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How can advertisers continue to target audience segments while planning for a privacy-friendly, cookie-free future? In this webinar, we discuss the current state of the targeting market, as well as where it's headed in years to come.
Mario Diez, CEO at Peer39, joins us to discuss the current tactics that are at risk, the rise of contextual and semantic technologies, strategies for transition, and more.
In the modern world of digital advertising, marketing analysts must adopt a scientific and almost artistic approach to exploring and dissecting campaign performance. With businesses today compelled to invest in more channels than ever before - paid search, social, email, PR, SEO - it has become increasingly difficult for those working daily with data to expose truly valuable insights and precisely measure the effectiveness of their strategies.
Marketing dashboards offer a simple solution to this problem, pulling data together from disparate sources and providing dynamic visualizations of performance - from a high-level down to channel-specifics - all in one single location. The ROI gained from dashboards is greatest when you set-up defined components that empower you with all the information you need to move the needle for your business. Ultimately, the more refined and insightful your custom dashboard analytics are, the more actionable intelligence your evaluations will yield.
In this blog post we delve into four dashboard components that every digital analyst should utilize in order to facilitate more penetrating examinations into performance. Each of the four examples we highlight is designed to help analysts report performance findings easily to all stakeholders and serve as a compass for charting a path forward on the marketing roadmap.
Overview:
Arguably the most important component you should have on your dashboard is a snapshot of campaign performance from the previous 24 hours. When it comes to digital advertising, the competitive landscape is forever shifting and it is therefore imperative to have a succinct birds-eye view of the return on investment your campaigns are bringing in. This simple summary does the job, empowering you with a quick understanding of aggregated investment, volume, unit economics, and campaign efficiency, and, essentially, whether your campaigns are performing as projected or if any unforeseen issues have arisen. Having this uncomplicated at-a-glance visual aid at the top of your dashboard will help you swiftly identify any performance changes as they happen.
Common Variations: Duplicate and segment widgets with added filters by publisher, channel, campaign, product/service, etc.
Overview:
As all analysts will affirm, campaign performance varies widely by segment, whether it be channel, publisher, or any other dimension. Focusing on the example of publisher segmentation, this dashboard offers clear insights into how each of your publishers performed the day prior and which, if any, has been the driving force behind any unexpected changes in performance, positive or otherwise. Search engine marketers using Bing as an additional advertising channel will find this snapshot particularly beneficial. While reach and impressions on Bing tend to be lower compared to Google Ads, it could be more valuable in terms of cost and ROAS. The only way to test this hypothesis is by paying close attention to how these key metrics differ per publisher.
Overview:
While your most recent performance snapshot offers a flying summary of campaign execution, there are also other important trends you’ll want to stay abreast of in order to maintain perspective and provide more informed insights to your C-level executives. You can do this by creating a component that includes line charts that detail swings and movements in key metric performance over the past 30 days.
Monitoring trends over an extended period such as this allows you to understand the daily fluctuations within advertising investment and revenue generation. Line charts illustrating 30-day changes make it possible to expose performance tendencies as they begin to reveal themselves. Quickly discovering negative shifts in conversions and revenue affords marketers the opportunity to diagnose and fix issues before they develop and hamper campaigns in a significant way.
Common Variations: Duplicate widgets and create additional graphs with other relevant metrics. You can also filter by publisher, channel, campaign, product/service, etc.
Overview:
Continuing with the model of segmenting by publishers, this dashboard component is essential for monitoring trends over a one-month period. A whole host of factors can impact advertising performance by segment almost overnight and thus collating all this data together allows you to quickly recognize the daily fluctuations in advertising investment and revenue generation for Google, Bing, Facebook, and other publishers. This can help you understand how search advertising performs compared to social, which publishers bring in the most conversions and revenue overall, and how consistent your advertising campaigns tend to perform across the 30 days. If the performance for one publisher starts trending differently, you can swiftly determine the root cause and make optimization changes.
Common Variations: Duplicate and segment by channel, campaign, product/service, etc.
Every business has unique goals and key metrics that drive marketing performance. By leveraging expertly designed dashboards, whether from a library of templates built with components like the ones discussed in this article or by building your own, digital marketing analysts can become empowered to maximize the performance insights they need. Dashboards offer a quick overview of daily advertising performance, help you follow recent trends, or break down performance by publisher and other segments to unlock opportunities for improvement.
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!
Nielsen Total Audience Report [:09]
The Nielsen Total Audience Report dives into the world of working from home—how consumers feel about their productivity, engagement, challenges, and the impact this new lifestyle is having on media and device usage. Overall media consumption jumped significantly in the first quarter of 2020, and video streaming increased from 19% in fourth-quarter 2019 to 25% in second-quarter 2020.
US Digital Display Advertising 2020 [:06]
Digital ad growth is taking a serious hit this year from the coronavirus and related recession. But display ad spending will still post 5.5% in annual growth, thanks to increased investments in video ads, mobile, connected TV (CTV) and programmatic transactions.
Consumers Want Brands To Reference Current Events, COVID-19 In Ad Messages, NBCU Study Finds [:01]
A new study shows that consumers wants brands to advertise at about the same level as before the pandemic, but that messaging should acknowledge current events. 69% of consumers want to see brands referencing current events and 81% say they are more likely to buy from and use brands that "help others when it’s needed most." 72% said they are being more thoughtful about brands they support post-crisis.
2020 International Report on Programmatic In-Housing [:28]
The IAB’s Programmatic and Data Center conducted a survey in the US, Europe and Latin America that found that programmatic advertising has been on a meteoric rise, that brands desire more control over programmatic buying and that when it comes to bringing programmatic in-house, most brands and agencies are taking a hybrid approach. More than a fifth (21%) of organizations have completely moved this function in-house, and almost half (48%) have partially moved programmatic buying in-house.
Brands Continue to Lean Heavily on Programmatic Advertising, IAB Says [:03]
IAB's latest report follows years of growth in the programmatic category and comes as the pandemic accelerates consumer digital consumption and changes marketers' data-related needs in the face of growing regulations and third-party cookie degradation. Almost one-fifth of U.S. brands had moved programmatic buying completely in-house in 2019, while more than half had transitioned to doing so partially—up 4% from the previous year—according to a new IAB report.
Streaming Viewing Up 74% Annually, Disney+ Has 4% [:02]
A new report that speaks to Nielsen’s streaming meter panel found that average weekly streaming minutes are up from 81.7 billion in Q2 2019 to 142.5 billion in Q2 2020, representing a 74% increase.
What The Rise Of At-Home Cinema Means For Connected TV [:04]
The at home cinema experience was already expected to grow between 2019 and 2025. However, as coronavirus shut cinema and theater doors down, this number has grown more than expected. First-party data from Samsung smart TVs shows that linear TV is making a smaller portion of people’s total TV viewing habits. This new trend is opening up new, innovative ways people experience film and the commercial opportunities along with it.
How The Death of Digital IDs Will Reshape The Marketing Mix [:04]
The demise of cookies, IDFA, and likely all 1-to-1 identifiers available to third parties will change the ways buyers approach the marketing mix. While the industry will develop new ways to target audiences, none of the solutions will be the 1-to-1 targeting buyers have become accustomed to. There will be 4 main ways the industry tackles this–advertising scale, audience engagement, media cost, and brand safety.
Apple Killed The IDFA: A Comprehensive Guide To The Future Of Mobile Marketing [:15]
Apple just changed the mobile ad tech ecosystem with their recent announcement. According to one expert, IDFA access will fall between 10-20%, and this article goes deep on what the impact may be for marketers.
How Covid-19 is Destigmatizing Virtual Life [:07]
A Collective Virtual Experience can be defined as an experience where a group of people simultaneously participate in a live event or experience online. From Zoom happy hours to meetups in Minecraft, we continue to find new platforms, forums, and feeds to connect with each other and our passions, all in the virtual space. How will these behaviors have a lasting impact as folks start to see each other IRL?
Designing Deeper Fan Experiences [:05]
Sports are back…kinda. Leagues and teams are rethinking the experience, exploring how fans can interact with each other and the game in real time. Technology enables experiences that have never been possible before. Now more than ever, people are willing to try new ways of doing things.
SECTION 1: DIGITAL MEDIA EXCITEMENT
In April 2020, Centro surveyed 65 progressive, conservative and non-partisan agencies, consultants and advocacy organizations specializing in political marketing. According to their responses, connected TV and programmatic advertising are poised for a big election year. Of the respondents, 63% consider connected TV (CTV) as one of the top five most promising developments for their digital campaigns. CTV had the highest vote total by a wide margin, whereas in our 2018 survey it ranked as the fifth most promising development, selected by less than 40% of respondents.
As enthusiasm for CTV rises, excitement around programmatic advertising is holding steady—and was selected by 53% of respondents this year, and 42% in 2018.
The use of programmatic ad tactics is still new for many marketing professionals—however, the use of data will continue to be a key element for any digital campaign. In our 2018 polling, the top five developments that received the most votes were audience data, technology for connecting offline-online audiences (no longer in the top 5 this year), digital media confidence spurring more spending, programmatic advertising, and CTV. One consistency from two years ago is that social ad products ranked last again. While social channels undoubtedly play a role in most campaigns, their ad offerings don’t appear to enthuse political marketers.
SECTION 2: HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH
When asked what portion of overall media spend goes to digital, a majority of respondents said that digital budgets make up less than half of total media spend, with 62.5% reporting digital allocations under 40%.
This is in line with industry predictions that digital will account for 19-30% of total political ad spending in the 2020 cycle. This also confirms that political investment in digital still lags well behind other industries, as digital is expected to make up more than 50% of all US ad spend in 2020 according to various studies.
However, in our survey there were a significant number of respondents (30%) for whom digital makes up the majority of their ad spend.
While no one believes digital is getting an outsized share of spending within their budgets, respondents were nearly equally split between feeling their digital budget allocations are ‘too low’ and those who say it’s ‘just right,’ while the remaining 11% are ‘just guessing.’
A majority (65%) of respondents who had 24% or less budget allocations felt this is too low. For the group that indicated a budget of 25-39%, it was evenly split between those who said it is ‘too low’ and those that say it’s ‘just right.’
A majority (68%) of respondents who had a 40% or more digital budget allocation said it was ‘just right.’
SECTION 3: CASHING IN ON CONNECTED TV
The growth of CTV (consumer use and ad dollars funneled through it) is leading to battles to win budgets. A continuing industry question is who is best equipped to manage CTV budgets—is CTV digital or TV?
According to Centro’s 2018 election ad spend data, only 5% of political spending was channeled to CTV. But allocation is projected to grow dramatically this year.
Although there is perceived parity in winning CTV ad dollars, respondents from advertising agencies (vs Political consultants, Public Affairs Communications, Media Buying Agency, or Non-profit Organization) strongly believe (70% of them) that digital buyers were winning more.
SECTION 4: PROGRAMMATIC IS A POLITICAL AD STAPLE
The overwhelming majority of professionals feel that programmatic advertising has some level of importance to their campaigns this year. Overall, 78% said ‘Yes’ programmatic will be important, which is consistent with the response to our 2018 survey, when 77% chose Yes. The shift over the last cycle was that ‘I don’t know’ responses dropped to under 5% this year (from 13% in 2018), and respondents selecting ‘Somewhat’ important increased from 9% to 16%.
Presently, programmatic is how most digital impressions are transacted. The question is how political operatives choose to access this, whether it’s through self-serve platforms or contracted as a managed service from a partner.
In programmatic buying channels, the importance of data (whether it’s 1st or 3rd party) for an election campaign is evident because of the need to scale impressions with precision, to reach the right people.
Illustrating its general popularity, CTV (along with other forms of digital video) looks to be a highly utilized programmatic channel for political marketers.
More than half of respondents are excited about hyperlocal ads—a coincidence, with Centro’s 2018 numbers showing that the same percentage of political clients used this tactic for election campaigns.
Holistic reporting, a new concept, is not specifically associated with programmatic (because programmatic is normally activated in a silo); but 40% of respondents added it their top five list.
Notable laggards are native advertising and private marketplaces.
SECTION 5: THE COVID-19 FACTOR
Political marketers are not concerned about job loss or inability to work during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Regarding the pandemic, the biggest concern is campaigns running and ad budgets, because there’s only one event and only one desirable outcome.
Vote by mail and education around it is a new concern brought on because of the current state of the country.
SECTION 6: AREAS OF CONCERN
When it comes to overall concerns in digital media for political campaigns, 53% of respondents think COVID will distract from key issues.
The shifting policies of digital platforms is the biggest concern – they take up most of the spend while causing more complexity and confusion for the industry.
Targeting voters, proving ad impact, and winning budgets are also top of mind for marketers.
Misinformation and the factors around it are not much of a concern.
SECTION 7: UNCERTAINTY
Uncertainty is a common theme for 2020 and that is reflected in the outlook for political campaigns.
76% say the political environment will affect their desired outcome but are not sure whether it will be positive or negative. This is up considerably from 2018 when only 50% of respondents answering this way.
In 2018, 21% guessed that the political environment would have no impact, but this year, only 6% feel this way.
Acknowledgments
As a thank you to our industry peers and partners, Centro is donating $2 to Feeding America for each respondent of our survey.
About Centro’ Candidates and Causes Group
For more than a decade, Centro’s technology and services have been trusted by agencies and consultants in politics, public affairs, and advocacy. Throughout the years, Centro’s Candidates + Causes group has collectively worked with 1000+ political campaigns and independent expenditure committees, and 1000+ issue advocacy advertisers. Our proficiency for driving perception in government, in the public sphere, or among specific audiences is a differentiated and valuable asset in this field. Centro is headquartered in Chicago with 43 offices covering North America, South America and Europe, including a Washington, DC, hub for its Candidates + Causes team.
In reaction to the current movement against racial inequality, many companies are scrambling to audit and improve their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies. Professionals of all levels are simultaneously determining how they can contribute to a more equitable future.
In this episode, DEI executive and educator Veronica Appleton shares her perspective on addressing DEI in the greater advertising and marketing landscape.
Digital audio advertising has ballooned over the past few years as technology has advanced the access and availability to streaming media, which in turn, has increased users' overall time online. According to the 2019 Infinite Dial report, Americans over the age of 12 years old are listening nearly 17 hours of online audio a week!
This is a huge opportunity to enter the new landscape of audio advertisements. eMarketer also reports that as listenership on traditional radio continues to fall year over year, digital radio is expected to surpass traditional by 2021.
The rise in digital audio streaming creates the need for easy and efficient digital audio advertising. This is where audio advertising, served programmatically, takes the lead. Programmatic audio is a type of digital advertising format designed for placement in audio contents such as podcasts, digital radio, and music-streaming services.
Centro’s Basis has direct PMP partnerships with some of the world’s leading brands and partners in the digital advertising landscape. Programmatic audio served through Basis is served based on an algorithm that analyzes where the targeted audience is within the specific programmatic audio marketplace.
Learn more about the audio advertising opportunity with Centro, here.
Native Advertising
Whether you’re new to digital advertising or a seasoned veteran, you’ve most likely heard clients and brands ask about native advertising. The amount of media dollars that brands are investing in native advertising has continued to increase year over year as the channel has evolved and more inventory has become available.
How Native Ads Work
Native advertising is commercial content that matches the look and feel of the site its on. Basis Technologies works with TripleLift and ShareThrough, two of the top native advertising platforms built for the visual web, to run native ads on our DSP. These platforms leverage pioneering ad and computer vision technology to integrate a brand’s most engaging images, across any device, at scale.
As consumers have become more and more accustomed to digital display banners, they’ve also become ‘banner blind,’ meaning they’ve become trained to ignore the typical areas of a publisher’s site where display banners are usually seen.
Native advertising can come in the form of in-feed content, branded content, or sponsored articles which all give the advertiser placement alongside relevant and engaging content to help mitigate banner blindness. This gives brands the opportunity to build awareness and consideration when the consumer is leaning in to learn more.
Basis Technologies’ experts are here to help! Learn more about Native Advertising with Basis here.
Anyone trying to navigate the Advanced TV space has felt the confusion—is there a difference between over-the-top (OTT) and Connected TV (CTV)? What is the benefit to Addressable TV over CTV? What on earth is an MVPD? Why are there so many acronyms?! Fear not! Centro is here to help navigate this rapidly expanding and increasingly confusing landscape.
The first piece of this puzzle is Advanced TV—this umbrella term encompasses each of the targeted TV types: Connected TV, OTT, Addressable TV, and Programmatic TV. Advanced TV is also typically the term people use to talk about the targeted TV landscape overall. With that down, we can tackle the definitions and differences for each type of Advanced TV. See? You’re already getting it!
Some other terms often thrown around in the advanced TV space are MVPDs, vMVPDs, SVOD, and AVOD. Think of these as different sources of inventory for the types of Advanced TV. Review more detail on each of these services, below:
The Advanced TV landscape is complex, but hopefully this guide helped clarify some of its intricacies. Buyers can access and discover CTV/OTT inventory through the private marketplaces and open exchange in Basis. Centro teams can also advise and execute buys across data-driven linear and addressable TV—learn more about Centro’s Connected TV offering here.
If you run online marketing campaigns for your organization, you’ve probably heard a thing or two about the benefits of investing in automation to streamline reporting and drive more effective decision-making. According to statistics outlined in a study by Marketo and Ascend2, 52% of marketers surveyed declared that applying artificial intelligence to analytics and reporting was considered the most valuable use of automation.
There is a crop of business leaders today, though, who still regard automated reporting as an option, not a real necessity. In this blog post, we dive into some of the tangible costs that using repetitive manual reporting processes could have on your business operations.
Arguably the largest hidden cost of repetitive manual reporting is your loss of a major competitive advantage. Manual reporting is so slow that it’s necessary to delay decision-making that can improve your sales and marketing performance. Collecting data from different sources, compiling them into complex spreadsheets, and manually evaluating them can lead to significant errors in interpretation. This means decision-makers have less confidence in results, which can also lead to missed opportunities.
Businesses that analyze performance manually usually do so monthly or quarterly. However, in today’s competitive landscape, it’s critical that you make changes in real-time. There’s no way to calculate the full cost of delaying decisions until you replace it with automation. Once you do, it’s easy to see that your business was missing out on potential sales and revenue by doing things the slow way.
In the worst cases, marketing managers are pushed to make major decisions before data analysis is even ready. They have to move forward with their best guess as to the right course to take, which could lead to even more losses. Missing the competitive advantage isn’t just about lacking productivity. As described above, automation technologies can also help you gain more accurate and valuable insights in comparison to what you could discover on your own.
Just know that if your business doesn’t invest in automated reporting, your competitors will. They will take advantage of improved productivity and more accurate insights to secure more sales and revenue that you’ll continue to miss out on.
Regardless of how careful you are, there will undoubtedly be human errors when reporting is carried out manually. It’s easy to hit the wrong key, copy the wrong data field, or misinterpret information in data reporting. You can also run into issues when different people work with your reporting data simultaneously. Without clear, company-wide definitions for each data field, you’re likely to run into discrepancies when everyone creates their own methodologies.
Ultimately, the real cost of human error is two-fold. One: undetected errors lead to inaccurate data and reports. And two: detected errors require ongoing time and resources to fix. While it may not be necessary to automate all data management, leveraging automation for your reports can minimize preventable mistakes. Automated tools essentially empower you to compile and analyze your data while reducing inaccuracies safely. Top-of-the-line tools have functionalities in place to prevent errors within the automation process itself, one example of which is anomaly detection features that automatically pause bids and flag data if performance starts to deviate significantly from projections.
Many businesses today hold out on adopting automation, but all that leads to is increased labor costs. Why would a CMO pay for several employees to manually execute a task when one person could do it with the assistance of automation? It doesn’t make sense.
Having a group of people work on the same assignment simply takes longer, and as a result of human error, they are also likely to spend additional time going back and fixing mistakes. When automation is employed, marketing organizations can accomplish the task with a higher degree of accuracy in a shorter period of time, which frees up employees to work on other, more critical projects.
Manual reporting allows you to build custom reports that focus on the insights that matter most to your business. With automation, however, you can do all that and more. Many automated data management and consolidation technologies use artificial intelligence to help users derive enhanced actionable insights from their data sets. Centro’s intelligent automation platform, Basis, leverages machine learning to discover correlations between different data points that can expose performance insights that would have otherwise gone undetected with manual reporting.
Automation also enables you to process and analyze significantly more data than you could with manual reporting alone. Look at advertising, for example. The competitive bidding landscape changes every day. Businesses can adjust their bids to take advantage of these changes, but only if they can analyze all the relevant data daily. Not even a team of the best data scientists are up to that task. With the help of AI-driven automation, however, you can do that. You’ll be empowered to surface timely insights and make appropriate changes to your campaigns that will drive improved performance.
The exercise of pulling together reports manually undoubtedly absorbs countless hours and resources. You have to gather data from various sources, verify it, conduct your analyses, build your charts and reports, etc. Depending on the size of your business and how much data you have to process, this could take employees several hours minimum. The universal reporting and analytics platform within Basis is one such solution that does all this work automatically, empowering marketers to consolidate their disparate data sources in one central location and completely eliminating the time it takes to stitch together disconnected performance reports.
By taking advantage of automation on this scale, employees become liberated from repetitive tasks and can instead focus on more complex initiatives where they can use their expertise to truly move the needle.
Thanks to the EU’s GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and other regulations coming into play, it’s become incredibly important for businesses to keep their consumer audience data safe. There are now strict rules about what kind of consumer data you can collect, how you store it, who can access it, and what it is used for, etc. Failing to comply with these regulations can lead to legal prosecution and massive fines.
This creates a big problem for businesses that regularly handle their data manually. Lack of knowledge and simple mistakes can lead businesses to break the law or compromise the security of their data. If this happens with your business, you’re legally obligated to notify your customers about the breach. That won’t look good for PR. Today, the majority of automation tools designed for data management strictly follow data privacy compliance laws. Managing your data within their system helps keep it safe and minimizes your liability.
In companies who still report manually, there’s usually one specific person who manages the data spreadsheet on behalf of the team. They define all the labels, create all the formulas, and run the analyses. What happens when this person is on paid time off or moves on? Who feels confident enough to go into the spreadsheet and pick up where this person left off?
When you automate data reporting, you’re not relying too heavily on your data expert to keep the ship afloat. Many different team members can easily work with the system to get the insights they need without having to put their hands on the raw data. This makes things easier for your team as a whole and eliminates the potential for major data issues caused by human error.
Manual data reporting equals numerous repetitive tasks. We’ve established that. You have to collect all the data, verify it, analyze it, create reports, and distribute results, etc. Often you have several people working on a single project at once. That makes it very difficult to keep track of who’s working on what, and what’s complete. This can also lead to duplication of effort — if nobody knows who’s working on which reports, it’s common for individual teams to create identical reports of their own.
When you work with one tool to automate data reporting like Basis, this issue goes away entirely. The reports are made automatically, and everyone knows exactly where to find them.
The above list illustrates just a few of the many hidden costs of using manual reporting in lieu of automation. Most of these costs are interrelated and compound each other to have a significant negative impact on your business. What’s more, leaders have no way to realize these losses unless they try out automation first.
Automating even some aspects of your marketing strategy comes with numerous benefits, namely improved productivity, better insights, more confidence in results, enhanced workflows, more leads, more sales, and increased revenue. With better, faster insights, you can make quick changes to your marketing campaigns to achieve these goals.
When you invest in advanced technologies like those offered by Centro, it’s also possible to automate changes to your advertising campaigns based on these insights. The more you can take advantage of AI-driven technologies to streamline your marketing process, the greater benefits you’ll start to see.