Audio advertising may take the ad spend throne soon, at least according to Dentsu’s findings. In collaboration with Lumen Research, Dentsu conducted a study to measure attention in audio advertising and the medium is 56% higher than Dentsu’s traditional targeting metrics.

This comprehensive study delves into the booming audio advertising industry, exploring its effectiveness across different formats and environments, including podcasts, radio, and music streaming. The findings are poised to reshape how advertisers perceive and leverage the power of audio ads, shedding light on their ability to capture attention and drive brand outcomes.

Participants interacted with audio environments in line with their native experiences, such as podcasts or radio stations. Afterward, they participated in Dentsu’s Attention Economy Survey to gauge ad recall and brand choice uplift. The study hinged on Lumen’s attention score which is based on audio listening data, survey results, and ad exposure types.

The Journey into Audio Attention

Credit: dentsu

Dentsu has been at the forefront of the Attention Economy for over five years, emphasizing the value of engagement in video and display channels. Now, with their foray into audio attention, they aim to redefine the industry’s understanding of the impact of audio ads on consumer behavior and brand recognition. 

Doug Rozen, CEO of Dentsu Media Americas, emphasizes the importance of this milestone: “This enables us to uniquely serve clients by proving the value of their audio, video, and display ads based on real engagement measures that drive growth.”

Impressive Findings: Audio Ads Take Center Stage

The studies conducted by Dentsu and Lumen unveiled remarkable insights into the potency of audio advertising. The data speaks for itself:

Average Attentive Seconds: Audio advertising, spanning podcasts, radio, and music streaming, achieved an impressive average of 10,126 attentive seconds per (000) APM (Average Persons Measured), surpassing Dentsu’s established norms of 6,501 APM for attention.

Brand Recall: 41% of audio ads exhibited correct brand recall, outperforming the 38% benchmark for other ad platforms, mostly video-oriented.

Brand Choice Uplift: Audio ads generated a remarkable 10% uplift in brand choice metrics, surpassing the 6% norm for other ad formats.

Unveiling Strengths Across Audio Formats

The study’s depth extended beyond these general statistics, revealing the unique strengths of various audio formats:

Podcasts: The podcast realm, encompassing participants like Audacy, Cumulus Media, iHeartMedia, Spotify, and SXM Media, emerged as a powerhouse regarding attentive seconds per thousand impressions. Host-read ads within podcasts exhibited superior brand choice uplift compared to traditional audio ads.

Radio: Audiences engaged significantly with radio advertising from Audacy, Cumulus Media, and iHeartMedia, with higher attentive seconds per thousand impressions than benchmarks in digital, social, and TV domains. Moreover, radio proved ten times more efficient than online video ads in generating brand recall.

Music Streaming: Amazon Music’s study provided insights into the efficacy of audio ads in this domain. The highest brand recall was associated with ad-supported streaming music on Alexa-enabled devices, and 30-second ads on these devices produced heightened brand choice uplift.

Transforming Audio Advertising Landscape

As the advertising landscape evolves, this study marks a pivotal moment. Joanne Leong, global head of planning at Dentsu, highlights how this research arms the agency with the ability to elevate conversations around audio ad spend and justify investments in this oft-overlooked realm. The study’s implications also extend to video ads, underscoring the value of “sound on” for impactful engagement and brand recall.

By tapping into the unique strengths of audio formats and harnessing their attention-grabbing potential, brands can forge deeper connections with their audiences and pave the way for an innovative era of advertising. Dentsu’s study serves as a reminder that audio deserves a spotlight in the oversaturated advertising landscape.

If Dentsu successfully changes the market’s perceptions, publishers who have yet to dip their toes in the audio arena might want to catch up quickly. Audio could soon be on the heels of the video regarding ad spend. 

The post Unlocking the Power of Audio Ads: New Research Reveals Their Impact on Attention and Brand Outcomes appeared first on AdMonsters.

What is ACR?

ACR is a technology that (with device-owner permission) reads pixels on a smart, internet-connected device screen as it delivers content to a T/V consumer—on a second by second basis. A recent Forbes article explains that the data is then shared with the manufacturer’s tracking software, matching them to a database that keeps track of local broadcasts and other T/V content sources.

So What?

In the past, ad value was determined by the “opportunity to expose” a viewer to an ad (not actual verified exposure). The contextual program rating served as surrogate for the commercial rating. ACR helps advertisers know if the ad itself was on-screen for specific viewers and for how long, and will help sellers justify higher rates for verified, completed views. Some points of valuation capturable through ACR include:

• The type of viewing platform—Connected TV, OTT, Linear TV, DVR playback, MVPDs, VOD
• Location—both fixed screen and mobile locations
• Viewer profiles—individual or household demographics and/or IP addresses, aiding cross-media measurement
• Viewing behavior—viewability, program/provider preferences, ad avoidance, ad consumption, time spent, channel surfing, fast-forwarding, binge-watching, completed views etc.

ACR is not only about helping television get more digital; it also allows digitally-delivered video to move beyond impressions and calculate reach and frequency, which has always been a necessity for television buyers.

The real-time nature of recording “glass-level” behavior moves T/V measurement into territory that television has not yet dared to visit. TV must be more measurable in order to compete with other digital delivery platforms. And according to Adweek, “ACR data provides the first independent verifiable source [of addressable audience data] through direct verification.”

This authentication of data, combined with second-by-second viewing measurement plus the door-opening promise of addressable T/V are key reasons why historic television content and measurement giants are seriously investing in ACR:

• After acquiring Gracenote’s Video Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology in 2017, Nielsen has integrated Gracenote-branded technology, unique IDs and metadata (through its own Grabix analytics platform) into an increasing number of its measurement, analytics and advanced advertising solutions according to Nielsen.
• CBS, A&E and MediaTek have joined with Nielsen’s Gracenote in a five-market pilot, enabling the many MediaTek-powered Smart TV platforms to deliver addressable advertising capabilities in live trials.
• Ad Age recently revealed that NBC Universal, CBS, Disney Media Networks, Discovery, AMC Networks, Turner, AT&T’s Xandr, Comcast’s FreeWheel and Hearst TV have formed a consortium with Inscape, a division of Vizio (10 million Smart TVs) to develop open standards for ACR, DAI and addressability across all Smart TVs. It is called OAR, for Open Addressable Ready.

Challenges Ahead

Data privacy issues and the consumer opt-in challenges will guide the level of success that ACR and its sibling addressability technology DAI will bring to the ad industry. As GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act bring legal restrictions or self-regulation, consumer data privacy and how data is used will be a hot issue.

All ACR players will need to stay ahead of regulation by making opt-in transparent to users and terms of use as clear as possible. Digital marketing news publisher DMN calls the February 2017 settlement between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Vizio “ the de-facto case law on the topic”, believing that ACR companies are now required to both prominently disclose the “opt-in” agreement to the consumer and obtain their express consent.

What Now?

By 2021, according to eMarketer, there will be about 114 million Smart TVs in the U.S.—enabled by ACR-capable devices like Roku and Apple TV. ACR is about data, viewability and addressability – all adding obvious value for advertisers and content providers. However, any growth will happen only if consumer benefits like content search, ad relevancy and a saner volume and frequency of ad messages justify viewer decisions to opt-into the ACR process.

Catch John Osborn’s session, “What Do Advertisers Want From Video?” at Ops June 4 in NYC, where he’ll discuss what advertisers want from video in terms of audience targeting, metrics, and most importantly what they should be looking for.

The post Automated Content Recognition (ACR): The Field-Leveling Technology for T/V (Television/Video) appeared first on AdMonsters.

Oh, hey–did we mention that video advertising can be far more lucrative on a CPM basis than display? No wonder every publisher is rushing to get in on the video market.

But of course it’s not easy. Building up a video program from scratch—or from something very basic—is a multi-department task, though the revenue team can and should have a large role in the process. To begin, there has to be a content strategy: You’re either producing video yourself, curating from the deep field of video creators online, or licensing video from partners. Then there’s the selection of the video platform or player. After that point, there’s the issue of reaching your audience beyond your own site, so you can build your business regardless of how your own traffic looks this month.

Assuming you’ve successfully conquered these initial challenges, there is monetization, selecting and setting up a video ad server to actually drive revenue… and sourcing partnerships for ads themselves.

This new playbook, developed in partnership with Tout, will walk you through these key facets of building up a video business, giving you key tips as you embrace the TV-ification of the web.

[download-link]Download your copy of the Building a Video Business playbook.[/download-link]

The post AdMonsters Playbook: Building a Video Business appeared first on AdMonsters.

In the first two installments of this interview, Claudia already has told us about how publishers don’t necessarily need Facebook for survival, but it’s extremely helpful to have some kind of distribution channel driving traffic to their O&Os. And she’s explained that with Facebook, normally such an eager-to-experiment company, focusing anew on their core competencies, pubs would be well-served to investigate other drivers of traffic.

You can catch up on Part One and Part Two of the discussion. In this third and final installment, she digs into the reality that publishers are so reliant on these outside traffic sources, which is not likely to change anytime soon.

Side entry became the norm for a lot of publishers, but are home pages about to matter again? Will we see a return to crazy homepage takeovers, or do you think the industry has outgrown that?—That is, are there better ways to look after user experience?

CLAUDIA PAGE: Given how fragmented media consumption habits have become, I don’t think most publishers will ever return to a place in which the lion’s share of their traffic is coming via the homepage. Side-door strategies and niche channelization are the most dependable pathways for audience development—but, as I mentioned, that does not diminish the need for publishers to identify partners that enable them to own their audiences, both on-site and off.

One thing to keep in mind is that social distribution strategies have forced publishers to create content within parameters that might not be best suited for their editorial voice and their brand. I don’t think it’s a good thing for publishers to have to constantly strive to retrofit their storytelling to align with the confines set by other platforms.

That’s where this idea of audience ownership becomes critical: If publishers must alter their content to fit a specific distribution channel, then how much control can they really have over their audience? This insight has been key to the development of Dailymotion’s HTML5 video player, which allows our content partners to host and stream on their owned properties—and also exposes their content to larger audiences via the Dailymotion platform, which helps consumers discover trusted premium content from thousands of leading global publishers.

What are your thoughts on Facebook’s outreach to publishers regarding its Facebook Daily Watch? It seems BuzzFeed and Bloomberg are already doing similar projects with Twitter where they have a lot more control over monetization.

Facebook has been articulating its focus for the near term: to help create a destination for community-building and meaningful conversations. As such, their video strategy falls under the umbrella of this vision. With Daily Watch, and Watch overall, Facebook wants to create video experiences that support community building and drive conversations around content. This is very different than what SVOD companies like Netflix and Hulu are setting out to do, and also different than YouTube, which focuses on aggregating a neverending library of viral and everyday video content.

The challenge Facebook faces goes back to the unit-of-content concept. If Facebook users are trained and engrained for status updates, it’s going to be an uphill battle to create entirely new user behaviors around video consumption—especially if these behaviors are taking place within a dedicated tab outside of the News Feed. Monetization opportunities follow audience behavior, so Facebook likely has less flexibility to offer publishers than Twitter in that regard.

I think flexible monetization will be a huge theme for publishers in the coming months and years. Publishers have seen their audiences fragment across various platforms, and they have been operating at the mercy of these platforms for years. The larger players like Facebook and Google will always have the benefit of reach, but I think we’re beginning to see publishers push back and diversify their distribution and growth strategies in places like Apple News, for example.

This is the third article in a three-part series. Read the first installment here and the second installment here.

The post The Next Stage of Social Strategy: A Q&A With Claudia Page of Dailymotion (Part 3) appeared first on AdMonsters.

Her own experience at Dailymotion suggests there’s a hopeful future for pubs where Facebook (or a platform like it) plays a role, but not a life-or-death role for their business. Since Claudia and I started this conversation, Facebook has come increasingly under fire for its use (or misuse) of its users’ data, and it’s put the brakes on a number of products that had been aimed at serving its publisher and app partners. Claudia weighs in on those developments now—and to catch up on what we’ve already discussed, check out Part 1 of this conversation.

I want to get back to what Campbell Brown from Facebook’s news partnership team said at Recode in February. She suggested Facebook is “having a point of view and leaning into quality news.” Do you think this means Facebook will try to become an arbiter of “quality” content? Does it have to? Who fares well under this circumstance?

CLAUDIA PAGE: I don’t think Facebook has a choice in the matter. Two-thirds of Americans say they get at least some of their news from Facebook. Our friends and family are going to continue to share information with us because it’s inherent in our social construct, and publishers want to be part of that conversation. Even though this behavior might not have been the reason Facebook was founded, network effects have scaled the flow of information, which means that Facebook should establish guardrails to mitigate the flow of false or malicious information.

The keys to authority and what is deemed “quality” content will ultimately come down to trustworthiness. Ensuring that the content we’re exposed to in these places is trustworthy will involve a blend of tactics, including algorithmic moderation, human moderation, and even user moderation. Facebook, for example, just shared that they will soon be allowing its users to score the trustworthiness of content they encounter in the feed.

There’s a lot of work to do still, and the solution may be a combination of new policies and factors. There’s no panacea to the notion of “content control.” At Dailymotion, for example, we use a combination of digital tools and algorithms to determine quality content, in addition to editorial supervision.

If they’re affected by the algo switch, where do you think publishers will most likely look to replace referral traffic? Could other social platforms pick up the slack?

It goes back to focusing on building an engaged and loyal audience versus trying to attain certain traffic milestones. Publishers need to understand the importance of building a strong consumer brand that people trust, versus simply enticing people to click based on a hyperbolic headline or snappy short video. I think we’ll see more major partnerships with the likes of Apple News, for example, which puts content directly in front of relevant consumers. There are also still gains to be made with a strategic SEO strategy. Ultimately, the conversation is moving toward quality and engagement.

If you think about leading platforms, there’s a common thread, in that each has a well-defined unit of content that the user experience coalesces around. Facebook was veering away from that vision.

Facebook recently killed an experimental news tab feature, and it’s been pausing the projected launch of a number of other new and experimental features. I thought the news tab would be a positive solution for users and publishers. Why do you think Facebook gave up on the project? Do you think it was a wise move?

If you think about leading platforms, there’s a common thread, in that each has a well-defined unit of content that the user experience coalesces around. For Facebook, it’s the status update within Newsfeed that connects people to friends and family. For Twitter, it’s broadcasting real-time updates. For Snapchat, it’s ephemeral images and video. At Dailymotion, we’ve created a video-first platform that relies on trusted publishers and human curation to surface the best content daily.

Facebook’s nature is to be experimental and to constantly learn from those experiments. In a dedicated Explore tab, it was veering away from that vision, and the users responded accordingly. People don’t want to separate feeds within the Facebook experience, and Adam Mosseri was very transparent about that when he announced the news tab test would not be moving forward. Platforms like Facebook, and Dailymotion too, face big challenges when it comes to appeasing and, ultimately, providing value to their communities.

At Dailymotion, we spent the better part of last year completely overhauling our user experience. In that process, we had to constantly test and optimize, paying close attention to how changes big and small would impact users, publishers, and brand partners. Platforms must work toward creating a harmonious environment in which all three stakeholders flourish, but as we’ve seen at Facebook and other platforms, this can be incredibly difficult to do, because the preferences of each group tend to be at odds with one another.

This is the second article in a three-part series. Read the first installment here. Read the third installment here.

The post The Next Stage of Social Strategy: A Q&A With Claudia Page of Dailymotion (Part 2) appeared first on AdMonsters.

In today’s digital environment we’re constantly talking about how the survival of digital media depends on conversations between buyers and sellers. There’s such a focus on direct communication, instead of relying on intermediaries to speak accurately and transparently on our business’ behalf. Fortunately, GABBCON CEO and Co-Founder Gabe Greenberg offered to help facilitate that communication by lending some of his own perspectives. Gabe has spent about two decades in media—he’s held leadership roles at The Trade Desk, Vibrant Media, Delivery Agent, Autobytel and other companies; he’s an advisor to a number of industry groups and he’s particularly well-versed in the language of TV/video.

This discussion with Gabe will be an ongoing one, but to start us off, I asked Gabe about what stories stuck out to him at the 2018 GABBCON NY event, which took place about three weeks ago. He also shared some thoughts about what buy-siders are thinking about when they hear the words “brand safety” or “consolidation”—and, like a lot of forward-thinking people in digital right now, he had quite a bit to say about blockchain.

What are the top three takeaways from GABBCON—and in particular, were any of these major themes something you didn’t really expect to be so prominent right now?

GABE GREENBERG: Number one, there is an abundance of senior diverse talent in the market. Any conference that claims there is a shortage is not working very hard on their programming. Diversity is integral in each and every  event.

Number two, blockchain is here to stay. Anyone who suggests that blockchain cannot support ad tech and address the many ad taxes and ills major brands and agencies talk about (trust, fraud, transparency, speed, reconciliation) is probably from a company that stands to be disintermediated, and is purposely trying to cast doubt to avoid their own ill fate. That is not to say that all the answers exist for blockchain—but have no doubt, this will change the business we all know today, and it will change it soon.

Number three, the continued consolidation in the TV market will pave way for continued innovation, shorter ad breaks and new waves of audience targeting and addressability.

Points two and three were ones we’ve predicted for some time. In fact, shortly after GABBCON NY, announcements were made by Fox and NBC about shortening the ad breaks, and there has been ample press about blockchain. Jonathan Steuer from Omnicom put it best when he said, “We are experiencing a new paradigm in network design, and blockchain represents positive change for the industry. Your team should be thinking about how you can leverage this new open source protocol” (referring to the protocol that MadHive is bringing to market).

What are media buyers’ biggest concerns about consolidation among publishers and broadcasters? How is this changing their buying habits and strategies?

The biggest concern is always the creation of a new walled garden or an overly dominant force. Buyers (and consumers for that matter) are more savvy then ever, and this is forcing publishers to rethink the media unit and what it represents. I expect we will see new ad units and experiences that value consumer attention and time more than ever before.

We’re seeing publishers restructure their sales and ops teams so they can be more flexible for however buyers want to transact (i.e., programmatically, directly, or with some hybrid of the two). How’s that working out for buyers? What else should publishers be doing to be as flexible with transactions as they can be?

The restructuring is a cost of doing business. To be fair, with a new blockchain-based fat protocol to replace OpenRTB, we will see far more change in the months ahead. The benefit of this new protocol, however, is that it will bring buyers and sellers closer together again. Publishers should embrace this new protocol and get ahead of it as quickly as they can. Unlike RTB, which many thought could represent a race to the bottom, this new protocol represents higher margins and the elimination of ad taxes from verification companies, data companies and many others who will no longer be able to get away with a large ad tax for a service that should be commoditized.

When you hear buy-siders talk about brand safety, what specific issues are they really talking about? And is there anything buy-siders wish publishers understood better about what they’re up against on the brand safety front?

They mostly talk about the risk of their brand being adjacent to content that is outright negative (terrorism, accidents, etc.). Buyers need publishers to understand the inherent risk of an airplane brand being next to an article about a plane crash, or safety issues or company impropriety. It’s clear that there are instances where these things can sometimes be unavoidable because of the nature of algorithms and targeting, but it is imperative that large publishers police their own sites and balance the use of AI and machine learning with human review.

We’re seeing publishers restructure their sales/ops teams to respond to the ways buyers treat the old programmatic/direct split. What kind of responses are media buyers looking for?

I do not think buyers have expectations here other than that their business be serviced. Sometimes I think we overthink this question in the industry.

The post Inside the Buy Side: Catching Up With Gabe Greenberg of GABBCON appeared first on AdMonsters.

Unilever CMO Keith Weed told the audience at IAB’s ALM that the company would pull spending from platforms that fostered “division,” hate, and conditions that didn’t “protect our children.” He also called digital environments of questionable brand safety a “swamp.” Meanwhile, Unilever has been cutting its advertising spend substantially in the past year and change, in both its media buys and its creative budget. I’m trying to ignore my own bias, which says that unless you’re in a war zone or a riot, playing the “do it for the children” card is kind of a last resort. The Drum has some more tempered hot takes: The digital platform rep who said Unilever had not told them anything previously about reducing spend, the marketing exec who noted how fellow CPG stalwart Procter & Gamble had publicly accepted some accountability for wading into brand-unsafe waters and Weed had not, the agency folks who said Unilever hadn’t told them anything about how to work with Google and Facebook in the future. And also, there’s the question: Would Unilever cutting back spending really affect the major platforms’ bottom line at all?

Has TV Ad Spend Peaked?

Bloomberg notes TV ad spend in 2017 dropped the largest YOY amount of the last 20 years, barring recession years. Cable ad sales dropped for the first time in nearly 10 years. The article paints a bleak picture about the future of TV advertising as a business, but in this column we were talking a few weeks ago about how agencies and brands should be careful about pulling TV spend, on account of the massive reach TV still allows. Bloomberg says the TV networks are “facing a revolt” from advertisers, and that total ad spend in TV seems to have peaked and begun dropping off. So the question is, how are broadcasters going to sell their digital audiences, who are clearly still “watching TV,” just not on a TV, per se? Is there more to getting those digital CPMs up to linear standards than bringing measurement to a certain level of maturity?

This Week in Blockchain

Jarrod Dicker, most recently the Washington Post’s VP of Innovation and Commercial Strategy, is leaving the Post to become CEO of po.et, a company that uses blockchain technology to license digital content to entities who’ll pay for it. In this Q&A with Poynter, Dicker sounds enthusiastic about this idea of liberating content creators from being beholden to any one platform (or one platform at a time) for getting paid for their work, and of liberating brands to buy into media without going through publishers or platforms. And also, he says, why should all content creators at any one website be paid the same rate? It’s an interesting way of looking at the media biz—certainly either a sign of the democratization of media, the free market eating itself alive, or something else.

Long-Game Strategy Needed for Media

Al Jazeera Media Network SVP of Business Growth and Development Michael Weaver says our current environment “reward[s] scale and reach over depth and substance,” and he says that’s destroying the digital business model, as evidenced by cutbacks and closures among high-profile media companies. One of the core problems, he says—one that ends up putting tons of money in the pockets of Google and Facebook, two companies that don’t even produce original content—is that the ad model as we know it is so focused on making revenue in the short term. But media is a long game—there’s always an audience for news. And he says publishers need to think about “curating content with an eye toward context and distribution” to save their hides in the long run. Problem is, there’s no long-game model we can look toward and mimic in this business. Someone will have to come up with one.

New Models for the Data Business

Some of the big data providers are selling data as a percent of media, rather than on a fixed CPM. AdExchanger’s James Hercher explains: “An advertiser, for instance, is unlikely to spend $2 per thousand impressions on data if the media itself has a $3 CPM. Instead of data consuming 40% of the budget, a percent-of-media price caps the cost in the 10-20% range.” That opens a door to buyers who hadn’t been able to justify the cost of audience data, and Hercher says performance campaigns buying low-cost impressions stand to benefit in particular. And because that means they’d be getting new clients, several of those leading data providers are happy to play along.

The post Unilever Threatens to Spend Less, While TV Ad Spend Drops appeared first on AdMonsters.

The stakes of publishers’ Facebook “addiction” are substantially different, and I don’t want to make light of them, especially in the wake of the platform’s news feed algorithm changes, threatening to demote news-related posts. If I were to get off Facebook immediately (erm… again), there would be no negative impact to my own revenue. Heck, it might even be beneficial to my earnings—it might allow me to focus on things that are ultimately more beneficial to me. Now that I think about it, though, can’t publishers say the same thing?

In short, Facebook serves this need that all publishers have. They need to pump their content out into some centralized conduit where users customarily go to discover and read or watch new content. Otherwise, they’re all sort of scattered points around the internet that users go to intentionally or accidentally, but not so much incidentally, the way a social media platform enables.

Intentional Engagement

But Facebook has never been as good at that kind of discovery as publishers or advertisers might hope—users are engaged, but it’s not always a deep or intentional engagement. Vox Media Chairman and CEO Jim Bankoff said as much in a blog post last week. The Facebook news feed algorithm is not great for building “brand-loyal audiences,” he wrote, because it enables users to consume content “through serendipity, not intent.” And beyond that, Bankoff wrote, there’s no sustainable monetization model for “in-depth video,” so there’s little incentive for a company like Vox to go hard in developing and promoting video for Facebook. Much like how I realized my Facebook posts and comments were becoming “my Russian novel,” and I took a break from the news feed to focus on writing an actual novel, Bankoff said Vox is going to divert video programming from Facebook to OTT and linear TV—Netflix, big broadcast networks.

That’s an important pivot for any publisher. The media industry is years past the point of figuring out how to measure social media impact. By now, we can say that if something isn’t working, it might be more the platform’s fault, less a measurement problem. And also, just because Facebook’s adoption among users is as close to universal as anything is in digital media, that doesn’t mean it’s universally supportive of all publisher goals and initiatives. It’s not. Premium publishers are annoyed that they’ve been expected to jump through all these technical hoops (new products, new strategies, all subject to change on a whim) to work with Facebook. Why not take a break to focus on monetization strategies you’re confident will bear fruit?

That said, there’s no clear long-term fix on the table for that centralized conduit of attention, and that’s problematic. Take branded content. My colleague Gavin Dunaway has said recently that “branded content is the new premium advertising,” and generally I agree with him. Publishers need to focus on the intersection of “biggest payoff” and “best UX,” and branded content is often right there. Now, social media has proven to be a good way to drive traffic to branded content. So even if publishers ramp up their branded/sponsored initiatives—if traffic drops off, advertisers will start questioning their investments in those initiatives. It’s a conundrum, but I expect it’s one we’ll try to solve at the upcoming Publisher Forum—Adam Hua of CitizenNet will be talking about the branded content boom, including social media’s ever-evolving role in distribution.

There’s has to be something to satisfy people’s desire to discover relevant, quality content, which would also serve publishers’ desire for fresh traffic. Maybe that thing can still be Facebook, or maybe it’ll be something else. Before search engines, the joke was that the internet is great, but you can’t find anything on it. That problem didn’t last long, and I’d expect this current problem we’re talking about won’t either.

The post Treating Publishers’ Facebook Addiction appeared first on AdMonsters.

I was talking with Tout Founder and CEO Michael Downing about this dynamic recently, and he suggested publishers should have additional options for bringing broader audiences to their video content. He told me publishers should take a close look at what Facebook and Google do well with video and try to replicate that experience elsewhere. That sounded to me like a pretty tall order, so I asked him to elaborate.

BRIAN LaRUE: Facebook and Google have scale in video beyond what publishers can do on their own. There’s the old line: “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” line. So why try to beat ‘em?

MICHAEL DOWNING: Over the last few years we’ve seen the acceleration of engagement and traffic on social, and declines across the distributed web. At a certain point, publishers have to tactically adopt some new method of competing with social platforms. Customers know they can go to social and get access to almost everything, packaged in a great UX, with no intrusive ad units delaying them, and custom configured for them every time they go back. That’s tough to compete with.

Publishers need to realize that their ability to engage a consumer in the instance that they visit the page correlates to their own business success. Publishers should think about it almost like ecommerce sites would—configuring the right content for the right user at the right time. Part of that has to do with user experience. Part of that has to do with understanding a one-size-fits-all approach to content delivers an irreversible decline. Part of it is being able to deliver the most relevant content, even if it’s content you didn’t produce—just like the social platforms do. Last I checked, Facebook does not produce any video.

BRIAN: I had seen this article on Quartz that argued that instead of “pivoting to video,” publishers should try to stand up to Facebook’s seemingly fickle practices. Why not do both?

MICHAEL: If you’ve been around for the last five to seven years, you’ve seen a long string of projects that Facebook pushed onto publishers, and later decided weren’t going to work. Remember Facebook Connect? People spent millions of dollars trying to adapt to this new system, and then ripped it out. That was the end of a number of companies. Facebook puts publishers, game developers and app developers on the goat rope— they get you to buy into a program, do original development, invest time and resources, and then they pull back six months later.

BRIAN: What does Facebook do particularly well in video, as you see it?

MICHAEL: One, they have been successful at getting a diverse ecosystem of publishers and video creators to publish their video to Facebook. They’ve got everything from motivational videos to sports highlights. The second thing they’ve done incredibly well is user experience. It’s one of the more advanced and efficient ways to display video. The Facebook app drives the majority of video consumption on their platform, and the scrollable reality of mobile has proven itself. Consumers believe if they scroll something into view, it should be active and engaging. Third, if you click to turn the sound on, it puts you into this rich, personalized feed. You end up watching five or six videos per session, which is pretty amazing. And it doesn’t mess with the page you’re on—at any moment, you can just exit that video feed.

The combination of those three things—the rich selection of content, an unbelievably tight user experience, and this level of personalization—is driving lots of engagement.

BRIAN: How might it be possible to replicate those strengths outside of Facebook?

MICHAEL: Publishers have to punch above their weight to provide a personalized experience to consumers. It becomes incumbent upon publishers to get out of this mode of showing every single user the same stuff. We all hear about artificial intelligence and machine learning. This is what that’s all about: watching overt and covert user behavior, modeling what you think will be the most relevant content, and configuring it on the fly based to the individual end user.

Most publishers are not equipped with personalization technology. But it’s possible to cross that bridge—there are tools out there that can enable personalization. And this is the direction content consumption is going, so it’s critical for publishers. The alternative, which no one is wildly fond of, is to rely on the social platforms as your touchpoint with consumers. There are some downsides to that—you lose control of your relationship with your consumer, and it impacts your ability to monetize tremendously.

BRIAN: When Tout was working on your video experience, what suggestions or feedback did you incorporate from publishers?

MICHAEL: We’ve tried to bring a high level of targeting and personalization to video, and to open up the video catalog to sources beyond your own video— and continue to generate revenue from them. Publishers want to maintain their editorial integrity within their pages. They want a consistent, but non-invasive way to bring relevant video into their environments. That’s especially requested in mobile.

Publishers generally want control over the monetization of video driven through their sites, whether it’s their own or third-party video. One of the big problems with Facebook is, you’re not generating revenue when you push to their platform. You can’t just sell preroll advertising. When you take a highly personalized video experience, and allow publishers to sell 100% of the ads against it, that’s the polar opposite of what happens on social platforms. It’s great to drive more engagement in video, but there’s got to be an equivalent with their ability to monetize.

BRIAN: Facebook can deliver very relevant video to users not just because of the volume of content they have, but because of user data. How can publishers compete with the enormity of what Facebook knows about the user?

MICHAEL: Obviously Facebook has a lot of social data: Who are you connected to? For us, the equivalent information we use to a personalized experience comes from over 100 million unique users per month across 3,000-plus sites. We see data around what content you’re interested in. You go to a page about the Dallas Cowboys game, or a page about the Fed changing interests rates. We capture the subject matter, genre or verticals that people engage with, in articles and videos. And we see the same people across all these sites, multiple times a month, so we get to see the patterns. That gives us a solid baseline to create this personalized experience.

BRIAN: Considering Google and Facebook’s market share, and publishers’ efforts to just hang onto a slice, where do you see the video marketplace heading?

MICHAEL: Google is positioned incredibly well to run the tables in video, because they have YouTube and AdX. YouTube has some brand safety issues for advertisers, which Google can work to overcome over time.

Facebook is at a slightly different stage. In a way, they’re almost like YouTube was in 2006. Facebook has proven that they can drive a lot of engagement. They have not proven they can put into place an economic framework that shares revenue with publishers and producers in an effective way.

One gray cloud hanging over both YouTube and Facebook is that some large content companies still resist distributing their video across those platforms. That’s largely out of a fear of losing control of their business, and losing control of their touchpoint with the consumer. If I were a publisher, there are two things I would be thinking: Is there a way to leverage the holistic publisher ecosystem to create the same kind of scale? And can I utilize that scale to drive meaningful revenue? I think that’s definitely possible, but it would require the user experience and KPIs around engagement be competitive with the big social platforms. That’s a huge challenge for publishers, as people implement video in a million different ways.

Going back to this notion of how you punch above your weight: One of the ways to do that is to band together with other publishers to get broader distribution than just your own traffic. You create a personalized, targeted experience based on the cumulative patterns across all those sites, and the content you offer to to the user is broader than just the catalog of video you’ve produced in the last week or so. If you can align those things, you have a non-social group that’s a viable competitor in the market.

The post Punching Above Your Weight: Can You Compete With Facebook in Video? appeared first on AdMonsters.

We’ll be live blogging sessions in the main room Monday and Tuesday. Keep refreshing this page for the latest.

9:04: AdMonsters Chairman Rob Beeler has taken to the main stage to welcome the attendees and ask out loud whose idea it was to serve moonshine at last night’s dinner. (Right, that was a thing, too…)

9:05: We look for a theme for every Publisher Forum. This time, it’s: “Are we out of gas?” With all the pressures publishers feel from all corners of the industry, it can feel like we’re living in a country song. Publishers used to focus on one key issue at a time. Right now, it feels like things are speeding up. “One of the biggest moves we’ve made as an industry is a text file. It can feel like The Upside Down,” Rob says.

9:24: Rob has spun through all the introductory details, and now Seth Rogin has taken to the stage to talk about a topic near and dear to his heart: “Real News: Truth and Tech Are the Solutions We Need.” Seth has come up through the New York Times, then Mashable, and now Nucleus, a platform that reaches audiences through their hometown news pub. They’re relatively new: “If we’re not in your city, we’re about to be.” He says advertisers didn’t get tired of news; they got tired of Scotch tape.”

9:27: Why unite local news pubs? Seth is into “mission-based media.” He’s not interested in taking a political side. He started as a writer, but in the days before nationwide health care, he wanted to make sure his fellow writers would stay fed and healthy, which meant he wanted to figure out how to monetize media better. And today, he says, we need more civic engagement, and media is crucial in that.

9:30: The people who live at the intersection of media and technology will drive the future of this industry, Seth says. And in doing that, “we have to stand up to the lies.” Media has always felt a bit uncomfortable, but you have to stand up to the discomfort, he says.

9:31: Mike Shields at Business Insider recently published an article with the headline: “The advertising industry has been living a lie.” That lie is what’s breaking the industry. The industry is not broken in itself.

9:32: The first lie is that audience is enough. If it were true, there are plenty of easier places for advertisers to be seen. You see ads on the walls of a bathroom in a bar. But if you saw a Rolex ad in a bathroom, you’d wonder what happened to Rolex. Consider the internet analogy. Environment matters more than ever.

9:34: Next lie is that people visit thousands of sites. In reality, the average user visits six apps on the regular. You can’t find your audience simply anywhere on the web.

9:34: Next lie is that advertisers don’t want to be around news. The idea is that news is upsetting. But news publications have entertainment or sports verticals. Publishers need to align their verticals. Build an ROI first and thank advertisers for supporting journalism later.

9:37: Next lie is that there is no third option for national audience buying. Now, does anyone in this room, Seth asks, not have a national audience?

9:38: Next lie is that young readers don’t read news. Nucleus has been aligning legacy media brands–news, sports, weather, etc.–and found they’re reaching more millennials than some major digital pure plays. The political climate in the U.S. right now demonstrates young people are very engaged in news.

9:39: Next lie is that brands support morals over money, and will not support content that divides people. We pat ourselves on the back for driving slimy people out of the media industry… occasionally. In reality, a lot of those people were supported by advertisers just fine for decades. Brands decided there was ROI in supporting them. We can be upset about that… but Seth doesn’t want to get upset. Return on investment and return on intolerance are not the same thing.

9:42: We hear brands’ C-level people say one thing, and their media buyers do another. Seth heard one of those such buy-side people say recently, “I had to turn the fraud back on to show the client money.”

9:43: Quality pubs need to understand their power. If someone is making a transaction, you’re in power, and you can take a stand. You don’t want to look back and wish you’d done more. You craft your legacy by taking a stand, by standing up against lies, and there are so many opportunities to do that right now.

9:44: The culture needs media, and the culture needs quality content. Where you are seen drives how you are seen. Being seen on a premium brand site matters. This shouldn’t be a provocative thing to say, but publishers have to explain it. Agencies will tell you they see your audience elsewhere on the web. Publishers have to keep articulating for the importance of reaching that audience on premium sites.

9:48: There are initiatives, like the Future of Marketing Initiative, that are being studied by institutions of higher learning, and they need publisher feedback.

9:51: Media doesn’t need to take a side, Seth says, but it needs to take the side of the truth.

9:52: Rob wants to ask a question. Say you’re a brand, and you want to reach your audience, but you know there are people hanging out on the internet and calling out brands for advertising on certain sites. You’re one impression from getting called out on Twitter. Seth says he’s not interested in shaming brands for supporting bad content. What we need to do is show the ROI for premium pubs is better.

9:55: There’s a question of when a topic becomes brand-safe again, after being at the center of bad news. Seth says there can be a point of healing or something like it. Rob mentioned the Ariana Grande concert shooting as an example. Seth pointed to where Grande came back and addressed her audience.

10:02: Rob is welcoming this morning’s sponsor speaker, Tout Founder and CEO Michael Downing, talking about “What They Didn’t Tell You About Making Video Work.” Tout is not, he says, an ad tech company. They’re a company that helps publishers distribute their video. The problem is that you have about 60 sites in this industry that drive 90% of the business, and Tout is trying to open up the marketplace. There’s premium video out there that needs an audience.

10:06: Let’s talk about the phrase “pivot to video.” Will video save us? Or will we lose our minds trying to make basic video tech work on our sites, create meaningful conversion in video, and make programmatic effective?

10:08: Consumers do love video, and 85% of the audience will engage with it if it’s there. Video increases time on site, and pages with video have lower bounce rates and higher social sharing rates. We’re seeing these numbers accelerate over time, and it’s happening faster on mobile.

10:10: Now, 85% of video consumed in digital is less than three minutes in length, but the average view time for live video is 7 minutes 30 seconds. Live video is complicated where monetization is concerned…

10:11 You have video-rich pubs and video-poor pubs. That presents an opportunity for some of the bigger video pubs to bring their content into new environments. There’s a mix of third- and first-party driving engagement in digital.

10:11: The tech in video can be messy and convoluted. Publishers struggle with basic implementation. Many pubs have attempted to replace their video tech in the last five years, and they often have fewer tech resources in-house than they need. Video creates fiction when you have pubs where engineering is not really part of their core competency.

10:14: YouTube will work for DFP… if you’re using DFP. But tech is the “number one blocker” in making the video market “an elitist market.”

10:15: Conversion and audience reach is hard. You probably won’t drive scale purely on your own sites.

10:17: Monetization is a mine field. Standards don’t play well; companies don’t speak with each other or connect in a meaningful way. The average fill rate from programmatic in video is 18%. We thought it was going to be amazing for fill, and it’s not. Not all video views are treated equally. A video watch page (like a YouTube page) is priced much more highly than an editorial page with a video placed in the content.

10:21: You need an actual economic model around the video you’re pushing out into the web, like pre-roll that monetizes wherever the video goes.

10:23: Tout is looking at how video is performing. They’re taking a lot of publisher feedback and doing the analysis to make it valuable to other pubs.

12:09: Following a round of attendee breakout sessions, we’re back in the main room. Jesse Clemmens, Manager, Publisher Development North America at Facebook is going to share a bit about monetizing OTT in the morning’s second full sponsor session.

12:11: Question is, is OTT a new channel, a repeat of mobile, or a hybrid of both? Jesse thinks it’s a hybrid.

12:13:We keep saying “eyeballs are shifting,” and now they’re shifting to video. Mobile has blown up quite a bit in the last couple years. Jesse hopes we can use learnings from the mobile shift to navigate OTT. OTT revenue right now substantially lags behind OTT consumption. What’s the difference between a roadblock and a speedbump?

12:17: Programmatic infrastructure for OTT is underbuilt. Direct sold teams are really good at selling “video everywhere,” so the need for programmatic infrastructure is relatively small. But there will eventually be more supply than direct teams can sell. Audience flow may be hard to control, but we may be seeing inventory going unsold.

12:19: SVOD is in the lead. But we may hit a tipping point where users decide they don’t need to add more subscriptions to their packages. There will be a shift toward ad-subsidized models at that point. We can see some parallels in digital music, which has become good at delivering content however users want to pay.

12:20: Many digital video ads aren’t ready for the big screen yet. That’s a supply chain problem. Agencies have gotten pretty good at transcoding for mobile, but the large screen/HD is another story.

12:21: Server-side tracking is also becoming the norm. Server-side ad insertion partners are on the rise. That makes transitions to ad breaks smoother, but it moves tracking to the server side too. The counting is not being done by publisher and advertiser in tandem. That makes entities more susceptible to domain spoofing and other forms of fraud, Jesse says. We need to solve for fraud in OTT.

12:23: Cross-device attribution was difficult in the shift to mobile. OTT can learn from it. With OTT, though, you have so many different device types, methods for creating device IDs, privacy settings, but Jesse thinks we’ll figure it out as an industry, and the leaders will be “participatory” in determining how tracking happens. Collective work will need to happen, because we have a lot of open questions still.

12:25: That gives Facebook a good foundational perspective to start working on these problems. Facebook can’t just “go with the flow” because its model demands a people-based monetization approach.

12:27: Facebook has some ideas about reducing supply waste and cross-device selling, based on its Audience Direct product for direct sold ads. Facebook data “is fairly common currency,” but if pubs can sell at higher rates, that’s good for the industry.

1:35: After a hearty lunch, we’re back in the main room for the State of Ad Ops, where the AdMonsters team selected a few choice analogies publishers came up with last night, based on our prompts at the Sunday workgroups. To start, ad tech is to complexity as, uh… Jaime is to Cersei? Is this business that incestuous? Viewability probably is to complexity as a hangover is to an 8 a.m. presentation, though. Or as nailing Jell-o is to a wall.

1:37: Randall Rothenberg has been quoted in the press as saying viewability has been solved, Rob says. Do we agree? Seems like the room disagrees, not to slam Randall. The metrics just aren’t aligned.

1:39: Rob has called a winner in this analogy game: “Agencies are to communicative as Hodor is to Hodor.” Thing is, Rob says, if we were to have this conversation with agencies, they’d probably say the same thing about publishers. We’re not speaking the same language and we need to cross the divide.

1:41: TAG has been a great conversation-starter on the Publisher Forum listserv. There’s a lot of concern, and the conversation will continue… and so that’s why we get analogies like “TAG is to transparency as DFP is to support articles” or “… as a fake ID is to a bouncer at the door when you’re 17.”

1:43: For the next conference, we might have to throw in some ominous music whenever someone mentions GDPR. Especially if we’re saying things like “GDPR is to foreboding as Stephen King is to horror,” or “GDPR is to foreboding as obnoxious is to New Jersey.” Rob points out that not a lot of people got into ad ops to become specialists in E.U. law.

1:46: “Mobile is to lucrative as the Ice Age squirrel is to the acorn:” Rob says that if you have kids, this is going to sound right. But hey: “Mobile is to lucrative as analogy problems are to fun.”

1:49: “Rob Beeler is to ad ops as…” This could get hairy. “Dick Clark is to New Year’s Eve?” Possibly generational. “Atari is to video games?” Burn… Anyway, the next PubForum might have a completely different prompt. We’ve prompted attendees to brainstorm startups that could solve their problems. We try to keep it fresh.

1:51: Time for our next sponsor session, Rob Lewis, Sales Director at The Media Trust, talking about “Ad/Revenue Ops: Time to Reset Groundhog Day.” Rob L. says he was recently at an event where this was the preferred topic at a bunch of buy-side people.

1:53: How sad is it that mobile directs have become boring, Rob L. asks? This is incredibly common stuff, and different parties along the supply chain deflect blame. Is what you’re seeing a source, or a symptom? Everyone runs into the same problems (pixel problems, encryption problems, etc.). Many apparent problems are symptoms of problems upstream. And with GDPR (will authorities go after big players or make an example of smaller players?), security, and fake ads on the scene, it’s going to get harder for publishers.

2:01: With all of this, it’s really important to tell your upstream partners what you want. You know how tight security is at a big office building in a major city? Security should be as tight on your site. You have creative specs. Do your partners know them, and do you enforce them? There should be consequences for not meeting security demands, too.

2:03: Define ad quality specs, whether they’re your own or the IAB’s. Share your policy–discuss with the CISO, and with legal, IT and sales teams.

2:04: Take a scan of your site, all your domains. Recognize who you partner with. Recognize who belongs there. See who you find, and what kind of behavior. And enforce your policies upstream.

2:05: One publisher found 600 domains on their site. They expected no more than 250. Naturally they wanted to know who the heck the other 350 were.

2:07: Rob (Beeler) agrees the CEO or president always has a particular knack for finding malware. Rob (Lewis) says it’s always after midnight or first thing in the morning, too.

2:10: Cookies with a long life span could be awesome if they’re people, Rob (Beeler) adds. But the longer they live, the less likely it is they’re people.

3:37: After the afternoon’s round of breakouts and a few minutes for coffee and snacks, we’re back in the main room for the Digital Media Leadership Awards. Lori Tavoularis (SvP, Digital Revenue and Operations at tronc) is sick and couldn’t fly to Nashville, on doctor’s orders. In her stead, for this panel, John Martin (Managing Director at NASCAR), who Rob is giving the “Newcomer of the Year” award for doing a lot for the community in a short period of time. Tim Messier (Director of Audience Data at Cox Automotive) and Megan Latham (Global Head of Advertising Operations at Bloomberg) are both here, though, and on the dais. Rob tells us Tim was the person who first brought him to an AdMonsters event, back when Rob was a young ops person who didn’t realize there were even other people doing the same job as he was doing.

3:46: Megan started out with a rough idea she wanted to work in advertising or marketing, and ended up in account management, trying out a bunch of different tasks and seeing what she liked and what she didn’t.

3:47: John wanted to go into coaching. He’s still “in sports,” as far as he’s concerned. He’s worked with a number of broadcast and sports/entertainment companies. He didn’t set out to get into ops, but he found it “pretty wild.”

3:49: Tim observes the word “trust” has been coming up all day. You need it at every level of a business. We need to “focus more organizationally on the concept of trust.” We can all benefit by internally developing a philosophy of trust.

3:51: Megan says Bloomberg is a cross-platform org, and that can be a strain for teams. Everyone benefits from trust, and she’s taken it for granted, she says, before Tim mentioned it.

3:53: Rob says that he thought he was doing people on his team a favor when he would say, for example, “You get a chance to work on mobile strategy today.” But to those people, it just looked like more work. Rob had to figure out where to take the weight off, so they felt motivated to try new things.

3:56: John says he’s been surprised to find how often people expected a lack of transparency, talking about transparency like it was a goal.

3:57: Megan says it’s important to reach the right person at the right time, in the right environment, when they’re in the right environment. Environment matters, per Seth’s keynote, and isn’t addressed enough. John points out it’s always a good time to offer a racing fan a beer, though.

3:59: Tim has been working on audience data strategy. Context is important, but at the end of the day you can only sell what you can generate.

TUESDAY, 9:03 a.m.: And we’re back for another full day of Publisher Forum! Editorial Director Gavin Dunaway is launching right into Industry Buzz. What has 2017 been if not the Year of Transparency? Mark Pritchard has been demanding it on behalf of P&G… but what if Pritchard himself wasn’t being completely transparent about his motivations? What if P&G had intended to pull tons of spending out of digital anyway?

9:09: We’re seeing the War of SSPs in 2017, and DSPs are feeling the pinch of header bidding. How much of this was expected? Probably not all of it…

9:10: Ads.txt is ramping up, although at the moment we’re still prepping for the effects.

9:11: Publishers are being more cautious about adding header partners, considering who brings unique demand. Will there be a price war among SSPs in 2018? The take rate for a sustainable SSP business is around 16%. There’s a lot of attention on take rates right now, which have long been… less than transparent.

9:12: First-price auctions are on the rise, with buyers advocating for them and DPS enabling them. But we’re seeing “shenanigans,” with intermediaries mucking up the waters.

9:14: Programmatic guaranteed is interesting, but right now is it like the case of the blind man and the elephant? Programmatic guaranteed differs from one campaign to the next. Is this an opportunity for the sell side to come together and define programmatic guaranteed, and put the heat on the buy side to stick to that definition?

9:16: Blockchain is also interesting, but it’s still nascent for ad tech. There’s a lot of buzz around AI, but right now what we’re talking about with AI is more like machine learning. AI might make life easier for ops, when it comes to creative testing and other factors.

9:18: There’s “a lot of panic” around the Coalition for Better Ads. Native could present an opportunity to stay ahead of Google’s demands, based on the Coalition’s findings.

9:19: Fluid placements could have a bright future. If you can be fluid with content–loading site content in accordance with what you expect will be the best for this particular user–why not with ads?

9:20: Time-based guarantees are in the news, with some in the industry questioning whether there’s much of a future for it. For publishers who are doing it, it’s complicated, and it can require a lot of building–but they’re doing it.

9:23: Eric Franchi, formerly of Undertone and currently an entrepreneur and investor, has taken the stage for a fireside keynote talk with Gavin on “Innovation Arena–The Investor Viewpoint on Ad Tech and Digital Media.”

9:25: Customer success rather than advertiser success drove things for Undertone, Eric says. He was with Undertone during a period of massive change, particularly programmatic (which upturned the ad network space). Undertone neither embraced nor rejected RTB, he says. Programmatic was empowering buyers with technology, and Undertone’s competition embraced it. Mobile was the second major evolution point–10 years ago, he says, we wouldn’t have predicted Google and Facebook would end up in the position they’re in today.

9:30: Eric invests in startups and advises more mature companies. If an ad tech or mar tech business is successful and able to scale right now, they’re in a good position, he says. The field has narrowed through consolidation, the leaders have emerged or remained, and it’s easier to make sense of the marketplace.

9:32: We’re coming off of the era of mobile and social, Eric says. That’s been a huge change and the industry is still figuring it out, but users have spoken. Any screen that can become addressable is in play from a marketing perspective. Interactivity has blossomed. Voice will be 40% of searches in coming years, and this is a huge opportunity. And VR/AR will present opportunities that we can’t entirely predict yet. “You’re not going to be sitting there with a phone for the rest of your life,” he says.

9:34: Gavin says he received a press release about self-driving cars… and the advertising opportunity there. And chatbots are increasingly popular for search in Asia. “You don’t want an answer, you want the best answer,” Eric says about search. You don’t want Google to turn up a whole page of sponsored results. And not a lot of companies are focused on voice right now.

9:36: Google is “showing us what Google of the future is, and it’s soon,” and leaning toward being “completely AI-driven,” says Eric. Alphabet is coming out with more and more devices that present opportunities to interact with the internet, which means more opportunities to deliver relevant search results.

9:38: Eric has a few examples of companies he’s following: Uru Video uses AI to understand what’s happening inside videos, rather than looking at contextual data. In order to do that, the tech needs to recognize shapes in the video. Uru has been looking at how to use computer vision for brand safety. It’s early, but the thing about AI is that it keeps getting better over time, with more input it receives.

9:41: Pulpix, which came out of Y Combinator, is a French company that uses AI to find and recommend engaging video content. You know how easy it is to fall down a YouTube hole. Pulpix “wants to bring that opportunity to every publisher.” You get a playlist of recommended video driven by AI, to keep people engaged on the publisher’s site. And there are obviously implications for advertising as well.

9:44: Why don’t people want to talk about mobile? Gavin asks the room. No response. So people evidently don’t even want to talk about why they don’t want to talk about mobile. Eric says there are a few reasons for this. The infrastructure of mobile didn’t support what desktop could support, where advertising is concerned. You need to be mobile-first, but not mobile-only. It calls for a re-imagining of cross-platform strategies. And the Coalition for Better Ads is recommending wiping out certain ad units in mobile, Gavin points out. Question is, are the publishers in this room hosting the kind of ad units the Coalition is targeting? Rob observes the Coalition is calling for important moves, but there’s some hesitation about how Google is the entity driving those moves right now.

9:51: Data is driving the identity-based world. Customer data platforms are interesting to Eric, he says. You’re creating capabilities for personalization across multiple platforms. It’s interesting for publishers to think about themselves as brands, he adds. Publishers want to connect with users across different platforms, and they need data to do that. That’s where the future is pointing, and publishers need to be in the center of those conversations.

9:55: Google and Facebook are hiring AI talent, and they’re pretty aggressive about doing so. That talent isn’t all that common. It’s interesting to look at other companies, then, and see who they’re hiring. Who’s hiring PhDs?

9:56: Question from the room about the dangers of “runaway AI”–the dystopian view–and how those fears factor into Eric’s investment decisions. Eric says it’s a small concern, but the broader concerns of AI are real. Elon Musk has founded an org to address this.

9:58: IBM is doing really interesting things with AI, Eric says, and there’s room in the market for “a fourth” (up there with Facebook, Google and Amazon). Whether that could be IBM remains to be seen. There are applications beyond optimization engines in AI.

10:05: Now we’re switching over to the next session, FreeWheel’s sponsor session. Geoff Wolinezt from FreeWheel and Megan Latham from Bloomberg are on the stage, and we’re recording a podcast live from the dais, Geoff’s “OK, so…” podcast. Megan has told us a bit about her background. One thing she’s pointed out is that even if you happen to find yourself in a role you don’t enjoy, you still have opportunities to learn.

10:11: “Bloomberg at its core is a technology business,” Megan says. They’re working with a ton of data and tech. Other media businesses are looking to Bloomberg for insights. But there’s a data safety issue when you’re using that much data, Geoff says. Megan explains they draw hard lines around terminal data. They use market data for targeting.

10:15: Sales, ops and planning teams are completely cross-platform at Bloomberg, Megan says. They think about the advertiser and their challenges, not about the platform.

10:18: Bloomberg does a lot of direct business, but they’re growing the programmatic business in tandem. Geoff wants to know how they strategize with partners and products. Megan says they have multiple SSPs partners, but they’re very selective about who they work with. They’re “extremely vigilant” about brand safety, but they are active in the open market and not just PMPs. There are some markets around the world, for example, that are less mature, where the open marketplace is an important place to be.

10:23: Geoff wants to know how Bloomberg handles UX in so many environments. Megan says that with a “fickle audience,” UX needs to be top of mind. Rules (like competitive rules) are different between TV and digital. They have to ask whether they should serve, say, a 30-second ad on digital. Even while setting up a media plan, they were thinking about these issues. Geoff points out agencies are very concerned about this stuff, too. And the six-second spot is becoming more accepted. Megan says they’re thinking about six-, eight- and 15-second spots. You don’t want to spend 30 seconds watching a pre-roll ad for short-form video. When those longer pre-roll ads come up, people will lean away and wait for the ad to end, which we see happening in our day-to-day lives. Six-second ads, when done well, are very memorable, she says.

10:28: You need to think about environments where the user is viewing, says Megan. Can you insert a mid-roll commercial break? How, when and where? Geoff points out that the way he watches video online is massively different from the way his kids do. “People are watching despite how they’re watching.”

10:33: Geoff wants to know if Megan has changed her mind about any her former core beliefs about the industry. She says she used to believe the big, splashy unit was the way to go. She’s learned how to innovate and grab users in a way that’s not “in-your-face.” You don’t need to explode things to be engaging, and at Bloomberg, a CEO is not going to be clicking through on a splashy ad.

10:38: Brian Chisholm from OpenX is on the dais now, talking about auction mechanics. Good auction mechanics are transparent, he says, with both buyers and sellers. Auction mechanics that are not transparent are not so good, and you have to wonder whether their main beneficiary is the middleman.

10:41: OpenX has an auction integrity checklist for pubs. Non-transparent auction mechanics are one point. Is there a “shadow first-price auction” going on? That happens today by manipulating paid-to-bid ratio, which is something DSPs talk about more than pubs, but it;s the difference between the advertiser’s bid and the price where the auction clears.

10:44: Why does this matter for pubs? Well, exchanges are making pricing decisions on pub inventory without pub consent. Return on ad spend could be impacted, and buyers may bid less aggressively, causing CPMs to decline. Rebates might shift to less competitive marketplaces, too. Publishers ought to talk to not only their SSPs (to understand the kind of auctions they’re running), but to DSPs (to get their POV on players in the market).

10:48: Unauthorized resale of publisher inventory is a factor. You want to see one supply path for each supplier. Unauthorized resale devalues pub inventory, exposes pubs to ad quality risks, and opens the door to domain spoofing. Publishers ought to do programmatic test buys of their inventory, communicate with partners, take a hard stance about reselling their inventory, and adopt Ads.txt.

10:53: Question from the audience about DSPs and SSPs consolidating, collapsing into each other. Brian thinks they’ll generally be winnowed down to fewer than 10.

10:55: Rob points out that a lot of programmatic is built around “gaming the system” in one way or another. Will first-price auctions help? If we know what buyers are willing to pay, will that help publishers price their inventory?

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