When an international hot sauce brand decided to launch a social media campaign with some kick, it turned to Centro. The brand was looking to build a stronger social following among U.S. consumers that it could target with promotional content, and the key platform was Twitter.

Centro's digital strategy gave this social campaign the zest it needed. Here's what happened in just one month:

• Almost 8,500 new followers to the brand's Twitter account -- nearly 5x the CPG benchmark
• Improved the cost-per-follower by 45% -- resulting in a CPF 3x more efficient than social benchmarks in the industry

To read more about how Centro reached this social audience and drove engagement, download our case study.

A national healthcare network, with over 80 hospitals and 110 urgent care clinics nationwide, needed to centralize its online efforts and improve visibility across regions and service lines. The network, with hundreds of disconnected and decentralized online appointment hubs, decided to drive consumers to a single-service portal for all appointment scheduling, but needed a way to alert consumers to this change.

That's where Centro came in. Due to our vast digital expertise, we were able to educate the client on best practices for successful digital campaigns.

And the results speak for themselves:

• Over 140 million impressions were delivered, accompanied by 418,000 clicks -- a CTR of 3%.
• Over 1,000 booked online appointments at various hospital locations

To read more about how we executed this campaign, download our case study.

When a Fortune 500 retailer needed to build a social campaign for a major sales event, it turned to Centro for help. With the event quickly approaching, the company needed a digital partner to increase brand awareness, drive sales for company-wide inventory, and achieve an ambitious ROAS.

The results of the campaign?

• Over 50,000 likes throughout the entire run
• More than $1.6 million in online sales during the two-week sale period
• 5.8x ROAS

To read more about our digital strategy and how we achieved this, download our case study to read more.

When a small private college decided that its digital media strategy wasn't making the grade, it sought a new digital partner with a fresh perspective. Centro's digital experts got right to work building a plan, and in three short months, the client experienced:

• A 67% increase in site traffic
• 7x the expected application pipeline
• 36% savings in cost-per-application
• 42% increase in total enrollment

To find out how we achieved such a great report card, download our case study to read more.

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!

Vibes' 2017 Mobile Consumer Report: The Mobile/Brand Engagement Revolution
Vibes put together over twenty pages of mobile goodness in its 4^th annual report. The report highlights consumer perceptions and preferences and offers insights into how they want to interact with brands via chatbots, texts on their phones, their mobile wallet, push notifications, apps and more.

4 Ways to Save the Mobile Ad Experience
In the time of clickbait headlines, brands and agencies are looking to take action to improve the mobile experience for consumers with these four pieces of advice. Click now!

Foursquare Unleashes Location Data Dashboard for Retailers and Brands
Foursquare has been working with major retail players to test Foursquare Analytics, a newly released measurement tool that packages the company's web dashboard into 93 million mapped locations. Insights from the tool can show what times people visit locations, how often, and how a retailer -- or other commonly visited POI -- stacks up against competitors in a similar retail category.

Apple App, 'Clips,' Joins Mobile Video Fray, Competing With Snapchat
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Snapchat must be feeling very flattered. Apple is encroaching on Snapchat's territory with the release of Clips, an app that enables video message sharing with more animation enhancements (speech bubbles and full-screen animated posters FTW). While the position Apple ultimately takes to threaten the share of Snapchat has yet to be seen, the popularity of Instagram Stories, and the release of Facebook Stories, gives reason for Snapchat to take note.

Twitter Extends Pre-Roll Ads to Include Periscope Video
In an effort to boost revenue, Twitter, the beleaguered social platform, announced it will start selling pre-roll ads against Periscope video.

Amazon Raises Ad Stakes With Video Advertising
I stream, you stream, we all stream for outstream. Just announced: Amazon Video Ads is an outstream video product that runs exclusively on Amazon's platform, and follows MRC and IAB guidelines for viewability.

Google's New Machine Learning API Recognizes Objects in Videos
Google has launched a new machine learning API that automatically recognizes objects in videos, outputs metadata, and makes them searchable. No April Fools' Day jokes here.

Pinterest/Samsung Partnership Has Everything to Do With Google Search
Imagine using your shiny new Galaxy S8 smartphone to take a picture and be able to instantly view related products or design ideas from Pinterest. This is a new reality: Pinterest visual search technology is powering Samsung's image search in their new Galaxy S8 smartphone and Bixby, their AI assistant. No additional app required.

April's DIAL is also available as a PDF. Download here!

Think about video ads. What comes to mind? Probably YouTube videos. But video ads can be found anywhere on the web.

Video ads are typically found pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll. In other words: before, during, or after the video content plays. This type of video ad space is referred to as instream.

But there's another, and less common, type of video placement and it's called outstream.

Have you ever noticed those videos that start playing as you're reading an article or a blog post? There's no sound, but as you're scrolling through the page, you notice the video starts rolling? Those video ad spaces are known as outstream placements. Unlike instream ads, outstream ads don't require a video player present on the publisher's site for the ads to exist. Instead, they are inserted into traditional display ad spaces.

Since the ad is served outside of a traditional video player, there are some benefits to marketers including outstream ads in their media plans. Because the video is integrated in the content, outstream videos tend to have higher viewability and click through rates. It even has the potential of being 100% viewable by the user, making it a great tool for brand awareness. Not to mention -- outstream placements provide advertisers with access to video impressions in premium inventory.

Even publishers can reap the rewards of outstream. Without needing video player space, more inventory can be offered by publishers – meaning, more revenue for them and more opportunity for available inventory for the advertiser. In other words, win-win!

Could outstream become the new mainstream? We're ready to find out. Soon we'll be offering a new feature in Centro DSP which will allow users to select outstream placements in their video campaigns. This new feature will provide an abundance of new inventory for video placements and more robust targeting for video ads.

For more information on how to make the most of this new feature, please join us for a webinar on April 20^th at 1 PM (CST). You can register here.

For more information on DSP technology or on Centro DSP, visit our website or email [email protected].

 

 

In order to understand campaign performance, make recommendations for future investment opportunities, and better optimize for success, it's important to craft a compelling campaign story that tells you what metrics you should be hitting.

One way to develop a story is to set up conversion tracking pixels. To get a better sense of where you should set up conversion tracking pixels, follow these three steps:

1. Look at the website
2. Determine what the path to purchase could be
3. Recommend and implement a smart strategy

Following the steps above can often mean you're recommending more than one pixel to get a better understanding of the customer's journey on the website. But tracking all of those conversions can get confusing, and that's why we developed a feature in Centro DSP that lets you label the most important conversion when you are setting up your campaigns.

It's called Primary Conversions, and it will be released later this month. It will allow you to set one of the conversion pixels as your primary conversion. Once you do so, you'll be able to see additional stats related to that pixel in six different UI grids of Centro DSP – group, campaign, sites, ads, exchange reporting, hourly reporting, and daily reporting.

Setting a conversion pixel as the primary pixel is easy: simply check the 'enable primary conversions' box, and then select the pixel you want to make the primary.

For media buyers working on multiple campaigns with multiple conversion pixels, this will provide a streamlined view of your most important conversions events. Additionally, this allows for faster optimizations, because you can quickly see in Centro DSP which conversions pixels you want to optimize your campaign to.

For more information on DSP technology or on Centro DSP, visit our website or email [email protected].

Recently, the second-largest chemical manufacturer in the world faced a branding challenge. The goal was to spike brand awareness among thought leaders, and then arm them to position the brand as a premier solutions-based chemical and product company.

The company needed to find the right place for its ads, so that the desired audience would actually see their content. Yet without access to proper research, tools, and data, developing a solid strategy and verifying its effectiveness proved more difficult than expected.

That's when the company discovered Centro and reached out to fill the gaps in its digital content strategy.

Download our case study to read more.

Centro is redefining programmatic. We unveiled Centro Platform at AdExchanger's Programmatic IO conference. Watch the full presentation here.