Amazon is reportedly building the infrastructure to make a move into the ad space occupied by the twin towers Google and Facebook. And Amazon has a couple great advantages.  First, they have the money and patients to sustain a long play.  Second, they have first party consumer data that no other company can offer.  They know what consumers are searching for, what they are buying, how much they are paying and where they are.  Match that!

“Amazon’s pitch to brands and agencies is that it is able to create a ‘total wallet’.”

Projections by eMarketer expect that by 2020 Amazon begins to change the vector.  It makes some inroads while Google and Facebook begin to lose a little of their dominance. For other companies this growth might be too slow, but for the Big A, it’s not a problem.  Source:  thenextweb.com

Push notifications are the standard, but its second cousin, the in-app message, may be the more effective form of communication.  Research by Localytics suggests that in-app messaging can deliver a significant improvement in retention lift particularly when used smartly in the right app category.  Entertainment, social networking, photography and educational apps deliver the most bang for the intrusion buck, but all categories provide some lift.

The trick is to create messages that accomplish two things: “streamline the app experience” and “direct users on how to gain value from the app.”  If you sustain the messages, research says you’ll see a 40% retention lift in months one and three and a slamming rate of 75% in the second month.  Source: Business 2 Community

Much of the focus in digital advertising over the last couple years has been around programmatic buying and the fallout from its emergence and rapid growth. With it has come the positive – media plan efficiency – and some negative – fraud, brand safety, need for transparency, etc.  The negative has motivated a move by some brands and publishers to bring programmatic buying in-house, which leaves agencies out in the cold.

Zach Rosenberg argues in MediaPost for agencies to “not let automation kill the art form that makes our industry great.”  He continues, “There is nothing more effective than using media to amplify creative messaging and to emotionally connect with audiences; both fundamental tenets of communications planning. Let’s also not forget the importance of contextual relevance.”

Creativity is the essence of agency work.  If agencies are going to remain relevant in the programmatic era, creativity must to be applied to the understanding and use of data with the same diligence it is for the messaging.  Source: MediaPost

In-app mobile advertising is making its move.  Just as with all digital advertising that has preceded it; mobile presents special issues for buy-siders.  Even some of biggest of them have yet to reckon with the differences between display and mobile.

The first shocking reality is that cookies don’t work in mobile targeting.  An initial strategy to overcome the issue has been to develop a white-list of apps and migrate it to private marketplaces, away from unstructured open exchanges. Still there’s a problem.  White-lists are not sophisticated enough for targeting.  Audience-based app categorization is the ultimate answer.

On the technical side there’s the issue of rendering, particularly with video ads.  Low render rates mean wasted supply that is not seeing a timed-out video roll.  Here, programmatic exchanges have a responsibility to check for creative compatibility. AdExchanger.com

This graph provides a revealing look at motivations driving Chinese consumer lust for foreign products. They view foreign products as higher quality, more authentic and less expensive.  For marketers wanting to reach China’s vast consumer market, these are the keys to success.  Play to these deeply held desires if you wish to win.  Source: China Skinny