targeting

ARF Original Research: How Advertising Works

Creating Effective Mobile Advertising
Manuel Garcia-Garcia, Ph.D., SVP, The ARF

Mobile ad spend is at $43 billion and growing rapidly, but an estimated 62% of campaigns today are not using mobile in an optimal way. For example, creative executions customized or developed for mobile are far more effective than those repurposed from TV. We surveyed and interviewed creative experts from top agencies and the provided the following guidelines:
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Demo Targeting Still Dominant At Agencies, Behavioral Tops With Clients via Media Post (source: Advertiser Perceptions)

 Age- and gender-based demographics—a staple for targeting consumers in media plans and buys since the 1960s—is still the predominant targeting criteria used by most ad agency executives, but it is losing luster with brand marketers who are more inclined to use “behavioral” targeting.

The findings, which are based on a survey of 300 marketer and agency respondents conducted by Advertiser Perceptions for Videology, found that two-thirds of agency executives still rely predominantly on demographics, while only 55% of marketers cited demos.

Access full article from MediaPost

The Top Three Data Trends of 2016 via AdAge

If there’s one phrase that could be used to describe the momentum behind marketing data business ventures in 2016, it’s full steam ahead. Companies helping marketers connect consumer data dots, tech firms turning mobile data exhaust into targeting tools for advertisers, and firms fostering partnerships to share the data wealth moved at a fast pace this year.

Among the key trends in data-driven marketing were:

  • The proliferation of location data sensors
  • The use of personally identifiable information to target and measure ad campaigns
  • A wave of partnerships complicating the web of data dissemination even more

Access full article from AdAge

The Quest For Scale Is Ruining The Digital Ad Industry – via AdExchanger (source: Yael Avidan, vice president of product at Adelphic)

The first question marketers or agencies ask ad tech vendors or media companies is probably this: “That audience is perfect, but can it scale?”

Audience targeting is great, but ultimately, advertising’s main draw is reaching large-scale audiences. Although it reflects the return on investment, that marker can miss the point and may end up stifling the digital ad world’s growth.

This results in three core issues I see threatening the growth and sustainability of the digital ad world. First, the quest for scale reduces the value of smaller yet engaged audiences. As a result, many smaller publishers are having a hard time competing and struggle to maintain their revenue bases.

Second, advertisers’ willingness to pay for scale has unsurprisingly driven the emergence of bots and traffic drivers that step in and “supply” this demand. This, in turn, created a massive distrust of advertisers in the ecosystem and is one of the key problems that holds back the shift of more TV dollars to online.

Last but definitely not least, in a market that values scale above all, a handful of large publishers are capturing the majority of advertisers’ attention and spend at the expense of the rest of the market.

http://adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/quest-scale-ruining-digital-ad-industry/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT1RRNE16UTFaR014Tm1ZeCIsInQiOiI5bmNreVlSR0xCZ3c2aTJSdndBdmN5VUllOU5XRFFtSXFcL0pOMTVYekdncTZLMVhNOUtkZVNuclRZWk9BSjg0RDhBelNvTDJtVVJSdU5DdUZnU2tcL2FVSVA4YzYwZjA0Q3pta1dpUCttdEYwPSJ9

 

 

How Netflix Is Using Your Data (Streaming, Sharing, Stealing: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment) via Fortune

Professors Michael Smith and Rahul Telang answered the following questions on this article:

“The making of House of Cards illustrates how a bunch of different changes coming together at the same time can be really disruptive to the traditional industry. The thing that Netflix had that nobody else in the industry had was they knew exactly who those Kevin Spacey fans were and they could use the platform to target them directly. So, Netflix went out and created nine separate trailers for House of Cards and targeted them directly to those users. So, I think part of the story is the power of detailed customer data to help you do a better job of marketing the content.”

  1. People have made a big deal about the idea of “binge-watching” as the embodiment of the changing way we consume media. But, what about the tailored content, based on users’ tracked habits? Which is more important?
  2. Both. It’s understanding at a detailed level how individual consumers are accessing the content, and then using the platform to help them discover and find exactly the right content that’s going to meet their tastes. What the academic literature says is that consumers get an incredible amount of value from being able to find exactly the kind of content that meets their unique tastes—and that consumers’ tastes are incredibly varied, more so than what you can find with traditional broadcast channels.
  3. What’s the biggest reason streaming services have a leg up over traditional media companies?
  4. Netflix, Amazon, and Google all own their own data and they don’t share it with anybody in the entertainment industry.

Access full article from Fortune

Y&R CEO David Sable Explains Why Audience Targeting Is Overrated via AdExchanger

As the ad industry races to embrace mobile, social, data targeting and ad tech, Young & Rubicam (Y&R) CEO David Sable says it’s forgetting about the consumer.

More specifically, he challenges that:

  • Audience targeting? Misses out on potential customers.
  • Ad blocking? A reflection of the unchecked proliferation of ads.
  • Sponsored content? It’s been around forever.

But he also realizes ads need to get better, especially for mobile experiences

Access full report from AdExchanger

Web Tracking Surges with Online Ads – via USA Today

 

The rise of web tracking and more targeted advertising has helped fund the explosion of online content and build such web behemoths such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and others. It’s even part of the reason Verizon recently bought Yahoo, to bolster its potential audience for ads. It’s also led to more consumers installing ad-blocking software, which resulted in pushback from companies like Facebook to thwart it.

A study found that at least 75% of the world’s 500 most popular websites contain web trackers, up from fewer than 5% in 1998.

“The number of trackers have increased, the ability of the top trackers to track you across sites has increased and the complexity of the trackers has increased,” said Adam Lerner, a security and privacy researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of the study designers.

Access full article from USA Today

“Watchouts with Programmatic Buying” – Dstillery

 

Optimization and measurement remain challenging primarily because the actions worth measuring (e.g., product purchase) often are exceedingly rare, not measurable at all, or only partially traceable to the digital identity of the consumer who was exposed to the ad.

As a result, we look for suitable alternative/proxy target variables when data on the true objective is in short supply or even completely nonexistent. In previous research we asked ourselves “is click the right proxy for evaluation and optimization of display advertising campaigns where the ultimate goal is purchase?”

In this research, we asked – “why is the click not a good proxy?”

For more information visit Audience Measurement

“The Beginning of the End for Gender & Age Targets” – Clypd

Many TV deals are moving away from gender and age targets towards advanced targets using fused research databases, transactional databases and 1st party customer data. This paper covers the opportunities and challenges in activating these negotiations including:

What data can be used to make linear TV ads more targeted?

How do buyer and seller get to a consensus when going beyond gender and age targets?

How can advanced target data be activated optimally and seamlessly in the activation process?

How much gain in targeting efficiency is achieved?

How can linear TV deals like this be integrated with digital cross-platform deals?

For more information visit Audience Measurement

TARGETING

Conference Paper – “Out of Home Advertising at Scale” – IRI

IRI had already collected empirical metadata that indicated significant underestimation of OOH impacts, especially for retail and consumer goods (both CPG and durable).

We now have leveraged a trade-area based approach to more accurately measure OOH by making the distance from OOH location to point-of-sale.

In order to understand how this localized impact model performs vs. the industry standard Market-level model, we ran a side-by-side comparison of both approaches across a cross-section of brands representing multiple categories including Beverages, Home Care, Snacks and Personal Care. Results will be presented at the ARF conference.

From Adweek: Article in the News – “Twitter Is Making It Easier for Big Brands to Target Smaller Groups”

Twitter is adding sublayers to ad campaigns. The goal is to make it easier for larger brands to better target and monitor advertising on their platform.

Twitter product marketing manager Andrea Hoffman wrote, “One campaign can have many ad groups, and an ad group can have many targeting criteria and creatives. This level of granular control helps advertisers improve how they measure results, set promotion schedules, test different audiences, and identify which Tweets work best.”