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Media Mobile Uncategorized

Mobile Apps: How and Why to Target

April 28, 2016 — by MediaMath

I’m not sure the debate between mobile apps or mobile web advertising dominance will be settled anytime soon. Both platforms provide separate and valuable use cases for advertisers throughout different points of their conversion funnels. Both have significant volumes of users that cannot be ignored but at MediaMath, we see slightly more in-app bid requests than we do mobile web. The numbers do not yet show a major discrepancy one way or another.

The bottom line is that advertisers can no longer chose to ignore in-app opportunities. But how do advertisers successfully target users inside of mobile apps? This presents a fairly unique problem as users are not identified by a cookie inside of an app. Instead, users are identified by a device identifier, which to the dismay of advertisers, does not exist in mobile web. This creates a few unique problems. The first, is that it can be tricky to link users on the same device between their app activity and their mobile web activity. The second, and the problem we’ll discuss here, is how do you go about effectively targeting users in apps?

App ID Targeting

The most obvious form of targeting users in apps would be to target a specific set of apps, identified by the app/bundle ID. This works well, provided you know what apps you’d like to serve on. This is a very similar approach to how many advertisers today selectively define the websites they’d like to display ads on or conversely, which sites they would like to not display ads on. This concept of white/blacklisting app IDs is a widely applied tactic in targeting mobile app users.

The obvious benefit with app ID targeting is the granularity and control it provides marketers to make sure that they are only messaging users inside desired apps that are perhaps on brand, or represent similar intent or demographic profiles to users they want to reach. One of the downsides of this mechanism is that it can be difficult to curate a wide enough list of apps, gather the individual app IDs across multiple platforms (iOS, Android, etc.) to achieve the desired scale of a campaign. Leveraging a contextual targeting solution here for apps may help alleviate this issue.

All things considered, App ID targeting is an excellent way to target a group of apps, but it should not be considered the be-all and end-all of app targeting.

Contextual App Targeting

Contextual targeting has proved to be an incredibly effective mechanism for display based advertising as it provides marketers with the ability to target certain categories or classifications of content. In theory, this allowed all sites to be considered eligible to have an ad served, provided they meet the content or classification criteria originally defined. MediaMath is excited to expand its contextual targeting offering to mobile apps. This allows marketers to target apps by any of the following:

Content Advisory Rating
App Category
Popularity
Price
Top Ranked Apps
User Rating

For marketers who understand the types of apps their intended audience uses, this provides a much simpler and perhaps “turn key” approach to targeting apps (and the users who engage with them).

Obviously, the downside here is the lack of granularity you have over specific apps. However, by combining contextual app targeting with a blacklist of app IDs, marketers begin to have fine grained control of app targeting, while leveraging an entire category or classification of mobile apps. Both app ID targeting and contextual app targeting provide marketers — who want to target all users who engage with certain apps — powerful tools to reach users. But what about reaching mobile in-app users based on profiles, personas or demographic data?

Mobile App Audiences

How much can you tell about an individual by the apps installed on their phone? Turns out — a lot. MediaMath has partnered with PushSpring to provide targetable segments of users based on the apps installed on a device. For example, say if you are targeting a fitness enthusiast, this can result in targeting a user who has workout apps, gym apps and calorie tracking apps installed on their device. As a result, marketers have a more holistic understanding of users and who they want to target.

If a marketer wants to target frequent travelers, they could target the entire category of travel apps, however that does not infer anything about the user except they may be currently traveling and consequently engaging with a specific travel app. However, if a user has several travel apps installed on their phone, regardless of what app they may be currently using (travel or not), PushSpring targets the device identifier and not the app itself, so a user can be served an ad in any app they engage with.

PushSpring provides targeting by the following:

Apps Owned by Genre
Demographic
Intent
Interest and Activity
Life Stage

PushSpring can also create custom segments based on apps, installed to allow marketers even more powerful and custom segments to identify and reach users who may fit a conquesting model, or a non standard user profile/persona.

This type of audience targeting provides another mechanism leveraging app targeting. While the PushSpring offering is technically an audience (i.e. a pool of device IDs) the audiences are created using information about apps installed on a single device, which provide strong intent and often demographic signals.

Putting It All Together

There is no sure fire, one size fits all mechanism for app targeting. But there are certainly several different tactics to leverage apps to reach consumers. Marketers can layer several of these tactics on top of each other to provide an incredibly custom and powerful solution, or run with any single one of these tactics on their own.

DIGITAL MARKETING Media Uncategorized

MediaMath Explains Competitive Advantage

April 27, 2016 — by MediaMath — 2

Mike Lamb, President, Commercial talks about what sets MediaMath apart from its competitors, including the company’s commitment to the demand-side and to true outcomes for marketers.

“We have built a system and a business on the proposition that marketing can and should be accountable to true business outcomes, not to marketing outcomes — cost per click, cost per thousand — but to true business outcomes.”

Press play to learn more!

Careers Culture People Uncategorized

From English Major to Ad Tech (in One Generation)

April 26, 2016 — by MediaMath

The first job I took after graduating from Wesleyan University was at a publishing company. After four years of dissecting the narrative genius of Joyce, Shakespeare and Hemingway as an English Lit. major (my thesis: “Defender of the Faith: Philip Roth and the Jewish-American Experience”), I was predictably bored out of my mind at my 9-to-5. There was a lack of creative anything. The real world was too real—and I had to wear shirts with buttons and tuck them into my pants.

I got out of there fast—like less than six months—quickly jumping to a multimedia publisher as a content editor. It made sense, from the writing standpoint. I’d had minimal exposure to tech and the internet at this point. It was 1999 after all. The turning point was when we were contracted to create a website about personal finance education for young adults. I had to write the content and organize the pages thoughtfully. I went into a room and started clicking through the shell of the website. It was dynamic. It was off the page and onto the screen with a click of a button. And it was so cool.

I want to do THAT, I thought.

Thus began my foray into understanding the inner workings of the web and the early beginnings of online marketing. Through a series of serendipitous steps, I ended up really enjoying learning about the underpinnings of technology, especially the structure of the internet. I’d bounce around to a few more jobs before getting into the proverbial adtech space, as it’s known today. My roles were always client-facing and super interesting because of the diversity they afforded. I never worked with just one client or industry.

When I joined Akamai back in 2009, my technology and marketing knowledge began to converge. The first month there, I truly thought I was in a different country. I literally did not understand what people were saying. I had no grasp of the terminology being spoken around me (DNS, CNAME, 302 redirects anyone?). The “aha” moment came when I finally began to understand and speak articulately to the ways in which systems talked to one another. I started to have these moments in micro form—This is what’s literally happening behind the web page when it’s loaded.

Then it all began to make sense…And then it didn’t—because this industry is always changing.

After MediaMath acquired the advertising business that Akamai had incubated, we re-branded as Adroit Digital in 2013 and I started running Product Marketing and Commercialization (the marriage of product understanding and true go-to-market strategy) which I loved. Since Adroit was reintegrated back into MediaMath earlier this year, I’ve been leading our national sales engineering team, partnering with our North American sales team to unleash our product expertise and offer strategic support across the sales cycle. It’s been quite a journey.

My 11-year-old daughter recently asked me about my childhood, “What do you mean you didn’t have on-demand television or carry a phone around?” (No Instagram?!) It didn’t exist when I was 13, email was barely mainstream in college and I didn’t even have a portable phone until I was 23. And now it’s a necessity. It’s woven into the everyday. And this is completely changing how we do marketing, and I love being at the helm of helping marketers figure out how to fully adapt to the new and ever-changing reality—the reality that my daughter will be the always-connected, totally demanding consumer one day very soon.

But back to that 20-year-old English major for a second.

It’s funny to think about what creativity meant to me back then (when I used a—gulp—typewriter to fill out my college application forms) and what it means now. I don’t think I really knew the potential of the creative process until I got interested in technology. It sounds a little crazy, especially when naysayers shout about how all our gadgets and gizmos are making our minds idle. But I truly think technology is transformational. It’s now at the forefront of the practice of marketing, and it’s amazing. It’s forcing businesses to evolve, not just in digital and in how ads are becoming more relevant, but in how they are reorganizing themselves internally. They’re building new centers of excellence, new marketing “muscles” and adopting technologies that didn’t even exist five years ago.

How is that not inherently creative, when you’re continually disrupting the way you do things?

Technology Uncategorized Video

Integral Ad Science Unveils Pre-Bid Video Segments To Boost Viewability By The ‘Threshold’

April 25, 2016 — by MediaMath

Recently, Integral Ad Science rolled out pre-bid viewable segments for video, providing advertisers the opportunity to target against different viewability thresholds.

MediaMath is the first demand-side platform (DSP) to adopt Integral’s new pre-bid segments.

Read an excerpt below of the AdExchanger article, written by Kelly Liyakasa, to learn more about pre-bid viewability:

Rather than bidding based on historical data, Integral’s pre-bid viewability segments help marketers fine-tune their bids before the fact.

So instead of just ranking the top 20% or 40% of impressions with the strongest viewability results, for example, marketers can now bid on ad impressions that are more likely to be viewable and in-view longer.

Although Integral offered pre-bid targeting segments to DSPs since 2011 – its earliest integrations date back to 2010 with AdMeld when Integral was known as AdSafe – those were largely centered around display.

“What we’ve done with video is a little different and something we feel is way more respective to advertisers,” said David Hahn, SVP of product management for Integral. “The net benefit is the advertiser can say, ‘My threshold for this campaign needs to have at least 70% of impressions in view,’” and adjust bids accordingly.

Although this capability gives advertisers more in the way of matching bids to their preferred viewability levels, it’s not just about a simple upfront selection.

“A higher level of viewability sometimes means less audience coming from a targeting standpoint, so you really want to create this balance of scale versus viewability,” said Aruna Paramasivam, senior director of data and partnerships for MediaMath. “We like to say, ‘Yes, your ad is 90% viewable, but to how many people?’”

To read the full article via AdExchanger, click here.

Events Trends Uncategorized

Webinar Alert: The Power of Programmatic

April 22, 2016 — by MediaMath

This blog post originally appeared on the DMA UK blog.

Next week we will reach an important milestone in NMI and the DMA’s relationship. On Wednesday, 27th April, at 3pm, we will be hosting our first webinar with the DMA. Led by Trevor Miranda, EMEA / APAC certification lead at MediaMath. This expert session will take you through the essentials. Leaving you with a new understanding of programmatic’s rich potential.

To register follow this link – http://www.dma.org.uk/event/webinar-the-power-of-programmatic.

Here at NMI we are looking forward to sharing our industry endorsed content with DMA members. It is incredibly meaningful in the Advertising space right now. As developments in technology are rapidly affecting many job roles. Our content is up to date, comprehensive and relevant, as programmatic spending is set to exceed US$32 billion by 2017.

We understand that all learners bring different backgrounds, expertise, experiences, and preferences to the table. Our philosophy is to ‘meet the learner where they are’. We put this into practice through our blended learning approach. This enables us to educate, engage and empower the new generation of marketing professionals wherever they are in their knowledge, career, experience and physical location.

Now more than ever education is pivotal to success. Improved skills and knowledge at all levels increases competency and productivity. Digital Media now accounts for a large part of most job roles in the sector. Yet a significant number of courses in marketing only include it as a short module. Businesses too must take responsibility for ensuring employees have the technological skills they need. This requires a top down approach to continual education.

AOL surveyed 25 brands, 96 agencies and 56 publishers. They discovered that 3 quarters of advertisers are using programmatic to buy display ads. Also, roughly half use it to buy both mobile ads and video ads. Only 8% are not using programmatic at all. Yet, just 54% of marketers in North America feel comfortable with programmatic.

Whether a recent graduate or a seasoned employee, continual development of your technological skillset in your specific market area is essential to avoid being left behind.

Book your place now and we’ll see you online!

PROGRAMMATIC Uncategorized

Case Study: MediaMath Helps Affiperf Increase Video Campaign Performance at a Lower eCPM in Brazil

April 21, 2016 — by MediaMath

In October 2015, MediaMath partnered with Dailymotion Exchange (DMX), the second largest video exchange in the world, to help advertisers easily purchase DailyMotion’s in-stream inventory.

For Affiperf — the programmatic trading desk of Havas Group — this partnership was a great opportunity for them to meet the aggressive KPIs of its multinational consumer goods company by activating target-oriented, private deal campaigns in an innovative video supply source.

Learn how the brand set out to achieve:

High CTR
40-50 percent video completion rate minimum
Limited investment budget

Marcos Mendez, Head of Affiperf Brazil, shared his thoughts on how the goals were achieved and continue to do so in reaching customer expectations.

“What we mostly appreciate about the work done with MediaMath and Dailymotion Exchange is the ability they have in solving problems through simple and effective solutions. With this, partnership, we had intended to have more qualified inventory and, at the same time, lower costs in media buying,” Mendez said.

Download the full case study to learn more.

To access the Portugese version, click here.

DIGITAL MARKETING Media Uncategorized

MediaMath Explains Goal-based Marketing

April 20, 2016 — by MediaMath

Erich Wasserman, Chief Revenue Officer, speaks on the importance of goal-based marketing and how this enables marketers to control their entire marketing ecosystem.

“As a primary input to our systems today, we asked our clients to think deeply about how it is that they make money so that we can translate that into outcomes, into goals, that we then optimize to,” Wasserman said. “When we partner with a client in a transparent way, they have all of the inclination to give us the information about their business, such that we can translate that into actual outcome-based goals.”

Data Events Trends Uncategorized

Tips for Mastering Mother’s Day 2016

April 19, 2016 — by MediaMath

Mother’s Day is the third biggest retail holiday of the year in the US according to eMarketer. Last year, the average US consumer spent $173 (up from $163 in 2014) on presents for mom, for a combined total of $21.2 billion on Mother’s Day gifting according to the National Retail Federation. The time to start planning your Mother’s Day campaign launches is now, and we’ve got some tips to help. Here is a tease of some of them—you can download our full analysis of Mother’s Day campaign trends, plus campaign optimization tips, here:

CPMs spike 11 to 15 days before Mother’s Day, and half of all conversions occur between 10 and five days before the holiday. In order to ensure delivery during this peak time, increase bids at least two to three weeks prior to the holiday.
It’s interesting to note that the majority of campaigns we saw were in the consumer goods category but the highest conversions were in clothing and accessories. To make sure you are reaching the right audience in your vertical, include Mother’s Day-specific CTAs, which tend to help ads convert better, and DCO for targeting your holiday browsers.
According to eMarketer, the most common way in which smartphone owners in the US planned to use their mobile for Mother’s Day shopping in 2015 was researching products and comparing prices (25%). This highlights mobile as a crucial touchpoint along the path to purchase this holiday. It’s more important than ever to develop mobile-specific initiatives as well as run desktop display. Utilize mobile-specific targeting (including creatives) where possible.

Get the full copy of Mastering Mother’s Day: An Analysis of Campaigns from 2012 to 2015 & Tips for 2016.

Events Trends Uncategorized

Recap of Festival of Media APAC

April 18, 2016 — by MediaMath

Last year, we signed a contract to sponsor the Festival of Media Academies globally. Well-respected and well-attended, the Festival of Media’s events span each corner of the globe. What better way to drive our global educational mission than to have presence at these reputable events.

The first event took place in Singapore in March, just before the Easter break. It was a perfect time as it coincided with our official NMI launch in the region. We were able to make a real impact on the launch via the audience at the Academy. The Academy was hosted at the impressive Twitter offices in Singapore. The delegates hailed from Mindshare, Starcom and Aspire as well as a handful from Nanyang Technological University.

During these academies, a brief is set by a ‘client’ and the delegates are asked to build a proposal using various digital strategies. Companies present to the delegates about how they specialise in their areas to help companies fulfil their briefs.

The first morning kicked off with an impressive amount of content led by Twitter talking about Connection to Culture.

This was a particularly interesting session. With more than 4 billion consumers, many enjoying rising incomes, Asia Pacific is so important for international advertisers and media owners. But, it is not easy to generalise about the diverse markets in Sydney and Shanghai, Mumbai and Manila. Language, culture, infrastructure and technology are all factors separating consumers.

After that session, Mondelez and Carat talked us through ‘How to Handle a Brief,’ giving fascinating insights. One of the key takeaways from this was the idea of being able to put your brief on a t-shirt and use the format ‘Get to By.’ What they meant by that was to always look to get your audience to do something with a call to action!

Then it was Tiffany & Co.’s turn to share the brief with the delegates—it was for a Christmas campaign. The really cool part of it was that they specifically called out that they wanted to see programmatic featured in the proposal!

The rest of the afternoon was spent with talks from S4M on mobile and Twitter on how to promote video.

The Academy was then split into teams. They worked into the evening formulating their plans on how to impress Tiffany & Co. with their response to the brief and win the prize for their team.

The second morning kicked off with an NMI presentation on Programmatic 101: Planning for the future. This was a specifically adapted piece of content for this event. Our experts, Trevor Miranda and Marrah Africa, engaged the audience by making it relevant for everyone in the room. Some of the audience had experience in buying programmatically but, for many, it was all new. The way that they broke down the evolution of programmatic was impressive. The pinnacle of this session was the ‘live auction’ whereby, everyone in the room was given a piece of paper saying if they were a brand or an impression. Marrah then facilitated the auction. In this way, Trevor and Marrah were able to illustrate what is usually a complex concept. The energy in the room was fantastic after this session. I think it had a direct impact on how the teams used programmatic in their responses to the brief.

After the NMI sessions, we had the BBC talking about broadcast media, followed by BlisMedia on using location as a planning tool.

Finally, the teams spent time on their responses, and then it was time to present!

Marrah was representing on the judging panel, which had a tough job. The delegates had a strict and imposed 9 minutes to present, so sadly some of them got cut off before they were able to complete.

The winning team really deserved the title. They had put together a comprehensive and visually appealing strategy for Tiffany & Co.’s Christmas campaign. They had thought about how to engage with the client’s audience in a thoughtful and creative way—which is how we think all advertising should be!

Data Events Technology Trends Uncategorized

Webinar Alert: Powering Cross-Channel Customer Experiences with Real-Time Data

April 15, 2016 — by MediaMath

Marketers want to connect with consumers—but they struggle to understand them and connect the dots across the increasing variety of channels and touch points. All the data points from interactions and behaviors across both paid and earned media initially appear disparate. With smart use of data and technology, linkages across these channels and devices become possible to get a more unified customer view and drive the customer journey toward your desired outcome.

On April 20^th, MediaMath, Tealium, Stratigent and Selligent will host an interactive discussion on the role of customer data in fostering richer customer experiences. Marketers who want to generate better insights, gain more understanding of customers and optimize in real-time action in the channels performing should attend the session to learn more about:

Building a technology strategy with customer data at the center
Gleaning the benefits of clean, real-time, actionable customer data
Better connecting and leveraging your marketing technologies

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