AppNexus Addresses the Challenges of Rich Media in RTB

AppNexus Console customers now have a fully-featured Creative Template capability, the company announced last week.

The challenge for RTB is matching the capabilities of the creative to the expectations of the publisher for that particular placement. In most ad serving environments this challenge is minimised since the same group of people — ad operations, or “ad ops” — generally sets the rules for what can serve, and also manages the development of the creative rendering code. In an RTB environment the seller and buyer are only connected by APIs and protocols.

To address the problem of rich media in RTB, AppNexus introduced the use of a Media Type. A Media Type is set by a seller on a placement and lets the system know what types of creatives are eligible to be served. To ensure expandable ads run properly across sites, AppNexus has mapped hundreds of placements on their platform to specific vendors of expandables, with the goal that an advertiser can buy expandables at scale on AppNexus and know that the ads are going to expand properly.

The platform also supports interstitial ads. AppNexus customers can now deploy interstitials on their own sites or partner sites, however RTB capabilities are limited.

Online Advertising Spending Continues to Grow

ZenithOptimedia Group predicts a global increase in advertising expenditure of 4.8 per cent for 2012, in their recent study "Advertising Expenditure Forecast," . Despite the euro debit crisis, the company predicts Germany will have a 2.1 per cent increase, with a 1.5 per cent for Western Europe.

Besides TV, the investment would go mainly in the field of digital media. The willingness to invest in advertising is spurred by the Olympic Summer Games, the European Football Championships, the U.S. presidential election, and interestingly, the recovery of the Japanese advertising market. International consumer goods companies such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Unilever have recently announced their intention to increase ad spend and investment in their brands and product launches. National providers are expected to follow suit.

"For the German advertising market, we expect a stable development with a growth of 2.1 percent," says Frank-Peter Lortz, chairman ZenithOptimedia. "The additional revenue is primarily related to major sporting events and the international and national brands in their struggle to raise their market shares.”

By 2014, online ad spend is predicted to reach about 22.1 per cent of total advertising investment. For 2011, spend was 16.4 per cent. According to the study, the drivers in this category are the areas of online video and social media. Over the next two years, online video is expected to grow 21 per cent.

"Companies whose brands have been advertised heavily on TV are shifting a portion of their budgets to the area of online video" says Lortz. "Facebook is still in its infancy in this country. The potential of this platform as an advertising medium we can only just imagine. Almost all major companies now have Facebook on the agenda, any major investment, however, has yet to follow. They are taking into account data protection and new advertising formats in deciding appropriate places to develop."

Aegis Reports “Stellar” Revenue Growth of Nearly 10% to More than £1bn

Marketing group Aegis has reported a surge of a third in pre-tax profits to over £160m in 2011, outperforming its rivals with revenue growth of almost 10% to more than £1bn.

Analyst Ian Whittaker at Liberum called the revenue growth, which surpassed city consensus forecasts of about 7.5%, "stellar" as Aegis easily outpaced its top five rivals, including WPP and Publicis Groupe. The UK media buying group, which owns networks including Carat and Isobar, reported a 32.3% year-on-year rise in adjusted pre tax profits to £161.8m in 2011.

Revenues rose 20.6% – or 9.9% on the key analyst metric of organic revenue growth – to crack £1bn for the first time since 2007 at £1.135bn. Sir Martin Sorrell's WPP and Maurice Levy's Publicis recently reported full-year revenue growth in the 5% to 6% range.

In the fourth quarter alone Aegis, which recently won the global $3bn-a-year account for General Motors, registered organic revenue growth of 12% versus an average down near 4.5% for its main rivals.

Aegis said that it pulled in $2.7bn of new business. As as well as GM, it won contracts for Home Depot and Disney at its US business – which had a strong year and reported market capitalisationof over £2bn for the first time on 1 March.

The company closed on Thursday 15 April at 179p, up just 0.03%, at a market capitalisation of £2.1bn. Aegis's Americas operation increased revenues by 14.7% to £217.3m.

"The on-going impressive performance of the US business has transformed the scale of our business in the largest advertising market in the world," said Jerry Buhlmann, Aegis Group chief executive. Asia Pacific grew revenues by 87% to £220.6m, led by the "outstanding" performance of China. The Europe, Middle East and Africa region showed slower growth by comparison, albeit respectable in tough conditions, of 8.8% to £631m.

Aegis, which offloaded its research arm Synovate to a French rival, Ipsos, for £525m, said it spent £75m on 18 "bolt on" acquisitions and investments in 2011. Net debt was slashed to £128m at the end of December, compared to £331m at the close of 2010. Aegis has an undrawn banking facilities totalling £450m and cash of £617m.

Collective’s Bi-annual Online Video Advertising Market Report Reveals 51% of video-on-demand (VOD) Media Buyers Want RTB

Of the 150 media buyers surveyed, 24% said they felt more confident about the potential value of RTB and the control it gives them over the buy. Meanwhile, 13% of buyers said they do not feel it necessary to use RTB for video.

Two thirds (64%) of respondents said they will increase their VOD spend by more than 25% over the next six months, with no one expecting a reduction in spend on the medium. Over half (57%) of them stated that VOD is used on half or more of media plans, up 6% on the previous bi-annual survey last September.

The average campaign budget for VOD rose from £5,000 in the last report, to £49,000. The report also highlighted that a growing proportion of media buyers are looking beyond broadcasters’ VOD catch-up services to non-broadcaster platforms, such as magazine sites and YouTube.

Only 15% spent more than 75% of their budgets on broadcaster platforms, down from 21% six months ago and 42% a year ago. Meanwhile, 19% spent less than 25% of their budgets on broadcasters’ platforms.

Media buyers who are widening their VOD budgets to non-broadcaster platforms did so for a variety of reasons, including competitive pricing – 73% said they use alternative platforms to deliver incremental reach to TV and broadcast VOD, with 46% saying competitive pricing was the main factor, with broadcasters charging the more expensive prices.

Premium content is still the most favoured content to advertise around, compared to long-tail video, according to the report. Nearly half (43%) of respondents said they would pay higher CPMs to ensure their VOD campaigns ran against quality content and strong brands.

View-through rates remain the preferred form of measurement with 48% of buyers using this method. Click-through rates followed at 32%, while 8% said they measure engagement on unique users. Meanwhile, 32% of buyers said price should be based around performance metrics.

Evidon Launches its Global Tracker Report, Powered by Ghostery

Evidon announced last week the launch of its new semi-annual Global Tracker Report, powered by Ghostery. Ghostery provides insights into the online tracking ecosystem across over 8 million domains worldwide. The report is available on Evidon’s blog.

The Evidon Global Tracker Report will be edited by Darren Hermann, Chief Digital Media Officer of The Media Kitchen and President of kbs+p Ventures, the investment arm of Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners.

“There’s a reason so many of the leading companies online choose to work with Evidon,” said Herman. “Having worked with their team to gather and issue a preliminary version of this report last December, I know how comprehensive their technology is and how deep their knowledge of this space is. Nobody else has the view that Ghostery enables, so I’m really excited to be involved with this vital effort to inform the market.”

Aiming to provide a comprehensive but easily-digestible combination of primary data and editorial from experts in the space, this semi-annual report will cover a range of issues around data collection and usage, such as:

- The most ubiquitous tags across the internet and where they appear
- Which tags improve performance, and which may hinder it
- Case studies on how businesses are using this insight to secure their audience data, improve performance and comply with privacy regulations
- Guest spotlights from the industry

The Evidon Global Tracker Report is driven by Evidon’s proprietary assets. The first is Ghostrank, Evidon’s panel of over 300,000 users worldwide, which sees and reports on tracker data. Panel members are users of Ghostery, a browser add-on that allows consumers to see which companies are tracking them when they visit a website and, if they wish, block that tracking.

“There are no short cuts to complying with the ePrivacy Directive,” said Evidon CEO Scott Meyer, in an interview that appeared in New Media Age. “Solutions that don’t necessarily rely on cookies may have a lot of advantages but they have exactly the same compliance obligations under the ePrivacy Directive as any cookie-based solution.”

The Evidon Global Tracker Report will be distributed at both US and EU Evidon Empower summits, the next to be held in London on May 21st. Individual parts of the report will also be published online periodically and made available exclusively to Evidon clients and partners.