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Proctor and Gamble (P&G) is going to cut it's budget paid to outside advertisers by 1.2 billion by the end of 2021. The number of outside ad agencies that P&G works with will be cut by 80%. Many other large companies are following the P&G trend by keeping advertising "in house." For the first time in history, advertising jobs are declining during an economic expansion. This is all possible due to automated ad buying (programmatic).

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With technology, accountability, and data as hot-button issues, many companies are re-evaluating and modernizing their advertising strategies. But these strategies may be leaving advertising agencies in the dust.

Proctor & Gamble Chairman and CEO David Taylor recently made headlines when he announced that P&G would continue to cut ad agency and production fees from its budget. The company has already reduced agency and production spending by $750 million since 2015, and plans to cut another $400 million by 2021. The process will reduce the number of agencies P&G works with by 80 percent from the original number.

This move is only part of a trend of larger companies cutting ties with ad agencies. There are several factors behind this trend. The biggest reason behind the shift away from agencies is the democratization of technology.

The accessibility of the Internet and rise of "digital native" generations mean that traditional advertising is on the decline; advertising jobs are declining during an economic expansion for the first time on record. The Internet has fragmented audiences, and online reviews often make consumers more selective about where and what they're purchasing.

Online advertising has also been dominated by Google and Facebook, which own a disproportionate amount of ad spend. Together, they drive more than half of global ad spending, controlling a combined 61 percent. So far, no other advertiser has been able to crack even a 3 percent share of the global market.

The number of ad agency jobs decreased by about 5,000 in 2017. Positions in media buying agencies have been generally stagnant since 2013. Meanwhile, Facebook and Google accounted for 90 percent of digital advertising growth during the same period.

In addition to offering inexpensive ads, Facebook and Google have massive amounts of user data. They're also two of the most well-known brands in the world: Facebook has 2.2 billion monthly active users and Google processes 1.2 trillion searches per year (that's 40,000 per second). This gives both massive scale and reach, and agencies haven't been able to catch up.

The second biggest factor in the decline of ad agencies is that, through programmatic advertising, companies are able to emulate agencies in-house. Not only did the number of jobs decrease, but the number of account wins also dropped, leading to an overall decrease in revenue.

Automated ad buying was a revelation. This type of program introduced a way to make the ad buying process more efficient automatically buys and sells ad space, and it now accounts for nearly 80 percent of display spending in the U.S. This number is expected to rise to 85 percent by 2019.

Programmatic is far from perfect - clickbot fraud and lack of control over ad placement are two major issues that should scare advertisers - but it works far faster than a human ever could. "Humatic" programs allow users to automate and optimize campaigns, which gives a single media buyer the media buying capabilities of a full team.

Anything that gives companies more control over advertising is now seen as a benefit. Keeping advertising in-house is cost efficient. Companies also own more customer data, giving them the ability to fine-tune their targeting. Additionally, customers are increasingly placing value on personalized marketing strategies, such as personalized responses on social media. This strategy has the additional benefit of giving the company data about what users think and value.

For many companies, involving outside companies makes it difficult to quickly adjust digital campaigns. Bringing advertising in-house means more efficient processes in terms of adjusting strategy in addition to buying and selling.

There are other factors driving companies away from ad agencies, too. One example is transparency issues breaking trust between agencies and companies.

Brands can also work directly with platforms to produce native advertising like blog posts. A Facebook and Google model that promises massive reach and scale for low cost has a final benefit in eliminating the middleman. Facebook and Google work directly with companies to place ads, and so companies who use these services in conjunction with automated eliminate most of the need for outside advertisers.

Finally, traditional agencies are simply having trouble changing. They don't have the digital capacity of newer and smaller agencies and aren't adapting to new advertising models. However, it is imperative for agencies to adapt to these models and adjust according to new advertising strategies to survive.

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How Tech is Disrupting the Advertising Industry - Maximus Live - Medium

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With technology, accountability, and data as hot-button issues, many companies are re-evaluating and modernizing their advertising strategies. But these strategies may be leaving advertising agencies in the dust. Proctor & Gamble Chairman and CEO David Taylor recently made headlines when he announced that P&G would continue to cut ad agency and production fees from its budget.

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Programmatic advertising is best suited to online advertisement due to real-time bidding structure. Programmatic is better than traditional ad agencies because it allows for targeted ads to create maximum impact. The winners are: ad exchanges, SSP's, DSP's, and third party data suppliers.

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Who wins and loses in the global shift to programmatic advertising?

Donald Draper, the protagonist of AMC's hit 50s-era series Mad Men, is depicted as one of Madison Avenue's smoothest advertising executives. He focuses on charm, style, and an innate understanding of the American consumer. Somehow, (in the show), he succeeds.
What is programmatic advertising?
Modern advertising has changed so drastically that Don might find himself considerably out of date. Today's advertising is more scientific and quantitative than ever before, and requires deep understanding of publisher metrics, customer behavior, and computer science. A large part of this is due to programmatic advertising, which has revolutionized the way marketers reach audiences through targeted digital ad placement [1].

Programmatic advertising refers to the use of automated processes to buy, place, and optimize advertising. This is in contrast to the traditional model of advertising in which ad agencies (e.g., Ogilvy & Mather) or marketers (e.g., Kraft-Heinz) directly contract with publishers (e.g., ESPN.com). Exhibit 1 shows an overview of these two approaches.

Exhibit 1: Overview of traditional vs. programmatic advertising models [2]

Due to its real-time bidding structure, the programmatic approach is best suited for online advertisements. In 2017, global programmatic advertising spending totaled approximately $80 Billion - representing 45% of all online advertising, and 14% of all advertising [3]. The sector is also expected to grow rapidly. TechNavio, a market research firm, estimates that programmatic advertising will grow at a CAGR of 21% from 2017 to 2022, and come to represent $210 Billion, 29% of global ad spending [4]. It is clear the industry's shift to programmatic advertising is significant and will continue into the future.
How does programmatic advertising create value?
Exhibit 2: Global programmatic advertising market size, 2017-2022 [4]

Programmatic advertising creates value for marketers by allowing them to target advertisements for maximum impact. For example, a company advertising de-icing salt might focus their ads on users who live in areas experiencing cold weather. By focusing advertising on their target consumers marketers can increase their return on investment. They also save valuable time, as shown in exhibit 3.

Programmatic advertising also creates value for publishers by ensuring that their inventory (i.e., ad space) is maximally utilized. Through the real-time bidding mechanism programmatic advertising ensures that inventory is most efficiently allocated to the highest bidder.

Finally, programmatic advertising creates value for consumers by showing them relevant, timely ads that may fill a genuine consumer need.
"The winners"
Exhibit 3: Time savings with programmatic advertising [5]

The shift to programmatic advertising has benefitted a number of sectors involved in measuring, analyzing, and optimizing advertising spending. Exhibit 3 shows several of these sectors and their role in programmatic advertising.
Winner #1: Ad exchanges Examples: Google's DoubleClick Ad Exchange, AppNexus
Exhibit 3: The programmatic media landscape [6]
Winner #2: Supply side platforms Examples: Google AdX, Pubmatic
Advertising exchanges run the real-time bidding process at the heart of programmatic advertising and are one of the most direct winners in its growth. Ad exchanges capture value by charging setup fees and commissions to the publishers seeking to sell inventory on the exchange.
Winner #3: Demand-side platforms Examples: Amazon Advertising, DoubleClick BidManager, Brightroll, DataXu
Supply side platforms, also called Yield Optimization Platforms, enable publishers to effectively manage their inventory and revenue on ad exchanges. By automating the sale of publishers' ad inventory, they create value for publishers. Several software companies focus exclusively on this market segment and have benefitted from the rise of programmatic advertising.
Winner #4: Third party data providers Examples: Lotame, BlueKai, Exelate
Demand-side platforms allow marketers (e.g., Kraft-Heinz) to manage multiple ad and data exchange accounts to accomplish an advertising goal. For example, BrightRoll might help Kraft-Heinz optimize its advertising across five separate exchanges to maximally effect brand perceptions among 25-39-year-old females.
"The Losers"
Third party data providers help marketers and their demand-side platforms better identify their "targets." The data that third party providers give - such as detailed consumer targeting data - helps marketers design better campaigns. Data providers capture some of this value by charging marketers access fees. These companies also frequently accept payment "in-kind" - i.e., they allow marketers to trade data on their customers in exchange for third party data [7].
Loser #1: Media agencies Examples: WPP, Omnicom, Publicis
Programmatic advertising's growth has negatively impacted a number of players in the traditional advertising model. In addition, the future promises more pain: programmatic advertising is expected to continue expanding, and will likely be introduced in advertising media currently considered off-limits (e.g., TV, radio, outdoor).
Loser #2: Owners of other forms of "broadcast" media Examples: TV station owners, radio station owners
Media agencies are the primary losers of the shift to programmatic advertising. Initially, media agencies saw programmatic advertising as a growth area; they quickly built staffs and expertise in programmatic campaign development. However, a series of scandals (involving programmatic ads showing up in less-than-desirable locations, coupled with inaccurate metrics) convinced many marketers to develop in-house programmatic advertising management capabilities. It is seen as unlikely that this business will return to the media agencies. Billings at WPP, the world's largest media agency, declined 3.9% in 2017 [8].
Loser #3: Workers
The additional value created by programmatic advertising is likely to reduce the proportion of advertising spending allocated to traditional forms of broadcast media. While this effect will take a number of years to materialize, and can be offset by overall market growth, I believe that the market's shift towards personalized, "narrowcast" media is likely to continue. Owners of broadcast media outlets will likely try to find alternate ways of targeting customers (e.g., through cable subscriptions). Once this is achieved, these media types are likely to join programmatic marketplaces.

Programmatic advertising requires less manual input and adjustment than traditional advertising, as shown in exhibit 3. This has led to a reduction in employee needs. These job losses may, in time, be offset by increased demand for data scientists, engineers, and other highly-trained computer professionals. However, the short term impact is a reduction in employment.
Towards a more efficient marketplace
Exhibit 5: Job growth in the Media & Advertising sector [9]

Programmatic advertising represents a new, more efficient process for buying, placing, and optimizing advertisements. In just a few years, programmatic ad-buying has become the majority of the online advertising market, and shows little sign of slowing. Over time I feel confident that the opportunities created by expanding programmatic advertising will unlock new ways for marketers and consumers to interact.

[1] https://medium.com/axialx/programmatic-advertising-explained-666c52978ea5

[2] https://www.match2one.com/blog/traditional-vs-programmatic-media-buying/

[3] https://insights-technavio-com.prd2.ezproxy-prod.hbs.edu/report/global-ad-spending-market-analysis-share-2018

[4] https://insights-technavio-com.prd2.ezproxy-prod.hbs.edu/report/global-programmatic-advertising-spending-market-analysis-share-2018

[5] https://www.bcg.com/en-us/publications/2018/guaranteed-opportunity-programmatic-advertising.aspx

[6] https://digilant.com/programmatic-buying-101-whats-the-difference-between-dsps-ad-networks/

[7] https://adage.com/lookbook/article/ad-exchange/needed-ad-exchanges-work/298394/

[8] https://sites.wpp.com/annualreports/2017//

[9] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/advertising-jobs-programmatic-tech/552629/

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Disrupting Donald Draper: Programmatic Ad-buying's Effect on the Advertising Industry

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Who wins and loses in the global shift to programmatic advertising? Donald Draper, the protagonist of AMC's hit 50s-era series Mad Men, is depicted as one of Madison Avenue's smoothest advertising executives. He focuses on charm, style, and an innate understanding of the American consumer. Somehow, (in the show), he succeeds.

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This article is from 2014 and the information in it is outdated.

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This article is more than 2 years old.

Despite stealing a larger and larger share of online ad budgets, the automated display-ad placement technology called programmatic apparently remains a mystery to most advertisers.

According to a new report from research aggregator eMarketer, even ad agencies that actually handle the work aren't sure what it's all about. Some 60% of them don't feel there's a good, agreed-upon definition, and almost all the rest aren't sure either way. As a result, only 12% of agencies trust programmatic systems to execute their ad order accurately.

Those numbers echo a survey earlier this year by the Association of National Advertisers and Forrester. It found that only 23% of marketers know what it means and use it, while 29% have heard of it but don't get it. (Some 12% have never heard of programmatic. Yikes.)

They'd better figure it out soon, because their rivals who have a clue are getting a big head start. IDC expects programmatic spending on display and video ads, including on mobile devices, to more than triple this year, to $675 million, growing nearly 10 times the overall display-ad market.

Just for the record, here's one of the better definitions of programmatic advertising, from Digiday:

"Programmatic" ad buying typically refers to the use of software to purchase digital advertising, as opposed to the traditional process that involves RFPs, human negotiations and manual insertion orders. It's using machines to buy ads, basically.

Still, there's nothing like seeing how it works in a diagram or, better yet, a video. That's just what the digital media trading company Media Crossing just released. Take a look:

I write about the Internet technologies and upstarts that are disrupting advertising and media faster than ever. I'm living this disruption, so I might as well write abo...

Read More

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Still Can't Figure Out How Programmatic Advertising Works? Watch This Video

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VideoDespite stealing a larger and larger share of online ad budgets, the automated display-ad placement technology called programmatic apparently remains a mystery to most advertisers. According to a new report from research aggregator eMarketer, even ad agencies that actually handle the work aren't sure what it's all about.

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What you need to know about Programmatic

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What you need to know about Programmatic

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Programmatic in conjunction with AI technology is "working harder" for brands than traditional ad agencies. Programmatic offers Real-time feedback which is something traditional agencies could never do. IBM is using Watson (AI) and it has reduced the CPC by 71%. By reducing the amount of necessary human labor, programmatic is cheaper than traditional ad agencies.

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Programmatic advertising channels are rapidly becoming the most important medium for US advertisers and the world at large. In 2019, US advertisers are expected to spend nearly $60 billion on programmatic advertising. And that number is expected to grow: by 2021, almost 88% of all US digital display ad dollars will transact programmatically.

There are constant changes to the industry as programmatic advertising matures, which makes it important for advertisers to stay up to date on the latest developments. This post offers a guide to programmatic advertising and the trends shaping the industry in 2019 and beyond.

What is programmatic advertising?

There is still a lot of confusion about what programmatic advertising is and is not. But the term programmatic simply refers to advertising that utilizes software and data to decide which ads to buy and how much to pay for them. In programmatic advertising, machines take the place of people who traditionally performed this job manually. This type of advertising can apply to a number of different channels; from display to digital out-of-home and television.

Before there was programmatic advertising, buying ads was a time-consuming process performed manually by people. Media buyers would negotiate, make purchases and create change orders with salespeople. Once confirmed, the publisher would take over running the campaign. This required the buyer to relinquish control to the publisher.

How does programmatic advertising work?

Programmatic advertising is bought and sold in an automated manner. Software algorithms evaluate user analytics to help the system determine what ad content is relevant to a particular user. Some of the data used in this process includes:

User Behavior

Engagement level

Social Engagement

Location

Time per visit

What are the benefits of programmatic advertising?
Increased Efficiency

Programmatic technology reduces human error by taking over some of the menial tasks performed by a media buyer.

This shift allows marketers and sellers to spend more of their time planning sophisticated, strategic campaigns rather than getting bogged down in the granular details.

Sophisticated data analysis helps buyers to identify the best use of their advertising budgets

Personalization

Programmatic leverages user analytics to determine what content is most relevant to a user at any given time.

Advertising creative can dynamically change as factors like location, device, weather, time, and demographics shift.

Programmatic advertising learns about customers as they roam online, enabling marketers to create specific messaging for different target audiences.

Real-time Feedback

As campaigns progress, programmatic technology can provide real-time feedback to advertisers. This allows marketers to optimize creative quickly as the software learns more about what is resonating with the campaign's audience.
Lower Costs

The majority of programmatic ad buys are priced by CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions).

Programmatic ads are typically a fraction of the cost of a direct buy. On average, programmatic CPM's are within the $0.50 to $2 range, versus the average $10 CPM of a direct buy.

Guaranteed Impressions
What to Expect in 2019 and Beyond

Programmatic Advertising + Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a key component of programmatic advertising, most notably for its ability to aid in real-time auctions and dynamic content optimization. Last year, IBM Watson demonstrated its ability to reduce cost-per-click (CPC) by focusing on these aspects of campaigns. IBM is already using Watson for buying media in both the US and the UK, with the highest results show a stunning 71% reduced CPC.

Additionally, AI is being used for remarketing and lookalike modeling to connect the most relevant prospects with content that is relevant and personalized. It also helps in media buying by predicting the likelihood of a customer responding to an ad and bidding on that opportunity accordingly.

"Technology is making programmatic advertising work harder for brands... Artificial Intelligence promises to unlock new understanding of customers as people, as well as improving the optimization of the trading process."
- Jonathan Barnard, Zenith's Head of Forecasting and Director of Global Intelligence

Programmatic TV
While traditionally programmatic advertising has been focused on digital channels, there is a new push to bridge the gap between TV and online advertising. By 2021, PWC predicts that programmatic TV advertising will represent approximately one-third of all TV ad revenue.

The term "Programmatic TV" refers to any TV ad inventory that can be bought and sold on an audience basis. It flips the industry standard, which historically relied on show ratings to determine desirable audiences for ads.

There are new ad format types for connected TVs, including unskippable and immersive 15- and 30-second video ads. Connected TVs also allow for greater precision in targeting based on more accurate consumer data. TV media companies are experimenting with new ad formats as well; Hulu announced this year that they would begin showing ads when a consumer pressed the 'pause' button.

Bringing Advertising In-House
As brands get more comfortable with programmatic advertising, there is an increased desire to own and operate their own data. This is largely motivated by the opportunity to gain more value from their advertising spend, the ability for more transparency and greater control over campaign placement ( Choozle). According to Econsultancy's 2019 survey, 22% of marketing respondents reported using a mixed programmatic trading model, with 29% running with solely in-house operations.

The shift to in-house advertising is a bit slow. Econsultancy's survey also found that 43% still report running their ads entirely with an agency. The primary reason for this is a difficulty finding the right talent.

Blockchain Will Combat Ad Fraud
The programmatic AdTech industry has had ongoing issues of transparency and ad fraud. In 2018 alone, advertisers lost$19 billion to fraudulent activities.

In response, advertisers are adopting Blockchain products in an effort to reduce fraud. Blockchain has shown success in tackling ad fraud by removing domain spoofing, verifying the legitimacy of publishers, and allowing transactions using cryptocurrencies. For example, Toyota began insisting that the businesses facilitating its programmatic buys adopt its blockchain to spot any inconsistencies between bids.

However, advertisers have been slow to adopt Blockchain. Only 11% of the 300 US agency and marketing professionals polled by Advertiser Perceptions had ever completed a transaction using blockchain.

Rise of Voice-Activated Advertising
Over 56 million in-home smart speakers shipped in 2018, which presents a big opportunity for advertisers. As voice-activated technology becomes more mass market, brands are looking to these devices as a new way to engage an active group of listeners.

This type of ad placement is still in its infancy, but voice-activated technology providers such as Google, Amazon, and Apple are developing ways to monetize their product lines by implementing audio ads on voice search devices. Success in this medium will depend on both brands and technology providers creating innovative ways to connect with audiences without disrupting the user experience. Brands should consider issues like tone of voice when experimenting with voice-activated advertising.

Expansion of 5G
By the year 2025, there will be approximately 1.1 billion 5G connections. As the speed of online transactions increases, advertisers will have a greater ability to serve high-resolution ads to their target audiences. New interactive advertising formats and higher-quality video ads will continue to increase, especially on mobile devices.

Video is expected to benefit the most from 5G. According to eMarketer, mobile video is already the primary driver of digital video ad revenue growth. 5G will enable users to stream larger, higher-quality videos on their mobile devices at a faster pace than ever before. This will likely drive continued growth of video use in advertising. It is expected that video traffic will account for 82% of all traffic by 2022.

Is programmatic the future of advertising?

The short answer is yes, most likely.

Currently, four out of every five digital display ad dollars in the U.S. are bought programmatically. Advertisers are attracted to the automation and efficiency of programmatic, as well as the ability to continually serve relevant, personalized content.

According to the 2019 Zenith Programmatic Marketing Forecast report, growth of programmatic may be slower than initially expected (due to factors like the GDPR), but the technology will still become the default trading for all types of media. With momentum continuing to grow around the shift to programmatic, it's critical that marketers gain an understanding of the technology today. Is your organization up to date on the latest developments in programmatic advertising?

To take a deeper dive into the future of advertising, check out one of our upcoming social media strategy conferences.

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What You Need To Know About Programmatic Advertising For 2019 And...

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Programmatic advertising channels are rapidly becoming the most important medium for US advertisers and the world at large. In 2019, US advertisers are expected to spend nearly $60 billion on programmatic advertising. And that number is expected to grow: by 2021, almost 88% of all US digital...

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The producers of TV and digital television content are struggling to find a way to customize ads the way programmatic can. They are trying to format "AddressableTV" advertising because the recognize the need to be able to customize TV ads that are shown to different households. Brands that advertise using traditional TV advertisements a struggling because today's audience is fragmented and they use multiple platforms.

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Where Have all of the Advertising Jobs gone?

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Where Have all of the Advertising Jobs gone?

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Traditional advertising jobs are in a recession with more than 5,000 job cuts last year. Programmatic is on the rise because they can deliver targeted ads at low cost. Programmatic is encouraging companies to in-source their advertising work. Smartphones have now edged out TV screens as the most valuable advertising real estate.

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Instead, the mysterious decline can be explained by two developments, most prominently technology's invasion of the ad sector and the phenomenon of more corporations trying to emulate outside media companies in-house, which leaves less work for traditional ad firms.

First, there are Facebook and Google. They are the largest advertising companies in the world-and, quite likely, the largest in the history of the world. Last year, 90 percent of the growth of the digital-advertising business went to just these two firms. Facebook and Google are so profitable because they use their enormous scale and data to deliver targeted advertising at a low cost. This has forced the world's large advertising firms to preserve their profitability through a series of mergers, accompanied by jobs cuts in the name of efficiency.

So what has been the effect of these tech companies on advertising employment? The Bureau of Labor Statistics technically considers Facebook and Google to be "data processing" companies, rather than advertising companies. So, because of this label, what government records show is not that Facebook and Google have stopped hiring people in their advertising divisions, but rather that the growth of those divisions has caused the traditional advertising market to shrink.

The emergence of an advertising duopoly has coincided with the rise of "programmatic advertising," a torpid term that essentially means "companies using algorithms to buy and place ads in those little boxes all over the internet." As any Mad Men fan might intuit, advertising has long been a relationship-driven business, in which multimillion-dollar contracts are hammered out over one-on-one meetings, countless lunches, and even more-countless drinks. With programmatic technology, however, companies can buy access to specific audiences across several publishing platforms at once, bypassing the work of building relationships with each one. That process produces more ads and requires fewer people-or, at least, fewer traditional advertising jobs and more technical jobs.

The old story about programmatic advertising was that both marketers and digital publishers-think AOL, or any news site-embraced the technology, as it allowed companies to cheaply target specific audiences on a budget. But the new reality is that programmatic advertising has placed many advertisements in controversial places, next to low-quality news sources or outright offensive content. Between 2016 and 2017, a survey by the Association of National Advertisers found that a third of marketers cut back on media agencies running programmatic ad campaigns. Instead, brands brought those operations in-house, where they have more control over where their ads run and much more information about who actually sees them. The upshot: Programmatic ads have been a double blow to media agencies, first automating their function and then encouraging companies to insource the work.

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For the first time on record, the number of people working in the industry is declining during an economic expansion.

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This article is more relevant towards Digital out of home ads than how programmatic is disrupting advertising.

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Digital out-of-home (DOOH) is developing at speed. Yet, like every advertising channel it is undergoing disruption. There are new players challenging established brands, and out-of-home (OOH) networks are expanding digital signage as fast as they can. The trends defined in this article are some of the most important.

Building on the success of OOH

Out-of-home advertising offers a brand safe environment, with unparalleled viewability. Unless something is physically blocking the screen, all ads are 100 per cent viewable. What percentage of digital display ad inventory can honestly make such a bold promise? What's more, a Nielsen study showed that OOH provides the highest rate of online activation per dollar of any offline media. Add data feeds, video, and programmatic capabilities to the mix, and digital out-of-home is an unbeatable offering.

DOOH enhances digital advertising

But why is DOOH so important to advertisers? Well, it's proving even more of a draw for viewer eyeballs! Motion DOOH ads capture the attention of outdoor audiences even better. In fact, DOOH ads are twice as likely to be seen and are 2.5 times more impactful than static OOH ads according to a recent study in the UK. Furthermore, ad tech developments are helping more and more brands work within the channel too.

Here's what we think will be shaping digital out-of-home advertising over the next 12 months and beyond:

The potential of mobile location marketing

Knowing who the viewers of your ads are already, makes some OOH ads incredibly powerful. For example, Swedish OOH network, Visual Art boasts of its " golf network " of static billboards, while some airlines offer targeted placements only seen by business travellers. Imagine if you could use data to personalise more OOH units?

Linking viewer's mobiles to nearby DOOH screens offers the opportunity to do these beyond just a few exclusive locations. It's also a trend that is already happening but probably not in the manner people expect. Indeed, billboard owners are already using location data from people's mobiles to offer more informed choices regarding ad placements - similar to online third party data.

Anonymised DOOH data for brands

Furthermore, information captured from phones is now being anonymised by carriers and data vendors who then sell it to media owners. This data is used to offer information on different demographic groups - for example, "business travellers" - who walk by an ad. Add this data to other insights, such as traffic or weather data, and you can better localise DOOH ad content. For example, an DOOH ad at one London bus stop may offer very different results from another unit located in a different part of town.

And why might this not happen in the manner people expect? GDPR, or other future regulation. The collection and application of mobile data has the potential to open a Pandora's box of privacy problems. For example, an ad that directly interacts with a user - Minority report-esque - using mobile data will definitely not be everyone's cup of tea. However, the use of mobile data for more gentle localisation of ads is far more acceptable.

Expansion of programmatic media buying

Programmatic is rapidly entering the world of out-of-home advertising. Moreover, it's the biggest and most important DOOH trend on this list. It offers revolutionary automation that is changing the OOH industry. What was once a cumbersome process involving negotiation between advertiser, agency, media seller, and printer is set for extinction.

Expect to see more programmatic platforms that allow advertisers to buy both mobile ads and DOOH ads via the same interface. The result: more integration across existing programmatic strategies, such as display advertising, and faster analytical insight across entire DOOH campaigns. Plus, the implantation of simpler real-time DOOH ad optimisation and agility.

Programmatic DOOH is the way forward

What's more, DOOH advertising is overtaking traditional OOH for the first time, according to PwC in the UK. And thanks to the rise of programmatic DOOH, outdoor ads are transitioning from static messaging towards automated, dynamic experiences.

Already brands, including Innocent Drinks and Mercedes Benz, are trialling programmatic DOOH. For a recent campaign, Innocent Drinks refined the creative shown on screens in different locations using audience data.

And the pace of change is quickening. Talking to The Drum, Clear Channel, considered by many a traditional OOH outfit, explains that digital now accounts for 60% of its overall revenues, compared with 2% several years earlier. It's a pattern being repeated with other players, such as JCDecaux too. The trend is pretty clear regarding to DOOH and programmatic: this is now the direction of travel.

Data feeds and dynamic signage

Use of feeds and dynamic DOOH features will grow - that there can be no doubt. For a start the out-of-home industry is already going through a digital revolution - with video at the heart of it. Walking past a dynamic, HD quality, full motion digital billboard with a simple repurposed press ad will be a thing of the past - dynamic content is the way forward.

Data feeds will become the new normal within dynamic DOOH ads too, as networks are opened up and expand. Adding dynamic content that changes within a DOOH ad such as real-time product listings, the latest pricing, and even live video is set to become easier and easier.

Again, there are also the more dramatic possibilities of personalised video content based on viewer data. There could very well be DOOH ads that use facial recognition data and smartwatch data, such as heart-rate, to offer targeted offers or content within out-of-home ads. But - and it's a big but - the data which the public will be willing to provide will dictate best practice. Likewise, if display advertising is anything to-go-by, brands will need to be extremely careful, or tactful in how they produce such ads. One person's utopia, is another person's dystopia.

DOOH and social campaigns

A feature of the further development of DOOH will be it working in unison with other channels. According to research carried out by Talon Outdoor, by including motion DOOH ads as part of a social campaign, effectiveness across brand metrics increases by an average of 23 per cent.

The same survey detailed that there is consistent, positive impact on awareness, emotional response, message take-out, consideration, purchase intent, and consumer action, when using DOOH alongside a social campaign. The adage is clear: ad formats can no longer just work alone; they've got to be used together. And thanks to the development of programmatic DOOH, outdoor ads just got that much more connected.

And brands are already experimenting. For example, PHD, partnered with Clear Channel and parenting publisher ChannelMum.com to promote Nick Jr. show, Shimmer and Shine, across DOOH formats. The campaign saw 9 different pieces of ChannelMum region specific, influencer content run on Clear Channel screens in shopping malls across the UK.

Growth of ad networks and "smart cities"

A trend that seems unstoppable is the growth of DOOH signage and networks. Many new networks look set to emerge, taking advantage of existing static placements and the large-scale real estate footprints of high street businesses, as well as other public infrastructure.

Indeed, cities the world-over are going online, with a massive ad ecosystem that simply didn't exist 10 years ago. What's more, this growth will lead to new and unique opportunities. What was once speculative or science fiction is becoming reality.

This change is already taking place in London. New York may have swanky digital yellow cabs but London's iconic double-decker buses are now being kitted out with " Children of Men" style DOOH screens. According to Campaign, the technology will allow brands to run imagery and copy that is connected to the locations of the buses, for instance according to nearby shops or London landmarks. Google will be the first to run geo-targeted messages.

Moving DOOH campaigns in-house

A growing trend across the ad industry is marketing teams moving some, or all of their advertising in-house. Previously, it would have been pointless to suggest that this trend would be relevant to OOH but the times are a changin'.

Recent ad tech developments, including the networking and implantation of transparent programmatic buying for OOH, have made it far easier for in-house designers to turn their attention to bigger canvasses. Meaning all ad assets for a campaign can be produced in-house.

Mobile-first and dynamic DOOH ads

One enabler of this shift is the development of enterprise-level creative management platforms, CMPs. These currently provide in-house marketing teams with the capability to produce dynamic display ads in-house. And here's the killer news: these same CMPs can now produce DOOH ads too.

What this means is everything you can do with a dynamic HTML5 ad, in-house, you can do with a DOOH ad. The expectation is that overtime in-house DOOH will get ever more sophisticated.

The longshot: DOOH with added blockchain

Finally, blockchain isn't going to impact DOOH overnight. Indeed, as we all know in digital marketing, blockchain is still very much not mainstream.

Yet, it does have the potential to make future DOOH campaigns even better. Data management, and audience targeting across digital platforms, combined with programmatic could enable smarter and more automated media buying. Plus, improved performance analytics could mean greater transparency.

But here's the catch, as Dan Dawson, CTO, of Grand Visual, explains: " it's going to be tough to implement blockchain technology across the digital OOH landscape ". And that is the honest truth. Blockchain will remain out of reach for most DOOH advertisers until processes and networks have developed further. Until then it will remain a section to tag on at the end of trend articles such as this.

To conclude...

Digital out-of-home is growing in importance for digital advertisers. Indeed, with so many positive integrations, and links with new or existing technologies, it offers exciting possibilities. More and more advertisers - local and multinational - will embrace the format too.

One way of making the most of this change will be by having the right format agnostic technologies at your disposal. The Bannerflow creative management platform offers the ability to produce display advertising from the smallest screen to the very biggest. Ensuring your out-of-home campaigns sync with your display and social ones has never been easier.

If you would like to find out about the different ad formats Bannerflow supports, then take a look here. Or, if you would like to know more about the Bannerflow CMP then get in touch.

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Digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising trends 2019 - Bannerflow Blog

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Digital out-of-home (DOOH) is developing at speed. Yet, like every advertising channel it is undergoing disruption. There are new players challenging established brands, and out-of-home (OOH) networks are expanding digital signage as fast as they can. The trends defined in this article are some of the most important.

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This article pertains to how RTB (programmatic) is going to become part of DOOH advertising. It does not really address how programmatic has disrupted the advertising business.

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First OpenRTB Programmatic Platform Available on over 100,000 Screens Across the US in leading Airports and Convenience Stores.

NEW YORK, Oct. 7, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - , a full-stack digital audience marketing platform, announced today the launch of the industry's first Real-Time Bidding Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) advertising solution. Disrupting the legacy programmatic DOOH industry, Kubient's patent-pending Open RTB solution connects the DOOH channel into the digital marketing ecosystem. Buyers and sellers now have access to a marketplace to dynamically trade, distribute and execute omnichannel audience retargeting. This unlocks significant value for marketers and owners by removing friction points, increasing audience reach, enabling access efficiency and maximizing inventory fill rates.

"Programmatic has become commonplace among digital advertising, however, DOOH has been one of the last to innovate," said Chris Andrews, Chief Digital Officer of Kubient. "We saw a need in the market for a transparent, open platform to buy and sell DOOH inventory in real-time. Now, brands that want to reach consumers at high foot-trafficked venues can leverage our integrated full-stack audience platform to reach, optimize and connect with their audiences with the efficiency available to marketers in every other digital marketing channel, in addition, to retargeting them throughout the day across all digital channels."

Kubient currently offers inventory from NRS and ReachTV. During Q4 of 2019, Kubient will be onboarding and announcing the addition of 1,000's of screens, and unique inventory partners across the US and Canada.

Kubient's patent-pending RTB DOOH technology transforms the DOOH ad-trafficking process into a real-time programmatic advertising transaction, allowing demand-side platforms (DSPs) and other programmatic platforms to bid on DOOH inventory in real-time, similar to how OpenRTB video and display bidding is handled for desktop and mobile devices. Kubient will offer advertisers both a managed service and a self-service solution.

"Kubient offers advertisers the opportunity to buy inventory in real-time, unlike any other platform in the marketplace," said Eli Korn, Chief Operating Officer, NRS. "With Kubient, buyers can seamlessly access our inventory and launch campaigns at the right cost, which will ultimately reach the millions of consumers that engage with our network every day."

"Our team's commitment to disruptive innovation has yielded patent-pending technology to advance the industry," said Kubient CEO Peter Bordes. "With the addition of the first programmatic DOOH solution that offers real-time bidding, we are now one of the only platforms that offers the ability to offer true hyper-targeted, omnichannel campaigns, with superior fraud protection."

About Kubient
Kubient is a technology company with a mission to transform the digital advertising industry. The company has created a cloud-based transparent open audience marketplace for advertisers and publishers to reach, optimize and connect with their audiences. Kubient's programmatic, transparent environment includes proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) powered technology that stops ad fraud in its tracks pre-bid, as opposed to measuring a portion of traffic for fraud or measuring fraud after the fact. In addition, Kubient's audience-based marketing engine puts the consumer at the center of the value chain. Kubient is the solution for brands and publishers that demand transparency and the ability to reach audiences across all channels and ad formats.

Media Contacts
Danielle DeVoren / Kate Tumino
KCSA Strategic Communications
212.896.1272 / 212.896.12252
ddevoren@kcsa.com / ktumino@kcsa.com

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Kubient Launches First Patent-Pending Real-Time Bidding Digital Out-of-Home Platform - Kubient

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NEW YORK, Oct. 7, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - , a full-stack digital audience marketing platform, announced today the launch of the industry's first Real-Time Bidding Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) advertising solution. Disrupting the legacy programmatic DOOH industry, Kubient's patent-pending Open RTB solution connects the DOOH channel into the digital marketing ecosystem.

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This article just tells about who is invited to the programmatic awards in San Francisco in May 2020.

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AdExchanger Awards | Celebrating the Future of Advertising & Marketing

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AdExchanger Awards recognizes the strongest achievements in the past year by leaders in the marketing and media industries.

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Programmatic Buying has Disrupted the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Advertising

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Programmatic Buying has Disrupted the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Advertising

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I did not use this article because it is three years old and it deals mainly with the fact that CPG is using programmatic. It does not focus on programmatic's impact on the advertising landscape at all.

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Authors: Matthew Arnold, Principal Analyst and Erin Warner, VP of Strategy

Much of the buzz around Advertising Week New York concerned programmatic advertising, which helps brands eliminate waste by giving them better access to the audiences that are most relevant to them.

Programmatic dominates the business of buying and selling digital ads - eMarketer projects that next year, 76% of desktop and mobile display ads will be bid programmatically. Consumer packaged goods giants, with their enormous ad budgets, have now signed on. The pharmaceutical industry is so far sitting this revolution out, taking a wait-and-see approach to a new technology rife with knotty regulatory issues. But as the potential benefits of greater efficiency and precision targeting become more apparent, pharma will work out the kinks and take the leap.
The programmatic adoption curve: pharma lags, but CPG has come around
With programmatic buying, a digital publisher places ad inventory on biddable ad exchanges. Advertisers can target this inventory based on audience behavior, geolocation or content relevance, and are empowered to bid on individual impressions in an auction-based environment, allowing them to reach more of their desired audience at a fair market price. Most publishers have embraced exchange-based sales across ad formats, including display, native and video.

The CPG industry was actually a late adopter of programmatic buying. While marketers in the telecom and e-commerce sectors poured ad spend into programmatic audience targeting, CPG marketers continued to focus on publisher-direct media buys. However, in 2012, new measurement tools emerged that enabled CPG marketers to quantify the impact of online advertising on offline consumer purchases, thereby optimizing their media mix in real time. The relative transparency and agility of these emerging data tools, relative to legacy publisher-direct media buys, made them tough for CPG brands to pass up. By 2014, P&G had committed to buying 70% of ads programmatically. Unilever, Kimberly Clark, and others have installed in-house teams that directly manage programmatic media execution. And digital data startups that serve the CPG marketer have been snapped up by the likes of Oracle for $1 billion-plus valuations.
For CPG brands, the benefits of programmatic buying include:

Greater transparency, as automated buying provides much richer performance data than could a single publisher directly;

More bang for your marketing buck - auction-based buying allows brands to bid competitively for their highest-value audiences, resulting in a more efficient deployment of ad spend;

Speed and agility, as real-time bidding lets brands fish where the fish are now and make rapid, automated adjustments.

Today's pharma marketer is in a similar position to the CPG marketer of 2012. Pharma marketers focus on a shortlist of trusted endemic publishers, are reticent to utilize audience targeting techniques, and have limited ability to measure the impact of digital ad exposure on real world outcomes. That's understandable - pharma's a heavily-regulated industry, and the potential pitfalls of programmatic buying around privacy are obvious (though manageable!). The difficulty of adapting an archaic regulatory framework to any new technology has fostered an industry culture of "stick to what we know." But programmatic advertising is now a mature and unavoidable ecosystem, powering the great majority of digital media. In healthcare marketing, programmatic is uniquely positioned to reach key stakeholders (patients and healthcare professionals alike) at crucial points along their treatment journey.
For pharma to get to catch up with the CPG giants, there are three core problems that require attention:

Privacy: Concerns about adjacent content and sensitivity to patient privacy issues that could trip HIPAA regulations, particularly where content is condition-specific or suggests advertiser knowledge of a viewer's medical history. Establishing guidelines and processes requires alignment across multiple internal stakeholders (MLR, brand, CoE, etc.), something that silo-ed pharma has always struggled with;

Vendors: Some ad tech vendors have opted to steer clear of healthcare due to regulatory concerns. Geofencing, for example, is viewed as a no-go outside of safer content such as medical conferences targeted at physicians. There are workarounds to regulatory pitfalls and quality vendors out there to help you navigate those, but good tech partners can be hard to find;

Measurement: Measuring the effectiveness of programmatic investments is inherently tricky. It can be challenging to attribute behavioral impact, often measured by script volume, to digital advertising. Effective measurement requires a partner that understands how to connect and interpret complex online and offline data in a privacy-compliant manner.

The promise of reaching the right customer in the right place, on the right device, during crucial medical decision-making moments is a powerful one - but it demands that marketers look beyond tight networks of trusted publishers and routine buying and planning. It asks that pharma get out of its comfort zone and establish new processes for ensuring non-violative messaging. It's a lift, but the potential rewards are too great to pass up forever.

To learn more about how pharma can engage with the programmatic landscape and to discuss any questions you may have, reach out to us at digital@teamdrg.com .

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Programmatic buying has utterly disrupted the advertising game for CPG brands. Pharma's Next. | Digital Innovation, DRG Blog | DRG

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Authors: Matthew Arnold, Principal Analyst and Erin Warner, VP of Strategy Much of the buzz around Advertising Week New York concerned programmatic advertising, which helps brands eliminate waste by giving them better access to the audiences that are most relevant to them.

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Ad Tech (programmatic) is plagued with fraud in the form of bots viewing, causing many marketers to shift their spending to social media and search, and this is reducing the revenue to publisher web sites.  Ad tech has damaging effects on the user experience (distracting visuals, slow loading time, and expensive burdens on user data plans).    The hyper-efficient market for programmatic display ads has driven down prices, and this also reduces revenue for publishers.

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Executive Summary

Advertising technology has built a massive technical infrastructure. The technology and motivations of advertising undergird the economy of the internet. News sites are no exception. The information we seek about our world is underpinned with, and shaped by, advertising and its needs. Journalists need to know more about these technologies, how they work, and how they influence the practice, distribution, and perception of journalism.

Advertising technology may threaten the reputation and economic viability of news publishers in various ways. Ad tech promotes a specific type of audience engagement, and its incentive structures have been shown to alter how news gets produced, potentially undermining readers' trust in publishers to provide objective coverage. Ad tech's push of user data through opaque systems, and in some cases deposit malware onto readers' devices, threatens reader privacy and safety and can further damage publishers' reputations. The slow load times and distracting user experience of display ads can hamper the performance of news websites and drive readers towards walled information gardens like private apps and social-media platforms. This may siphon audiences away from professional journalism outlets and may render them more vulnerable to manipulative information operations, patterns which academics and policy-makers are only beginning to understand. Policies around advertising on social platforms threaten to blur the line between news and political messaging, and may incentivize so-called "influencers" to bypass publishers entirely and create their own content. Search-engine companies, meanwhile, have been accused of exploiting their power over how users find and access information.

In producing this report we were driven by a set of questions, including: What's the relationship between news publishers and advertisers? What's changing? What's contested? And how does the contemporary arrangement of advertising, writers, readers, and devices influence the news?

Key findings:

Advertising was fundamental to the development of the modern newspaper and objective reporting. Today's advertising messages, delivered via an interconnected system of software programs, data servers, marketing agencies, and data markets, still support most news production yet are understudied in professional journalism training.

News publishers' dependence on ad tech facilitates the harvesting and movement of reader data through opaque systems, which may threaten readers' trust in news.

Ad tech and its metrics have been found to alter the internal production of news, which may be at odds with classic journalistic commitments to objective coverage.

The hyperefficient market for programmatic display ads has driven down their prices, reducing revenue for publishers.

Ad tech is plagued with fraud in the form of bot viewing, causing many marketers to shift their ad spending to social media and search, further reducing revenue for publisher sites.

Ad tech's damaging effects on the user experience (distracting visuals, slow loading times, and expensive burden on users' data plans) may drive readers (and the revenue derived from their attention) away from news websites and towards private apps and social-media platforms.

Social media's relationship with news publishers represents an asymmetrical power dynamic and has been found to effect publishers attempting to reach audiences, especially local publishers.

Platforms' control over the display of news items has pushed some publishers towards the use of influencers, which in turn may hasten the growth of service firms providing both tailored content and algorithmically produced websites to influencers. Platforms have begun to write policies against influencer distribution, but these may be tough to enforce.

Social media's advertising mechanisms, specifically hyper-targeting, are prone to weaponization by malicious actors.

All journalists, from reporters to editors, need to keep informed about the changing markets for, and consumption of, news and information.

Introduction: Why Do Journalists Need to Know How Ad Tech Works?

Imagine a young woman named Molly, working as an events coordinator in Chicago. During the planning of a daylong workshop, she and her colleagues have a good-natured groan about the post-lunch slowdown that always plagues these types of events. To jazz up the flow of conversation Molly decides to stock the room with candy. She uses her personal laptop to go onto the retail website Amazon.com and buy several packets of candy. The next day, Molly sees that Amazon is suggesting more types of candy for her to browse. Soon, however, she notices that her digital life has been transformed into a candy land. Peppermint patties and lollipops parade across her screen on nearly every website she visits. That night, looking for information about a serious presidential announcement, she visits several reputable news sites and is surprised to find that even the most serious articles are wallpapered with saltwater taffy and gummy bears.

Advertising undergirds the economy of the internet. "Advertising technology" is an umbrella term for the system of software programs, data servers, marketing agencies, and data markets which facilitate the sale of user data and the display of advertising messages to users of the internet, including search engines and social-media sites and apps. The vast majority of websites and social media platforms are supported by ad tech. News publishing is no exception. Troublingly, in journalism schools little attention is paid to the political economy of advertising on news sites. The user experience across devices, the loss of control over what's displayed on publisher sites, and how this loss may impact brand reputation have all gone understudied by professional journalism curricula. This is a worrisome trend, as ad tech may influence the production, distribution, and perception of journalism in both obvious and subtle ways.

Social media, in particular, has disrupted the control that publishers once had over information and advertising, and a multi-device environment has upended the command those publishers long enjoyed over readers' attention. Experimentation in ad formats has blurred the once-bright dividing line between the business and editorial departments within news outlets. Ambiguity is now the rule of the day. Jill Abramson, the one-time executive editor of The New York Times, tellingly reflected on her values in the past tense, with a sense of nostalgia: "Maybe I was too hard-line, but I believed in the wall [between the business and news sides of the newspaper]." This "Guide to Advertising Technology" is intended to explain how all this happened and what it means for practicing journalism today by offering a usable education in the history and political economy of digital advertising technologies. It begins with a short history of modern advertising in news and a review of the fundamentals of marketing. What follows are technical descriptions of how digital display advertising works, the contours of the ad tech space, and the material impact ad tech has on the user experience. The report then looks at the resulting patterns of news and ad consumption, how consumers and market forces reacted against digital display advertising, and how the marketing industry responded by investing heavily in social platforms and search engines.

We also cover how ad tech creates incentive structures, which may shape how reporters and editors alike think about news production, and how advertising technologies risks to the relationship between publishers and readers, including news brand and reputation. That journalistic institutions, which have decreed a commitment to informing citizens in a free democracy, willingly participate in advertising's technical stack-which has reportedly violated reader privacy-is a serious ethical quandary. Technology and society are embedded in and construct each other, and journalists need a grip on both to do the storytelling that our democracy demands.

Finally, it's worth noting that this report is a library case, meaning that its primary sources, rather than interviews, are general and industry press pieces, academic literature from the fields of marketing and journalism studies, marketing industry handbooks, and business-school cases.

Advertising technology is a rapidly developing field, so we caution that material details may be subject to change. The political and philosophical lessons, however, will remain salient.

Review of Ads: Display, Branded, Targeted, and Programmatic

i. From branding to targeting

To get context on the world in which display ads are bought and sold, it helps to offer a bit of history on the largest themes in advertising over the last 30 years.

For the latter half of the 20th century, the ad industry's focus was on branding. Branding ads are large, sweeping, image-based messages, which associate a product with a set of values. Consumers who feel those values represent them, or who want to signal to others that they hold those values, may be enticed to purchase a company's product. Branding campaigns take place most often through television commercials, as television has been called the "consummate branding medium." If you've ever seen a beer commercial that focuses more on parties, girls, and good times than anything about the beer itself (remember the ratio of entertainment to information), then you've seen a branding ad.

Advertisements tend to rely on branding when there are a lot of similar, high-quality competitors on the market:

A good example of this is Coca-Cola versus Pepsi. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are soft drinks which, as products, are almost indistinguishable-so a lot of money is poured into their branding campaigns to distinguish them from one another. Coca-Cola pursues associations with values like iconic togetherness, international community, and happiness. Pepsi, on the other hand, seeks out qualities like progressiveness, energy, and youth.
Perception of a brand and brand values, advertisers believe, can have an influence on consumers' spending decisions. Procter & Gamble, a consumer-goods manufacturer and one of the largest advertisers on the planet, deliberately advertises its suite of different products, including Ivory soap, Tide detergent, and Dawn dishwashing liquid as a unified "family of brands." Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard said, "We've found a lot of times that when people know a brand is from P&G, they feel better about the brand. And when they know P&G has all these brands, they feel better about P&G." This approach was exemplified in P&G's advertising on the 2010 Winter Olympics, which combined 18 different P&G products under one brand-focused (rather than product-focused) banner.

In the midst of branding-oriented advertising, digital display ads were born in the late 1990s. Digital display advertisements are the rectangular ads which appear on websites visited through a browser on a desktop computer, tablet, or smartphone. They come in several formats, which the marketing industry trade group the Interactive Advertising Bureau names for both their longest edge and width-to-height ratio, such as Horizontal 2:1, Horizontal 4:1, and Vertical 1:2 (see Figure 1).

Display ads are expected to adhere to standards and practices set up by the IAB. As consumer attention has split between phones and tablets, alongside television, radio, magazines, newspapers, and billboards, advertisers have had to compete for the increasingly scarce and valuable resource of attention in a marketplace termed the "attention economy" and a practice referred to as "the economics of attention." Among such stiff competition, advertising has shifted in focus from branding to targeting.

Branding campaigns are designed to appeal to large portions of the population. Targeted ads are the opposite: they're crafted to be as persuasive as possible to particular people. This process is called targeting. To understand how ad targeting works, it's necessary to look at which data is collected on consumers, and how that data is collected.

First, websites gather data about you both from your browser and from something called "tracking cookies." Tracking cookies are bits of code like HTML and Javascript that websites deposit onto a user's browser. These bits of code track users, recording and reporting back to the website about which future sites you visit and the things you purchase. Websites aggregate all this information into two buckets: 1) behavioral data they have on what kinds of sites you've looked at, how much time you've spent on them, and whether you bought anything, and 2) demographic information that they've estimated based on these online behaviors, such as your age, educational level, family status, income bracket, and interests. This information is then used to tailor ads to users along two different parameters: 1) what you do (i.e., behavioral targeting and 2) who you are (i.e., demographic targeting).

Data collection can also happen on hardware. One example of hardware-based data collection takes place on Google's Android phones and operating systems. A journalist at The Guardian requested a copy of Google's data file on them, finding that Google had saved every term they'd ever searched (roughly 90,000 in all), every image downloaded, every website accessed, every event listed on their Google Calendar, what time the event was, and every item the user had saved in their Google Drive. The journalist had also connected their FitBit to Google, and Google had recorded all their steps taken, workouts, and yoga and meditation routines. Further, because the reporter had an Android phone with a Google operating system, Google had saved every single photo ever taken with the phone, including metadata on where and when the photos had been captured.

Google has made the use of this data for ad targeting transparent to users of its Chrome browser. All Chrome users can access a page called "ad personalization" to examine the demographic and interest-based attributes that have been collected and estimated about them (see Figure 2 for the author's attributes).

This information is not only useful for targeting ads directly to you, but also for targeting ads to people like you. Websites aggregate all the data from their users to build a snapshot of their visitors' demographics, including average age range, ethnicity, where users live and work, income, and educational level. This user data, called "inventory," is then used to sell ad space to brands and advertisers via ad agencies. The industry metric for buying inventory is the "impression," also known as how many "impressions" an ad has ostensibly made on viewers. Impressions are sold in CPM, or "cost per thousand views," a term borrowed from television advertising measured by Nielsen ratings even though digital ad impressions are of a very different quality. The "M" comes from "mille," the Latin word for "thousand." Advertisers typically set their impressions targets and spending limits together: "We want to reach [Y] number of impressions, and we will spend [X] amount for them."

Publishers can offer alternative pricing models based on other viewer actions (outside of just impressions), such as CPC, Cost Per Click (when a viewer clicks on an ad), or CPA, Cost Per Action (when a viewer both clicks and makes a purchase).

ii. Programmatic Advertising

To return to the history of advertising, online ads exploded in the 1990s and 2000s. Websites were selling more and more impressions to more and more advertisers. Publishers were soon handling billions of impressions and thousands of advertisers. In this noisy space, a layer of service providers sprang up called ad networks. Ad networks are companies which aggregate websites with comparable inventory into bundles, making it easier for advertisers to centralize their ad purchases. This way advertisers could buy large numbers of ads to show to similar users visiting different websites, and more efficiently hit their impression targets (number of impressions they want their ads to make on viewers).

All of this aggregation, and the mind-boggling number of impressions bundled, soon led to a confusing environment in which advertisers didn't know where their ads were being placed or who was buying them. Soon enough, ad buyers sought more transparency around what they were getting for the money they were spending. This led to the creation of ad "exchanges:" open platforms for comparing the price and quality of impressions and buying them. Figure 3 shows the ecosystem of ad exchanges and ad networks. Advertisers are represented by a green bar on the left, and publishers by a blue bar on the right. Here, you can see the enormous number of service companies making up the ad tech landscape, including ad agencies, media buyers, and data brokers.

You can also see additional layers of companies, which perform services on user data (remember all the behavioral and demographic user data that websites gathered using tracking cookies). These services include optimization, or testing and analyzing data more extensively to better target ads; retargeting, or targeting your ads to audiences even after they leave your site (remember how Molly kept seeing candy ads even after she left Amazon.com?)l and ad attribution, or performing data analysis of ad viewers' buying habits to determine which ad actually led to the final purchase. One data broker in the ad exchange business explained their services for advertisers this way:

It's on these ad exchanges where real-time programmatic bidding takes place. Real-time programmatic bidding is a live auction for viewers' attention, taking place in milliseconds every time an ad loads. The process starts like this: as one might on the auction site eBay, publishers place ad inventory (measured in impressions on viewers) on an auction block. Advertisers bid on this inventory using computer programs (hence, "programmatic"). Advertisers tell their programs what sort to inventory to buy based on several parameters. The programs bid high or low depending on how well the inventory matches their targets for their clients' ad campaigns, based on their budget. It's called "real-time" bidding because, again, these auctions are carried out every single time a user loads a web page, in the span of milliseconds.

iii. Display ads on news sites

News institutions publish standards describing the formats that advertisers can expect of them, as well as the terms and conditions that the publisher sets for advertisers. In terms of formatting, these guidelines include visual templates. On The Guardian's "Digital Advertising Production Format Guide," these include ad formats like "Cascade," "Expanding Billboard," "Fabric Video," "Filmstrip," "Focus," and "Sliding Doors." The Guardian provides screenshots to advertisers showing how their ads will look on the news site across a collection of devices (see Figure 4 and Figure 5). The New York Times 's "Media Kit" likewise provides a full suite of specs and previews of its available ad formats.

Terms and conditions outline what is expected from advertisers. Some publishers describe requirements for the "truthfulness" of the ads themselves ( The Guardian's advertising "Terms and Conditions" sheet specifies that ads be "legal, decent, honest and truthful"). Others make a good-faith attempt to call for reliability from advertisers around their technical specs. For example, The Guardian's "Terms and Conditions" states that "all digital Advertisements submitted for publication online will be free of any viruses, adware, malware, bit torrents, and no Advertisement will cause an adverse effect on the operation of the Website." The New York Times's "Media Kit Guidelines and Requirements" specify that "all 3rd party tags (creative serving AND tracking-only) and accompanying technologies being served by the tags must be SSL Compliant (HTTPS)." Despite these requirements, there have been reported problems created by both the technical infrastructure of advertising, and by the political economy in which this infrastructure is embedded.

Advertising's Influence on News: Bloat, Clicks, and Bots

The ad tech ecosystem introduces many issues to the production, distribution, and consumption of news. First, it has material impact on the user experience. Second, ad tech creates incentive structures, which may shape how reporters and editors think about news production.

i. Usability and ad bloat

In addition to disrupting the quality of the user experience, digital ads' technical infrastructure slow down the performance of web browsers. Remember all the tracking cookies (i.e., Javascript and HTML code) embedded inside ads, in addition to the innumerable transactions and technical complexity of real-time bidding auctions, running millions of lines of code and sending data to, and receiving instructions from, thousands of servers in milliseconds. This puts a heavy load on web browsers, weighing down news sites and even further disrupting the user experience.

Ad targeting can even further shape the world that readers see online because of how ads are targeted to particular audiences, meaning some people will be offered different products, services, and experiences than others. University of Pennsylvania professor Joseph Turow described this process in The Atlantic:

ii. Ad tech, privacy, and security

In 2009, The New York Times fell victim to what it called a "malicious ad swap" when what looked like a legitimate advertiser suddenly switched to serving malware to readers-"malware" meaning software intended to "damage or do other unwanted actions on a computer system."/autocitemalware It's also been reported that both the BBC and The New York Times have served ransomware (software code embedded in an ad that "attempts to find any back door it can into the target's computer, where it will install ... software, which encrypts the user's hard drive and demands payment in bitcoin for the keys to unlock it"). In another instance of news-publisher-owned sites serving code violating readers' devices, The Guardian reported that CBS-owned Showtime was caught mining bitcoins from their users, in an article titled "Ads Don't Work So Websites Are Using Your Electricity to Pay the Bills":

All of these threats to readers' user experience and privacy may endanger the trust that readers have in news institutions. In sum, it should come as no surprise that advertising technologies present a serious risk to news brands and reputation. Similarly, ad tech and its demarcations of what is valuable in the attention economy stand to alter the organizational and professional practice of journalism.

iii. News? Or revenue-generating product?

Outside of usability and privacy issues, the incentives and infrastructures of ad tech may tempt news organizations into producing and distributing specific types of news. Economics of scale dictated by advertising mean that ad dollars only become tangible when large numbers of people view them. Journalistic investigations and academic studies inside newsrooms have shown that reporters and editors feel pressured to produce news and make operations decisions according to the demands of advertising structures and metrics.

The Columbia Journalism Review wrote extensively on these competing motivations in its coverage of the 2014 departure of Jill Abramson, the executive editor of The New York Times, and the rise of her successor, Dean Baquet. CJR reported that Baquet believes the traditional "wall" between the editorial and business sections of the paper must be blurred in order to ensure the precarious survival of the Times: "Baquet ... says flatly that the traditional news-advertising divide has become a luxury the Times can no longer afford. ... Pulling that off, he says, required cooperation with the business side." Jill Abramson, however, remarked the opposite: "I didn't want the energy of our journalists focused on revenue-producing products."

Christin found that while different in their exact responses, neither newsroom was immune to the influence of engagement programs. Either reporters, or editors, took these numbers into account when making decisions about what sort of stories to write, how to write them, and how to manage, incentivize, and promote reporters:

YouTube provides a stark example of how engagement metrics change what sort of content is incentivized and algorithmically distributed in the attention economy. Media critic Zeynep Tufekci wrote about a Wall Street Journal investigation reportedly showing that YouTube's recommendation algorithm pushes viewers toward videos that are ever more extreme, potentially facilitating viewers' radicalization:

Journalists should reflect on the relationship between publishers and advertisers, usability and privacy issues presented by ad tech, how the structures of advertising incentivize specific operational and organizational decisions inside newsrooms, and whether it's a reasonable expectation that advertising continue to underwrite journalism. With that in mind, let's turn to one of the actors in this system siphoning money away from both advertisers and publishers: fraud.

iv. Fraud and bots

These bots are used to defraud advertisers, tricking them into thinking that millions of people have clicked on their video ad, when some of that engagement was actually non-human. Some Russian-engineered bots even mimic publishers, imitating news websites to steal money from advertisers.

The MIT Technology Review wrote in 2014 that 36 percent of internet traffic was from non-human machines. The Interactive Advertising Bureau estimated in its 2015 report, "What Is an Untrustworthy Supply Chain Costing the Digital Advertising Industry?," that the ad industry loses 4.6 billion dollars a year to bots. The Wall Street Journal reported that in mid-2017 Procter & Gamble-which, remember, is one of the largest and therefore most-watched advertisers in the world-cut its digital ad spend by 100 million dollars, with the company's finance chief saying, "We were serving bots as opposed to human beings." By the end of that year, cuts on digital ads had doubled to 200 million dollars.

Some advertisers have turned to blockchains to combat fraud, seeking out the technology's secure and transparent transaction ledgers.

The Turn Against Advertising: Blockers, Dimes, and Walls

Given the usability and financial issues for readers, threats to readers' privacy and devices, how the metrics of ad tech may influence the practice of journalism, and an ad tech system itself riddled with fraud, it's unsurprising that we've seen a consumer and publisher backlash against ad tech.

i. Blockers

Since 2015, the popularity of ad blockers has skyrocketed.

ii. Print dollars and digital dimes

The widespread transparency, efficiency, and availability of data drove the price of impressions down, as noted by The New York Time s in its 2014 annual report:

Publishers have reckoned with the low click-through rates and low comparative revenue yielded by display advertising by experimenting with alternative ad models. One such model is affiliate advertising, which means that an advertiser works with affiliates (i.e., websites and publishers) to place sponsored posts or promoted products, and those affiliates get a commission when a sponsored post or product on their site leads to a sale. Advertisers obviously will pay more for these higher-engagement actions, but they're risky for publishers, since the revenue stream is contingent on getting viewers to actually click on ads-a difficult endeavor. The New York Times purchased a product-review site called WireCutter, where some reviews feature affiliate links. If a viewer makes a purchase through one of these links, the Times makes a commission.

The Times addressed the potential issues of biased reviewing on the "About" section of WireCutter's site:

Taken together, a stormy picture emerges of digital ad tech. Usability and financial issues drive readers away from news sites, just as the readers that do stick with them are using ad blockers or clicking on ads at severely low rates. Meanwhile, newer ad models like affiliate marketing are risky in that they may bring about biased reporting. It's no surprise that both publishers and advertisers have begun to look for different strategies.

iii. Paywalls and subscriptions

One way that publishers have turned away from the advertising model is through paywalls and subscriptions. As ad revenue has dropped, the revenue brought in from subscriptions has risen for many publishers. In 2000, subscriptions were only 23 percent of the total revenue picture for The New York Times, but by 2015 that figure had risen to 54 percent. By building paywalls, publishers can attempt to leverage digital readers' behaviors and nudge them toward buying subscriptions. A paywall is a digital system to prevent readers from reading content without a subscription. There are roughly three kinds of paywalls:

1. Hard: all readers need to pay for access to all articles across all devices.

2. Metered: a certain number of articles are free per month, after which readers have to pay for access.

3. Leaky/porous: while only a certain number of articles are free, readers can access content when they come into the news site from a search engine or a social platform.

There's a psychology at play in building these walls: readers who come into the publishers' site from a search engine or social site are considered "new" or "casual" users, with no demonstrated loyalty to the outlet.

Negative pressures on digital display ads (downward pricing pressures, poor usability, the mismatch between branding-oriented professionals and small display ad formats, privacy violations, and the turn toward subscriptions) have pushed the marketing industry to look for new channels for delivering their messages to consumers-some of which include serving ads on social platforms and through search engines. While there are many social media and search companies, our focus is on the biggest player in each sector: Facebook for social media and Google for search. For our purposes, these two-referred to as the "duopoly" of digital advertising, making by far the most money in the industry-are sufficiently representative of issues for journalists and journalism.

In their professional work, however, journalists should look beyond these two companies to examine the actions and implications of the many other companies in these spaces. Amazon, for example, is a quietly rising force in the digital ad space, already introducing novel ways of reaching consumers engaged in shopping behaviors.

Ads on Social

Advertising on social media platforms contains a complex sociotechnical system of platform companies, advertisers, publishers, devices, servers, algorithms, and readers. This arrangement introduces a number of professional, social, and economic complications into the advertising-news relationship.

i. Walled gardens and the growth of surveillance economics

Just as falling prices for CPMs and the rise of ad blockers began to choke off the flow of cash coming into the ad industry, you can imagine what a boon it was for advertisers to enter into the social media age. Social media's almost limitless data on users' lives and centralized control over what users see afford powerful targeting opportunities. Users not only supply data directly, by writing into their profiles details about their favorite movies, music, foods, TV shows, and clothing, but they also perform tasks on these platforms such as uploading photos, tagging their friends, watching videos, clicking on links, marking their "likes," joining "fan pages," and sending messages to friends-all of which is recorded and tracked.

ii. From targeting to influencing

Influencers are a popular new strategy in social media advertising for industries from beauty to energy drinks to toys. Some marketers have termed this "growth hacking," i.e. growing their audiences by piggybacking onto influencers' existing social networks. The news industry itself has used influencer marketing, with publishers Mic, Refinery29, and Slate hiring entertainer George Takei to promote their articles on his popular Facebook page. Mic saw a triple-digit jump in engagement (measured in comments) on an article once Takei had shared it (see Figure 8).

Digiday also reported in 2017 that influencer service firms had begun to design new strategies, offering to step in and replace news with their own content, an option more lucrative for the influencer while cutting news publishers out of the loop.

Further, some of these influencer pages, displaying potentially dubious content untouched by any journalistic institution, were created using sophisticated AI tools and tracking software to mimic the websites the user has already visited.

iii. Facebook and the news

Facebook acknowledged that 150 million Americans had been exposed to Russian propaganda on the platform, and the platform has been called on by both the general public and Congress to make changes to how it handles news and disinformation. In response, the company announced changes to its News Feed algorithm, which its spokespeople said would de-prioritize news articles and content from brands. The company also introduced policy changes around how news and advertising are shared on the platform, principally 1) how news sources are evaluated for trustworthiness and 2) how political advertising is policed.

iv. News and trust

v. Political ad or political news?

Another piece of Facebook's response to the public outcry over information operations on the platform has been to implement new policies around how political ads are purchased and classified. This includes more strident rules around who can purchase a political ad, labeling every political ad with the name of the person who purchased it, and creating a publicly searchable archive for these ads. ProPublica reported that "Facebook is betting that a combination of voluntary disclosure and review by both people and automated systems will close a vulnerability that was famously exploited by Russian meddlers in the 2016 election."
This policy, however, introduces new complications into the relationship between Facebook and news publishers. A New York Times reporter covered a panel held at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which included Times CEO Mark Thompson and Facebook's head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, writing:

This policy is reportedly acute in its impact on local publishers, who say they may not have the resources to jump over the hurdles now required to steer clear of political-ad blacklisting. Digiday reported:

We see here a surreal retread of the pre-modern commercial press, where the first "news" papers provided only political coverage sponsored by local parties. Again, as history has shown political, economic, and technological issues are irrevocably intertwined.

Ads on Search

i. Targeting to intent

A classic idiom in the marketing industry is that nobody pays attention to an ad until they're in the market for that product. One way to capture the attention of people who are in the market for a product is to target them with advertising while they're searching for information on that product. This makes advertising on search engines a valuable endeavor for marketers.

Targeting consumers who are in the middle of searching for a product is called "targeting to intent" and takes place at a lucrative spot in what's known as the "consumer decision journey.". The consumer decision journey is the process through which consumers initially and then actively contemplate a purchase, research that purchase, ultimately buy a product, and then experience that product in their lives.
To illustrate how valuable this spot is, consider this statistic: in 2014, 13 out of the 20 most valuable ad spots on Google Search (bid on programmatically via the platform Google AdWords) included the terms "mesothelioma," because the disease is often searched for by those who are potential clients for lucrative class-action lawsuits (see Figure 13).

Most Expensive Paid Search Keywords by Average Cost Per Click (Source: AdGooRoo)

U.S. Google Desktop Text Ads, Jan-Dec 2014

$319.34

Mesothelioma attorneys

$312.49

Buying structured settlement annuities

$291.93

Alabama mesothelioma attorney

$247.64

Hawaii mesothehioma attorney

$231.35

mesothelioma attorneys California

$230.04

Structured settlement industry

$229.33

National structured settlement trade association

$226.43

Cash structured settlements

$221.25

Virginia mesothelioma attorney

$211.01

Mesothelioma claim

$206.13

Mesothelioma attorney washington

$206.04

Virginia mesothelioma lawyers

$203.54

Virginia mesothelioma lawyer

$200.21

Maryland mesothelioma lawyer

$189.78

Selling structured settlements

$189.53

Nevada mesothelioma attorney

$188.76

Wisconsin mesothelioma attorney

$187.00

Structured settlement annuities

ii. News on search

Still, as the ubiquity of computational tools allows companies to explore ever greater integration with adjacent industries, the onus is on journalists to understand how these moves will affect the marketplace for, and regulation and consumption of, news and information.

Conclusion

This is where journalists come in. Journalists need to be more thorough in their understanding of, and curiosity about, the sociotechnical ecosystem and political economy of advertising. This is not only because their work is distributed within it, but also because as citizens of a capitalist democratic republic we need journalistic coverage of the complex relationships between our elected officials, the information-distribution infrastructures we rely on, and the information provided for us by news publishers.

Further reading

The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth by Joseph Turow (Yale University Press, 2013)

Weaponizing the Digital Influence Machine: The Political Perils of Online Ad Tech, by Anthony Nadler, Matthew Crain, and Joan Donovan (Data & Society, 2018)

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu (Vintage, 2017)

"Digital Marketing Strategy, Course Overview Note," Harvard Business School, by Thales Teixeira (Harvard Business School, 2013)

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else) by Ken Auletta (Penguin, 2018)

Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers by Michael Schudson (Basic Books, 1981)

"Friend and Foe: The Platform Press at the Heart of Journalism," Tow Center for Digital Journalism report

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil (Broadway Books 2016)

"Grappling with the Weirdness of Advertising" Data & Society Points blog post by Caroline Jack (Data & Society Points Blog)

Glossary

Ad attribution-an analysis of ad viewers' buying habits to determine which ad actually led to the final purchase
Ad blocker-a browser plug-in (digital tool that can be downloaded and added onto a browser), which blocks ads from showing content on users' screens, prevents ads from downloading tracking cookies onto users' devices, and also blocks ads' attempts to communicate with their ad-exchange servers
Ad exchange-open platforms for comparing the price and quality of impressions and buying them
Ad fraud-creating fake ad traffic by way of content-scraping websites or other environments or creating other fictitious mechanisms for delivering ads that are not seen by consumers (see also "Bots" and "Bot viewing")
Ad network-companies which aggregate websites with comparable inventory into bundles, making it easier for advertisers to centralize their ad purchases
Ad optimization-testing and analyzing data more extensively to better target ads
Ad tech-umbrella term for the system of software programs, data servers, marketing agencies, and data markets which facilitate the sale of user data and the display of advertising messages to users of the internet, including search engines and social-media sites and apps
Affiliate advertising-when an advertiser works with affiliates (i.e., websites and publishers) to place sponsored posts or promoted products, and those affiliates get a commission when a sponsored post or product on their site leads to a sale
Attention economy-the marketplace for the increasingly scarce and valuable resource of consumer attention
Bots-software programs carrying out automated tasks on the internet
Bot viewing/bot traffic-when software programs are designed to mimic users and inflate audience numbers
Branding-image-based messages which associate a product with a set of values
Consumer decision journey-the process through which consumers initially and then actively contemplate a purchase, research that purchase, ultimately buy a product, and then experience that product in their lives
CPM-"cost per thousand of views" (a term borrowed from television advertising measured by Nielsen ratings). The "M" comes from "mille," the Latin word for "thousand"
CPC-Cost Per Click, paid to a publisher when a viewer clicks on an ad
CPA-Cost Per Action, paid to a publisher when a viewer both clicks on an ad and makes a purchase
Display ad-rectangular ads which appear on websites visited through a browser. They come in several formats, such as billboards, portraits, sidekicks, and sliders.
Engagement metrics-measurements for how an audience engages with a website. This includes clicks (how many people click on ads on a site), hits (pageviews), sessions (everything a reader does while on a site), uniques (number of unique visitors to the site), and more.
Engagement programs-software programs, such as the popular ChartBeat, which measure and display engagement metrics
Filter bubble-theoretical state of information isolation, where users' digital services like search and social media algorithmically tailor content recommendations according to the user's consumption histories, to the point that the user is only shown information that conforms with their preexisting biases
Impression-industry metric for buying ad "views," or evidence that someone using the product selling the advertising saw a specific advertisement.
Influencer-someone who has a strong relationship with his or her audience and can affect their purchase decisions because of the knowledge and authority they have
Interactive Advertising Bureau-the marketing industry trade group that sets standards for digital display ads
Malware-software intended to damage or do other unwanted actions on a computer system
Paid search-when a website appears at the top of search results because a marketer paid the search engine for that spot
Paywall-a digital system to prevent readers from reading content without a subscription. Roughly, there are three kinds of paywalls: hard, where all readers need to pay for access to all articles across all devices; metered, where a certain number of articles are free per month, after which readers have to pay for access; and leaky/porous, where a certain number of articles are free but readers can access content when they come to the news site from a search engine or social platform.
Real-time programmatic bidding-the live auction for viewers' attention, taking place in milliseconds every time an ad loads
Retargeting-targeting your ads to audiences even after they leave your site
Targeting-tailoring an ad to appeal to specific types of viewers, based on one or both of two different parameters: who you are (i.e., demographic targeting) and what you do (i.e., behavioral targeting)
Tracking cookies -bits of code like HTML and Javascript which can track users, recording and reporting back to a website which sites they visit and the things they purchase

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Emily Bell for suggesting this report, and for our sprawling discussions about ad tech. Thanks to Kathy Zhang and Katie Johnston for their unflagging support, Ava Sirrah for her suggestions, and Sam Thielman for his keen eye on the ad industry and what makes it tick. Thanks to Bill Grueskin and Dr. Adam Klein for their course on the Business of Journalism, which provided invaluable material. Thanks both to Sam and Abigail Hartstone for their eagle-eyed edits. Lastly, thanks to my unflagging advisers Dr. David Stark, Dr. Michael Schudson, Dr. Chris Anderson, Susan E. McGregor, and Andie Tucher. September 2018

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11. Thales Teixeira, http://www.economicsofattention.com/.

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17. Ibid.

18. Guide to Ad Tech in a nutshell, May 31, 2017, https://medium.com/automatad/lets-take-a-look-at-the-history-of-ad-tech-landscape-abf4ced58ac8.

19. , October 19, 2014, https://www.adclarity.com/2014/10/ad-exchanges-vs-ad-networks/.

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24. Joseph Turow, The daily you: How the new advertising industry is definingyour identity and your worth.

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26. The New York Times Digital Media Kit, http://nytmediakit.com/digital.

27. The Guardian Advertising Terms and Conditions, https://www.theguardian.com/advertising/advertising-terms-conditions.

28. Ibid.

29. The New York Times Digital Media Kit Online Ad Specifications, http://nytmediakit.com/specs/digital/online-ad-specs.

30. Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves, "Chapter One: News FromEverywhere," May 10, 2011, https://archives.cjr.org/the_business_of_digital_journalism/chapter_one_news_from_everywhere.php.

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37. Riva Richmond, "What to Do If You Saw an âĂŸAntivirus' Pop-Up Ad,"September 14, 2009, https://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/what-to-do-if-you-saw-an-antivirus-pop-up-ad/.

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39. Ashlee Vance, "Times Web Ads Show Security Breach," September 14, 2009,https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/technology/internet/15adco.html.

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42. Ashlee Vance, "Times Web Ads Show Security Breach."

43. Jeff Gerth, "In the digital age, The New York Times treads an increasinglyslippery path between news and advertising."

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49. Jeff Gerth, "In the digital age, The New York Times treads an increasinglyslippery path between news and advertising."

50. Ibid.

51. AngÃĺle Christin, Clicks or Pulitzer? : Web Journalists and their Work inthe United States and France.

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53. Otto Peura, "What do bounce, user, session and other Google Analyticsterms mean?"

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56. Zeynep Tufekci, "YouTube, the Great Radicalizer," March 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html.

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72. The New York Times Paywall., February 2012 (Revised January 2013).

73. The New York Times Company 2014 Annual Report, February 24, 2015.

74. Mark Irvine, "Google Ads Benchmarks for YOUR Industry [Updated!]"https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/02/29/google-adwords-industry-benchmarks.

75. Neil Patel, "What is Affiliate Marketing?" https://neilpatel.com/what-is-affiliate-marketing/.

76. About Wirecutter, https://thewirecutter.com/about/.

77. Case Flash Forward: The New York Times Paywall, May 17, 2016 (RevisedJuly 17, 2018).

78. Rob Howard, "Three reasons why journalism paywalls still don't work,"January 5, 2018, https://qz.com/1173033/the-psychology-behind-why-journalism-paywalls-still-dont-work/.

79. Max Willens, "How Hearst Newspapers changes its paywall to drive readerloyalty," March 5, 2018, https://digiday.com/media/hearst-newspapers-changes-paywall-drive-reader-loyalty/.

80. Mike Ananny and Leila Bighash, "Why drop a paywall? Mapping industryaccounts of online news decommodification," International Journal of Communi-cation 10 (2016): 22.

81. Ibid.

82. Julie Creswell, "Amazon Sets Its Sights on the $88 Billion Online Ad Mar-ket," September 3, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/03/business/media/amazon-digital-ads.html.

83. Nilay Patel, "The mobile web sucks," July 20, 2015, https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9002721/the-mobile-web-sucks.

84. Dylan Curran, "Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Googlehave on you."

85. Adinject, "Who are Influencers? Get to know 4 Types of Influencers," Jan-uary 30, 2018, https://medium.com/adinject/who-are-influencers-get-to-know-4-types-of-influencers-f0c984aeba4f.

86. Ibid.

87. YouTube for Brands, 2014.

88. Ana Andjelic, Can luxury brands hack their own growth? November 2015,https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/nov/03/luxury-brands-growth-hacker-marketing.

89. Joanna Walters, "George Takei saga sheds light on the murky world of pay-to-promote news," November 24, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/24/george-takei-pay-to-promote-social-media-facebook-mic-slate-refinery29.

90. Max Willens, "Facebook-thirsty publishers turn to celebrities to worm into the news feed," October 21, 2017, https://digiday.com/media/facebook-thirsty-publishers-turn-celebrities-worm-news-feed/.

91. Ibid.

92. Ibid.

93. Ibid.

94. Ibid.

95. Max Willens, "Facebook's new branded-content guidelines will force somepublishers to abandon a business model," February 12, 2018, https://digiday.com/media/facebooks-new-branded-content-guidelines-will-force-publishers-abandon-business-model/.

96. Ibid.

97. "Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 2nd quarter2018 (in millions)" (), https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/.

98. Sheera Frenkel and Katie Benner, "To Stir Discord in 2016, Russians TurnedMost Often to Facebook," February 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/technology/indictment-russian-tech-facebook.html.

99. Ibid.

100. Mike Isaac, "Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friendsand Family Share," January 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/technology/facebook-news-feed.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news.

101. Josh Constine, "Facebook and Instagram launch US political ad labeling andarchive," May 24, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/24/facebook-political-ad-archive/.

102. Mathew Ingram, "Campbell Brown on Facebook's plans to decide what newsis trustworthy," May 3, 2018, https://www.cjr.org/q_and_a/campbell-brown-facebook-news.php.

103. Ben Smith and Mat Honan, "Facebook Has Begun To Rank News Organi-zations By Trust, Zuckerberg Says," May 1, 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bensmith/facebook-has-begun-to-rank-news-organizations-by-trust#.jd4vavbBA.

104. Alex Kantrowitz, "This Is Facebook's News Survey," January 23, 2018,https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/this-is-facebooks-news-survey#.njepxpM6X.

105. Adam Rogers, "You Can't Trust Facebook's Search for Trusted News," Jan-uary 25, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/you-cant-trust-facebooks-search-for-trusted-news/.

106. Americans' Attitudes About the News Media Deeply Divided Along Par-tisan Lines, May 10, 2017, http://www.journalism.org/2017/05/10/americans-attitudes-about-the-news-media-deeply-divided-along-partisan-lines/.

107. Josh Constine, "Facebook and Instagram launch US political ad labeling andarchive."

108. Jeremy B. Merrill, Ariana Tobin, and Madeleine Varner, "What Facebook'sNew Political Ad System Misses," May 24, 2018, https://www.propublica.org/article/what-facebooks-new-political-ad-system-misses.

109. Ben Sisario, "Facebook's New Political Algorithms Increase Tension WithPublishers," June 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/business/media/mark-thompson-facebook-algorithm.html.

110. Lucia Moses, Facebook tweaks political ads policy, but not enough to satisfyirate publishers, June 28, 2018, https://digiday.com/media/facebook-tweaks-political-ads-policy-not-enough-satisfy-irate-publishers/.

111. , "Number of explicit core search queries powered by search engines inthe United States as of July 2018 (in billions)" (), https://www.statista.com/statistics/265796/us-search-engines-ranked-by-number-of-core-searches/.

112. Modern Marketing Partners, Paid Search vs. Organic Search, March 13,2013, https://www.modernmarketingpartners.com/paid-search-vs-organic-search/.

113. Ethan Zuckerman, "The Internet's Original Sin."

114. Joseph Turow, The daily you: How the new advertising industry is definingyour identity and your worth.

115. David Court and Dave Elzinga and Susan Mulder and and Ole JørgenVetvik, "The consumer decision journey," June 2009, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-consumer-decision-journey.

116. "The Most Expensive Keywords in Paid Search, by Cost Per Click & Spend"(), https://www.adgooroo.com/the-most-expensive-keywords-in-paid-search-by-cost-per-click-and-ad-spend/.

117. Ibid.

118. Natasha Lomas, "Google fined $2.7BN for EU antitrust violations over shop-ping searches," June 27, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/google-fined-e2-42bn-for-eu-antitrust-violations-over-shopping-searches/?_ga=2.183358894.985552415.1532622430-372491574.1532016941.

119. Natalia Drozdiak, "Alphabet's Google Responds to EU Antitrust Fine;Search-engine giant argues in court papers released Monday that European regu-lator failed to prove its behavior hurt rivals," October 30, 2017.

120. Eli Pariser, The filter bubble: How the new personalized web is changing whatwe read and how we think (New York: Penguin, 2011).

121. Engin Bozdag, "Bias in algorithmic filtering and personalization," Ethics andTow Center for Digital Journalism58 Guide to Ad TechInformation Technology (June 23, 2013): 209âĂŞ227, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%5C%2Fs10676-013-9321-6.

122. E Nechushtai, SC Lewis, "What kind of news gatekeepers do we want ma-chines to be? Filter bubbles, fragmentation, and the normative dimensions ofalgorithmic recommendations," Computers in Human Behavior, 2018.

123. Michael Schudson, Discovering the news: A social history of American news-papers (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1981).

124. Ethan Zuckerman, "The Internet's Original Sin."

125. John Battelle, "Facebook, Twitter, and the Senate Hearings: It's The Business Model, Period," September 6, 2018, https://battellemedia.com/archives/2018/09/facebook-twitter-and-the-senate-hearings-its-the-business-model-period.

Elizabeth Anne Watkins is a PhD student in Communications at Columbia University and a contributing researcher at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

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Executive Summary Advertising technology has built a massive technical infrastructure. The technology and motivations of advertising undergird the economy of the internet. News sites are no exception. The information we seek about our world is underpinned with, and shaped by, advertising and its needs. Journalists need to know more about these technologies, how they work, [...]

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This article is basically an advertisement for an ad agency that uses programmatic bidding. There is nothing that is relevant to programmatic's impact on advertising.

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"Adtaxi is hands-on and really takes the time to listen. We've worked with a number of other vendors in the past and didn't get the same level of service as we do with Adtaxi. They are a real partner."

- Shane Fouch - GM, Byers Subaru

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We are dedicated to your success. We strive to build strong, long-term partnerships built on transparency, trust, and most importantly, performance. Our clients' goals are at the center of our operation. We are focused on driving results, ROI, and customer experience.

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How is Digital Disruption Hurting Advertising Agencis

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How is Digital Disruption Hurting Advertising Agencis

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This article does not talk about the ways in which programmatic is disrupting the advertising industry. It focuses on the amount of money that ad agencies have been losing over the last several years, but it does not talk about the specific reasons why this is the case.

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Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that "shares in the world's largest advertising company, London-based WPP PLC, [owns agencies such as J. Walter Thompson, Young & Rubicam and Ogilvy & Mather] fell nearly 11%... after it reported a steeper-than-expected slowdown in global ad buying, particularly from consumer-goods companies. It was the stock's biggest one-day drop in more than 18 years... The penny pinching has been widely telegraphed, but the sharp declines at WPP shocked investors."

This phenomenon is not limited to WPP. The other three leading ad agencies in the Madison Avenue Big Four - Publicis, Interpublic, and Omincom - have also seen similar growth challenges. Michael Farmer, an advertising industry veteran and author of Madison Avenue Manslaughter, states in his book, "what was once one of the most fulfilling and glamorous of industries [personified, in my view, best by Don Draper in Mad Men] has become a grim sweatshop for the people who do the work." While that feels like an extreme characterization, this blogpost examines if, and how, digital disruption is hurting ad agencies.

Ad agencies provide a broad spectrum of services for their clients, including creative content development, media buying, and public relations. Typically, their revenue comes through a markup on labor and overhead costs for content, strategy, and creative development, and/or a commission (typically 15% of clients' media dollars) for media buying across different formats like print, radio, TV, digital, cinema, etc. The worldwide advertising industry has grown from $493 billion in 2012 to (projected) $505 billion in 2017. During this period, traditional media (TV, radio, print, out of home) spend fell by $105 billion (from $405 billion to $300 billion), while digital media (display, search, video, social) grew by $117 billion from $88 billion to $205 billion.

Ad agencies (historically) manage different media for their clients, and pool their clients' money to get the best prices for them. With that 'network effect' advantage, an additional fast-growing ad format like digital should have been a welcome business opportunity. However, the reality is quite the opposite, and is driven by two key factors: 1) disintermediation by digital ad platforms and 2) agencies' inability to respond to data based conversion quantification.

While digital advertising has grown at an impressive 20% CAGR over last 5 years, over 60% of that growth was captured by just two companies - Google and Facebook. Like other ad formats, sizeable digital advertising from brands continues to go through the money pool given to their ad agency - for example, in 2016 WPP spent $5 billion of their clients' money with Google and $1.7 billion with Facebook. However, a rapidly increasing portion is going direct, as Google and Facebook have made it convenient for advertisers and publishers to interact over advertising marketplaces.

Google started the disintermediation by first building the Doubleclick marketplace to help buy and sell display advertising, followed by the Admob platform to help mobile app developers monetize their apps through in-app ads. They further invested in programmatic advertising on both the supply side and the demand side - Double click bid manager for advertisers to find the right audience, and Double click for publishers for publishers to find advertisers across all screens. Facebook has built Facebook Audience Network (FAN) to help brands take native ads to 3rd party publishers, leveraging the same targeting data that they use on Facebook or Instagram. These platforms provide agency-like functionality and an increasing number of brands are putting their agency contracts up for review, while also building in-house "trading desks," thus, disintermediating ad agencies and their 15% commission on media buy. Mike Shields illustrates this in " The Future of ad agencies has never been more in doubt "
"A few years ago, Booking.com, a hotel e-commerce site owned by Priceline, worked closely with a media-buying agency to figure out where to allocate its ad budgets. "We'd have meetings where we'd sit down and say, 'We should put this much on YouTube, this much on other sites,' etcetera," .... But Booking.com is about to cut out that middleman, and it could have big implications for the advertising industry. In recent months, Booking.com has hired data scientists and researchers and other digital-media-buying experts. By the end of the year, all Booking.com's digital-media buying will be done in-house."
Brands today are also keen on data-based conversion quantification. In the past, an ad campaign was deemed "good" either if a key client executive, or executives, liked it, or if it was successful with a focus group. The key criterion was likability, and not necessarily the effectiveness of the campaign. Google, with its CPC (cost per click) search ads, helped start a mindset change on marketing ROI quantification. This was exacerbated by brands building direct connections with users and getting better access to data than agencies - all while agencies continued to primarily have a creative and campaign mindset. As Penry Price proposes in AdAge, ad agencies urgently need to act more like technology companies

" As marketing becomes increasingly driven by data and technology, ad agencies are having to compete for business against a newfound rival: consulting firms like Accenture and Deloitte... Deloitte has acquired a dozen creative agencies, while Accenture Digital last year was named the largest and fastest-growing digital agency network... Omnicom, for example, created Hearts & Science, an integrated digital agency that uses technology to scale customer relationships. As ad spend continues to shift from TV to digital, agencies will need to hire software engineers, designers and analysts that can quickly build tools and drive the customer experience their clients are looking for. The year 2017 will be a turning point for agencies. Those that aren't singularly focused on technology to scale the customer experience may find themselves up for review. "

Are these challenges insurmountable for ad agencies? One could argue that the days of full-service ad agencies are gone, and potentially replaced by ad agencies focused on niche areas like creative, search, mobile, and social. Having said that, in the past, ad agencies have shown remarkable agility and adaptability in their work. With digital technology becoming core to advertising, they will have to demonstrate that once again.

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How is digital disruption hurting advertising agencies?

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Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that "shares in the world's largest advertising company, London-based WPP PLC, [owns agencies such as J. Walter Thompson, Young & Rubicam and Ogilvy & Mather] fell nearly 11%... after it reported a steeper-than-expected slowdown in global ad buying, particularly from consumer-goods companies.

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The article talks about how programmatic is dominating the advertising industry, but it does not address the specific ways that programmatic is disrupting the ad industry. It talks more about "what" and not about "how."

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What's New in Publishing | Digital Publishing News

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It's a message we've been hearing percolate through the industry now for years: programmatic is the future of advertising. Brands, in search of more control over their media buying activity, have embraced technology-based approaches that promise efficiency, precision, flexibility, and superior ROI. Warts and all - and there are plenty, ranging from flat-out false value propositions to rampant fraud and monopolistic marketplace control by actor behaving badly - programmatic is here to stay.

Media planners and buyers have arrived at this conclusion, however begrudgingly. But other participants in the advertising ecosystem - designers, copywriters, developers, and publishers - are wading into programmatic territory in earnest now as well. Here's what they need to know about programmatic.

Audiences Increasingly Rely on Programmatic-Driven Experiences

Digital users - across desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones - increasingly expect tailored experiences, from both independent and sponsored content. And the most the efficient way to deliver custom experiences is via programmatic platforms.

For progressive advertising professionals, this is a welcomed opportunity (more on that later). Technology companies and developers benefit from this market evolution via an increased need for their solutions and services. Publishers, however, don't have much of a choice in this regard. In order to encourage engagement, and minimize the deployment of inhibitive tools such as ad blockers, user experience must be a paramount consideration. Content providers that deliver optimal UX - which includes unobtrusive but effective advertising, such as native tactics - will win in the long run.

Dynamic Ad Creative Is a Genuine Game-Changer

One of the underlying historical maxims of the ad business has been its aim to distribute messages "to the right person, at the right time, at the right cost." Though this has typically been more aspirational than realistic (and a regular source of frustration for creative professionals in particular) technology-enabled advertising does genuinely provide the opportunity for more specific customization.

To be sure, as a broader umbrella category, "digital marketing" was a step in the right direction on the road to customization (and what will eventually be widespread "personalization"). But due to a combination of hypergrowth conditions and the lack of internal structures to accommodate customization, the industry as a whole has lagged in this regard. As a recent BCG analysis explains, "Within both agencies and publishers, organizational silos with little cross-functional interaction lead to excessive work and rework, including costly handovers, long wait times, and fragmented decision making."

Programmatic seems poised to serve as the bridge to genuine, industry-wide progress on the customization front. In a few short years, most campaigns will adjust art and messaging to accommodate fluid factors such as time of day, geography, demographics, user interests and behaviors, and the like. This will almost certainly improve campaign performance. It will also impact the underlying cost structure of campaign delivery. This will require more creative labor, for example, so the net ROI effect remains to be seen.

The Programmatic Train Has Left The Station

Like "digital" before it, programmatic will likely lose its specific designation over the next decade, and morph into a marketing channel line item or equivalent. But until it does, it will continue to be popular fodder for industry publications and conferences. And not without good reason. Most estimates peg the U.S. programmatic marketplace in the tens of billions of dollars annually, and growing in the double-digit range. eMarketer sizes the market at $46 billion in 2018, and comprising more than 80% of the entire digital display category, and a major factor in mobile advertising.

That said, in spite of its formidable size and growth forecast, all is not well in the programmatic category, and brands, publishers, and vendors alike are scrambling to address problems related to the big three challenges: fraud, transparency, and viewability. To wit, also according to eMarketer analysis: programmatic growth through 2020 will be driven by "private setups, such as private marketplaces (PMPs) and programmatic direct transactions, as buyers continue to be wary of the open markets' transparency and quality issues".

It's both an exciting and terrifying time to be part of the advertising business. Brand, publishers, and agencies alike are scrambling to navigate the constantly shifting terrain that's characterized by tens of thousands of vendors competing for share and voice. Programmatic is one of the driving forces of disruption and upheaval in our industry today, and will play a big role in shaping the industry for years to come.

About the author
Raquel Rosenthal is the Chief Executive Officer of Digilant US, a Republished with kind permission of , advancing the future of trusted content programmatic marketing compan y headquartered in Boston. A digital industry veteran, she's held various senior positions at Digilant, DataXu, AudienceScience, and DoubleClick. Raquel splits time between Dallas and New York City, and holds a B.S. from Ithaca College.
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Programmatic Advertising Isn't Just for Media Buyers

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It's a message we've been hearing percolate through the industry now for years: programmatic is the future of advertising. Brands, in search of more control over their media buying activity, have embraced technology-based approaches that promise efficiency, precision, flexibility, and superior ROI.

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Programmatic advertising is disrupting the advertising world for the good because it allows for greater transparency, accountability, and safety. The use of programmatic in artificial intelligence (AI) assisted advertising is inevitable. AI can much more efficiently parse through the massive amounts of accumulated user data to better target users. The next frontier is going to be "predictive advertising" where AI will be able to help a brand to predict when a user will be most open to buying a product. Consumers of the future will be able to interact with advertised products via virtual reality (VR).

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When I was asked to give my top predictions for advertising in 2019, I hesitated. Everyone writes about trends this time of year-and I was skeptical.

But after giving it some thought, I knew it made sense. Advertising has changed on a macro scale in the last year. We need to take stock of what's happened, and identify what's around the bend. So when pulling together a list of trends, I decided to think big-and focus on the massive behavioral changes that are shifting our industry.

At the end of the day, I think 2019 will see both some risks, and some big opportunities for advertisers. And these will show up through five distinct trends.

Trend #1: Transparency, Accountability, and Safety Will Rise in Relevance
Data collection in advertising has become a hot topic-one that's wrought with controversy. Facebook has been no stranger to this.

After the 2016 election and the continued onslaught of fake news, Facebook took hit after hit of bad PR for their lack of transparency. They're facing trust issues from consumers and brands.

But brands aren't responding the way they should. Advertisers talk often about transparency, but many haven't at all changed their Facebook advertising strategies . I don't believe this is sustainable-and I envision 2019 will see an epic shift.

It comes down to three things: transparency, accountability, and safety. The platforms and publishers that commit to data transparency and privacy will gain trust. They're the ones that consumers will flock to, and the ones that brands should align themselves with in order to see tangible results by connecting with consumers in safe, quality environments.

Trend #2: Go Big or Go Home
In today's ecosystem, consumers are faced with dozens of options for any given purchase. With so many choices, it often comes down to who can make the biggest, most memorable impression. As a result, brands are getting braver-and will continue to do so in big ways.

Burger King has been highly successful, led by Fernando Machado. He's the man behind the industry-disrupting Google Home Super Bowl ad spot . He burned a Burger King restaurant to advertise the flaming burger. And he recently helped the Burger King app earn a spot at the top of the free app ranking by rewarding customers with a 1-cent Whopper if they're within 600 feet of a McDonald's location . He's making a big splash in terms of creative campaigns that bet on pure creativity and ideas that grab headlines. But he's also doing it being divisive.

On the other side of the coin, some brands are following consumers and taking a stand on social issues. The most well-known example of a successful political risk is Nike's 30 years anniversary of the "Just do it" campaign. For the anniversary, the sports retailer launched an ad with Colin Kaepernick in early September-resulting in the company's highest stock price in history . Here's where the importance of creativity shines through-and how a strategic and well-thought-out risk can pay off in spades.

Trend #3: Embrace AI-Assisted Advertising
Technological advances are inevitable. I think in that vein, the creative industry will, at last, wholeheartedly embrace artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning. Until recently, the struggle has been about quantity: there's been an overwhelming amount of data to parse through, and with it, so many disruptions that it was natural to want to take a step back.

The rise of more powerful and friendly AI and deep learning solutions will allow us to cut more cleanly through the noise-and leverage only the data and insights that matter. Advertisers will be able to make more informed decisions that lead, in turn, to strategic creative risks. In other words, we can dedicate more time to being creative-and let the best ideas shine through.

A good example of creativity assisted by science is the in-house creative team at Spotify. They've used the data from their platform to create traditional ad formats in a brand voice that is connected to society. Consider their 2018 goals campaign : the music streaming platform took real-life playlists by real users and created witty posters. And this year, they've piggy backed on that idea with more data-based campaigns. It's about connecting with their user-base but it all stems from their ability to leverage data.

The next frontier for our industry is predictive advertising. AI helps us store and analyze a huge amount of data. With deep learning in the mix, we are now able to understand what's going to happen next. We will be able to predict when the audience will be most interested in watching your video, when and how they will engage, and more. This is game changing-especially when you consider the fact that digital advertising currency is based heavily on impressions.

Trend #4: Personalized & Self-Optimized Advertising

The beauty of leveraging data is that it allows you to make campaigns more targeted and successful. This will get better and better as time goes on. Optimizing for weather, location, time of day will be integral to the future of personalized advertising.

Say you're creating ads for a car manufacturer, and you're targeting a consumer in a context of content about travel and road trips. Wouldn't it make sense to show the multimedia feature with kids enjoying the journey?

It's that kind of personalized ad targeting (and creative thinking) that will be the name of the game in the years to come. The truth is, optimization has never truly existed until now. And Teads is leading the charge with our capabilities. We are able to leverage our algorithms and dynamic creatives to create optimized campaigns that are based on audience behaviors. The results are astounding: 150% increase in brand awareness, 30% video completion rate, and 40% increase in click through rates.

Trend #5: The Intersection of Brand Perception and Mixed Reality

Technology is vastly changing the way we speak and interact with consumers. Ad campaigns are no longer limited to print, digital, and video. Mixed reality experiences are here to stay.

Virtual reality is literally exploding: devices are getting more affordable, content options are through the roof, and storytellers are working to leverage this new canvas.

And of course, brands won't just stick to one format-they'll use interchangeable mediums for connecting with consumers. This will be especially true as consumers increasingly look to their phones. Advertisers will mix and match creative assets to optimize them for a mobile environment. Consumers will be able to "try on" sunglasses or test out different lipstick shades via AR. It's all about pushing the bounds to better connect with and engage consumers. The only limit here is how creative you get as an advertiser-and how much risk you're willing to take.
Macro Trend: Performance Marketing
Working closely with the most relevant brands, media, and creative agencies worldwide, we believe that the advertising industry is shifting to a better, more holistic approach to marketing that simultaneously leverages science and art. In the last couple of years, we have all been challenged to find a more efficient model, one of biggest challenges of media agencies and the number one challenge of CMOs around the globe.

As The Global Media Platform, we're inspired by the trends we see impacting the industry today, and in the future. And sitting at the intersection of media and creative, we can help brands engage their audiences via mobile and native creative solutions that are backed by outcome driven media solutions within professionally produced content. 2019 is going to be a year for innovation & creativity within the bounds of brand-safe environments, and I look forward to seeing more daring and exciting creative this year.

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The Future of Advertising and How to Go Big in 2019 | Teads

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Written by Bertrand Cocallemen When I was asked to give my top predictions for advertising in 2019, I hesitated. Everyone writes about trends this time of year-and I was skeptical. But after giving it some thought, I knew it made sense. Advertising has changed on a macro scale in the last year.

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This paper just gave statistics on where programmatic is in terms of advertising. It was more about the dollar amounts spent in traditional advertising vs programmatic.

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I didn't use this article because it is obviously biased toward the use of programmatic advertising vs. traditional advertising. The article focused on the ways that the Watson AI can make programmatic even better for advertisers.

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Powering new possibilities of decision making, informed by billions of data sources, and enabled by the world's best AI technology.

Our Solutions

Trusted, insight-driven solutions that can be deployed across a brand's entire marketing strategy to help drive results.

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We offer trusted, insight-driven solutions that can be deployed across a brand's entire marketing strategy to help drive results.

We Live in an AI-Powered World

New customer needs and expectations have forced brands to rethink how they engage. AI has also teased a future full of exciting transformations for marketers such as better campaign analytics, hyper-personalization, and predictive audiences.

Businesses using AI to unlock data are influencing sales, engaging the customer better, boosting operations, and generating insights - all by more than 10%.*

But adoption is slow. Challenges include concerns over data safety, lack of a playbook on how to incorporate AI into one's job, concerns about replacing human capital, and lastly, no singular definition of what AI is.

Enter IBM Watson

Watson is AI tech that has been designed to solve today's data challenges and empower smarter business. It does this by understanding, reasoning and learning from all data and facilitating increasingly natural interactions with humans.

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It takes a client-first approach: Clients build and train their own AI so data stays proprietary and secure

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It is open to the world: Anyone can access the APIs for a fee, and use them to develop innovative solutions

Your Trusted AI Partner

Just like how Watson is being used to solve key challenges across industries, IBM Watson Advertising, formerly The Weather Company, is leveraging its unique heritage of innovation and trust to bring AI to advertising.

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Subway generate a 15% increase in store visits by using machine learning (Watson) to process weather, sales and behavioral data to find the optimal mix of signals that drive consumers in-store...

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Or Hulu exceed industry interaction benchmarks and generate valuable insights by leveraging Watson Ads to engage consumers in a 1:1 dialogue, uncover viewing preferences and serve up relevant content.

Source: Success stories from participating clients and agencies

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