Author: rssmasher

There’s not much to laugh about when it comes to airline travel during the holiday season, but Fox is trying to change that with the marketing campaign for its new airplane comedy, LA to Vegas. The network has launched a holiday-travel-themed campaign for the new comedy, premiering Jan. 2, about the crew and passengers who…
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Kids battling cancer can’t always leave the hospital to enjoy the holiday season, so RPA and Honda brought some festive magic into their lives through the power of augmented reality. Working with the Children’s Hospital of Orange County in California, the client and agency delivered personalized get-well cards that contained a fanciful AR experience and…
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Kids battling cancer can’t always leave the hospital to enjoy the holiday season, so RPA and Honda brought some festive magic into their lives through the power of augmented reality. Working with the Children’s Hospital of Orange County in California, the client and agency delivered personalized get-well cards that contained a fanciful AR experience and…
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All publishers and marketers are hyper-aware of the many ways technology has simultaneously expanded and altered content consumption. We now have more access to information than ever before, but trust in the media is at an all-time low. Advertisers are scrambling to find brand-safe environments on which they can rely. From the emergence of fake…
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Instagram Stories and Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam are back with a second iteration of its highly anticipated “Stories Are Everywhere” campaign … and it’s magnificent. The W+K-made global multi-channel campaign was first launched in April, debuting in June, to challenge users to be as creative as they can with just stickers, brushes and some live…
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Instagram Stories and Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam are back with a second iteration of its highly anticipated “Stories Are Everywhere” campaign … and it’s magnificent. The W+K-made global multi-channel campaign was first launched in April, debuting in June, to challenge users to be as creative as they can with just stickers, brushes and some live…
[Read More …]

All the presents have been unwrapped, but that doesn’t mean the season is over for publishers. The “gift guide,” where publishers curate products set to some theme and then get a cut of purchases made through the guide, isn’t just for Christmas. As publishers continue to scrounge for loose change in the sofa, some are…
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All the presents have been unwrapped, but that doesn’t mean the season is over for publishers. The “gift guide,” where publishers curate products set to some theme and then get a cut of purchases made through the guide, isn’t just for Christmas. As publishers continue to scrounge for loose change in the sofa, some are…
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By Gabriel Weintraub (associate professor at Stanford GSB and chief economist at AppNexus)

The information technology revolution has created a tremendous amount of change in how markets function today. Online marketplaces are complex platforms that can be “designed” and “engineered” through the different levers that a platform controls. In this process, there are at least three features that these marketplaces need to execute effectively in order to become successful, as discussed in Alvin Roth’s book “Who Gets What – and Why” and Peter Coles HBS case “Market Design in Online Businesses.” These three features are at an inflection point in real-time display advertising marketplaces, and I believe we have a unique opportunity to get them right for the industry. Let us go over them one by one:

1. Creating “thickness” and enabling transactions

This means the ability to bring many buyers and sellers on board and then facilitate matches and transactions among them. For example, e-commerce platforms provide “global” reach for otherwise local sellers, while sophisticated search algorithms help buyers find what they are looking for from a multitude of offerings.

The real-time display inflection

We would like to have a thick marketplace and header bid auctions are a case in point. Header bidding enhances the openness of the market, which increases thickness by bringing additional demand sources to participate in transactions that would otherwise be closed to them. To deliver on this promise, however, we need to carefully think about auction logic. First, SSPs and exchanges should avoid using straight second-price auctions for header bidding. Sending second highest bids to the ad server typically results in heavily discounted bids that cannot compete head-to-head with competing highest bids from SSPs and ad exchanges (such as AdX), and fails to increase thickness. Additionally, sending the highest bids without shading them could massively increase clearing prices, which would harm buyers. For these reasons, it is important to come up with creative auction designs that compete fairly with other SSPs and exchanges, effectively increase thickness, while at the same time ensuring good outcomes for buyers and enhancing publishers’ monetization.

2. Managing trust and alleviating asymmetric information

A few decades ago, there were serious concerns due to trust issues on whether e-commerce sites could be successful: who would conduct a transaction in a single occasion with a stranger? Today, we not only transact confidently on these sites but we also use platforms that allow sharing cars and apartments. We trust these platforms because of sophisticated reputation and review systems, payment security, and other mechanisms in place that alleviate asymmetric information.

The real-time display inflection

Historically, this is a dimension in which display advertising has been lagging. In fact, some platforms and sellers have traditionally exploited asymmetric information and buyers’ naivety via non-transparent fees and non-transparent auction logic. However, as the market has matured, buyers and the ecosystem as a whole are increasingly demanding transparency. Buyers, rightly so, would like to know the quality of the inventory they are buying, what fees they are paying throughout the supply chain, and the auction logic of the exchange. Platforms and sellers should provide all of this information in a clear way. Failing to do so will result in a significant competitive disadvantage moving forward.

3. Effective monetization

On one hand, the platform and sellers need to make enough revenue from transactions. On the other hand, buyers need to extract enough surplus from them so that they have the desire to participate. Note that our two points raised above are critical drivers of monetization. With a thick market, sellers enhance their ability to monetize because of increased competition, and buyers have more options to choose from. In addition, both sides of the market can improve their decision-making with better information, for example, regarding the quality of agents at the other side of the market. On top of this, agents can optimize to enhance monetization even further.

The real-time display inflection

Similarly, if the two points raised above are well-executed, both buyers and sellers should benefit. On one hand, with the additional thickness and competition created by header bid auctions, sellers should obtain better prices for their inventory. This will be especially true if sellers are smart when defining auction logic, specifically with respect to pricing rules and hard floors. On the other hand, with better information, buyers can and should become more sophisticated and make better decisions. In particular, given transparent fees and auction logic, bidders can optimize both their path to supply, that is to allocate their spend in the most cost-effective way, as well as their bids.

Overall, I believe we are well positioned to create a better marketplace. If we successfully implement header bidding, increase transparency, and enable supply path optimization, we can increase the size of the pie in the real-time display advertising industry. All sides in the ecosystem—buyers, sellers, and platforms—can benefit.

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Snapchat had a tough but busy year. After a disappointing earnings call in November, ad buyers continue to reserve Snapchat campaigns for the “experimental” portions of their budgets, a slim 10 to 20 percent.

“While there are still a lot of strides that they have to work on as it relates to the performance marketing and direct-response side,” said Sherwin Su, social activation director at Essence Global, “their product development establishes a good foundation and signals they are continuing to add value for their core users, content creators, premium publishers and advertisers.”

Here’s a rundown of all the developments in Snapchat’s advertising in 2017:

Leaning into self-serve 
Ad buyers agree that Snapchat’s best move of the year was introducing the Snapchat Ads Manager. In May, Snapchat began allowing ad buyers to run two of the platform’s ad units, Snap Ads and sponsored filters, via a self-serve auction. The platform’s third ad unit, sponsored lenses, must still be bought through the Snapchat sales team.

Although Snapchat lost ad revenue due to this new application programming interface as reported in the company’s third-quarter earnings, ad buyers applaud the tool for making it easier and faster to roll out campaigns.

“The rollout and consistent development of their self-serve buying API reduced the cost of entry, which has led us to see a slight decline in total spend on the platform for some of our clients,” said Brittany Richter, vp and head of social at Dentsu Aegis’ iProspect, “but it has also led to an increase in performance and trust on the platform, as well as in the number of brands investing and planning to continue to invest in the platform.”

In the summer, Snapchat launched its marketing mix modeling platform, partnering with third parties like Neustar MarketShare and Nielsen to measure marketers’ return on investment, a necessary move in the current transparency climate.

Aiming to be the finest in AR
Snapchat wants to be the platform brands turn to for AR. In 2017, there’s no doubt it has made more developments in this area than major competitors Facebook and Instagram. Marketers have begun to discover AR’s capabilities and are spending millions to experiment with them.

In the last year, Snapchat has made a number of AR launches, including branded 3D World Lenses, where users can place 3-D avatars into snaps. Bud Light was the first to test this, according to Snapchat, making a character that appeared in a commercial running at the time (a vendor selling the beer) virtual.

AR Trial Ads debuted in November, allowing brands to showcase their products virtually in the real world. BMW, for instance, presented a 3-D model of the new BMW X2 in the camera’s field of vision. This gives viewers a way to see the car within their environment.

In December, Snapchat launched Lens Studio, which lets developers design their own AR lenses. The average Lens user spends three minutes daily trying out new lenses, and on average, Lens campaigns saw 19 ad lift awareness points and 9 percent in sales lift.

Contrasting storytelling and instant impact
In the summer, Snapchat began to determine the impact Snap Ads have on users. Compared with sponsored lenses and filters, which lead to more engagement, Snap Ads are meant to serve as a jumping-off place and provide “instant impact,” according to Snapchat. In July, Snapchat launched three new types of Snap Ads to emphasize this: cinemagraphs, GIFs and still images, which are ads that appear for a few seconds.

In the last few months, Snapchat has increased the number of ways brands can tell stories in filters and lenses, introducing Promoted Stories, which give brands the ability to share up to 10 photos or videos as part of one Story, in November. HBO was one of the first to use the format, using six photos on Black Friday of the TV series or movies people could watch instead of shopping.

On Dec. 20, Snapchat began letting brands sponsor their own animated filters with graphics that move across a screen that users can snap and share. Dunkin’ Donuts is the first brand to use these filters, promoting its dark roast coffee on the winter solstice. In the coming months, advertisers will be able to use these branded animated filters to target based on age, gender, interests and even time of day.

Breaking into gaming
In 2017, Snapchat made progress with gamified Snap Ads, where users swipe up into a branded game experience, and gamified sponsored lenses. According to Snapchat, 2017 saw a significant increase in brands launching game-style ads. Brands like Gatorade, McDonald’s, Mars, Hershey’s, Grubhub, Moët and Hollister worked with Snapchat to run branded games — ranging from trivia to choose-your-own-adventure games — in an effort to drive more engagement on the platform. Gamified ads average over a minute of engagement time when users swipe up, according to Snapchat.

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