IAB Releases API

by Roy de Souza

IAB has recently released an API for “programmatic direct,” also known as “programmatic premium.  These methods for buying advertising are a hybrid of both programmatic and direct sales methods, and programmatic direct has become a mainstay of publishers who want to protect their premium inventory and advertisers who want guaranteed buys.

The API, which is in a document over 100 pages long (no, we haven’t read it yet), has been released for public comment. It  is designed to make workflow between advertisers and publishers easier, and fix some of the problems of DealID, a method that has turned out to be problematic but desirable for advertisers and agencies

Here’s the background:

AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Yieldex created the OpenDirect working group in June 2013 to
develop and support a standard for the programmatic selling and buying of guaranteed digital
ad inventory. The OpenDirect API specification will allow buyers who want to access
guaranteed inventory via automated processes avoid multiple, costly, custom integrations. This
document is the culmination of those efforts.

Implementing the API lets buyers write a single client that can access inventory from multiple publishers without the need to write custom code for each integration. The hope is that the API would make integrating with publishers less resource-consuming and more attractive.

The document also says that the API supports getting and searching product inventory, determining pricing and availability, applying targeting and frequency constraints, creating orders, adding lines to orders, uploading creative, assigning creatives to lines, and reserving and booking inventory.

While we have only gotten started on reviewing it, the IAB suggests that the following points about the API be noted:

• The API takes an advertiser first approach. Both advertisers and agencies must sign up
with the publisher and receive credentials. Advertisers may perform their own buys or
provide consent to have an agency perform buys on their behalf; for an agency to
perform buys on behalf of an advertiser, the advertiser must provide consent. The
process of signing up and providing consent is publisher defined.
• To book a line, the line must have a creative assigned to it. The creative may be the
actual creative that the advertiser plans to run or a placeholder creative that is later
replaced with the actual creative when it becomes available. However, the line will run
with whichever creative is assigned to it (the actual creative or placeholder creative).

No one in our industry can afford to get behind the curve for an instant, so we’re already on top of this important new initiative.

The tension between data and creativity was apparently very much on display at New York Ad Week recently. It seems as if the industry pendulum has swung from an emphasis on creativity to an emphasis on data and back again. That swinging too far in one direction will always lead you back to the other would seem obvious.   In the immortal words of David Ogilvy, known to many as the father of advertising, “In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.” Instead, Ogilvy felt that “advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.”es in.

Data used to have a simple place in advertising — as a utilitarian tool in the background. However, when digital advertising took off and the industry realized it could have better metrics on ad responses and consumer desires, data came to the forefront.  But now that we know we can target the right consumer on a multitude of platforms at any hour in any medium, we have come back to the grim reality that we still need a compelling message. In digital your message needs to be even more compelling as the user is in control and can often scroll past, close or somehow skip boring messages.

Once again, from Ogilvy “There isn’t any significant difference between the various brands of whiskey, or cigarettes or beer. They are all about the same. And so are the cake mixes and the detergents, and the margarines… The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most sharply defined personality for his brand will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit.

Now in 2014, in the words of Rishad Tobaccowala, there is “too much plumbing, too little poetry.” For brand advertising, storytelling is necessary. Especially for video. No matter how much data you have about your customer, there’s no engagement in a video without a good story.  Tobaccowala gives an example from a recent Nestle campaign, which he felt was an example of next generation storytelling.

We help the story tellers. The ZINC Native InArticle Video unit provides advertisers with a large space on an un-cluttered part of a page, where the users really see it. Viewability is very high and the uniqueness of this format plus the tier one sites, means that the right users are watching. So now that users are watching the ZINC Native video unit: storytellers, please tell your story

Last week was Advertising Week in New York, the historic home of advertising and media. But while always a cause for parties and drinking,  the annual citywide meeting of agencies, publishers and brands has  evolved into a cause for hand-wringing as well. Some of the event titles gave away the uncertainty that afflicts the ecosystem today: there was “What Keeps CMOs Up at Night,” “Why Your Viral Video Strategy is a Waste of Time,” and “Are We There Yet?: The Journey from TV to Video.” What has caused all this turmoil? Digitization, of course, and the follow-on disruptions, apparently coming more quickly than ever.

The advertising industry has suffered through nearly two decades of change from the days of predictable revenues for publishers and  budgeted expenditures of brand advertisers to the current programmatic (algorithm-driven) real time environment, which can often look like chaos to those at either end of the media buying and selling process. It all started with Netscape, and now it’s as if no one really understands the industry in which they operate.

Read more →

Great media plans involve a combination of  strategy, creativity, and data support. First, the plan must deliver  a great brand experience. Then, it must be targeted contextually, and last, but most important, it must deliver against the brand’s objectives, which means those objectives should be clearly stated and presented to the media planner.

To deliver a great brand experience, we rely heavily on creative, which is lately overlooked in favor of data. Contemporary creative must  keep some core principles while trying to be brave,  not accepting what has happened in the past,  and being willing to try something new. A campaign that will engage a busy mobile consumer must have some flair and some newness — but not just for novelty’s sake. The consumer has to be able to recognize that this creative supports her actual desire for information about a product or service.

Read more →

Premium video is going programmatic. So says Adapt.tv’s fifth annual study of marketers and advertisers, “The State of the VIdeo Industry.” As you can probably guess, video ad spending has been growing for the past five years, and mobile video has given that spend a big push. The “extra” money to buy online video ads is being shifted from both cable and broadcast TV budgets.

This year, for the first time,, more than half of publishers said they planned to make their premium inventory available programmatically. Did they do it by choice? Not really; they did it of necessity, because buyers have already shifted to programmatic. Brands said a full 60 percent of their online video ad spending has gone programmatic. Agencies are behind the curve here; only 40% of their spend is programmatic. Agencies who have made the investment to make programmatic one of their core competencies will win here, as the shift intensifies.

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One of this year’s biggest trends has been the move of premium content to programmatic platforms. In the past, programmatic was considered good enough for remnant inventory, but not really appropriate for  the top tier of content. Not so long ago, we heard the New York Times and Disney say they’d never do it. But as both buyers and sellers have gradually come to realize that the word “programmatic” refers to work flow, and not necessarily to auctioning off prime ad  space to the second lowest bidder, more high value sites have embraced programmatic.

One of the tools that was supposed to make selling premium programmatically more transparent was Deal ID. Originally sold as the salvation for publishers, it was also to provide a guarantee of placements for advertisers. As author Jennifer Chen explained in a recent Digiday article, a Deal ID is just a unique number assigned to an automated ad buy on a publisher’s exchange. The Deal ID represents the terms of a deal negotiated between the buyer and seller in advance, including the floor price, priority and specific publisher data. Read more →

Shouldn’t this be a “no-duh”? It’s hardly a surprise that if visitors spend more time on a page they have an opportunity to see more of the ads. But we now have graphic evidence that ads are indeed more viewable on pages people actually want to read or see. These pages give the ads time to appear, and then time to be seen. This chart, based on a study from May 2014, shows how the percentage of ads viewed goes up quite sharply the longer the visitor spends on a page. This seems to be true of display ads,  may not apply to video ads on video content sites, where viewers are either forced by pre-roll to watch ads, or don’t watch half of them at all. Read more →

Nielsen has a “new” metric for measuring actual advertising success. Well, in all honesty it’s not really new, but it does make sense to us. Proceeding on the theory that only about 50% of online ads are considered viewable according to IAB’s definitions, nothing has changed in advertising since John Wanamaker said half of his advertising spend was wasted, only he could never figure out which half. That, however, is no longer true. We can at least begin with the viewability metric.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Media Rating Council (MRC) industry guidelines, a viewable impression is defined as a served impression in which a minimum of 50 percent of pixels are in view on a user’s screen for a minimum of one consecutive second. Read more →

Kevin Tofel wrote this about the app economy: “Did you download any apps to your smartphone this month? Chances are, you didn’t, says research firm ComScore. The company published a report showing that in the U.S., 65.5 percent of all smartphone owners aren’t adding any new apps to their phones these days.”

So if your advertising strategy is too focused on the app economy, you may be disappointed in your ROI for the next few years (although not eventually). Apps are a first world solution. A small minority of smart phone users download most of the apps. So if you are BMW, you may find your target audience in an app. If you’re a CPG company, you won’t get the scale you need. Read more →