"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.

"The term “ad tech” doesn’t completely capture what the industry is about. The people are the ones powering the machines. If more companies in our industry put a little more focus on employees and their development, they’d see advertising technology fulfill its potential to change the way we do business."

Read more from Centro's Scott Neslund in Tech.co:

"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!

"Nonpolitical advertisers will feel the tightest pinch in broadcast TV this year, but the problem affects any media. Even when there is enough inventory available for all advertisers, elections will drive up prices, and TV spots will become unattractive — or unattainable — for many brands. Exploring new video ad formats will make more and more sense for consumer brands that want to reach their audiences effectively during election season."

Read more from Centro's Heather Robertson in MediaPost.

Retargeting is a common tactic used to keep top-of-mind after a consumer’s visit to an advertiser’s site or product pages.  Occasionally, Centro customers won’t be able (or are not allowed) to put a tracking pixel on their site.  I’m here to let you know that there are other options at your disposal to do ‘siteless’ retargeting, or retargeting that doesn’t require you to put a pixel on your site.  I’ll walk you through 3 such options.

1. Click retargeting
Centro DSP’s “Audience Capture” feature allows advertisers to retarget users who have clicked on their ad.  It’s another way to get value out of your paid media by letting your ads create a retargeting pool for you.  Pro tip: make sure that there’s a strong call-to-action on the ad to drive higher engagement.

2. First-party search click retargeting
If you can’t put a tracking pixel on your site, you can select the “redirect pixel” option available in Centro DSP.  This creates a URL redirect for your search ad – when a user clicks on the ad, Centro DSP first captures the user, then redirects them to the desired landing page of the campaign.   Here’s how it works: if the URL redirect pixel is centro.pixel.com/abcd and the destination URL is example.com, your final URL for the paid search link would be centro.pixel.com/abcd/www.example.com.

3. Video completion retargeting
Video completion retargeting is a tactic allowing you to retarget those who have viewed one of your video ads. This can be done when you are setting up your ad within Centro DSP. While this tactic can be turned on to capture those users who have completed ¼ or ½ of your video, I recommend collecting data only from users who have fully viewed the video ad. We tend to see the best performance among those who have fully completed a video view.  This tactic is a great way to get more mileage out of your video spend and a great way to bridge upper and lower funnel initiatives.

Want to learn more great tips? Sign up for our newsletter or our webinars here.

Centro recently rolled out new capabilities to its Centro Brand Exchange that are tailored to the political advertising market. This offering will allow newspaper companies to garner more political ad buys through programmatic ad channels, while enabling political groups to reach voters at scale through premium publishers.

Read more on the NAA Blog.

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!

Media Websites Battle Faltering Ad Revenue and Traffic

$.85 of every new dollar spent in online advertising goes to Google or Facebook, according to Morgan Stanley. This is the result of audiences’ growing preference for social feeds and apps versus traditional websites.

Dorm Rooms Go TV-Set-Free as Millennials Change Their Habits

Though they’re not the only generation to change video viewership behaviors, Millennials are leading the pack today by shifting away from live TV. Forrester data shows that young Millennials, age 18-22, stream video for 2 hours per day. Others estimate that only 20% of Millennials still watch live TV. It’s not that this young adult generation doesn’t like TV. They prefer to watch video content on digital devices instead of traditional TV sets.

New Study Shows Millennials Prefer Short Mobile Videos, While Older Crowds Like Long-Form

Considering our low attention spans and propensity to multi-task with various devices, the results of a recent IAB study conducted in partnership with Millward Brown Digital and Tremor Video reaffirms what we already know. Nonetheless, it’s a research-backed reminder that advertisers shouldn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to video campaigns.

Unskippable, Too: YouTube Touts New 6-Second Ad

In a move intended to capitalize on viewers’ tendency to watch short-form, bite-sized content on mobile devices, YouTube is rolling out a new ad unit they call Bumpers next month. These six-second spots will be non-skippable, and seem like a good fit for a platform known to have content of varying lengths, with dominant mobile consumption patterns.

IAB Reports $59.6 Billion In 2015, Mobile And Programmatic Drive Growth

PricewaterhouseCoopers released a full report on digital ad revenue growth in 2015. Much of the growth was attributed to mobile-related advertising encompassing search, display and video. It rose 66% to $20.7 billion in 2015, compared with the prior year. Digital video, excluding mobile, rose 30% to $4.2 billion in 2015.

Shopping Frequency: Smartphones Up 64%; Physical Stores Down 30%

A new research study conducted by Ipsos found that there is a rising trend of consumers shopping and buying with their smartphone, right from wherever they are– which might very well be their couch. The recent study found that 64% of surveyed individuals were more frequently shopping on their smartphones compared to their past usage, which included shopping and making a purchase.

Google Mobile Clicks Double, CPC Lower

Google search ads are showing stronger performance coinciding with a growth in traffic largely sourced from an increase in mobile web searches. The increased traffic from mobile sources is subsequently driving down the cost of buying on a CPC.

Report: App Store Plans Auction-Based Search Ads

Apple is considering adding search ads to the App Store which would appear at the top of the search results, similar to sponsored search ads seen on Bing, Google and Yahoo. This would enable Apple to join the ranks of the Google Play store, which already offers up these search-based ads to Android users.

Google's CEO is looking to the next big thing beyond smartphones

Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, believes the world will shift from mobile-first to AI-first.

15 examples of artificial intelligence in marketing

Artificial Intelligence is becoming an increasingly big part of marketing, or at least it seems like people are talking about AI more (we’re looking at you, Google). Check out this round-up of case studies and use cases, as a primer for AI in our industry.

Will conversational marketing become a reality in 2016?

Are you hearing voices? Will 2016 be the year that conversations actually become a paradigm for realizing the promise of marketing as a personalized experience at scale?

"Business is a copycat league. If your business is successful, other companies will be quick to copy your products, your messages and even the ways in which you do things. But no one can copy your “why.” If you make your purpose the foundation of your business, the trust of your customers will follow."

Read more from Centro's Kelly Wenzel in Entrepreneur.