The display advertising industry is in rude health. It’s constantly evolving and has proven to be a cornerstone of innovation in the advertising world. The display ad landscape offers marketers a wide range of formats and creative options, with benefits like gathered data and flexibility for delivering brand and performance campaigns.

When technology and marketing objectives present challenges, display can offer immense benefits to help advertisers precisely cut through to otherwise difficult to reach target audiences.

Here’s what to expect from display advertising in 2018:

More programmatic

Next year display advertising is gearing up to become even more programmatic, due to the fusion of technology, creativity and data with the adoptive mindset of the advertiser. The ad industry is clearly witnessing an ever-increasing proportion of marketing spend being devoted to programmatic display advertising. eMarketer reported that nearly $40 billion will be spent on this technology in 2018, compared to $32.5 billion for 2017.

Programmatic technology will increasingly be integrated into the creative process. For example, instead of serving a single ad creative to all target audiences; machines can learn to segment, select and display different and relevant creatives according to context, in order to maximise their impact with audiences.

Mobile will eat into more of display’s budget pie

As an increasing amount of time is spent consuming content on smartphones, the volume of mobile inventory that’s available to display ads increases. Launching mobile ad campaigns gives advertisers a great deal of scope to reach audiences. The objective of location-based advertising campaigns is to discover the optimum context to impact the final user, and only mobile devices can do this efficiently.

The rise of native advertising

Native advertising has emerged as a successful ad format, one that connects with audiences in a natural or ‘native’ fashion. Native advertising is attracting a great deal of interest from advertisers because it generates twice the amount of audience attention when compared to traditional display ad formats. Therefore, native generates significantly more engagement and shareability, helping to build strong brand awareness and, often, the influence of native advertising is more significant than original editorial content.

Taking this higher reception and engagement into consideration, there is no doubt that in 2018, investment in this type of advertising strategy will increase significantly. This will be especially visible across mobile, with ever more companies adopting programmatic as a method to buy and serve native advertising. Some researchers report that by 2021, Native ads will drive 74% of all ad revenue.

Emergent ad display formats

Emergent ad display formats such as playable ads (where the ad is an interactive game) will become more mainstream for brands, agencies and publishers. These offer increased engagement, conversion and revenues.

Next year display ads will be served much more intelligently, with dynamic creativity. For example, an advertiser will have different iterations of an ad. These different iterations will be served according to contextual factors, and this process will be powered by intelligent learning AI algorithms, which make their decisions based on user and contextual data factors, such as geo-positioning or changes in the weather.

2018 will be a turning point for the display ad landscape, where technology will begin to take over more of the human thinking processes and decision making, helping to optimise investment in advertising for brands, agencies and publishers.

As we’ve seen with the recent launch of the new iPhone X, augmented reality functionality will open up a new universe of advertising possibilities for brands. 2018 may well be the year when mainstream advertising finally crosses the border from reality to virtual.

Viewability

In their quest to maximise ROI and combat ad fraud of their campaigns, brands will continue to highlight the importance of viewability and push the sector into the adoption of universal metrics for it. The viewability metric will emerge as one of the most important measures for publishers to demonstrate themselves as a quality and effective support.

The upcoming year will see display advertising growing significantly in terms of investment and performance. User interactions will be raised to new heights thanks to the adoption of the innovative technologies discussed, enabling brands to become more effective at planning campaigns and reviewing their results.

The post What Will the Display Advertising Industry Look Like in 2018? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

It’s no secret that mobile fraud is a serious concern for digital advertisers who use programmatic technology. Programmatic carries a major fraud risk when compared to directly sold inventory due to the significant presence of intermediaries which makes it easier for fraudsters to become invisible in the value chain.

Last year, eMarketer commented that ad fraud represented a significant barrier to entry for mobile programmatic adoption. The whole mobile ad industry is suffering large financial losses due to ad fraud. WPP’s The&Partnership reported that programmatic ad fraud will cost brands about $16.4 billion globally this year, which equates to nearly 20% of total digital ad spend in 2016.

Fraudsters can conduct mobile fraud through an amalgam of techniques designed to cheat advertisers by attacking the basic advertising business models, i.e. CPM, CPC and CPI. Let’s take a look at the most common programmatic ad fraud techniques:

Impression fraud and the effect on CPM

This manifests itself under different guises. Impression fraud occurs when you pay for an ad that was never viewed, not because a human didn’t see the ad, but because the ad was invisible to human eyes. Fraudsters often embed ads in hidden frames, conduct ad stacking i.e. the technique of hiding an ad below another ad, or use bots to artificially create impressions and traffic.

How click fraud affects CPC

Click fraud is essentially using bots to generate massive numbers of clicks on ads. Basically, your campaign is hijacked by these bots, misleading advertisers into believing that their campaign is performing outstandingly. Fraudsters also often create fake mobile sites, with fake traffic based on expensive CPC keywords. When a brand buys inventory on these fake sites and receives a fraudulent click, the advertiser believes that the click came from a real person.

App install fraud

This focuses on stimulating fake app downloads or re-installs, even if an app has already been installed. The process follows this sequence: after clicking on an ad, it then redirects to an app store to download and install an app. The app can be downloaded by ‘install farms’ – places where people with dozens of mobile devices manually download, install and uninstall apps. Fraudsters also use bots to generate fake traffic. This type of fraud can quickly increase a user base, but with poor quality users who won’t be engaging or spending money in-app. The consequence is that the advertiser or brand burns faster through its user acquisition budget, and then receives deceptive metrics around retention, ARPU or ROI.

Programmatic ad fraudsters are constantly devising new and inventive ways to fool brands and advertisers. Ad fraud has always been present in the ad industry; its influence can detrimentally affect important campaign KPIs like install rates and viewability. Digital marketers should not underestimate the power of this digital menace. They should analyse, be vigilant and integrate a robust anti-ad fraud strategy into their day-to-day operations.

Detecting app fraud

How can you detect app install fraud?

Programmatic ad campaign managers have several ways to detect fraudulent activities. They should keep a close eye on:

• Suspiciously positive or way-above-average behaviours/results emanating from a single source, which affect critical KPIs over a short period of time,
• Inconsistencies about the origin of a click and install, number of installs vs the hour that they were conducted,
• Bulk installs that are generated from the same device ID.

And what measures can you use to fight it?

Blacklist of IPs

If you detect a substantial change in the number of installs or clicks, and if these are generated by the same device IP, then something is probably wrong. Follow up anomalies coming from these IPs and then list them by creating a database to help avoid them in the future. You can do this as a single company, or through an open shared database involving other companies across your sector, even with competitors. The wider your net, the better for everyone who wants to play fair.

Work with first-party data and track post-install events

By utilising first-party data, digital marketers can exert full control, allowing complete verification of data quality and the ability to detect suspicious patterns. Working with data from post-install events, for example ending an onboarding tutorial, makes identifying fraud easier because events like these are more difficult for bots to simulate human behaviour. So, if you don’t detect any activity after installing an app or game, you can be sure that the source that sent the traffic will be fraudulent.

Detect unusual behaviour

Machine learning and intelligent algorithms can be valuable tools in the fight against programmatic ad fraud. Fraud detection is not an easy task for humans to conduct on a manual level; it’s a tough challenge to manually check a huge dataset of information from hundreds of digital ad campaigns. Machine learning is an automated process that is constantly learning. By defining logical rules, patterns and ways to react to ad fraud, algorithms can be very effective at detecting fraudulent patterns before an impression, click or install is completed.

The post Programmatic Ad Fraud and How to Fight It appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Marketers have often said that ‘content is king’, but in mobile marketing, the notion that ‘context is God’ now resonates even louder. It isn’t enough to just have great content in this omnichannel era. Modern marketers need to know the ‘who?’, ‘what?’, ‘where?’, ‘when?’ and ‘how?’ around content delivery, and this is where context emerges as the main weapon that marketers can use to build highly successful campaigns.

Context defines content

Contextual mobile marketing empowers brands and agencies to deliver relevant content at optimum times. The immediate benefits are increased effectiveness and engagement for ad campaigns. Without context, a brand’s ability to communicate effectively is severely limited. Regardless of the type or quality of content, if it’s being delivered in the wrong context, this renders it meaningless for both the brand and the consumer. Context defines the content, and not the other way around.

Studies report that people check their smartphones an average of 150 times a day. This understandably varies the contextual marketing conditions throughout a 24-hour period. For example, if you wake up in the morning and check a weather app, and see it’s going to be a sunny day, this is an optimum time to serve an ad for breakfast in a local restaurant. Conversely, the 109th time you check your smartphone could be when you’re on the way home from work, and boot up a casual gaming app, and this could be a good time to serve an ad recommending new Adidas apparel for running. This is done because mobile tracking technology knows that you’ve recently installed a Runtastic app which you 

This may seem like science fiction, but it’s actually how the new advertising landscape is being configured today. To be really effective and win the race, brands need to act in near real time.

Embracing new solutions

To act in real time, traditional media buying involves the bulk purchase of ad space, otherwise, it can’t be scalable. Implementation usually involves a great deal of time and manual processes, often involving many unfinished negotiations with brands. Needless to say, this is viewed as obsolete in the digital world. Traditional digital agencies need to rethink the way they are doing their job by embracing new programmatic technologies and processes, which enables real-time buying of ad inventory, by targeting individual spaces using real-time data. By doing so immeasurably increases chances for success.

Real-time bidding (RTB) and supercharged data are at the core of the programmatic engine. All RTB technology is essentially programmatic, but not all programmatic advertising is RTB. To be specific, programmatic is a concept much larger than this, as it can run with different ways to manage the ad stack, such as private marketplaces. These private rooms are where agencies can gain access to premium inventories or direct deals, where they can buy guaranteed ad spaces without an auction and at fixed eCPM.

Real-time bidding, as the name suggests, is the process of buying and selling online ads (display, video or even native ads) in real-time, on an auction basis and by skipping all the negotiations with the supports or ad networks. The benefits for brands and agencies include better control of a campaign’s performance, greater efficiency on ad stack management, and better results thanks to comprehensive segmentation and a broader scope. By eliminating wasted impressions, you can invest your budget more intelligently. As a result, you get a higher return on your advertising spend (ROAS) which empowers you to reinvest it more effectively in this virtuous circle.

Data and metrics

Marketers need to measure in order to improve. The best way brands and agencies can improve their performance is by analysing data. Data has truly emerged as a new invaluable commodity, especially in the advertising industry. Marketers say that 69% of their expenditure in data is aimed at improving targeting effectiveness.

The programmatic industry deals with different types and sources of data. First-party data is one of the most valuable sources which originates directly from a brand, whatever the method in which they gather it. Second-party data (which you don’t own) is interesting and valuable because you get it directly from a publisher or SSP that collects data from mobile users vía a SDK. This data can be just as valuable, or even more valuable than first-party data. And finally, third-party data, which originates from providers who are not involved in your business. Regardless of the data source, the important thing is that nowadays we have a great deal of information; some of it goes beyond cookie detection, like mobile identifiers or SDKs which are better at understanding user behaviour and building behavioural advertising.

Programmatic offers better day-to-day operations management and a new way to buy ad inventory, auto-managing campaigns by directly connecting to an SSP or trading desk, acting as a centralised buying technology for agencies. These two powerful features enable brands and agencies to be more precise for delivering highly successful targeted campaigns, as they no longer have to rely on inaccurate or sampled data and the confidence that a small percentage of the impressions that were bought in bulk are successful. Instead, this new approach allows one to process and manage larger data sets, buying impressions individually and impacting your targets in real-time.

This doesn’t end here. The amount of data that we’re able to collect and analyse increases as more people embrace new technology. The next progressive step is to integrate powerful AI algorithms that can learn how to improve the accuracy of successfully determining the “who?”, “when?”, “how?” and “where?”, helping to get the most out of your advertising spend.

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