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Programmatic jargon explained through new Amazon Echo skill addition Marketers struggling to remember what digital advertising jargon like DSP, SSP and even programmatic advertising can now ask Amazon Alexa to explain through a new skill that has been developed. The addition to the AI of the explanations for terms allows marketers who own an Amazon Echo enabled device to ask it to decipher or compare digital ad terms through the skill which can now be chosen within the Alexa app. The skill will also act as a marketing device for the Leeds and London based biddable media agency Journey Further with users having to ask: "Alexa, ask Journey Further to define programmatic" or other queries that uses the name of the business at the beginning. Skills are built in capabilities that are downloaded to the Alexa app to help inform the AI to answer further future questions. Commenting on the creation of the skill, Robin Skidmore, chief executive of Journey Further, said: "We thought this would be a fun way to experiment with Amazon's artificial interface and solve a key problem in our industry - confusing language that causes a disconnect between advertisers and their agencies." [embedded content] A video of The Drum's editor testing out the skill can be viewed above.

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With Brand Safety in Focus, Digital Advertisers Are Quickly Shifting Toward Direct Programmatic Bots, fraud and particularly brand safety—given YouTube's recent controversies—are among the reasons “programmatic advertising” has become a dirty term in some marketers' minds. Yet, there appears to be an acceleration toward direct programmatic (or ... #programmatic

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Where does your programmatic spend go? The question of where programmatic spend goes has stumped advertisers since the dawn of programmatic. I thought it was time to try to answer it, as simply as possible. #programmatic

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Tech Roundup: A Defense of 'Programmatic Ads' Not surprisingly, YouTube is trying to fix the problem with these “programmatic ads.” But to critics of online ads, the problems on YouTube are just the latest example of an advertising system that is at best not as effective as its proponents say and ... #programmatic

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Digital Out-Of-Home Media Courts Exchanges With DPAA Programmatic Standards The Digital Place Based Advertising Association (DPAA), an industry trade group spanning out-of-home media and advertising technology, on Monday released its first programmatic standards for digital out-of-home (DOOH) campaigns. The DPAA hopes ... #programmatic

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Where does your programmatic spend go? The question of where programmatic spend goes has stumped advertisers since the dawn of programmatic. I thought it was time to try to answer it, as simply as possible. #programmatic

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Debunking the Myths of #Programmatic Delivery Most Popular Programmatic. Automation. Private Marketplaces. Guaranteed Deals. These are the buzz words that made us all think that everything was simple, required few resources, and would make us not only a ton of money but -- more importantly -- more margin. We thought we could pull in stronger yield with leaner teams and less overhead. We were wrong, and we've learned a lot through the process. Let's talk through some of the assumptions that carried us into the growth of programmatic deal channels in 2015 and early 2016 -- and why they turned out to be not as true as we thought they were. Programmatic deals don't require the same sales cycle as managed service Many thought that as the market moved to programmatic, we'd see sales teams as lean as they'd ever been and margins skyrocket with the decreased overhead. The reality is, while the means of execution have changed, we're still talking to the same marketers who want transparency and understanding of the content and the sellers they are working with. Convincing a retail giant to spend tens of thousands of ad dollars with you through programmatic is no different than asking for an IO of the same amount. The real difference comes into play with the delivery and controls that the marketer can keep in-house -- the power to change those budgets at any time. Set it and forget it -- right? Wrong. With viewability and performance metrics as the driving force behind keeping a budget live, there really is no "set it and forget it" when it comes to selling media. We need placement and targeting optimizations in order to continue to exceed client benchmarks, and those happen with tools for reporting, helpful automation from systems, and thoughtful human optimization and planning. Do we need the same resources on call for a private marketplace campaign as a managed service campaign with the same budget? No -- but we do still need significant resources to be able to be successful in this field. Viewability is one-size-fits-all Measuring for viewability -- or any of the vanity metrics we all track -- is completely dependent on the measurement company used and the guidelines set by the advertiser. Everyone has their own definition of what is acceptable, and both buyers and sellers need to get on the same page with what that is. Who is going to be the measuring partner? What are factors that determine a successful measurement? These are the questions you need to ask before you end up with the "my-reports-don't-match-yours" headache. Programmatic deals are going to scale fast and stay strong While this one is certainly possible, you have to understand the vulnerability of this business line. Just because a client says they want to run on your inventory and give you a price, target budget, and deal ID, it doesn't mean that's money in the bank. One of the biggest benefits to buyers here is the level of control that they keep, which means that they can turn off or decrease spend at any time. The risk is worth the reward, but don't count your chickens before they're hatched. The client said yes. Let's get it live right now! There's a lot of troubleshooting that happens to turn on a deal: do both parties have the right connections in place; are your targeted segments passing in the right bid requests; are they applying targeting on their side that is messing up the bid rate? I'm sure this is one that will taper off with time, as tech and buyers get more savvy, but it's not usually a five-minute turnaround to see the revenue flowing in. Don't forget to thank your ad ops and solutions engineering teams for their help here! If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is But that doesn't mean programmatic isn't a channel to invest heavily in. It's where we should all be in order to live in an advertising world with transparency, control, and fair value pricing -- but it takes work to make it successful.

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#programmatic A weekly comic strip that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem...

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Lipton’s Ecom Site Brews Up More Conversions With AI | AdExchanger T.O by Lipton, Unilever’s Keurig-like tea brewer in France, was struggling to turn analytics from its ecommerce platform into actionable insights. “With [tools like] Google Analytics, I could know what consumers were doing, but I had difficulty knowing why they were dropping off or why they weren’t buying our machines,” said Mathieu Bernard, ecommerce lead at T.O by Lipton. To understand and optimize against consumer experiences on the site, Bernard turned to an artificial intelligence (AI) bot from ContentSquare. The bot, called Arti, analyzes how user experience (UX) impacts ecommerce sales by tracking consumer actions like swipes, taps, calls and mouse movements, as well as ad visibility and exposure time, and tying it back to conversion. It then makes optimization recommendations based on specific KPIs. Arti fuels itself with data from ContentSquare about general user interactions on ecommerce sites as a basis to make more specific recommendations. For example, if a marketer wants to increase conversions on in-app advertising, Arti will recommend how to achieve that through UX optimization, like moving an overperforming video higher up on the home screen, said Jonathan Cherki, CEO of ContentSquare. “We are collecting every user experience – every mouse movement, every interaction on the page – to understand what to put on the page, what people are doing and if we are behind them,” he said. “We can attribute the revenue to each piece of content on a website.” Arti’s recommendations help Bernard’s team understand bounce rates and quickly optimize to improve UX at the individual level. It also allows his team to decide how to take action and understand how the change will impact conversions. “Ecommerce companies spend a lot of time analyzing and understanding what people are doing, but not enough time on testing and improving the consumer journey,” he said. T.O by Lipton uses Arti across its marketing, CRM, development and design teams. “It’s not one guy who is looking at the solution and distributing actions to people,” Bernard said. “Everyone is involved and directly responsible for the data.” Last year, conversions increased by 105% after T.O by Lipton followed Arti’s recommendations and streamlined the checkout process. In doing so, T.O by Lipton created more opportunities to upsell their tea capsules. Arti also helps Bernard’s team save time by up to 30% by telling it exactly what needs to be optimized. After deploying Arti, T.O by Lipton was able to speed up the pace of its A/B tests and optimizations from once per month to two to four times per month. “When you know what the problem is, it’s not so complicated to improve it,” Cherki said. The T.O by Lipton brand is two years old. The site saw on average 1,000 monthly visitors last year, which spiked to 1 million around peak season during Christmas. The brand had never used an AI bot before. Arti was easy to deploy and only took about half a day to set up. It was able to start delivering insights within a few days, Bernard said. Brands don’t need to embed any tags on their page, as Arti uses a line of JavaScript to collect user interaction across the site. Training efforts were minimal. “You don’t need to be a skilled analyst to use ContentSquare’s solution,” Bernard said. With ecommerce platforms eating their lunch, CPG giants like Unilever, which owns T.O by Lipton, need to provide a great ecommerce experience of their own to compete, and optimizing UX can help. An owned and operated platform also gives Unilever access to more user-level data, which it doesn’t get from retailers. “The important thing is constant optimization,” Bernard said. “You cannot optimize your web store only once a month.” T.O by Lipton is only operating with Arti in France, but Bernard plans to scale the solution globally to optimize its website user experience against cultural nuances. Bernard expects the Unilever to scale Arti to other direct-to-consumer brands in the future. “There’s opportunities for ContentSquare with other brands at Unilever,” he said.

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#programmatic Bypassing creative: How agencies are turning influencer posts into programmatic ads Within the first week, the engagement rate was “100 times higher” than it would have been in an influencer campaign without programmatic, according to Vic Drabicky, founder for January Digital. “We always want influencer endorsements but we cannot see ...

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#Programmatic v/s #RTB: A Closer Look #brand #exposure #advertising

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#programmatic The state of programmatic advertising Globally, programmatic ad spend grew from $5bn (£4bn) in 2012 to $39bn (£31.3bn) in 2016, at an average rate of 71% a year, according to Zenith's programmatic marketing forecast. It predicts programmatic advertising will grow 31% in 2017, faster than ... #programmatic

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Google Says #Programmatic Direct Is Due for a Rise in 2017 Most Popular Programmatic direct isn't a new thing. In fact, two or three years ago it was being touted as the future of buying and selling digital media. And for a time, those who did the touting looked foolish because programmatic direct never really became a "thing." But like header bidding, which had been around for years before finally taking off with publishers near the end of 2015, programmatic direct seems poised for a lift in 2017 thanks to renewed interest by agencies and publishers. The concept behind programmatic direct is simple: While the open ocean of digital advertising is often bought in real time, sometimes digital media buyers want to lock up particular ad inventory, especially video, on premium websites such as The New York Times ahead of time. They may want to lock in a decent price on ads they know they'll want, or just to make sure they've got the right placements for a campaign they're planning. And buying via programmatic ad tech can, in theory, make it easier to find and assemble certain consumer targets across publishers than buying with one publisher at a time. The holiday season -- a time when brands unload ad dollars specifically earmarked to reach consumers who are in a shopping state of mind -- provided a good reason for agencies to use the technology. Google said the number of video ad impressions served monthly through programmatic direct on its platforms have doubled from January 2016 through September 2016. The number of programmatic direct deals by retail advertisers executed on its DoubleClick Ad Exchange grew 2.8 times from the fourth quarter of 2014 to the fourth quarter of 2015. Although 2016 has yet to close, Sean Downey, VP of platforms at Google, told Ad Age he expects the company to see a year-over-year increase of 150% to 200% for the same time this year. "You're starting to see statistics from us saying 90 of the Ad Age 100 are using programmatic direct," Mr. Downey said. "We think as the market grows and matures that this will become table stakes for any strong marketer or agency who is trying to achieve their goals." The advance of programmatic direct reminds Michael Kuntz, senior VP of digital revenue at USA Today Network, of the growth in mobile advertising. "I can think back to five or six years ago when people were saying, 'This is going to be the year of mobile,' and that never happened," he said. "And finally, it exploded." Although Mr. Kuntz declined to share specific numbers, he said in the last six to nine months USA Today has seen "a really big upswing" in programmatic direct deals. "Frankly, the technology has now caught up to the demand," he said. "And now we can bring richer, more high impact media opportunities to our clients via programmatic direct buying channels. I think that has absolutely caused a migration away from the open exchange." But there are other factors, too. Ad blocking, fraud and the risk of appearing on a fake-news site are nonexistent or less prevalent in programmatic direct deals, Mr. Kuntz said. "I think lots of clients have woken up and they're saying, 'We understand there are efficiencies in buying through an open exchange, but I'm not so confident my ads are showing up in the right environment," Mr. Kuntz said. "I think the pendulum is starting to move away from just buying the right eyeballs in real time to, 'Yeah, we want to do that, but we also want to make sure our ads are showing up on the right content and in an environment we're comfortable with.'" Meanwhile, agencies and trading desks have helped breathe new life into programmatic direct deals. "Where we think there is a lot of power is the fact we are bringing our data and our advertiser's data to the table and saying, 'These are the audiences we want to deliver and find within your environments,'" said Erica Schmidt, managing director at Cadreon North America. "That is a key sea change and it is very different from working with publishers directly." Although Ms. Schmidt agreed that programmatic direct seems poised for success next year, she did pump the brakes. "I absolutely think this will be big in 2017, but we are in early stages," she said. "It is a philosophical change when you are going direct and there is going to be an adjustment period." Vin Paolozzi, senior VP of marketplace development and investment at Magna Global, said he's most excited about now having the ability to pass a client's audience data through Google so it can forecast how much of that audience a publisher can truly reach across its inventory. "We had some of that ability in the private marketplace, but it lacked scale," Mr. Paolozzi said. "Now we can forecast and buy as much as we need -- especially when it comes to the holidays … If you think about the opportunity with Google, to be able to match and scale those audiences, that is a powerful connection to have." Very few technology companies can compete with Google when it comes to the business of matching audiences. The company has rich data on users through its many services and Android operating system. The tech kingpin also works with nearly every publisher on the planet. Meanwhile, other publishers like The New York Times have also seen increases in the number of programmatic direct deals over the course of 2016. "We had some big deals in every quarter," said Sara Badler, director of programmatic advertising at the New York Times. "Obviously, seasonality helps, but marketers are becoming more and more interested in transacting this way." Ms. Badler added that the publication is "definitely" seeing more and more agencies moving toward programmatic direct. "I think that marketers used to think of it as just direct response. Before programmatic direct used to be standard units. Now, we're starting to see high-impact units go this way and marketers are starting to follow." "We're not just remnant inventory anymore," she said.

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#Programmatic How to Navigate the Programmatic Contextual Maze Ask 100 marketers to describe "contextual advertising," and you are likely to get 400 vague, optimistic answers about the "right message at the right time and place to the right person." Ask 100 startup CEOs and you're likely to get 1,000 black-box answers that will confound you. There lies the core conundrum. Everybody wants "contextual advertising" but no one knows how to get there with all this techno-babble black-box confusion. This leaves marketers scrambling to figure it out amid a plethora of platforms with their glossy contextual promises that may fall short of what a marketer really needs. So let's deconstruct the contextual equation recognizing that "contextual tech" covers a wide swath of ad tech. I've confined this highly simplified schema to those technologies that directly drive the "right time/place/message/person" model in the programmatic world for advertisers, leaving out many branches of the ad-tech tree. From this very focused, programmatic perch, we have an excellent view into the highly variable contextual tech landscape: Credit: EngageSimply. custom_html> Right Message The Tech Keyword match data for ad placement How they work This is a data layer used during the digital ad buying process where ad is placed only when keyword appears on page Best Uses Best used when keyword is very specific with unambiguous meanings Limits Buying keywords can misfire because many keywords have vague & multiple meanings which can lead to bad placements The Tech Native ads/ Content syndication How they work These are ad placements in two flavors: 1) Dynamic ad creation to match page design 2) Broad "interest classification" matching – i.e.; shopping Best Uses Quick traffic hit to a page or destination Limits 1) Topic classifications are very broad and may not reflect advertiser real topics of interest 2) Native ad campaign CTR deteriorate quickly due to content fatigue and link bait tactics Right Time (Real Time Intent) The Tech Interest based targeting How they work "Interest classification" data is attached to cookie profiles to buy media. Interest data is derived from previous profile digital habits Best Uses Ability to deliver tonnage cost effectively Limits Interest classifications are broad, vendor defined and not marketer created resulting in topic gaps and mismatches that waste ad dollars Right Place The Tech GEO based targeting How they work Cookie syncing data is used during digital buying to identify users across devices – desktop, tablet, mobile. Best Uses Most typical applications are mobile ads when a clear offer is present Limits 1) Low mobile CTR 2) GEO proximity does not predict real time user interest Right Person The Tech Cookie profile targeting How they work This is the data backbone of all exchanges so advertisers can target by demographics. Interest and device data can be bundled in or appended to the cookie based targeting. Best Uses Allows advertisers to model alternate profiles to determine optimum ROI Limits 1) Data quality 2) Cookie profile data is a rear view mirror not indicative of real time interest The Tech Remarketing How they work Presenting an ad to a previous site visitor when they appear in the programmatic exchanges. Best Uses Very effective at getting visitors back to site Limits 1) Can't scale beyond known visitors 2) Ads "stalk" users since there is no contextual filter custom_html> The contextual moving target One of the reasons it is so hard to wrestle the contextual equation to the ground is that technologies keep morphing and shifting, undermining most attempts to stabilize technologies. When cookie-based data providers add geo-targeting capabilities or when email goes programmatic, this blurs the lines -- making a clear contextual tech roadmap as easy to calculate as the unifying theory of ad tech. To transcend the complexity and grasp clarity, let's look at the leading trends in programmatic tech and what they mean for marketers: 1. Growing realization that native advertising/content syndication is just another name for a type of banner ad -- not necessarily more contextually useful than any good banner ad placed on a quality site. Plus, it is potentially laden with FTC disclosure issues. 2. Shift to tech that delivers topic-based context buying (i.e. programmatic content marketing) as that is closest to real-time intent versus cookie-based targeting. 3. Ratcheting down use of "interest classifications" as a targeting parameter because they are often too broad to drive good results. P&G's recent pull back from Facebook's targeting efforts is indicative of this trend. 4. Recognition that keywords work very well in the search paradigm but can struggle to be productive outside of search. 5. New attention to quality, integrated programmatic solutions that cover the sales funnel -- from click to close -- because too many SaaS platforms spoil the contextual soup. 6. Re-engineering retargeting and acquisition marketing from being dominated by platforms that game advertisers to technology that can better align users' real-time interests and behaviors to improve results. No marketer wakes up and says, "Today I am going run advertising that is NOT contextual," but achieving great contextual marketing has become a caveat emptor market. Great technologies can deliver great contextual campaigns but only if well woven together. Today, this is about as easy as cracking the code on the unifying theory of ad tech. A conundrum indeed.

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#programmatic Centro Drives Evolution of Programmatic Advertising Software by Integrating DSP with Collaboration Tools, Workflow ... Programmatic advertising helped advance digital media innovation, but also increased complexity by creating the need for multiple platforms, additional education and more headcount.

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Google Removes Its 'Last-Look' Auction Advantage | AdExchanger The "last-look" advantage Google’s ad server gave to Google's ad exchange so bothered publishers and exchanges that it gave rise to header bidding. As of this week, that advantage is no more, AdExchanger has learned. Google just reworked its auction so it no longer favors itself in the allocation of bids. A support document this week detailed the switch for Google's Exchange Bidding in Dynamic Allocation (EBDA) feature, which is still in a beta, unfinalized state. Google’s director of product management, Jonathan Bellack, confirmed the change to AdExchanger. “We are collecting the price each exchange would pay, including AdX, and then putting it in a unified auction where the highest price wins,” Bellack said. Here's how the programmatic auction will work: All EBDA exchange participants – including Index Exchange, Rubicon Project, PubMatic, Sovrn, Smaato and Gamut – submit their final bids. The DoubleClick AdExchange (AdX) also submits its final bid. And the best price wins. Previously, AdX would wait for all those other exchanges to submit their bids, and then give itself a chance to outbid the winner. So if Google’s exchange had two bids of $1 and $5, it would be able to beat a $4 bid from an outside exchange. Under the new auction rules, it would submit a bid of $1 (the second price) and lose the auction. While at a glance this might seem bad for the publisher, since Google is restrained from submitting a higher bid, in fact the outcome should be the same given the rules of second-price auctions. In the above example, the impression clears at $4 regardless of which exchange takes it. According to Index Exchange SVP of product Drew Bradstock, who had been briefed on the change, removing last-look signals a shift in how Google works with its partners. “This is a big change in how exchange bidding works that shows they are open to having it and DFP be a lot more neutral,” said Bradstock, who spent five years at Google before joining Index Exchange. “We like that they are willing to listen and be a lot more transparent.” During a Google forum late last year, the biggest concern voiced by publishers and exchanges centered on this last-look advantage. Bellack said feedback from those constituents influenced the decision to level the playing field. “The exchanges and publishers we’ve been working with like this [change], because they think this is a fair way to make competition,” he said. Google wouldn’t say how changing the auction rules will affect its win rate and revenue. But AdX includes unique demand from AdSense and performs strongly even without its last-look edge, Bradstock said. Google’s infrastructure is also more robust than most companies, meaning it can return more bids before the auction closes – something other exchanges and DSPs have struggled to keep up with as header bidding has multiplied the number of auctions taking place. And Google will retain one additional advantage in the auction: It knows more about the user than it passes on to the other exchanges. Since Google’s exchange bidding project uses a server-to-server integration, its partners can’t see as much information – think full-page URL, contextual details or viewability predictions – as they would if they had their own tag on the page. If all buyers see the same impression, but buyers through one exchange have more information about that impression, that will be more valuable than the same impression offered up through other exchanges. Bellack emphasized that it's not in Google’s best interest to retain that information advantage. “We only succeed when our partners succeed,” he said. Industry Impact Google making its server-side auction fair moves the header bidding wars to a new chapter. As a primer, publishers first started implementing header bidding to allow outside exchanges to compete on every impression, a privilege Google previously reserved for its own exchange. As publishers saw massive increases in yield, the trend caught like wildfire. Technical upgrades, like moving the header bidding auction server-side, followed. Google announced that it would allow exchanges to compete via a server-side integration last April, with its EBDA release. Index Exchange, AppNexus, Media.net and Sonobi operate server-side solutions. And a large, outside player – Amazon – unveiled a server-side wrapper last December. Publishers could use it as an alternative to Google’s exchange bidding or other server-side solutions. But the shift to server-side solutions, which make auctions run faster, also threaten to make the auctions lose transparency again and replicate the last-look advantage. “It’s not clear that even the rest of server-side implementation of header bidding are operating this way,” Bellack said. With Google removing its last-look advantage, other players with server-side solutions may feel pressured to do so too. Could ad tech enter an era where transparency, not hidden fees and rules, win the day? “Changes to a fair auction will not be an advantage for those that aren’t open or transparent with fees,” Bradstock said.