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We’re facing off against a billion dollar bot problem. For all you Star Wars fans out there, we’re not talking about the R2-D2 kind of bots. According to research from the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) and a study conducted with White Ops, $6.3 billion will be lost to ad fraud this year. Staggered? We are too.

Because ad fraud is multi-faceted, it’s often difficult to understand. Here’s a quick refresher. Ad fraud is the practice of serving digital ads that have no potential to be viewed by human users. In the programmatic sector, it’s a critical issue plaguing marketers today. The openness that allows pretty much any advertiser or publisher to participate in the programmatic ecosystem also lets the bad apples partake and pollute the quality of the marketplace. So what does this mean for you? With 11 percent of display advertising impressions deemed fraudulent, something needs to be done in order to alleviate the problem.

The good news is that our industry has overcome numerous challenges in the past, and ad fraud will be no different. To start, you must first address the issue as a whole by taking the time to truly understand it. It’s great if you already do, but if you’re one of the many who don’t, now is the time to get started. As a marketer, you should know (or at least have a good idea) the answers to the following questions: What are the types of ad fraud? What are some best practices for fighting it? What steps should you take when you come across a suspicious site? We know what you might be thinking: that’s a lot of knowledge to process and I don’t really have the time. Not to worry! We’ve got the right resources available to help you get up to speed in a matter of minutes.

At this year’s ad:tech New York, our very own Ratko Vidakovic, vice president of product marketing, programmatic, spoke about the war against ad fraud and what you should know to protect yourself. We’ve got his presentation available here for all you fraud fighters looking to come out on top. In it, you’ll get a deep-dive into the hot topic, as well as learn some steps to take to determine whether a publisher is suspicious or not. Also, here is the link to download your copy of the one-sheet that was distributed during the session. Refer to it for some battle-tested best practices, as well as a couple handy tools and tactics to help you win this fight.

“It’s an on-demand world. We need to make better ads”

Said every savvy marketer this year.

Successful ad campaigns start with a marketer’s firm understanding of their audience’s online habits. From research to content consumption to shopping – consumer behavior changes as the media technology around them develops. Our experts at Centro have their fingers on the pulse of the industry, carefully noting and anticipating how these consumer trends affect marketer’s media plans and campaign performance.

Yesterday, along with the American Marketing Association, two of Centro’s data and insights experts presented on the 5 Ways to Turn Digital Trends into Strategies and Investments into Returns. In essence – what you need to know about how consumer trends will affect your media strategies and business results going into next year. Kurt Anderson and Ryan Manchee, our presenters, led our attendees through five key consumer trends that are causing commotion in the industry today. These trends were paired with best practices for marketers to leverage as they employ smarter strategies for 2016.

If you missed the webinar, or would like to share it with someone else who would love these insights, just head to our landing page to download the webinar. If you have any questions on what you heard, feel free to reach out at centro.net! We’d love to hear from you.

IAB Sees Strongest Digital Growth Since 2011
Revenue in the digital ad space topped $27B from January to June in 2015 – the best growth rate in four years with a 19% total increase. On the top of the leaderboard were digital video and social advertising, with a 35% increase in video spend and a 51% rise in social advertising. Check out the stats here.

Are Marketers Finally Getting the Hang of Location-Based Mobile Ads?
In an Advertising Week panel, Essence digital agency discussed lessons from a campaign for Google’s search app that won Adweek’s Media Plan of the Year award. By applying location-based mobile ads, over 20 custom data points were produced to create unique and personalized ad messaging. Get all the insight.

Linking Digital Ads to Local Conversions
A recent poll covered in eMarketer found that 60% of U.S. CPG and retail brands tailored specific digital advertising messages to drive in-store purchases. Moreover, nearly as many also said that driving such in-store conversions was a key indicator of their digital marketing success. See the full story.

We are thrilled to announce that this month’s Partner of the Month is the one and only Utah Media Group (UMG). Since the beginning of our partnership, UMG has acknowledged the importance of adopting an agency-like model to better serve advertisers’ needs and to secure a strong presence in the local market. When the group caught wind of Centro’s demand-side platform (DSP) technology, it knew that it had to get its hands on the powerful technology. However, it wasn’t until after the organization fully dove deep into the product, did it see (and experience) the plethora of benefits Centro DSP has to offer.

Ben Council, digital media coordinator, explained, “The original purpose of bringing the technology in-house was for cost control and for the capability of offering digital to businesses of all sizes. But, we quickly learned that it presented so much more. The transparency allows us to access actionable performance insights along with real-time reporting that can be broken down to a variety levels.” Additionally, the flexibility of budget-based buying allows the UMG team to deliver strong results for its advertisers based on their campaign goals and objectives. With the adoption of Centro DSP, UMG has been able to more accurately manage its advertisers’ campaigns, while also increasing its own revenue. To date, UMG has surpassed its 2014 revenue by 50%, with two months still left in the year! Congratulations on your success and we look forward to an even more prosperous 2016!

Let’s say you’re an airline CMO and you started a new route to a vacation destination. Who doesn’t love promotional fares? Let’s make this fun – you now have flights going from East coast U.S. airports to Martinique. Ever heard of it? It’s a little-known set of French islands in the Caribbean. There aren’t a lot of crowds yet (because hardly anyone has heard about it!). It’s getting cold in the U.S. and now you, Ms. airline CMO, are one of the only games in town for getting on this small piece of paradise.

You work with your agency on a digital media campaign and you run it in Q4 2015 with a $200,000 budget. Let’s assume that the media plan is solid – no doubt because perhaps you’re working with a team (like Centro’s!) that’s got this function down to a science. Then January 2016 rolls in and you check the online bookings on this route -- $150,000 worth in revenue. #epicfail

Was it really a failure? Did the campaign achieve the outcome we wanted? That’s always the million dollar question in advertising. In this case, if our desired outcome was only online bookings, then we sucked. However, response (and the measurement of it) isn’t always that simple.

Yes, as an airline carrier, we want to take into account online bookings. But wouldn’t we want to know about other results as well based on the type of campaign we are running? Perhaps we’ll get more revenue from baggage fees and other charges. Maybe we want to drive people to talk to travel agents about the destination and the choices of getting there. How about the people who browsed our site and didn’t pull the trigger, but still signed up for our newsletter. The possible KPIs that lead to outcomes could be endless, and sophisticated marketers shouldn’t just be looking at single factors for results.

With the variety in how campaigns can arrive at outcomes, marketers need to properly optimize (and measuring) for them. Looking back at our airlines campaign, for example, optimization for a direct response (to get a click, a purchase, a sign-up) is going to be different if we were running a branding campaign. Furthermore, if the desired outcome is an offline purchase (like the ones made with travel agents), our airline marketing team has to find out what measures lead to those purchases. Is it a visit to those resellers, scheduled appointments, or something else?

Furthermore, performance measurement doesn’t necessarily stop at the end of a campaign. Quality leads can result in customers with a high lifetime value because he/she purchases more later on. These customers who we sold on our Martinique route may end up being loyal to the brand for all their Caribbean destinations. Those folks who browsed our site and who only signed up for the promo newsletters may be future customers with some appropriate nurturing campaigns. A marketer has to ensure that business value from their campaign is measured properly, whether it’s in real-time or the future.

A marketer can put a lot of rigor in media planning, buying and execution, but if they don’t sync their desired outcomes with the right KPIs, the campaign results will look terrible to any CEO or CMO. So make sure you’re counting your customer opportunities correctly. And if you’re still wondering, yes, there are still affordable fares available to Martinique. I hear it’s wonderful in January.

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