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Why More Publishers Should Be Thinking Automation



    By: Skip Brand

    Premium programmatic has a major hurdle in its path: publishers are slow to join. In my conversation with Peter Minniuma few months back, Minnium noted that a shortage of premium inventory was a key obstacle to getting brands to invest in digital display. So, if the IAB is publicly telling publishers that the demand is there, why aren’t more publishers offering up the inventory?

    This week I spoke to Alex White, GM of data and trading at DG, and this topic came up early in our conversation. “I think premium publishers already find a benefit in selling premium ad units directly on their sites, and that’s something that they are not necessarily interested in commoditizing,” he told me. “That’s where they like to have bigger relationships and they can do more custom type of things. Typically they want to sell those themselves, keep rates high and keep scarcity.” Continue reading…

      Canal+ relies on DG technology for the digital launch of Game of Thrones Season 3


        Background

        The third season of Game of Thrones, the Emmy-winning HBO series, reached Spanish audiences on Canal+ just a few days after its US broadcast. To promote the new season, Canal+ launched an online campaign with digital agency Wink TTD, using DG MediaMind’s online campaign management platform.

        Execution

        DG’s platform capabilities enabled deployment of a creative campaign that showed the shadow of a dragon hovering over the publisher’s home page. This innovative, attention-grabbing and appealing execution mirrored the show’s print campaign, which also featured the dragon shadow projected over print content.

        Check out the great results here

          DG MediaMind Online Analytics Now Available Worldwide

            By: Jonathan Tesser, Product Marketing Manager, Analytics

            DG MediaMind’s stellar analytics and reporting tool, Online Analytics, has left the beta building and is now available for agencies and advertisers around the world. Answering the demands of increasingly complex campaigns, the updates to this digital campaign management tool include the following.

            • Up to 20 times faster data and reporting speeds via Report Builder for multichannel advertising campaigns.
            • Access to data up to 2 hours earlier.
            • Three-times a day data refresh, assuring that any report will include the most timely and relevant analytics.
            • An upgraded back end infrastructure that allows for increased campaign scalability and speed.
            • Additional ease-of-use:

          • o Visual Analytics, a data visualization tool that makes it easy to provide a holistic overview of a campaign’s performance.
            o New analytics navigation bar for simplified access to tools and reports.


          • Some of the awesome new features of Visual Analytics include:



            NEW Visual Analytics depicts more than 20 metrics in flexible visual formats.



            NEW Benchmarking lets you compare your campaign’s performance against similar categories, i.e. Arts & Entertainment, or against a specific advertiser or agency’s campaign on the MediaMind platform.



            NEW Media Buy Channel lets you compare ROI channel-by-channel.

            Don’t miss it! Access the upgraded Online Analytics by clicking on Analytics from the campaign management drop down:

              Remember Display In Your Campaign Attributions



                By: Michael Froggatt, Principal Research Analyst, DG

                No online display campaign is complete without analyzing results. Brands and agencies both need to understand performance, but assessing how your campaign fits into the rest of your marketing plan can be very complex. So what can marketers do to understand how all their diverse campaign components work together?

                Wes Nichols, CEO of MarketShare, in a March 2013 Harvard Business Review article, talked about how brands can begin to piece together their media plans and attribute real dollars to advertising by using “big data” to count clicks, interactions, dwell time and myriad other performance and engagement metrics. Sure, these are all very important in determining the effectiveness of your creative and each individual ad, but how do you evaluate how display ads fit into the overall campaign? More…

                  Overcoming Fragmentation to Maximize Ad Effectiveness

                    By: George Musi, Head of Cross-Media Analytics, DG

                    Brand advertising is really about two things: reach (how many people see advertising) and frequency (how often they were exposed to it).

                    In order for advertisers to achieve the most effective brand advertising and the holy grail of advertising, they need to:

                  • • Reach the right person (target audience)
                    • With the right tone and message (advertising creative with high relevance, receptivity, stopping power and likability — so they’ll see, like and engage with the ad)
                    • At the right time
                    • In the right media placement
                    • At an optimum and effective frequency
                  • With the mass TV audiences of yesteryear, advertisers could rely on reaching a large, stable audience at a given time and place. That made assessing reach and frequency a relative no-brainer. But with the proliferation and fragmentation of devices, platforms and channels – and the expansion of consumer viewing habits across TV and digital — this simple formula has gotten a lot more complex.

                    Now, audiences are dispersed across PCs, netbooks, smartphones, mobile, tablets, connected TVs, over-the-pop boxes or gaming consoles, video-on-demand systems and even internet-enabled cars. And they are viewing when and where they choose.

                    Fragmentation also means marketers have fewer constraints on how and when they engage. Advances in media and technology and given that time and place are no longer constraints when it comes to engaging with media, marketers have an enormous opportunity and expanded value proposition — reaching and engaging their audiences more often and via more touch-points. It’s why a fragmented advertising marketplace presents more of an opportunity than a challenge, if managed efficiently.

                    Despite media fragmentation, TV still has a dominant leadership position among media for delivering massive reach and frequency against consumer audiences in a short period of time. No other medium compares. But clearly what has happened, through the development of new digital technologies and platforms, is that TV now lives and breathes in a multi-screen environment.

                    Therefore, as other mediums come into play and as audiences continue to fragment across devices, it becomes increasingly difficult — but at the same time very critical — for an advertiser to reach the right consumer at scale in an efficient and effective manner at optimal levels of exposure (i.e. effective frequency) for its message to achieve the desired brand communication objectives.

                    TV advertising ultimately reaches a point of diminishing returns, where it becomes more and more difficult and expensive to build incremental reach against a target audience — at this point investing more dollars mainly increases frequency of exposure. In fact, advertisers can leverage digital channels to extend the reach of TV campaigns to viewers who have not seen specific ads and thus expand messaging frequency to target audiences. Success in the multi-screen universe, however, is a matter of efficient management.

                    Effective video advertising campaigns necessitate an approach to targeting consumers across all screens and that combines content, audience and data. TV and online media planners and buyers must understand their audiences better than ever, using demographics, psychographics/attitudes and behaviors to optimize allocation and spend across TV and online.

                    Data-driven segmentation is thus more vital than ever to maximize reach and frequency with levels of precision and confidence. Advertisers must present a relevant and consistent message that appeals to consumers, delivered on the right channel at the right time.

                    Online, of course, strategic targeting can be accomplished in multiple ways. And now it’s possible on TV. Newer technologies enable advertisers to selectively segment (or categorize) TV audiences into distinct, mutually exclusive clusters or sub-groups and serve different ads or ad pods within a common program or navigation screen. Through cable, satellite and Internet Protocol television (IPTV) delivery systems and set-top boxes (STBs).

                    Using addressable ads, marketers can predetermine the type of consumer who will see their commercials. Marketers can now combine widely available third-party data sources such as Nielsen PRIZM segments, TargusInfo, Acxiom, Experian, Epsilon, Datalogix and/or Polk with subscriber information from delivery providers like Dish and DirecTV to pinpoint niche audiences. Addressable advertising means two people watching the same show in different homes will see different ads based on their individual consumer profile (a combination of demographic, geographic, psychographic, and other information).

                    In a world of fragmented platforms, devices and audiences and new marketing paradigms, advertisers and agencies overarching goals remain unchanged: maximize persuasive effectiveness and reach, and optimize frequency levels to garner the greatest ROI from their ad dollars.

                    Managing reach (incremental and duplication) and effective frequency distribution levels requires more sophisticated thinking. But with the right use of creative elements and messaging, targeting and retargeting data, data science, advanced analytics and technology, this new landscape also provides far more opportunity to reach and engage consumers in relevant and personalized ways.


                      Inspiration for Digital Advertisers