Digital advertising and campaign management is fast-paced. From a digital media team's perspective, strategists, planners, and buyers need to be able make quick updates and modifications. But the amount of manual effort required to plan campaigns means it's often hard to find time to continuously evaluate campaign performance and optimize towards success. With one of the busiest seasons right around the corner for marketers, finding ways to create efficiencies, improve the digital media workflow, and utilize the right tools and techniques are crucial building blocks for campaign success.

Basis DSP's new productivity tool, Bulk Editor, lets you make multiple changes simultaneously, so you spend less time modifying campaign settings and spend more time focusing on campaign strategies. Instead of going into individual campaigns to adjust settings, Bulk Editor allows you to make changes at once, which helps to speed up campaign set-up and free up time for strategic thinking and optimizations:

• Do you need to adjust the budget of your campaigns or groups? In General Settings, you can change the spend settings for all of them at once. There is also the option to update the status, flight dates, advertiser settings (for groups), and CPM bid (for campaigns).
• Are your October campaigns going to be the same in November and you simply need to rename them? With Bulk Editor, retitling Campaign Names is easier than ever. Add a prefix, suffix, or try the unique “find and replace" option.
• Would you like to substitute the times and days your ads are being displayed? Requests to change campaign dates can come in unexpectedly and require immediate action. Quickly create different rules using the Day Parting control.
• Have you analyzed your geo report and noticed low performance coming from a particular state? Now you can exclude it entirely from more than one campaign at a time with the Locations option. You can also add or replace the geos your campaigns are targeting.

To learn more about Basis DSP, visit our website or email us at [email protected].

How do you determine the best demand side platform?

That's not an easy question to answer. Demand side platforms, or DSPs, are digital campaign management product software that provide advertisers features for buying ad placements online in real time. Determining the best one depends on who you ask, what problem they want to solve with a DSP, and how they evaluate success. Asking an analyst – who is basing their answer off a strict set of criteria, reports, and data – might yield a different opinion than an internet user on platforms like Quora or Reddit.

In order to eliminate bias and opinion, the better question to ask is: How do you determine the best demand side platform that exceeds user needs and the needs of their digital buying teams? And to measure that accurately and objectively, reviews from actual users should be gathered in aggregate based on a certain set of criteria, like how many people are using the software and how successful they are.

According to Forrester, 80% of B-to-B buyers seek a referral from their network and 74% conduct half of their research online before making an offline purchase. One popular and trusted tool for online research in the programmatic space is G2 Crowd, a review site for business technology. Every year, G2 Crowd collects, aggregates, and analyzes user reviews to produce their G2 Crowd Grid Reports. The Grid is developed from a combination of robust data science algorithms that pull in data points from product reviews shared by G2 Crowd users and data aggregated from online sources and social networks. Users ranking and reviewing DSPs are basing their criteria off a number of factors, including DSP functionality and ease-of-use, quality of support, and DSP features, workflow capabilities, and platform integrations. The highly anticipated report plays a critical role in the procurement process of thousands of software buyers globally, who use the Grid to help them quickly select the best DSP products for their businesses and to find peers with similar experiences.

The latest Grid Report for Demand Side Platform Software was released this month, and the report ranked the top 11 demand side platforms. G2 Crowd ranked the industry DSPs based on two measures: market presence and satisfaction. In other words, the very questions we're trying to answer: how many people use the software and how successful are they?

Basis DSP is The Leader in Demand Side Platform Software

Based on the chart above, you'll see the leaders category is populated with software solutions and tech companies that exceed client happiness in both market presence and satisfaction. Though Basis has some company in the top right quadrant, it also has the highest G2 Score (74) among the competition. Not only that, but 100% of users rated it 4 or 5 stars, 94% of users believe it is headed in the right direction, and 90% of users said they would be likely to recommend the product.

Basis also scored the highest for quality of support and ease-of-use, in addition to meeting the highest satisfaction ratings in several other categories.

If you take a look at the Net Promoter Scores (NPS), no other DSP scored half as high as Basis. What's NPS? The concept, discussed in a 2003 Harvard Business Review article, is designed to highlight the link between profitable growth and customer loyalty. After two years of research, HBR determined that, for most industries, the best indicator of customer loyalty could be measured by asking people how likely they would be to recommend a particular company to a friend or relative. So, a company's NPS is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.

Why does this matter? When you invest in a software solution, it's important to know the product will be there for the long haul – with regular updates, consistent and quick support, and the stability to deliver on its promise of growing your business and driving revenue.

Impacting the Future

Without our customers using and loving Basis, we wouldn't be able to celebrate this win. Customer success is the driving force behind our product and our continued innovation:

Read more of user Alicia R's review on G2 Crowd.

G2 Crowd's report also gives us an objective and honest look at where we can improve, how the competition stacks up, and what the digital marketplace looks like. But it also benefits potential buyers, allowing them to crowdsource information and hear from industry peers on what works for them, what doesn't, and why.

If you are in the market for a media buying solution, we encourage you to closely scrutinize the methodology and results. Download the report to read in-depth, and contact us at [email protected] to get a demo of Basis, the No. 1 demand side platform!

The rise of Connected TV has changed the way consumers watch and engage with content – and the way marketers can reach viewers who are spending less time with linear TV in favor of viewing on Internet-connected devices.

For our next 3Ton30 webinar, we’re going to explore how Connected TV, which combines the branding power of TV with the highly targeted capabilities of digital, has opened up new advertising opportunities for marketers.

Watch our webinar, The Connected TV Opportunity. In 45 minutes or less, Director of Video, Heather Robertson, discussed:

• What Connected TV is and the increase in device adoption
• Viewer insights, media habits, and viewership trends to help you reach audiences
• Advertising opportunities available and advantages for including in your video strategy
• What trends to watch and how to think about the future of TV targeting

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!

Why Amazon Is The New Google For Buying
Amazon Prime customers start their search for purchases at Amazon 100% of the time. With over 85 million Amazon Prime account holders, Amazon is hard at work creating products to reach buyers who are actively demonstrating high purchase intent. Amazon already offers a wide range of ad products from mobile and desktop display banners to dynamic ads and coupon ads, but there are big expectations for the growth of their global ads segment, which is already on track to generate close to $2B by end of 2017. What will this mean for the Google and Facebook duopoly?

The Digital Ad Industry is Officially Out of Ideas
What's old is new again, and the new push is for more display banner ads -- and bigger ones to boot. As we flashback to the last decade, how will creativity be saved in our increasingly data-driven, programmatic ecosystem?

Apple's Move to Kill Cookies Brings Plea From Six Major Trade Associations
Apple plans to limit cookies on the newest version of Safari through a feature called Intelligent Tracking Prevention. While cookies will still exist, they will be wiped of data after 24 hours instead of the standard 30. It should come as no surprise, but digital advertising regulative bodies are asking Apple to rethink the rule that is expected to go into effect later this month.

What Marketers Need to Know About Location-Based Advertising and Where It's Headed
Grab a seat and read this round table discussion about how some industry leaders think about the current state of location-based marketing, and, more importantly, what the future looks like for them and the industry.

Data Feeds Can Bridge The Digital Divide
It's easy to focus on the new and shiny objects in digital marketing when it feels like there's something new every day. However, customers want personalization, and that can be found by connecting offline data to online data.

Programmatic is Finally Figuring out the Basic Flaw in Ad Audiences
An unfortunate reality of programmatic is that buyers are often left in the dark about what type of auction they are bidding on. But now there is a shift for more programmatic platforms to step up and offer more transparency around auction mechanics

Spotify Launches Self-Serve Ad Studio, Enables Long-Tail To Create Three-Figure Professional Audio Campaigns 
Just as they helped music fans rethink the concept of a playlist, Spotify is helping advertisers of all sizes rethink the way their media can be bought. The release of their new self-serve audio advertising platform includes a tool to create audio ads with a professional voiceover. Self-serve has been all the rage with Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, and now Pinterest, not to be outdone by their social peers, has launched their self-serve platform for Promoted Pins. So much power, so many new platforms to manage.

Pinterest Is Offering Brands Its Visual Search Technology to Score Large Ad Deals
Target, one of Pinterest's earliest advertisers, has deepened the partnership with plans to leverage the platform's visual search tech in their sites and app. In exchange, and in an effort to get smarter about how they merchandise their products, the retailer will gain access to insights about how consumers use Pinterest.

Infographic: Shoppable Media Is Transforming How Consumers Find and Then Buy Products
As the traditional path-to-purchase collapses the active and passive stages, shoppable media has made it not only about finding the right person at the right time, but also in the right experience.

Nearly Half of Millennials and Gen Xers Don't Watch Traditional TV: Study
Did you know that half of adults between the ages 22-45 are not watching TV in traditional platforms? They are watching TV content, but they're streaming it on their tablets or through OTT devices like Apple TV.

Smart Speakers: Why Marketers Need to Listen Now 
According to a recent report from NPR and Edison Research, only 7% of the U.S. population owns a smart speaker. This number is expected to rise, and according to the research, folks who do have a smart speaker are using them in ways that marketers should start to consider.

October's DIAL is also available as a PDF. Download it here.

For a media buyer, the digital work doesn't end once a campaign is up and running. The launch is just the beginning, and if you adopt a “set it and forget it" approach, even the best strategies and tactics can translate to wasted money or missed opportunities.

Staying on top of optimizations is crucial to campaign performance, but for many buyers, it can be a struggle. Optimization, at its most basic definition, means to make something as good as possible. But in programmatic it means utilizing data to identify and modify campaigns towards the highest possible performance.

Campaign optimization should be top of mind every time you set up and launch digital campaigns. So, we've rounded up five things to consider before launching your next one:

1. Define a single KPI. Set clear and specific goals for every campaign you create. For example, if the campaign objective is to drive conversions, then optimize the campaign toward conversions and not the lowest eCPM. The KPI will tell you which metric you need to optimize against.
2. Identify what can be modified upfront. Depending on the situation and advertiser, certain campaigns may be more restrictive than others. This impacts the amount or frequency of changes you can make. In general, these changes can be categorized into three main buckets:
   • Scope: Changes to geo target, devices, exchanges, ads,
     day and time
   • Audiences: Changes to first or third-party audiences, as
     well as frequency caps
   • Price: Changes
     to CPM bid of the whole campaign or a sub target within it
3. Don't make too many changes at once and record all the changes you do make. Avoid adding a new exchange, creative, or increasing the bid of your campaign all in one day. Why? If you make too many changes at once, you won't know which optimization made the difference. Have you ever tried so many new hair products at once that you can't figure out which product is making your hair look so fabulous? Bet you didn't think programmatic could be compared to hair products. But, it leads me to my next point …
4. Measure the impact of every change. Before making an optimization, think about the short-term impact. Do you expect CTR to go up 0.02% by removing an ad? Do you expect overall campaign performance to increase if you remove a placement or domain? Having a measurable and timed goal for each optimization will help you determine if you're making the right decisions for campaigns.
5. Accrue enough data to make educated and statistically-sound decisions. How can you determine how much data is enough data? That's tricky, because it depends on budgets and flights. A general rule of thumb is 10,000 impressions per tactic. However, this may not be a realistic benchmark if you have a smaller budget. In those cases, we recommend aligning the impression value to the monthly tactical budget. For example, using 1,000 impressions per tactic as a benchmark for a $1,000/month per-tactic campaign.

Post-launch, always revisit live campaigns to apply one – or all – of the above tactics. And keep in mind that as digital media evolves, so too do the tech, tools, and solutions that are available to us. Meaning technology today can sometimes do most of the optimization heavy lifting – for example, algorithmic optimization.

For more information on DSP technology or on Basis, visit our website, reach out to your Centro representative, or email [email protected].

We're back from a trip to the Mile High City, where the 2017 Ibotta Mobile Innovation Summit has concluded. We spent the week connecting with some of the brightest minds in digital, discussing the state of mobile marketing, how to identify innovation opportunities, and the impact digital has had on CPG and retail advertising.

The event, held in downtown Denver, was jam-packed with keynote speeches, panel discussions, digital insights, and best practices for attendees to take back to their jobs.

Our CEO Shawn Riegsecker spoke on a panel and discussed the challenges the digital industry faces as ad dollars shift from TV to digital.

“We are witnessing and going through the greatest disruption the advertising and marketing industry has ever seen," Shawn noted, as the group spoke about how to reach valid consumers, measure ad effectiveness, and bridge the gap between online and offline behavior.

Panelists agreed ad dollars haven't shifted to digital quickly enough – even though all data suggests that's where consumers are and, in an ideal world, marketers determining the right TV/digital split would follow the customer. But it's no secret that digital is a very fragmented space and brings its own unique set of challenges, which has slowed the digital ad spend progression.

Several factors come into play when you begin to explore the reasons behind this. Quite a few theories were debated at this panel, including the demographics of people controlling the mid-market ad budgets. They're the same people who are still watching TV and consider it the most valuable medium.

Another piece of it? The forecasting models and techniques determining the right marketing mix aren't able to keep up and meet the current demands of this fast-moving industry. Asking a company to uproot what's been historically working – but maybe not working as well today – is an enormous request and a huge undertaking.

Consumers are also everywhere these days. Cross-device is the new norm, and that hinders some marketers ability to gather accurate data on where customers are, what devices they're using, what actions they're taking platforms, or whether they're multi-tasking. To make matters more complicated, if a brand works with a digital vendor or a “walled garden" like Facebook or Google, there's a lack of transparency and insight into the data they are able to gather. Brands are spending money on the audiences and getting the performance data, but they don't own the data.

From a brand marketing perspective, it was argued that the onus is on digital partners to prove they can provide the same scale and reach that TV provides.

Which begs the question: Will programmatic TV capabilities help marketers and brands transition to digital ad spend? After all, it combines the broad reach of TV with the highly targeted capabilities of digital.

Certainly, brand marketers argued, programmatic allows for better measurement of traditional business objectives – like ROI and ROAS – so it gives marketers the intelligence they need to determine if they're making an impact or driving sales.

Others on the panel argued that it's the wrong question to be asking, and that we're thinking and talking about digital in the wrong way. Their thinking was that as all the mediums begin to blend together in the next few years, TV just becomes another video touchpoint to consider.

Instead of brands beginning their planning with what has traditionally worked (TV) and allocating the remaining budget to digital, or instead of agencies just repeating tactics that worked last year or last quarter, it's time to infuse innovation into digital strategies.

The question isn't how do you split digital ad spend and TV ad spend. The question is what mix and what strategies create a more impactful ad?

Think about what will meet business goals. Think about how TV spots could be improved if they resembled the interactivity of digital and social media ads. Or how digital could be improved to allow more time for brand stories to be told. How can we get smarter at the individual targeting level – no matter the medium? What can be done to segment audiences properly and interject more creativity? Are we sitting on top of enough data and intelligence to identify solutions? How can we come at advertising with a better targeting perspective for each platform?

At the beginning of the discussion, the moderator asked the panelists to adopt baseball terminology and describe what inning the digital industry is in. Most everyone seemed to decide (perhaps optimistically) that we're in the 2^nd or the 3^rd inning. After diving into the considerations, debates, and issues at play, it sounds like we're in the top of the 1^st inning – bringing a world of opportunity to the plate for digital brands and marketers.

Technology has been changing the way we work and live for decades now, and the digital industry and digital media buying is not exempt from explosive technology evolutions.

You only have to go back to 1986, when ACT!, a contact and customer management company, introduced the first database marketing software to the business world. It was essentially a digital rolodex – except it stored large volumes of customer contact information. Even in the 80s, the power and inherent value of customer data for marketing and advertising purposes was evident.

Fast forward 30 years and where has that wealth of customer data gotten us? The prospect of customer analytics and insights colliding with ad tech and technology solutions – and the opportunities that would open up for programmatic.

Programmatic has come a long way in the last decade – evolving from direct response and remnant inventory to brand campaigns and the majority of premium online publishers offering programmatic services. The complexity warrants its own glossary. But programmatic, as it's defined today, isn't doing enough. Programmatic today means a top-ranked DSP that allows you to buy in an RTB, private marketplace, or private deal format.

That sounds great, right? Until you start to realize how many features and functions are missing in DSPs that don't allow for critical pieces of the business to run. If we really want to innovate, then what should the new DSP model be? What does the DSP of the future look like?

The terms “demand side platform" or “DSP" are often associated with outdated definitions of key capabilities and components. Traditionally, a DSP is defined as an automated buying perform where advertisers and agencies go to purchase digital ad inventory.

But DSPs need to evolve into intelligence and strategy tools that are both man and machine.

It isn't all about the machine. People are still the most important agency resource. In advertising, the skills required of people today are totally different from what they used to be, while the pressure from clients to deliver is skyrocketing.

But pairing technology and people will be the crux of advertising success in the future. When individuals can focus on taking insights and creating strategic, actionable marketing, it empowers them to make an impact on business outcomes

How can we empower them? It starts with the right technology.

The future DSP will take a performance-driven approach to digital. Imagine an advanced platform that unifies direct and digital media buying with a business ecosystem through a single entry point, creating a holistic view of the digital media business. Imagine automation across your entire digital media business, for all the significant pieces that matter most: workflow automation, vendor organization and relationship management, communication, RFP and negotiation storage and tracking, 1^st and 3^rd-party integration, robust analytics and reporting, and business intelligence for the entire organization -- all the way down to finance and media buying reconciliation.

With the sophistication of this type of technology, strategists and digital media employees no longer need to determine what to buy – but instead what strategy will get the best performing results for every media dollar.

Remember when mobile advertising arrived on the scene? Back then, there were mobile companies, mobile agencies, and mobile ad networks. Today, mobile equates to simply digital. The same will happen with programmatic. In the very near future, there will be no distinction between biddable, direct, search and social. There will not be a need for separate programmatic teams, or functions, or departments, or trading desks. If you're a digital media strategist or media buyer, you won't be working with another programmatic team. You'll be buying programmatic media – all media types, across all channels – through the same software as you're executing everything else.

Soon, programmatic will equate to simply digital.

And if you believe software can help you do more, accomplish more, create a better media industry, and produce the best results for your clients, this is the programmatic platform you should be pushing for.

This is programmatic for the future.

For more information on Basis Platform, request a demo or email us at [email protected].

Retail's busiest season is right around the corner, so it's time to make a digital strategy list – and check it twice. Whether you're a retailer looking to reach your customers, or a buyer ready to launch a successful ad campaign, we're here to be your holiday helpers. For our next webinar, we're going to unwrap five key retail strategies to help you launch a successful holiday campaign and reach your customers in-store and online this shopping season.

Join us and Centro's Director of Media Strategy & Operations, Jared Rosenbloom, on Wednesday, September 20, as he helps you map out a digital strategy:

• Key lessons from the 2016 holiday retail season
• Capturing customer attention as the path-to-purchase evolves
• Innovations in digital that offer new opportunities for brands to engage with customers
• How to use technology, targeting, and personalized experiences to measure campaign success and brand loyalty

Coming in October, we'll be launching Algorithmic Optimization, an efficiency tool that makes automated bid adjustments to the best performing placements of your campaigns. The feature streamlines inventory analysis and fine-tuning to generate better outcomes, allowing you to focus more on business objectives.

We created this feature with media buyers in mind, to save valuable hours in their day. Every 12 hours, campaign goals are analyzed, budgets are better distributed, and placements are optimized toward relevant KPIs.

The initial feedback from a buyer test-driving Basis' Algorithmic Optimization feature was: “I have a campaign that requires a $10 video CPM to run on only one video exchange. The client also wanted a completion rate between 65%-70%. No matter how frequent or aggressive my manual optimizations were, I couldn't get above a 62% completion rate. Once I added the new optimization feature, the completion rate grew higher and higher every day. The campaign ends in a couple of days and is currently at a 75% completion rate!"

Need some more reasons why the Algorithmic Optimization tool will benefit you?

• Better outcomes and campaign performance: You can choose from five options to optimize against: CTR, CPC, CPA, CPCV, and VCR. The best performing inventory is rewarded, while the low achievers are re-evaluated. As a result, bid adjustments are made on each placement based on the performance of the inventory.

• More control over your campaigns: Leverage your expertise to assist the optimizer tool through the advanced optimization settings.
• Full transparency: All modifications and changes are captured in real-time in the campaign grid for your review.

Register for our upcoming September webinar to learn how to make Algorithmic Optimization work for you and to get a sneak peek at some other upcoming Basis features.