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"No computer program can educate clients on new innovations, nor can it come up with original, refreshing creative that engages customers."
Read more from Centro's Scott Neslund on MediaPost.
Centro Helps Consolidate and Scale Millions of Dollars in Ad Spend with Long-Tail Digital Publishers
New York, June 15, 2016 – Centro (centro.net), a provider of enterprise-class software for digital advertising, today announced the expansion of relationships with the some of the largest holding company and independent media agencies in the U.S. These agencies use Centro’s software and services as needed to augment media-buying capabilities by scaling and consolidating millions of dollars of ad spend. Centro empowers agencies to transact directly with numerous publishers with speed, precision, transparency and brand-safety through its proprietary software platform that automates this entire process.
Client teams within large agencies are focused on relationships with their top 10-20 digital publisher partners, including the agency’s trading desk. These partners collectively garner more than half of a client’s digital media budget. The rest of the budget is spread to hundreds or thousands of other ad sellers. These vendors include high-profile, quality publishers. Scaling ad spend on these numerous sites, while solving for challenges such as viewability and ad fraud, is a heavy burden. Agencies rely on Centro and its technology to execute campaigns with a greater number of publisher partners efficiently, without sacrificing transparency and control.
“Because of our accelerating growth, we’re ending up with more business at a faster rate than we can hire to support it. Centro’s agile team can integrate fluidly with our in-house process so they can be activated on-demand for any media buying initiatives,” said Steve Carbone, Managing Director and Chief Digital Officer at Mediacom, North America. “We want to ensure that our staff remains focused on their accounts and their client relationship development instead of the time-consuming task of spreading ad buys across hundreds of publishers. Centro simplifies the ever-changing aspects of digital media buying when dealing with multiple partners.”
To drive consolidation of ad buying among agencies, Centro promoted Joe Pospisil to vice president of national agency development. A seven-year Centro veteran, Joe helped expand the company’s presence in New York and the East Coast, and is part the team that grew the company’s regional revenue by more than 200% during his tenure. Prior to joining Centro, Joe was instrumental in developing digital media sales and execution competencies for SportsNet New York (SNY) and CBS Radio. His team harnesses technology to simplify the day-to-day work and strategic efforts of buying on multiple publishers.
“Digital is unlike traditional media where advertisers are likely to buy from the same partners month over month. Marketers face a much broader challenge because consumers are visiting a wide swath of sites, channels and devices every single day,” said Joe Pospisil of Centro. “Centro’s technology makes it easy for agencies to fully realize the value of activating campaigns across hundreds of premium publishers without compromising their team’s efforts in managing their most-valued relationships and honing strategies for clients.”
Centro’s solution is comprised of software and services that are ideal for large agencies that want their media teams focused on strategy and customer relationships while cultivating deep partnerships with their most-important ad vendors. This approach enables agencies to move rapidly when client ad spend ramps up or down. Agencies also have the option to embed Centro buyers and planners anywhere in the U.S. Centro is providing this solution to more than 35 large media agencies representing 116 brands.
About Centro
Centro (centro.net) is creating a platform to make digital advertising easier. Its enterprise-class software centralizes, organizes and automates all digital media campaigns across all channels, accessing both guaranteed and biddable inventory, to achieve any objective. Our holistic approach gives marketers a single system of record to fulfill their research, planning, buying, optimization, reporting and reconciliation needs. Since 2001, Centro has successfully planned and executed more than 250,000 campaigns across all digital display platforms and ad format types. Headquartered in Chicago with 32 offices in North America, Centro has received numerous accolades for its commitment to employees and workplace culture.
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Contact:
Anthony Loredo
646-462-4888
"Looking to service its agency clients more directly and efficiently, ad tech software provider Centro is rolling out what it’s calling 'assisted direct buying' -- that’s contractually purchased inventory direct to many vendors at once."
Read more in MediaPost.
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 annual report from KPCB partner Mary Meeker is chock-full of great insights looking at the state of the internet, and some bold media, consumer, and technology trends.
LUMA Partners released its annual report packed full of market updates, how the ecosystem is evolving, and some of the top trends.
Google Now Controls 12 Percent of All Global Media Spend
Alphabet/Google, The Walt Disney Company, Comcast, Twentieth Century Fox and Facebook round out the top 5 media owners in Zenith's "Top Thirty Global Media Owners" report. The report points out that traditional media owners — particularly newspaper and magazine publishers — struggle to keep pace. Nearly half of the 30 companies featured in the report have lost media revenue in the past year.
Saying a Third of Mobile Searches are Local, Google Brings “Promoted Pins” to Maps
Google officially announced the “next generation of local search ads,” also known as Promoted Pins for Google Maps. The new branded pins will appear on users’ maps along their route or near their destination.
Google to Expand “Store Visits” Online-to-Offline Foot Traffic Measurement
Reporting on online-to-offline store visits, available today to 1,000 of the biggest advertisers, is rolling out throughout the year to more advertisers for Google search campaigns – for no additional charge. It will eventually be an option for small advertisers as well.
A YouTube Experience Like Nothing You've Seen Before
The new YouTube VR app brings virtual reality experiences to the masses. Content collaborations with the NBA, Buzzfeed and Tastemade are already in place.
Facebook has been signaling this day would come for over a year (cutting partners, dedicating development resources to the native tool, announcing it generated less than 2% of the business, etc), but it’s finally here. FBX will be shutting down starting November 1. Marketers need not fret. There are still ample ways to reach audiences efficiently on the platform.
Facebook is Expanding its Video Ads
Facebook made two rather big video-related announcements: extending its video offering with in-stream ads through its audience network, and shutting down Liverail, the large video SSP it acquired less than two years ago.
For Advertisers, Amazon Video Direct Provides More Questions than Answers
With Amazon’s launch of Video Direct, the industry is curious to see what paid opportunities it brings to the marketplace and how it compares to YouTube.
Snapchat Dabbles in Direct Response
While Snapchat is still the new kid on the advertising block, the company is already starting to become one of the major players in the space. Numbers continue to spike in user growth, video views and time spent, and Snapchat is quickly moving to monetize with brand awareness video and native plays. Expect to see more tests in the direct response space.
Over 30 media companies presented at the IAB Content Newfronts earlier this month. There was quite a bit of coverage from numerous news publications about each presentation, and a number of ad tech companies shared some insights during an IAB luncheon. Don’t miss the IAB’s 2016 Original Digital Video Consumer Study conducted in partnership with Gfk.
Seven Big Challenges Facing Healthcare Marketers
Healthcare marketers face a number of unique challenges as they look to target and reach audiences. Seven of them are highlighted in this article.
There’s no question that programmatic buying has been widely adopted by advertisers for action-oriented, direct response campaigns. But when it comes to branding and awareness, historically advertisers have been slow to take the programmatic advertising plunge. More recently, however, there have been many developments to develop and improve the overall ‘premium programmatic’ effort. Ad tech providers and publishers have been proactive in bringing more premium programmatic inventory into biddable environments. You can see this not only in examples like the growth of private marketplaces and availability of video inventory but also in how open-RTB specifications have evolved to support programmatic native and other high-impact ad units.
In a report by eMarketer, marketers elaborated on the benefits of utilizing programmatic advertising for branding and awareness. They claimed increased efficiency, reduced overall advertising costs, ability to optimize and target the audience in real-time, overall higher ROI, and the opportunity to better leverage first-party data as all key contributors to their decision to use programmatic for upper-funnel initiatives.
Below three ways you can start using programmatic advertising for your upper-funnel marketing programs right away.
1. Private Marketplaces (PMP) – Not only are PMPs the gateway to publisher first-party audience data and premium programmatic inventory, like homepages and section fronts across top comScore-rated sites but more recently they’ve begun to bring new and compelling ad units into the mix. With PMPs, you can access ad units like rising stars, billboards, pushdown units, desktop and mobile interstitials, 100% viewable units, connected TV, header bidding inventory, pre-roll and native ad units.
PMPs return a bit of control back to the publisher, and as a result, they can be more inclined to release some of their best-quality inventory to be sold programmatically to advertisers. They have learned how to package offerings by season, audience, and life-event, making it easy to add these onto a media plan.
2. Video – This is a natural fit for the upper-funnel as video ads tend to run longer and be more impactful. Recently there has been a great uptick in the quality and quantity of available video inventory through publishers and accessing video inventory is easier than ever. An added benefit of using programmatic video in your upper-funnel initiatives is that you can identify users who complete a full view of your video ad and create a pool of these users for downstream retargeting efforts on future campaigns.
3. Native – It’s the most recent addition to the mix, allowing you to place contextually relevant ads that align better with the look and feel of the page they’re on. Advertiser assets such as images, logos, headlines and copy dynamically adjust to fit the page they’re served on, regardless of device type. As a result, the emphasis is created around strong visual imagery and contextual alignment.
Learn more about the Programmatic Advertising opportunity with Centro, here.
"The Founders (i.e., those born since 1995) are distinguished from the Millennials, who were born from about 1977 to 1995. Society has been disrupted by the Millennials, and the Founders will be the ones charged with resolving it."
Read more from Centro's Ryan Manchee in CMO.com.
"Centro, which sells digital media management software, had a busy year. The company raised $30 million in Series B funding, led by Neuberger Berman Private Equity Funds. It also acquired GraphScience, an automated social ad-buying platform."
Read more on Business Insider.
Intrusive ads are so 2015. Centro’s Senior Director of Digital Innovations, Ryan Manchee, delivered this message in his recent webinar, Stop the Interruption! How Meaningful Marketing is Replacing Intrusive Ads and Driving Results. There are more active websites and smartphone users now than ever before, which means it’s vital for marketers and advertisers to find their audience on the right platforms and channels, identify areas to send a personalized message, and deliver a compelling experience for the consumer. Missed the webinar? You can download the recording, as well as the presentation, here.
Following the webinar, Ryan tackled many questions but unfortunately, he was unable to address all of them. Here are his answers to the questions we couldn’t get to during our time together.
Are digital ads with instant coupon more effective than general theme/brand offers?
In terms of conversions, yes, digital coupon ads are more effective. But I don’t believe it is an equal comparison for that type of performance, nor would I recommend coupon ads replace a more general brand offer. In fact, I could see them working in conjunction with one another, either from a sequential perspective. For ex,a general theme or brand offering is shown and if there is no conversion, a retargeted message with the coupon could be used.
Can you provide an example of a native advertising campaign with results that have impressed you?
Most native ad campaigns are incredibly unique, but a recent CPG client’s campaign comes to mind. This national CPG brand had a very unique target audience and some very specific goals around not just increasing overall awareness of the brand through engagement with ads, but also to increase social followers. This was a great campaign, as it not only exceeded the success benchmarks we had set, but we also ran customized branded content across a number of publishers that fit perfectly for the brand and its unique target demo. Each of the publishers were able to promote the content across their social channels which drove more traffic and exposure, but also promoted a unique brand hashtag and included promotion of the brands social presence.
Are CTAs still necessary for branded ads?
Absolutely necessary? No, but I would encourage some type of call-to-action in 99.9% of all campaigns. Even if the primary intention of the ad is centered on brand awareness or favorability, in most cases the secondary goal of the campaign is more than likely to get the audience to perform some action. If that is the case, why would you want to miss out on the opportunity if the consumer is interested?
Do you think the media mix changes for products with purchase cycles of weekly or monthly vs 2x per year?
I do! Though to best address this scenario there are a number of unique variables worth consideration. Everything from media consumption habits for the audience to purchase cycles to where and how the products can be purchased is essential. I’d encourage you to reach out to your Centro Account Lead to talk through the specifics and put together a more customized recommendation.
What are some popular tools to track location habits and interests?
Through partnerships with location data aggregators like Factual, Centro DSP can offer location-based profiles for advertisers to test and see which location targeting tactics drive the strongest KPIs for campaign needs. There are also several carefully vetted partners that we use in order to build out location audience profiles based on users’ real-life foot traffic patterns. These profiles can range from commonly sought-after audiences, such as consumers who visited particular categories of stores in the last 30 or 60 days to people who frequent competitive locations or more nuanced custom profiles based on selective foot traffic patterns determined by analysis of consumer behaviors. Once we identify the best tactics, we also identify the best partner(s) to utilize.
In addition to enabling the targeting of various types of users, several of these partners offer the opportunity to provide clients with various attribution studies to better understand how ad exposure led to driving consumers to retail or brick and mortar locations.
Join us next month on June 22nd for our next 3Ton30 webinar: Pillars of Performance. For more information on our 3Ton30 series, visit our resource center here. We hope to see you next month!