Anton, who is President of Meredith Xcelerated Marketing, has a theory for how this happened, as she explains in an interview with Beet.TV at the annual Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
Instead of organizing themselves to best serve consumers with optimal content, some marketing department brethren think, “Hey wait, I’m a channel lead. I’ve got to protect my channel. I need to make sure my budget’s as high as last year. I’m competing with the other folks that I work with.”
The answer, according to Anton: “Reorganize the marketing department around the consumer as opposed to being channel-centric.”
Having been in the content business for more than four decades, MXM is in sync with the content-generation demands of the current consumer marketplace. Now Anton is seeing some clients paring back on paid media for more reliance on organic earned and owned media, with search engine optimization critical to driving website traffic.
“Many of our clients have very ambitious goals around traffic generation and yet they don’t have big paid budgets,” Anton says. “So you really have to be creative about driving that traffic through excellent SEO.”
MXM planted its flag in the mobile space in 2008, so “We’ve been thinking mobile since way back,” Anton adds.
The agency has already embraced virtual reality in a pilot for a paint company client that shows consumers how certain colors look throughout an average day. “To have something like VR to be able to bring to clients is an awesome tool,” says Anton.
We interviewed her at the ANA Masters of Marketing annual meeting in Orlando. This video is part of a series produced at the conference. Beet’s coverage is sponsored by Cadent. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“The fundamental challenge in the mobile landscape right now is the lack of a standard user identification method,” says Adelphic co-founder Jennifer Lum, who worked on Apple’s iAd in 2010. “We’ve built a patented method of user identification that works across connected devices … a proxy for a cookie… to deliver better scale to advertisers.”
“Our op opened up bec many of the top platforms weren’t fast enough to extend their technology to mobile. We spent time with product teams at the leading agency trading desks. They helped us understand what they needed for a supply-side platform to be able to run and execute successful mobile campaigns.”
Now the Boston-based company – which has $23m in funding behind it – is expanding internationally. “We are working very hard on our European launch and we expect to be live there by the end of this quarter,” Lum adds.
Beet.TV interviewed Lum last week at the BrightRoll Video Summit in Manhattan.
]]>“Mobile is now the first screen,” Opera Mediaworks CEO Mahi de Silva tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The desktop ad business started with banner ads… mobile is very unique – you can take over the screen and that user experience is like TV in the palm of your hand.
“Mobile video is the fastest-growing segment within mobile advertising. The same thing marketers love about your 60-inch screen in your living room, we make that happen on a smartphone or tablet.”
Da Silva said mobile video ads had to be brief, six- or eight-second videos that opened up in to full experiences upon user clicks, not 30-second spots shovelled from TV. But that places a new burden on creators. In January, Opera Mediaworks announced Native Video Fund, an initiative to financially assist the creation of mobile video ad campaigns in ways that uniquely fit mobile device demands.
Da Silva says mobile video represented over 50% of company revenue in 2014, up from 9% a year earlier.
Da Silva was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.
]]>“The phone is your primary device,” says business development mobile ad tech provider AdColony‘s VP Matt Barash.
“Maybe gaming is the new cinema. It’s where people spend a lot of time.
“Recently, we had the Super Bowl – we saw a number of different app developers spending between $4m and $9m (on advertising) – that’s validation.”
AdColony makes HD-quality video play more efficiently on mobile phones, including for in-app ads.
Barash was interviewed by Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.
Beet.TV coverage of the IAB meeting was sponsored by SpotXchange. Please find Beet.TV’s coverage of the event here.
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“We’ve seen usage of mobile grow 76% year over year,” CEO Simon Khalaf tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “That’s insane growth – usually, you expect a market to start saturating.
“Last year, most of the growth was happening in emerging countries – this year, growth happened across the board, including mature markets like the US and South Korea.
“This is the first year that mobile eclipsed television in terms of time-spent. We have discovered the killer ad experience – video (and) native advertising.”
He was interviewed for Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Beet.TV coverage of CES 2015 is sponsored by Adobe Primetime. Find all the coverage here.
“The idea of putting a 30-second TV spot as a pre-roll or a CPV video in mobile is dying,” says app advertising group Supersonic’s European MD James Salins.
“What we need … is to educate both media agencies and creative agencies about the virtues of mobile video – which tends to be 10 or 15 seconds. You entertain, inform – and get out.”
Supersonic is currently building out its Beijing office after taking a $15m investment in July to expand in Asia-Pacific. Next up are Japan and India, Salins says.
This video is part of series of videos covering DMEXCO. Please find all of our interviews from the show right here. Beet.TV’s coverage of DMEXCO is sponsored by Videology.
“Seventy percent of the video views we did were on mobile devices,” says Jun Group CEO Mitchell Reichgut.
“The performance is better, counterintiuitively, than the web (because) it takes up the whole screen, buttons are bigger, you’re not competing with chat windows and other things.”
“Brands are only just beginning to catch on mobile video to. By and large, the advertising economy in mobile ads has been app installs.”
Reichgut was a panelist at the recent Beet.TV summit on branded content, interviewed by Furious Minds CEO Ashley J. Swartz. You can find additional videos from the event here.
]]>“A media company that was based on the web is now struggling getting in to the mobile space,” Jun Group CEO Mitchell Reichgut tells Beet.TV.
“Mobile apps are where most of the traffic is taking place. To get integrated is much more difficult that building another web network. The differentiation is everything. They’re buying that access.”
Acquiring Flurry, reportedly for more than $200m, gives Yahoo access to troves of information on how consumers use mobile apps – useful to Flurry’s 170,000 developers as well as to Yahoo itself.
MediaCom’s global media head Ben Phillips tells Beet.TV mobile ad formats have moved on significantly over the last decade: “We’re seeing a lot more branding opportunities come in, like rich media advertising. Consumer are expecting us to provide them with a lot better advertising units, as opposed to the 320×50 banner.
“The engagement layer is completely different. We need to start understanding a little bit more about how the consumer interacts on that device.”
We spoke with him at the Mindshare party at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
We taped this segment at the rooftop suite of the the MediaCom at the Martinez Hotel.
]]>“Delivering in to mobile is about 20 times harder than it is in desktop,” says Medialets COO Richy Glassberg. “In desktop, there’s 15 years of technology which allows anybody to build one ad in Flash, it works everywhere.
“In December, with the billions of ads we serve, we saw 30,000 different devices. You have to make an ad work in every type of environment. The scary thing for the agency is, ‘Did my ad work?’.”
“We’re seeing a rate of change we’ve never seen in the advertising world before. I don’t think anybody’s caught up.”
He was speaking to Beet.TV during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Please find more Beet coverage of Cannes Lions here.
]]>“We’ve had an explosion of formats,” says Maxus’ north America chief strategy office Mark Egan
We’re seeing a lot of this roll in to a common unit which is represented in the stream format that you see in Facebook on mobile, a lot of what Yahoo is basing their new mobile product on – and is fixated around image-based messaging along with a little bit of text.
“That’s really exciting. Things are beginning to coalesce and make themselves more available, more digestible, more palatable for mobile-first consumers.”
We spoke with him as part of our series, “The Road to Cannes.”
]]>Group M’s data and audience unit Xaxis has already operated the scheme, dubbed Xaxis Sync, in the Netherlands, buying social mobile ads corresponding to TV spots identified by data partner Civolution. Now it is launching the scheme elsewhere including the US, as this release announces.
“About 60% of TV viewers are engaged with another screen while they watch mainstream linear TV,” Xaxis’ UK MD Nicolas Bidon tells Beet.TV.
“It allows u to get a greater share of voice. (With Xaxis Sync), even if your audience is busy while your spot is airing on TV – emailing their friends or watching their Facebook account – they’re still seeing your brand on these other screens.”
Beet.TV spoke with him at the recent FT Digital Media Conference. To view all our coverage of the conference, visit this page.
Disclaimer: Our coverage of the FT event was sponsored by Xaxis.
]]>“Most of the media that I see spent – not a hell of a lot of data is actually being gathered,” says the company’s north America GM Francisco Cordero. “That could be done quite easily.
“We’re trying to get brands to reinvest for the next 20 years, not just for a tactical buy … (in) data warehouses and infrastructure that could dominate thinking for the next 20 years.
“People underestimate the mobile wave … the one (device) with the most data is the one that’s with you most of the time.”
Cordero was interviewed by Furious Minds CEO Ashley J. Swartz at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico.
]]>“We’re going to break up the banners,” InMobi global strategic partnerships VP Pankaj Bengani tells Beet.TV.
“Instead of showing banners to users, we’re going to show native advertising. The ad becomes less disruptive. Native ads make more sense than banners in most cases.”
Bengani reckons advertisers deployed through native formats see higher click-through rates and increased conversion: “We’ve seen numbers in the order of 10x, in some cases 100x, what we see on banners.” InMobi’s native ad deployments include promo slots for apps.
Beet.TV interviewed Bengani at the big Mobile World Congress convention.
]]>“We came up with an episodic learning platform which uses a methodology to work with consumers campaign-to-campaign,” says mobile ad network InMobi‘s head of products, brand and commerce Preetham Venkatesh.
“If you treat your campaign an episode, you learn what your cons did in one campaign, and apply that in the next campaign.”
Speaking to Beet.TV at the big Mobile World Congress convention, Venkatesh says these episodes build in to a privacy-compliant “consumer experience profile”.
]]>“We’re now able to target advertising based on Shazam activity,” CEO Rich Riley tells Beet.TV. “We can do that on Shazam and off Shazam. We can follow a device ID on to Facebook and continue targeting.”
This recently launched feature is an ad “retargeting” service. “If you Shazam one of our Shazam-For-TV spots, we can build an audience for an advertisser and they continue talking to that audience on mobile devices on Shazam and beyond.”
Dependent on automated content recognition (ACR) technology, Shazam started out as a way for people to identify music they hear on the radio. Lately, it has broadened out in to trying to provide the engagement glue between TV ads and online marketing material.
Shazam users identified 1.1 million pieces of audio during January’s Grammies award show and 700,000 ads during the recent Superbowl, Riley says. The latest addition extends this by implementing “retargeting”.
“We want Shazam to be an app that you use evert day to … recognize not just music, not just TV, but movies, live events, retailer environments and whatever is around you,” Riley adds.
Beet.TV interviewed Riley at the big Mobile World Congress convention.
]]>“We’re going to have a major announcement here in a few weeks about our native solution which we think will be really interesting,” Gallagher said.
“If you look at Facebook……they rolled out not a square banner but a native unit that really works for mobile.
“What we’re going to do is roll out something similar but for various publishers around the world, to kind of mimic what Facebook has done without having to build their own native solution, in-stream while you’re looking at an article.”
In the native content format, AOL’s ad units currently include brand blogs, infographics, listicles and lookbooks – all on Huffington Post. The upcoming solution sounds like it will be available to other publishers and be deliverable on mobile devices, where consumers are consuming an increasing amount of editorial.
AOL UK has previously said more than a third of its revenue will come from native advertising in 2014.
]]>“Advertisers don’t have access to cookies. They do have access to location data,” says Tyler Bell, product VP at Factual. “We have a location data set of all the world’s businesses and landmarks. We overlay user movement on top of those places.
“From longitude and latitude, we build user profiles that have demographic, geographic and behavioral data.”We can find places they return to over time and have an affinity to.”
For Bell, this development aims at “anticipatory computing” and personalization – the idea that, by understanding users’ movements as cues, providers can serve them relevant messaging.
Bell was interviewed by Beet.TV at the Mobile World Congress convention.
]]>We’ve moved past the mobile vortex and confusion,” he tells Beet.TV. “But there are still some fundamental issues.
“Do brands go down an app route or stick with the browsing experience? If you look at information coming from the US, 80% of consumers are going through apps.
“What role can they play with apps or within apps? (They should) embed themselves in existing apps.”
Johnston was interviewed by Beet.TV at the big Mobile World Congress convention.
]]>“People don’t even realize how disruptive mobile is going to be around their media buying,” says InMobi’s global alliances GM Anne Frisbie. “Mobile devices generate 10x the amount of data signals that desktop has. Even though we think we’ve been in a Big Data world before, you’re in a whole new ball game.”
InMobi recently announced that its network touches 759 million active users per month through mobile phones. According to Frisbie, that’s overwhelmingly via apps.
“Eighty-five percent of mobile activity is on the app side not the mobile browser side,” she says. “You really need to make sure you work with a partner that has a scaled view of the consumer from their app behaviors.”
Beet.TV interviewed Frisbie at Mobile World Congress.
Disclaimer: InMobi is the sponsor of Beet.TV’s Barcelona coverage.
]]>“Mobile never had a seat at the table, I wasn’t even included in upfront conversations,” Starcom Worldwide’s SVP and director of mobility, Erin Kienast, tells Beet.TV. “Now, I’m the first seat at the table. Within my CPG brands, 0.54% of total dollars invested in the upfront was mobile; now we’re close to 10% – that’s under three years.”
So, mobile advertising has been realized in formats that advertisers might expect. But advertising is set to take on whole different forms, thanks to mobile in the connected home, Kienast reckons.
“For a CPG client, think of your washer-dryer, your refrigerator,” she says. “If you have your (laundry) pods and you’re almost running out – how do I trigger the consumer via a message, “You’re running out, click to purchase’?”
Kiencast was interviewed by TouchCast co-founder Erick Schonfeld at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico.
]]>“Some of the best mobile advertising we’re seeing to date are from brands who understand the importance of data,” mobile ad tech firm Millennial Media‘s global strategy VP Carrier Seifer tells Beet.TV at the Consumer Electronics Show.
New York-headquartered Millennial aims to help marketers reach consumers on mobile screens, and last fall acquired Jumptap.
Seifer says two pieces of information rank above others when it comes to planning the best mobile ad campaign:
- “The user session is much shorter than any other media,” she says. “Average user session on a mobile device is five minutes or less. The ad you put in front of them needs to understand that.”
- “Understanding what device they have. How people are consuming video on a tablet versus a high-end smartphone versus a low-end smartphone versus a feature phone is very, very important.”
Seifer’s takeaway: “Look at the data at your fingertips and make the right choice about which message you’re going to give them.”
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