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Forward-thinking media teams will have noticed that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought increased opportunities to win with video. The stars have aligned, with:
All these developments add up to the much-anticipated convergence into omnichannel video, which will impact the industry for years to come.
In this month’s webinar, Forrester Research’s Jim Nail shares how agencies and brands can ready themselves for the growing opportunity in omnichannel advertising.
‘Ask the Expert’ is a series that breaks down the tools, tech, and trends you’ve been hearing about in the trade pubs and around the office. We ask our in-house experts the tough questions and write up the answers in bite-sized pieces for your reading pleasure.
This month’s topic? Brand safety on news and information sites. We brought in a partner—Connatix’s chief revenue officer, Jenn Chen, to give us the breakdown.
Why is brand safety a topic of interest when it comes to serving ads on news outlets?
News sits at the heart of knowledge and information—especially now when consumers are spending more time online than ever before for the latest updates. News sits in a unique and critical place between the public and advertisers, whose allocated budgets help front-line journalists. While advertisers know they need news inventory to reach most of their consumers, they also have to protect and promote their brand in a positive way. Brand safety is an essential criterion to allow them to accomplish objectives, without sacrificing core advertising principals.
How can advertisers assess brand safety levels on video news content?
Today, there are very few solutions that allow advertisers to target the context of both page-level and video content. Advertisers usually layer on a pre-bid page-level solution such as Peer39, Oracle Grapeshot, Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, Moat, or a DSP’s built-in solutions for targeting. However, page-level solutions are not without limitations—they require advertisers to spend additional time and resources on reaching out to individual publishers and asking them to include first-party data on the backend to categorize video private marketplaces (PMPs). Ultimately, advertisers should consider solutions that can add another layer of insight with in-video context in order to target efficiently and safely.
How are news publishers properly classifying their content to fit their advertisers’ safety requirements?
Traditionally, publishers and their editorial teams manually classify content by grouping them into feeds, adding keyword tags, and also using their own technology solutions to decode transcripts and audio files into first-party categorizations. Video indexing tools help publishers use content contextualization to analyze the content on-site and, in their videos automatically, to complete an otherwise manual process.
How is Connatix solving problems with video content classification?
With our goal of creating engaging video experiences for readers, Connatix has developed technology that classifies and contextualizes videos by sentiment, content category, keywords, and famous individuals to help both publishers and advertisers scale in-video buying in a brand-safe way.
How does Connatix work with advertisers, DSPs, and publishers?
One of our goals at Connatix is to bridge the gap between publishers and advertisers. We build our platforms and tech to streamline processes and deliver effective video experiences across the board. For advertisers and DSP partners, Connatix helps curate our direct-to-publisher supply, optimizing towards goals alongside the brand’s DSP partner. Connatix offers the most efficient way to contextually target and access unique video supply activated inside our players. For strategic partners, we also create custom creative and data solutions with both parties to drive video performance. For publishers, Connatix offers a full-stack video solution: video player, CMS, ad server, and SSP/exchange. We work with over 500+ publishers, helping them improve their content strategy and creation as well as advertising monetization.
Are you interested in learning how Centro can boost your video advertising with brand safety? Learn more about our video advertising capabilities.
What are you going to watch? Yes, you!
One of the most daunting decisions we make today is what to watch. All of us are constantly inundated with content options and it’s hard to not find the experience overwhelming. Personally, I end up re-watching The Office instead of finding something new. That said, it’s not all bad! Thanks to the Connected TV (CTV), we now know the best way to watch. Looks like you’ve found your show! While it’s loading, let’s explore how your CTV works, below!
What is Connected TV?
A Connected TV (CTV) is a television or connected device with an Internet connection and a UI that enables users to access content through applications such as Smart TVs, Gaming Consoles, and Set Top Boxes. Centro will serve video ads to users on various Connected TV devices including Roku, Xbox, Apple TV, and more.
Connected TV is channel accessible via programmatic media which takes place in a Private Market Place (PMP). A Private Market Place is an exclusive, invitation-only exchange where premium publishers make their inventory and audiences available to a select group of buyers, programmatically. PMPs not only have premium inventory but also allow for higher win rates as there is less competition for ads to be shown.
For example, SpotX is a Video Advertising Platform that creates PMPs that are made up of premium publishers, such as Pluto TV, Samba TV, and Discovery. These publishers offer hundreds of channels with a plethora of content. Therefore, if you choose TNT’s Animal Kingdom on the SlingTV app on your CTV device and see an ad, this ad has won this inventory via the SpotX PMP.
How Does Connected TV Advertising work?
Is your show still loading? Good. Your next question may be, how are these ads targeted to me on my CTV device? This can get tricky as CTV devices are not tied to a device ID, which is how advertisers are able to target ads via desktop and mobile. Instead, CTV devices are tied to an IP address because they are connected to the internet, as well as, the rest of your household. PMPs curate publisher inventory based on content indexes. Therefore, if the Animal Kingdom indexes high against auto intenders, then you will most likely be receiving a car commercial.
Oh, looks like your show is about to start! Well, I think we made the best of a boring situation. Next time you turn on your CTV device with your friends, take advantage of the load time and impress them all with your understanding on how Connected TV advertising works—and enjoy that streaming content from the comfort of your couch!
Want to know more? Learn more about the Connected TV advertising opportunity with Centro, here.
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 Is How Covid-19 is Affecting the Advertising Industry [:11]
Covid-19 has no doubt changed the way people consume media, therefore changing the way advertisers across the globe are spending their media dollars. Many advertisers are realizing that their long term strategy needs to be shifting their messaging to one that focuses on their mission, their e-commerce experience and brand-building.
Pandemic Brings Change to ‘Bloated’ Ad Industry [:06]
As advertising spending declines this year by 25%, the timing of a full recovery may be several years out. Many marketers are finding ways to be innovative and successfully do more with less, while also addressing regional messaging related to the pandemic and overdue calls for increased diversity.
Follow the Money: How Digital Ads Subsidize the Worst of the Web [:12]
An interesting non-industry perspective from Wired, about how the internet has some terrible content and how much of the internet is ad-supported. Brand safety continues to be important, and so does an advertiser’s partnership with media buyers and the platforms.
Adobe Exiting Political Ad Business [:02]
Last Friday, omnichannel DSP Adobe confirmed that they will be exiting the political ad business. The change requires businesses to scramble to other sources. The Wall Street Journal reported that the move was driven by a need for the DSP to focus on larger, more stable clients.
Side note: did you know that Centro has an amazing team dedicated to Candidates & Causes?
2020 U.S. Report on Programmatic In-Housing [:10]
An updated report from the IAB and Accenture shows that the US continues to not just lead with programmatic media investment, but also with in-housing programmatic, though that means different things to different organizations. While 69% of US brands have brought functions in-house and are seeing increases in transparency and efficiency, the support of an outside partner remains crucial.
The Cookie Is Crumbling And COVID-19 Is Still Here, But Digital Advertising Will Be OK [:05]
Despite the continued challenge presented by COVID-19 and the projected impairment posed by losing third party cookies, Rob Rasko of the 614 Group shares 3 reasons why he believes the industry will survive the death of the cookie.
Will People Actually Opt In to IDFA Tracking? [:03]
Starting in September, developers must get permission from users before tracking them with the IDFA on the app-by-app basis. Will people actually opt in when presented with an explicit choice between being tracked and not being tracked? Current consent rates range from 50%-70%. However, with the ‘allow tracking’ button, some experts think that 95% of people will opt out. The clock is ticking on GAID (the Google Advertising ID.)
OTT Leaders Outline Different Paths Through the Pandemic and to Profitability [:04]
There’s no single template for taking over-the-top video services to sustainable success. Three executives at smaller OTT services shared that lesson in a round of interviews that closed out FierceVideo’s OTT Blitz Week virtual conference.
Unilever, Anheuser-Busch Join Test of Pandora's Voice-Powered Ads [:02]
Acura, Anheuser-Busch, and Purple Mattress are among the brands testing interactive ads that respond to voice commands on Pandora. The streaming platform recently started the next stage of a voice-powered ads pilot that originally launched in December, after hearing that 72% of listeners found the voice ads easy to use. I said, THEY WERE EASY TO USE!
How is the marketing landscape going to look after COVID-19? Should businesses go back to following the same strategies that worked for them in the past, or have we entered into a whole new territory?
Realistically, both of those assessments are correct. Following marketing best practices is still important, yet much has changed about what businesses should prioritize and focus on. Arguably the most important tactic that will help businesses navigate the post-pandemic ecosystem is monitoring marketing ROI. Here’s why:
Many businesses have downscaled their marketing efforts significantly since the pandemic began. It just didn’t seem like the right time to be pushing the public into buying products and services.
Now we’re many months down the road and the economy is still running. The vast majority of marketing organizations that took a break at the onset of COVID-19 have returned to work. Many never rolled back their initiatives. According to Advertiser Perceptions, only one in 10 new product or service launches have been canceled for 2020; 41% are proceeding as planned, and 48% were simply pushed to the second half of the year.
While there are, of course, plenty of businesses that are still in survival mode, many are not. Influencer Marketing Hub’s recent Coronavirus Marketing & Ad Spend Impact Report indicates that one in four companies are set to increase their marketing activities this year. So if your competitors aren’t taking a break, why should you?
A large number of CMOs are investing heavily right now. If you want to keep up with your competition—or even outpace and outperform them—you need to ramp up your performance monitoring and optimize your marketing strategy post-pandemic.
Previous campaign performance has always been a valuable indicator of what to expect from your current efforts. However, that’s all completely changed. Adapting to new economic and societal norms is bringing businesses into whole new territory.
Marketers now are changing which channels they invest in and how much budget they allocate towards each. IAB’s COVID Impact on Ad Spend Report documents that many brands expect to increase their spend across digital channels in the second half of 2020, including CTV/OTT, digital video, social media, podcasts, digital audio, and paid search.
With that in mind, it’s safe to say that your previous marketing results won’t tell you much about how your campaigns will perform right now. Metrics tracking lead generation, conversions, sales, and retention can be drastically different from what they were back in January. The only way to know if your current marketing efforts are effective is by paying close attention to real-time performance trends.
The global pandemic has led to drastic changes in consumer sentiment. If you want your marketing message to resonate with your target audiences, you need to continuously adapt it to their current preferences. You’ve probably seen a lot of marketers already doing this with new advertisements. Businesses are going out of their way to show how they care and help their communities—those in the restaurant and travel industries, for instance, have been highlighting their sanitation practices to ease consumer fears.
As the pandemic continues to unfold, preferences among consumer groups change week-to-week (and almost day-to-day!) The best way to ensure your marketing message is still relevant in the long run is by constantly and maniacally monitoring performance.
According to a recent Media Frenzy Global survey, 47% of US consumers are interested in reading or hearing news that is not related to the pandemic, and 45% also say they want to be inspired by brands so they can be hopeful about the future. Your brand can cater to these changing sentiments, but only if you’re closely observing audience reactions and adapting accordingly.
Just about every business sector has been negatively affected by COVID-19, either directly or indirectly. According to research from McKinsey & Company, it could take more than five years for the most severely affected sectors to return to 2019-level contributions to GDP:
Regardless of whether your industry is set to recover, it could take a long time to reach pre-pandemic levels. Business leaders need to operate frugally while still moving forward with their sales and marketing initiatives.
The best way to do this is by ensuring every marketing dollar counts. The more you check your metrics, the more informed optimizations you can make to your campaigns, ensuring your budget is always spent as effectively as possible.
Just about every day, we are seeing new restrictions, shutdowns, and major events happening around the world in real-time. Many of these events can significantly impact your business and marketing efforts.
For example, many cities in the US and around the world are quickly imposing local lockdowns that include closing select businesses and limiting the opening hours of others. But you don’t want to leave your Google Ads running until 10pm each day when your business is suddenly forced to shut down at 5pm.
It also makes a lot of sense to segment your audiences based on their location and local sentiment. People in certain areas are more inclined to shop in-store or online, and the only way you can figure this out—and take advantage of it—is by paying close attention to how they engage with your marketing message.
Throughout the last few months, certain channels have become significantly more (or less) popular with marketers compared to pre-pandemic times, and this means there are numerous opportunities you can take advantage of. Advertising is a prime example: a recent global advertising investment forecast from WARC shows that 2020 ad spend is expected to decline by 8.1%, rather than growing 7.1% year-over-year as expected.
Since businesses are investing less in advertising, competition for ad rank and cost-per-click is decreasing. If you optimize your advertising strategy right now, you can potentially rank well for keywords that were once too expensive to target. That said, diving into this new territory is only going to be effective if you prioritize regularly measuring performance.
In short, there’s no need to be in survival mode. Research from Rakuten recently showed that 87% of global consumers still plan to shop for Christmas and other seasonal holidays. What’s more, 57% expect to buy on key days like Black Friday. Imagine competing for ad space on Cyber Monday with half of your competition out of the advertising game. Businesses that are brave enough to take an aggressive marketing approach right now can set themselves up for significant success.
These are not normal times, which means businesses cannot rely upon a normal marketing strategy. If there was ever a time to start checking your marketing performance metrics several times per week, it’s now. Society, sentiment, marketing platforms, and business strategies are changing faster than ever before. If you don’t prioritize monitoring marketing ROI, don’t be surprised if your performance changes significantly each time you check-in.
The good news is you won’t have to be vigilant forever. Slowly, the world will go back to normal, and it will eventually become easier to predict the marketing landscape. Just keep monitoring performance closely. Once things level out with your metrics, you can start relying more on past performance again.
Paying close attention to marketing ROI may well be a chore, but it does come with many added benefits. Businesses that manage to market effectively through 2020 will have built a strategy that’s much more in-tune with consumer preferences in the long run.
According to a study by New Vantage, 97.2% of organizations are investing in big data practices today. Just how valuable the intelligence you collect is, though, depends entirely on how capable you are of harnessing it. The first thing you need to do is consolidate your data effectively so you can easily process, analyze, and extract insights from the swathes of information.
Data consolidation can be challenging, time-consuming work. However, it’s easy to streamline your efforts by adhering to some key best practices. We delve into them below.
First, a quick summary of why data consolidation is critical in the modern marketing ecosystem. Combining your CRM, email, advertising, web performance, and other relevant intelligence in one place empowers you to do all of the following:
This is by no means a comprehensive list. Data insights can help you improve sales, marketing, customer success, and many other areas within your organization. Consolidating your data will ultimately enable you to maximize the value of investing in big data and artificial intelligence in the long term.
Effective data consolidation involves creating a system where your business data is regularly processed and uploaded to a single platform. You can manually consolidate data from various sources, but it will quickly become outdated and irrelevant as new, real-time business data comes in. Combining application programming interfaces (APIs) from your various data sources is the solution to this problem.
The most valuable marketing technologies today have features in place that allow them to easily communicate and share data between other software programs. You need to have flexibility and control over how your different tools share data, what format the data is in, etc. If you’re unable to combine APIs between your various tools, it’s worthwhile investing in new technologies that can.
Successful data consolidation means you must have complete control over your own audience data. This becomes challenging when you rely heavily on “walled garden” data environments. Platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have a wealth of third-party data you can use to surface insights about your marketing campaigns. However, you don’t actually own this data, so you can’t control it or consolidate it.
While you can’t simply cease using Facebook and Google Ads, there are tactics you can adopt to minimize your reliance on such walled garden data environments. For instance, avoid using features that also allow these platforms to control your first-party data (such as Facebook’s tracking pixel or Google’s tracking tags). Instead, use your own technologies to capture your intelligence. This will make it easier to control, unify, and analyze your audience data the way you want to.
Utilizing technologies that can share and merge data is very valuable, but it’s easy to run into issues if the data you’re transferring is incomplete. Different tools use data points in different ways to categorize, tag, and sort consumer data. If you don’t have complete information about each of your leads or customers, this could lead to organizational issues later on.
As an example, some CRM platforms identify leads by their name, while others identify and categorize leads by their email address. If the data you transfer over is missing email addresses, then the tool will be unable to distinguish and categorize those leads properly. For this reason, ensure that all your fields are filled out before engaging in any kind of data consolidation activities.
It’s also vitally important that data types are consistent across these platforms. Different platforms will categorize and illustrate the same data contrastingly. You don’t want to discover this after your data is already merged. One tool may use a date/time format while another uses date only. Or one may denote currencies using symbols ($, €) while another uses USD and EUR abbreviations. It’s much easier to adapt your data to a new system before transferring it over, rather than fixing it after the fact.
As a result of globalization and the growth of the technology industry around the world, there are now a plethora of tools on the market that allow you to store single-byte characters (used for European languages) and double-byte characters (used for languages like Chinese and Japanese). However, if you merge your data to a platform that doesn’t have this flexibility, you could end up storing data with incongruent characters, making some fields impossible to read.
Regardless of whether or not you run an international business that uses multiple languages, it’s just good practice to use a character set that can express data in any language. Unicode is one popular option that can encode and represent text irrespective of the character set used.
Data consolidation can be a huge task, particularly for enterprise-level businesses with various distinct audiences, marketing channels, and campaigns. Since it will take a while to achieve full data consolidation, it’s best to start with the data sets that you can derive the most valuable insights from.
Cross-channel data is one of the best places to start. Consistently marketing to leads across platforms is now more important than ever. It can grow your purchase rate, conversion rate, and ROI. According to Omnisend’s 2020 Marketing Automation Statistics Report, Omnichannel campaigns that include SMS are 47.7% more likely to lead to conversions:
That said, omnichannel marketing is only possible if you’re able to track interactions across marketing channels. That’s a key benefit of data consolidation. So, start by integrating disparate data that will offer the most valuable insights into your marketing strategy, such as online and offline performance data and cross-channel interactions.
Even if you’re able to combine APIs to automatically share data between platforms, there’s still a lot of possibility for errors in your data. The worst way to discover data errors is after you’ve already consolidated it in a single processing platform. Then you have to fix the problems on multiple platforms rather than one. The majority of data management systems have safeguards in place to prevent people from accidentally corrupting or deleting data. However, mistakes can still be made. It’s best to review your data at the source before consolidating it.
Using the right data management tools, you can also use automation to double-check for data errors. Many automated bidding technologies have anomaly detection capabilities that can identify potential data errors, flag them, and notify marketing managers. In the case of PPC bidding, artificial intelligence can identify when campaign performance varies significantly from projections, then pause campaigns and give marketers the chance to determine if data anomalies are the cause.
Technologies that can help you streamline data consolidation are growing in number. Turning to technology for help is necessary for just about any sized business because there’s simply too much relevant business data to sift through by hand.
What kind of tool you should invest in, though, depends on what your goals are. Why is data consolidation important to you? Most businesses invest in data consolidation to gain insights to empower sales and marketing organizations. In that case, it makes sense to consolidate data using a tool that can also help you analyze it and act on new insights.
There are plenty of benefits to data consolidation, but there is also a lot of room for error. You need to take a careful, planned approach to consolidate your data accurately, minimize the time you invest, and maximize the value for your marketing and sales strategy. Ultimately, the effectiveness of your data consolidation efforts owes a lot to your MarTech stack. You should work with technologies that can share data with each other and look to employ a central tool that can process all your relevant data for you. Invest in technology that’s designed for data consolidation and you can’t go wrong.
There are three major advantages of streaming audio vs the terrestrial radio counterpart:
The growth of streaming audio has brought advertisers a plethora of options for ensuring that their most profitable consumer is receiving the message.
Below are the common ways we can target listeners via streaming audio:
In comparison, below are the ways terrestrial radio allows advertisers to target:
Streaming audio’s capabilities from a targeting standpoint allow brands to limit waste, increase their understanding of who is really reacting to their message and when, and enhance the listener experience through meaningful and timely communication.
Streaming audio is growing and has significant reach, but it shouldn’t replace a traditional terrestrial radio strategy entirely. As the points above demonstrate, the real mountain mover for brands is when both terrestrial radio and streaming audio are brought into the overall campaign.
While streaming audio benefits through advanced targeting options, stronger reporting and analytics, and a more engaged consumer listening and interacting with the medium, its greatest strength comes from the fact that it offers advertisers an immediate and actionable platform for listeners to engage with their :30s/:60s radio spots.
Native Advertising is sponsored content designed to be perfectly positioned within a publisher’s editorial content.
I know what you’re thinking. “Oh, so like an advertorial?” Well, yes and no. Because there isn’t an industry-wide definition or metric, some publishers are putting native into the “advertorial bucket.” The trouble with this definition is that native advertising can be so much more than that.
Publishers are defining native in more ways than one–sponsored infographics, tweets, and nonstandard ad units, to name a few. The US Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, defines Native Advertising as "blending advertisements with news, entertainment, and other editorial content in digital media." No matter how you define it, the goal is to drive engagement through what is considered a natural, organic environment.
While there could be better clarity around the actual definition, as a publisher, it might be time to start incorporating native options if you haven’t already. We already know that successful ad placement generally does not disrupt the reader’s experience. With native, that’s just the intention. It should not only feel like part of the editorial, but rather enhance the experience. When we enhance a user experience, we earn their attention–which then leads to (you guessed it) premium pricing. Earning a reader’s attention might be the most valuable action a publisher can ask for.
Premium content has always helped set the great publishers apart from the not so great. Integrating native should be a no-brainer for sites bursting with great editorial. No matter how you want to define it, eMarketer forecasts that advertisers will devote almost two-thirds of display budgets to native ads by the end of 2020. That’s enough to make both publishers and advertisers start paying attention!
Learn more about Native Advertising with Centro.
While most consumers are familiar with ads that promote the sale of products and services, many are less familiar with cause-based campaigns—campaigns that the market the missions and movements of cause-based organizations.
For some perspective on this topic, we speak to Jordan Ruden, Co-Founder of cause-driven ad agency Craft and Commerce, and Amanda Pyron, Executive Director of The Network, a membership organization that advocates against domestic violence.
Amanda shares her inside perspective on the unique challenges that non-profits face, while Jordan provides color on how organizations can approach mission-driven advertising in today’s world.