Programmatic has been the most transformative thing to happen to advertising since the 30-second TV spot.

Suddenly, publishers have the ability to sell automatically, at scale, while private marketplaces have given them further control of whom they sell to. No wonder eMarketer forecasts UK programmatic spending will hit £4.52 billion by 2019.

But the infusion of advanced technology into advertising operations has not been without its tension recently. On top of publishers’ mounting anxieties comes a cluster of worries over platform power – the extent to which Google, by adding an ad-blocker to Chrome, and Facebook, by dialling news down in its feed, skews its chances of success.

I believe all of these events can be surmounted so that publishers can continue to benefit from programmatic powers to a greater extent than ever.

But, to do so, they are going to have to learn the lingo and walk the walk, because one of the biggest factors holding ad sellers back currently is lack of skills.

A couple of years ago, it was common to talk about a programmatic skills gap on the buy side. Since then, advertisers and agencies have begun closing the gap; publishers now urgently need to do the same.

Adding the expertise to fully understand their ad technology will allow them to take full control of their ad sales strategy and reap the rewards which programmatic brings.

The need is greater than ever: For those who want to reduce the likelihood of fraudulent ad-buying practices like inventory spoofing, the IAB’s new ads.txt standard now offers a marvellous solution, allowing publishers to list only the demand sources they choose to allow to buy.

But, whilst this new technology is simple at the core, it runs all on the publisher’s own server side and is new enough to drive the latest demand for up-skilling.

So, how can publishers best up their game, and play to win? Not by throwing out the baby with the bath water – a return to the old manual ways of selling will not be scaleable or successful for anyone.

Rather, the preference should be investing to add more expertise, either sitting in-house at publishers or via reliable sell-side partners publishers can and do trust. But publishers need to understand underlying processes like header bidding, server-to-server, private marketplaces and programmatic guaranteed in order to fully understand what is being done on their behalf. These are all critical business issues for publishers; failing to fully understand them – and conveniently blaming their ad technology partners when things go awry – is no longer a valid excuse.

Many publishers over the last couple of years have hired top-quality people to roles like ‘programmatic director’, but the knowledge must now also be spread down through to the foot soldiers if the whole team is to march in the same direction.

Fortunately, publishers are not alone on this odyssey; a good ad-tech vendor is not just a service provider to a client, it is a partner. It is not in the interests of supply-side platforms like the one I work for to keep all the cards close to our chests, to make publishers dependent on us through retaining all the skills and all the information. Rather, it is better to educate our clients in the best ways they can use our technology – not only to achieve results but to understand the underlying processes which lead to better results.

It has worked on the buy side, where there are even professional mentorship practices designed to boost the programmatic understanding of middle-ranking professionals. Now 90% of agency staff say they have a close relationship with their ad-tech partners, according to a survey commissioned by AdRoll.

Now it is time publishers took control of their own destiny – by seizing the opportunities to deeply understand the technology that will shape their future.

The post Why Publishers Need to Staff Up With Ad-Tech Experts appeared first on PerformanceIN.

When interactive ad agency director Joe McCambley bought what is considered to be the web’s first banner ad – for AT&T on HotWired in 1994 – he lit the blue touch paper that kickstarted a revolution in advertising.

Although the web at that time may not have been accustomed to commercial messaging of any kind, banners were set to become the most popular format in the ad category, funding most of our digital content today.

Tipping the scales in favour of native

Display advertising, the kind bought by brands, has been dominated by banners for more than 20 years. A decade ago, banner spend made up 95% of all digital display spending. But now there are new formats in town.

Let’s take a look at the new ad mix. IAB UK today recognises at least 11 different kinds of display formats, of which banners still make up the largest share. The £1.4 billion spent on UK digital banners in 2016 – according to IAB UK/Pwc Digital Adspend Study – represented 38% of total display spending, and is nearly four times greater than a decade ago.

But there is a new display format snapping at the heels of banner ads. In 2016, so-called content and native formats took £1.17 billion in UK spending, making up 31% of total display spending.

If that puts native in a narrow second place, consider the pattern of movement. Last year, banner spending fell 8% whilst content and native spending grew 28%. If the same trajectories hold true in 2017 (and all our dealings with advertisers and buyers suggest they are), then by the time this year’s data is pulled, we could be describing an advertising market that is now dominated by native ads rather than traditional banner offerings.

Halfway through the year, chances are high that the scales have tipped in favour of native. Content and native ads already account for the largest share of UK mobile display spending: 46% or £884 million.

Confronting native fears

The growth figures also provide some vindication, because – for all the hype about native ads over the years – the format has also attracted a healthy dose of scepticism. Will audiences trust it? Will advertisers embrace it? Can native scale? The native tipping point we have reached suggests the answers to all of these questions are “yes”.

Why is native winning the day? The format’s lead is thanks not just to its inherent benefits but also to the surrounding context in the buyer market.

Average display ad click-through rate had fallen to just 0.05% at DoubleClick’s last count, hardly representing marketing effectiveness. Attention has been re-shaped by feed-centric social media, with many consumers now quick to identify a traditional and obvious advertising message, instead placing greater trust in the valuable content a brand can provide.

Opportunity within segmentation

No wonder there are signs of anxiety in traditional advertising segments. Buyers are now pulling back from traditional formats at a rate of knots. Greater effectiveness and higher engagement can be found elsewhere. In a wider consumer economy that is increasingly stretched by growing consumer debt, falling car sales and small-business apprehension on the cusp of Brexit, advertisers are either reducing spend or switching to more impactful channels.

Another of these channels is online video. Growing 56% within the last year, this format is also likely to surge past banner spending when the 2017 scores are on the doors.

But much of video spending has been low-hanging fruit, simply the shoveling of TV ad inventory toward new screens, and toward audiences considered receptive to video ads simply by dint of having an appetite for video content.

Native ads are not just the same creative squeezed into a differently-shaped box, they are a brand new format in their own right. They have required the industry re-think its whole approach to advertising messaging, the standards with which we operate.

I am of the opinion that native advertising is more than just a new, convenient advertising format. I believe that what we are seeing , and what we describe as native advertising today, is in fact the evolution of online advertising as a whole – how it is commissioned, created and consumed – and that native advertising is the first truly native-to-digital-ad-format in existence.  Video Ads and Banner Ads, for example, are legacy formats from pre-digital days. It’s the central argument I make in my book Native Advertising, published by Kogan Page.

Native advertising has risen out of the primordial swamp of competing online advertising formats that characterized the first twenty years or so of the internet and is evolving to become the dominant form of digital advertising in existence.

Let’s credit the banner for having fuelled the digital display ad boom up until now. But let’s also celebrate the milestone at which native becomes the larger slice of the pie that will keep us fed in the future.

The post Native vs Display: Who’s Winning The Advertising Fight? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Native advertising was once the punch bag of the industry, an ad format that garnered little respect and was criticised widely. However, today it represents a major element for publishers in enhancing the online customer experience and is estimated to capture 30% of the global ad spend by 2020.

Recent research based on figures from BI Intelligence, the IAB and eMarketer has found that global investments in native advertising will reach $85.5 billion in 2020, with North America leading the charge and remaining the biggest native market in the world. It retains this title with huge levels of investment in native style display, sponsorship and social native, while Asia-Pacific will be the second biggest investor and Western Europe third.

In four years North America will have spent over $17 billion in the ad format, holding 37% of the global growth for the form. In Western Europe, the UK takes the largest stake in native advertising, spending over a billion more than Germany, and almost three billion more than France.

These numbers clearly demonstrate that native advertising is on the rise, but the industry will still need to address some challenges that lie ahead.

Making native work

Firstly, the need to simplify native. The industry will need to quickly embrace SSP [supply-side platform] and DSP [demand-side platform] native platforms – in OpenRTB – so that the buying and selling of native can become simple, efficient and scalable.

In addition to this, content and ads will need to start to endorse one another. Contextualisation is a big challenge for native, as the advertising format functions on being placed in the middle of a content feed; it’s very visible. Therefore, if the editorial content and the native ad fail to endorse each other, the result will be a jarring experience for the viewer, which may affect traffic to the site. 

In comparison, for other types of digital ads, such as banners, the ad is placed beside the content and not actually within it. In these instances, contextualisation is far less important as the ad stands alone from the site, and is not concurrent with its style.

For classic advertising (banners, pre-roll etc), contextualisation is a nice to have, but for native ads, it’s a vital element.

Finally, native still has a way to go visually. As it’s component-based, there aren’t many noteworthy visual integrations as of yet, and most native ads look like a grey box with a small image and black tile. This will hopefully improve over time, and soon enough we’ll be seeing far greater visual rendition – more engaging and dynamic.

A new player

With these challenges in mind, there’s also a game-changing trend that’s beginning to emerge in the industry – the use of artificial intelligence.

A recent report released by Infosys, a global leader in technology services and consulting, detailed the clear link between revenue growth and the amount of time businesses had implemented AI technology. According to the report, those who are adopting AI earlier are already reaping the benefits and experiencing fast growth compared to the businesses without the technology.

Such an example of this tech is IBM Watson. Its use value is far greater than one can imagine. When Watson is integrated into ad tech platforms, it provides the ability to deliver analysis of thousands of web pages per second, and for each page it captures every piece of key data and measures its sentiment. It provides a relevancy score on the entities on the page, as well as the keywords and concepts, it even goes as far as gauging emotions like joy and sadness. 

ADYOULIKE begun using Watson because of its unrivalled ability to crunch data and the company’s idea is to create better semantic targeting for native advertising, being the first business in the world to offer this service. For example, Watson is able to look at where, why and how the existing editorial content on each site is ‘talking about’ subjects and it ensures advertisers are dynamically delivering the best native content to fit.

With this technology, targeting can go much farther than any regular digital advertising currently does. It’s clear that the industry as a whole needs this trend to fully take hold, as many will have experienced an ad that hasn’t been well-placed and is of no relevance, one that makes the viewer question the publisher for displaying it in the first place. This has largely influenced the rise of ad-blocking software which has become a norm for everyday internet browsing for a large group of people. However, this might change if ads suit the content on the site, as well as the viewer who happens to be viewing it.

This year, the ad tech industry will watch as AI revolutionises the user experience online. It will change how ads are delivered and with the increased integration of machine learning, publishers will be able to greatly improve their blacklist criteria that prevent certain ads appearing on their pages, thus enhancing the viewer journey and finally allowing them to deliver the right ad at the right moment in time.

The post Why Native Advertising’s Growth Can’t Be Ignored Any Longer appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Ad blocking has been one of the biggest stories in performance marketing over the past 18 months. It’s yet another wake-up call to the industry indicating that the status quo no longer holds sway, as well as something the recent APDAC conference discussed in detail.

Banner blindness, the distaste for pop-ups and the continuing inability of display ads to work effectively on smaller-screen mobile devices have all had a significant impact. It’s what in recent years has led to the rise in alternative approaches, such as in-feed native advertising and content marketing.

The challenge facing advertisers is to take away the desire for consumers to want to use ad blockers in the first place. It’s not easy – the software is usually free and simple to download, and it promises a better web experience – but it’s certainly possible. First, however, we have to take a step back.

Think about the value exchange

Digital advertising is increasingly built on the value exchange. Consumer time is precious and there is a swathe of competing distractions. In exchange for their time interacting with your brand, digital consumers expect something in return. They expect a brand to entertain them or to offer information they need or might find interesting.

That’s the value exchange and one of the main reasons behind the rise of ad blocking.

Can most advertisers put their hands on their hearts and say with absolute honesty that their display ads offer that kind of genuine value?

Add value with storytelling and strategy

For a start, adding value means being less intrusive.

Embrace formats that are less pushy and think about how to give your customers what they want. That means being less annoying.

Tell stories. Share them. Invest time and resource in your content. Build a compelling brand content strategy. Then create a good distribution model for delivering  stories to your target audience.

Make advertising better

We need to create better digital advertising. First, it needs to be designed specifically for digital, so for one, stop shoehorning TV ads into mobile video units.

Adyoulike’s figures show that 78% of total video campaigns that we run in 2015 were TV ads, a decrease from 90% in 2014. So while the industry recognises the need for specific creative produced for digital, there is still a long way to go. Let’s use the technology we possess to create, not just to track performance and generate reams of data purely for the sake of it. 

We should look at ad blocking as an opportunity to create something better: a chance to take digital advertising to the next level using the technology and tools that are already at our disposal. If you look at what leading brands and their pioneering agencies do so well, it’s innovating. And innovation is what the digital ad industry has always been about.

For example, programmatic buying and the arrival of in-feed programmatic native advertising inventory means we can now see the right content delivered at the right time to the right person in a space where they will actually interact with it. And looking beyond that, wherever possible we should aim to create immersive ad experiences that look beyond narrow KPIs based on clicks, views or dwell times. 

The future of advertising

The recent Coke Zero ‘Drinkable Advertising’ ad campaign is a great example of the immersive future of advertising, with mobiles, TV, billboards and interactive technology all working together. The reality is that most people who interacted with these ads forgot it was  an ad – they were bought into the experience and didn’t even realise a value exchange was taking place. And because they were completely immersed in the story created by the brand, they weren’t reaching for the ad blocker. 

This type of immersive activity is the future of all advertising – both on- and offline – but it’s only possible when underpinned by great technology and the innovation of digital creatives, and exciting new ad formats.

This is the real value of digital advertising and it’s our job to showcase it, because only then will we get people excited enough about digital ads to regularly engage with, share and appreciate them. And only then will we have defeated the scourge of ad blocking.

The post How Can We Stop People From Using Ad Blockers? appeared first on PerformanceIN.