But what’s left on the table? Mobile, measurement and that little matter of creativity, says one exec working at the numbers end of an ad data company.
“There’s a surge in people moving on to mobile devices. From a measurement perspective, we’re still paying catch-up,” Xaxis EMEA analytics VP Paul Martin says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“Twenty years ago, there was one radio and one TV in the household. (With) a couple of panels, you could get all the insight you wanted. Now there’s so many devices. There’s still more work to be done.”
Xaxis, the data-driven ad targeting division of WPP’s GroupM, just replaced Nicolas Bidon with Harry Harcus as UK MD, and debuted a programmatic platform for buying native ads together with Plista – something considered a key move for an ad format many have worried is not scaleable
Martin says programmatic – which, if you like, is the science of ad processing – needs to get more creative.
“People feel there’s still a gap in the creative space, trying to join up the creative with the media world, that’s untapped,” he says, adding Xaxis intends “working more closely with the creative guys of the world”.
This interview was recorded at the I-com Global Forum for Marketing and Data Measurement in Seville, Spain, April 18 to 21. This video is part of a series from the Forum sponsored by Xaxis. Please visit this page for more videos from Seville.
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Lotame SVP and CMO Doron Wesly suggests they should be in prime position, if technology can get them over the hill.
Citing just-published Nielsen quarterly data, he tells Beet.TV: “50% of US households have SVODs. This is not a fad. That space needs a TV DMP (data management platform)… for agencies who are trying to create smarter plans for clients.”
A data management platform is the software that lets ad buyers mix up data sources to create audience segments for ad targeting. That is what Lotame offers its customers.
Wesly is suggesting TV hardware makers – so-called, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) – are in the best place to know which of their customers is watching which show.
“Data comes out of OEMs – every OEM knows the IP address of their TV and has active content recognition,” the former Tremor Video exec, who joined Lotame in February, says.
“Even if you have a third-party device like a Roku, technically – because it’s going through the (TV) – they are able to recognize the content. So you’re seeing not just what’s going through the TV from a cable perspective but also what other points are connected.”
TV makers, it’s over to you.
This video part of a series about the state of programmatic advertising sponsored by OpenX. Please find other videos from the series here.
]]>Another vendor, Factual, has already been in this game for a number of years, and in December took another big $35mn funding round to further its ambitions. The aims for that cash are threefold, says Factual’s revenue SVP Rob Jonas:
All of that is toward that single aim – helping advertisers better target ads by accounting for exactly where audiences (or their phones) really are.
“We know that location in its most basic form has a very positive impact on advertising rates, and allows publishers and media owners and app developers to monetize at a much higher level than they can without that information,” Jonas says.
This video was is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Mobile World Congress presented by Light Reaction. Please visit this page for additional videos from Barcelona.
]]>But mobile advertising can do much more, and one of WPP’s divisions is recommending advertisers take advantage.
“There’s been a lot of focus on things like media optimization towards performance or different types of datasets, but a real under-representation of the importance of creative and optimizing towards performance,” says Paul Dolan, GM of Light Reaction, a mobile-centric, data-driven unit launched by WPP’s Xaxis last year.
“We actually believe, and our studies have found, that the more engaging, richer formats actually lead to better performance. And that’s what our study of perceptual science is all about, understanding how users emotionally react to what they see in front of them.
“Different formats for different types of clients can lead to better performance – either more outcomes or at a better price. And so by focusing in on creative in addition to data and media as optimization levers has been really successful for our clients.”
The IAB’s mobile phone creative guidelines were updated last year to account for new HTML5 ads, while its rising-star mobile formats describe new approaches that take advantage of modern smartphones, like filmstrips, pulls and sliders.
This video was is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Mobile World Congress presented by Light Reaction. Please visit this page for additional videos from Barcelona.
]]>Rosa Markarian, VP of Global Business Operations for WPP’s mobile-focused Light Reaction performance marketing division, lays out the key considerations.
“It’s important to understand that, (on mobile), you might use different types of inventory for both (apps and web) – whereas on desktop, it’s of course just web inventory,” she tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Worldwide, around 70-80% of the inventory on mobile is in-app. It’s really important to also leverage this inventory and deliver ads there that have high quality, because usually in apps you have really high visibility of your ads.”
That amounts to advice that advertisers exposing on mobile website should use their ads from mobile apps, which account for the largest share of consumers’ mobile device time.
The latest data-driven ad-tech operation under the WPP stable, Light Reaction was launched by WPP’s programmatic division Xaxis a year ago to put a performance spin on mobile-first ad sales.
Markarian’s advice goes further. She outlines three useful mobile marketing tactics:
This video was is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Mobile World Congress presented by Light Reaction. Please visit this page for additional videos from Barcelona.
]]>The sad truth is, many consumers’ app use tails off. So Auke Boersma, the APAC MD of WPP’s performance marketing unit, Light Reaction, wants to help clients re-enage.
“We have an app install base in some markets, 10, 20, 30 million in size,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “But there’s still a percentage of that which is inactive, (which) is not creating any positive ROI for marketers.
“They’re starting to focus on that next level of app marketing, which is reengaging with that sleeping part of your app install base, if you want. And I think across the region, a lot of marketers are focusing on that next level into app marketing. That’s a very big opportunity for us.”
The latest data-driven ad-tech operation under the WPP stable, Light Reaction was launched by WPP’s programmatic division Xaxis a year ago to put a performance spin on mobile-first ad sales.
This video was is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Mobile World Congress presented by Light Reaction. Please visit this page for additional videos from Barcelona.
]]>“The evolution of mobile is a direct response,” says Karl Elken, the boss of Americas for Light Reaction, a WPP unit focused on the issue.
“Today, (for) every step of the buying process, we use our mobile devices for now. And the biggest change there is the actual purchase. In the past, that was the one part of the buying process that was lacking.”
Much of digital advertising is premised on either building brands or on driving users to some third-party ecommerce opportunity. But the industry is starting to talk about shortening the purchase journey, helping consumers buy there and then.
“Clearly I think that we’ve turned a corner last year on that,” Elken adds. “Just take a look at the role of mobile in the Q4 holiday shopping period. It was just off the charts, both in terms of the traffic it was driving to ecommerce pages but also in conversions.
“Marketers are going to be trying to optimize their pages and their site experiences to drive sales.”
Mobile accounted for 27% of US ecommerce sales in Q4, according to Criteo.
The latest data-driven ad-tech operation under the WPP stable, Light Reaction was launched by WPP’s programmatic division Xaxis a year ago to put a performance spin on mobile-first ad sales.
This video was is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Mobile World Congress presented by Light Reaction. Please visit this page for additional videos from Barcelona.
]]>Programmatic can support creative ad campaign sequencing, too – but one exec doesn’t imagine that ability coming to mobile quiet yet.
The potential is astounding for brands,” Opera Mediaworks strategic accounts SVP Ryan Griffin tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “When you think about the sheer breadth and depth of the signals these devices can record … they’re in our pockets all the time.”
Griffin sees the smartphone’s accelerometers, gyroscopes and cameras technology as “a broad palate to activate creatively” and “an opportunity to creatively activate… experiences that can’t be replicated on other screens” – at least, they will be.
“It’s going to be a little while before programmatic can access all of that,” he concedes. “Programmatic is very very nascent in the mobile space.”
Mediaworks is the advertising unit of veteran mobile web browser maker Opera, which is likely to be sold to a Chinese investment consortium for $1.2 billion. It recently found short-form video ads out-perform longer ones on mobile
This video part of a series about the state of programmatic advertising sponsored by OpenX. Please find other videos from the series here.
]]>“We’re trying to help people move away last-click attribution,” Google EMEA performance solutions MD Ian Carrington tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “A lot of people are using last-click attribution models. That means they’re not valuing mobile correctly.”
In last-click attribution, the value of a purchase made by a consumer is attributed to the last click she made on the journey.
But the model is falling out of favor in a multi-channel world.
“Sixty-five percent of users will start their journey on a mobile and complete it on a different device,” Carrington stresses.
“Users will often search on a mobile device and go to a physical location. We can understand that behavior and help advertisers to value a customer who’s walked in to the store after using their mobile device.”
This video was is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Mobile World Congress presented by Light Reaction. Please visit this page for additional videos from Barcelona.
]]>Asked to name a big trend at the recent Mobile World Congrress event, mobile ad server and measurement software maker MediaLets CEO Richy Glassberg said: “We’re seeing a ton of companies from India, from China, from Indonesia, APAC, LatAm, Africa – that’s really exciting to see this growth across the whole spectrum of mobile advertising.”
But Glassberg sounded a note of caution – the readiness for rich media advertising in these places is not yet fully-formed.
“Everybody’s talking about 5G and all that future stuff in 2018,” he said. “The reality is there’s hundreds of millions of people moving online – 300m+ in India by June, 250m in Indonesia this year – in 2G and 3G.
“We have to remember, advertising in its basic principle to get all these consumers online from flip phones and to entry-level smartphones. They’re on a slower connection. While everyone wants to talk about video, to get the mass in emerging markets, you have to realise the connectivity is very different.”
Medialets recently partnered to power digital communications consultancy Millward Brown’s mobile measurement.
This video was is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Mobile World Congress presented by Light Reaction. Please visit this page for additional videos from Barcelona.
]]>Facebook EMEA publisher ad technology head Yoav Arnstein says the industry has got it wrong.
“With the shift to mobile, there is growing concern as to the ability of publishers to monetize while balancing the right consumer experience,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“We’ve seen the rise of ad blocking. We have basically taken it too far and have created experiences for consumers that they are not happy with.
“The format is not engaging, consumers are very opinionated about that. The tools are antiquated, they’re not suitable for a mobile environment. The overall experience is not relevant or engaging.”
Ad blocking is rising to levels that are worrying advertises. In the latest survey, IAB UK found 22% of Britons used ad blocking software.
Arnstein, who runs part of Facebook’s off-site Audience Network, says it’s a problem for publishers – up to 40% of their traffic is coming from mobile, and about 93% of their ad inventory is mobile web, the kind most affected by ad blockers.
He wants to “take significant budgets from advertisers”, but says: “Native is the only thing that will work … creating a different type of monetization solution that is much more native-driven.”
This video was is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Mobile World Congress presented by Light Reaction. Please visit this page for additional videos from Barcelona.
]]>Now the boss of the world’s biggest ad agency holding group is repeating his call for online platforms to do more for his customers.
“Our second largest client, Keith Weed, CMO of Unilever, has already sounded off about the three Vs – value, validation and viewability,” WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell tells Beet.TV in this video interview from Mobile World Congress.
“Viewability on Google and Facebook is critically important. Some of those frenemies are being helpful, some are not. We are going to have to up the tempo in terms of making sure that the data is right and consistent and properly measurable.”
The ad fraud problem is prompting responses ranging from detection software and a move from display to native ads, to a demand from advertisers who only want to pay for ads that are viewed by human users.
But WPP companies are doing their bit in the new world of advertising. The company runs data-driven ad tech outfit Xaxis; Light Reaction, a vendor putting the performance in to programmatic, as well as a host of other properties and investments.
In what has been a year of challenge for agencies – tasked with proving their worth in the new world to clients, many of whose contracts have come up for renewal – Sorrell says WPP has fared well.
“We’ve been the biggest net winner, we’re +$1.5bn,” he claims, citing latest RECMA media agencies benchmark data describing new business wins.
“There’s been big $5bn swing between the strongest and the weakest. That demonstrates the importance of technology.”
This video was is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of Mobile World Congress presented by Light Reaction. Please visit this page for additional videos from Barcelona.
]]>That’s testament to the changes Facebook is having to make to ensure it continues connecting with audiences. But the same goes for advertisers who use the network, according to Facebook global agency lead Dave Dugan.
“Advertisers who can communicate with consumers on those terms are more inclined to do better than those that don’t,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview:
Dugan was summarizing research Facebook and Twitter published through AdAge on the topic of mobile consumption this month.
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology. You can find more videos from the session here.
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The the two WPP units announced the product offering today.
For an overview on brand measurement via mobile and implications of the alliance with Millward Brown, we interviewed Medialets CEO Richy Glassberg in the company’s New York offices.
Medialets was acquired by WPP in April.
]]>Omnicom’s PHD worldwide CEO Mike Cooper says the emergence of virtual personal assistants – intelligent digital agents that perform tasks for owners based on user input, location awareness, and the ability to access information from a variety of online sources – “is going to be completely game-changing for our business”.
“The next generation of Siri will interact with the apps on your phone, which starts to get quite interesting,” Cooper tells Beet.TV.
“Your VPA, if you miss your airplane, is going to make decisions on your behalf – it’s going to rebook the airline.”
Here’s where things start to get weird. More than trying to reach users with messages, brands will need to reach their virtual assistants instead, Cooper says.
“You need to market to algorithms rather than the frontal cortex of people’s brains.,” he says. “At a micro-decisioning level, you need to re-think how you deal with that process in order to market your goods or services.”
Consulting firm Frost & Sullivan has pegged intelligent assistants as a growth trend in 2016, as Facebook’s M and Baidu’s Duer join Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri and Google’s Now.
Cooper isn’t expecting to see these developments at January’s upcoming CES show – better wait two more years, he reckons. But he is warning every ad agency to start thinking about the implications today.
We interviewed in London last week for our series “The Road to CES” — our preview of trends and topics to be discussed in January in Las Vegas. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. The series is sponsored by YuMe.
]]>Under iOS 9, the Safari web browser will support extensions that enable “a fast and efficient way to block cookies, images, resources, pop-ups, and other content”. That has been interpreted by many as ad-blocking – something which 4.9% and growing of all internet users did in Q2 2014, according to Adobe and PageFair.
But advertisers shouldn’t sweat, says Pivotal senior research analyst Brian Wieser – ad-free content has been around for a long time. “The reality is probably that ad-blocking in digital is overblown, as ad-blocking in the TV world was overblown,” Wieser tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Looking back over time, about 15% of total video viewing was ad-free in the United States. Netflix is around 5% of total viewing – a minority. The absence of advertising by itself doesn’t mean the media is going to die.
“DVR-based ad-skipping probably takes about 5% of total inventory out, so we still have around 80% of potential inventory (left).”
Even if Safari supports ad-blocking (and Apple has far from confirmed that specifically), it may not matter as much as some fear – by far the majority of mobile content consumption happens not on the web, but in apps, which will continue to be powered by display advertising in particular, Wieser adds.
We interviewed Wieser as part of a series on video advertising at Cannes Lions presnted by true[X]. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>Ad tech supplier Kargo is betting on giving advertisers and publishers something different, eschewing performance-driven banner sales for high-touch brand campaign placements.
Founder and CEO Harry Kargman tells Beet.TV his technology “allows us to take over the page and create a custom site skin”, “woven in to the editorial page”.
“Mobile is really challenging. The screen sizes are small,” he says. “Getting a consumer to consider buying that product is a really hard thing to do. That requires something more than a banner – we don’t think that a 320×50 banner is long-term sustainable in mobile. It’s not going to get the consumer to make the purchase.”
Clients include McDonald’s and Target. Kargo aims to grow its staff headcount from 130 to 200 by year’s end, partly by opening up a London office meet growth.
Kargman 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.
]]>“Apple just rolled out the Beacon API last year,” MEC Global’s north America lead for mobile and emerging technologies, Rachel Pasqua, tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Because you haven’t seen a lot of stats come out, you think it’s not happening. But it’s happening everywhere. Every big box store, supermarket, stadium, concert venue, every public space from train stations to airports to government buildings are putting beacons in to their infrastructure to enable all sorts of interactions.”
Bluetooth beacons, which Apple is calling iBeacons, have existed in one form of another for several years. Unlike GPS, they enable precise targeting within buildings by detecting proximity to a user’s smartphone.
Some retailers are getting excited about pinging messages to customers as they walk by product shelves.
Pasqua imagines “everything from quietly measuring foot traffic … to seamless delivery of useful information… about a public monument or something as useful as a coupon delivered at point of sale”.
Pasqua 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.
]]>“When we talk about creating a responsive experience … to deliver mobile use the same experience they would have on the desktop … how can they be more responsive based on the connection speed?,” asks Adaptive Media sales and business development head Nick Lynch.
“We are focused on building the (video) player that also identifies the connection speed… that’s going to be really important in terms of responsiveness.”
The company employs around 60 people in Irvine, California. Just don’t ask Lynch to comment on one hackneyed old mobile industry buzzphrase: “I’ve heard it before – ‘this year is the mobile’, ‘next year is the year of mobile’. Mobile is just going to continue to grow, so every year is going to be the year of mobile.”
He 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.
]]>“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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The New York Times went to HTML5-first a few years ago now, out of a “toolbox” that has been used by editorial, Interactive Stories and Paid Posts teams, NYT product management director Sara Poorsattar tells Beet.TV.
The player is being used for both editorial and ads in NYT’s “36 Hours In…” travel series. “We take a Standard VPAID overlay ad for each individual video we put out; (it) uses the Google API,” Poorsattar says. “As the interviewer in the video is talking about a very specific restaurant, you can go and bring up Google Maps information for that restaurant; how to get there.
“(It) brings this advertiser closer to the content, while still respecting the autonomy of the edit voice in the content.”
Poorsattar says mobile consumption is more than 50% of New York Times traffic – meaning a key 2015 imperative is monetizing that new traffic source.
She was interviewed by Hulu ad sales SVP Peter Naylor at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat.
The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.
]]>“The Networked Society… our vision for the year 2020 – everything that can benefit from connection to the internet will indeed will be connected,” Ericsson content delivery marketing head Lisa Skelton tells Beet.TV.
“Of those 50bn connected devices, 15bn will, at least, be video-enabled. Video is the heavy stuff of the network.”
Skelton says delivering rich-media content to mobile devices is a key imperative.
Skelton 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.
“It’s personal,” Young tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “They’re watching it not only out of home but in-home as well.
“I heard a term, “meerkatting” – they’re watching terrestrial television or cable television whilst on the phone consuming other video content.
“So I think there’s a real opportunity to synchronise with other messaging. The way the phones are being built is for video; the screens are getting bigger.”
The Weather Channel uses programmatic technology to sell ads inside its mobile app in real-time and depending on weather conditions in users’ locales, Young says.
This video is part of a series titled The State Of Video, a series sponsored by AOL Platforms. Please visit this page for all the videos from the series. This session was recorded in London.
]]>In this video interview, the company’s video services SVP and GM Matt Strauss tells Beet.TV how the group is now giving Xfinity customers their DVR recordings not just at home but on their mobile devices.
“Once you’re able to move the recordings to the cloud, it unlocks all this flexibility,” Strauss says.
“DVRs have been around for well over a decade. About 50% of all TV has now have DVRs. As passionate as people are about their DVR, they don’t appreciate how much better the DVR could be.”
Comcast also wants to offer linear, live and on-demand content on mobile devices, making smartphones and tablets the equivalent of living room TVs.
]]>“The demand is obviously there,” ZenithOptimeda Group strategy director Chris de Cruz tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The ways in which consumers are starting to behave is obviously moving in that direction is obviously moving in that direction.
“It’s going to be expedited by the increased form factor of the new iPhone. Then the predilection for short form content will become cemented.”
But de Cruz says simply shovelling TV shows on to mobile won’t succeed: “We are seeing an attempt to transmogrify traditional TV programmes to a mobile device. It doesn’t necessarily work. What we need to do is find a way to create a method of delivery that’s much more appropriate for people’s consumption.”
This is part of a series title the State of Video, a series sponsored by AOL Platforms. Please visit this page for all the videos from the series.
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