A weekly round-up of the industry’s top stories and research curated by the ARF.
Researchers can now send secret audio instructions undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant.
Many people have grown accustomed to talking to their smart devices, asking them to read a text, play a song or set an alarm. But someone else might be secretly talking to them, too.
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Fox is adding Thursday Night Football this season and is looking to create innovative forms of advertising that are more engaging and less interruptive.
Media Rating Council (MRC) CEO, George Ivie, has heard your complaints about viewability, and he thinks you’re missing the point. It’s taken longer to nail down “viewability” than the MRC wanted, Ivie says, but the whole digital ad viewability idea was only meant to be a relatively quick fix on route to a bigger thing, which is now set to arrive by 2019. That would be cross-platform media measurement standards across all forms of TV and digital video delivery around demographics or any other audience data that marketers want.
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Three top trade groups – the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM), and Data & Marketing Association (DMA) — announced plans to develop audience “data quality labeling standards.”
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Editor’s note: Below are highlights from recent articles describing new methods to measure advertising impact on sales.
YouTube said it’s rolling out a Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) product that will help advertisers determine whether their youTube ads led to actual sales lifts.
Fischer, S. (2018, May 1). Axios Media Trends #2: Household Video Devices Becoming Ubiquitous. Axios.
Editor’s note: Below is a point-of-view on ad targeting from Wall Street guru Craig Moffett as told to Axios’ Kim Hart.
“Almost everyone believes that advertising that is better targeted, that is that has more data behind it, should sell for higher CPMs, or that is that advertisers will pay more for it. That’s the concept that AT&T is talking about. History says the opposite tends to happen … And that’ll be, I think, one of the real controversies and challenges that the whole digital world faces, over the next decade — is will, in fact— better targeted advertising lead to more advertising revenue, or less advertising revenue? My suspicion is it will lead to less.”
Fischer, S. (2018, May 1). Axios Media Trends #8: Moffett: Programmatic Advertising Won’t Save Everyone. Axios.
Editor’s note: The following is an author commentary for Forbes
These facts aren’t meant to discourage you from pursuing a social media marketing campaign, nor are they a criticism of the stats themselves. I’m a major proponent of social media marketing in my own right, and I stand by the idea that social media is still one of the best, most cost-efficient marketing strategies. But if you want to be successful, you need to set realistic expectations, and that means thoroughly understanding the nature and potential of the strategy before jumping in.
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Scott McDonald, ARF CEO & President, brought this topic to the forefront at our CONSUMERxSCIENCE conference on March 27 and 28, 2018. He opened the event by laying out the proposition that science was: dispassionate, methodical, skeptical, collegial, evidence-based, and theoretically-grounded. Scott noted that facts are not the same as values, that while facts can be wrested from a complex universe by close observation and disciplined experiment, values can’t be “proven” in the same way as facts. Rather, they arise from some shared understanding of what we regard as right, as ethical, as decent or fair.
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Editor’s note: The two pieces from Think with Google and Digiday discuss two perspectives on AI (Artificial Intelligence) and marketing.
Forward-thinking companies are using machine learning tools to supercharge their marketing. These early adopters take advantage of the technology’s ability to streamline data, unlock user insights, and engage users in highly relevant ways. In fact, 85% of executives believe AI will allow their companies to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage (The Boston Consulting Group).
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