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It’s no secret: Digital is more complex than ever before. The industry has seen an explosion of tech, vendors, tracking metrics, cost types, and devices in recent years.
Considering our relentless focus on minimizing industry chaos, we partnered with research firm Ad Perceptions to survey more than 150 digital media professionals. We talked to the marketers who are tasked with making sense of it all every day, and we worked to uncover their pain points, expectations, and wish lists for programmatic advertising in 2018.
Want the state of the (programmatic) state? Download our infographic.
At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time consuming. To make that easier, we’ve compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy our latest list below!
Less than 60 days until the new European internet law General Data Protection Regulation – or GDPR as most refer it – goes into effect, and it has already spurred changes in how data is collected and handled. GDPR attempts to standardize data rights across all 28 European Union countries, ensuring that users know, understand, and consent to the data collected about them.
Averaging over a million players per game, HQ Trivia continues to hit new milestones with sizeable sponsorship deals, the most recent being the movie release of Ready Player One. In an age of hyper-targeting, there’s still high value in large, attentive audiences.
As digital advertising has matured, most of the promises made early on have come to fruition, but at what cost? This offers some good perspective on what’s taken place over the last several years, with a nod of hope towards improved digital advertising and how TV will benefit as well.
Looking at data across platforms, eMarketer found that prices for programmatic ads are going up. Prices are seeing an increase across channels such as desktop, mobile web, mobile app, and video. This increase is attributed to a growing importance on both audience and data in the programmatic space.
With more buyers moving into the programmatic space, agencies are using RFPs less and less. Claiming it to be old school process where vendors do not receive feedback from agencies, more partners and agencies are pushing back on them. There’s a growing desire for a more efficient process – particularly with the more custom and complex offerings available.
There’s been a notable rise in the adoption of ads.txt by publishers in recent months – with upwards of 51% of sites that sell their ads programmatically having implemented the verification file. For those out of the loop, ads.txt is a way programmatic platforms can check whether a vendor’s claim to inventory is legitimate or not, offering a greater level of transparency of who is allowed to sell their inventory. Read related Centro articles from last year here and here.
Are you confused by blockchain? Blockchain technology is a new-ish network that decentralizes trade and allows for more peer-to peer transactions. Still a little confusing? Political scientist and blockchain researcher Bettina Warburg breaks down blockchain technology in this video to five different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert.
Knowing that over two billion people in the world are not online can be tough to fathom in our non-stop connected lives. This article explores how many of these people are getting connected, though somewhat indirectly, while still benefiting from new services that offer micro-loans, crop insurance, and even more efficient energy sources.
April's DIAL is also available as a PDF.
As a digital media professional, what would it mean for you to have a full set of digital tools at your disposal? Before you start thinking about the answer to that question, let’s start with an analogy.
Imagine you are a renowned artist and you have been commissioned to create a painting of the beach. Your client is going to spend a significant amount of money, and you will spend countless hours on the project. You have your brushes, your easel, and your canvas, but when it comes to paint, you only have the color blue. Sure, you can paint a lovely painting of the water and the sky, but what’s a beach without the sand, the sun, or the small plane flying by advertising local bar specials?!
Now, I have nothing against the color blue. In fact, it’s actually my favorite color. But think of how limiting it would be as the only color on an artist’s palette. All the talent in the world wouldn’t help the artist portray the full breadth of the visual landscape.
The lesson here is very simple. Client happiness and return on investment are paramount to a successful partnership – those are the goods that keep you in business. Without them, a client’s money goes elsewhere. Maybe to different mediums, a different artist, or several different artists who can meet their expectations.
As unrelated as it may seem, digital media agencies are a lot like the commissioned artist in this scenario. The digital landscape is increasingly cluttered and complex. Standing out and creating competitive differentiation requires agencies to create more elaborate stories for their clients and produce meaningful, valuable, and creative executions. The campaigns they work on should provide extensive and layered insights – learnings that impact future expenditures and marketing tactics. Like an artist, the agency needs to provide a specialized service that a brand can’t create on their own.
But that is not as simple as it sounds. Getting from point A to point B means overseeing and orchestrating numerous technology tools to manage granular elements of a digital media buy -- vendors, creative units, devices, cost types, tracking metrics and more. It also means increased complexity, because digital advertisers today work with an average of 4-5 vendors in each of the ‘DSP,’ ‘data provider & data management,’ and ‘other ad tech’ categories.
Considering that most digital advertisers and agencies are dealing with the same above-mentioned opportunities and problems just to meet the minimum that’s expected of them, how is an agency supposed to stand out?
It all comes down to the tools.
The tools at an agency’s disposal, much like the colors on an artist’s palette, have a direct impact on the level of creativity, insight, and performance that can be provided for a client. Agencies cannot afford (literally) to be limited by a lack of access to information, nor can they be burdened by the inefficiencies of having their teams toggle between multiple platforms or dashboards throughout the day to accomplish both simple and complex tasks.
Basis by Centro is more than the color blue! It is the multi-color palette that digital agencies and marketers need. It’s the most robust DSP on the market, nestled inside a single system that provides unparalleled access to data across your entire digital media process. It’s powered with real-time and on-demand information that transforms into actionable intelligence about your client’s business – and your own. Recently ranked as the #1 DSP, according to user feedback on software review site G2 Crowd, Basis is wrapped around must-have features and benefits such as:
Want to unlock your ability to provide sticky, meaningful, and colorful masterpieces for your clients? Learn more about Basis on our website or email us at [email protected].
We continue to release product features, updates, and functionality within Basis to make your day-to-day campaign management more effective and efficient. This week, we introduced an important YouTube campaign enhancement, and we talked to the product guru behind the feature to get the inside scoop.
Let’s start with the basics. What is the YouTube Campaign Inclusion feature?
Good question. YouTube campaigns are now accessible to users that have Google AdWords credentials, which allows users to map YouTube ad campaigns to Basis line items. Historically, YouTube campaigns have not easily been included into the AdWords API. Given our focus on bringing all digital media buying into a single platform, our team felt it was important to build a creative solution to support this.
Awesome. How does it work?
Prior to this feature, users would have to manually download YouTube performance reports from AdWords and upload the performance report into Basis. This feature cuts down the manual work because YouTube campaigns are included as part of the list of ad campaigns associated with a user’s AdWords account. YouTube campaigns are quickly and easily linked as a delivery source to the corresponding line item.
Beyond reducing manual work, which is great, can you break down the other benefits for me?
Sure! There are five really great ones that come to mind:
Will this information be easy to find in Basis?
Once a user maps their YouTube campaign, all of the data is available in the same reports as AdWords data, and a user will see YouTube data in the analytics grid, daily delivery reports, performance reports, and creative performance reports.
Having all of this data in a unified place gives you unparalleled access to reporting across the entire digital media process. That ability to review and optimize across all buying methods and channels is invaluable when making campaign and business-level decisions. It means everyone – from digital ad buyers and media planners all the way up to leadership – is operating informed and in concert with the entire team.
How robust is the reporting data? For example, would it be good for day-to-day reporting or could I share this data with a client?
The YouTube data should be treated like data from any other source. How often you’d present data to a client depends on your client’s needs. This update doesn’t necessarily change how or why you’d share data with a client. It just makes the data easier to get into the platform – and makes your life a little easier.
To see this feature and more of the Basis platform in action, request a demo or email us at [email protected].
Did you know location-based ad spending will reach $32 billion by 2021?
While location-based ads aren’t a new concept in digital, this popular mobile advertising tactic continues to see growth, and there’s a good reason why. By combining heavy consumer phone usage with improved data collection and technology advancements, location advertising has opened up new advertising opportunities for marketers.
What better time than now to get up to speed on what location advertising is and how to keep pace with the opportunities? You’ve got questions, and we’ve got answers. Give us 45 minutes of your day, and we’ll give you:
WHAT: X Marks the Spot: How to Advance Your Location-Based Advertising Strategy
WHEN: Wednesday, March 21 @ 1:30 EST
WHERE: Register here!
Be sure to visit our Centro Institute Resource Center for more educational content, and learn more about the mobile advertising opportunity with Centro, here.
At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time consuming. To make that easier, we’ve compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy our latest list below!
This series of short articles explore the current and future impact of an increasingly visual internet through audio, video, and richer graphics. From memes to camera searches to voice-based interaction, how will consumers search, discover, and share as new tools become available to help them convey their thoughts, and find things they want or never knew they needed? And how can marketers keep up with consumer trends?
When your business is heavily dependent on another company, it’s often not a matter of if this spells trouble, but when. Online publisher Little Things, which focused on upbeat news content, learned this lesson as Facebook made changes to their news feed algorithm. With Facebook shifting from passive content toward more posts from friends and family, will this lead to more challenges for publishers who rely heavily on Facebook as a primary traffic source?
More and more major publishers are identifying new ways to use their site visitor data not only to help their editorial teams, but also to improve the consumer journey for brands they work with. The data ranges from declared audience data (primarily from registration information) to consumption data on the site. Many big publishers like Condé Nast, Meredith, and Hearst (featured in this article) are building out their content development practices, which could be viewed as competing directly with agencies, and building out their technology practices, which could be seen as competing with some players in the ad tech space.
This year, we’ll consume more content on the many screens available to us, but for the first time ever we’re starting to multiscreen less on our laptops. It may come as no surprise that smartphones win as the go-to second screen while watching TV – with 8.6% growth this year. Tablets will grow steadily at 3.9%, while laptops will see a decline for the first time at -0.4%. Cross-platform buys are still smart, but keep in mind that mobile reigns supreme when someone also has the big screen on.
Retailers have been traditionally product-driven, transaction-focused businesses, but industry disruption is occurring as some forward-thinking retailers deploy AI to power central decision-making, smarter merchandising, and marketing personalization at scale. Those who have seen success (the disruptors) have taken a pragmatic approach to breaking down their business problems, a targeted approach to solving specific aspects, and building upon both for greater overall impact. Start small, then move to larger problems. It may a bit early to call it a revolution, but the possibility for one is there.
Could the unchartered territory known as blockchain transform the way we conduct business for programmatic? The promise of greater transparency in both the supply chain and actual ad delivery sounds enticing, but could the potential challenges of scale, security, and lack of regulation present a new set of problems for the industry to address if widespread adoption did occur?
Robots are coming after you. The best case scenario is they take your job, and the slightly dystopian outlook is they destroy all the humans. Either way, our future looks bleak. Or does it? Read about the seven mistakes that lead to unwarranted fear (and misunderstanding) according to the former director of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT (not Centro’s MIT, but similarly prestigious).
New data from Kantar estimates that an impressive 45% of households in the U.S. (or 56.9 million homes) are paid Amazon Prime subscribers. What’s more, according to Feedvisor, 1/4 of Prime members make a purchase on Amazon at least twice per week, with nearly 1/3 of Prime members visiting the site on a daily basis.
March’s DIAL is also available as a PDF. Download it here!
Looking to improve digital media campaign performance for your clients? Need to consolidate your research and reporting tools to make sure you’re gathering up-to-date and vital campaign insights? Curious to know if your online media buying efforts are truly working? Then you’ve come to the right place. We’ve created two new features in Basis with these questions in mind: creative level reporting and expanded property/vendor cards.
How many times have you, as a digital media professional, found yourself searching for the answer to the age-old question “which of these ads are working?” You’ve spent a large portion of your budget on getting the creative designed and countless hours getting ad campaigns set up, but are the ads reaching the right people and are they pushing the right message? Understanding what’s performing helps you make informed and data-driven marketing decisions. And the answers lie with the creative.
But today, with the digital system set up the way it is, the vast amount of manual work required to report on creative campaigns and individual creatives could make your head spin. Most of the work is still done manually and requires logging into to each delivery source on a media plan – whether that’s DoubleClick, Facebook, Instagram, AdWords, the DSP, and or/Sizmek – and building, pulling, and exporting reports. Time is spent manually entering data, switching contexts to source information, and matching creative delivery data to complex and varying contract data by hand. The overall absence of accurate data or a structured, guided workflow significantly slows the process down. It’s clear as mud, basically.
Creative performance reporting on Basis handles all that time-consuming work for media analysts and planners, which helps speed up campaign optimization, eliminate mistakes, and free up time for strategic thinking and optimizations. More importantly, in Basis, you’ve got a complete picture of creative campaign data in one system. Once you understand how each creative is performing and which perform best, you can optimize for performance and clearly communicate expectations to clients.
Need some more reasons why the Creative Reporting tool will benefit your media planning – and your campaigns?
Since its release, Basis came complete with a curated directory of more than 9,000 vendors and 11,000 contacts. We built that feature so media buyers could quickly access contact information for properties during the negotiation and RFP process. But we’ve been perfecting the speeds and feeds since then, and we’re excited to announce that we’ve added some features to our property/vendor cards.
Our expanded cards give planners information across all the different channel offerings of a property, including crucial data points that help inform decision-making like:
What’s new to the Property Card?
What’s new to the Vendor Card?
For more information on how to make the most of this new feature, visit our website or email us at [email protected].
We received a lot of questions during our February Centro Institute webinar on private marketplaces. Because we wanted to keep this bite-sized PMP presentation under 45 minutes, we weren’t able to answer all of them, so we’ve enlisted our fearless speaker, Christine Kim, to answer questions on our blog:
Generally speaking, how do CPMs for private marketplaces compare to the open marketplace?
CPMs for PMPs do tend to be higher than the open marketplace. That’s because you’re getting more premium inventory with a PMP, and you already know the floor rate and where you need to start bidding for a chance to win inventory.
In the eyes of a programmatic buyer, will the adoption of ads.txt undermine the value of PMPs relative to the open exchange?
No, because ads.text does not impact how PMPs are bought for a buyer. Publishers will still set aside different types of inventory for PMPs – like first-party deals or special packages for high viewability or access to sections of their site that buyers may not be able to get in the open marketplace.
Today, ads.txt mostly impacts publishers and exchanges that show which inventory is being sold to an authorized re-seller. Why? Because, even though this wasn’t the original intent of PMPs, advertisers often used PMPs to ensure they were buying from an actual publisher. If you think of it in that way, ads.text makes PMPs redundant.
Does Basis have more than just web display inventory?
Yes, Basis has a lot of other inventory other than web display. We have a filter function within Basis where you can search by format – either display advertising or video – and you can search by device types. The device types available are desktop, phone, tablet, and connected TV. You can also filter by inventory type such as desktop web, mobile web, and mobile app.
Why not do a direct buy instead of a PMP buy?
You can do a direct buy if you want! It just depends on the strategy you are looking to implement for your client. We talked a bit about private marketplaces vs. direct buys on our blog earlier this month.
What is the difference between a PMP and an allowed list?
An Allowed list is considered a different tactic than a PMP. An allowed list is when a buyer will identify sites that have historically performed well and use those for either the same campaign or future campaigns.
You can select an allowed list tactic and apply that in the open marketplace. However, with a PMP, that inventory would not be coming from the open marketplace.
You mentioned geographic weather-based targeting. How does that work with PMPs?
Geographic weather trigger targeting is when ads are served based on the weather in the area you are targeting. These type of PMPs are provided by The Weather Company and AccuWeather. Because you cannot predict the weather, it’s often recommended this type of buy is also coupled with another tactic to help drive scale for your campaign.
Are there any additional landing page best practices that would be required with a private marketplace campaign? Do audiences have any special expectations when they are served ads on these channels?
How an ad is served and the experience a user has on the ad’s landing page are independent from one another. Audiences don’t know how ads are bought and wouldn’t be able to tell if an ad came from a PMP buy, so they do not have any special expectations when it comes to ads from PMP buys. So, there are no additional requirements that need to be made on a landing page.
Can you further explain the difference between programmatic guaranteed inventory and PMPs? Any particular preference for which is better or worse?
Sure! That main difference is that programmatic guaranteed offers guaranteed inventory – and PMPs do not. With a programmatic guaranteed buy, buyers agree beforehand that they will spend a certain amount.
With PMPs, you’re still operating in a RTB environment and you still have to bid against other buyers to win the inventory. And if you bid too low, you run the risk of not winning the inventory.
Is it possible to buy only viewable impressions with niche first- and third-party data targeting?
Basis has deals with viewability as high as 90%. However, combining that with first- and third-party data targeting is not recommended, because this will highly limit the scale of your campaign.
In terms of scalability, if I have an audience of 20,000 targets, does a PMP buy make sense?
It would depend on a number of factors, including your campaign geo, budget, flight dates, and creative, to name a few.
These all play a role in determining whether your campaign will be able to scale with a PMP. For example, if your geo is bigger and your flight date is longer, the possibility of that campaign delivering is higher.
For Latin America, do you have PMPs for TV?
We have Connected TV PMPs available for Latin America that were just implemented through Spot X.
For additional info on specific opportunities, Centro capabilities, or questions unanswered, please reach out to your Centro Account Lead.
Learn more about Programmatic Advertising with Centro.
‘Ask the Expert’ is a series that breaks down the tools, tech, and trends you’ve been hearing about in the trade pubs and around the office. We ask our in-house experts the tough questions and write up the answers in bite-sized pieces for your reading pleasure.
Last month, we explored header bidding. This month's topic? Connected TV. We brought in Heather Robertson, Centro's Director of Video, to give us the breakdown.
Connected TV is a television that's connected to the internet and facilitates the delivery of streaming video content. Ad placements run on Connected TVs are typically bought and sold more like digital video. We covered Connected TV during our October webinar.
Advanced TV is an umbrella term that encompasses Connected TV, Addressable TV, and Programmatic TV, all of which offer the opportunity to run ads on a TV screen and differ from traditional TV in unique ways. To keep it simple, all three are different from traditional TV technology and/or ad buying and selling methods.
We define Programmatic TV as an automated, data-driven method of planning and buying linear TV advertising. This can include TV spot placements within cable, satellite, and/or broadcast inventory.
Addressable TV is the ability to deliver targeted TV ads on a household-by-household basis via cable, satellite and telco set-top boxes. In theory, different households watching the same TV program could be served entirely different TV spots through the use of dynamic ad insertion.
The difference between these terms is confusing, because you can buy some Connected TV and Addressable TV inventory programmatically, and you could argue that targeting on Connected TV is addressable. Because of overlap with some of these terms, they often end up being used interchangeably, so it's important for media buyers, sellers, and advertisers to talk through definitions and ensure they're speaking the same language.
Yes, it's advised that ads are produced in high definition for connected TV, too.
This depends on the media seller's capabilities. In some cases you can, and in others, you can't. Because this is still a growing space, avoid limiting the potential scale of a Connected TV buy with these types of restrictions, unless there's a necessary reason to do so.
For example, if your ad promotes media or entertainment content that's only available on select Connected TV devices, it would be smart to avoid serving the ad on devices where the content can't be watched.
This also depends on the media seller's capabilities. In many cases, there are opportunities to buy based on app genre, like sports, news, entertainment, health and fitness, etc. In other cases, if you need to be very specific about which Connected TV apps your ad will show up on, it may be best to create a custom PMP or work directly with the app publisher.
This depends on the device type and manufacturer, so it can vary. Unfortunately, there's not a single standard across all device types or manufactures at this time.
According to eMarketer, in 2017, 17.1 million households are cord nevers, but future growth will be somewhat slow. It's expected that number will gradually increase, and about 19.5 million households will be cord nevers by 2021.
This can vary based on ad format, but assuming you're running in-stream video ads, we suggest utilizing VAST tags where possible to track standard digital video metrics like impressions, quartiles, and video completion rate.
Depending on where you'd like to run the interactive pre-roll ad, you'd have to work with Innovid or Brightline, the two primary developers responsible for producing these units for Connected TV placements. After finalizing the creative, you'd work with a digital partner, like Centro, to place and run the ads.
There are plenty of DSPs to choose from in ad tech. But we can speak to ours: DSPs like Basis give you access to video inventory that's both on-demand (VOD) and live. There are multiple video deals available in Basis, including AT&T, DirecTV NOW, and Dish, and video packages that can be inserted into live streams on all of the major TV stations, via Sling and DirecTV.
With this capability, you're able to reach non-traditional viewers streaming on their preferred device choice -- whether that's their phones, tablets, or Connected TVs. Luckily, Basis also comes with a full team of experts who are there every step of the way helping you create these video deals.
Interested in other Centro resources that will help you understand Connected TV? Reach out to [email protected]