, after another AdMonsters panel, where the convoluted terminology for programmatic products came up in the discussion. Sure, there are still a lot of similar-sounding terms out there for substantially different products, but now there’s little confusion among ops about what “programmatic guaranteed” means. That matters, because if programmatic guaranteed is supposed to be the next iteration of PMPs, pubs first need to make buyers recognize the value of PMPs, and then need to communicate how programmatic guaranteed is different (and better for everyone involved, ideally).

Buyers may have a lot of thoughts about brand safety and ad fraud right now, and these conversations may be trying for pubs, especially where the programmatic market is concerned. But the bright side is that pubs are able to point to PMPs and programmatic guaranteed as strategies to keep buyers’ investment and good name safe. Do your advertisers think they’re getting a better deal on your inventory in the open market? Show them how much of their spend is actually making its way to your pockets. If it’s significantly less than they thought they were spending on your stuff, minus intermediary fees, that suggests the remainder is going to counterfeit sites. No one wants that except the counterfeiters. So it appears the bad news about the wild and wooly open market is helping PMPs and guaranteed deals to come into their own.

And the increasing popularity of PMPs and programmatic guaranteed means…

Big changes are afoot in how direct sales teams operate and communicate. We’ve known this for a while, but it’s still happening. Pubs are re-evaluating whether there’s good reason to keep programmatic and direct sales teams separate, or whether that just leads to redundant conversations with clients. When you have a sales team that can speak about direct deals and the nuances of programmatic, you have a more efficient sales process, and you have better yield. But it’s easier for some pubs to get there than others. Hiring and training are costly propositions. We’ll probably be talking about this for a while still. This is a process that could call for completely reorganizing the sales team.

Sure, tracking the development of the programmatic market takes a lot of work. But at least it gives us something new to talk about. I’ll be looking forward to hearing how the discussion has progressed in just a couple months at Ops this June.

The post Deeper Into Programmatic: Where We Are With S2S, Programmatic Guaranteed appeared first on AdMonsters.

Google announced the Google News Initiative, which is more like a set of initiatives for boosting quality journalism and combating the fake stuff, and which isn’t necessarily 100% new in itself. Google has already been working on sorting real news from misinformation during breaking news events and elections, and the company has taken the opportunity to remind us of that, while announcing a partnership with the Poynter Institute, Stanford University and the Local Media Association to aid in media literacy efforts for younger users. It’s also launching Subscribe With Google, which lets users subscribe to multiple news outlets at once, and the company says it’s training its algorithms to identify users who may be more likely to subscribe (so they can be targeted with special offers). Google says it’ll devote $300 million to these efforts in the next three years. Say what you will about good intentions—there’s a bit of a “company store” flavor to this approach, but we’ll see how it plays out.

Meredith Announces Time Inc. Layoffs

Following its acquisition of Time Inc., Meredith Corp. has laid off 200 employees and says it will let another 1,000 go in the next 10 months. That large number may come as a surprise, even if the act itself is not: Meredith is reviewing its entire portfolio and is getting rid of assets that aren’t essential to its business. Part of that means, according to Meredith CEO Tom Harty, looking into selling off Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money, in order to streamline its ad business and target audiences more efficiently. “We believe each brand is better suited for success with a new owner,” Harty said. Meredith has already sold off the UK divisions of Time and ad tech company Viant, as well as the Essence and Golf magazine brands.

Recent Vox Layoffs Explained

You probably remember Vox also laid off a bunch of people in February—50 people, so not as many in total as Meredith is talking about, but about 5% of its workforce regardless. Now, in an interview with MediaShift, Vox Media Publisher Melissa Bell has explained the company’s strategy behind the restructuring: they’ll be going harder in podcasting, partnering with more linear broadcasters, moving farther into ecommerce, and exploring more tech partnerships with other publishers. She also emphasized Vox still has an interest in social video, despite dialing back its efforts there—it’s more that the company is looking for more efficient ways to monetize, and Facebook isn’t it right now.

Programmatic CPMs Rising

Now some good news: eMarketer looked at the prices on a bunch of different ad platforms and determined programmatic CPMs have gone up “meaningfully” in desktop, mobile, mobile app and video through the course of 2017. How much they rose varies—some sources showed an increase of about 1%, others 10% or higher. But eMarketer’s take is that this trend will continue through 2018. It could be a coincidence, but AdMonsters’ take is that this means ads.txt is doing what it’s supposed to do—boosting buyers’ confidence in the open programmatic market.

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