We recently published new research demonstrating that lower file load size correlates with better viewability in digital ads. Heavier file load size results in slower loads, so it’s not surprising that it can interfere with viewability as well.
The writing’s on the wall for rich media advertising as we know it today.
When it debuted, the rich functionality in rich media advertising was seen as a victory. At first it was animation, but then interactive elements became available. Banners could play videos, pop over your screen and expand over content.
The vision behind rich media advertising was admirable: make ads that people want to interact with. But it turned out to be a bait and switch.
Instead of endearing consumers to ads, these formats did the opposite. They pestered users with unwanted pop ups, aggravating expansions, and startling autoplay video with audio. They “politely” loaded megabyte after megabyte on people’s mobile data plans. They intruded at every opportunity because of marginal gains in CTR.
As the ad industry transforms, rich media is on the chopping block. Here are the top 5 attackers.
To successfully execute cross-platform digital campaigns, different creative messages and variations must be produced to target different audience segments. Yet, two of the industry’s biggest players are falling short of meeting those needs. CEO Victor Wong writes on iMedia discussing how Google and Adobe are failing brand marketers.
Though brands and advertisers have done an excellent job effectively reaching the right people at the right time, most campaigns fail to deliver the right message. In The Makegood’s People of Ad Tech interview, Bill Brazell, WIT Strategy Partner, interviews Victor Wong to discuss why the real problem is the widespread failure to customize ads.
Lastly, Thunder teamed up with its global DSP and programmatic exchange partners to conduct a study on viewability and load times. After studying billions of impressions, they discovered that beyond simply improving the ad experiences for consumers, faster load times dramatically affect viewability rates.
With creative being the biggest driver of performance on Facebook, leveraging the right tactics to optimize Facebook ads is essential to the success of the campaign.
An effective ad not only increases engagement from potential customers, but also boosts your overall ROI. More importantly, testing different elements over time will allow you to keep your creatives fresh and improve the results of your Facebook ads.
Below are 11 best practices to optimize your Facebook ads and videos.
With Facebook ads, the creative is the strongest driver of performance. An ad that resonates with and engages people will reduce your CPM/CPC, protect ad delivery and improve performance on your overall objective.
The best part is that Facebook does a lot of creative optimization work for you automatically. With a little extra work, you can reap the benefits and earn great ROI.
In my new whitepaper, the Thunder Playbook for Facebook Creative Optimization, I outline the 4 pillars of ideal Facebook ad creative.
With over $6 billion being spent annually on data-driven ad technologies like DMPs and DSPs, the biggest challenge is activating this data. Victor Wong and Econsultancy discuss how Creative Management Platforms (CMPs) can help brands and advertisers build creative versions at scale to achieve a significantly higher ROI.
Though marketers have increasingly focused on serving ads at the right time for the right audience, the right message has been forgotten. Victor Wong sits down with Beet.TV to examine why brand marketers targeting consumers should control the messaging.
To successfully reach consumers in our multichannel world, marketers are increasingly favoring relevancy over intrusiveness. In this episode of DMN: One-on-one podcast, Kim Davis and Victor Wong discuss why marketers are thinking strategically about the consumer experience, ad blocking, and the implications of walled gardens.
Despite the rapid growth of programmatic advertising and rich audience data, merging creativity with programmatic to produce data-driven executions lags far behind. Victor Wong offers Digiday one solution to bridging the programmatic-creative divide.
With more than two-thirds of all digital display advertising expected to be purchased programmatically this year, according to eMarketer, programmatic display is more sophisticated than ever before.
To successfully serve the right message to the right user, understanding the right creative strategies will enable you to deliver relevant messages that strongly appeal to your target audiences. More specifically, leveraging creative optimization tactics ultimately helps to amplify the results and ROI of your programmatic display campaigns.
Below are five programmatic creative strategies to boost your display advertising performance.
The creative brief sucks because it is too general for the modern customer journey. Here’s a pragmatic solution: Revise our templates so they reflect the advanced targeting capabilities of programmatic advertising and the fragmented consumer landscape they represent.
But today ads can be readily targeted and optimized based on factors like:
A generalized, generic creative brief is likely to lead to average campaign performance, so it doesn’t invite scrutiny. But if you neglect these details you neglect the most powerful advances in ad tech. Embrace them and your campaign is golden.
Though rich media ads were once touted as more engaging and generating more clicks than standard display, it has not delivered the type of personalization and interactivity we hoped for. Victor Wong published a piece on AdExchanger answering, Why Is Everyone Trying To Kill Rich Media?
Programmatic advertising has equipped travel brands with endless opportunities to target audiences across the web, which is why marketers need to be creative when thinking about programmatic. Melody Yan writes on Tnooz offering travel brands actionable programmatic creative tactics to cut through the noise and drive conversions.
And finally, Victor Wong was recognized on the DMN 40 Under 40, which honors 40 exceptional marketers who have done an outstanding job reshaping their organizations, clients, and the marketing industry as a whole. Congratulations Victor!
The emergence of programmatic creative platforms has unlocked many ways to tailor, test, and optimize ad creative to drive campaign performance. When we looked into other people’s numbers, we found evidence that customizing creative consistently delivers a 30-50% boost in performance. That’s a little under our experience, where our customers that optimize creatives tend to size up to benchmarks by 2X or more.
It’s clear that in the age of so much data in digital media, the model of showing one generalized creative to everyone is giving way to a new style of advertising that combines data and creative in ways that resonate far more with audiences and produce greater results for advertisers.
But for companies seeking to leverage many of these new strategies, where does one begin? If you’re looking for examples of these ads, how can you find them?
The newest installments to our programmatic creative series of eBooks dig into precisely these questions and the strategies and tactics that new technologies like Creative Management Platforms and dynamic creative optimization make possible.
We’re calling them programmatic creative playbooks. These guides contain example ways to tailor creatives to audiences, including example ads. They are meant to serve as inspiration for the next generation of creative strategy.
Creative Management Platforms are a class of programmatic creative ad technologies that meet the design needs of modern digital advertisers who are looking to tailor, test and optimize the creatives in their campaigns.
The core use of a CMP is ad design and production at scale. To tailor an ad’s messaging to its audience, for each segment, a different creative must be produced or generated. CMPs use a combination of manual and automated features to amplify the creative output of a team dramatically.
Advertisers can use the high volume of creative production enabled by Creative Management Platforms to make their creatives perform better through three key qualities:
April was the beginning of a new era for PaperG.
PaperG officially rebranded as Thunder, reflecting our evolution into the next generation Creative Management Platform. The name “Thunder” is derived from the concept of perfectly synchronized campaigns, similar to “rolling thunder,” building in strength as they move through time and distance.
At the same time, Thunder also launched Facebook PowerPlus, making Thunder the first Creative Management Platform to enable marketers to simultaneously build and edit cross-channel display and social ads.
See what the press had to say about the rebrand!
Thunder is the First Solution Enabling Brands to Simultaneously Build, Edit and Preview Creatives Across Display and Social — New Identity Reflects Company Mission to Optimize Creative Ads Across Channels
San Francisco, CA – (April 25, 2016) – Effective today, PaperG, the original and leading Creative Management Platform, announces it has changed its name to Thunder. Additionally, the company has unveiled the first-ever solution for marketers to build, edit and preview creatives across display and social creatives in one interface, called PowerPlus for Facebook.
The concept of perfectly synchronized campaign waves is analogous to “rolling thunder,” which is both a natural concept and a term used by marketers to describe how thunderstorms and campaigns build in strength and power as they successfully move through time and distance. It is also part of the thinking that led the company and its board to rename and reposition PaperG as Thunder.
Getting going with programmatic creative isn’t difficult if you have a roadmap to follow.
That’s why we published our proven three-step buying process to help you navigate getting started. Answer questions like:
This is both a guide and a mini-workbook, purpose-built to help you find success with programmatic creative.
This article originally appeared on CMO.com.
While DMPs, social networks, and advertising giants like Facebook and Google struggle to combat data leakage with the unauthorized transfer of their data to the outside world, a more insidious type of leakage is draining ad dollars largely unchecked.
Advertisers and agencies are investing a great deal in targeting technologies like DSPs and DMPs, which account for about 30 percent of the $20 billion being spent globally in programmatic. Even so, only a small percentage of programmatic campaigns have creatives that completely match each targeted audience. In fact, up to 97 percent of programmatic campaigns lack a targeted creative for each audience segment, according to research by AppNexus.
This year, $6.1 billion will be spent on DSPs and DMPs. But over 90% of the resulting targeted ads won’t have matching creative.
That means that despite the all the money spent on data and targeting, generic or generalized creatives are being used in the vast majority of programmatic campaigns. Programmatic creative solves the problem—adapting brand storytelling to become tailored to the viewer. It’s an exciting moment. Through technology, creativity and data can finally dance.
This is the subject of the eBook The Essential Guide to Programmatic Creative Technologies. This webinar summarizes the 35-page eBook in just 5 minutes.
Want the full eBook? Download it here: The Essential Guide to Programmatic Creative Technologies
Having already overtaken the majority of digital ad spend, programmatic buying continues its rapid rise.
In the US, programmatic already accounts for over two-thirds of all display media. Magna Global forecasts programmatic-driven ad spend in 2015 to hit $20.5 Bn worldwide. Growth for years ahead is projected to remain steady.
To deliver the right message to the right audience, advertisers and agencies have put about 30% of their programmatic spend, $6 Bn, into targeting technologies like DSPs and DMPs.
And yet despite spending billions, the promise of delivering the right message still hasn’t been realized.
Research by AppNexus shows that 97% of programmatic campaigns lack a targeted creative for each audience segment. That means the vast majority of programmatic campaigns use generalized or generic creatives, a factor that has lead to heavy concerns from marketers about driving ROI from big data.
It’s not all wasted data, however. Many companies have figured out how to make creative work in the programmatic era, and they are reaping the rewards:
This year, $6.1 billion will be spent on DSPs and DMPs. But over 90% of the resulting targeted ads won’t have matching creative. Programmatic creative solves the problem—adapting brand storytelling to become tailored to the viewer.
It’s an exciting moment. Through technology, creativity and data can finally dance.
To help you capture this moment, we’re excited to release a free, comprehensive, 35-page eBook. The information on these pages will help you understand the quickly-evolving world of programmatic creative by covering:
If you are ready to explore the technologies that will transform programmatic marketing at your organization, this is the ultimate eBook to kickstart your journey.
Download your free copy today.
Lately, there has been a lot of talk about the burgeoning relationship between programmatic media and ad creative. Most of the discourse has been about how optimal creative can significantly impact the performance of the media in theory. The purpose of this article is to look at the data behind what those gains might be in practice.
Creative optimization is the act of customizing and testing advertisement artwork and messaging to be more resonant with audiences. Since programmatic allows advertisers to precisely target specific audiences, these technologies have inspired advertisers to leverage creative variations for greater media effectiveness.
The dominant tactics include:
The expectation of gains from these tactics comes from an already established success in creative relevancy and testing in email, social, search and website content. Armed with programmatic buying, big data and algorithmic optimization, advertisers hope to translate similar gains into display ads, native ads and video.
The strategies here seem sound, but what data is there to back it up?
When it comes to design, $51.8 billion buys surprisingly little love.
What I mean is that despite display being a $51.8 billion market annually, the creative part of display advertising takes a far back seat to media planning and buying.
At the core of it, this lack of love stems from the high costs of creative production, particularly because marketers and media folks aren’t able to produce enough creatives to match the scope of what could be done.
In my experience, there’s no shortage of copy or concepts to run epic display ad campaigns. Marketers would like to use a test and learn mentality with display, but due to the costs and time involved in creative production, only a single or a few campaign concepts can actually get created. It’s online advertising in 2014 and we’re stuck in a plan and execute mode.