Amazon Unveils New Video Advertising Solutions
Amazon unveiled a slew of new video advertising capabilities at its Unboxed event. A bright spot for the retailer in the midst of economic uncertainty is its highly profitable advertising revenue. Alan Moss, VP of Global Advertising Sales at Amazon Ads in a statement,
“We have to provide our advertisers the flexibility, efficiency and scale to be nimble and responsive as their needs change.”
These include features like campaign presets, campaign recommendations, and video creation tools. Tanner Elton, vice president of U.S. sales for Amazon Ads said in a statement, “We want to bring the power of video advertising to more brands, no matter their size or level of resources.” Here is a quick overview of 7 new features and programs follows:
1. Rewarded Sponsored Display
Brands can add an Amazon shopping credit directly into the Sponsored Display creative. Customers receive the reward by clicking on the ad and purchasing the featured product. This is an expansion of the rewarded ads already available across various placements, including Twitch and Fire TV.
Business owners that sell products and services in verticals that Amazon doesn’t carry, such as restaurants and hotels, can now use Amazon’s Sponsored Display ad product to market to Twitch viewers. The interesting part to note is it is available only to Sponsored Display Ads and not Sponsored Product Ads. The feature will soon roll out to U.S. advertisers in closed beta.
2. Sponsored Display for non-native brands
Amazon Ads is introducing Sponsored Displays for brands that do not sell in Amazon’s stores. This is currently offered to US advertisers in closed beta on Twitch. Previously, sponsored ads had only been available for brands that sell products on Amazon. Now, businesses that sell products and services in verticals not available on Amazon, like restaurants and hotels, can use Sponsored Displays to reach the highly engaged Twitch audience.
This is currently offered to U.S. advertisers in closed beta on Twitch. There needs to be more information regarding when or if this will apply to Amazon.com on-site placements and other owned media properties. If it does then this could be an excellent opportunity for non-native brands. Amazon’s increasing focus on revenue generation beyond its own ecosystem could pave the way for bigger opportunities in the future. Existing advertisers will face competition, which will lead to an increase in Amazon’s auction-based bidding costs.
3. Sponsored Display video creative
Sponsored Display video creative available worldwide empowers advertisers of all sizes, particularly small and emerging brands, to easily create video campaigns that showcase their products and stories to millions of customers on Amazon and elsewhere online. Advertisers can deliver immersive video ads—such as tutorials, demos, unboxing, and testimonials—and measure campaign performance with new video metrics.
4. Digital Signage Ads in Amazon DSP
Amazon Ads is enabling a new inventory opportunity for brands to create campaigns on Amazon DSP to run in physical store digital signage, allowing customers to view or engage with a brand in a physical environment, at the time of purchase. It will be available in November to eligible US advertisers via managed service, making it easier for brands to advertise within Amazon Fresh stores. With Digital Signage Ads in Amazon DSP, brands can now purchase ads programmatically, giving them more flexibility and control over where their ads are featured.
Campaigns can be scheduled based on store location, by daypart, or by location of the digital signage within the store. This creates more opportunities for brand discovery and will enhance the customer shopping experience by creating a wider variety of in-store ads. Amazon should roll this feature to other big stores like Whole Food stores and more placements in the DSP.
5. Sponsored Products campaigns with presets
Advertisers can now launch new Sponsored Products campaigns with preset campaign settings such as daily budget, bidding strategy, targeting strategy, and associated bids. With this feature, advertisers will see recommendations on how to set up performant, ready-to-launch campaigns—saving time and helping drive results from the onset. Amazon Ads found that campaigns launched with preset observed a 77% increase in clicks, and a 29% increase in conversions compared to campaigns that did not utilize presets.
This feature helps advertisers identify potential candidates for advertising and provides all the campaign settings tailored to the product being advertised. This is suitable for the launch of new campaigns that require high bids to attract traction. However, one has to trial and test to know the results.
6. Performance recommendations
Performance recommendations are in-console, actionable best practices for Sponsored Products campaigns. As advertisers browse the advertising console, performance recommendations work in the background, constantly looking for recommendations that can be adopted with one click such as new keywords and updated bids. This gives advertisers in-the-moment feedback to improve campaign performance based on rigorously tested and validated best practices.
7. Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)
In ad-tech, Amazon highlighted its Amazon Marketing Cloud, a data clean room solution, at UnBoxed. Increasingly, marketers are looking for clean rooms as third-party cookies are deprecated. The company is focused on improving signal coverage and ease of use. AMC now offers Sponsored Display and digital subscription events, pre-built instructional queries, and the ability to manage DSP audiences. Keerat Sharma, director, Amazon Marketing Cloud, and Ad Tech Solutions said,
“We are constantly thinking about how we can better help marketers, particularly as they grapple with accurately measuring campaigns and adapting to the changes happening in digital advertising. Offering more actionable insights and increasing interoperability across our ad tech suite are examples of how we’re building to help brands operate more efficiently and make more informed business decisions.”
Furthermore, Amazon touts its Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) clean room service, which supports more flexible analytics and enables marketers to build their own ad tech solutions. Over the past year, AMC’s active customer base has quadrupled.
The tech giant also expanded CTV Integrations and Metrics. CTV advertisers on Amazon will now be able to see how valuable their audience is with the company’s new “incremental household reach” feature. Brands will be able to measure the unique, incremental audiences that were reached by Amazon streaming TV ad campaigns, in addition to those reached by linear TV ads.
Additionally, brand selling on Amazon can feature a variety of interactive video ads that feature CTA options such as “Add to cart,” or “Shop now.”. Off-Amazon brands can include an opt-in CTA “Send me more” and provide follow-up information.
Interesting Read: The Journey From Deterministic To Probabilistic Marketing
DoubleVerify Launches New Attention Lab For Advertisers
DoubleVerify, a leading software platform for digital media measurement, data, and analytics, announced the launch of the new DV Attention Lab. It will help advertisers optimize campaign performance using in-depth “attention data” on ad engagement and ad exposure.
One of its kind DV Attention Lab
The newly-formed DV Attention Lab will focus on providing advertisers with sophisticated, attention-based insights and recommendations on campaign performance powered by DV Authentic Attention covering industry benchmark reports, best practice guides, and illustrative case studies.
What is DV Authentic Attention?
DV recently released the DV Authentic Attention Snapshot, a comprehensive and holistic overview of high-level attention measurement for all DV advertisers. This feature helps DV clients achieve greater campaign performance against the current macroeconomic backdrop.
Parameters for measurement: DV Authentic Attention is a performance solution that analyzes over 50 data points on the exposure of a digital ad and consumer’s engagement with a digital ad and device – in real-time.
As for exposure, it evaluates the entire presentation of the ad, taking into consideration the viewable time, the share of the screen, video presentation, audibility, and more. As part of user engagement, it analyzes key events that occur while the ad creative is displayed, including user touches, screen orientations, video playbacks, and audio controls. Mark Zagorski, CEO of DoubleVerify explained in a statement,
“As advertisers grapple with economic uncertainty, the need to understand and maximize advertising performance is more important than ever. “
“Traditional KPIs such as viewability and clicks are not effective at identifying whether an ad is making an impact on the end viewer, and disruption from regulatory shifts to cookie deprecation is hindering how brands can use existing tools. With that in mind, we are confident that privacy-friendly attention metrics will become the industry’s new performance currency. We are excited to launch the DV Attention Lab™ to help advertisers navigate today’s digital landscape.”
And what they say
Mondelez International, one of the world’s largest snack companies, used DV Authentic Attention to evaluate and optimize the performance of a cross-platform display campaign for a popular snack brand. DV’s campaign was able to demonstrate that “high-exposure” impressions contributed to a 9 percentage point increase in brand favorability, an 8-point lift in consideration overall, and a 5-point increase in purchase intent. In the DV Attention Lab, the findings will be presented to the industry to illustrate how global brands and agencies can effectively utilize DV Authentic Attention to maximize media results.
Jennifer Brain-Mennes, Director of Global Media Strategy & Planning, Americas CX Lead of Mondelez said,
“We are excited to see them launch the Attention Lab and support the industry as attention-based measurement and targeting becomes even more critical. Now more than ever, advertisers need actionable insights to drive campaign optimization and deliver outcomes.”
Interesting Read: The Journey From Deterministic To Probabilistic Marketing
Google Introduces 2 New Audience Solutions In Display And Video 360
Google introduced new audience solutions with first-party data and machine learning in Display and Video 360. The two new updates are Optimized Targeting and Exchange Provided Identifier, also known as EPID.
What is it about
a. Optimized Targeting
Optimized targeting helps advertisers expand reach across relevant audiences and increase return on investment (ROI) with the touch of just a button. Campaign settings, such as manually-selected audiences including first-party data and Google audiences, influence the machine learning algorithm. Optimized targeting then uses machine learning to expand reach across other relevant groups without relying on third-party cookies.
It identifies and targets the most likely audience to drive impressions, clicks, and conversions depending on the advertiser’s strategy.
What are the performance results: This ultimately leads to better performance and increased conversions. The early test results found that advertisers who use optimized targeting in Display & Video 360 can see,
Availability: In Display & Video 360, optimized targeting is currently available for YouTube Video Action campaigns. In the coming months, it will expand beyond YouTube to all display and video campaigns. Once launched, new eligible display and video campaigns will be opted into optimized targeting with the ability to opt out.
b. Exchange-Provided Identifier (EPID’s)
Exchange Provided Identifier, also known as EPID, provides Display & Video 360 with new signals which will be used to automatically future-proof frequency management tools. In the future, EPIDs will be powering a variety of other marketing use cases in Display & Video 360 with no action required by advertisers.
Expansion of PPID technology: EPID expands the PPID technology. Publisher Provided Identifiers, also known as PPIDs, became available for publishers to use programmatically last year. PPID allows publishers to send Google Ad Manager the first-party identifier for marketing use cases.
EPID makes it available to more exchanges, publishers, or vendors looking to share their first-party identifiers with Display & Video 360’s backend to improve the quality of programmatic ads served on their respective properties. An EPID from a particular exchange or publisher cannot be used outside of an exchange’s inventory. In this way, people are protected from being tracked across the web.
Testing and availability: Google has improved the feature based on the feedback from the tests with several exchanges and partners. In the coming months, EPID will be used to inform Display & Video 360 users frequency management solutions. Brands will be able to avoid ad repetition and maximize reach efficiency even in the absence of third-party cookies. Brands and agencies will automatically benefit from EPID when setting frequency goals.
In the blog, the company also stated, EPID will be used as a signal for building Google audience segments in Display & Video 360. This will give advertisers a chance to deliver more personalized ads on publishers’ sites for which EPIDs are received. Down the line, EPID will also help brands unlock other core advertising functionalities, like cross-device reach on a domain by domain basis, and invalid traffic prevention in a privacy-safe way.
How will this help the marketers?
The new solutions created in Display & Video 360 solutions will allow marketers to successfully reach and influence their most relevant audiences while ensuring consumers feel safe online.
As digital advertising changes, it’s essential for advertisers to stay ahead of the curve while meeting people’s expectations. Consumers want two things -Ad relevance and privacy. Using these programmatic options, publishers can serve successful programmatic ads despite having a cookie-free future.
Wait there’s more- The Journey From Deterministic To Probabilistic Marketing
MMP Worldwide Partners With Bidstack In MENA
MMP Worldwide announces a new exclusive partnership with Bidstack, the leading in-game ad tech platform across MENA. They aim to offer the next generation of programmatic in-gaming solutions to the market.
Bidstack is the leading in-game advertising and video game monetization platform that enhances the gaming experience with immersive advertising. It offers a range of non-intrusive brand opportunities with a worldwide reach. It provides multi-solution advertising access to the world’s biggest video games through ad formats like native in-game, in-menu, and rewarded video placements.
How is this partnership beneficial?
The opportunity for in-gaming advertising has been growing exponentially over the past few years. The MENA games market has quickly emerged as a key growth region for the global video game industry. Research estimates gamers reached 65.32 million in 2021, rising to 85.76 million in 202 in the region alone.
With MMPWW’s partnership, Bidstack will be able to scale immersive solutions across the Middle East and North Africa. With MMPWW‘s programmatic expertise, it can connect with consumers on the platforms they use most often with multiple activation options and unique experiences.
MENA is on its way to becoming a global hub for gaming, which is why this partnership is an important step for the investment scene in the region. This rapidly evolving space offers advertisers a great opportunity to take advantage of programmatic in-game advertising.
Businesses are increasingly turning to in-game advertising with impressive results – with over 3 billion gamers across the globe.
Interesting Read: Targetspot and Gadsme Unites to Launch In-Game Audio Ads
And that’s what they said
As reported by CampaignME, Walid Ramadan, general manager of MMP Experiences commented,
“This is one of the biggest launches we have done. We are continuing to set the agenda for the region by bringing the most innovative and cutting-edge solutions to our clients as they look to increase their digital presence in new ways, particularly as new opportunities continue to emerge in the sporting industry. By partnering with Bidstack we can offer these ground-breaking in-gaming formats, minimising disruption to the end user experience and helping marketers reach a new, engaged audience.”
Lewis Sherlock, EVP, Bidstack Technologies and Partnerships said,
“We’re delighted to be working with MMPWW across the MENA region to deliver authentic brand experiences that fit in seamlessly with the gameplay.
MENA is an important strategic market for Bidstack, and this innovative new partnership will help extend our sales effort into previously untouched markets. MMPWW will become our first buy-side enterprise sales partner in the region, and we are looking forward to working closely with them to unlock gaming as an engaging and effective new ad channel for their partners.”
Interesting Read: Meta Audience Network Announces Rewarded Interstitial Ads
Foodpanda Forays Into Adtech In Partnership With Group M
The largest food and grocery delivery platform Foodpanda officially announced the launch of panda ads, its suite of advertising technology (AdTech), and marketing solutions.
Originally introduced as a proof-of-concept in 2021, panda ads enable brands to reach millions of digital-native consumers beyond traditional channels. With the launch, foodpanda unveiled a suite of integrated advertising features, including the Foodpanda app, digital marketing assets, and new partnership programs. Through panda ads, foodpanda aims to help brands increase their visibility and reach, improve sales conversion, and build brand awareness to drive sales.
Interesting Read: Meta and JioMart Will Launch Chat-To-Cart Services In India
Accelerating the growth of Panda Ads In partnership with Group M
Food Panda has joined forces with leading media investment agency Group M in line with this launch. This partnership allows GroupM clients to tap into the fast-growing AdTech space by activating Foodpanda’s in-app advertising and other media assets and collaborating with foodpanda on brand partnerships and campaigns. The partnership spans seven markets – Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
Kiranjeet Singh Purba, senior director of advertising and partnerships at foodpanda, said in the blog post,
“foodpanda has worked extensively to improve our ads solutions over the past year, and we are excited to offer advertisers a new, full suite of ad solutions with panda ads. We are especially thrilled to kick off our panda ads launch with a partnership with leading agency GroupM, and believe this will help their clients tap into new areas of digital marketing in Asia.”
Meanwhile, Toni Ruotanen, head of commerce for APAC at GroupM Nexus, commented,
“Our partnership with panda ads covers an extensive region – across seven markets – opening up expansive possibilities for our clients in the digital and mobile space to enhance their brand visibility and increase business impact. panda ads’ innovative tech will see a great degree of personalization and targeted advertisements, which charts the way forward in retail media.”
With GroupM, Food Panda aims to bridge the online gap between brands and customers as well as enhance its Adtech vertical.
Interesting Read: Procter & Gamble Support Trade Desk’s Unified 2.0
Bridging the online gap for advertisers
As an integrated advertising solution, panda ads offers a full suite of advertising options, from static or carousel images to videos and lead-generating ads.
Brands can also leverage Foodpanda’s social media channels and enter collaborative partnerships across Foodpanda’s verticals. These build brand visibility and allow for performance tracking and monitoring. panda ads support brands with their digital marketing campaigns by providing-
- Using Panda ads, brands are able to plan and execute their digital marketing campaigns more quickly.
- Ad campaigns are designed and managed directly on Foodpanda’s platform which results in quicker implementation. In just two weeks after campaign approval, foodpanda’s ads can go live.
- Ad assets also have prime visibility on the order tracking page, which captures consumers’ attention for a longer period (up to 30 minutes for quick-commerce deliveries, for example), and as a result, video ads have a 70 to 80 percent completion rate.
- Advertisers tailor their campaigns to incorporate a variety of solutions, ranging from in-app advertising to digital marketing channels, depending on their unique objectives.
- Furthermore, foodpanda provides the largest reach in the region, across 11 markets — Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, providing the widest coverage among all on-demand delivery players in the region.
- Advertisers can run ads across all foodpanda verticals – including food delivery and pick-ups, grocery deliveries via Pandamart, and foodpanda shops. The Panda Ads network is ideal for brands who want to reach digital-native consumers who value convenience and order food and groceries regularly.
- Lastly, foodpanda offers exclusive advertising to selected partners with exclusive opportunities to collaborate with its beloved brand ambassador, Pau-Pau.
Brands that have already signed up for panda ads span a broad range of industries, including Tiger Brokers, Heineken, Huawei, and many others. Globally, the market potential for AdTech is expected to reach US$1 trillion by 2030. Separately, food panda’s parent company, Delivery Hero, predicted that AdTech services would generate more than €2 billion by 2024 or 2025.
Panda ads are designed to offer a seamless experience in the native app environment. It will support brands from the start to the end campaign journey- from ideation, activation, and measurement.
Interesting Read: The Journey From Deterministic To Probabilistic Marketing
Procter & Gamble Support Trade Desk’s Unified 2.0
Unified ID 2.0 (UID 2.0), the privacy-conscious identity framework spearheaded by The Trade Desk, is winning the support of Procter & Gamble, one of the largest advertisers in the world.
P&G senior executive Eric Austin said,
“P&G supports new solutions like Unified ID 2.0 that are designed to help improve the U.S. consumer advertising experience. Advertisers and publishers need a consumer-centric identity solution that will raise the bar on privacy.”
The CPG giant is the latest major ad player to join the growing list of brands, agencies, streaming platforms, publishers, and ad tech suppliers supporting and embracing UID 2.0. Last year, P&G reclaimed its top spot as the biggest advertiser.
Interesting Read: Clean Rooms Explained: How Marketers Can Prepare For Cookieless World
UID 2.0 aims to provide a new identity framework for the open internet, with user transparency and privacy controls, flexibility, and interoperability key to its offering. The need for an alternative to cookies is necessary as consumer privacy takes center stage around the world. UID 2.0 creates an identifier from a hashed and salted email address, which is regularly regenerated to enhance security and give consumers greater control over how their data is used.
In digital channels, such as connected TVs and mobile apps, cookies are largely irrelevant. Furthermore, it aims to take the place of third-party cookies, which Google plans on deprecating in the second half of 2024. The changes Google made to its deprecation plans have actually helped its push to develop and deploy UID2, which has been integrated with Disney, Amazon Web Services, and Vox Media. The Trade Desk and Disney Advertising expanded their partnership in July to integrate Disney’s Audience Graph with UID 2.0.
Jeff Green, co-founder, and CEO at The Trade Desk said,
“P&G continues to be a force in moving the digital marketing industry forward. P&G recognizes that we need to work together as an industry to develop new identity solutions that preserve value for advertisers and publishers, and control for consumers.”
Interesting Read:And Google Does It Again, Delays Phaseout of Third-Party Cookies
GroupM’s outcome media specialist ‘Xaxis’ launched a new programmatic media commerce solution in India
GroupM’s outcome media specialist, Xaxis, has launched a new programmatic media commerce solution in India called Discovery Commerce. This helps brands and advertisers navigate the evolving programmatic media commerce ecosystem and drives stronger outcomes from their media investments.
Interesting Read: Omnicom Partners With Walmart, Instacart, First Of Many eCommerce Deals at Cannes Lions
Discovery Commerce, the new programmatic media solution
– With Discovery Commerce, advertisers can leverage specific data signals associated with product adoption, search patterns, and purchase patterns. Next, integrate advertising tactics that drive sales, promote brands, and engage customers on e-commerce platforms.
– The solution leverages Xaxis’ programmatic expertise, strong global partnerships, proprietary technology, and tailored data touchpoints to drive consumers to make purchases across various platforms and retail outlets. In the following steps, the data and insights gathered through each touchpoint will be used to inform future campaigns and audience planning.
– Brands can use Discovery Commerce to better understand consumer behaviors and create more accurate target audiences by connecting online and offline data. This will aid in driving stronger e-commerce performance and building benchmarks for future campaigns.
– With the ability to reach multiple online environments, premium publishers, leading marketplaces, and shoppable media formats, the service provides consolidated and simplified consumer data management that unifies previously siloed consumer information.
– Discovery Commerce leverages this data using Shoppable Media, a solution powered by Xaxis’ own in-house creative and execution studio (XCS), to elevate brand outcomes. With AI, XCS understands real-time consumer behavior on retailer websites and recommends products based on that data.
– Shoppers can add branded products more conveniently to their preferred retailer’s basket, eliminating the need to remember brands when shopping online or in-store. As a result, consumers are able to browse, compare, and complete orders without leaving the ad.
Interesting Read: The Journey From Deterministic To Probabilistic Marketing
New Partnerships
Xaxis has onboarded numerous partners into Discovery Commerce, including key partnerships with Shopalyst and Flipkart that provide data, inventory, technology, and creativity capabilities.
Girish Ramachandra, Co-Founder of Shopalyst, said,
“We are happy to partner with Xaxis. With Xaxis’ Discovery Commerce solution, brands can make their ads instantly shoppable and help drive impressions to conversions in one seamless journey for consumers.”
Atique Kazi, president of data, performance, and digital products, GroupM India said.
“We believe there could not be a more exciting time to launch this solution as there are so many opportunities for brands and advertisers to capitalise on e-commerce platform growth. From consistent datasets to campaign measurement and optimisation knowhow, there’s various key ingredients when it comes to doing e-commerce advertising right.”
Interesting Read: Have You Played Netflix Games?
Why Adtech Firm Tremor International Buys DSP Amobee For $239 Million
Tremor International, a video-focused advertising-technology company, is buying Singtel’s digital arm Amobee, a cross-channel, demand-side advertising platform, for $239 million. It will acquire Amobee’s Omnichannel Demand Side Platform and Advanced TV Platform.
Singtel first bought Amobee in 2012 for $321 million, making this latest deal quite a steal. Singtel says the divestment is in line with its strategic reset to revamp its business focus and recycle capital and assets into higher-returning growth areas. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter.
Interesting Read: Connected TV Explained: The Essential Glossary Of CTV
How this acquisition benefits Tremor?
– The acquisition is expected to create one of the most compelling and scaled CTV and video end-to-end platforms in the market. It is expected to drive incremental financial growth within the first twelve months of completion.
– The deal is intended to expand Tremor’s demand-side market share. The transaction expands its self-service DSP, CTV, and video reach, while creating new technology and partnership opportunities, including the ability to integrate major linear capabilities.
– Over the past couple of years, Amobee has been branching out into advanced TV. Amobee uses CTV to supplement and support linear TV, which remains a large part of the market despite streaming.
– The combined company seeks to benefit from meaningful annual run-rate operating cost synergies. It would build upon Tremor’s proven track record of successfully integrating acquisitions to drive growth, scale, and long-term value for shareholders at attractive valuations.
– Ofer Druker, chief executive officer of Tremor International, said in a release that the deal “would increase our U.S. and international customer reach and data footprint, and drive more advertiser spend to our SSP [supply side platform] Unruly.”
Tremor International has scaled and deepened their strategic relationship through a $25 million in VIDAA, the smart TV operating system subsidiary of Chinese-based TV set maker Hisense Co. The company is looking to be a major player in TV OS as well as connected TV (CTV). With that deal, Unruly became VIDAA’s exclusive supply-side platform for North America, Europe, Canada, and Australia.
– It would expand Tremor’s international presence as Amobee currently serves over 500 global customers including McDonald’s, Johnson & Johnson, Verizon, and Comcast, and maintains strong relationships with some of the world’s leading media partners.
Tremor’s ad tech roll-up spree just got a whole lot deeper with Amobee’s inclusion.
Interesting Read: Bridging The Gap: Is YouTube Unifying Linear And CTV Ad Buying?
The Journey From Deterministic To Probabilistic Marketing
For years, brands & marketers have been using 3rd party cookies & tracking pixels to track website visitors, improve the user experience, and collect data that helped them target ads to the right audiences. However, now this is going to change forever. Digital tracking capabilities are more restricted than ever. Third-party cookies are already redundant on browsers like Safari (iOS devices) as well as Firefox and now Chrome will discontinue supporting them from 2023. All apps on iOS require consent from the user to be able to track/monitor them. Law enforcement bodies across the globe are laying strict rules and guidelines for advertisers to restrict online tracking to avoid misuse of any PII (personally identifiable information) data. And above all the growing use of ad blockers by internet users restrict the data flow from one server to the other.
While this is progressing in the right direction as far as protecting users’ online privacy is concerned, on the flip side, these changes are taking digital marketing measurement back to its initial years. Back then, the digital infrastructure was just evolving and the most an advertiser could track from their digital marketing was how many people did they reach, how many impressions were delivered, and how many clicks/interactions came through. A major disruption in digital marketing came almost a decade back with the introduction of remarketing which was built on the back of third-party cookies and along with that followed a whole new eco-system of digital marketing attribution. Now marketers have complete visibility on who came to their website, from what source, using which device, which page of the website they dropped out, what products did they buy & finally retarget them with ads based on their interaction on the website. And the business world was only getting used to how sophisticated they can get when it comes to running as well as tracking their digital marketing campaigns when the lawmakers and the big tech giants decided to overhaul the system all over again.
So, let’s stop for a minute and imagine what the worst-case scenario would be – that all tracking goes away completely no more google analytics, no more data from Facebook you would have no idea who’s coming to your website, who’s buying your products or services, all tracking would be eliminated. How do we survive this situation & what should we do today to prepare ourselves if and when tracking starts to be depreciated? As per the latest update from Google, it will delay the deprecation of third-party cookies on Chrome by another 2 years or so. Therefore, it’s very important to use this time to have a strong plan to transition from what we call deterministic marketing to more probabilistic marketing.
In deterministic marketing, you can be 100% sure that John came from Facebook and brought a hat on your website. Probabilistic marketing on the other hand, only lets you know with a high degree of certainty that someone came from a particular channel or the probability that the user has certain attributes. Having said that, probabilistic marketing has its pros and cons. One of the best things about working in a probabilistic environment is that it’s going to work regardless of what they do to tracking. So, if we can start to train ourselves to rely on probabilistic data today and start to transition how we think about marketing into a probabilistic thought process we’re going to succeed when the big tech players continue to ratchet what tracking is available to us. Another advantage of probabilistic marketing is that it will still allow us to make optimization across all the channels and across various audiences so even if we don’t know specifically that John is John, we can still make a determination about the probability that John is John and that the audience that describes John will behave in this way. Another merit of a probabilistic marketing environment is that it really forces us to focus on the bigger picture without getting too far down in the weeds looking at individual landing pages, conversion points, customer journey, etc. We get to take a step back and analyze across all channels, landing pages, assets & customer journey what’s working well and what levers can we pull in order to increase the campaign performance. Working in a probabilistic environment will allow us to have access to campaign insights much faster as compared to that in a deterministic environment. In a deterministic setup, we need to track every single point of contact, know where the customer is in the journey, where they came from, have cross-device tracking, and all other aspects of tracking put in place perfectly. In a probabilistic setup, we just make assumptions and get close to similar results. It’s not going to be perfectly accurate, but the net results will resonate with what one would expect from having a perfect deterministic marketing setup.
However, not everything about probabilistic marketing is good. At its core, the data itself is less accurate. It is not as scientific as a deterministic marketing approach. A big drawback is that we lose the individual customer journey. All these journeys are grouped together into a probabilistic journey, but we can’t zero in on John to find out exactly what John did, how long he spent on each page, etc. If John comes in and he’s a top customer who did everything right and we want more Johns it’s pretty hard to determine exactly the steps that this one individual did so that we can get more of that customer. Instead, John is lost in the population of other people of who some were good, and some were bad but they weren’t all Johns and so with probabilistic attribution we lose that ability to get down to the individual level to know for certain what each person did. Another demerit is that as consumer preferences change and traffic on the website starts coming from a new source, the system needs to re-learn what this new traffic source is, how well is it converting, and then update the overall probabilities across channels. This disrupts the learning established so far and, in a way, resets the whole attribution pattern all over.
Therefore, to have an accurate attribution or to improve our marketing campaign with higher accuracy based on data, we need to rely on quality data. And typically, that is our own first-party data. We should start creating our own first-party universe and if we are successful in doing so, we should be able to thrive in today’s environment but also be future-proof in the event that cookie tracking goes away. As an immediate step, we should start capturing customer information by incentivizing the visitors on the website to register or login before they are able to access full content on the website. Once we build our own first-party data, we will not be reliant on the likes of Google, FB, and Amazon to target the right audience and get a better return on our advertising spends.
This guest post is written by Suparshv Chopra, Director of Digital Media at Serviceplan Group, Middle East.
AVOD Surprise: Netflix Advertising Powered By Microsoft
Netflix is building its advertising business and the streaming giant has signed Microsoft as its first ad tech partner. In April, Netflix surprised the world with the news that it plans to launch an ad-supported tier. Industry watchers were expecting that Netflix was close to picking an advertising platform to help it build the ad-supported tier of service.
Why Microsoft of all the choices?
Microsoft Advertising is the dark horse contender for the Netflix account and a positive surprise for the industry. Notably, other potential adtech partners such as FreeWheel or Google have interests competitive to Netflix’s. They both sit inside companies that have their own content plays on streaming TV. This likely knocked them out of the race.
Prior to its acquisition of Xandr, Microsoft was not even considered a serious programmatic competitor in the industry. As an early, dominant player in programmatic display advertising, Xandr (formerly AppNexus) started focusing on the TV/video ad space after being acquired by AT&T in 2018.
Xandr is well suited to build Netflix’s ad operation from scratch, a task that won’t be easy but isn’t new for the company. The ability to provide privacy, combined with an established ad tech stack and a strong ability to iterate quickly, helped Xandr push over the finish line. Greg Peters COO and CPO said,
“Microsoft has the proven ability to support all our advertising needs as we work together to build a new ad-supported offering. More importantly, Microsoft offered the flexibility to innovate over time on both the technology and sales side, as well as strong privacy protections for our members. “
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What does this mean for advertisers?
Marketers looking to Microsoft for their advertising needs will have access to the Netflix audience and premium connected TV inventory. The Microsoft platform will be the exclusive provider of all Netflix ads.
In the future, a Netflix subscription with ads at a lower price may entice value-seeking customers. With Netflix entering the ad-supported streaming world (AVOD), advertisers will have access to a wide range of premium inventory.
As AVOD continues to expand, this partnership not only supports the momentum but also creates more competition in the field. The recent Disney partnership with the Trade Desk also gives advertisers access to more premium AVOD inventory.
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Why do we care?
With Netflix getting into the AVOD market, the equation changes entirely for TV watchers who compare steep cable subscription fees with rising streaming costs.
CTV advertising is known for its chaos, consumer dissatisfaction, and controversy. Netflix has never faced any of these issues. The biggest challenge will be to maintain the balance between efficient monetization and retaining subscribers who are used to ad-free content.
The question of the hour: Does this partnership really push the envelope on ad innovation?
Certainly, Microsoft brings gaming to the table, where there are opportunities and innovation, but there is still much room for development. If It could be magic if these new partners are able to translate this kind of next-gen thinking into the more traditional streaming TV ad ecosystem.
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