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Hello to those who find themselves now working from home! I’m Ben Smith, Salesforce Architect at Centro. I’m writing to offer some tips and tricks for setting up your physical working space while working from home. Take it from me—I’ve been working remotely from home for over 10 years. Even more, I’ve figured out how to WFH successfully with five homeschooled kids at home.
Rest assured, I promise this adventure will be as much ‘business as usual’ as it will be an accelerated rush of focused productivity for you. All those ‘to dos’ piled up on your desk, those colorful squares of post-it notes stuck to your monitor…. Forget about them! You don’t need them. In fact, it’s a good thing you forgot to bring those home, isn’t it? Because now you have basically ‘Marie Kondo-ed’ your workspace!
Defining the physical space where you can truly focus and work is very important. So important, that I would say it is the single most important thing to get right when you are working remotely.
Having the same well-defined physical space to work in every day allows you to establish proper boundaries between your everyday home life and your professional work life. My top three personal requirements for a home office are as follows:
Below you will see some additional tips from Centrons that exclusively work from home to help you define your new WFH space. They're all great suggestions and I hope they help you find your optimal workspace!
“Make sure to have your space set up before you start the day. I always make it my "work only" space so that I can separate work from home. It helps me compartmentalize work. Sometimes I even light a candle to lighten the mood.”
–Amanda Wallman (McDonald)“Formalize your space. Arrange your desk space as you would in the office. Don't just push your cereal bowl out of the way for your laptop. Your workspace should be designated as specifically that: workspace.”
–Andy Alvardo“If possible, try to work in a room with a door that you can close for privacy. Practice good posture while sitting (just like you hopefully would do in an office) and don't sit in front of the TV or work while laying on your bed.”
–Christine Lundell“What was most valuable to me was carving out a space in my apartment that I would only use for work. I know this isn't possible for everybody, but if it is, I would highly recommend doing so.”
–Gabe Doran“Create a space that makes you happy, but get out of it often. Walk around and use your porch or deck if you have one.”
–Stephanie Jurney
As a parting thought, don’t forget to go to your workspace like you would go to work, thereby mentally putting yourself in the mindset of work. Try and keep your routine the same as you would at the office. I think you'll find that your productivity will increase dramatically!
You have your laptop, you have your phone, and you have your team—let’s do this!
Interested in joining our team? Check out our careers page.
We told you all about ad spenders continuing to adopt programmatic advertising capabilities in-house. You know that digital media teams have to figure out how to make programmatic and direct buying co-exist peacefully. What’s left? Well, it’s only March, so there’s probably plenty left on your digital plate for the rest of the year. And we want to help you get set up for programmatic success in 2018.
Beyond the tools and the features and the teams, what can digital media professionals do to get the most value from their programmatic partners? How can they manage the change within their organization? How can they drive the most performance out of their media, their teams, and their business?
You didn’t think we’d leave you hanging, did you?
When we worked with research firm Ad Perceptions on this survey, we made sure to ask a simple question of 150+ digital media professionals: What would help you be more successful in your role?
The results probably won’t surprise you:
Ultimately, marketers and agencies want campaign performance and results they can work with – the right results to satisfy their bosses and impress their clients.
What will surprise you: Everything that marketers and agencies deemed a “key to programmatic success” remain some of their biggest pain points – things like better insights, consistent measurement standards across all buying channels, and an overwhelming selection of vendors vying for their attention.
It’s a catch-22. And the real challenge we’re facing as an industry lies in figuring out how all the tools stack up against the problems we’re facing.
According to our research, the tools themselves aren’t always the problem. Of the groups we surveyed, agencies were the most likely to be satisfied – with 64% saying their existing toolset works well. Whereas almost half of the marketer respondents expressed that their toolsets are cumbersome and not effective.
Ultimately, users of this digital tech and software may not be fully considering how theses tools relate to their satisfaction. The tools are a means to an end – but are they delivering? Are they generating the right results? Are they being used to their full potential?
In a digital world inundated with the promise of tools and tech and solutions that can do more, how can you quickly recognize the value of yet another programmatic ad partner? And once you find that perfect partnership, what resources can you tap into to ensure you’re unlocking everything that’s possible with digital media?
At Centro, we like to focus on three main things:
Learn more about Programmatic Advertising with Centro.
Performance marketing is a strand of marketing that focuses on driving specific actions, such as clicks, form fills, or sales. Rather than simply spreading a brand message everywhere and hoping it resonates, performance marketers develop specific strategies to drive key goals based on insights. Anyone serious about marketing online today is investing in performance marketing strategies.
Most businesses, though, never consider working with a performance marketing agency to improve results. It’s a common misconception that you should only enlist third-party help if you don’t know how to market yourself. In reality, a performance marketing agency can help you deliver better business outcomes in a great many ways, regardless of whether you have your own internal marketing team.
Let’s start by discussing some of the many benefits of building a relationship with a performance marketing agency today:
Most performance marketing agencies have their own MarTech stack they use to provide services to their clients. These can include advanced PPC bid management software, social media management tools, analytics solutions, and more. When you work with a performance marketing agency, you can benefit from all these technologies without actually purchasing them yourself. Lots of top agencies use software that individual businesses may not be able to afford and use on their own.
Most internal marketing teams have experience in many different marketing areas. Few businesses have enough budget to recruit and hire experts in every area, though, and so team members often multitask and work on various initiatives at once. Working with an agency is one solution to this problem as they can fill in the gaps in expertise where your internal team falls short. As an example, if you’re lacking a specialist in PPC bid optimization, you can work with an agency that has the tools and personnel to run this for you.
Just because you have your own marketing team doesn’t mean you can’t work with a performance marketing agency. In reality, an agency is designed to support your in-house team, empowering them with savvy suggestions and recommendations. An agency can offer a fresh perspective based on their knowledge in your market and others. Their expertise outside your business allows for the creation of novel ideas and strategies that can help you win your battles for revenue.
Different areas of marketing can absorb significant amounts of time, especially if your team doesn’t have expert knowledge and tools for certain channels. It can require a lot of manpower and investment to optimize correctly. Allowing a performance marketing agency to take care of these tasks frees up your internal teams immensely. They’re able to reallocate their efforts to other marketing tasks, increasing productivity in the process.
As a business grows, so too does its marketing strategy. Most leaders are faced with a decision - either expand their current marketing team or invest in a third-party contractor. Adding new employees requires lots of investment. There are office space and tools and also recruiting costs and turnover to worry about. With all that in mind, investing in a performance marketing agency is likely much more affordable than expanding your own organization.
Today there are many marketing agencies out there saying they can help you drive better business outcomes. However, few are equipped with the skills, expertise, and technology to maximize the effectiveness of your output. Here are a few things to look for when evaluating potential performance marketing agencies to work with:
It’s possible your business is looking to fill a gap by working with a marketing agency. If that’s the case, then it’s important to choose an agency that has specific skills and expertise in the areas you need. Any agency can offer services in social media marketing, display advertising, SEM, content marketing, etc, yet some will have key specializations that set them apart from the rest.
To get an idea of what areas an agency excels in, take a look at their service page and case studies. If most of their success stories are in a specific area of marketing, that’s likely where their specialties lie.
Even if you are working with an agency to optimize a specific marketing channel, it’s important to choose a partner that also has multichannel capabilities. In the future you may want to outsource more of your marketing activities. You don’t want to have to change agencies in order to get the services you need.
It’s also important to remember that your marketing strategy isn’t siloed by channel. Your strategy should include a number of channels that work together to drive key performance goals like traffic, leads, and sales. Agencies should be prepared to take on multichannel marketing responsibilities. At the very least, they should understand how the current channel they’re working on fits into the broader strategy.
Getting access to powerful technologies is one of the biggest benefits of working with a performance marketing agency so, in any evaluation process, it’s essential to consider their MarTech stack as well. Do they work with all the tools you need to optimize your marketing message, deliver it, and track results? Are they capable and willing to work with your favorite tools?
Invest in a performance marketing agency that’s prepared to help you get the most value out of the marketing automation tools they work with.
You don’t want to work with an agency that has a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing for their clients. They should be able to develop a personalized strategy based on your industry and specific business goals you illustrate to them.
A worthwhile agency will audit all aspects of your marketing strategy and make personalized recommendations for improvement. They may also suggest new channels and marketing strategies to invest in that can help your brand get more visibility, nurture leads, drive sales, and grow your ROI. Once you provide feedback on their strategy, they should also be prepared to adapt.
A performance marketing agency should feel like an extension of your internal team. It’s important to have complete confidence that they’re acting in the best interests of your business. For example, if your agency wants you to partner with another business for marketing, or use a certain advertising network, they should do so with your goals only in mind.
Before choosing an agency, ask them to disclose any relationships they have with other advertising platforms, businesses, or software providers. This transparency can help you ensure they’re truly aligned with your brand at all times.
When evaluating a potential partnership, it’s important to ask about their capacity. Are they prepared to handle all the tasks your business needs? It’s very likely they’re working with lots of other businesses on marketing strategies. You need to be sure they have enough personnel and resources that can focus on your specific needs.
If an agency plans to assign an individual person to work with you, ask how many other clients they’re working with at the same time. That way you can ensure they’re not overloaded with other client projects.
A performance marketing agency that’s worth the investment should be able to explain some of their novel ideas to you before you decide to work with them. They should take the time to evaluate your marketing needs then make specific suggestions for how they can help you move forward. For instance, they could suggest investing more heavily in a certain advertising strategy or targeting certain keywords with your content. They should also have supporting data that illustrates why this is a good direction for your business.
In the modern era, any business that’s serious about broadening their reach and driving sales online is investing in performance marketing tactics. Yet few have the capacity, skills, expertise, and tools to maximize the effectiveness of their campaigns. Working with a performance marketing agency is the perfect solution to supplement your internal strategy and really start working towards key goals. Just make sure you build a partnership with the right agency for your unique needs.
With new and changing advertising technologies at every turn, being an enterprise CMO has never been an easy task. But before you can solve the problem, you must understand the factors influencing the rough seas of performance marketing.
Let’s look at the top three issues faced by CMOs and performance marketers in 2020:
Facebook and Google are data giants. Facebook holds audience and behavioral data on more than 2.375 billion monthly active users, allowing advertisers to use this information to make targeting decisions on their advertising platform.
Google takes a similar approach, controlling bidding and bid landscape data for competitive analysis, and offering valuable query level search data. There are also significant amounts of audience behavioral data across Google-owned properties that it uses to create new targeting options such as “in-market” and “affinity” audiences.
This setup is incredibly lucrative for advertisers, but it does also create some inherent limitations. Facebook and Google own this data and control it completely. Advertisers have no way to use it for their own analytic purposes outside of the platforms. This so-called "walled garden" data management is largely why Facebook and Google make up 90% of the advertising industry’s annual growth.
The result? CMOs are faced with a serious dilemma: they can’t stop using platforms like Google and Facebook for advertising, but they need to find ways to improve their own data collection and management beyond what these walled gardens provide.
Regulatory acts such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have significant implications for the advertising industry, limiting how advertisers can collect consumer data, what kind of data they can collect, and how long it’s legal to store it. Advertisers end up working with a smaller customer database, making it more difficult to deliver relevant, interesting marketing messages.
Digital privacy is very important, but new regulations are making it increasingly difficult for performance marketers to deliver the user experience consumers deserve when presented with ads. It also makes it significantly more challenging to deliver a marketing message that drives clicks and conversions.
Walled gardens and data protection laws are affecting the advertising industry as a whole. Meanwhile, other big players are significantly disrupting specific industries, with implications that could be far more wide-reaching.
As an example, let’s look at Apple Card. It’s easy enough for Apple to get a significant number of brand loyalists to sign up for the credit card so they can start benefiting from its perks and integrations.
While Apple is trying to dominate payments, Google is working to control the customer relationship with a variety of industries, such as travel, with Google Assistant. Many marketers in the travel industry are left with little choice but to maximize their marketing budget for Google to get visibility.
At the same time, Amazon is reshaping eCommerce marketing having stopped buying products from many of its wholesalers, and encouraging eCommerce businesses to sell directly on Amazon Marketplace. Amazon’s ad sales are increasing by 37% year-over-year, valuing its advertising business at over $10 billion in 2019.
There are lots of factors impacting how CMOs can approach their marketing strategy today. Gartner’s 2019 CMO spend survey revealed that marketing budgets have dropped to their lowest levels since 2014. This can be in response to economic variables, confidence, and many of the emerging issues discussed above.
To work around the challenges that big players like Google, Amazon, and Facebook present, in addition to surviving the impact of data protection laws, CMOs need to be hugely strategic in their budget investment. For example:
There’s no denying that these strategies require significant changes for most businesses to succeed. CMOs need to employ new technologies and campaign strategies in unison to fully benefit. This can mean reevaluating your MarTech stack, investing more in your marketing team, or enlisting the help of external agencies to manage these decisions.
One guarantee with the U.S. elections in 2020 is that history won’t repeat itself—at least, not when it comes to digital advertising for the candidates and causes that Americans will vote for on November 3rd.
So much has changed since the last nationwide elections in 2016 and 2018. For political campaigns, Google has adjusted audience targeting features, Twitter has banned paid campaigns, ad exchanges have increased digital audio and CTV inventory, California has restricted the use of consumer data, and Facebook—well, maybe not everything has changed. Still, the fact remains that the opportunities available to political marketers have transformed over the past two years.
It’s imperative for campaigns to work with marketing partners who regularly navigate the political landscape, and who have deep experience driving winning outcomes. Because let’s face it: in November, you either win or you lose.
Basis Technologies’ Candidates and Causes (C&C) team is set apart by three factors: people, leadership, and tech. Read on for a brief introduction to all three!
Basis has one of the largest media buying teams in the U.S., ready to jump in on campaigns and able to leverage existing relationships with thousands of sites.
Our C&C team has cataloged battle-tested best practices of winning campaigns. In the 2018 mid-terms, 73% of campaigns we were a part of won their races. In 2016, 80% of our clients had winning outcomes.
We’ve also been at the forefront of political advertising in digital media since 2006. Our D.C. office has spent more than a decade working with teams of political ad experts, allowing for the separation of teams aligned with partisan work. Basis also staffs regional offices across the country with subject matter experts on digital advertising in the political arena.
Basis’ C&C team is led by a tenured team of experts, including Vice President Grace Briscoe and National Director Jaime Vasil.
Since joining Basis over a dozen years ago, Grace has guided the company’s most important political advertising clients nationwide. She is a leading resource in the various marketing aspects of politics, providing insight to prominent news outlets such as Adweek, Bloomberg, CNBC, Fortune, The Daily Beast and more.
Jaime Vasil joined Basis’ D.C. office in 2011, with vast experience working with Basis in the public affairs realm as an advertising sales leader for The New Republic and for the The Atlantic. Over the past 9 years, she has overseen the growth of Basis' D.C. team and its work with key advocacy and public affairs clients.
Our platform, Basis, is uniquely suited to the needs of political advertisers, and is the top user-rated cross-channel digital platform among political organizations. Basis is:
In every election cycle, there are a multitude of political and advocacy campaigns vying for attention from voters. Digital is a critical awareness and engagement channel for political campaigns, and there is a huge opportunity for these groups to leverage technology to their advantage in 2020.
Are you looking to explore digital marketing for your 2020 elections campaign? Connect with Basis to learn more.
There’s a lot of noise out there, and as more marketers continue to adopt programmatic advertising, we will try to clear the air. Which brings us here—about to shed light on a few of the grey areas within the complex digital ad world we all know and love. Let’s bust some myths!
A common point of confusion in the world of digital media buying, this is one of those “same, same—but different” situations. Technically, programmatic is the automated format of ad buying – one computer talking to another computer to execute campaign operations, while real-time bidding is just one type of programmatic buying. Programmatic ad buying alone automates certain tasks (insertion orders or ad tagging, for example), which ultimately empowers ad buyers to build more sophisticated strategies, pull better analyses, and pivot more effectively amid industry shifts.
Real-time bidding, or RTB, is a technology protocol or mechanism for automatically bidding, buying, and selling display impressions via an auction format. It’s the lightning-quick auction that takes audience data into account, to assess the value of an impression to a certain advertiser (BannerConnect, 2017). In short, advertisers compete for an impression, or ad space, on a web page with automated bids. The highest paying bidder wins the auction and placement on that particular web page (which is then loaded immediately). Therefore, while RTB absolutely equals programmatic, programmatic does not exclusively equal RTB; RTB is but one piece of programmatic.
Read more about other differentiators here.
Let’s be honest. Between click farms, bots, and human traffic (yes, the end users are real), fraud is prevalent in today’s world. According to Juniper Research, advertisers lose $51 million per day on ad fraud, which may add up to well over $19 billion in wasted ad spend by the end of 2018 (SearchEngine Journal, 2018). Those numbers aren’t small. However, according to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), as media agencies have improved controls and filtration processes, fraud experienced in programmatic buys, is no longer riskier than general market buys.
The Integral Ad Science (IAS) 2017 Media Report data states that when appropriate precautions are taken (automatic pre-bid filtering, for example) the fraud rate isn’t that different at all—in fact, they saw slightly lower fraud rates on programmatic buys for desktop displays in the US (Integral Ad Science, 2017). The video numbers (in the US) are barely higher for programmatic, and it plays out the same globally. Overall, programmatic has either lower rates of fraud or a very small difference, as long as the proper precautions are being taken.
Have there been cases where suspect publishers supplied the RTB ecosystem with questionable inventory? Yes. However, most of the quality players (SSPs and DSPs alike) actively work to remove such inventory from the marketplace, as low-quality inventory benefits nobody in the long run.
In today’s landscape, we can potentially purchase the very same impression that would otherwise have been available to a Direct Buy campaign. In the beginning, RTB was viewed as a means of monetizing inventory that was not directly sold—this is far from the truth today. Advances such as header bidding, means that for many publishers, every impression is potentially available through RTB. Header bidding is a new, unified auction conducted by publishers outside of their primary ad server, which allows advertisers to cherry-pick impressions at the highest priority; it is also known as “first look” (AdProfs, 2018). Header bidding has enabled publishers to maximize their revenue by taking the best price available for any given impression—in many cases, that may be a directly sold campaign, but if a programmatic source offers a higher CPM, the publisher’s ad server can choose that source instead.
Attitudes have also significantly shifted amongst publishers. Previously, publishers may have viewed RTB with suspicion and intentionally withheld valuable inventory. Today, however, most publishers recognize that making every impression available for purchase by the highest bidder is truly in their best interests.
The “black box” terminology doesn’t come from programmatic buying, but rather, the business models companies offering programmatic buying services choose to offer. An advertiser can engage in real-time bidding by sending an insertion order to the company that runs their campaigns and send back only basic stats. In that regard, it’s not that different than buying directly from an ad network. However, advertisers also have the option of working with partners who promote transparency and show them everything—or even take the reins themselves and decide how every aspect of the campaign should run (outsourced managed services). For most major DSPs, what a self-service customer sees, is exactly the same as what a buyer who works at that DSP can see.
At its core, programmatic buying promotes transparency and increases the amount of control buyers have when it comes to when and where their ads are displayed. Reporting will vary by vendor, and platforms that pride themselves on providing maximum transparency will report on multiple levels of granularity, including but not limited to: campaign, domain, placement, creative, and more (MarketingLand.com). The programmatic advertising industry as a whole is continuously searching for more transparent methods, including better tools for reporting and tracking.
Programmatic buying is both an art and a science. Sure, the algorithm (scientific component) gets most of the glory, but people are still needed to pull the levers. Basically, the human element is crucial to thoughtful execution. Algorithms are only as good as the data that feed them, and data is only as good as the strategies it informs. There is also something to be said about thinking long-term versus short-term. Algorithms generally address the details of any campaign in any given moment, but (human) experts have years of experience and accumulated knowledge about what works for the brands they buy for. Most algorithms will have to learn this over and over again and don’t have the benefit of long-term insights.
In addition, there is a strategy behind the optimization of the ad campaigns and media buying implementation (yes, humans, this is where you come in), as well as the personal relationships that come into play between the programmatic firms and agencies. The internal culture of a programmatic firm can also dictate success. Chances are, if employees feel engaged and trusted, they will perform to the best of their ability. People are the innovators, groundbreakers, and builders that optimize campaigns to yield the highest results, develop brilliant creative, and work together to decide what the future holds. Automated platforms help bring data to life, but the whole picture wouldn’t be complete without human intuition.
As noted by IAS, political, economic, cultural, and media trends can all impact media quality metrics and also be reflected by them. As the ad tech industry continues to ebb, flow, and grow, it’s important to stay abreast of the major shifts and intricate changes that make this digital world so exciting. On that note, consider these myths—busted!
Learn more about Programmatic Advertising with Basis.
Humans are a social species: We all want to belong. Being part of a community allows us to feel safe, support each another, and discover shared experiences. Most importantly, it builds valuable relationships and gives us a sense of belonging.
At Centro, our goal is to create that sense of belonging by fostering community in our workplaces. Our programs and initiatives are geared towards working to ensure that people of all identities can join us, create valuable relationships, and bring their whole selves to work.
Centro Community Groups (CCGs) are one initiative we’ve kicked off to better cultivate a culture where everyone recognizes the power of their uniqueness. These employee-led, employee-organized groups are centered around common identities, interests, life experiences, and backgrounds.
Our list of CCGs is growing quickly! Here’s what’s Centrons have organized so far:
As a company, we are committed to supporting these groups both financially and via professional development. Every month, members of Centro’s leadership team will meet with Community Group leadership to ensure that we’re cross-collaborating and providing mutual support. We also provide an external Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion consultant to train Community Group leaders so that they're well equipped for facilitation.
We realize that there’s no end to the work of building an environment where everyone feels that they belong. We realize that we will fail and make mistakes along the way. And, we are committed to transparency, persistence, and humility as we continue our journey to a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace.
Curious about what it’s like to work at Centro? Learn more here.
Being at the right place at the right time can make all the difference in digital. It's especially important when you're running programmatic ad campaigns, because finding the exact audience you're looking for and meeting them where they're most likely to see and act on your ad means you won't waste impressions or ad dollars.
Let's use an example: If you were to launch a campaign promoting lunch specials, and you ran it on desktops only, then you'd be targeting the right audience, because you're reaching the hungry masses at their desks. So, great, you've got your audience, and you're fishing in the right pond.
But have you caught them at the right time? Maybe your lunch special ad isn't as effective on desktops because people ate an early lunch, or they're sitting in a three-hour meeting and aren't able to leave the office.
What if you could show them the lunch special ad while they're walking through the food court – which is, of course, conveniently located right next to your business. You'd achieve the most important recipe to programmatic success: right place, right time, and no wasted impressions.
Mobile and smartphone ownership and usage is extremely prevalent in our technologically driven world. According to eMarketer, mobile users spend over four hours on their smartphones each day, and most of that time is spent on mobile apps. In addition, comScore reports that "mobile apps account for 57% of all digital media usage, and smartphone apps alone capture more than half of digital media time spent."
Those are valuable views your ads could be getting, and taking advantage of the mobile space in programmatic advertising is critical. Luckily, programmatic opens up the option of precise location targeting or a mobile app campaign. When running a mobile app campaign, geotargeting – also known as hyperlocal targeting or mobile geo targeting – is a very commonly used campaign targeting tactic.
When an app is downloaded, it will ask permission to collect a user's location data. In many cases, the app provides filters or geospatial features that require location tracking to be on. Once enabled, the app knows the user's GPS coordinates at all times.
These coordinates are extremely useful to an advertiser buying in-app impressions. By utilizing mobile geotargeting and tapping into the GPS information on a user's mobile device, you can capture their exact location and target based on coordinates and radius.
And by pinpointing the exact consumer for your campaign needs, you can use real-time location information to target users in the exact moment where they are where you want them to be. You're no longer wasting lunch ads on the hungry woman at her desk. You're showing lunch ads to the hungry woman in the food court who's busy deciding what kind of food she's in the mood for.
Using coordinates and a surrounding radius, you can create a geo-fence, allowing you to leverage location to target unique audiences for different digital strategies:
One other success tip: Use dynamic mobile creative that delivers a localized message to potential customers. This helps to deliver highly relevant ads to users in the right location.