Archives for July 2018

Images are becoming the universal language.

It is predicted there will be 7.6 billion people in the world in 2019, and about 5 billion of them will have a mobile phone.  With close to 80% having a built-in camera, that’s 4 billion people taking pictures every day. And we’ve seen the proof. 10 percent of photos taken, by humankind, have been produced in the last twelve months.

Pictures have more power to enrich communication and stimulate response than text. The IAB’s In-Image Advertising Primer notes that articles with relevant photos get 94 percent more views than those without. The brain is able to process visuals 60,000 times faster than text and those visuals can trigger a prevailing emotional response from the recipient. Those are just two of the many reasons why there’s such a predominant focus on images in areas such as brand advertising and news. Images currently comprise around 30 percent of the editorial content within Vibrant’s premium publishers, and this is expected to grow.

The greater presence and consumption of images online helps to explain why the next generation of digital display ads will be in-image advertising.

In-image ads tick all of the boxes of contemporary digital marketing best practice: they are an in-line, truly native format; they work cross-platform; they can be programmatically deployed at massive scale across mobile and desktop. At Vibrant we’ve seen a big uptake in the past year by some of our biggest CPG advertisers for the format. Clients appreciate the scale and viewability of buying programmatically but buy direct for the more custom, animated and highly creative functionalities.

The most viewable programmatic format?

Unlike standard banner ads that appear around content, in-image ads appear as nimble overlays placed natively at the base of contextually-relevant static editorial images. As an in-line format, a high viewability would be expected, however, the scale of that performance is remarkable. The formats also regularly attain double the industry standard.

Designed to perform

However, whilst such technical display capabilities are important for advertisers to know when purchasing ads, it’s the impact on consumers that matters most. In-image ads achieve nearly three times the industry average brand lift, according to Nielsen Online Brand Effect. The ads are so effective they generally need just three exposures or less to achieve the maximum brand lift for the ad creative.

The changing online landscape and challenges mean marketers must adopt new ad tactics for programmatic performance. In-Image advertising may be the solution. It’s viewable, it performs and it’s a visual medium that consumers like.

 

Today in London It’s 33 degrees. Probably the hottest day on record!

Whilst we swelter away on the tube ride to the office, fanning ourselves to keep cool, the tech team have been busy reading up on all the latest happenings in the word of tech. So a big thank you to the team for not just reading about the weather!

The tech team have selected some great articles this week… They’ve highlight one of the most inspirational women in the world of physics and have covered the latest news from Roku, Google and Apple.

We hope everyone enjoys these reads with a nice chilled drink in an air conditioned environment 🙂

Top Tech Stories This Week

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Meet the Woman Who Rocked Particle Physics – Three Times

One of the many women who, in a different world, might have won the physics prize in the intervening 55 years is Sau Lan Wu. Wu’s name appears on more than 1,000 papers in high-energy physics, and she has contributed to a half-dozen of the most important experiments in her field over the past 50 years. Great interview to read on Wu with Quanta Magazine. 

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Open Sourcing Quantum: Get Ready to Help Build a New Future

This is a keynote highlight from OSCON in Portland 2018. Jay Gambetta explores Qiskit, an open-source framework that aims to make quantum computing accessible for everyone. Jay Gambetta is a fellow at IBM, where he has contributed to the work on quantum validation techniques, quantum codes, improved gates and coherence etc, and leads IBM’s quantum theory, software, and applications group.

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Today’s the Day That Chrome Brands Plain Old HTTP as Not Secure

With the change, every site now gets a label in its address bar: “Secure” if the site is loaded over HTTPS, “Not Secure” otherwise.  However, Troy Hunt—creator of the Have I Been Pwned service—has found that a number of popular sites can still serve content insecurely. Linked to this article explaining why, is a great one from The Inquirer. 

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Apple Promises Fix for Throttled MacBook Pros, But That Might Not Solve Everything

In a statement released on Tuesday, Apple officially confirmed issues related to excessive heat generation in new MBPs and promised that the company will release a patch to address the problem.

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Roku is in the Ad Business, not the Hardware Business, says CEO

Hear CEO Anthony Wood’s frank  and open interview on this week’s Vergecast. “We don’t really make money… we certainly don’t make enough money to support our engineering organization and our operations and the cost of money to run the Roku service,” he said. “That’s not paid for by the hardware. That’s paid for by our ad and content business.”

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Google to Offer Blockchain as Part of  Cloud Service

In a blog post ahead of its Google Cloud Next ’18 conference this week, the search giant said it is partnering with Digital Asset and BlockApps to enable customers to “explore ways they might use distributed ledger technology (DLT) frameworks on Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP).”

Brand safety is at the heart of everything we do. 18 years ago when Vibrant was created, the core purpose was to find relevant, brand safe environments for advertisers. Our founders thought the irrelevant ads littered in the corners of crammed web pages, provided no user experience and ultimately damaged brand reputation. Vibrant was founded to make advertising better for all.

Industry verification 

18 years on and we are still leading the industry for brand safety. As well as our own proprietary brand safety technology, Vibrant joined The Digital Trading Standards Group (DTSG) to adhere to industry codes of conduct for best practice on ad placement.

DTSG is a cross industry working group managed by JICWEBS. The group created a set of high level Principles aimed at minimizing the risk of ad misplacement and their role is to independently assess whether a business is compliant with these Principles. Upon successful completion, businesses are issued a Certificate and Seal of Compliance from JICWEBS, demonstrating their commitment to brand safety.

Vibrant Renews DTSG Seal of Compliance!

We are delighted to announce that Vibrant has just had its DTSG seal of compliance renewed. After a very thorough audit, we were able to demonstrate how all of our processes and operational teams adhere to the strictest set of internal guidelines to provide the most brand safe environments for advertisers.

We’d like to say a big thank you to all of the Tech and Ops people at Vibrant who worked with DTSG and continue to do a sterling job every day. We really do care about our brands and it’s great to have the seal to show that by trading with Vibrant, they can trade with confidence!

Pre-GDPR, we polled media buyers to ascertain their thoughts on how the legislation would affect their client’s consumer data/profiles. The stats looked bleak. Respondents predicted that 43% of audience data would be unusable after the 25^th May.

Even though nearly half of the media buyers (48 per cent) thought that infringements of the GDPR would be difficult to enforce, brands were reporting a decline in spend on the most GDPR compromised marketing strategies. For example, two fifths of media buyers (42 per cent) said that the GDPR would result in a drop in programmatic spend.

So, were they correct?

Three weeks post GDPR, in June 2018, we ran the same poll to establish what the reality was. Based on over 40 agency execs, they said that 35% of their client’s audience data was no longer usable. A stat very close to earlier predictions.

However, only 12% were spending less programmatically. The low percentage was mainly due to plans being made pre GDPR, so budgets had already been allocated accordingly knowing that reach would almost certainly be affected. Time will tell how this pans out in the future. Programmatic may never go away but it means brands are now looking at other options on how to reach their audiences. 39% agreed that direct IOs would make a comeback under GDPR. The rise and reliance on brand safety, coupled with the comeback of contextual advertising were cited as the key reasons for media planners wanting to have more control on their brand campaigns.

So, what is the future for our industry? 42% said contextual, non-personalised ads will become more important going forward. Whilst data is still incredibly important to brands, Contextual advertising doesn’t need cookies, so helps brands to reach and attract new audiences where they don’t have consent.

Contextual ads can also help retain current audiences. If brands suddenly have 35% less audience data, the last thing that want to do is drive away the remaining 65% by serving irrelevant ads. Their strategy must be to work hard to retain and then grow new audiences through quality ad placements in brand-safe editorial. Context really is the comeback kid for brands post GDPR.

Every Thursday we hand the blog over to the smartest people at Vibrant to share what they’ve been reading and watching this week. All tech related of course! Tho, we’d love to think some Love Island has crept into their viewing habits.

This week there’s lots of fines, lots of fake news (not from us) and new partnership deals. Have a great Thursday!

Top Tech Stories This Week

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Fork it! Google fined 4.34bn Euros over Android, has 90 days to behave

This one has dominated the headlines today. News that Google leveraged its platform dominance in Android to promote its own services and apps, at the expense of third-party services (says the European Commission) has resulted in a a very hefty fine.  It has 90 days to mend its way or face further penalties of up to 5 per cent of the average daily worldwide turnover of parent firm Alphabet.

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Facebook will begin taking down fake news intended to encourage violence

Under the new policy, text and image items that are flagged for”contributing to or exacerbating violence or physical harm” will be removed. Facebook will work with outside organizations as well as its own internal teams to detect these types of offensive items. Parties will have to confirm the information is false, and other groups may be asked to weigh in.

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Microsoft and Walmart team up to take on Amazon

The five-year agreement will see Walmart use Azure and Microsoft 365 across the company, alongside new projects focused on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data platforms.

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Power to the drones: Utilities place bets on robots

Italy’s Snam, Europe’s biggest gas utility, and France’s RTE are just two of the many companies that are testing drones to  fly ‘beyond the visual line of sight’ to detect damage and leaks.  Michal Mazur, partner at consultancy PwC, said of drones “They’re 100 times faster than manual measurement, more accurate than helicopters and, with AI devices on board, could soon be able to fix problems.”