Welcome To AdTech Weekly
Holding Our Feet To The Fire
One of our Slack channels exploded this week because a publisher passed on a campaign we had lined up for them. While the rest of our team were voicing their frustration, I thought it was fantastic.
Publishers regularly turn down campaigns from our advertising partners because they don’t view the campaigns as a fit for their audiences. It’s something that’s a constant struggle for us (esp. our ad sales team) because we all pride ourselves on collecting the best possible advertisements we can for our publishing partners. While I can understand our team’s frustrations, I’m actually quite thankful that our publishing partners constantly hold our feet to the flame and demand better advertisements for their audiences.
That kind of commitment to audiences isn’t the norm in our industry anymore, but at BuySellAds we actually try to cultivate those kinds of publishing partnerships. Advertising online has ultimately become a ‘set it and forget it’ type of industry for the majority of people trafficking in advertisements online today. Measurement happens, but rarely at a level that considers audience perception as a key metric.
To see a publisher pass on a lucrative campaign because they don’t believe the product matches up with their audience is always quite eye-opening, and it tells me that publishers still get it.
Maybe I was naive, but I used to view online advertisements as products that were being endorsed by publishers. That’s not the case any longer, thanks to things like content ad networks, RTB, and other formats like interstitials, pop-unders, and basically every other interruptive technique now littering the side of abandoned ad tech highways.
Building trust is the only real currency a content producer has today. It’s increasingly difficult to hock snake oil for a living online. A quick Google search, or even a search on social sites like Facebook or Twitter, immediately reveals the truth about a product.
Some companies, like Wirecutter, get the value of maintaining their audience’s trust. They’re renowned for taking a trust-first approach to everything they cover online. Their audience has come to respect them tremendously for it. Most, however, seem to have forgotten that the trust and relationship between reader and content producer is what actually drives revenue growth. When that trust is gone, the power of advocacy disappears almost immediately. As a result, revenue tends to dry up pretty quick.
So, when publishers turn down an advertisement outright, I do a little happy dance inside. For me, it means that they take their audiences seriously. For me, it means that they understand the situation they find themselves in today. It means they’ve made our jobs a little bit easier in the long run because they have a lock on their audience demographics.
Publishers who understand the relationship between audiences and their brands are doing the most important thing they can online, protecting their most valuable commodity: trust. Without it, what do they have left? Not a whole lot.
Joshua Schnell, BuySellAds
AdTech News And Editorial
Native Ads Will Democratize Advertising
Native campaigns don’t only save advertisers time and money by reducing production hours — removing design from the equation democratizes the entire digital ad process. Now, anyone with writing chops and an understanding of their audience can place effective digital advertisements on preferred websites.
I Am Where I Am In Life Because Of Advertising Online
When I boil it all down, I come back to one simple truism: advertising online is responsible for driving the revenue of the majority of content creation on the internet. It creates jobs.
Conde Nast Britain's 18-person native ad team accounts for half its digital revenue
Native advertising revenue has taken a considerable jump across its portfolio, which includes Wired, GQ and Vogue. This year, native accounted for half of its digital ad revenue, up from 25 percent in 2015.
Google Says Faster Mobile Ads Are Boosting Clickthrough Rates Up to 200 Percent
Results showed publishers using AMP, an open-source Google initiative, saw clickthrough rates increase by 200 percent, completion rates increase by 15 percent and ad performance increase 18 percent.
Can Rubicon's Customizable Ad Filter Make Online Advertising Less Annoying?
"The plug-in, called Project Awesome, will filter not only ads placed by Rubicon but also by any other ad exchanges, including inside Facebook. A forthcoming app will do the same for ads in mobile browsers and apps. But this will take time—if it succeeds at all, that is. Project Awesome launched in a test phase with a private beta (you can request access), and only for the Chrome browser."
YouTube, Quitters And The Black Market Of Advertising
YouTube marketing is strong because it can achieve the holy grail of marketing, which is advocacy. Advocacy in marketing is a term which describes the type of marketing that we receive from friends and families. YouTube builds this relationship with viewers through the trust gained by the content creators.
There's a huge opportunity for publishers to monetize through genuine "advocacy marketing". Call what you'd like (native advertising, anyone?), but if a brand or person has the respect of their audience and they genuinely believe in a product, they'll drive more sales than a display advertisement ever could.
Raconteur magazine folds ‘suddenly’ after eight months
We stubbornly kept going all year despite the advertising revenue not being there, but finally had to accept that it's a distraction we can no longer afford.
Ad tech profits from ads on fake news -- and preventing ads on fake news
Blacklists often fail in programmatic buying, and with brand anxiety high post election, some vendors are capitalizing on the zeitgeist by developing products that block ads from reaching fake news websites.
Header Bidding
Purch Ditches Header Bidding And Moves Server-To-Server
“What’s great about header bidding is that it adds more demand sources and competition,” said Purch CTO John Potter. “What’s not good about it is that the entire process takes place on the user’s browser. Moving server-to-server, we get rid of all that back-and-forth on the client side and remove a lot of clutter and latency from the user’s page.”
Header Bidding Will ''Take A Back Seat'' According To Publishers
"Now there’s speculation that header bidding will come to an end as publishers shift toward server-to-server solutions that move bidding actions off publishers’ pages and onto servers."
Platforms
Social Media Moves to Advertising Forefront
Social media ad spending should be "comfortably ahead" of newspaper advertising by 2020, driven by consumers using social media as their "main source of news," Zenith said.
Warning... Autoplaying video ad. ಠ_ಠ