Guardian US tests header bidding technology to maximize ad yield

thedrum.com

The Guardian is the latest tier one title to experiment with the use of header bidding technology, as the publisher seeks to strike the right balance between increasing the number of bids on its advertising inventory without detracting from the user experience in a real-time bidding (RTB) context.

The Guardian has confirmed with The Drum that it is testing a number of ad tech options, and is working with a number of vendors, believed to be AppNexus and Rubicon Project, to trial header bidding technology.

Header bidding is a method of deciding how best to allocate advertising inventory, and causes much disagreement in the industry. While it has been available for years, the technology has received a massive push from several ad tech vendors over the past 12 months.

This technology works by letting a publisher offer an ad impression to several ad exchanges at once on an RTB basis, before issuing a call to its ad server (this is usually Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers). Alternatively said publisher can instead decide to allocate the ad impression to another method of monetization, such as a directly sold deal.

Balancing bid density and latency

Advocates of the technology claim this will improve yield for publishers by increasing the number of bids on a given impression, but as noted header bidding is not without its detractors (Google is a notable critic of the technology) with a key criticism being that it can impair page load times.

For its part, the Guardian is trialing header bidding to see how the technology can improve its advertising yield in the US, and key to this will be striking the right balance between working with the right number of partners without detracting from the audience experience.

One concern the Guardian (or indeed any publisher using header bidding technology) has to address is how the potentially longer page load times will affect ad viewability. Critics of the technology note that having to perform an ad auction before issuing an ad request to DFP could result in a user scrolling past any adverts before they have loaded properly.

Header bidding splits opinion

As mentioned above, debate over the application of header bidding has been one of the key issues of disagreement in the ad tech sector over the last 12 months, and is likely to remain so throughout 2016 as vendors such as AppNexus and Rubicon Project continue to extol its virtues now that the use of programmatic advertising has hit scale.

Speaking earlier with The Drum about the use of header bidding technology Tom Shields, AppNexus’ SVP publisher strategy, said the benefits of header bidding were that publishers have the ability to see what prices buyers are willing to pay for an impression, before having to accept a bid. 

Discussing earlier header bidding trials AppNexus has conducted with publishers, Shields went on to state that the revenue gains were “huge”, and that concerns over bid latency leading to impaired page load times, etc., were overplayed.

To aid the rollout of header-bidding, AppNexus has contributed some open source code to the IAB US' Tech Lab, asking them to issue its seal of approval in a bid to promote header bidding. This includes submitting some guidelines, which are currently being reviewed by the trade body, according to Shields. 

As noted above, Google is a vocal critic of header bidding technology, and is instead testing an alternative called ‘DFP First Look’, the revelation was first made in a heated debate on the use of the technology shown on the video above (courtesy of the IAB) where Shields (center stage) debates the technology with Jonathan Bellack, Google’s director of product management (seated right).    

The alternative to 'the waterfall'?

Header bidding has been developed, and pushed to market with a view to addressing some of the issues involved with publishers monetizing inventory in an auction process – typically this is called ‘waterfalling’.  

AppNexus’ Shields is quick to highlight that this method of monetization almost always favor Google’s DFP. He told The Drum: “The question you have to ask yourself is: who benefits from the waterfall?”

Similarly, in a recent opinion piece penned by Alex Reinhold, Sociomantic’s head of global supply, said: “To discuss header bidding without addressing Google is insane. Ultimately, both Google and ad exchanges are offering their attempts at horizontalisation—and our industry is lapping it up.”   

Meanwhile, Martin Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Infectious Media, offered The Drum an opinion from the buy-side of the industry. He added: "Ad tech was supposed to be brought about to offer an open, liquid market place, and what some of this debate shows is that it's not."

He went on to sate that if 'waterfalling' is something that favors DFP then header bidding is a solution to be welcomed. "However, it can feel like it's a hack, and from the buy-side there are certainly questions to be asked of it," he added. 

Snapchat is testing ads that contain advertorials like listicles

marketingland.com

Snapchat has started testing ads that let marketers like AT&T attach branded articles containing text, images and GIFs to their 10-second video ads.

AT&T is using Snapchat’s advertorial-containing ad format to run a listicle of GIFs.

Snapchat’s advertising business has only been around for about 17 months, and in that time its ad formats have been pretty basic: 10-second vertical videos slotted between posts in its Live and Local Stories or content in publishers’ Discover channels. That’s changing.

A couple of months after Snapchat rolled out its first app-install ads, the app has begun testing a new type of interactive ad that lets brands append branded articles to Snapchat’s standard vertical video (or 3V) ad format, a Snapchat spokesperson confirmed.

AT&T appears to be the first brand to try out the new format with a campaign that began earlier this week in BuzzFeed’s Discover channel and has expanded to other Discover channels, including Refinery29’s. In AT&T’s example, people can swipe up from the video to see a listicle of GIFs to promote the ability for people to stream NCAA tournament games on their smartphones.

While AT&T has adopted a listicle format for its campaign, it’s believed that the new format caters to any style of branded article that incorporates text, photos and GIFs.

The more interactive ad format could boost Snapchat’s pitch to brand advertisers looking to expose people to their brands for as long as possible, assuming Snapchat green-lights the test into an official ad format. And Snapchat appears to be fully aware of that. Last November, Snapchat started testing video ads that were longer than its standard 10-second length, which has been used by film studios to run 90-second trailers promoting movies like “10 Cloverfield Lane.”

The article-oriented interactive ads would also offer brands another outlet for the text-based branded content they’re creating. And it could offer Discover publishers that create those advertorials with brands, like BuzzFeed and Mashable, another option when selling their Snapchat channels, as well as a way to better bundle those Snapchat sales with their other properties without a need to produce — and the brand to pay for — extra content unique to each distribution outlet.

Report: Bot Fraud Costs Advertisers $7.2 Billion Worldwide

adweek.com

Bots are a constant thorn in the side of the digital advertising industry. They are becoming more sophisticated, and thus more difficult to track and remove. And with the rampant fraud, advertising online might seem a futile endeavor.

A report from the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA) suggests that it’s time for digital advertisers to get realistic. The digital media industry continues to pour budgets into advertising, with bigger, more expensive campaigns, and much of that money is wasted on bots.

According to the report:

Last year globally, display media with cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPMs) over $10 received 39% more bot traffic than lower CPM media. Video media with CPMs over $15 had a 173% higher bot rate than lower CPM media. Going programmatic, the holy grail of hands-off media planning, makes matters worse. Programmatic display ads attracted 14% more bot traffic than average while programmatic video invited 73% more bots.

In addition, online audiences are adopting adblockers at high rates across the globe. Approximately 40 percent of all users have an adblocker installed, up 12 percent compared to mid 2015. These adblockers affect everyone in the industry, including Google, which loses up to $6.6 billion per year. Non-viewability may be wasting more than $7.4 billion per year, bot fraud may cost more than $7.2 billion globally, and reporting fraud may be as high as 25 percent.

Ignoring this problem is creating a “reality gap,” according to the report. Advertisers need to make changes to their methods, and they need to find ways to deal with bots and adblockers in particular. Digital advertising budgets are ever increasing, but when the loss is so high, this is not a problem easily solved by outspending fraud and pushing more ad units.

Begging for engagement from social media and internet users isn’t going to work either. Audiences want genuine value for everything they view online, not just the content they seek but the ads they are exposed to as well. In fact, readers don’t mind sponsored content, especially when it comes from influencers. Identifying your core audience, and engaging with them correctly will do a lot more than wasting another billion dollars.

For information on OAAA’s real world meets online campaign, download the full report.

The comprehensive guide to video advertising in 2016

marketingland.com

Columnist Thomas Stern discusses best practices for video advertising across a wide variety of platforms and channels, including mobile, display and social.

The expanding reach and connectivity of digital video advertising provides marketers with improved outlets for engagement.

Increasingly, consumers are cutting their ties to traditional media and turning to digital video for discovery, entertainment and brand awareness. BI Intelligence reports that in 2016, digital video will reach nearly $5 billion in ad revenue due to developing delivery channels, amplified engagement and the highest average click-through rate (1.84 percent) of any digital format.

Cross-channel video advertising has transformed how brands reach users at key points of the customer journey and influence conversions with highly engaging media. Digital video advertising empowers brands to build stronger connections along the path to purchase with niche-focused content delivered across an increasing variety of digital channels and connected devices.

Over the last few years, research firms such as eMarketer have tracked the maturing value of display advertising, noting extensive growth across all digital channels since 2013. Display ad spend from video, banner ads, rich media and sponsorships is set to surpass total ad spend for search advertising this year. This shows that marketers are flocking to more visual and connected forms of advertising that adapt to changing user behaviors.

Today’s users expect advertising to be brief, targeted and convenient. Consumers engage with content at a feverish pace and scroll past ads that fail to capture their attention.

Video advertising creates a more stimulating environment for consumers by meeting their expectations for content. It allows brands to quickly inform and visually entertain, which generates a powerful platform for conversion when accurately targeted across user behavior patterns.

In this article, I offer marketers some insights to help leverage a variety of targeting opportunities and delivery techniques to create effective cross-channel video advertising campaigns.

With integration throughout content networks, brands can deliver extremely relevant, engaging videos to users across social, mobile and traditional outlets — improving brand awareness, conversions and retention.

Don’t surrender your market share to competitors. Expand your digital reach with video advertising that connects your target audience segments with the digital content experiences they desire.

Cross-channel video impacts purchases

The structure of video advertising is changing as the range of digital content continues to expand. With more channels for delivery and improved targeting features, video advertising now allows brands to reach audience segments across their preferred platforms to stimulate the highest levels of ROI.

Cross-channel video campaigns connect with users across websites, social networks, mobile devices and connected TVs, delivering content fluidly along different touch points of a consumer’s journey. This increased exposure with engaging, targeted content positions brands for purchase in an increasingly competitive landscape.

Imagine the progression a user goes through when making a big purchase like a car. They initiate the process by building a consideration set of possible brands and models that fit their needs. As users collect information across relevant and trusted sources, video ads can reach users on those sites with content targeted around the needs specific to different stages of search (such as product information or nearby stores). Additionally, video ads can reactivate a user’s search by connecting during lulls in their research process with social, mobile and programmatic TV advertising.

Successful cross-channel video advertising campaigns will reach users with targeted content across their entire path to purchase and identify their point of conversion. Actionable exposure can aid conversion whether users encounter video display ads on trusted websites, in-stream videos from their mobile device, sponsored content across social networks or targeted video content displayed across connected TV devices.

Visibility at each of these touch points allows users to build trust and awareness with your brand. Enhance your overall value with connected strategies in each of the following video platforms.

In-stream video advertising

In-stream video ads display content within a video player before, during or after a piece of video content. This is a great way to target niche audience segments already searching for video content to solve a need.

Typically, 15- to 30-second pre-roll video ads are used to display an advertisement before a video begins. According to Google, these ads are most effective when focused around branding, as conversion rates are often lower than with other forms.

Keep your message tight, and offer value to users with as little disruption as possible. Many in-stream ads can be skipped after five seconds, so convey your message quickly, and incorporate strong calls to action early in your video.

Direct traffic from your ads to additional video content on your website to foster a user’s video experience and further stimulate engagement. Ensure that you create a positive experience for users by directing traffic to relevant landing pages that correlate with the targeting used initially to trigger a view. Incorporate remarketing code on your landing pages to continue delivering targeted ads that grow awareness and stimulate conversion as users move around the web.

Display video advertising

Advanced audience targeting allows your brand to display relevant video content within banner ads and text links on the sites users already explore and trust. This lets brands piggyback on the authority these pages hold, building trust and driving conversions with targeted solutions.

For example, a user may come to a site to view an article about designer shoes and experience a targeted auto-play video from a shoe retailer in place of a standard banner ad. This can be an effective way to stimulate action from users already engaged in discovery and at key points in their research process.

To be successful, ensure that you and your media buyer have a good understanding of audience segments targeted within campaigns. Align your video content with relevant user interests and websites to improve the impact of your investments. To increase retention and ROI, make your content actionable, with clear value and strong calls to action displayed early within an ad.

Additionally, display ads can be a good platform to draw additional engagement with interactive and expandable media that rewards users who click to learn more.

Social video advertising

Social media networks offer a unique platform to deliver video content that goes beyond promotional advertising. Unlike in-stream and display advertising, videos advertised within social media channels are inherently more shareable, as they are well integrated within the content users have come to interact with. Additionally, sponsored videos within social networks often look very similar to organic content and are equipped with additional features that allow users to share, like and discuss.

Most social platforms allow marketers to share videos directly in the news feeds of targeted audience segments, which can stimulate additional reach organically. Create video content tailored around the detailed user interests and demographics accessible in social channels, and leverage paid amplification to heighten exposure and engagement.

On some social networks, marketers can choose to have videos silently auto-play. Adapt content to offer value and stimulate interest without sound.

According to a study from Locowise, viewers on Facebook watch videos for 18.2 seconds on average, despite the average video length being 55.3 seconds. By incorporating compelling content and imagery within the first three seconds of videos, brands can increase viewing and retention rates from social videos. Furthermore, make sure your thumbnails are compelling enough to encourage users to stop scrolling and engage with your content. Combined, these tactics can lower your cost per acquisition and enhance conversion rates.

Mobile video advertising

According to eMarketer, digital video advertising spend will double by 2019 in response to a surge in mobile video. With mobile leading online access, user trends in content consumption have shifted. There is a massive, growing market of mobile consumers looking for quick, valuable and relevant content on the go.

As recent data from Cisco suggests, video is the preferred content platform for mobile users and will soon make up two-thirds of mobile online traffic. To be visible in such a fast-paced market, brands must adapt to changes in consumer behavior.

Mobile video advertising presents many of the same targeting and delivery options as desktop, with two distinct advantages. First, studies from Google and Ipsos have found that mobile video holds more attention and provides additional opportunities for real-time engagement.

Second, 68 percent of video on mobile devices is non-skippable, according to the Mobile Marketing Association. This means your mobile views are more valuable and present the opportunity for higher completion and click rates.

To take advantage of this opportunity, keep your videos actionable, between 16 and 30 seconds long, and develop content that adapts to different screen sizes. Additionally, coding videos in HTML5 VPAID allows marketers to run interactive pre-roll/mid-roll/post-roll video regardless of device, screen size or most in-application environments.

From the Mobile Marketing Association’s Mobile Video Benchmark Study

Programmatic TV advertising

Perhaps the most exciting advancement in video advertising is programmatic TV, which allows marketers to deliver digital video advertising through television sets. Instead of conventional show ratings, this platform leverages advanced audience data to deliver targeted videos to niche segments already engaged with related video content.

Unlike traditional channels, programmatic TV advertising allows brands to deliver highly focused and measurable video content across connected TV, linear TV and addressable TV outlets, creating value and operational efficiency for marketers and consumers.

Create your video content to be flexible with all screen sizes, as users may be streaming from large smart TVs or small mobile devices. Programmatic TV advertising allows for extremely niche targeting to user segments already watching video content and comfortable with video advertisements. Additionally, targeting features expand audience reach, allowing marketers to retarget website visitors who did not convert, competitors’ customers and user segments as they move across devices.

Video advertising best practices

To get the most out of your video advertising, develop a cross-channel strategy that incorporates a variety of delivery methods to engage users at all stages of the discovery process and across all devices.

Video exposure throughout their path to purchase can grow awareness and improve conversion rates. Regardless of your video advertising platform, keep the following best practices in mind:

• Invest in quality production.
• Cater video content to devices and audience interests.
• Leverage audience data to keep content targeting relevant.
• Implement retargeting to track users across devices.
• Pay by view or completion to keep impressions and conversions high.
• Monitor video shares, channel subscribers and site traffic.
• Establish goals in your analytics platform to track online conversions.
• Display strong calls to action at the beginning and end of videos.
• Tell your story with and without sound.
• Incorporating compelling content and imagery within the first three seconds of videos.

3 lessons mobile advertising can learn from display’s mistakes

Phil Guest is senior vice president for international at The Exchange Lab

mobilemarketer.com

By Phil Guest

Take one look at the mobile marketing ecosystem and you will see the parallels between mobile and display advertising: vast swathes of investment from venture capitalists (VC) over the past five years that resulted in a boom that has left a fragmented ecosystem. 

It is well documented that the boom days of VC ad-tech investment in Silicon Valley are coming to a dramatic end, leaving marketers with a mobile advertising ecosystem that is increasingly difficult to navigate. 

Add in multiple operating systems alongside the opportunity and challenge proffered by walled-garden publishers such as Facebook and Google present, plus the differences in mobile-Web and application environments, and things start to get messy for marketers.

Mobile has the opportunity to help marketers put their consumers first, but that currently is not happening as much as it should. 

Learning from the past mistakes of display advertising, here are three areas that the mobile industry should focus on to develop a better consumer experience.

Avoid same growing pains

Take a look back to the early days of programmatic digital display advertising when media owners were selling their inventory direct to advertisers and giving unsold long-tail, or remnant inventory, to SSPs and exchanges. 

Prices for direct advertising were much higher and inventory was largely left unsold. Remnant inventory that was sold was often un-targeted, undesirable and inappropriate, leaving many editors in despair.  

Then, publishers woke up to programmatic as a great way to monetize their inventory at scale and started releasing premium ad units to an auction environment. 

Fast-forward to today, and programmatic display advertising has cleaned up its act, while mobile appears to be back in the same early cycle as display. 

In-app inventory is in abundance and prices are low. Mobile Web is relatively under-developed and reliant on micro-banners that most consumers click by accident. 

Repeating the same learning pattern as display would be insane and mobile can avoid many of the pitfalls. 

Programmatically traded mobile inventory that is aligned with a good mobile experience, based on quality rather than quantity, is the only way forward. 

After all, Albert Eisenstein described insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. 

Deliver a seamless experience 

The media industry is learning a tough lesson from the adoption of ad blocking and if we do not pay attention, it will jeopardize much of what we have built. 

If you go to many of the top news Web sites today, you will find great content and increasingly fresh layouts. 

Scroll to the bottom of the page, however, and on many of these sites you will see placements full of irrelevant content designed as clickbait for a third party. These ads are contaminating content on the rest of the site, leading to a poor consumer experience. 

Those content segments are not only jarring, but when you do click, they take you out of the main site, breaking the flow and putting us in a whole new environment, inconsistent with the original experience.

All advertising, whatever the medium, works best when it is relevant to the consumer. 

Native ads that blend in with site content help build brand trust and affinity. Social formats also offer in-feed solutions that are less out of place because of their friend- recommendation associations. 

These are great opportunities for advertisers to add value to users in the way some large publishers are doing now. Mobile environments are well positioned to create a better, more consistent consumer experience. 

An example such as Amazon Video’s X-Ray feature within its mobile player provides additional information on actors and the sound track, enabling viewers to jump to that content in a click, all within the same window. 

Mobile advertising should employ a similar seamless approach to content and function, avoiding the dumbing down of the content experience. 

Expandable ad formats are one current way to give the consumer the same option to open new content and remain in the same window. 

Publishers should rethink all their formats and invest in their mobile Web properties to encourage marketers to think outside of linear formats. 

Mobile has the potential to create engaging personal ad experiences in real-time, adding to customers’ lives rather than turning them off. 

Focus on what counts 

In the same way that it took marketers 10 years to recognize that clicks do not determine display performance, the same should be said about mobile advertising. 

This comes down to better measurement and attribution of mobile campaign performance for which the industry currently is not set up. 

True campaign attribution should cover a user across multiple devices and take into account multiple touch points, something that no vendor is able to do currently at scale. 

Multi-touch attribution helps build a clear consumer picture for marketers, taking into account branding and other performance influences on consumer behavior. Clicks alone cannot do this. 

TELECOMMUNICATION AND technology vendors need to come together to share both user preferences across platforms and consumer tracking. 

While uniting an industry that is used to competing against each other rather than working together may be ambitious, this needs to happen for the benefit of consumer experience as well as marketers. 

Mobile has the potential to unlock momentous marketing experiences and holds great opportunities for marketers to think outside the box. 

The digital industry has had to learn its lessons the hard way. Mobile has a great advantage that it must use to take advertising to the next level before it loses the consumer forever.

Mobile ads: Will advertising fund cheap mobile phone deals?

cbronline.com

Analysis: Mobile operators need to decide how they are going to handle mobile ads.

Advertising is becoming omnipresent in modern life, particularly as many services become free. Is it possible that in future we will have completely free mobile services, paid for through advertising?

The basic advertising for content deal has been around for a while. Television channels have partially or wholly funded themselves with advertising for a long time.

In the digital age, the model is the same; a website might require you to view a banner ad before you can read an article. Spotify allows users to listen to music for free if they are willing to listen to an advert every few songs.

With mobile advertising set to be worth over $100 billion by 2018, according to eMarketer, it's time for mobile operators to decide what they are going to do about it.

Some operators have tried to offer protection from ads as a service in itself; the user pays their subscription and receives a premium service where they have to interact with no ads whatsoever.

For example, UK operator Three is working with Shine Technologies to implement new technology to tackle mobile advertising at the network level.

Three said that it does not aim to eliminate mobile advertising altogether, but to empower the customers with more choice over the advertising that they receive. Three pledged to protect the right of consumers "not to have their data experience in mobile degraded by excessive, intrusive, unwanted or irrelevant adverts."

This approach could be a win-win for mobile operators. They limit the unwanted ads and the user is happier and gets a better data access experience. If they are curating the ads, they will also find a new revenue stream from the advertisers.

Other mobile operators are using advertising itself as a new revenue stream.

In the mobile arena, FreedomPop offers a completely free service, with a fairly limited data, voice and text allowance.

However, users can upgrade to a bigger plan in exchange for "performing specific actions with [FreedomPop]'s third-party advertisers."

These could include completing questionnaires or purchasing products or services. The provider clearly quantifies the amount of additional service the customer will get if they complete the required action.

One company working to bridge the gap between advertisers, mobile operators and customers is Aquto, which currently works in the US with AT&T.

As of October 2015, the start-up had raised over $16 million. Based in Boston, the firm has recently expanded into markets in Asia and Europe, with a partnership with Brightstar opening the door to a network across more than 100 countries.

Eligible AT&T customers can use the Data Perks app to accumulate data of up to 1000MB per bill period to their AT&T account.

Kester Mann says that the ad-funded model is tough to make work in the UK due to the competitive market and the "high costs of buying data and establishing a brand presence."

He cites the failures of Blyk and Samba as evidence of this.

Blyk, for example, was launched in 2007 in the UK, offering free calls and texts to 16 to 24-year-olds in exchange for viewing a certain number of targeted ads during the day.

It only reached 200,000 customers in its first year of existence and never expanded to the continent, being acquired by Orange in 2009.

Mann adds that the costs of plans are currently fairly low in the UK anyway, leaving little room for undercutting.

"Only last week, charitable MVNO The People's Operator launched a tariff offering 2GB of 4G data for just £6.99 per month," says Mann. "This undercuts many of its peers, illustrating the tough ask for low-cost or discounted providers. When prices are so cheap already, the ad-funded business model could be tough to pull off."

"Many consumer surveys point to an obvious conclusion: most people hate seeing ads on smartphones and tablets," says Calum Geraghty, marketing manager, EMEA & APAC, Webtrends.

Geraghty notes that when consumers are faced with a choice between free apps with ads, or paying even a nominal fee for an app without ads, "consumers overwhelmingly choose the free apps and tolerate the ads.

"While consumers may not like in-app advertising, their behaviour makes it clear that they are willing to accept it in exchange for free content, just as we have had in radio, TV and online media for decades."

However, Geraghty argued it was unlikely that mobile services would in future be completely funded by ads.

"This would depend on multiple factors including how tolerant the users were to the ads being served and how much revenue the advertisers would anticipate making buy essentially paying for people to have a free phone," he said.

He argued that since mobile services are fairly cheap anyway, consumers would be quite averse to a constant stream of advertising.

However, we may see mobile operators either blocking ads or taking a greater role in curating them in future.

A Guide to Programmatic Advertising for Financial Marketers

thefinancialbrand.com

Here's how programmatic advertising — automated, real-time bidding and placement of online ads — can help financial institutions grow and retain more relationships.

By Laurie Naspe, Director/Strategic Insights at Quantcast

According to the IAB, the financial sector spent over $7.19 billion on display advertising in 2015. This figure reflects a massive shift in the industry — two out of every five financial institutions in the U.S. say they will move 20-40% of their offline budgets to digital in the next two years. The advent of programmatic advertising (the automated buying of digital media) has created massive opportunities for increased efficiency and relevancy at every stage of the consumer’s journey.

Financial advertising trends

Increasingly, digital display ads are being purchased programmatically. Today, 45% of U.S. digital display advertising is spent on programmatic.

As advertising moves towards digital, financial institutions, too, have reworked the ways they advertise online. According to an independent study commissioned by Quantcast, the majority of larger financial organizations (over 500 employees) are already spending 20 to 40% of their digital display budgets programmatically.

Understanding your audience

Programmatic advertising, like all forms of advertising, should always start with target audience — i.e., the customer. Looking at audience insights from global Quantcast campaigns in the financial services sector yields a deeper understanding of who a typical online borrower/credit applicant is. Credit card and loan applicants are:

• Likely to be young, professional males who live in big cities
• 2x more likely to have a graduate degree
• 2x more likely to be in the top income bracket
• Often researching international travel destinations and fine dining
• Making purchases on retail sites, booking travel and searching for homes

Take a financial services brand that has three different credit cards. On the surface, all three credit cards are similar products with similar audiences. However, in reality these products — and their audiences — are very different. By understanding the nuances that make each of these audiences special, marketers can create much more relevant and targeted advertisements.

While understanding your target audience is important, you have to reach them on the devices that they are using. The Quantcast study revealed that 51% of large financial brands derived over 41% of their overall web traffic from users on mobile devices. This means that there is a massive opportunity to reach consumers where they are spending the majority of their browsing and searching time: mobile.

From the day the first credit card ad is seen, it takes someone an average of 23 days to submit an application. And credit card applications on tablets are more likely to be submitted on weekend afternoons, whereas the desktop channel is favored during the week.

But how can you manage all these variables in your digital media plan? What is the appropriate product to offer someone based on their past online behaviors? Should you deliver the ad on desktop vs. mobile vs. tablet? How can you retarget interested credit card shoppers during their 23-day consideration phase? It can quickly become bewildering.

This is where a programmatic ad strategy can really help.

Leveraging Programmatic Technology

Programmatic advertising allows for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness in media buying via ad exchanges that instantly serve hyper-targeted advertisements. In short, you can automate the purchase and delivery of ads to consumers at the right time, on the right device, and for the right product.

Unlike traditional forms of advertising, programmatic advertising enables marketers to target users based on characteristics such as browsing behavior or interests. These programmatic ad systems crunch massive streams of user data — effectively doing your Big Data dirty work for you — so you can target customers throughout their journey with precision messages.

By incorporating and taking action on the intent signals your audience is giving off, such as keyword and browsing behaviors, marketers can take advantage of potential consumers as they continue their journey toward conversion.

And in an industry where accountholders stay with their institution for years, it’s critical to connect with audiences early, then continue the engagement throughout the process — from initial awareness, preference and building to the final action. Programmatic advertising is one of the few options that provides the scale needed to maximize your reach across the entire sales funnel.

Prioritizing Your Advertising Budget

When allocating advertising budgets, financial marketers prioritize growing their customer base, retaining customers, driving conversions, upselling, increasing site visits and branding. The majority of financial services marketers allocate more of their digital budgets to prospecting (bringing new customers to their site) than retargeting (driving conversions from site visitors).

But driving leads and sales isn’t the only objective. 90% of financial marketers say that branding is an important priority in their advertising budgets. Generating brand awareness with key target audiences before they are even in-market for a credit card or bank account can help to build brand affinity. With the right messaging, you can guide consumers from the very initial “awareness” stage to “consideration” and ultimately “preference.”

Niche Targeting With Programmatic

One global financial services provider wanted to find and reach frequent fliers quickly with a promotion for its high-end airline credit card. The company worked with Quantcast to identify and target a niche audience of frequent fliers after analyzing large data sets of real-time web activity. Quantcast’s technology enabled a comparison of the browsing patterns of frequent fliers with millions of other web users to find similar behaviors. Quantcast was then able to serve ads for the promotion to this new, previously hidden set of prospects before they even started researching any credit card options.

Fast analysis of the data also uncovered a new customer segment. An unusually large number of applicants were also researching animation and comics. Further investigation revealed two major comics conventions along the promoted route shortly after the credit card promotion dates. Quantcast was able to tap into this new segment of comics fans and serve relevant messages in real time to boost conversions.

Ultimately, comics fans made up 35% of the total conversions that signed up to the credit card. Crazy, right? That’s not something you’d probably ever be able to figure out on your own.

Putting It Into Practice: Implementing Tags

Of course, to make all this happen, you have to implement “tags” — tracking codes you need to place in your website that will become the building blocks for your campaigns. Valuable data from tags provides the insights necessary to improve modeling of new audiences. The attributes of visitors who complete acceptance pages could, for example, feed into the creation of an advertising model, which can be used to score other Internet users and serve them ads accordingly.

However, the Quantcast study found that 61% of all respondents at large financial organizations have concerns regarding data privacy when it comes to tagging website pages.

Financial marketers should be careful to ask these questions before working with any potential programmatic ad solutions provider to ensure their data is being handled correctly:

How does the company ensure its products do not collect or use any personally identifiable information (PII) of individuals based on their website actions?

• Does the company sell its clients’ audiences to third parties?
• Will the company use client data for other advertisers’ campaigns?
• Has a third-party regulating body carried out a security assessment of the supplier’s systems?
• Where is the audience data stored?

These are all issues you’ll want to sort out with your compliance team if your financial institution is going to get seriously involved in any programmatic ad buying.

Closing Thoughts

Forward-thinking financial marketers need to start researching the opportunities to leverage the real-time changes in consumer behavior offered by programmatic ad buying. Consumer engagement with mobile devices will only increase, but most financial marketers struggle devising an effective mobile advertising/marketing strategy. Financial institutions have the ability to amass consumer data in vast quantities from these devices, but success will be determined by how data is used to identify prospects, create models of new audiences and deliver personalized messages at scale.

Done correctly, programmatic can help you uncover untapped audiences. You can reach your prospects when they are most receptive to your message. You can get in your audience’s consideration set, and put your brand top-of-mind before prospects start shopping, then usher them through the funnel to purchase. The ultimate objective is to identify potential customers and deliver them the right message — on every device — faster than your competitors. If you get started with programmatic advertising today, you’ll have a big jump on them.