"Programmatic buyers on the open exchange who think they’re purchasing inventory from ESPN or The New York Times often end up buying from imposter sites instead."

Centro's Ian Trider is part of the IAB group that's creating this solution to fight domain spoofing. Read more in AdExchanger.

What's the deal with fake news anyway? It's become the latest hot topic – especially in the online media industry.

Fake news goes beyond the tabloids you see in line at the grocery store or the funny articles you read in The Onion. It is defined as deliberately published hoaxes, propaganda, and misinformation, masquerading as real news – and often social media is utilized to drive web traffic to amplify the effect for financial or political gain. This spread of false information has presented real problems across several industries in the online ecosystem.

So, as an advertiser, how can you avoid your ads being placed near fake news stories or on websites that carry fake news and perpetuate the cycle?

This all comes back to the idea of brand safety. As we discussed on our blog in March, brand safety is relative to the brand in question. What one company considers brand safe may not be considered brand safe for another company. Whether you are an advertiser, an agency, or a company that handles their own advertising, it's important to establish what you determine to be brand safe and what you do not.

While fake news may seem like it's all over the internet, there are ways to combat it through digital media technology and Centro DSP specifically. We are committed to ensuring your standards of brand safety are met, through a multitude of ways:

Allowed list capabilities: Handpick and target sites and apps that contain approved content. This is recommended for advertisers who have run previous campaigns and have an understanding of which sites and apps work best for them.

Block list capabilities: Select specific sites that you know may not be brand safe or contain a prominent amount of fake news, and choose not to run your campaigns on those sites.

Third-party technology partnerships: Centro DSP partners such as DoubleVerify can scan pages to make sure advertising runs on appropriate content. DoubleVerify specifically has a brand protection segment called “Inflammatory Politics & News (Fake News)."

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

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!

What in the World Is Causing the Retail Meltdown of 2017?
While overall retail spend continues to grow steadily, hundreds of shops and malls are shuttering. But several trends — including the rise of e-commerce, the over-supply of malls, and the surprising effects of a restaurant renaissance — have conspired to change the face of American shopping.

Amazon Will Stream NFL's Thursday Night Games
The NFL has reached an estimated $50 million agreement with Amazon for Amazon Prime customers to stream 10 “Thursday Night Football" games. Will this be a touchdown for both the NFL, who has faced declining ratings in recent years, and for Amazon, who continues to invest in content to grow and retain their user base?

Instagram's Growth Speeds Up as it Hits 700 Million Users
Instagram has doubled its user base, to 700 million monthly actives in two years, fueled by Stories and an improved desktop web experience. While it's now twice the size of Twitter and on pace to be double the size of Snapchat (375 million), it's still shy of the billion user club that includes Facebook (1.8 billion) and WhatsApp (1.2 billion). Also, important to note that Instagram has over 1 million active advertisers, and has plans to add more data, targeting, and measurement.

Desktop and Mobile Ad Revenue Surpasses TV for the First Time
The IAB/PwC's 2016 Internet Advertising Revenue Full-Year Report was released, and it recognizes some impressive growth numbers for the industry. Digital advertising pulled in $72.5 billion revenue in 2016, a 22% upswing from the previous year, surpassing TV's $71.3 billion. Mobile took the lead over desktop – accounting for roughly 51%, or about $36.6 billion, of all digital ad revenue reported in 2016.

Mark Zuckerberg Just Signed the Death Warrant for the Smartphone
At this year's F8 conference, Zuck doubled down on the company's ambitious 10-year master plan, where Facebook plans to turn artificial intelligence, ubiquitous internet connectivity, and virtual and augmented reality into viable parts of its business over the next decade.

Google Home Solves Major Flaw for Advertisers
Google is looking to solve for a flaw that many advertisers have seen in the smart home advertising: The device's inability to separate voice queries for the various people in a single household. Google is now offering the ability to identify up to six different Google accounts in a single household that will enable advertisers to attribute voice searches to specific users of the home.

Creating a More Human Conversational UX
With voice assistants liked Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Google Assistant rapidly growing, brands need to learn how to craft conversations that feel natural and authentic. This article discusses three critical concepts in mastering the art of humanizing these conversations.

Neuroscience Says Listening to This Song Reduces Anxiety by Up to 65 Percent
In collaboration with sound therapists and a UK instrumental group, “Weightless" incorporates carefully arranged harmonies, rhythms, and bass lines to help slow a listener's heart rate, reduce blood pressure, and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. And for everyone working in this industry, I'd highly recommend you follow the Spotify playlist of the Top 10 Most Relaxing Songs.

May’s DIAL is also available as a PDF. Download here!

We received a lot of questions during our April 3T paid social webinar. Because we like to keep these bite-sized presentations under 45 minutes, we were unable to answer them all, so we've enlisted our fearless speaker, Amy Rumpler, to answer them on our blog.

How do you improve on your relevance score for Facebook ads?

Since the relevance score is based on the amount of positive or negative feedback your ads receive, you want to minimize the amount of times someone hides your ad. A few easy ways to address this issue:

• Check your ad's targeting: Make sure you're being specific enough with your audience, and that the message you're serving them is relevant to that target.
• Check the ad's image and message: Follow best practices outlined by Facebook (minimal text; utilize the real estate around the ad to explain any offers, features, or benefits you're selling; avoid anything that might be offensive).
• Consider rotating in multiple creative options if your audience reach is small, to reduce ad wear-out and over-saturation of one piece of creative. (Another advantage to this is Facebook will then optimize your campaign against the ads in rotation, serving the more relevant ones more often and the less relevant ones less often.)
• Test new images, headlines, and other copy to see what connects best with your target audience.

What's your opinion on the new 'Snap-to-Store' Snapchat feature that will be able to tie ad vies to in-store visits/purchase? Will that be compelling enough for advertisers to jump on board with a clearer path or track ROI in place?

I certainly hope so, but it's unproven at this point. What we do know is that Snapchat has good offerings already tied to local events and activation (like their filters and lenses), and they can use ambient Wi-Fi, beacons, and other data (check-ins and posts) to know within a reasonable doubt when someone is in-location. Unfortunately for Snapchat, so does Facebook. And Facebook still wins in terms of scale, reach, data implantation, ad products available, etc. Not to mention that Instagram (owned by Facebook) is offering Instagram Stories as a direct competitor to these Snap Ads. I think for the right advertiser looking specifically for that younger audience, it may make sense. But for the vast majority of advertisers, they'll continue to lean toward Facebook/Instagram for ROI.

Are you able to order campaigns with a certain number of impressions on Facebook? How about the other platforms?

Ads are purchased in a real-time bidding environment, like a lot of programmatic exchanges. So, you bid for ad space/inventory based on how much you're willing to pay for impressions. You can usually back into a projection of about how many people you expect to reach, and based on average frequency for how often the ads are served, determine a benchmark for expected impressions. It's not a guarantee, however, that you'll receive those impressions. A lot of other factors are at play, such as:

• How large is the audience you're trying to reach? When you layer on geography, demo, age, gender, or interest targeting, how does that affect your audience pool?
• How are you optimizing who your ads are served to? Do you want maximum reach, or are you only looking for people likely to remember your ads or attend your event?
• How relevant are your ads? If they're not connecting well with your target audience, Facebook will prioritize serving other ads over yours, through their auction algorithm.

With Instagram, how are people getting so many followers with only a few posts?

It depends! Ads could be the cause. You can still pay for additional page likes. There are other not-so-reputable sources and programs people use to buy fake page likes, too. I've even heard of people following pages of influencers and other bigger brands in their space – actively commenting and participating in engaging with their content – as a means to piggy-back on their community and attract followers. I do think in these cases, it's hard to keep those followers. I encourage you to think beyond followers/likes and look toward “harder" metrics as evidence of how pages are performing (and ads) to drive business – things like engagement rate, clicks on links, conversions, or ad recall, to name a few.

With Facebook ads, I usually just have them pick the bid automatically. Is that a best practice?

Sure! It's where most of us start. The advantage in doing so is that you let Facebook optimize the rate you're paying in the auction based on the type of ad you're buying, targeting you set, etc. Theoretically, Facebook will give you the best value they think they can.

But: As your campaigns progress and you start to get a better idea of what you think you should be paying for a CPM or a click or a lead generated, I'd encourage you to test manual bidding, too. With a little experimenting, it's definitely possible to drive just as efficient of results at a lower cost.

When talking about optimizing a post and submitting a bid, is that different than just boosting a post? If so, how?

Yes. Boosted posts are the most basic forms of advertising you can run on Facebook. They take content from your Facebook page (something you posted organically) and amplify it to a specific audience (reaching more of your current page fans, or an additional audience). The goal with those posts is usually just to get more people engaging with your content.

Facebook's ad products are more advanced, and allow you to tailor the ad content to a very specific audience – and they're designed to meet your specific campaign goal. They do not appear in your page's news feed at all. The auction we referred to and bidding types that are available (CPM, CPC, optimized bids) are used in the ad auction. Boosted posts are priced on reach – and how much you're willing to pay to have more people see your content.

Can you talk about your approach to promoted posts vs. paid ads and when to use them?

I think promoted posts are a good place to start if you've never spent money on social before. Boosting or promoting posts is very simple. You use content you've already organically posted to your page, and put paid spend behind it to increase the reach of that content – either to people already following your page or to another targeted audience. Promoted posts are useful when promoting short-lived events, for high-funnel awareness, or to grow engagement with your content.

Ads, on the other hand, are more complicated and more feature-full. To name a few benefits: We have many more targeting options available through the ad placement process, and you can custom design the creative to help drive toward your goal (for example containing clear call-to-action buttons to drive to a website; featuring multiple products/offers/images in a carousel format; or generating specific outcomes like downloads of a whitepaper, purchases, ticket sales, lead generation, form completions, etc.).

Ads also give you more options in terms of bidding optimization (paying for the specific outcome you want). Paid ads are where you probably want to go for campaigns that require certain outcomes, budgets, targeting strategies, or creative control.

What is the best way to gauge how much money you should be spending on a FB ad?

Work backwards based on the outcome you're trying to achieve. Set clear goals and be realistic about what success looks like to you. If your goal is to drive 1,000 sales or 10,000 clicks, understand that your budget is going to have to support that effort. If you want to test 10 different targeting tactics, you need enough budget allocated to each ad set to collect effective results. At the same time, understand that you have to start somewhere. You can always test, turn off what isn't working, and scale what is – growing the budget as you go.

With Facebook, it's a safe bet to use their automatic bid setting initially to get an idea of what your CPM or CPC should be coming in at, and then manually adjust from there. When you select the manual bid option within the Facebook platform, they'll recommend a range they think you should bid within to be competitive, based on the length of your campaign, your overall or daily lifetime budget, and the audience target parameters you've selected. And as a side note, Facebook requires your daily budget to be 5 times your bid rate. So if you bid $4 a click, factor on spending a minimum of $20 a day.

At Centro, before recommending a budget to our clients, we start by clearly outlining the campaign objectives, flight dates, and tactical plan. Then we test the audience size available in that target set – to make sure our budget recommendation is aligned appropriately.

Can you talk about the methods you use to estimate ad performance prior to launch?

We regularly log in and test audience size by creating a test campaign that is not activated. You can build out “fake" ad sets and vary the geographical area, demo targeting, or interests you layer on to see how your audience availability is affected.

Once we know about what our daily reach potential is, we can use an estimate of ad frequency to calculate impressions. Due to the high-volume of campaigns we run on behalf of our clients, we also have access to historical campaign performance data that breaks down by client vertical, by ad objective, and by creative type. Our team uses all of those past performance metrics to help indicate what our CTR, CPC, CPA, etc. should be.

The best way for agencies or companies just getting started to establish those same kinds of benchmarks for your campaigns is to test. Once you get started, track performance across each campaign you run, and use that data to help optimize future campaigns.

When talking about KPIs, how do you measure brand effect or ad familiarity?

Facebook has an algorithm that calculates it for you. They utilize metrics like number of people your ad reached, time spent with the ad (dwell time), and historical information from over 300 Nielsen brand studies that indicate the types of ads people are likely to remember.

You can also look like metrics like Ad Relevance, and the amount of positive/negative feedback your ads are receiving to measure how well they're connecting with your target audience.

What creative do you recommend to use on Instagram in order to get the most user engagement? I have found that it's difficult to get users to engage with posts because Instagram is such a scroll-heavy platform.

Any kind of video! Seriously, if you're not using videos, you should be. And they don't have to be complicated or overly produced. There's a great example I like to share from Inspiralizer, who used the Boomerang app to show one of their spiralizers turning a sweet potato into cool spirals. It was simple to produce, but highly engaging, and it linked directly to their website where you can buy the product.

Is it possible to over-saturate your social audience with ads, especially if you are targeting to one specific geographic area?

Definitely! Ad wear-out is a very real thing. You can avoid wear-out by running a few different versions of your ad creative concurrently, and rotating in new creative from time to time (monitor your results and be aware of drop-off in response).

Also consider mixing things up with a full-funnel objective strategy. For example, a brand awareness campaign that is “always on" and a website traffic or video views strategy to promote specific events/promotions.

For some of the Instagram ad options: Do you need to build and set up within Instagram instead of Ad Manager for Facebook?

No. All Instagram advertising is now managed through the Facebook Ads Platform (Ad Manager or Power Editor).

Any tips on how can I leverage Facebook platform to generate leads effectively?

The best ad options for this goal are typically conversions ads (driving to your website) or lead ads. Lead ads let you collect lead information directly within the platform without having to click off-site. They can be highly effective for businesses with non-mobile-optimized or non-user-friendly websites.

There are also lots of great targeting tactics that can be used effectively to drive additional lead generation, such as retargeting people who have visited your site but didn't fill out the form; people who opened your lead ad but did not complete the form; or conversion look-a-likes, which can reach people who are similar to people who have filled out your form previously.

Does Instagram's shoppable/tagged product feature potentially take away some of those same buyable pin ad dollars from Pinterest? Or will advertisers focus more on direct targeting on Instagram, vs. the less targeted discovery option on Pinterest?

The shoppable products on Instagram are currently only an organic offering – meaning you run into the same constraints as you do with any other organic post (only a small percentage of your organic followers will see that content).

If/when these expand into a paid offering, they will definitely compete with Pinterest. Where Instagram will win is on scale – even though Pinterest does a good job of reaching a certain percentage of the population, Instagram has way more reach in every demographic.

What are the minimum spends for the vertical video Snap Ads?

Our recommended starting budget is $30,000, although the strict minimums that apply to other types of Snapchat ads (filters/lenses) don't apply to this format. We've found that it takes a substantial investment to achieve reach and collect meaningful insights. The ideal investment depends on the market and audience you'd like to reach, of course, but in general, we haven't seen great results from campaigns spending below this amount.

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!