It’s interesting to see some predictions from Spear Marketing Group on which types of technology U.S. B2B marketers expect to find important this year and next, as well as which they expect to see ROI gains from (all as reported by eMarketer). In short, automation is looking good — and so, too, is content marketing and its close cousin, SEO. Could there be a trend here of the three overlapping?
Across the multiple technologies available, it looks like predictive analytics and Big Data are the only niches that will grow in importance among surveyed marketers next year. However, neither gets close to the top billing ascribed to content marketing, SEO and marketing automation. Even CRM sees a massive dip in importance over the next 18 months, as does social media, leaving the aforementioned three amigos way ahead.
It’s always risky to read too much into figures, and adding two and two together to get five, but given the current high rate of ad blocking that is coming between consumers and display, there will clearly be a need to be a shift to more ad dollars being put into content marketing. This is likely to be a no-brainer for B2B marketers who clearly have content marketing and SEO at the top of their radars.
For the most part, advertisers agree that programmatic ad-serving and buying supports growth in online automation. However, industry agency experts believe the “emperor’s new clothes” need to button up processes to support a tighter fit.
James Harris, chief digital officer at media agency Carat Global, believes programmatic has been somewhat guilty of throwing ads at people and pushing the industry back to the days of the pop-up advertisements, when many predicted the end of online advertising.
“Programmatic sits at 1.0, which is about hitting people many times, because they’re in an audience pool,” Harris says. “Brands need to look for the signal from consumers telling them it’s the appropriate time to serve an ad.”
On Thursday, apps to block advertising were numbers 1, 3 and 6 on the most downloaded list kept by Apple. The surge came the day after Apple’s iOS9 update made it possible for iPhone users to enable them with the Safari browser for the first time.
Newly released apps like Peace, Crystal and Purify have cracked the top ten on the App Store’s most-downloaded chart. When enabled in the Settings menu, they shield Safari users from the pop-ups, auto-play videos, trackers and other types of mobile advertising that can weigh down loading speeds and clutter web pages.
People are declaring war on pop-ups, commercials and advertising by installing ad-blocking software to keep commercials at bay as they browse the web.
But internet ads are not going down without a fight.
In a game of cat and mouse, news sites and other online publishers are blocking the ad-blockers in ways large, small, and nearly always passive-aggressive.
Thanks to software that can detect whether a site visitor is using a blocker, websites can now direct messages at these readers, jam ads through to them anyway or even withhold stories. Uneasy publishers are increasingly turning to startups that give them the ability to detect and pierce through ad blockers, such as Sourcepoint and Pagefair.
The maker of the ad-blocking software Adblock Plus released a version Tuesday for mobile iOS browsers, one day prior to similar news expected from Apple.
Apple’s forthcoming technology in iOS 9 expected Wednesday will provide ad-blocking capabilities on iPhones and iPads.
Aside from blocking advertisements from serving up, Adblock’s iOS free browser extension, released Tuesday, touts ways to protect users from malware and malvertising, protects mobile data, disables ad tracking, increases privacy, and extends battery life on the phone.
A call is, generally speaking, a better lead than a click. But how much better is striking: calls have 30 to 50 percent conversion rates while clicks top out at 1 to 2 percent. That’s according to a new Call Intelligence Index report from Invoca.
The data in the report represent “more than 32 million phone calls placed to businesses across 40 industries in 2014.” The analysis determined that mobile marketing (search, display, etc.) was responsible roughly 54 percent of all calls to businesses. And 45 percent of calls to businesses came as a result of a mobile search.
Beyond this the overwhelming majority of business calls (75 percent) come from mobile phones.
Malicious advertising attacks (malvertising) have been plaguing mainstream sites and their visitors a lot these past few years.
While some are easy to spot and get rid of, others tend to be much more sophisticated and hard to shine light on.
On Saturday 11th, we discovered a malicious advert that was displayed on huffingtonpost.com as well as other popular sites, such a Zillow.com. This advert was used to deliver the Cryptowall ransomware via a Flash exploit.
The ad was loaded by a third-party advertiser (servedbyadbutler.com) initially called by delivery.first-impression, where it won the real-time bidding auction for $2.31 CPM (cost per thousand impressions).
An audience member at Tuesday’s Programmatic Insider Summit in Scottsdale, AZ, told the private exchange panel that he has been told from some “open market exchange people” to look into private marketplaces because his company isn’t winning enough bids on the open exchanges.
How common is this, the ad buyer wondered, and is it a legitimate suggestion?
Brian Brownie, director of advertising operations at eBay, noted that a common misconception is that supply is limited in private marketplaces; that if an ad-buyer is worried about entering a private marketplace because it will limit their scope, that isn’t necessarily true. (Obviously, it depends on which private marketplaces are joined.)
“The supply is not necessarily limited by the fact that the priority has now changed,” said Brownie. “[On the open exchange], there are 10,000 buyers, and everybody is level,” he exclaimed. “Then you step into the private world, and you have 100 buyers. The inventory is the same — it just means they get to go in through the velvet rope.”
Advertising isn’t what it used to be. It’s more precise than at any other point in history. According to LinkedIn Influencer Tim Cadogan, “programmatic advertising” is expected to “grow tens of billions of dollars” by 2020, but what is it?
First there was “paid search” which peaked at the turn of the century and finally became a $58 billion industry–and paid search is still going strong. However, the growth of programmatic is outpacing even that of paid search. Is programmatic advertising set to leave paid search in the dust?
“Advertisers’ demand for viewability is frustrating for publishers, who must contend with new contracts, new billing structures and new ways to value inventory, all while ensuring meeting viewability standards doesn’t erode ad revenue,” writes AdExchanger.
At the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Phoenix, AdExchanger notes that about half of the publishers said they have sold campaigns based on viewability.
But what “viewability” means is still up for debate, even after the Media Rating Council (MRC) spelled out its standard (50% of the pixels being in-view for at least one second).
