Kroger Precision Marketing made waves in the ad tech industry as a pioneer in retail media. And, they are determined to expand their  impact further. 

Last week, Kroger’s retail media operation announced the  launch of an in-house self-service ad platform. The platform was designed to ease advertisers’ ability to activate, measure and optimize their campaigns and improve their customers’ overall experience. 

But that’s just the beginning. Plans are in motion to expand the platform’s capabilities to service their entire retail media service portfolio which means a more unified marketing strategy for brands. We spoke with Michael Schuh, VP of Media Strategy at KPM, to understand the origins of the new platform, how they put consumers’ needs first and plans for future-proofing their ad platform. 

Andrew Byrd: What motivated Kroger to develop its proprietary self-service ad platform?

Michael Schuh: We created the in-house ad platform because we’re obsessed with optimizing the customer experience. We designed our diverse portfolio of ad products to help brands engage with our customers no matter how they consume media. We’ve been on a journey for five and a half years since launching KPM. 

Our parent organization at 84.51°, the data science company of Kroger, gave us an incredible foundation of data science that we’re excited to deploy on our platform. It will improve the content that our customers see when they visit Kroger.com or the Kroger app. The scale and speed with which we can deploy that data science to improve customer experiences will only increase as we build in-house capabilities versus leveraging third-party partners.  

AB: Regarding creating a great consumer experience, the ad tech industry is in a privacy reckoning. How are you thinking about that when creating the ad platform? I know that with your retail media network, you have plenty of customer first-party data. Still, I’m curious how you deal with transparency and privacy protection concerning your customer data. 

MS: We built our ad platform to be consumer-first. We empower and encourage our customers to make informed choices about whether they wish to receive tailored ads and personalized offers. We provide clear information about how customers can opt out of such advertising. Most customers feel that personalized offers and fuel points make their shopping easier. That’s why our loyalty program has a high participation rate: 96% of Kroger sales are connected to loyalty accounts.  

AB: Can you explain how advertisers create and launch campaigns on Kroger’s ad platform?

MS: As a self-service advertising platform, advertisers will have lots of flexibility to control the process. Initial capabilities will allow clients to: 

• Reach relevant audiences using search-based insights and custom ad groups.
• Design, iterate, and activate creative messages within the platform.
• Customize and save multiple creative templates by brand and product.
• Optimize all campaign elements, including budgets, messaging, and flighting.
• Build reports and boost performance against deterministic retail data – including sales lift, household penetration, and unit lift.  

The new platform will also pave the way for greater interoperability with other media activation and management software. Advertisers using third-party management tools like Pacvue and Skai will still manage inventory through those platforms.

We’ll own the platform and deploy capabilities like data science, onsite inventory, and new inventory types. We will then surface new capabilities to help brands activate across our entire suite of ad products.

We’ll start to onboard existing clients over the next couple of months. We’ll have beta clients on the platform within the next 60 days or so. Then we’ll move to our full launch. We’re already working on features and functionality to enhance the platform. We will connect with third-party bid management platforms – like Pacvue and Skai – to help brands buy across onsite display and search.

AB: What are the future plans for Kroger’s self-service ad platform? Are there any upcoming features or expansions on the horizon?

MS: As part of this first release, we will maintain our relationship with bid management platforms like Skai and Pacvue. We’ll continue to innovate with partners to enhance our suite of metrics. Part of the reason advertisers are investing in retail media is because of the ability to close the loop and improve performance. It is not limited to performance metrics. We can also show how a campaign drove new buyers or category share. The new platform will increase how we optimize these metrics. 

Retail media is not just about setting the campaign and forgetting it. This platform will enable brands to see real-time data and optimize between different ad placements, creative types, or products. The result is a better customer experience with the brand content. 

The post Kroger Precision Marketing’s In-House Ad Platform Finesses Customer Experience appeared first on AdMonsters.

Imagine it if you will, you’re sitting on your porch eating Catalina Crunch Cereal, and you look up and your neighbor is chirping away to a pair of seagulls who then respond to her. Next, a voiceover says, “The world is full of surprises—like getting cinnamon toast cereal without all the bad stuff.”

Pretty funny stuff, huh?

That’s what happens in the first nationwide brand awareness TV Campaign from Catalina Crunch.  With the help of SuperHeroes NY and System1, the keto-friendly cereal and snack brand created 30, 15, and 6-second spots featured across TV, social media, and CTV platforms, with a focus on amusing their audience.

To test and land on the right creative, SuperHero NY leveraged System1’s Test Your Ad platform to scale the campaign’s performance and determine how viewers felt about the creative throughout development. The goal was to connect data with creativity. Test Your Ad enables marketers and their agency partners to A/B test people’s emotional responses to creative, second-by-second, with custom reports delivered within 24 hours.

AdMonsters spoke with Krishna Kaliannan, Founder/CEO, Catalina Snacks, Jon Evans, Chief Customer Officer, System1, and Susan Vugts, Managing Director, SuperHeroes NY, about the campaign. We discussed System 1’s Test Your Ad platform, how to market a campaign across different platforms, and the importance of collaboration. 

Catalina Crunch’s Creative Campaign Collaboration

AB: Catalina Crunch partnered with SuperHeroes NY and System1 for a creative cereal campaign. Why was this partnership worthwhile for your company? 

Krishna Kaliannan: We’re big fans of leveraging data to drive improvements. In Catalina Crunch’s early years, we learned that less than half (45%) of buyers were eating our cereal out of a bowl. Some were eating it from the bag as a snack, baking, or adding it to yogurt or smoothies. This insight led to the launch of additional snack product lines.  

So when we launched a broader awareness campaign, we also wanted to ensure we were partnering with agencies that understood data and creativity.

When we learned about the Test Your Ad platform, we recognized it as another way to capture valuable feedback from consumers so that we could create an ad they would enjoy. As a challenger brand, we aim to stand out among established competitors. Partnering with Superheroes as our creative agency that seeks to save the world from boring advertising and System1 has enabled us to be more creative and get real audience insights that shape the final campaign.

Testing Your Ad’s Effectiveness

AB: SuperHeroes NY used System1’s Test Your Ad platform to gauge how viewers felt about the creative throughout development. How does this product work, and why did you think creating it was necessary? 

Jon Evans: Nearly half of all advertising (48%) does not deliver long-term market share growth. Furthermore, many brands need clarity on which campaigns fail to engage consumers. We developed Test Your Ad, a platform that measures viewers’ emotional response to advertising because research demonstrates that the more people feel, the more they buy.

With Test Your Ad, advertisers and agencies can quickly and accurately predict the short-and long-term potential of creative, understand which specific elements are or are not adding value, improve their ad’s effectiveness through expert guidance and compare their ad to competitors’ commercials among our database of more than 80,000 ads.

Tell Me a Story: Scaling Ad Creative Across Channels

AB: While this is Catalina Crunch’s first TV campaign, the ads will be displayed across social media and streaming platforms. Do you find that marketing across different platforms changes your ad process? Do you have to market to audiences differently depending on the platform? If so, how? 

Susan Vugts: When developing our campaigns, we will always start with a solid creative strategy and build our story upon a vital human insight and a creative nugget that connects with people and can stand out.

For Catalina Crunch, this was the insight that something that seems impossible can be true. Like healthy cereal that tastes delicious or a neighbor that talks with seagulls in the Catalina campaign.

Based on this premise, we usually develop multiple executions per platform and audience because you must market to audiences and platforms differently. But we also ensure we have one overarching recognizable storyline and build distinctive brand assets such as packaging, color usage, and logo across all executions and platforms to build brand affinity. This is especially true for a challenger brand such as Catalina Crunch, which is building its brand and business. 

Optimizing Marketing Budgets Amidst Economic Uncertainty

AB: There is a reported slowdown in ad spend and a possible ad recession. What role should creative advertising play in combating this rough spot? 

JE: Many brands are looking for ways to stretch their marketing budgets further in the face of an economic downturn. Creative effectiveness is key to maximizing a brand’s advertising investment.

Creative effectiveness is key to maximizing a brand's advertising investment.

First, marketers must understand which of their current campaigns support brand building and which do not impact the bottom line. Ad testing can help reveal the effectiveness metrics so that marketers can allocate spend to the ads most likely to drive market share growth.

While some brands will inevitably roll out new ads during a recession, others may prefer to create savings by reinvesting in campaigns with high effectiveness metrics.

System1 has conducted extensive research on ad wear-out and has found no evidence. Audiences take more time with creative than marketers do. Advertisers can revive or repurpose older creative that tests well with audiences to reduce the need for an entirely new brief and production process.

Brand-building Ads Spark Emotion

AB: What advice would you give to advertisers to implement creative ads in their campaigns to help them drive revenue? 

JE: One of the main differentiators between ads that drive long-term growth and those that don’t is the former’s emphasis on right-brained features.

Advertising expert and author Orlando Wood outlines in his books — Lemon. How the advertising brain turned sour. and Look out — the importance of appealing to the brain’s right hemisphere to drive mental availability. Right-brained features include:

• Melodic music
• Characters with agency
• A clear sense of place
• A scene unfolding
• Humor and dialogue

Brand-building ads spark an emotion in viewers, ideally happiness.

In comparison, Wood’s research finds that ads that lean heavily on left-brained elements, like rhythmic music, voiceovers, words on the screen, and freeze-frame effects, are less likely to drive long-term market share growth. Unfortunately, over the last nearly 20 years, there has been an increase in left-brained features and a decrease in right-brained features in ads. 

Advertisers must build briefs with the right and left brain in mind. Agencies are equally responsible for developing concepts focusing on storytelling and bringing rich characters and interactions into the mix. This creative will have a better chance of taking viewers on an emotional journey and driving long-term profit and market share growth. 

The post Catalina Crunch Campaign Shows How to Save the World From Boring Advertising appeared first on AdMonsters.

Specifically, do they have the tools they need to ensure the ads that appear on their sites meet their brand’s standards, and whether they spend too much time managing the process?

Take our 5-minute State of Publisher Rev Ops Efficiency Survey

This survey and report — to be published in conjunction with GeoEdge on AdMonsters.com as a Playbook — will explore the publisher’s ability to fully monetize their sites while maintaining strong brand standards while driving efficiency in their Rev Ops and AdOps teams. In the final report, we will also provide tips and best practices that you can put into practice in your business right away.

Take the Survey Now!

The post What’s Your Rev Ops Efficiency? appeared first on AdMonsters.

The challenges are great, and in a recent Think Tank hosted by Celtra, publishers came together and discussed their individual challenges and how to rectify them.

First-party Data and Letting Go

“We sit on a wealth of first-party data, and quite a high percentage of our ad revenue is data enabled,” said one publisher.

“Targeting is heavily utilized. In terms of the intersection of data with creative, there are places where we’ve been really strong and done a really great job, and we’ve had to sort of prioritize what we focus on. We have really strong first-party multicultural data, and we know that our advertisers really needed some guidance about what is the right way to message these audiences: ‘When should I deliver an ad in Spanish versus English? When should I have cultural nuances or words inserted that show the audience that I’m aware of who they are, and they’re more receptive to the message.’ So I would say multicultural is a place where we focused because we saw that there’s a huge opportunity.”

Letting go is hard in all aspects of life; in love, in death, and in business. More times than not, it’s the right call.

“It’s okay, to throw things away,” added another publisher. “I think a lot of times we forget that. It’s fine if you tried a product and you learned from it and now you don’t want to use it, you want to sunset it or phase it out. And I think sometimes it’s easy to say, ‘well, we put so much work into this, so now we have to keep doing it because we spent all this time and money and resources doing it.’ But then you end up supporting too many things and maintaining too many things.

We did that recently. We phased out a pretty big product that just never worked the way we wanted it to work. It was like, okay, we tried and we tried, and it was too hard and too expensive to make it better. And it was disappointing but it was the right move.”

Template Is Not a Bad Word

Everyone wants to feel special, have that custom, unique experience, whether it’s as an individual or a business looking for that “wow” factor. Advertisers can still have that wow factor with the use of templates on the back-end. Templates work, for starters, and they are also easy to set up and ease the burden on an already stretched-thin ad ops department. 

“We try and make sure that the client understands that even though it’s a template,  it’s going to meet their KPIs,” said one attendee. We try to make these templates as simple as possible for clients. And, it’s repeatable. The agency loves it because for some of our units, it’s three assets, video and image and maybe a poster thumbnail and the pixels. And then we can just crank that out. If agencies want to rotate five different titles or five different versions of creative for the same unit, depending on it, we’ll throw it in for them, because it’s so simple to do, and they know exactly what they’re giving us every time.”

“Template can almost be considered a bad word from a sales perspective, because sales wants to sell customized experiences,” added another participant. “Advertisers want to want it to feel custom, want it to feel special.

But on the back end, you can use a template, and the output can still look and feel like it is custom for that advertiser.”

The post Things That Keep Publishers up at Night appeared first on AdMonsters.

Publishers know that advertisers will pay more for premium ad experiences as they drive better engagement, and Sandow Media has seen the results. They’ve streamlined workflows while delivering dynamic ads with more granular targeting and personalization. And with fewer banner ads, the newsletter reader experience has dramatically improved.

In preparation for our webinar: How Pubs Are Increasing Revenue While Delivering Premium Ad Experiences In Email, on Wednesday, September 22, 2021, @ 1 PM EST (Register for the free webinar now!) — featuring Jessica Munoz, SVP Product Marketing & GTM Strategy, LiveIntent and Bobby Bonett, VP, Digital, SANDOW — we spoke with Nick Bolt, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Publisher Solutions, LiveIntent, about how native ads can help publishers grow their business and revenue, as well as how they can significantly streamline their workflows and gain back resources with dynamic ads and sophisticated targeting options.

Lynne d Johnson: Native advertising is one of the fastest-growing areas of digital display when it comes to ad spend. I think eMarketer is predicting native will account for $57.27 billion of display spend this year. But a lot of that money is going to the walled gardens, primarily social networks. What other opportunities do publishers have to cash in on this native advertising surge?

Nick Bolt: While there are plenty of native opportunities publishers can tap into on the web, email poses a valuable option for publishers. Native ads garner high engagement rates for advertisers, and in turn, high CPMs for publishers — which only increase in the opt-in environment of email.

Native ads also enable publishers to diversify their media kit with premium ad units that elevate digital experiences. Furthermore, with native ads in email newsletters, publishers can transform their newsletters into a channel for first-party data collection. With more premium options publishers can attract a larger array of advertisers and acquire more data to continue growing their business and revenue. 

Lynne d Johnson: Native in email sounds great, but how can publishers capitalize on native ads without undercutting the work they’ve put into cultivating their display inventory options? 

Nick Bolt: Native ads and banner ads both play an integral part in monetization and advertising strategies. While native ads may garner higher engagement rates for advertisers, they’re designed to fit the look and feel of the publisher’s branding; an advertiser may prefer an ad unit that provides them with the opportunity to showcase their branding and logos instead, as is the case in brand awareness campaigns. The key is to have one’s native and display inventory work together as a multi-format buy where advertisers can purchase both types of inventory for a full newsletter sponsorship. 

Lynne d Johnson: One of the many benefits of native ads in email is that publishers get to use data to make advertising extremely relevant for readers, which of course is a win-win for buyers. What are some of the other benefits?

Nick Bolt: With native ads in email, but more specifically LiveIntent’s Native Ad Blueprints, publishers gain more control and greater flexibility. Native ads enable publishers to monetize their email newsletters while maintaining their brand identity. As publishers work to increase their subscription and retention efforts, native ads are a valuable way to improve subscription experiences with highly-curated, premium ad units powered by reader behavior and interest data. 

Lynne d Johnson: Besides monetization opportunities, what are some of the publisher benefits of using native ads in email newsletters?

NB: With Native Ad Blueprints, publishers can go beyond guaranteed deals committed to a single advertiser and instead can run multiple deals across several advertisers that serve the most relevant ad to readers. Publishers and their ad ops teams can do this while significantly streamlining their workflows and gaining back resources with dynamic ads and sophisticated targeting options. Furthermore, our Native Ad Blueprints solution enables publishers to leverage their email newsletter inventory for their own marketing needs, targeting their audiences with ads that will help them achieve their own marketing goals and objectives.

Don’t forget to sign up for our free webinar with LiveIntent: How Pubs Are Increasing Revenue While Delivering Premium Ad Experiences In Email, on Wednesday, September 22, 2021 @ 1 PM EST (Register for the free webinar now!)

The post Pubs Are Increasing Revenue and First-party Data Collection With Native Ads in Email appeared first on AdMonsters.

During our April 22, 2021 webinar, Unlocking a Creative-First Approach to Social Display, Nikki Gertner, Senior Product Manager at Celtra and our own Rob Beeler dug into why publishers should look for more functionality — whether that’s the ability to make content “shoppable” or even just build out time-saving templates — in a social ad solution.

Nikki and Rob also covered a few tips and best practices for how publisher ad teams can turn social content into a premium ad experience that entices both users and advertisers.

Key Takeways:

• The beauty of social display is its ability to mimic the social media experience that both users and advertisers have come to expect: Gorgeous creative with rich functionality, like video, parallax scrolling, and other animations.
• It’s all about the remix: Social posts contain high-performing assets like copy and images that advertisers are eager to repurpose.
• Without the right tools, efforts to resize and otherwise modify social content can be time-consuming for publishers’ ad sales teams (especially teams without in-house designers).
• “Template” doesn’t have to be a dirty word when it comes to social ad creative — in fact, using templates can help streamline workflows and give your team more time to ideate.
• The “half-life” of social content on platforms like IG and Snapchat is short, but using templates that easily port it to the display channel can drive more engagement with that content over time.
• Premium social display experiences feature-rich media capabilities like parallax scrolling and image transitions that encourage interaction.

The post Webinar Replay: Unlocking a Creative-First Approach to Social Display appeared first on AdMonsters.

So how can publishers help advertisers maximize their existing content while offering them trusted inventory to advertise on? As alternative ways to distribute social content become more important, publishers are now offering solutions that help brands take their social creative and run it across publisher inventory with Social Display.

In preparation for our upcoming webinar, Unlocking a Creative-First Approach to Social Display, on Thursday, April 22 @ 1 PM EST (Register now!), AdMonsters Advisory Board Chairman, Rob Beeler, spoke with Nikki Gertner, Senior Product Manager, Celtra, about monetizing an advertiser’s content from social media, having a range of ad product templates in your arsenal to leverage an advertiser’s social content, and how to stand out from your competition by offering creative services.

Rob Beeler: Are publishers missing an opportunity to monetize an advertiser’s content from social media?

Nikki Gertner: If a publisher does not offer any kind of ad product that can meet a social distribution KPI, then they are absolutely missing out on an opportunity. It takes a lot of resources on the publisher side to come up with new and innovative ad products. Researching client KPIs, prototyping an idea, building a template, A/B testing, etc. You could dedicate an entire team to this, but with Social Display the majority of that ideation work is already complete. It’s just a matter of getting your hands on the right assets, and how publishers can stand out from the competition by offering creative services to advertisers.

RB: It seems to me with so many different social platforms, it would be complicated to build ad products that can distribute content for each. How can publishers manage all these specifications?

The post How Pubs Can Monetize Advertisers’ Content From Social Media appeared first on AdMonsters.

Opportunity is knocking. The proliferation of platforms—from mobile to social and even connected TV—has advertisers leaning more on publishers for creative solutions at scale. A solid creative offering can win additional business, drive better ad performance, and improve user experience.

On September 18, 2019, AdMonsters brought together an illustrious panel (Time to Get Creative), featuring Derek Gatts, Vice President, Ad Product, CNN, Katie Spagnuolo, Associate Director, Media Strategy & Distribution, TripAdvisor and Ron Duque, Senior Director, Revenue Operations, GroundTruth, to discuss how to leverage the latest breakthroughs in creative technology, scaling creative development, effectively integrating ad design into workflows, using creative services to up-sell advertisers, smart formats for different platforms, evaluating and optimizing creative performance, transferable skillsets for creative, what to look for in a creative management partner and more. The Meetup was sponsored by Celtra at GroundTruth’s lovely office at 1 World Trade Center.

Following are some of the highlights from the AdMonsters Meetup: Time to Get Creative, Sponsored by Celtra:

Derek Gatts, Vice President, Ad Product CNN

“There are two KPIs in digital media: conversion… and job retention.” #Meetup

— AdMonsters (@AdMonsters) September 18, 2019

In his work with ad products at CNN, Derek Gatts works closely with data intelligence to develop deeper insights that lead to unique ad format capabilities. When it comes to creative trends like AR, he says that one of the challenges for most publishers’ ad products is going after the one-off shiny object, when media companies should start thinking like SAAS companies, bringing things to market in a cohesive way. How can a publisher take something that’s been done in the past and build something unique that specific to an advertiser, KPIs and use cases?

For a large publisher like CNN the transition from scale to quality isn’t an easy one, but the road there includes looking more closely at what users are doing—looking at positive attributes from social like FB and Twitter as an example in terms of how they develop an ecosystem around what the user is doing on their platforms. CNN is looking at what signals they can create in relation to how users interact with advertising that can allow the publisher to serve users better, perhaps through content recommendations or ad creative. “It should be less about assets and more about ‘I know this is how this user engages with this type of format,'” he said.

We have to examine our data in terms of the experience in our entire environment—just like the social platforms we sneer at/envy. The creative affects the ads/the ads effect the creative. #Meetup

— AdMonsters (@AdMonsters) September 18, 2019

Katie Spagnuolo, Associate Director, Media Strategy & Distribution, TripAdvisor

Do you have to worry about the creepiness factor in data-driven creative? Oh yes—it’s a balance between personalized vs stalking. A/B testing can be extremely helpful in drawing that line. #Meetup @CeltraMobile

— AdMonsters (@AdMonsters) September 18, 2019

As the Associate Director, Media Strategy & Distribution at TripAdvisor, Katie is tasked with managing and further developing their platform monetization fueled by data. She’s looking at leveraging first-party data, creating audience extensions to target users even when they’re offsite, and most important, making sure creative is relevant.

“Travel planning is complex,” she said, “There are multiple touchpoints. We want to make sure we’re engaging users in their travel planning by following their consumer journey.” For TripAdvisor it’s about providing that extra value to clients with dynamic creative that pulls in data and personalizes messaging. Advertisers rely on the trust the brand has built amongst their audience and then leverages their voice when it comes to creative. “We look at how we can take what’s core to TripAdvisor like ratings and reviews and incorporate those elements into their messages so that its authentic to their brand,” she explained.

When it comes to workflows and processes, TripAdvisor has a Core Experiences Team that works across the organization to ensure that everyone isn’t working in silos. A program will have a consistent pre-sale, KPIs will be known, and creative needs will be holistically met. The processes are streamlined to provide triggers across the journey of the program from pre-sale to flight to post.
 

Ron Duque, Senior Director, Revenue Operations, GroundTruth

“It’s not about creative that’s in your face—it’s about personalization and relevant to context.”

— AdMonsters (@AdMonsters) September 18, 2019

Ron Duque and GroundTruth fuel a lot of what makes weather app WeatherBug work. Everything about the app (and by extension advertising in-app) has to be relevant to location and weather. Location is a very important ingredient in the creative process.

Latency is a big challenge for mobile in-app advertising. “We were at 9 seconds, then we got it down to 4 seconds, now we need to get it down to half of that. We needed to find the technology and partners who could help us reduce latency and better service consumers so they don’t get pissed off,” he said. It’s hard to find that in the header space with a rich media company who can help you accelerate your tech and offerings.

The company has a consumer-first philosophy and Ron and his team are even willing to pushback on sales. “We’re being very strategic in what we show people. It can’t be intrusive. We have to think like them and ask ourselves, ‘Is this something I want to see?’
 

Interesting question about whether publisher (particularly ad tech team) can get more involved in the storytelling element of creative—where do the performance metrics fit? @AdMonsters @CeltraMobile #meetup

— Gavin Dunaway (@AdMonsterGavin) September 18, 2019

 
All three speakers talked extensively about how important it was to have a creative management partner that works seamlessly with you like Celtra to provide effective and efficient cross-channel creative workflows, powered by data and analytics, as well as the ability to deliver dynamic creative, at scale across the entire media plan, in real-time and connect creative to media, measurement and data infrastructure to bring about adops simplification and value enhancement of the tech stack.

The post Meetup Debrief: It’s Time to Get Creative appeared first on AdMonsters.

The teams come together to ponder over whatever ad ops issues are impacting their daily work — with the main goal of finding viable solutions. It’s sort of like a startup weekend (or hackathon) if you will. Here are some of the really great ideas — and ad ops challenges — that came out of the Admonsters Austin Publisher Forum.

Company Name: The One
Tagline: You CAN handle the truth
Problem: Discrepant fraud measurement between vendors
Solution: New fraud translation layer that defines fraud
Celebrity Endorser: Jack Nicholson

Company Name: Tiny Ops
Tagline: No ad ops problem too big; No ad impressions too small
Problem: Small teams dealing with trafficking, optimization, ad quality, reporting and standards
Solution: We help the small teams solve big problems such as trafficking optimization ad quality reporting standards
Celebrity Endorser: Paw Patrol

Company Name: Behavioral Sciences Labs (B.S.Labs)
Tagline: B.S. Labs – We call you out
Problem: Invalid traffic (IVT)
Solution: Data graph integrated with ad servers to prevent IVT impressions from delivery
Celebrity Endorser: John Legend

Company Name: Pudding
Tagline: Putting together the right mix of product and ads.
Problem: How do you know your assumption is correct? Product vs ads? We are on the same team but we are at war.
Solution: Out-of-box solution to A/B test UX vs Ads (product engagement vs revenue)
Celebrity Endorser: Martha Stewart & Snoop Dogg

Company Name: BidSwitch (Editor’s note: Haven’t we heard this one before?)
Tagline: Figure it out, finally
Problem: Inability to figure out which header bidders are problematic when a bad ad appears on the site
Solution: Toggle for a nonprogrammer to instantly turn on/off header bidders individually
Celebrity Endorser: Mr. Potato Head

Company Name: Specs, Specs, Baby
Tagline: Let’s talk about specs, baby! Let’s talk about Q +C
Problem: As each publisher has different rules; i.e. video aspect ration, MB size, duration, etc. User connections vary with 3G, 4G, OTT, Desktop
Solution: Ad server/exchange dashboard; Rule configuration for allowable ad specs; Determine specific criteria to allow/block ads that do not match pub requirements; apply bitrate allowable based on connection speed
Celebrity Endorser: Vanilla Ice

Company Name: MADOPS
Tagline: One tag to rule them all
Problem: The industry lacks one source of record impression delivery that is accepted by advertisers, agencies and publishers
Solution: We are inventing a universal code that ALL will adopt and use as the single source of record for delivery & revenue actualization; the IAB will own this and enforce it.; the benefit will be less waste and more revenue for all sides
Celebrity Endorser: Chance the (W)Rapper

Company Name: Digitopia
Tagline: One ad – reimagined
Problem: Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) challenges
Solution: Creative execution plug-in that optimizes creative automatically based on user preferences
Celebrity Endorser: Lady Gaga

Company Name: Build AI
Tagline: Bridging selling & serving
Problem: Order management systems are either too manual or they aren’t customizable
Solution: Build AI allows proposal/order creation that integrates selling & serving
 
 

In 2018 digital advertising, and especially programmatic, have become more sophisticated than ever — but also much more complex and challenging. As we head into the mobile-first world of 2019, we’re likely to see many more challenges arise — but as ad tech and ad ops are wont to do, we will also see a lot of innovation tackling those challenges.

The post The State Of Ad Operations 2018 appeared first on AdMonsters.

A recent tip, picked up by AdExchanger, reveals that the retail giant is stealthily enabling advertisers test search-based retargeting outside its walled-garden marketplace and across the web—through its DSP, which is larger than Google’s. Also, according to the tip, advertisers would be able to self-serve ads which would provide more control and transparency.

This isn’t the first time Amazon is allowing advertisers to retarget its customers. The retailer has also stepped into Google and Criteo’s businesses, selling display advertising to marketers on publishers websites and apps allowing them to retarget customer’s who have browsed for or made purchases on Amazon’s site.

Retargeting has some challenges though. For one, customers get a little freaked out by ads following them from site-to-site, not to mention the impact of GDPR, cookie blocking and brand safety.

Amazon’s Advantage Over the Duopoly

Amazon owns purchase intent hands down and is increasingly becoming the number one search engine — over Google — people use when shopping for products. With over 183 million unique US visitors and 5 billion items shipped solely to Prime members last year, we’re talking about an intimate look into a lot of really rich first-party consumer purchase data here.

The more products, services and offerings Amazon provides to consumers, the more data it will be able to provide. Further, Amazon has the ability to deliver direct access to audiences across channels and devices which provides more opportunities for advertisers to buy and publishers to monetize.

It definitely seems that Amazon is here for the long haul and opportunities abound for publishers (Amazon provides header bidding tools to publishers) and advertisers. There will be more ad inventory and more access to relevant first-party data outside of a walled garden and the duopoly.

The post Amazon’s Search Retargeting Sounds Like a Big ‘Ol Data Party appeared first on AdMonsters.