After a bad experience with bot fraud and domain spoofing, vice president of programmatic and data strategy at Business Insider, Jana Meron articulates the need for all elements of the advertising world to “commit to enforcing higher standards.”

Responsibilities

• Exchanges must police their buy-side partners to assure they are not reselling inventory.
• Supply-side platforms need to enforce their contracts with buyers. Turning a head when there’s suspicion does injustice to those who are footing the bill.
• Publishers must fight unauthorized reselling of their inventory and join IAB Tech Lab’s Ads.txt initiative.
• Demand-side players must resist ads that “appear too good [read: cheap] to be true.” Best practices say one should use third party fraud tracking and blacklists to reduce bad actors while seeking exchanges that actively search for fraud.

Source: AdExchanger

At a recent Advertising Week panel the subject of regaining trust in the current advertising market was discussed. It was David Kohl, president and CEO of TrustX who turned the conversation when he said, “Ultimately it’s all about the consumer. You’re in the business of putting content in front of consumers, and we need to stop being in the business of monetizing the consumer. We must aim at creating an experience that’s respectful of the consumer’s time and engagement. It is our job to offer an experience that works for our consumers. Only then can we build that trust.”  That statement cuts through the haze yielding unusual clarity.  Lesson learned.   Source: CampaignUS

Here is some collected wisdom from Advertising Week’s recent panel called, ‘We must be able to do better than this: making better ads for mobile.’

Steve Ellis, chief executive officer of WhoSay;  “There is a physical change of behavior… around carrying smartphones and we haven’t altered our advertising thinking to address those tactile changes.”

Brian Wong, chief executive officer and founder at Kiip mobile advertising network;  “Marketers, agencies and brands need to start understanding ‘what people actually do on the phone.’”

Ian Schafer, chief experience officer at Engine USA, a multi-faceted agency: “The most successful efforts on mobile screens are the ones that look less like advertising and more like content, while still getting the message across to the consumer.”

Russ Freyman, head of partnerships at Google; Speedy page rendering is important for ad consumption. “If the user is spending more time consuming the content, it’s more likely that their ads become more viewable.

Source: The Drum

IAB is sponsoring an event at which industry leaders will discuss how publishers can better monetize their mobile inventory.  Given that the time spent by mobile users is greater than time spent with desktops, it is notable that mobile’s advantage has not been successfully converted into ad dollars. This webinar promises to address the discrepancy.  Sign up for the October 26^th event at the following web address: https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/register/hxevhgrv   Source: Internet Advertising Bureau

YouTube’s chief business officer, Robert Kyncl, had to go to Germany to make a very revealing statement about video advertising.  He said there has been a 70% increase in six-second video ads in the second quarter of 2017 compared to the first quarter. The quick increase is one thing, but one wonders how it took so long for advertisers to figure out that people want to get to the video they chose and that long ads riled the audience.  It’s as though advertisers never use the medium and therefore, don’t realize the intrusion a long ad represents.

Fox Networks Group is described as “aggressively pushing six second ads” because they too realize the value to the audience.  We’d like to see research to judge effectiveness of short-form ads compared to longer ads. Source: broadcastingcable.com

Following Facebook’s quiet attempts to re-enter China is a study in patient persistence. We have seen Mark Zuckerberg’s personal diplomacy including learning the language and using it at local appearances.  Recently the company’s photo app, Moments, was launched in China through a local partner under the culturally friendly name Colorful Balloons. Though Facebook itself has been banned since 2009 for political reasons, the government seems to be letting Colorfull Ballons fly for the time being. The latest report is that the company is searching for office space in Shanghai.

Facebook’s desire to get back into China is obvious given the size of the market and given its absence relative to other Asia-Pacific counties. A Kantar TNS study shows that Facebook is the most used social network in the region with an average usage of 83.5% in 15 Asia-Pacific countries.  By comparison, usage in China is estimated to be a mere 19% and those users are circumventing the government with VPNs.  Source: eMarketer.

Artificial intelligence firm GumGum surveyed marketing and advertising executives in June 2017.  The result is an optimistic view of AI’s current adaption.  The data suggest that 55% of marketers use Chatbots while 77% use predictive analytics and auto-personalized content, some are more committed than others. From our perspective, those numbers seem more like wishful thinking.  After all, we have watched as it has taken several years for programmatic technology to be widely adapted and still, it hasn’t been fully exploited.  To argue that AI has already made the penetration rates suggested in these data seems to be a stretch.  The time will come for AI and programmatic advertising will benefit from integrating predictive analytics, but for now it feels like we are talking near to mid-term futures rather than existential reality.  Source: eMarketer

It is pretty obvious that fake news is top of mind these days.  More than half the respondents to a BrightRoll survey of North American programmatic advertising decision-makers said they intended to pressure their programmatic partners to screen for fake news.  Almost one third of respondents “said they would reduce their spending with programmatic partners whose inventory includes publishers associated with fake news.”

It’s clear from the numbers in the above table that many of the respondents are applying a combination of several initiatives to clean up the quality of their buying.  Better targeting, white lists and shifting from open exchanges to private buying are among them.  Few are doing nothing.  Source: eMarketer

1. Personal Discovery – Chinese shoppers tend to go to an online mall to shop as though they were walking to a physical mall, which leads brands to set up stores in online malls rather than as stand-alone sites – a contrast to the west. To attract customers the stores have to appeal to known interests, which they do by augmenting standard demographics with sophisticated AI
2. Seamless Sales – Where a western in-app ad a customer clicks to the ads site, in China the users can click the interesting ad while remaining in the app they’re using be it social, search, maps or news.  The sales process is integrated into the various apps of choice.
3. Content is King – Live streaming is yet another area in which advertising is made easily available.  While some brands connect with celebrities and internet influencers others create their streaming content to connect their products directly to their customers.
4. C2B Innovation – The standard practice of business-to-consumer is often reversed in China. The consumer data informs the business.  It becomes an interactive loop that a brand can use to feed products to the right person at the right time and to quickly evaluate success or failure of the ad.
5. Agility, Flexibility, and Speed – The idea of ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing is juiced up with sophisticated communications technology allowing for products to be manufactured after they are ordered and for changing trends to be responded to in real time.  Lag time is eliminated and delivery is efficient.

Source: TechNode

Russ Cohn, Quigley-Simpson’s VP of Creative Marketing & Innovation, expresses a frustration that there seems to be a division between the ‘big idea’ people and ‘big data’ people.  The big idea folks stress need for the great creative while the big data people are programmatic true believers. Cohn makes the point that the two are not mutually exclusive and should instead be considered two sides of the same coin. He suggests the two are interdependent for many reasons.  He asks, in effect, what good is the most accurately targeted ad if it doesn’t connect with the audience? Unfortunately, having both big ideas and big data under the same roof is an expensive luxury that most brands/agencies don’t have.  Source: CampaignUS