Welcome To AdTech Weekly
"Advertising Has Its Axiom."
I had a nice little editorial put together for this week, but then Joe Parrish went and knocked it out of the park, eloquently stating what I've been struggling to write all day. So, I'm just going to leave a quote here, and recommend you read the whole article.
Joe Parrish (of The Variable), writing for The Drum:
I’ve seen so many decks from so many big agencies where they promise clients that their proprietary wizbangery will allow them to stick an idea in front of more people for less money. And I’m so not impressed. Show me the last brand that was built through banners. The bottom line is that quality should never take a back seat to quantity. And I feel like, so many times, that is what data forces us to do. If your KPI is eyeballs (interested or not), data can help. But if your KPI is goose bumps, data isn’t gonna get you there.
If you can only read one thing this week, I recommend reading this article, titled, Data can't write your ad -- yet.
AdTech News And Editorial
About.com Retires, Rebrands As Vertical Publisher Group Dotdash
Neil Vogel claimed that the vertical reinvention last year is paying dividends. Verywell, for instance, has grown 63% to 17 million monthly uniques since focusing on branded content creation over chasing search traffic.
24 billion clicks show mobile ad fraud is rampant: 8 networks are 100% fraudulent
The analysis shows that eight ad networks consist of nothing by fraudulent clicks. Another 35 networks are revealed to contain more than 50 percent fraud.
Snapchat is opening itself up to advertisers of all sizes with new buying tools
Starting this June, Snap is going a step further by flinging wide its gates to advertisers of all sizes and budgets with a new suite of self-service tools.
How to Write Powerful Advertorials that Sell
Writing a great advertorial requires a delicate balancing act between informative and sales content. In my experience, the strongest advertorials always share six characteristics. To help marketers reach their goals through advertorials, I’ve detailed them below along with examples from around the internet.
Rubicon Project Predicts ‘Significant’ Declines in Take Rate
Revenue declined 34% YoY to $46 million in the first quarter. Advertising spend declined 23%, to $191.5 million. Though the revenue slightly beat expectations, the stock slid a few percentage points in after-hours trading.
AppNexus leads adtech consortium to enable ‘people -based marketing’
AppNexus, LiveRamp and MediaMath, along with Index Exchange, LiveIntent, plus Rocket Fuel, have all agreed to to create a standard framework that will enable people-based media buying for advertisers looking to utilize programmatic technologies, similar to the deterministic targeting.
Chumbox Quality Quotient
More than a quarter of the trafficked sites are anonymously registered domains. This is this an indication of how unaccountably ads get arbitraged on these networks.
Confessions of a fed-up ad fraud researcher: ‘Prevention is always behind’
The researcher said agencies have perverse incentives when it comes to picking verification firms and a poor understanding of statistical sampling.
I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads
The hard reality is that Facebook will never try to limit such use of their data unless the public uproar reaches such a crescendo as to be un-mutable.