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The modern landscape of performance marketing has evolved quite considerably over the past decade as emerging technologies powered by artificial intelligence have pushed the boundaries of how brands can effectively market their services. This transformation stems principally from the sheer amount of data now available to organizations - both emerging and established - across every industry. Digital advertising teams of today are faced with two options: either they take on the mammoth task of tapping into that data to improve operational efficiency, or, they simply ignore it and run the risk of losing market share to their respective competitors.
This new wave of data is largely attributed to changing cultural and behavioral patterns that are permeating contemporary society. The chief example of this is our increasing use of multiple devices on a day-to-day basis. Each one of our laptops, smartphones, and tablets are generating data that can be captured, stored, analyzed, and then leveraged by companies that have the capability of doing so. In a study conducted by Business Insider back in 2016, it was estimated that by 2020, more than 34 billion internet-connected devices will be installed globally - to put that into some sort of context, that is more than four devices for every human on the planet. Together these devices will truly revolutionize many aspects of our lives both at home and at work.
So, with such vast swathes of information comes the question of how marketers can decipher meaningful insights from all the noise. How is it possible to manage every online touchpoint and create a seamless brand experience for consumers throughout each stage of their journey? The good news is that there are plenty of solutions and strategies designed to help manage all of this. One of the most powerful weapons in an advertiser’s arsenal is dedicated audience targeting - the practice of segmenting desired customers by defined characteristics and then hitting them with relevant messaging at precisely the right time in the buying cycle. If done effectively, this tactic can bring numerous benefits including a lift in conversion rates, a reduction in cost per acquisition (CPA), and an increase in customer lifetime values (CLTV).
In an era when online marketplaces have never been more crowded and consumers have never been more demanding with brands, it’s essential that digital advertisers no longer throw a blanket over audiences. Those days are long gone. Instead, they must be cognizant of the fact that each member of their audience has a specific set of attributes that will influence how they should be targeted.
It all sounds very complex, doesn’t it?
Marketing audiences offer a wonderful abundance of insights to help maximize the performance of campaigns across your entire portfolio. To begin, we suggest a few techniques you can adopt to take advantage of the power of audience data:
Google offers a wealth of information about the users visiting your website through both organic and paid efforts. Paying close attention to the demographic makeup of your site traffic can help you build better, more defined audience profiles which will ultimately lead to improved targeting.
Once you’re able to paint a clear portrait of your target demographics, you can easily use this information to tailor your ads. There are currently eight major audience types advertisers can use to target and drive peak performance. Due to this large number, few PPC managers have a full understanding of how to utilize them to their potential. The list includes:
Rather than focusing solely on specific customer types over others, it’s possible to target large categories of search users while still prioritizing certain segments that are most valuable for your business. This is done through targeted bid adjustments. Doing this strategically can lift the efficiency of your spending and increase your returns.
While all these options undoubtedly represent great opportunities to move the metaphorical needle in your favor, they do come in tandem with a set of challenges concerned with implementation and optimization. These include:
Having this bounty of targeting tools makes it difficult to determine exactly how much you should spend on different audiences. Take location targeting, for instance. A business can target several locations with their ads, assigning a constant cost-per-click (CPC), but if you look at how much revenue you derive from clicks in certain regions, there will be some noticeable variations. If you maintain a constant (CPC) across the map, you can end up losing money in certain locations while simultaneously missing out on peak performance in others with a higher revenue-per-click (RPC).
Most advertisers feel it’s a question of which audiences they should or shouldn’t spotlight. In reality, though, a wide variety of audiences can have some amount of value when it comes to driving conversions and reaching business goals. For example, let’s say new site visitors show an RPC hovering around $2 while Add to Cart (PLAs) have an RPC over $10. This doesn’t indicate that bidding on new site visitors isn’t worthwhile. It simply means you need to allocate spend toward each audience based on the revenue value they provide. Targeting should always be based on the ROI of each audience. There are locations, audiences, devices, times of day, days of the week, and other dimensions to segment and assign value to.
The volume of bid calculations and their accuracy are just two of many considerations to make for your campaigns. Other questions that may arise include:
In order to make the most of all the targeting options at your disposal, employing automated technologies to help with the workload is an absolute necessity. Here's why.
In the process of calculating bids, it’s common to be considering factors such as location, device, time, and seasonality. They alone, however, do not represent the end of relevant data points that can influence bidding decisions. Businesses may also want to take into account offline customer data, CRM data, inventory, transactional and POS data, or other engagement data to improve targeting and bidding. That’s where solutions backed by artificial intelligence come in. Through the use of third-party automated bidding technology, it’s possible to unify all significant data to make more efficient and effective bidding decisions.
Unified data is just the first step. After first building predictive models and using optimization algorithms to determine bids that maximize financial objectives, it’s possible to consider location, device, schedule and audiences before automatically calculating bid adjustments. By using the technology, you can be empowered to take advantage of thousands of unique bid adjustments based on targeting data and other dimensions.
Automated bidding technology also helps glean new insights when data is scarce. Advertisers can target many highly specific keywords or audiences. But there is often very little data illustrating the true revenue value of these low volume groups. Automated bidding technology can use machine learning to accurately predict their value, making robust bids and bid adjustments accordingly.
Whether you’re managing the performance marketing campaigns for a small business or an established enterprise, understanding exactly who you are targeting and knowing precisely when to target has never been more essential. Successfully reaching, engaging with, and then converting consumers in the online environment has never been more testing than it is today.
Our people are a large part of what makes Centro such a great place to work. We’re excited to introduce you to some of Centro’s most interesting people in our newest blog series, as they share their ‘Centro stories’ and a variety of experiences that have impacted their work and life.
As SVP of Program Management and Operations, Joanna Vahlsing creates a variety of systems, frameworks, and processes to help Centro reach its strategic goals. Her agile, collaborative style allows Centro to continually grow in efficiency and speed.
Read on to learn how Centro’s leading process and operations engineer transforms big ideas into big accomplishments.
Clare McKinley: Can you give us an example of a system, framework, or process you’ve created, and the impact it’s had on Centro?
Joanna Vahlsing: One high-level framework that I’m proud of is integrating operational goals into Centro’s annual plan. Every year we create an annual plan, which focuses primarily on revenue goals and expense budgets. This year, in addition to setting revenue goals, we set operational goals as well.
The framework started with gathering departmental goals from the entire leadership team. Understanding and aligning these goals ensures that we’re set up to enable each other, and also makes any dependencies across departments very clear (situations where, in order for one department to achieve a particular goal, it needs a deliverable from a different department).
In addition to rolling out operational goals, we have an operational meeting every six weeks to review our progress against those goals and make any necessary changes along the way.
CM: You’re known for taking the Agile process and putting it to work throughout Centro. What do you find valuable about the Agile process in terms of program management and operations?
JV: In general, the premise behind Agile is that it’s the most adaptable framework for getting things done. It’s a methodology that reminds us that sometimes it’s OK to deviate from the plan. That also aligns well with Centro’s culture—we’re a team that chooses to embrace change, rather than resist it.
Centro’s method of providing solutions is actually informed by Agile—when we first rolled out Basis, the primary solution offered was our self-service option. As we collected feedback from the market, we realized we needed more flexibility and optionality. We began offering flexible solutions between managed services and self-service, in order to meet customers where they are. If we hadn’t been working from an Agile mindset, we wouldn’t have been able to pivot and realize those opportunities.
CM: You’ve successfully increased cross-departmental collaboration at Centro. What strategies have worked for you in terms of this achievement?
JV: Well, there are many ways to do it wrong (laughs).
For starters, when we kick off cross-departmental projects and initiatives, we include clearly stated and measurable goals. A goal creates a reason why participation and collaboration are needed.
Another strategy that’s worked for me is inviting feedback. I regularly invite people to poke holes in my ideas. I’m up-front about asking, “Where do I have blind spots? What am I missing?” That creates a layer of ownership and commitment to whatever we’re working on.
CM: How would you characterize your leadership style?
JV: I strive to be a coach, a servant leader, and an enabler. I have high trust in the folks on the team, and fully expect them to go until I tell them to stop. I create a lot of autonomy within the team—and a lot of trust.
CM: What do you find most challenging about your work? Most rewarding?
JV: Well, I don’t like to be bored, so I love challenges. I love when someone says, “It would be really great if we could…” Cool! Let’s figure out how to make it happen. No challenge is too crazy.
The most rewarding part of my job is being part of a winning team. I’m really proud of the work everyone is doing. I love where we’re at right now—the accolades we’re getting, the uptick in Basis usership—it feels like the culmination of everything we’ve been working for over the past five years since I joined Centro.
What I love even more is that it’s not at all that we’re “peaking.” Things are going to keep getting better. We have an amazing future ahead of us.
The Internet: It's the only place where new content appears constantly, social shares find their way around the globe in a matter of seconds and advertisements appear in front of the people most likely to pay attention to them. It seems like the whole thing runs on autopilot, but there have to be humans at the helm, right?
Not necessarily.
Sure, there are still people creating content and designing the websites you see online, but behind the scenes, technology has taken the reins on certain parts of the web—particularly where advertising is concerned. Welcome...to real time bidding! Read on to find out more.
Real time bidding (RTB) uses programmatic advertising technology to put ads in front of audiences at the exact moment they’re relevant. Technology can take care of the ad-bidding process quickly and efficiently, and it's able to place bids on ad space anytime, anywhere.
When ad buying is handled manually, it’s easy to waste impressions because there’s only so much people know about their audiences at the time ad space becomes available. RTB, on the other hand, allows for more automation—robots spend time familiarizing themselves with the behaviors of consumers and instantly know which impressions are going to be the biggest wins for their brands.
Ultimately, RTB is a win-win benefit for all sides of the advertising process, as it allows for more efficient buying and selling across the board. Basis facilitates programmatic advertising and real-time bidding from a unified platform. We're excited to show you all that Basis can do—connect with us and get started today!
A company is only as good as its leaders. Recently, low unemployment rates have made finding and retaining the best leaders difficult for businesses. When unemployment rates are low, the excess of opportunities usually leads to increased rates of job hopping.
Job hopping isn’t ideal, because employee turnover is expensive. It also means that more leaders are being hired externally, rather than cultivated from within.
Independent research firm, Bersin & Associates, states it quite perfectly: “It is hard to find a company which has survived many economic cycles that does not have a sophisticated leadership development strategy in place.”
At Centro, we know that leadership development is an antidote to today’s job-hopping culture. A good leadership development program will boost employee engagement, reduce turnover, and increase an organization's ability to deal with gaps in the talent pipeline.
Here are our top two tips for cultivating and retaining leaders:
1. Invest in self-improvement.
Self-improvement is one of Centro’s core values for a reason: “lasting happiness is achieved through continuous personal growth.” In other words, the success of our leaders depends on the opportunities we provide for learning and advancement.
LinkedIn’s 2018 Workforce Learning Report found that 93% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their careers. Further research shows that 80% of employees consider high skills training a top benefit.
Ongoing training and development programs can help your team become more skilled in every part of their job. Providing additional opportunities for continued education is also a great way to prime team members for leadership roles.
2. Create a plan.
If your employees aren’t sure how, when, or why to take advantage of self-improvement programs, then those programs aren’t being fully utilized. It’s important to create a strategic plan around leadership cultivation, in order to track the progress of each individual.
For example, Centro made the investment to boost our own leadership development program based on the teachings of the Conscious Leadership Group. Our leaders are enrolled in a 10-module program that includes reading materials, in-person coaching, online courses, and cohorts with peers. Content includes topics such as hiring for fit, value alignment, emotional intelligence, and the power of feedback.
Investing in people follows one of the oldest rules in the book: You get what you give. We’ve seen that every dollar we put into our leaders comes back to us in measurable benefits.
Curious about the perks and benefits of working at Centro? Learn more about our total compensation package here.
If you’ve ever participated in a race of any kind, you know that most people typically don’t wake up the day of the event and start running (or at least you know that it's usually not optimal to do so). Instead, it's crucial to strategize, obtain the right gear, and prepare accordingly for the journey to come. A similar strategy can also apply to campaign optimization.
Make a Plan
Similar to training for a race—it helps to break-out optimal timeframes and set milestones that indicate future campaign achievements and ramp-up time. Plan thoroughly beforehand so that you're as agile as possible once the campaign begins.
For example, establish campaign checkpoints - and what constitutes success for each checkpoint, ahead of time.
There are multiple parameters within a campaign that contains valuable information—trying to analyze all of them at once can become overwhelming. Assign just a few of these parameters to each checkpoint to highlight them more effectively.
Use Available Resources
Have you ever tried tracking your speed, distance, and heart rate using an analog watch? It’s complicated! That's why apps and smartwatches were created—to measure those things automatically, so you can focus on the task at hand.
In the same way—leverage technology whenever possible throughout campaign execution. For example, Centro's comprehensive digital media platform, Basis, has three optimization engines that can help achieve KPIs. Basis' Optimizations Suite includes:
Stay Flexible
We all know that even the best-laid plans can go awry. Whether it's inclement weather at a race or an unexpected situation popping up during a campaign—a realistic planner should identify what conditions they have control over ahead of time, including a set protocol for how to handle or escalate any issues that may arise during a campaign. Keep communication lines open, and have open conversations amongst your team, in order to reassess, evolve, and improve your optimization strategy on a regular basis.
Crossing the finish line is a joyous experience—optimizing campaigns and achieving advertising goals should be too! Connect with us to learn more about how Basis can help campaign performance, here.
‘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? Connected TV (CTV). We brought in Basis Technologies VP of Media Innovations and Technology, Noor Naseer, to give us the breakdown.
CTV consumption has already grown significantly these past few years. It continues to grow at a rate that makes the shifts in consumption more actionable for advertisers to buy against.
Nearly 70% of all internet users are currently using CTV. And CTV ad spending is soaring in kind, passing $25 billion in 2023 and forecast to hit $40 billion by 2027. Even for those who aren’t actively watching it, chances are likely that they’re equipped to. The same eMarketer report forecasts that more than 85% of households already have a CTV device in their household.
MVPD stands for ‘Multichannel Video Programming Distributor.’ While the term may sound unfamiliar, it’s likely that many consumers have signed up for one or know someone else who has. These distributors provide access to multiple TV channels through a single service. The first iterations of MVPDs that most consumers are familiar with are cable and satellite providers, like Comcast Xfinity, Charter Spectrum, DirectTV, and Cox.
The current iteration of MVPD that has led the term to recirculate is ‘Virtual MVPD’. The addition of the word ‘virtual’ is in reference to new cord-cutting options that provide access to content channels without needing to supply a data transport infrastructure, à la coaxial cable, satellite or fiber.
Like so many things in today’s digital advertising landscape, the CTV advertising space can best be described as fragmented. There are many disparate ways to consume connected content. Accordingly, many advertising opportunities may need to be strategically considered and bought disparately.
One popular means of consumption is through streaming VOD, or ‘Video on Demand.' To date, some highly popular VOD services strictly generate revenue through a subscription model and do not offer advertising opportunities. Examples of providers that don’t run ads include Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.
However, there are plenty of VOD providers and streaming players that do have advertising offerings. Popular ad-supported options include Hulu, FuboTV, Sling TV, and Roku.
While there is still a significant amount of inventory in the paid TV space, the slow diminishment of available inventory has TV ad buyers paying more for the same type and volume of inventory they’ve paid for in the past. Simultaneously, forecasts are showing that 10s of millions of traditional TV consumers are expecting to cut the cord in the next few years. This means that the volume of traditional, linear TV inventory will continue to decline.
With the continued decline in traditional TV inventory, the time to start testing and learning in the CTV space is now. CTV advertising is a great fit for advertisers for whom massive reach and branding goals are essential. It also has additional benefits paralleling the traditional TV space, like mostly non-skippable ads, 100% viewability, and viewer dedication to a single piece of content. Advertisers also have the flexibility to enhance targeting through buying based on the audience, as opposed to building their buy strategy against programming or content type.
Digital video advertising enables an advertiser to leverage sight, sound, and motion without constraining their buy to the confines of the TV screen format. Research suggests that this inventory type will continue to steeply increase. eMarketer and IAB reports indicate that more than half of digital video ad spend will be driven by video ads featuring original content.
With a volume of inventory and ad-supported spaces that far outnumber CTV, digital video can enable much more granular targeting. Digital video advertising also implies a ‘hands-on-keyboard’ element for the user experience. This allows the consumer to more immediately engage with the brand on a deeper level than they otherwise would be able to in a TV-viewing environment.
A media planner should start by evaluating the consumption habits of the audience they are seeking to reach. For instance, if an advertiser has brand awareness goals to reach a demographic that primarily consumes traditional paid TV, it might make less sense to heavily shift dollars into alternative digital video strategies. Conversely, if the target audience is heavily made up of cord-cutters and video consumers, there will be many digital video tactics worth considering.
After taking screen-based habits into consideration, the buyer can delve deeper into the combination of ad formats that will resonate best with that audience. Popular programmatic formats include full episode players, in-stream, out-stream, and in-banner. If the target audience skews younger and consumes a lot of social content, the planner may want to consider preparing vertical video assets as well. From there, more targeted video strategies and tactics can be determined based on the goals and objectives of the campaign.
Basis has solutions both for digital video and CTV. Buyers can access and discover CTV and video ad inventory by private marketplaces and the open exchange. Inventory can be aggregated a few different ways. One popular means is by audience type, such as ‘homeowner,’ ‘in-market auto shopper,’ or ‘travel enthusiast.' It can also be organized by the type of content the viewer has consumed, such as sports, news, comedy, home improvement, etc.
Learn more about Connected TV advertising with Basis
AI-powered bidding is one of the most popular and valuable applications of artificial intelligence in advertising today, yet it’s an extremely complex technology to master, so few people truly know how it works and how it improves Adwords campaigns. It all becomes clear and easy enough to utilize, though, if you have a basic understanding of the options and how they operate. Here’s an overview of everything you need to know about AI-powered bidding algorithms to take advantage of the benefits.
Automated bidding is designed to help advertisers set bids without resorting to guesswork. Google Ads offers a variety of bid strategies designed to help you meet specific business goals. Say, for example, you have a target cost-per-acquisition (CPA) goal and want to maximize conversions. You can utilize Google’s target CPA bid strategy to meet your goal. This allows Google Ads to automatically make changes to bids using machine learning insights.
Smart Bidding is a subset of Google automated bidding that offers conversion-based bid strategies: Target CPA, Target ROAS and Enhanced CPC. This allows you to make targeted bid decisions for each auction your ads enter. These automated strategies use a number of important signals to make bid decisions, including device, location, time of day, remarketing list, language, operating system, and more.
Currently, Google offers six main automated bidding strategies advertisers can use to work towards key business goals. Here’s a brief overview of how each work for PPC bid automation:
| Strategy | Description | Goals |
| Maximize Clicks | Helping you get as many clicks as possible with your budget | Increase website visits |
| Target Impression Share | Automatically setting bids with the goal of showing your ad on the absolute top of the page, on the top of the page, or anywhere on the page of Google search results | Increase visibility |
| Target CPA | Automatically set bids to get as many conversions as possible at a target cost-per-action (CPA) | Get more conversions with your target CPA |
| Target ROAS | Automatically sets bids to help get as much conversion value as possible at a target return on ad spend (ROAS) | Met a target return on ad spend (ROAS) when you value each conversion differently |
| Maximize Conversions | Automatically sets bids to help you get the most conversions for your campaign within your budget | Get more conversions while spending your budget |
| Maximize Conversion Value | Automatically sets bids to help you get the most conversion value for your campaign within your budget | Get more conversion value while spending your budget |
Adwords artificial intelligence is just one form of AI bidding technology. There are many other PPC bid automation tools with advanced bidding algorithms for ads. To get a fuller understanding of how AI-powered bidding algorithms work, here’s a walkthrough of the QuanticMind bidding process:
All AI bidding technology begins by determining the optimal value of each keyword you bid on in a campaign. There are different metrics the technology can use to determine this, such as impressions or conversions. QuanticMind uses a revenue-per-click (RPC) model - determining how much to value each keyword based on the potential revenue they drive. Using all relevant business data and bid landscape data, the RPC model generates machine learning algorithms to understand millions of interactions and how they might impact performance.
After assigning value to each keyword, QuanticMind determines how changes in CPC bids might impact clicks and costs. Using bid landscape data, it maps out what click volume might look like for each hypothetical cost. This array of bids is fed into QuanticMind’s decision engine where it’s used to determine final bid amounts.
Next, the algorithm determines the best bid for each keyword based on the performance goal you specify. This works much like the goal-oriented strategies you select with Adwords artificial intelligence. For example, if your goal is to maximize profit margin, the overall maximum margin for a group of keywords is determined by finding the CPC with a maximum margin for each individual keyword.
In the next step, QuanticMind looks at historical performance data for bid modifier opportunities. This includes leveraging location, device, audience, and other important dimensions to create bid adjustments and improve results. Using the same machine learning and AI bidding technology, bid modifiers for location, device and audience are automatically adjusted through the automated bidding platform. This kind of automation is extremely valuable because it ensures you only bid exactly what you need on various dimensions to meet your advertising goals. This improves campaign efficiency and efficacy, driving higher ROAS.
One problem that makes people nervous about using bidding algorithms for their ads is the potential for mistakes. AI bidding relies on data inputs to make informed bidding decisions. What if there’s a problem with the data? The algorithms could end up making less-than-optimum bidding decisions based on this. With manual bidding, you always have an account manager checking performance and ensuring there are no data quality issues.
QuanticMind addresses this problem with built-in anomaly detection for AI bidding. It uses several techniques to compare forecasted cost, revenue, clicks and CPC to actual results. If performance starts to deviate from expectations, bidding is automatically paused until the issue is addressed.
Lastly, these final optimized bidding decisions are applied to Google Ads. These highly optimized bids are based on all relevant historical performance data, business goals, and more. If your business has additional data you can use to optimize bids throughout the day, these will also be applied retrospectively. Examples include inventory data or other limitations to costs, leads, or revenue.
All these processes take place in the background. PPC managers are free to monitor and adjust changes to bids and accounts, but it’s possible to optimize everything with high-quality business data and AI bidding technology.
There are lots of benefits to using bidding algorithms for your PPC ads:
Smart Bidding is able to understand how different bids might impact conversions. Machine learning algorithms are able to learn from data and a wide range of parameters to understand potential performance. This capacity goes far beyond what a regular PPC manager or even a team of data scientists could manage.
Automated bidding is capable of making optimizations based on the latest insights at the time of bidding. This includes dimensions such as location, intent, weekday and time of day, demographics, site behavior, operating system, and more. AI bidding is capable of making targeted bid adjustments at the time of auction to maximize the value of these data insights for bidding. Advertisers who don’t take advantage of bid automation are unable to effectively target valuable micro-moments when people turn to search engines because they’re looking to buy.
AI bidding allows you to select a targeted marketing goal to control how the algorithms make bidding decisions. It also allows you to customize performance control settings, including selecting the right attribution model for you.
AI bidding technology makes it easy to get a snapshot of your bid strategy status and performance. You can also easily create bidding experiments to see for yourself how strategy changes might impact performance. Forecasting capabilities illustrate how many conversions your ads might receive for different CPA targets.
Artificial intelligence is a valuable tool for Adwords advertisers today. AI-powered bidding algorithms make it possible to make targeted campaign decisions, improving budget spend while meeting business goals. Google Ads offers a number of internal AI bidding features that encourage businesses to try out automation to see the benefits for themselves. But third-party tools like QuanticMind actually have advanced capabilities that allow advertisers to maximize the benefits of AI bidding and machine learning. The fact that businesses need to utilize AI PPC bid automation in 2019 is a given. The next thing to figure out is which platform has the right features and the most value to help you meet your advertising goals.
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!
What Marketers Are Moving In-House in 5 Charts [:03]
In-housing continues to be a hot trend and, programmatic buying is the most anticipated function marketers are bringing in-house this year. How are marketers gaining more control, who are they working with to streamline the process, and what functions are they not prioritizing to bring in house?
How Advertisers Are Untangling the Programmatic Supply Chain [:02]
Under pressure to prove the value of their programmatic ad spend, advertisers are becoming increasingly selective in choosing their ad-tech partners. With thousands of ad-tech middlemen littering the landscape and seemingly more entering daily, marketers are quickly realizing the need to be smarter about the outfits they partner with. (Hi, have you heard about Basis by Centro?)
A Reality Check on Advertising Relevancy and Personalization [:06]
Recently a number of articles have popped up calling ad personalization into question, most notably one from the Wall Street Journal. Forbes contributor David Doty builds his case for why personalized digital experiences continue to be necessary to prove ad relevance and purpose for audiences.
ARF: The Price Consumers Put On Their Data [:03]
A new study by the Advertising Research Federation found that U.S. consumers have been pulling back the reigns on how much personal data they’re willing to share. The report examines what types of data consumers and willing to share and how much they value that data. The survey found several percentage point drops against what consumers were willing to share compared with the previous year.
Beyond the Cookie: Publishers Flirt With Generating Identity-Based User Content [:05]
With new data-privacy law requirements, publishers are looking for new ways to collect data about their consumers. The newest way is called authenticated consent which enables publishers to collect users’ consent based on identity-based signals rather than cookies, and make the user experience more consistent across multiple publisher platforms and devices in the process.
Privacy Evolving [:02]
Google recently released a study that showed that 52% of monetization drops when there are not cookies, while also announcing their release of a privacy sandbox aimed at limiting the amount of personal information that is exposed while creating some targetability. Watch for revisions in the IAB’s Transparency and Consent Framework, which will include standardized messaging templates for consumers as well as more granularity to communicate user privacy preferences.
Why Brands That Have Sense(s) Will Have the Strongest Identities [:04]
As consumers adopt new ways of consuming media, are brands prepared to adapt for a future in which multi-channel will evolve into multi-sensory marketing? This article explores moving beyond what we see and how it makes us feel, and into what we hear, smell, taste, and touch.
TV Broadcasters Are Hot on Addressable – But CCPA Might Hamper Their Plans [:06]
The California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) may very well disrupt audience-based TV advertising before it has a chance to take off. CCPA is considered one of the most developed state-based privacy laws and companies like WarnerMedia are trying their best to explain the value exchange of data collection to customers now. This way, they will not have to retrofit products with consent agreements in the future, but will it be enough?
VR Ads in 2019: What’s Working, and What’s Not [:06]
Venture Beat previously highlighted the keys to a successful VR campaign, noting that ad performance, turnkey distribution across platforms and live in-market demos were vital components. Now they’re looking to share new observations including why brands are moving towards more immersive ad experiences and how to fit goals to the format across stages of the purchase funnel.
These Are the Shady Tricks Shopping Sites Use to Get Your Money and Info [:03]
1 out of 10 shopping sites employ “dark patterns” to get consumers to spend more time, share more info, and spend more money on their sites. While some of these dark patterns seem obvious, others are a bit sneakier in how they pressure or even shame a user to perform a desired action. Read the article now, before it disappears in the next 5 4 minutes!!
The last 18 months have seen massive change for social media. The introduction of new platforms, new features on existing platforms, strategic partnerships, and shiny new advertising tools happen at lightning speed. Data regulation and concerns continue to impact the ways in which advertisers can activate across social channels, and the balance of consumer attitudes and user engagement remains finicky.
Yet, there’s a reason why social advertising revenues continue to rise at double-digit rates year-over-year.
In this webinar, we explore why our clients continue to invest in social platforms (and why we continue to recommend them). We also cover the ways Centro is proving out the ROI of paid social as part of the overall paid media mix.