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Twitter Adds Targeting By Email Address, User IDs

1/17/2014

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by Mark Walsh, Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Twitter on Tuesday announced the ability for marketers to target ads more precisely on the site using customer email addresses or users’ Twitter ID information.

The new targeting options mark an expansion of the tailored audiences program the company introduced last month for retargeting users, based on expressed interests in particular brands or categories by bringing their own or third-party data.

One of the additional ways to create audiences rolled out today allows marketers to use their own lists of customer email addresses to retarget them on Twitter or use CRM database records previously stored with an ad partner. Similar to how Custom Audiences work on Facebook, email addresses would be sent to Twitter as hashes -- unreadable alphanumeric strings -- for matching against its database to find the appropriate users.

In a blog post today, Kelton Lynn, product manager, revenue at Twitter, gave the example of a fashion retailer that wants to advertise a spring clearance sale on the site, but is opting to show the ad only to current loyalty cardholders.

The other new approach for audience targeting is to use lists of Twitter IDs -- either user names or the unique number that identifies a Twitter account -- to reach new prospects. The same fashion retailer could leverage public data on Twitter including a user’s bio, follower count, verified status or past tweets to glean specific accounts that are best suited to receive a particular ad or offer.

“The retailer would then use this list of Twitter ID’s to create a tailored audience through an ads partner, show those fashion influencers a Promoted Account and engage them as followers,” stated the post. Twitter is also allowing marketers to exclude certain CRM and user ID audiences from the set of users it wants to reach through existing targeting options tied to interests, keywords and TV.

If the retailer is running a new customer acquisition campaign aimed at Twitter users who are interested in fashion and style, it can use the loyalty cardholder audience to remove anyone who fits that interest category but is already a loyalty member.

Advertisers will continue to receive the same reports showing the number of users who viewed, clicked on or converted from an ad, without identifying individual users.

For the CRM-based ads, Twitter said it’s working with several third-party data providers -- some of whom also work with Facebook -- including Acxiom, Datalogix, Epsilon, Liveramp, Mailchimp, Merkle and Salesforce ExactTarget. The company will also allow marketers to use its Ads API to create both CRM- and Twitter ID-based audiences.

What about privacy concerns raised by the more direct targeting methods? Lynn explained in the blog post that Twitter users can uncheck the box in their privacy setting next to “Tailor ads based on information shared by ads partners,” and Twitter won’t match their accounts to information from its ads partners for tailored audiences.

Twitter also sets a minimum audience size for all tailored advertising to avoid overly specific targeting. 

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Mobile Commerce Explodes On Thanksgiving And Black Friday

12/3/2013

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Perhaps there was a lot of surreptitious smartphone Web surfing going on beneath the Thanksgiving table this year. But all signs point to T-Day being a blockbuster for mobile commerce. According to Branding Brands -- which powers m-commerce for over 200 leading brands, including American Eagle, Costco and Ralph Lauren -- visits to 46 smartphone-optimized sites for major retailers saw a 69% increase in visits over Thanksgiving 2012. But even more revealing is the explosion in actual sales coming from those devices -- up 258%.

Branding Brands was measuring smartphone-optimized sites specifically, so the data suggests the rising comfort levels consumers have with both browsing and ordering over their smaller devices. Page views from smartphones across the 49 sites compared year-over-year show 102.62% growth, and the average order size was up 15.71%. Overall across 152 sites for retailers, Branding Brands found that 32.56% of e-commerce traffic came from smartphones.

The trend continued on Black Friday, when Branding Brands also saw a year-over-year increase of 75.65% in visits and a 186.54% increase in sales from smartphones.    

Adobe, whose marketing and analytics suite monitored over 400 million visits to over 2000 U.S. retailer sites across Thanksgiving and Black Friday, says that 24% of online sales late last week occurred on smartphones or tablets -- up 118% from the same period last year.

Breaking down Adobe's data across platforms, they found that over the two days 15.6% of sales were coming from tablets and 8.6% from smartphones. The iPad remains the clear driver of device base sales -- responsible for $417 million compared to $126 million from iPhones, $106 million from Android phones and $42 million from Android tablets.

The traditional retail brands ruled the holiday shopping zeitgeist. Retailers with both online and physical presence (“bricks and clicks” brands) outsold online-only retailers during this period by nearly three to one.
 

by Steve Smith
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Upward Mobility: Hand-Held Web Accounts For Half Of U.S. Ad Expansion

9/30/2013

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by Joe Mandese

Mobile advertising -- ads on wireless handheld devices including smartphones and tablets -- will account for half of the expansion in the U.S. advertising economy this year and next, according to the fall edition of ZenithOptimedia Group’s quarterly forecast. The update, which was released early this morning, now projects U.S. ad spending will grow 3.4% in 2013 -- a tenth of a percentage point less than the 3.5% ZenithOptimedia forecast when it released its last outlook in June.

The U.S. ad economy is now on track to expand 4.5% in 2014 and 4.6% in 2015, according to the new forecast, making it one of the fastest-growing industrialized markets in the global ad economy and the biggest single contributor to the worldwide advertising marketplace.

The worldwide ad economy is now projected to grow to 3.5% this year, 5.1%  in 2014, and 5.9% in 2015 -- the same rates projected by ZenithOptimedia in June, except for 2015, which has increased by one-tenth of a point.

The Internet -- especially mobile advertising -- will be the biggest contributor to the worldwide economy too, but it will be an even bigger driver in the U.S. because of mobile’s still nascent domestic base.

“Mobile advertising is still relatively small,” the Publicis media shop notes in its report, adding: “we expect it to total $6.2 billion this year, or 3.7% of total ad expenditure – but it is growing extremely rapidly.”

In fact, ZenithOptimedia forecasts that mobile ad spending will grow 81% in the U.S. in 2013, followed by an expansion of 61% in 2014 and 53% in 2015.

“By 2015 we expect mobile to account for 8.4% of total ad expenditure, narrowing the gap between mobile’s share of ad expenditure and its share of consumers’ time spent across all media,” the agency noted, citing several key factors for mobile’s acceleration, especially consumer adoption of mobile devices and better and more standardized mobile advertising formats.

“After years of hype, mobile advertising has finally arrived,” states ZenithOptimedia North America CEO Tim Jones, adding: ”Its importance will only grow over the next few years as advertisers and agencies get to grips with the opportunities it offers, and improve its ability to measure and deliver return on investment.”

Non-mobile Internet ad spending, meanwhile, continues to expand faster than the rest of the U.S. ad economy too, and is now projected to grow 10% this year and next, followed by an 8% expansion in 2015.

“We forecast total Internet advertising – both desktop and mobile – to account for 21.8% of all U.S. ad expenditure in 2013, up from 19.0% in 2012,” the report reads, adding that by 2015, total Internet ad spending will rise to nearly 28% of all U.S. advertising in 2015.

TV, meanwhile, has fallen below 40% of U.S. ad share, accounting for 38.8% of budgets in 2012, despite the incremental boost of the Olympics and elections that year.

“In [Olympics/elections] absence we forecast relatively disappointing 2.9% growth in 2013,” ZenithOptimedia said of TV’s growth in 2013.

“Television will benefit from the Winter Olympics, soccer World Cup and mid-term elections in 2014, when we forecast 3.8% growth in ad expenditure, followed by 2.5% growth in 2015,” it noted, predicting moderate rates of growth for other traditional media.

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Advertisers Begin to Navigate the Mobile Landscape

9/30/2013

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Nearly 20% of mobile marketers will increase mobile ad spending by 50% or more in next two years Mobile advertising, once uncharted territory, is being taken up by marketers in droves, as publishers offer more opportunities on the devices, usage of mobile skyrockets and the ads show strong performance. In a survey conducted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and tech researcher Ovum, 19% of US mobile marketers said they planned to up their mobile ad budgets by 50% or more in the next two years. These respondents already market on mobile, and their responses suggest that they are seeing considerable return on investment (ROI) from the format.

As advertisers plan their mobile strategy, they have choices as to what ad inventory to use. The study found that the greatest percentage of respondents—by a wide margin—employed mobile sites or landing pages, at 70%. The next most common type of mobile ad was a static mobile display or banner ad, used by 49% of respondents. Despite search’s ubiquity as a digital tactic—and its importance on mobile—a lesser 44% invested in mobile search ads. This may be in part because there is less real estate for such ads on mobile screens. Nearly three out of 10 marketers used branded mobile apps, and 19% used mobile video ads.

There are still significant challenges mobile advertising must overcome, however. The greatest percentage of mobile marketers cited fragmented operating systems as their biggest challenge, followed closely by privacy concerns.

Responsive design should help ease mobile ad campaign deployment across devices, and 87% of respondents cited it as a “very important” or “important” development for mobile advertising, followed by HTML5, at 77%.

Despite the challenges, there is much to gain from mobile ad campaigns—a fact which has obviously not been lost on these marketers. In a Q3 2013 survey from the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and Neustar, between 45% and 48% of US marketers cited mobile marketing as offering each of the following significant and sustainable benefits: loyalty retention, improving transactions and improving customer service.

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Video Ads See Higher CTR In Mobile

9/4/2013

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Video Ads See Higher CTR In Mobile
by Mark Walsh, Wednesday, September 4, 2013

People are more likely to click on ads while watching video on smartphones and tablets than on the desktop, according to new findings from video ad provider TubeMogul.

Click-through rates for pre-roll ads shown on mobile devices were 4.9%, on average, compared to 0.6% on PCs, based on second-quarter data from the company’s media-buying platform spanning millions of mobile ad views in the U.S.

David Burch, communications director at TubeMogul, suggested the higher engagement rate in mobile stems from people being in more of a casual mind-set than on the desktop, since they’re less likely to be at work when seeing the ads, especially on a tablet. TubeMogul’s research showed tablet ad viewing peaks during prime time (8 p.m. to midnight), while the pattern for phones was steadier throughout the day.

Looking at tablets by operating system, viewing on Android and iOS was similar, reaching highs during morning and prime-time hours. The absolute peak for iPad users, however, was a bit later—from 10 p.m. to midnight—when Android tablet owners tailed off. There was more of a contrast between mobile platforms on the phone side.

Ad viewing among iPhone users peaked from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m., while Android phone users tend to come alive at night, watching ads mainly during prime-time hours. The lone exception for iPhone owners is at midnight, when they switch back on to watch videos before going to bed.

The TubeMogul data also showed most mobile video ads viewing takes place late in the week, with nearly half (49%) of ads watched between Thursday and Saturday. The peak is Thursday, when 17% of views take place, followed closely by Saturday, at 16.7%.

Similarly, ad completion rates are highest on the weekend, likely reflecting the greater amount of leisure time people have. That rate averages 52.2% on the weekend, compared to 44.4% during the week. Completion rates tend to spike during the morning and afternoon hours on the weekend rather than the in the evening.

Comparing interaction by country, completion rates were highest in Canada, at 64.1%, followed by the U.K. (56.3%), the U.S. (53.2%), Singapore (46.9%), and New Zealand (34.4%). TubeMogul said the U.S. rate has gone up 7.1% on a monthly basis. Singapore had the highest mobile click-through rate, at 7.6%), trailed by the U.S. (4.9%), Canada (3.4%), New Zealand (3.1%), and the U.K. (1.5%). 

In its latest cross-platform report, Nielsen said 45.3 million people watched video on a mobile phone in the first quarter, up from 36 million in the year-earlier period. Time spent viewing mobile video also increased, to five hours, one minute a month, from four hours, 29 minutes a year ago.


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Facebook Forges Ahead With Mobile Rich Media Ads Via PointRoll Agreement

8/26/2013

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Facebook Forges Ahead With Mobile Rich Media Ads Via PointRoll Agreement
by Tyler Loechner, Thursday, August 22, 2013 


Mobile advertising represented roughly 41% of Facebook's ad revenue during Q2 2013, and the social media giant appears to have its sights set even higher. Facebook and Gannett-owned PointRoll are expected to soon announce an agreement that will bring more rich media ads to Facebook's mobile News Feed.

In June, Online Media Daily reported that rich mobile ads are more engaging on social-networking sites compared to the same ads on regular mobile sites. The article cited data from Celtra, and wrote that "rich media ads running in the Facebook and Twitter apps had an interaction rate of 55.2%, four times that of the same ads on standard mobile sites. Time spent interacting with ads was nearly double in social media, with an average of 53 seconds versus 32 seconds on other sites."

Rich media ads on Facebook's app already exist, but Todd Pasternack, PointRoll's VP of digital innovation and product strategy, argued that PointRoll's history is what will set their offering apart. "We've been doing this for 13-plus years," he asserted.

Mario Diez, CEO of PointRoll, said: "What's different about the Facebook mobile environment is that if the brands build the right type of engagement, and it is served within an environment that people are used to engaging with and interacting with, we see really good performance of the media." Pasternack added: "What's great about this is that it maintains the feel of Facebook."

While both Diez and Pasternack seemed to beat around the bush, Facebook didn't shy away from using the word "native" when talking about the agreement. Anurag Gulati, Facebook partner manager, PMD Program, said: "Facebook's native format and large photo ads in News Feed -- the most engaging part of Facebook -- sets our mobile ads apart." He added: "Mobile rich media lets brands create ad experiences that allow for multiple levels of content in one placement: videos, games, shares, etc."

Because the Facebook Exchange (FBX) isn't available on the app yet, all of the mobile rich media ads are the result of direct buys through Facebook's platform for mobile News Feed.

PointRoll and Facebook have an existing relationship on desktop, and Pasternack indicated that this agreement is part of Facebook's mobile-first strategy."We've been right there with them as they shift to mobile to make sure we would help support that strategy," he said.

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Brands Investing More in Mobile Search

8/24/2013

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Brands Investing More In Mobile Search
by Laurie Sullivan, Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Marketers scrambling to understand mobile search campaigns once thought it easier to build and launch an app. Now, when it comes to investing budgets in search on mobile, many have begun to quicken their pace.

Mobile spending will rise 95% this year to account for 20% of all digital budgets spent on ads, and 5% of total media ad spend, according to a report from eMarketer. The research firm released findings that show 21% of search budgets will go toward mobile this year in the U.S., rising to nearly 60% of all dollars spent on mobile by 2017.

Total U.S. search budgets will reach $19.6 billion this year, including desktop and laptop, mobile phones, tablets and other connected devices. Mobile search will take $4.3 billion this year, $6.6 billion in 2014, and $9.3 billion in 2015.

eMarketer expects that 51.5% of all spending on mobile ads will go toward search, compared with 44.8% for display ads like banners, videos and other formats. Display formats continue to grow at a faster clip compared with search -- but not fast enough to overtake search spending by 2017, according to the report.

The increased investments in mobile search campaigns have begun to give smaller search marketing agencies an edge. 

Silicon Valley PPC Associates works with more than 70 clients managing about $175 million in annual spend. It generated 70% year-to-year growth supporting clients like GoPro, 23andMe, OpenTable, Eventbrite, SurveyMonkey, and RentTheRunway. 


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Interpublic Strikes Deals Automating Buys With 5 Media Giants

8/20/2013

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Interpublic Strikes Deals Automating Buys With 5 Media Giants: Covers TV, Radio, Outdoor, Display, Video, Mobile
by Joe Mandese

On the heels of last week’s deal naming Adap.tv its primary automation platform for targeting and buying TV and video inventory, Interpublic this morning unveiled a spate of similar deals to automate its transactions with five big media suppliers traversing TV, radio, out-of-home, mobile and online video and display.

Details about how the deals would be structured and how they would work were not disclosed, but Interpublic said it now has agreements with TV programmer A&E Networks, cable operator Cablevision, out-of-home and radio operator Clear Channel, local broadcaster Tribune and online portal AOL, which is in the process of acquiring Adap.tv, to supply assets “not previously available through automated buying systems.”

The initiative, which was developed by Interpublic’s Mediabrands unit, is dubbed the Magna Consortium, and is part of the agency holding company’s mission to automate 50% of its media-buying by 2016.

Interpublic has said it is making the push for several reasons, including both greater operating efficiency for its agencies and its clients as media-buying becomes hyper-fragmented and hyper-complex, as well as greater precision in targeting audiences it says will result by shifting from conventional audience-buying data (ie. Nielsen ratings, GRPs, etc.) to estimates that co-mingle so-called first- and second-party sources of data in a manner similar to the way agency trading desks utilize DMPs -- or data management platforms -- to trade online audience buys.

“The good news is that our charter members were quick to sign on to develop a plan forward,” Magna Global Worldwide CEO Tim Spengler stated, adding: “Our goal is to ignite real change in the way media is transacted for the industry.”

While programmatic trading systems are growing fast in the online display marketplace (Magna estimates this is currently about 25% of all online display advertising), the growth has come largely from the emergence of an over-supply of online inventory and auction-based media-buying models like “RTB,” or real-time bidding, that many “premium” suppliers are loath to embrace for fear it will “commoditize” the value of their inventory.

However, some of the most premium online publishers now participate in programmatic exchanges, and many of those deals are not necessarily auction-based, but function more like private exchanges where sellers can set pricing “floors” and buyers can set “ceilings" to ensure that both sides are in control of the process -- even if it’s being processed by machines faster than humans can manage such deal-making.

According to Frank Addante, CEO of Rubicon Project, one of the biggest suppliers of media-buying automation technology, the speed of such transactions is accelerating and is now down to 30 milliseconds of processing time for the average online buy. That’s an improvement from 300 milliseconds a year ago, and three seconds three years ago, all thanks to improvements in data-processing technologies.

The advances of such technologies, and the shift among advertisers and agencies to use them to improve their efficiency, as well as the data-driven effectiveness of reaching their audiences, has sparked a gold rush among media and advertising technology suppliers, many of whom are now going public. One of the fastest-growing and most sophisticated of those developers -- Rocket Fuel, which utilizes artificial intelligence and robots that can assess and bid for media value faster than any human can -- is the latest to file for an initial public offering.

In its filing late last week, Rocket Fuel noted that advertisers are flocking to its technology, and that its revenues more than doubled last year -- and more than tripled during the first half of this one, thanks to a surge in the number of advertisers using its platform. The filings said Rocket Fuel currently has 784 advertisers (up from 341 last year), and that many of its existing advertisers continue to increase the volume they trade via its systems.

The greatest impediment to Interpublic’s goal of automating 50% of all its media buys by 2016 is convincing the most premium suppliers of media inventory -- especially the major television networks -- that they won’t lose control, or value, by doing so, which is why A&E Networks' direct involvement is so significant.

That said, at least a portion of all of the most premium TV suppliers inventory already is being sold through programmatic exchanges. While it’s not being sold directly by the national TV networks themselves, the trading desks of at least two agency holding companies have already begun utilizing AudienceXpress, a programmatic audience-buying exchange spun off from target TV-ad serving developer Visible World. The portion being traded by AudienceXpress comes from the two minutes per hour that networks give to local cable TV operators as part of their carriage agreements. While the cable operators are supposed to sell that commercial time to local or regional advertisers, AudienceXpress effectively pools their national reach into unwired network buys.

Since it became operational in late January, AudienceXpress Founder and CEO Walt Horstman estimates the two agency trading desks that have been beta testing it have bought 2 billion TV advertising impressions through it.

The reason why AudienceXpress has been successful where others, including Google and Microsoft, have failed, says Horstman, is that its platform is designed to give suppliers 100% control over the floors they set for selling their inventory, while giving buyers the ability to analyze more data that will enhance the value of buying those audiences from their perspective.

As with online publishing, the supply of unsold TV inventory also continues to expand due to the emergence of so-called “long-tail” networks that are not yet rated by Nielsen, as well as a torrent of free video-on-demand audience impressions

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