Narrative: Advertising Sustainability
Each narrative page (like this) has a page describing and evaluating the narrative, followed by all the posts on the site tagged with that narrative. Scroll down beyond the introduction to see the posts.
Google’s Criteria for Acceptable Ads Failed by Several Big Web Publishers (Aug 8, 2017)
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Procter & Gamble Says Slashed Digital Ad Spend by $140m, Saw Sales Rise Anyway (Jul 27, 2017)
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★ Facebook Reports More Rapid Revenue Growth, High Profits in Q2 (Jul 26, 2017)
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Google is Working with Publishers to Detect and Combat Ad Spoofing (Jul 21, 2017)
Business Insider reports that Google has been working with a number of big publishers to detect and combat a form of ad fraud known as spoofing, where ad inventory purporting to be available on a major site is in fact merely offering space on little visited sites spoofing those domains. It’s apparently found that there’s lots of this activity going on, and at the same time is pushing an industry standard called ads.txt which aims to get each publisher to host a text file listing the ad exchanges with which it’s working and thereby make it easier to establish which inventory is legitimate and which isn’t. Ad fraud in various forms is one of several big issues which threaten to undermine the online ad industry, along with viewability and measurement issues, ads showing up against the wrong content, and so on. Cutting down on spoofing would go some way to reducing at least this one form of ad fraud.
via Business Insider
Sizmek to Acquire Fellow Ad Tech Company Rocket Fuel for $125.5 Million (Jul 18, 2017)
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Snapchat Is Looking for Ad Tech Acquisitions, Has Talked to AdRoll (Jul 14, 2017)
Business Insider reports that Snapchat is looking to beef up its ad tech capabilities and has had discussions with AdRoll as a possible candidate, though those talks seem to have ended at this point. This goes to the heart of one of the big weaknesses Snapchat still has as an advertising platform, namely its inability to give advertisers the insights they want into how their ads are performing or the impact they’re having. That, combined with the lack of user growth, means Snap’s future growth prospects are challenged, and that in turn explains the recent hit to the stock price. The right acquisition (or several) in this space would help change that, but many of the best assets in the market have long since been snapped up (or developed internally) by the major players, so the pickings will be slim and the benefits of an acquisition less than they might once have been.
via Business Insider
Facebook Starts Testing Ads in its Marketplace Classifieds Tab (Jul 14, 2017)
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Some Online Publishers Increase Revenue by Reducing Ads (Jul 13, 2017)
The Wall Street Journal has a nice bit of reporting here on several websites which are reducing the number and toning down the nature of ads, and seeing positive results in terms of ad revenue as a result. Reading the article, it’s hard to avoid asking “You mean you dramatically improved the user experience and more people spent more time on your site?” The changes being described here seem so obvious that it’s easy to forget that the received wisdom in online advertising (as in TV advertising, arguably) has been that the best way to generate more ad revenue is to show more ads and make them harder to ignore, at the expense of the user experience. The backlash against advertising online (manifested in both use of ad blockers and refusing to visit sites with obnoxious ads) and on TV (manifested through ad-skipping DVRs and the rise of ad-free properties like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO) is now finally forcing a reckoning among those that have swallowed that line of thinking. And the results should surprise no-one: prioritizing anything over the user experience is always going to worsen the experience and therefore usage, while prioritizing the user experience will improve it and usage, and in the process may well improve revenues too. This isn’t a panacea for online display ads, many of which will be blocked anyway even if not obnoxious, and whose value compared to native and search ads continues to erode, but it’s better than continuing down the road most online publishers have been on. The solution for TV advertising, on the other hand, isn’t nearly so simple, given the broader declines in viewership.
via WSJ
Facebook Begins Rolling Out Ads in Messenger Globally (Jul 11, 2017)
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Study Shows Programmatic Ad Buyers Drop, Native Ads Grow Fast in Q1 2017 (Jul 11, 2017)
A study from MediaRadar, reported here by Adweek, suggests that the number of advertisers buying programmatic ads dropped by 12% year on year, while the number spending on native ads rose 74% year on year. The latter is very much in line with a longer-term trend towards native advertising, which looks more like the content in or between which it is embedded, but the former is more newsworthy. The most likely reason appears to be the worries over automatically-placed ads showing up next to undesirable content on YouTube and through Google’s AdSense earlier this year. I said at the time the YouTube boycott began that, although the backlash was publicly aimed at Google’s properties, it was likely to affect programmatic buying generally as brands became more concerned about a lack of control over which content their ads would show up next to, and this is a bit of evidence that confirms that hunch. The two formats discussed here – native and programmatic – needn’t, of course, be mutually exclusive, and as an example Google’s recently introduced mobile ad formats could potentially be bought programmatically while being designed to appear as native ads on various sites. But programmatic buying itself, while Google has explicitly called out as one of a small number of major factors driving its ad performance in recent quarters, looks to be heading for a bit of a setback as at least some brands re-evaluate whether to use it.
via Adweek