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EventsMediaPeopleTrends

Kick off the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup by Scoring the Best Media Placements

June 28, 2023 — by MediaMath

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Women’s soccer is hot right now.

Ticket sales have topped 1 million for the FIFA 2023 Women’s World Cup taking place in Australia and New Zealand from July 20th to August 20th, putting it on track to be the most attended standalone women’s sporting event in history. About two billion fans are expected to tune in from screens globally. It will be the first-ever dual-host Women’s World Cup and the largest-ever with 32 teams competing. Add to the popularity of women’s soccer the fact that global sports tourism is one of the fastest-growing sectors and a boon to commercial and economic growth in host cities. The market was valued at $587.87 billion in 2022 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 17.5% from 2023 to 2030.

There are some unique characteristics of women’s soccer fans:

  • 42% actively seek out information on the brands that sponsor the sport (Nielsen)
  • 61% believe that sponsors gain the favorable attention of the audience (Nielsen)
  • 56% of Women’s World Cup fans use social media, 39% order food and 35% drink alcohol while watching sports (GWI
  • 23% of U.S. female soccer fans are Hispanic, 47% hold a college degree and they enjoy an average household income of $80,362. (Gilted Soccer)
  • 58% of Gen Zers identify as “superfans” or “supporters” of women’s soccer and 12% report that they prefer women’s soccer to men’s (Footballco)

Compared to Men’s World Cup fans, Women’s World Cup fans are more likely to watch official content and sports documentaries and purchase sports collectibles.

MediaMath’s Curated Markets help you get your ads in front of shoppers where they are. 

MediaMath’s Curated Markets are designed to help you get your ads in front of Women’s World Cup fans wherever they plan to watch the matches. 

Sports Marketplace

Ensure your ads get delivered in premium sports-related environments people know and trust, with geo-targeting to show relevant ads to audiences based on their location and the local sporting seasons currently happening. 

Performance Marketplace 

This marketplace offers turnkey, privileged access to premium content owners in quality environments optimized for direct response campaign performance. Plus, target MediaMath Audiences at no additional fee.

Download our regionalized FIFA 2023 Women’s World Cup collateral to get more statistics about the audiences that watch and tips for reaching them in the best environments. 

Media

7 Ways Attention Metrics Impact Media Buying

January 17, 2023 — by MediaMath

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Attention metrics are becoming an increasingly popular way to measure the success of ads within the wider advertising industry, as they can give advertisers and publishers a much more accurate idea of how users are interacting with their content and how that content is performing. As they continue to gain industry adoption, we need to start thinking about how these metrics impact our media buying decisions and how to successfully incorporate them into our marketing plans.

So, in what areas do attention metrics impact media buying?

Planning 

Today, forecasting typically involves inputs like target audience attributes, geographies of audiences being targeted, and what type of creative(s) might be used, in order to produce an estimate of reach, usually represented by impressions, unique consumers, and target bid amounts, e.g. CPM.

Forecasting inputs and outputs are extremely important as it helps to remove the guesswork from business decisions, allowing you to predict the outcome of marketing activities. Depending on your target KPIs, this will influence the type of campaign that is run, the channels used and how the campaign will be measured.

As attention metrics gain industry adoption, they will be incorporated into forecasting inputs, like viewability targeting has, and outputs, e.g. cost of aCPM.

 

Attention oriented campaign goal types 

Traditional campaign KPIs such as CTR aren’t going away anytime soon, however, more attention-based goals will start to be added more regularly.

In the MediaMath platform, campaign goals define and inform how to bid and optimize toward your ideal business outcomes. Of the goal types available, several are attention-oriented and can be leveraged for your campaigns today:

  • Cost Per Action (CPA)
  • Video Completion Rate (VCR)
  • Viewable Rate
  • Viewable CPM

Attention oriented goal types, such as the ones listed above, are much more efficient at helping brands and publishers measure the success of their campaigns as they give a clearer picture of how well consumers are engaging with their content and can adapt campaigns as necessary.

Targeting 

Depending on the attention metric, there may be suitable proxies available today from bid enrichment specialists like DoubleVerify and Oracle for targeting in ad platforms. Targeting parameters like ad position, player audibility, and even app/domain allow and blocklists can be leveraged to filter ad opportunities to avoid attention-dark ad experiences.

Like with planning, as attention metrics gain industry adoption, they will be incorporated into new or existing targeting solutions.

Inventory Intelligence 

The MediaMath Attention Marketplace offers turnkey access to inventory that index high for attention, as measured by Adelaide. Adelaide’s AU is an omnichannel media quality measurement that allows for standardized comparisons across sites, placements, platforms, channels, and more to predict the likelihood of greater attention to creatives by customers.

Through the MediaMath Attention Marketplace, you have on-click access to placements turned for quality attention curated with Adelaide. This partnership also allows direct access to inventory that is specifically curated to place ads where people are more likely to see and interact with them and have been proven to perform well when measuring using attention metrics.

Optimization 

With targeting comes the opportunity for optimization. While the attention metric discussion in the industry evolves, brands can optimize using post-campaign analysis learnings to adjust fold position, app/domain lists, viewability, audibility, and even frequency, to maximize attention.

Through the MediaMath Brain, our algorithm for determining optimal bidding strategy based on buyer and market value, we consider several components of attention, automating a portion of the task of optimizing for attention:

  • Exchange viewability, included within the bid request as part of the metric object to offer insight into the available ad opportunity
  • Fold position, aka ad position, included within the bid request to indicate the position of the ad
  • Time of day, for instance whether the ad opportunity is available in the consumer’s time zone
  • Historical interactions like completed video views and clicks on content

By measuring with attention metrics during a campaign, you can ensure that your campaign is performing to the highest of its ability to produce the best results or you can collate your findings post-campaign to produce a more effective strategy for future campaigns.

Creative Intelligence 

Creative fatigue happens, but consumer sentiment and content consumption change over time too. Creative intelligence unlocks effective planning for your marketing strategy. Evaluate aspects of media like page clutter and ad format, which can inform attention, holding creative and audience targeting constant, so that you can compare attention across media properties. These comparisons help publishers to create a better user experience and boost revenues, while, in turn, increasing media effectiveness for advertisers.

Creative vendors like Marpipe, help with multivariate testing to measure the performance of every possible combination of creative variables, which can help focus your development of creative specifically designed to maximize attention. Companies focused on capturing attention, like Lumen, also offer consultative services to help build creatives to cut through the clutter of ads and are designed to capture attention.

Measurement 

Measuring attention is a first step toward deciphering which attention metrics are best at achieving your brands’ key business outcomes.

The results can influence future campaigns, impacting outcomes such as budget allocation channels used, and creatives made.

Companies like Adelaide, Amplified Intelligence, DoubleVerify, Lumen, Oracle/Moat, Playground.xyz, and TVision offer several tag-based measurement solutions that can be used to measure attention &/or a proxy for attention. These solutions can be implemented on your campaign in the MediaMath platform today.

To learn more about attention metrics and find out how MediaMath can help you implement them into your media buying strategy, download our attention metrics whitepaper or contact your MediaMath rep.

 

Media

MediaMath Research Shows that Ads can Change Voter Beliefs

October 24, 2022 — by MediaMath

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As Netflix plays catch-up on ad tiers, it’s clear that ads are becoming more central to the user experience across channels. In the US where political commercials reign, CTV will likely be a key platform to facilitate such messages ahead of upcoming elections. But what does this mean for the average consumer? How much of an impact can political ads really have?

As we shift away from third-party cookies, brands and marketers are utilizing data and targeting audiences to be more precisely tailored to consumers – and as ads become more prominent on streaming services, this precision means the two neighbors could receive different local political ads on the same streaming services, based on their data. And it appears this personalization can make all the difference, per the findings of a recent survey we conducted among 1,000 US-based residents aged 18 – 65 and above. The findings relay the capacity for ads to change voter beliefs, with accuracy and messaging being the top drivers for engagement. Per the survey:

  • When it comes to the primary factors that make consumers engage with a political ad, 39% of consumers cite accuracy of message, 29% note the political party, and 26% say the presentation of the ad (Q7)
  • 39% of consumers prefer concise (less than 30 seconds) political ads (Q6)
  • 41% of consumers have changed voting beliefs or have rethought a position because of a political ad (Q8)

It’s evident that political ads have the power to sway an impressive number of consumers, and this power depends on the presentation and length nearly as much as it does on the message itself. At the same time, this doesn’t mean politicians can run amok with campaigns built on creativity and style alone. The survey also reveals:

  • 62% of consumers believe the government should update laws to ensure political advertising of all mediums are legitimate, its financing transparent, and targeting is kept to a minimum (Q10)
  • Interestingly enough, despite this push for legitimacy and visibility, 0% of consumers would be more likely to trust political ads if they were provided with added transparency about the source of advertising beyond what is currently required by law (Q5)

These survey findings tell us a lot about how consumers react and respond to political ads, which can have a major impact on how political advertisers promote their candidates’ messages. As marketers seek to personalize and optimize their ads based on how they accumulate consumer data, this can change the way they collect the data and how they customize the ads. It also means rising data privacy laws will redefine how politicians promote their messages, creating more opportunity for trust between the customer and the politician.

MediaTrends

Purpose as a MediaMath Differentiator

October 27, 2020 — by MediaMath

Advertising is the WD-40 of the economy. It greases the gears, connecting the creators of goods and services to the people that want and need them. In the process, jobs are created, families are provided for, and communities are sustained. That is a purpose worth fulfilling. But just as important, though less obvious, is the fact that advertising finances the vast majority of our media ecosystem—everything from social media to connected television to gaming and mobile applications. As a result, the health of that ecosystem—the stories that get told, the investment possible for journalism, the content our kids are exposed to, the facts on which we base our democratic deliberation—are all dependent on what our industry chooses to finance and how. We must all ask ourselves if we are rising to the challenge of financing the right things.

Ensuring that advertising spend continues to make the critical connection between producer and consumer while also financing a healthy ecosystem—one healthy for our democracy, our kids, and our mental health—is the challenge for the next wave of programmatic advertising. To succeed, it will take brands that care about purpose, technology built for purpose, and authentic messaging and efforts that align brand values with advertising spend.

The importance of brand purpose

Brands recognize the need to make their purpose, their reason for being, the core of their message to consumers. The Association of National Advertisers surveyed their members on the importance of purpose and the response was overwhelming. In their report, the quotes from leading marketers made the case plain. “My job as a marketer is to express our purpose and share it with the world, and to realize that it may not be for everyone, but it will be meaningful and important to those who find resonance with its mission,” said Geoff Seeley, global marketing director at Airbnb. “That’s how you remain a brand people embrace and want to be involved with.”

The report also cites a Kantar Consulting survey of consumers that found that 72% said more companies should take a stand on social issues and 85% said that they appreciate it when a brand makes its values clear. The desires of CMOs and consumers are aligned. Our tools help connect them.

Curated multicultural and news marketplaces for brands that value diversity and journalism

The Purpose-Driven Advertising initiative we have created at MediaMath starts with the idea that brands want to reach diverse audiences, support minority publishers, preserve the open Internet, and reward quality content with journalistic standards. We have created two curated markets as the foundation of the effort to enable that investment: a multicultural marketplace and a news marketplace.

In the wake of the rising awareness of the need for reform in policing after the George Floyd incident, multiple major brands came out in solidarity with the Black Lives Matters movement. Major brands have committed to investing in minority employees, communities, and businesses. This is meant to be a movement, not a moment.

That got us thinking about how their marketing spend could help. Our multicultural marketplace is composed of close to 1,000 minority-owned publishers. Investing in that media finances the telling of stories we all need to hear, makes authentic the commitment to economic development in minority communities, and connects brands to an audience that needs and wants to hear their message. Using additional tools to expand reach, brands can also use audiences of consumers who have self-identified as supporting BLM and communicate their solidarity there as well. If we really care about ensuring that the needs and lives of minorities in America are heard and met, then we can’t let those stories drown in a sea of lowest common denominator content intended simply to reach as many eyeballs as possible.

Tools enabling brands to help make the Internet safe and suitable for commerce and discourse

Beyond elevating minority voices, we need to make sure that those who would abuse the Internet understand that the right to free speech is not a right to free amplification of division and hate. The #StopHateforProfit boycott of Facebook this summer highlighted the need for our industry to elevate and use tools to protect brands from financing hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation. Too many marketers are doing so unwittingly today.

We have partnered with NewsGuard and are working with the Global Disinformation Index to put in place some baseline protections to ensure that our clients are not financing misinformation and disinformation. And we make those organizations’ more advanced tools available for more intensive protection as well.

NewsGuard rates the nearly 6,000 websites responsible for approximately 95% of all the news and information consumed and shared online in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Italy.  Their ratings icon provides useful information to educate both readers and advertisers on the quality of the journalism on the Internet and makes it possible to disinvest from questionable news content.

Making it all easy to execute

We get that many advertisers will remain social-first in their digital strategies and that we must make running that same creative on the open Internet easy. Our partnerships with Spaceback and TripleLift enable an efficient shift in marketer spend from user-generated content to trusted publishers running the same creative brands are running on social. Brands can take that creative to our multicultural or news marketplaces or out to the open Internet and change the incentives and dynamics of our ecosystem while encouraging the development of safe, independent content and services across the Internet.

It’s time to put our money where our mouths are

The proclamations of commitment to purpose and progress are many and vocal across the world’s leading brands. As a demand-side provider of advertising technology, where we sit in the supply chain enables us to help our clients manage their media spend to meet their marketing goals. Through our Purpose-Driven Advertising initiative and with our tech and media partners and clients, we want to differentiate ourselves by helping put advertising to more intentional use. Our suite of purpose-driven advertising products and solutions are designed to help our clients communicate authentic messages, form genuine connections with consumers, and ensure that their campaigns further the beliefs and causes for which they stand. Let’s turn words into action and make advertising spend a force for good.

DataMediaTechnology

MediaMath Continues to Bring Unmatched Transparency to Digital Advertising with New SOURCE Ecosystem Scorecard

October 20, 2020 — by MediaMath

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In 2018, we released an open letter to 50 SSPs saying we’d stop buying from them if they played games that contributed to unfair, murky programmatic auctions. Almost a year to the day later in 2019, we took another huge step towards greater transparency with the unveiling of SOURCE, our effort to build a programmatic ecosystem that is accountable, addressable and aligned. And today, two weeks after celebrating SOURCE’s first birthday, we are releasing a new SOURCE Ecosystem Scorecard to continue our quest to offer unmatched transparency in the supply chain.

“With SOURCE, we set out to address some of the biggest issues facing the industry—to create an environment that is accountable and addressable, and to align the interests of brands, agencies, publishers and technology providers,” said MediaMath Founder and CEO Joe Zawadzki. “The SOURCE Ecosystem Scorecard continues to make good on that promise and is truly a Holy Grail for the industry— a configurable setting that provides brands and agencies with unparalleled data and transparency, giving them confidence in where their advertising dollars go regardless of the channel.”

The Scorecard has nine, equally weighted data signals that are split across Accountability, Addressability and Alignment and tally up to a final score across all ecosystem partners which directly leads to increased buyer value. Currently, the average score for the 82 participating SSPs is a 7 out of 10. We wouldn’t expect a perfect score of any SSP—that’s not the purpose of the Scorecard. Instead, we want the Scorecard to provide an incentive and roadmap for our partners to pursue a more  transparent ecosystem in which we provide measurable value and collectively empower advertisers to make better, more informed decisions.

ACCOUNTABLE

  • Fee Transparency Method: To achieve a top score, partners must provide complete transparency into supply chain costs so customers can understand the true value of every impression and create data-driven optimization strategies.
  • Supply Authorization: Partners with the top scores provide impression-level seller data and publisher path transparency to inform data-driven enterprise and campaign-level SPO strategies.
  • Inventory Type: Top scoring partners enable granular inventory and placement targeting, target instream instead of outstream video and define skippable vs. non-skippable video access.

ADDRESSABLE

  • Fraud & Invalid Traffic: Top scoring partners for this signal have 100% of their supply filtered by White Ops for pre-bid IVT, provide free fraud protection for buyers, have no post-campaign IVT claw backs necessary and no undelivered marketing budgets due to IVT.
  • Preferred Identity: Partners with top scores here will provide an increased find rate to customers by transacting on multiple common IDs and measuring consistently so they can attribute at the person and household-levels.
  • Unique Channel Identifiers: Partners who exhibit this signal use appropriate identifiers for channels such as CTV and ensure omnichannel reach to audiences across devices.

ALIGNED

  • Bid Feedback: This signal is focused on informing effective bid shading, ensuring advertisers pay the fair price for impressions and providing future support for auction insights reporting.
  • Brain Sync: Partners who exhibit this signal at the highest level better inform seller bidding algorithms and improve supply performance toward advertiser goals by ingesting MediaMath algorithm data.
  • Impression Counting Method: This signal is scored on how well partners ensure marketers pay only for impressions that have the potential to be seen, align counting methodology across the supply chain and reduce counting discrepancies.

A sample of the Scorecard:

The SOURCE Ecosystem Scorecard is available globally. If you’re interested in learning more, please reach out to your Account lead.

DataMediaTrends

Download our 2020 Holiday Guide for Retail

October 19, 2020 — by MediaMath

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For eCommerce retailers and those with robust digital capabilities, Holiday 2020 can be a success. Holiday sales are expected to increase 3-4% and retail e-commerce sales 44.5% year-over-year. eCommerce also accounted for 16.1% of total retail sales in Q2, up from 11.8% in the first quarter of 2020.

While COVID-19 quarantine measures abated over the summer, cautions of a second wave as students and teachers return to school and the flu season looms will prompt 71% of US adults to do more than half of their holiday shopping digitally this year. Consumers will also take advantage of options like click and collect, which eMarketer expects to grow 60.4% this year, with sales reaching $58.52 billion.

It is more important than ever for retailers to build a strong digital presence as consumers start their holiday browsing, carting and purchasing, likely even earlier than they did last year. In 2019, half of the season’s revenue was complete by Dec. 3. Encouraging earlier gift shopping this year will help reduce the
risk of losing share of wallet.

We’re here to help retailers plan for Q4 even as the world continues to change. Download our 2020 MediaMath Holiday Guide for tips on how to make this holiday season a success for your brand. You’ll get access to:

  • Holiday audience packages
  • Recommendations for reaching across device
  • Measurement approaches for both online and in-store
  • How to leverage native, creative and social display

Happy holiday advertising!

DataMediaTechnologyTrends

Programmatic Buying: Accountability & Transparency in Focus

September 9, 2020 — by MediaMath

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We are excited to announce our series with Beet.TV “Programmatic Buying: Accountability & Transparency in Focus,” which explores how we can build an accountable, addressable and aligned digital media supply chain to solve for the interconnection of brand-safe advertising, funding of quality publishers and consumer respect. Check out the first videos from Jeremy Steinberg, our Global Head of Ecosystem, and Tom Kershaw, CTO at our partner Magnite, below, and check back for more to come from IBM, LiveRamp, PubMatic, Tru Optik, Oracle, TRUSTX and MMA.

DataMediaTechnologyTrends

Accountability is a Top Priority for Marketers Who Seek Greater Transparency into the Supply Chain

August 19, 2020 — by MediaMath

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“There’s so much good that’s associated with programmatic in being able to make much more intelligent, real-time, data-driven decisions, but the supply chain is complicated and messy and hard to penetrate and confusing for a lot of brands and their agencies.”

Those words were spoken by Joanna O’Connell, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, in her interview with Beet.TV on the issues around transparency and trust in our current digital media supply chain.

In July 2020, MediaMath commissioned a custom study executed by Forrester Consulting called “Confident Media Spending Requires A More Transparent And Addressable Supply Chain” which shows that of 220 advertisers surveyed, 55% cite challenges working across partner ecosystems and 48% say having less visibility into costs and fees is contributing to less transparency in the digital media supply chain today.

Watch more in the video with O’Connell below and download “Confident Media Spending Requires A More Transparent And Addressable Supply Chain” here.

EducationMediaTechnologyTrends

How CTV is Driving Greater Accountability and Addressability in Marketing

December 16, 2019 — by MediaMath

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We are in a golden age of TV content, much of which is only available in connected environments, not through traditional linear. Consumers are inherently drawn to the superior viewing experience TV offers, and publishers are following suit, running a significant amount of their impressions on connected TV platforms. This shift from linear to CTV is enhancing advertisers’ abilities to reach and engage consumers, lowering rates of general invalid traffic and leading to higher video completion rates for premium publishers. And as we’re seeing through our SOURCE by MediaMath offering, brands and agencies can use CTV to reach real people with real ads, helping embed greater accountability and addressability into the entire supply chain.

We recently sat down with Adam Lowy, Chief Commercial Officer at SOURCE by MediaMath partner, Telaria, and our own resident TV experts Mike Fisher, VP/Head of Advanced TV & Video, and Aulden Kaye, Director, Advanced TV & Video, to discuss why the time is now to use CTV to deepen marketers’ direct relationships with customers, and just how we can do it. Listen here.

Media

Where are Key Verticals Spending Their Digital Ad Dollars? Head of Advanced TV and Video Mike Fisher Weighs In

August 5, 2019 — by MediaMath

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As we close in on the final months of 2019, where are key verticals spending their digital ad dollars? Our Head of Advanced TV and Video Mike Fisher recently spoke with eMarketer about ad spend forecasts for TV in particular industries such as US media and entertainment and retail.

“Now Netflix is coming out with 500 original series a year and needs a way to promote that to the right viewer. You’ll see more marketing dollars shifting…to get eyeballs and promote original series with niche audiences, you need to spend more to drive eyeballs to that content that you then monetize on the backend.” 

“Retail’s great for advanced connected TV ads because you’re able to tie back an impression to either something like a Nielsen Catalina or any sort of store foot traffic, Basically, anything that is looking to drive traffic is starting to shift to connected TV.” 

For more on Mike’s insights on how TV is evolving, check out the below articles: