As things started to grow and change in the mobile advertising landscape, publishers quickly realized that responsive design was going to be super important for their content to morph to the screen that it was being shown on. As a publisher, you’d want your readers to have the same great experience whether they were on their phone, iPad or desktop computer.

Using proportion-based grids and flexible images, the method of building websites provides an optimal viewing experience for users no matter what device they are utilizing to read the content. Time, FortyOneTwenty and Somewhat have all received great feedback on the new layouts that they had rolled out and how each one made the experience much better across devices. As a result of this traction, we are starting to see the same idea work behind the creation of content.

There are now several content sites that have started designing their site so that the content moves page location during the day depending on what their reader is looking for. Talk about things that make sense! It’s not about making the site prettier or showing off a publisher’s tech chops, but rather it’s about molding the site to the consumption patterns of the people reading it. For example, you wake up and want your hard news – that news will be the stories on top of the page. Later on, you are thinking more about your sports games for the night and entertainment focused stories, so now those have a presence on the top part of the page. See Philly.com or Yahoo.com for examples of how they have implemented responsive content.

As publishers make this move, we are going to have to keep in mind how this will impact the advertising across each page. If publishers start moving around content to what the readers are spending the most time on, how will this affect their pricing? Do advertisers pay more for additional eyeballs? Do they pay less for the continual change of what content their ads will be next to? This frontier is still very much in its infancy stage and there will be growing pains as the media industry figures out what will be the best course for advertisers to work around these changes.

Both responsive content and responsive design have been great strides in pushing publisher content out to readers in the way that they will consume it with the most attention.

On Thursday, June 6, Centro was awarded Partner of the Year and Sales Person of the Year at the annual thinkLA Cirque de LA 2013 Interactive Awards Gala. For Partner of the Year, Centro was nominated by marketing services agency AdEase.  For Sales Person of the Year, Account Executive Ben Sarmiento took home the honors. thinkLA is the largest advertising industry organization for Southern California.

More and more agencies are seeing the value Centro delivers for streamlining the operations of digital media buying and planning. AdEase  is one of the 60+ agencies and 120+ advertisers Centro has worked with in the region since 2009. Ben Sarmiento, who won Sales Person of the Year, is a five-year Centro veteran whose 15-years of experience in the media and marketing space has garnered him a distinguished reputation for service and industry knowledge.

“Winning two awards at the thinkLA Gala is a significant achievement for our Southern California team as it exemplifies the energy, passion and dedication we have for our partners,” said Matt Davis, Western Region VP and seven-year Centro employee. “We want to thank the nominators, voters and judges for recognizing Centro and our team as a vital part of the agency and media ecosystem.”

“Our partnership with Centro allows us the bandwidth and resources to create strategic plans in digital. We nominated Centro because of its role in helping us enhance our offerings to be a powerful marketing services partner for top brands,” said Trisha Hall, Group Media Director of AdEase.

thinkLA established the Interactive Awards Gala in 2011 to recognize the achievements of local companies and individuals who are interactive marketing leaders. Nominations for the thinkLA awards drew in a record number of votes this year, totaling almost 2,000. The Gala event, held at the Beverly Hilton’s International Ballroom, was packed with nearly 1,000 attendees celebrating top campaigns, agencies, client marketers, media partners and individuals.

Centro is continuing to strengthen its presence in the Southern California region by adding new team members and clients. The office more than doubled its staff over the last year. The Los Angeles office has various openings in ad operations and sales.

Local digital advertising is about delivering ads based on the vicinity of the consumer, including messaging that supports national brand exposure but is contextually relevant to the in-market consumer.  However, a legacy connotation is that local equates to local-only publications such as local newspapers or community magazines. This leads advertisers to raise the skeptical question of, “Why local?”

The importance of local digital advertising can be seen in growing industry trends. Borrell Associates says U.S. local digital advertising spend will reach $24.5 billion in 2013. Much of the projected growth is due to the increase in mobile advertising that is inherently local, as Google suggests that consumers use their phones when they are on-the-go and also as they interact with the world around them. Real-Time Marketing (RTM) efforts are also essentially local, based on relevancy to the consumer’s environment. Even creative technology is able to take video assets and modify them in improved ways to feature local themes, i.e. Dynamix.

Local has become an undercurrent that is quickly gaining traction in the industry as more options become available for tailoring messaging specifically to an audience in the market. But, understanding the consumer and how local environments affect daily functions is imperative. Typical profiles incorporate core demographics and psychographics – anything that is tied to creating an overarching persona of the general target consumer. However, the application of that information needs to include examining the local market and understanding the nuances that segment the consumer further. Integrating these insights helps create budget frameworks for allocation and channel distributions, as well as media selections. For instance, a new report series from Nielsen, “Local Watch:  Uncovering Growth Opportunities,” explores the video experience (examining tablet, types of video content viewership and mobile access) by local market. Its findings support that although consumers across all parts of the country are staying connected and consuming content at a high rate, each local market “maintains their individuality even as new technologies are adopted.”

Consumers live in a world that is increasingly becoming digital. Devices keep them connected to their social circle, local and national occurrences, preferred brands and to shopping opportunities. Ever-growing Digital Place-Based executions impact experiences at staple locations such as the grocery store, gas stations, the gym, or office buildings. The amount of digital influence that surrounds consumers raises the challenge for advertisers to scale relevancy in varying local environments. So the question at hand isn’t “why local,” but really, “how do we customize our strategy for different markets?”

Since my last post at the beginning of 2013, a lot has changed in the Paid Search world. That change is due primarily to Google’s Enhanced Campaigns.  This new approach to device targeting is revolutionizing paid search. Seriously, this is the largest major change in search since the Microsoft – Yahoo! Alliance. There are pros and cons with this change, Bing sees it as advantageous while the industry in general runs the gamut from negative to positive, depending on your outlook.

A lot of marketers were disappointed with the removal of budgeting capabilities between devices. Over the last few years, advertisers were separately budgeting dollars against mobile phones, tablets and desktop. The practice was a solid approach as each device typically performed differently and separate budgets would allow an advertiser to focus on the areas that worked best. The downside for Google (and other engines) was that the volume of searches on mobile devices was rising, while the volume on desktops/laptops was slowing.

Because Google’s main source of revenue is advertising, it could not continue riding a wave (desktop/laptop) that was slowing down. Instead, Google’s message to advertisers is, “You want to run on Google? Then you will run across all devices… and the volume of searches will be the main driver on how much you spend on each device.” So now, if mobile volumes increase, so does the spend against it. Granted, there is a work-around in order to not spend on mobile devices at all or only run a click-to-call campaign on mobile phone, but marketers can no longer determine how much they wish to spend against mobile devices. At Centro, we had approached the change client by client and priority focus on those accounts that originally had mobile specific budgets.

In my opinion, Google is forcing the hand of advertisers to “get with it” and update their sites to be more mobile friendly. The excuse of “my site does not work on a phone” is no longer acceptable. At the end of the day, if you cannot play in the mobile space you might not be able to play at all. Again, Search proves to be the innovator and driver of mobile advertising.

Many analyst firms estimate that Real-Time Bidding (RTB – the ad buying process where bids are placed on impressions in the milliseconds before an ad space loads) will represent 20% of all digital display ad spend by the end of this year.

For media planners and buyers, this method of running campaigns is getting more and more interest as clients continue to ask about it and look for greater precision and efficiencies in their media buys. It behooves us to evaluate how well it drives the advertiser’s objectives. So, how much should we spend on RTB when planning a campaign?

Welcome to Navigator, a new Centro planning tool our services team uses to help agency customers strategically allocate campaign budgets between site-direct/insertion-order and RTB inventory. The Navigator dashboard determines the percentage of budget that should be allocated toward a campaign’s branding and direct-response (DR) objectives. It also recommends what percent of that branding budget should be allocated to standard desktop display, mobile/tablet and video platforms across multiple site categories. This helps planners make better and faster decisions on how much to invest of ad budgets based on the target audience media behavior and the advertising category.

Enabling Better Budget Decisions
As the digital media landscape continues to become more complex, media planners need to provide advertisers with smarter rationale in campaign recommendations – especially for emerging methods like RTB advertising. Navigator is yet another step Centro is taking to deliver quality insights from our years running campaigns for more than 1,000 agencies.

Navigator utilizes algorithms developed from Centro’s proprietary database of campaigns conducted for clients – more than 20,000 in our decade-plus history. We’ve blended this with comScore consumer behavior data to create instant budget allocation recommendations. With some data input, planners can gain insight with this powerful decision-making tool for pre-planning campaign development within minutes.

Here are additional details on its features:

• Allows easy input of RFP details such as objective, budget and target (gender, age and income)
• Provides suggestions on what site categories would be best, based on budget, flight, advertiser vertical and target
• Enables details and information to be transferred to an e-mail or PowerPoint presentation

Huh? Bitcoin? What?
Quick recap: Bitcoin started in 2009 by a hacker who calls him or herself Satoshi Nakamoto (and who might be several people). It’s a form of decentralized virtual currency used to buy goods and services online. By internet standards, it’s still an odd and super nerdy phenomenon. Bitcoin is a byproduct of software and computer networks looking at the concept of currency and asking the question, “How can we create a new economy?”

How does one earn bitcoins?
Anyone armed with a computer can download Bitcoin’s software and theoretically mine for bitcoins. The bitcoins serve merely as a form of payment for using your computer’s resources to solve difficult math problems. The more computing power dedicated to solving the virtual puzzle, the better chance you’d have at earning bitcoins. Once you earn bitcoins you would transfer them to a digital wallet where you could exchange them for goods, services or even back into a local currency for a very low fee. Alternatively, you can exchange cash for Bitcoins for a very low fee
(often 1% or less) and then go about exchanging them for goods or services over the net,
avoiding the entire “mining” process all together.

Why should you care?
Bitcoin has reached a tipping point where people are genuinely considering placing a piece of their real-world wealth into a virtual economy backed only by trust in this unproven, unregulated system. In the past week, some well-known venture capital firms placed millions of dollars as investments into companies that run Bitcoin exchanges and the rate at which Bitcoins are being exchanged has been growing on average 15% per week. The implications of what this could mean for business is currently unclear, however it offers a solution to immediately reduce the cost associated with accepting credit cards or transferring payments.

Whether you see it as all hype or a legitimate institution, Bitcoin is gaining momentum and now has a real case for our attention. At minimum, go ahead and marvel at how a virtual currency that appeared practically out of thin air just created a billion-dollar market that is for the moment, free of government control.

Have you jumped into bitcoin yet? We’d love to hear about your experience.

By Sara Tady on May 14, 2013

By now we’ve all seen and heard much about the six IAB Rising Star Units. It’s no surprise Centrons are eager to hit the ground running to bring these new, sexy ad units to our advertisers. Creative teams are busy building these out and publishers are working hand-in-hand with their web development teams to get them approved.

Historically speaking, if an advertiser wanted to make an impact, they’ve been somewhat limited to sliding billboards, interstitials and overlays. The new IAB Rising Star units are a perfect combination of splash and functionality. These ads are high impact and cannot be missed.

But how do these eye catching ads perform? According to one study conducted by the IAB, they are already outperforming the standard IAB units. Let’s be serious though – this is no surprise! Looking at one of Centro’s more recent “rising star” campaigns you’ll find the results mirror just that of the IAB study.

According to Emilie Lee, one of Centro’s Sr. Campaign Analysts: “Rising Star units are proving to be a successful form of interactive advertising. Our West Coast team ran fourteen portrait units within one campaign in the entertainment vertical, which averaged a 14.8 second dwell time and a CTR of .24%.” That’s a lot of engagement and a 10x click-through than normal banner ads.

According to the same IAB study, users spent 50% more time interacting with a rising star unit vs. standard IAB ads. Big name brands like AT&T, Jeep and Westin Hotels are all giving it a try. In February 2013, Undertone released a whitepaper stating that an overwhelming 92% of agencies and marketers ranked the units a 1 or 2 (on a 5-point scale – 1 being the highest) on their overall performance satisfaction.

These interactive ads are demanding both attention from the consumer and warranting premium pricing for publishers. Best part of all? It’s pretty advertising that is being proven to work.