News You Can Use

2017 Consumer Email Habits Report: What Do Your Customers Really Want?

• Posted: July 26, 2017

Brands have an opportunity to segment and personalize email campaigns to drive even more success and engagement, particularly with millennials. This trend will continue over time, as email continues to reign as one of the most effective tools to engage with consumers in a personalized way, at scale.

Key takeaways from the survey:

• More than half of those surveyed in the US, check their personal email account more than 10 times a day, and it is by far their preferred way to receive updates from brands.
• 76% of consumers agree that retail brands are sending relevant, accurate emails which reflect their shopping preferences, location or purchase history.
• Across verticals, the top reasons consumers will open an email from a brand are personalization and discounts. Consumers are just slightly more inclined to open an email offering a discount (72%) than one with a personalized subject line (62%).

Campaign Monitor.

Original Research from the ARF 2017 Audience Measurement Conference: Home Sweet Digital Home

• Posted: July 20, 2017

Consumer adoption and engagement across a growing number of devices is reshaping how advertisers reach audiences, while simultaneously driving competition for consumer attention. We are undergoing disruptive viewing pattern shifts, with new screen formats, and the rise of voice enabled devices (smart speakers).

comScore has analyzed 12,500+ homes, with over 150,000 devices, to understand how advertisers can reach valuable, but hard to identify, digital segments and understand how all devices function together across today’s digital home.

Among the key takeaways:
The average home interacts with over eight devices per month, yet computers, phones and tablets are the only devices to reach household penetration over 40%.

Skinny Bundles are showing some traction as 3.1M HHs streamed skinny bundles on their televisions in March.

Mike Rich, comScore. ARF 2017 Measurement Conference.

The 2017 Emmy Nominees for Outstanding Commercial

• Posted: July 20, 2017

Nominations for the 69th Emmy® Awards were announced this week by the Television Academy in a ceremony hosted by Television Academy Chairman and CEO Hayma Washington along with Anna Chlumsky from the HBO series Veep and Shemar Moore from CBS’ S.W.A.T.

The 69th Emmy Awards will telecast live from the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, Sunday, September 17 (8:00-11:00 PM ET/5:00-8:00 PM PT) on CBS.

The Creative Arts Emmy Awards will air Saturday, September 16 at 8:00 PM ET/PT on FXX.

Outstanding Commercial nominees are:

The Ad Council and ad agency R/GA worked together on two nominees:
“Love Cam – Love Has No Labels” and “We are America – Love Has No Labels”

“Why I March – Women’s March on Washington” – ad agency McGarryBowen
“Year In Search 2016 – Google” – ad agency 72andSunny
“Calling JohnMalkovich.com – Squarespace” – ad agency John X Hannes

You can view the nominees at AdAge.

Advertisers scramble to meet the platforms’ new formats

• Posted: July 20, 2017

Even in 2017, many advertisers are still focused on the 30-second spot and aren’t set up to adapt to all the new formats, agencies and publishers say.

It’s not just the skills and expense that’s the issue. The creative ecosystem has been built around the 30-second TV spot and, more recently, the 15-second spot. The investment is both financial and emotional. PAnd publishers need the money so they take them and repurpose them as pre-roll, users be damned.

Noah Mallin, managing partner of MEC Wavemaker, said, “A six-second ad may be more audience-friendly, but it isn’t often the first thing that comes to mind when the client’s thinking about a big idea.”

Change is happening, though. In June, Fox Networks Group announced it would start supporting the six-second unskippable ad format, following YouTube’s example.

Lucia Moses. “Don’t take away our 15s”: Advertisers scramble to meet platforms’ new formats. July 11, 2017. Digiday.

USA Ever More Diverse – 2016 Census Bureau update

• Posted: July 20, 2017

Total population: 323,127,513
Non-Hispanic White: 197,969,608 – 61.3%
Hispanic: 57,470,287 – 17.8%
Black (alone or in combination): 46,778,674 – 14.5%
Asian (alone or in combination): 21,419,159 – 6.6%

The Non-Hispanic White segment of the population climbed to 38.7 percent in 2016, up from 36.2 percent in 2010.

Between 2015 and 2016, the number of non-Hispanic Whites grew (births minus deaths) by just over 5,000 compared with a gain of more than 500,000 for Asians and Blacks and more than 1,000,000 for Hispanics.

CNN Source: exit polling for the 2016 presidential race revealed that while 61% of the population was Non-Hispanic White that segment comprised 71% of the voters (age and turn-out were notable factors).

Cheryl Russell. July 2017. American Consumers Newsletter-New Strategic Press.

From the ARF’s CEO Scott McDonald, Ph.d. – Is Blockchain a Solution to Digital Ad Fraud?

• Posted: July 13, 2017

Fraud has been a problem with digital advertising for a long time. Earlier this year, Business Insider estimated that digital ad fraud was costing advertisers $16 Billion per year, double the estimate from the previous year.

Various solutions have been proposed. Each of these represent earnest efforts to provide tools today to fight ad fraud. At the same time, each also seems inadequate to the enormity of the problem and the ingenuity of the criminals.

Into this fraught situation comes a new blockchain-based approach proposed by an open-source L.A.-based startup called MetaX. Blockchain is the distributed ledger system that has been disrupting the finance sector for the past few years – most famously via Bitcoin. MetaX wants to apply blockchain technology to clean up the digital ad supply chain, and they recently have signed up the DMA as a partner in that effort.

As MetaX CEO Ken Brook described it at the Advertising Research Foundation’s audience measurement conference in June, this approach will attempt to change the fundamental incentives that, in their view, lead to digital ad fraud. According to MetaX, the problem stems from the incentives of CPM-based ad buying. Buyers are incented to pay the lowest possible CPM for their ads, while sellers are incented to maximize impressions at the lowest possible cost. These misaligned incentives lead to mischief (poor viewability, bought traffic) and they invite fraudulent interlopers.

MetaX’s implementation roadmap envisions full deployment by early 2019. Will that day come soon enough? Will others come forth with better alternatives? Perhaps, but in the meantime it is great to see blockchain being applied to this festering problem in digital advertising.

Scott McDonald, Ph.d. Is Blockchain a Solution to Digital Ad Fraud? June 27, 2017. Publishing Executive.

The State of Mobile Ad-Blocking in 2017

• Posted: July 13, 2017

Selected key findings from 2Q2017 Survey

• Despite mobiles being one of the most commonly owned devices in the US, they lag significantly behind PCs and laptops as a device used for ad-blocking – only 22% of current ad-blocker users are blocking ads on their smartphones (meaning only 15% of US internet device owners block ads on mobile).
• Only half of internet device owners in the USA are even aware that they can block ads on their mobile. And if we look only at those who have not blocked ads on a mobile, more than 6 in 10 state that they did not know that it was possible to do so.
• There remains little willingness or recognition on the part of many consumers to accept that ads – even if they are respectful – are at the core of free content online. 1 in 2 smartphone owners in the USA state that they would prefer to block all ads on their mobile device. However, it is still one fifth of smartphone owners who say they don’t mind seeing ads on their mobile if they are respectful, while a similar number say they are willing to donate money to support websites.
• It’s ad-frustration which is the biggest driver of ad-blocking uptake in the US. Respondents were most likely to state that ad-overload, irrelevant content, intrusive formats and slow page load speeds motivate them to deploy an ad-blocker. Around 3 in 10 US Ad-Blockers are stating that they are concerned about ads compromising their online privacy, and 1 in 4 saying they don’t like ads which are personalized based on their browsing history. But most of all it’s poor user experience which is driving this resistance to ads.

The State of Mobile Ad-Blocking in 2017. 2017. GlobalWebIndex.

Strong creative more effective than intrusion online

• Posted: July 13, 2017

Ads that rely on the persuasiveness of their creative rather than the intrusiveness of the ad unit have more success, as both user behavior and increasingly sophisticated programmatic drive a new conception of online effectiveness.

Writing in an article for WARC, Jane Ostler, urges marketers to push for solid brand-building over cheap media.

“Do you know what your campaign is doing for your brand?” asks Ostler, “advertisers are waking up to brand safety issues and the importance of ensuring their ads appear in appropriate contexts.”

Ostler outlines six steps that can make online display and video advertising more effective and this starts with marketers receiving guarantees that they are paying for human eyes, not bot eyes.

Jane Ostler. Strong creative more effective than intrusion online. June 27, 2017. WARC.

A media measurement symposium worth considering

• Posted: July 13, 2017

The Publishing and Data Research Forum (PDRF) is an international group devoted to best practice and innovation in measuring newspaper and magazine audiences in markets around the world.

The annual PDRF symposium symposium will be held in Madrid on October 14-17, 2017. Scott McDonald, Ph.d., the ARF’s CEO, serves as program chair this year.

Increasingly this involves utilizing all available data to demonstrate to advertisers the size of digital and print audiences and value of publishers’ content across all platforms.

PDRF is more scholarly than many other such meetings. Presenters talk candidly about the limitations as well of the benefits of the methods they examine, and floor discussion is active. Between biennial symposia, the PDRF website is a vast resource from past symposia on how audiences are measured around the globe, cross-platform measurement and attribution, advertising effectiveness and monetization strategies.

Earlybird registration rates are open until the end of July.

For more information visit Publishing Data & Research Forum. https://www.pdrf.net/.

How Can TV & Digital Currencies Be Unified?

• Posted: June 29, 2017

Ed Gaffney (GroupM), George Ivie (MRC – Media Rating Council), Manu Singh (Discovery Communications), Daniel Slotwiner (Facebook), Jane Clarke (CIMM, served as moderator)

While the industry agrees that there needs to be standardized definitions of metrics across platforms, there are several evolving approaches.

GroupM – Developing cross-media standards is challenging. Counting impressions across all screens is imperative. Get long-form impressions done correctly first. We cannot wait on the purity of research. Right now, we are not moving away from age/sex for TV. If we are still doing C7 in ten years, we need to be shot!

Discovery Communications – There is a need to look at both long-form and short-form. From a publisher perspective, the ideal is to do business on the impressions not currently getting credit. What we are trying to do is very challenging. There will be a standard currency.

Media Rating Council – Cross-media measurement standards are the goal. Viewable impressions in digital has caused turmoil. Measuring audiences for digital impressions – these standards have been a long journey.

Facebook – There is a consensus moving forward that addressable measurement must be impression-based. Facebook wants to be able to report on all the factors that advertisers need. Fancy models are not needed, rather better reporting and thinking about how to plan campaigns across platforms will improve the campaigns.