comScore, Inc. has released full results from its U.S.-based vCE Charter Study involving online advertising campaigns for 12 premium national advertisers, including Allstate, Chrysler, Discover, E-Trade, General Mills and Sprint, among others. comScore announced the Validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) offering in January, and last week signed on Forbes.com as a client.
The comScore study found that, in many cases, a large portion of ad impressions are not delivered according to plan, and that the quality of ad delivery can vary greatly based on a variety of factors, including site, placement, creative and targeting strategy. The study evaluated ad delivery based on a several key dimensions, including whether or not the ads were delivered in-view, to the right audience, in the right geography, in brand safe environments and absent of fraud.
“This is the first study to bring twelve leading marketers together to holistically understand how online advertising is delivered, allowing us to begin to diagnose sources of waste and identify solutions for improving the value that all players in the ecosystem can extract from the digital advertising market,” said Linda Abraham, comScore co-founder and CMO. “Until now, neither side of the industry has had a clear picture of ad delivery, resulting in a lack of confidence in digital’s ability to deliver on its promise as the most measurable advertising medium. The insights from the charter study represent a critical first step to improving the efficiency, efficacy and ultimately the economics of online advertising for all participants.”
Executive Summary of Key vCE Charter Study Findings
The vCE Charter Study includes a variety of detailed findings that shed light on the current state of online ad delivery and its implications for different participants in the online advertising market. Key findings include:
- In-View Rates are Eye-Opening. The study showed that 31% of ads were not in-view, meaning they never had an opportunity to be seen. There was also great variation across sites where the campaigns ran, with in-view rates ranging from 7% to 100% on a given site. This variance illustrates that even for major advertisers making premium buys there is a lot of room for improvement.
- Targeting Audiences Beyond Demographics Can be Powerful. Generally, campaigns that had very basic demographic targeting objectives performed well with regard to hitting those targets. For example, those with an objective of reaching people in a particular broad age range did so with 70% of their impressions. Predictably, as additional demographic variables were added to the targeting criteria (e.g. income + gender), accuracy rates of the ad delivery declined. However, the results also showed that 37% of all impressions were delivered to audiences with behavioral profiles that were relevant to the brand (i.e. consumers with demonstrated interests in categories, such as food, auto or sports). One campaign had 67% of its impressions viewed by the target behavioral segment.
- The Content in Which An Ad Runs Can Create Problems for Any Brand. Of the campaigns analyzed, 72% had at least some impressions that were delivered adjacent to objectionable content—chiefly adult-oriented or “hate sites” (e.g., white supremacist content). While this did not translate to a large number of impressions on an absolute basis (141,000 impressions across 980 domains), it is important to note that 92,000 people were exposed to these impressions. This demonstrates that brand safety should be of concern to all advertisers.
- Fraud is the Elephant in the Digital Room. Fraud is an undeniably large and growing problem in digital advertising. The results showed that an average of 0.16% of impressions across all campaigns was delivered to non-human agents from the IAB spiders & bots list. Although this percentage might appear negligible, there are two important considerations to keep in mind. Only the most basic forms of inappropriate delivery were addressed in this study. When additional, more sophisticated types of fraud are considered, the problem will only get larger. Like brand safety, fraud should be an important concern for all advertisers.
- Digital Ad Economics: The Good Guys Aren’t Necessarily Winning. The study showed that there was little to no correlation between CPM and value being delivered to the advertiser. For example, ad placements with strong in-view rates are not getting higher CPMs than placements with low in-view rates. Similarly, ads that are doing well at delivering to a primary demographic target are not receiving more value than those that are not. In other words, neither ad visibility nor the quality of the audience reached is currently reflected in the economics of digital advertising.
These findings suggest that measuring all dimensions of ad delivery for every placement in a holistic fashion is critical and that optimizing delivery in-flight is a necessary step in the campaign management process. The findings also support the argument that any digital GRP metric must account for validated, not gross impressions. This validated impression measurement must include ‘viewable impressions,’ based on the very simple notion that if an ad is not seen, it cannot possibly deliver its intended effect.
“With 31% of vCE Charter Study impressions not being viewable, it is now abundantly clear just how important in-view measurement is to online campaign validation,” said Abraham. “In order for any digital GRP metric to be relevant in the online space and to be cross-media comparable, it must include validated ‘viewable impressions’ in its calculation. While audience and geographic validation are crucial – and should not be ignored – if a digital campaign rating does not also take into account whether or not the ad had the opportunity to be seen, then the metric fails to deliver a true apples-to-apples comparison to all other media.”
About the vCE Charter Study
To better understand issues associated with display ad delivery and validation, 12 leading marketers participated in a U.S.-based charter study, called the vCE Charter Study. The goal of the study was to quantify the incidence of sub-optimal ad delivery across these key dimensions for the advertised brands, and in so doing, frame the relative importance of each for the industry. Key validation dimensions included: in-view, audience delivery, geographic delivery, brand safety and fraud.
Select Study Participants: Allstate, Chrysler, Discover, E-Trade, Ford, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Kimberly Clark, Kraft, and Sprint
Time Period: December 2011
Total Campaigns: 18
Media Placements: 2,975
Site Domains: 380,898
Ad Impressions: 1.8 billion
Format: All ads were display, delivered via iframes
B2B Marketers: Think Social, Search Ads for Lead Gen in Place of Email
Paid search, social media and display ads are poised to take over in lead generation, where email leaves off. But B2B marketers are particularly optimistic about social media, reports eMarketer.
In a February 2012 survey of B2B marketing and agency professionals by BtoB Magazine, 59% view lead generation as their greatest online marketing challenge.
Most respondents rely on email, with 57% saying that as an online channel, emailcontributes the most qualified leads to their businesses. But a significant percentage reported that another online channel was their biggest driver of leads, including paid search (20%) and social media (13%). Respondents from agencies were more likely than marketers to favor social or search.
Both B2B marketers and agencies felt that social media in particular has room for growth in their organizations. After email, social media was the most widely adopted of the marketing channels, but only 5% of respondents described their social media efforts as “well-optimized,” compared with the 30% that felt their email programs were optimized. A majority of 55%, said their social efforts were in the early-stage but showed promise.
The data suggests that B2B enterprises should look first to LinkedIn and blogs (both of which are increasingly ad friendly). An October 2011 study of B2B marketers worldwide conducted by marketing automation provider Pardot discovered that LinkedIn was the social media tool most successful at lead generation, followed closely by blogging.
While paid search presents another lead-gen opportunity for B2B marketers, with 18% reporting that it was their single greatest lead creator, only 11% said claimed to have a mature and well-optimized search program in place. Another 43% reported not using search marketing at all.
Upfront Digital: Social TV Dashboard | Apple’s Free DigiMag Renewal | Facebook Faces Antitrust Suit
- Social TV content and data solutions provider SocialGuide has launched SocialGuide Intelligence, an analytics engagement platform that tracks Twitter for networks, reports MediaBistro. SGI’s charter client for the service is A&E Networks, which will utilize the service for A&E, HISTORY, Lifetime, BIO and its other networks. The service enables networks to see how many tweets roll in about a show, and get “social snapshot” of an audience. As the company describes its solution, SGI delivers daily, weekly and monthly social TV reports across 215 broadcast and cable channels in a dashboard view (see graphic), and “[measures] the social activity for every program type and every program air. Also, SGI is the only social TV analytics product in the marketplace that can be used to identify and engage with key comments and the social influencers of every network and program.”
- Apple announced yesterday that it had sold 3 million new iPads since releasing the newest iteration on Friday, reports Mashable. Forbes reported that as of Monday evening, the new iPad took of 4.6% of all iPad traffic in the U.S., citing data from Chitika. That sounds considerable, but Managing Director Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research reminded Forbes that Apple released the iPad simultaneously in 10 countries, versus the usual three or four. “Three million units sold, or 4.6% of iPad traffic…would be good if the release had been limited to three countries,” said Chowdhry, “Not ten.” He estimates that ideally, the new iPad should have taken 12% to 15% of all iPad traffic.
- Elsewherein iPad news, Adweek reports that Apple is offering trials to publishers of auto-renewing subscriptions. This signals that the usually inflexible Apple is “paying close attention to the Barnes & Noble Nook and Amazon Kindle, which already have the feature,” says Adweek. In the auto-renew model, customers who sign for a free trial are automatically charged at the end of the trial, unless they take action to turn off the auto-renew. unless they turn off the auto-renew option. Bonnier Senior VP Gregg Hano (who helms “Popular Science” and other titles” told Adweek said Bonnier will try the feature: “The downside risk is very small, and the upside is high.”
- Time Warner Cable (TWC) has added 26 live local broadcast channels in New York City to its TWC TV apps for iPhones, iPads and the TWCTV.com website, reports Multichannel News. This may be a direct response to Aereo, the broadcast-to-digital startup that offers much the same service for $12 per month. TWC's New York customers may now stream WCBS, WNBC, NBC NY Nonstop, WNYW (Fox), WABC, and numerous other broadcast channels.
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A small developer of social media and online applications has filed suit against Facebook, alleging antitrust and anticompetitive behavior. Kotchen & Low LLP has filed a lawsuit on behalf of its client Sambreel Holdings LLC against Facebook for alleged violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and California state laws prohibiting unfair competition and interference with contract. Sambreel seeks an injunction preventing Facebook from requiring Sambreel's advertising partners to boycott Sambreel and to prevent Facebook from "gating" – i.e., scanning its own users’ computers without their consent to learn who downloaded a Sambreel application then forcing those individuals to uninstall Sambreel's applications before they are allowed access to their Facebook accounts.
Online Ads: Proving ROI To Be Job 1 for CMOs in 2013
CEO Mark Hughes of C3 Metrics (a media analytics platform) predicts that as of 2013, marketing officers will be far more accountable to financial officers for digital ad return on investment (ROI). He detailed why in a Business Insider column.
The standards of ad verification will change as of 2013, and for the better. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) in February released the final version of its “Guidelines for the Conduct of Ad Verification,” in cooperation with the Media Rating Council (MRC). The advantage to advertisers and marketers is truth in numbers: IAB is promising that with a common set of standards, “companies engaged in the verification of interactive advertising campaigns can themselves be audited against a common, transparent standard.”
What will be required of chief marketing officers (CMOs)?
First, they will need to recalculate ad ROI. The ROI of display ads is about to change. The until-now accepted definition of an impression is the “server request” (when a consumer logs onto any website), but the ads do not fully load, 12% of the time. So, writes Hughes, “Advertisers still pay for ads never reaching a consumer’s page.” He expects CMOs to account for and pay for only fully-loaded impressions.
Secondly, the definition of a “viewable ad” will tighten. This is owed to the new standards defined by the IAB, along with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s). According to those organizations and C3’s own data, 68% of all display ads are never seen by consumers—they are not even viewable for one second, which IAB recommends as a standard. If it becomes a standard, then advertisers will not pay for unviewed impressions; cost-per-thousand impressions (CPMs) will rise 50 to 70%; and advertisers can expect stronger ROI.
Finally, CMOs can expect more scrutiny concerning advertising expenses, as they fall under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). As the IASB (International Accounting Standards Board) defines it, “Expenditure on an intangible item shall be recognized as an expense when it is incurred." The CMO will be held accountable to prove that an ad runs, else, expenses are out of line with services or advertising, and a company risks violating GAAP. “CFOs generally don’t like to be caught by surprise, and they don’t like violating GAAP,” opines Hughes.
Social Media Ads: Trees Falling In The Forest?
Advertisers and marketers have caught on to social media, finds Duke University in its CMO Survey. Still, there is a “sizable fissure” in integration (lead capture, engagement, sales), finds Professor Christine Moorman, Director of the CMO Survey.
Moorman described an increase in social media ad and marketing spend from 7.4% of marketing budgets to 10.4% over the next year, year and 19.5% over five years. But, she asked chief marketing officers (CMOs) to rate “How effectively is social media integrated with your firm’s marketing strategy,” to reveal an average score of 3.8 out of 7. Only 7% of CMOs rank social media as “very integrated” with their companies’ strategies, and 18.4% rated it as “not at all integrated.” That is “disturbing given the increasing amount of money that companies are spending on social media,” especially considering that the score is practically identical to that of February 2011.
So spending has increased, while integration remained the same.
Business-to-consumer (B2C) companies are better integrated than business-to-business (B2B) companies. Moorman argues that B2C companies better developed marketing groups, but likely, it is because B2B enterprises still struggle with the value of social media. Blogs, they understand, but Facebook is unlikely to appeal to an Accenture or KPMG; LinkedIn (the most businesslike of social media) has yet to flesh out its ad offerings; and social media is perhaps of little value to, for example, a capital equipment maker.
Interestingly, small business (including start-ups) and large businesses are stronger in integration than are medium-sized businesses. In a small business, Moorman speculates, “everyone can still talk to each other (and may be working side by side),” while larger business has the resources to tackle social media. Mid-sized businesses do spend but haven’t the human interaction, time, or money to make it work. And of course, companies that rely on the Internet for revenues score higher in integration, scoring 4.9 on that one-to-seven scale, versus 3.3 for those with no Internet sales mechanism. Sales is the prime mover in social media, while branding is a distant second.
Moorman advises—in essence—taking social media more seriously as an outlet, and a more hands-on approach to align it with corporate goals. Chief among her recommendations is a system of accountability that demonstrates the return-on-investment (ROI) of intermediate outcomes, like “buzz,” but also financial performance. “The choice of metrics should be influenced by whether social media is doing a push or pull job for your company.” And, have social media staffers and marketers report to the same person. The mission for both must be aligned, not separate.
Research: Conventions, Primaries Cause Ripples in Cross-Platform Share
More grist for the advertise-across-platform advertising mill. In its newly released February MobileSTAT report, Jumptap (the targeted mobile advertising technology provider) revealed that Android and iOS together are “hogging” the mobile OS market, with 91% combined market share. Based on data from the company’s network of 95 million monthly users, both operating systems reached new heights in January; Android hit 58.8% and iOS reached 32.2% market share respectively. Blackberry sank to a record low of 6.7%.
The data is in sync with Nielsen’s recent report, showing 89% of smartphones that were acquired in Q4 2011 were either Android or iOS, while only 6% were Blackberry. Jumptap forecasts an uphill battle to retain marketshare in 2012, for Blackberry, Symbian and Windows.
“With Google activating 850,000 mobile devices daily, it’s no surprise that Android has continued to outpace every other OS on the market,” said Paran Johar, chief marketing officer for Jumptap. “What advertisers should take away from this data is the importance of advertising cross-platform. Both the Android and iOS operating systems continue to grow while the remaining competitors represent only a fraction of the market.”
Additional February MobileSTAT Findings:
- Exponential tablet growth. The launch of the Kindle Fire has helped fuel exponential tablet growth in the last few months. Overall tablet traffic on the Jumptap network has increased over 50% since December. In that same time period, Kindle Fire has grown from holding a 4% share of tablet traffic to a 33% share. Jumptap predicts that 2012 will be a year of heavy competition between the iPad3 – launching in March – the Kindle Fire, and other low-cost tablets.
- Top Picks for Mobile Devices of CES Attendees. The largest consumer electronics show in the world, CES, brought hundreds of the best and brightest in media and tech to Las Vegas — and with them, their mobile devices. In analyzing the types of devices used in Las Vegas during the event vs. devices normally used in the area, the Jumptap February MobileSTAT found that Apple and—surprisingly—Blackberry made the strongest showing (likely due to Blackberry’s legacy enterprise penetration). Additionally, iPad traffic increased 100% and Blackberry traffic increased 111% during the show. To no surprise, the report also found that tech-focused CES attendees were less likely to use feature phones as compared to Las Vegas locals.
- All Politics is Mobile. Mobile users in South Carolina took to their phones to check results of the state’s primary election on January 21. Significant spikes on the Jumptap network ‘News Channel’ occurred on the day of the primary resulting in a 35% increase in traffic at 7 p.m. ET when the polls closed, and a 40% spike at 10 p.m. when results were announced.
MobileSTAT (for “Simple Targeting & Audience Trends”) is a monthly view of the top targeting and audience trends in mobile advertising. MobileSTAT contains analysis of hundreds of gigabytes of log data run through Jumptap’s analytics technology.
Upfront Digital: Girl Scouts Gone Mobile | Comcast’s Streaming Battle | Apple Rejects eBooks
- Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai is leaving the company, reports AllThingsD, just three years after launching the check-in service. Sevaldurai will remain on the company’s board, but is unsure about “my exact next steps.” Foursquare investor Spark Capital is buying up employee stock, and Selvadurai and co-founder Dennis Crowley previously sold shares in an earlier funding round.
- The Girl Scouts are celebrating the organization’s 100th birthday by “embracing mobile technology and accepting mobile payments for their fundraising cookies,” according to BizReport. Girl Scouts in 23 States are accepting mobile payments, using Sage technology on smart phones and notebook computers, and early returns from North East Ohio troops are encouraging; they report that mobile payment is behind a 13% boost in sales. Girl Scouts estimates its annual cookie program brings in $760 million per year. Troops not using mobile technology experienced flat sales.
- Streaming TV providers “strain to retain” customers, reports Adweek. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes and Comcast EVP Neil Smit are urging investors to pressure cable operators and Nielsen to support the “TV Everywhere” concept, which allows cable subscribers who can verify their memberships to access cable content digitally, on computers and mobile devices. Bewkes and Smit spoke at last week’s Deutsche Bank Media and Telecommunications Conference. “We’re giving the customers no reason to go anywhere else,” said Smit, describing the company’s Xfinity Streamplay service. The TV Everywhere initiative positions Time Warner and Comcast to better compete against streaming services from Netflix and Hulu. The Time Warner and Comcast stream would differ from Netflix or Hulu in being ad supported.
- Marketing guru and author Seth Godin is grumping at Apple, which refused to carry the digital edition of his new book Stop Stealing Dreams in its iBooks Store. As Time reports, Apple rejected the title because its bibliography included links to rival bookseller Amazon.com. Godin wrote in a blog post entitled “Who decides what gets sold in the bookstore?” “I think that Amazon and Apple and [Barnes & Noble] need to take a deep breath and make a decision on principle: what’s inside the book shouldn’t be of concern to a bookstore with a substantial choke on the marketplace.”
- Southwest Airlines is suing to shut down a website providing Southwest customers with first-in-line boarding, reports Denver Business Journal. SW Software Development’s “MySouthWestCheckin” takes $5 to offer the preferential seating, using a patch-through to the Airline’s own website. Southwest Airlines complains that this robs it of selling and advertising opportunities, and trespasses on Southwest’s website. Southwest Airlines filed its suit in the U.S. District Court in Dallas, where the airline is based.
Research: Advertisers, Agencies Migrate to Aggregated Media and Emerging Channels
ValueClick, Inc., an Internet advertising network, has announced results from its “2012 ValueClick Media Advertiser Survey.” This annual survey tracks the perceptions, thoughts and actions of agencies and brand marketers, including their views on advertising budgets, reasons for selecting media partners and digital marketing trends. Nearly 300 digital marketers and agency professionals participated in the survey, conducted in December 2011—71% of respondents from agencies, 26% being direct buyers.
ValueClick found that in the category of stationary display advertising, aggregated media–such as networks, demand-side platforms (DSPs), exchanges and trading desks–are stabilizing or increasing their footprint, apparently at the expense of portal buys. Still, while DSPs, exchanges, and trading desks are gaining momentum, 19-31% of media buyers do not plan to spend in those channels in 2012. In addition, video and mobile marketing are experiencing a surge, with only 7-10% of marketers not planning to spend in these channels in 2012 (down from 13% and 15%, respectively, in 2011).
Other findings:
- The number of buyers planning on decreasing spending in networks dropped by over 50%, while those planning to spend the same or increase on networks grew from 72% to 83%. A mere 3% of buyers do not plan on spending on networks.
- DSPs appear to be stabilizing, with the percentage of buyers who plan to keep the spend the same as last year equating to 30%, vs. 23% in last year’s survey, while those planning to increase their spending decreased to 17% from 20% over the same time period.
- Those buyers planning to not spend at all with portals jumped over 38% - from 13% to 18% - and the percentage keeping the same spend or increasing declined from 53% to 45%. A mere 9% of buyers expect to increase their spend with portals.
Targeting Techniques Even Out
Compared to prior years, 2012 will bring a relative impartiality to various targeting techniques. For the first time in the seven years that ValueClick Media’s Annual Advertiser Survey has been completed, the top four preferred targeting techniques (audience-based, demographic, contextual and retargeting) are within a mere six percentage points of each other. Advertisers value any method of reaching the audience, but the one-time king of demographics is now simply part of the pack as contextual and retargeting methodologies have improved, and proved their worth.
Performance Takes on Greater Emphasis
Perhaps related to the leveling out of targeting preferences, the importance of tangible results dwarfs all other criteria buyers use to select media partners. While buyers surveyed in past years regularly ranked performance as the most important consideration, never before has the gap between performance and any other consideration been this wide. In a particularly surprising finding, the importance of transparency dropped by just over 50% compared to last year’s survey.
So buyers are spending less time policing their partners, than policing the results of the partnerships.
IAB Unveils New Ad Unit Portfolio With Six “Rising Star” Formats
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) introduced the IAB Standard Ad Units in 1996 and updated them in 2003, and now over 80% of display ads follow the IAB standards. IAB has released a new Standard Ad Unit Portfolio, which it claims will “drive the industry forward and create new opportunities for dynamic brand advertising.” IAB unveiled the new portfolio over the weekend, at its fifth IAB Annual Leadership Meeting “Ecosystem 2.0: Beyond Time and Space.”
The portfolio includes a new range of formats designed to “meet marketers’ communications needs across the purchase funnel,” said IAB in a release. Among these formats are the IAB Rising Stars Display ad units, six new interactive ad units developed and tested in partnership with digital publishers and agencies.
As Adweek reported from the Leadership Meeting, IAB’s head of brand initiatives Peter Minnium told the crowd “This new [collection of ad units] varies not only in size but in functionality and, of course, in interactivity.” Without standardized units, advertisers had to handcraft creative ads as needed, whereas the new units “will enable them to craft [an ad] once and run it broadly.” Industry bodies including the Online Publisher's Association (OPA) have clamored for larger and more intrusive ad units that attract bigger brands and larger premiums.
Of the Rising Stars, the Portrait may be the most high profile, says Adweek. The Portrait was unveiled by AOL’s Pictela division in 2010, and enables advertisers to include interactive apps embedded in a 300-by-1050-pixel display. IAB has also added two full-page units to the portfolio, called the "Sidekick" and "Slider."
“The new IAB portfolio allows creatives to tell bigger, bolder brand stories,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB. “The new units offer more space, greater functionality, and a broader range of user experiences—providing a collection of next-generation interactive canvases designed to leverage the rich, immersive benefits of digital.”
Higher Engagement, Interactivity
To measure the new units’ ability to deliver at scale for brand advertisers, IAB partnered with IPG Media Lab to conduct proprietary research with Affectiva, GazeHawk and Moat that looked at attentiveness, emotive response and brand lift. Working with BBDO, BBH, Razorfish and SapientNitro, campaigns were tested from AT&T, Jeep and Westin Hotels & Resorts, leveraging all six Rising Stars units for each. The test creative, which was showcased on MSN.com, was built by AOL/Pictela, DoubleClick/Google, MediaMind and Microsoft Advertising.
The research findings revealed that consumers interact significantly more with Rising Stars ads than with incumbent standard ad units (such as the leaderboard and medium rectangle). Users were 2.5 times more likely to interact with a Rising Stars ad unit than a standard ad unit, spent twice as much time interacting with the ad and took less time to react to the ad (two times quicker than with standard ads). Along with increased interaction, eye-tracking showed that users viewed ads longer (31% more) with Rising Stars units versus standard formats.
In addition, study respondents found the Rising Stars ads to be more “enjoyable” and “engaging” when compared to regular displays ads, and they were more likely to say the Rising Stars ads “improved my impression of this web site” and their opinion of the brand.
"Being able to combine eye-tracking and facial-coding with more traditional behavioral analytics and brand lift survey data, and to do all of that in a respondent’s home using their webcam, gives us an amazing new view into the true impact of these cool new ad formats” said Tim McAtee, Research Director, IPG Media.
"As marketers we are all going to be more efficient in maximizing our production resources by having more structure around rich digital advertising units,” said Christi Gettinger, Senior Director Brand Management, Westin Hotels & Resorts. “To date, publishers have been fairly fragmented in their offerings to advertisers and this ultimately drives up production costs to effectively reach our target audience. We are thrilled the IAB team is taking the lead in creating more opportunities for marketers to be effective in connecting with consumers online.”
“The Rising Stars Display ad units have already proven themselves in the marketplace with exponentially higher interaction rates and interaction time—the core metrics that matter for brand advertisers” said Minnium. “They can only bring the interactive industry to new heights as part of the IAB Standard Ad Unit Portfolio.”
Mobile Ads: Mobile Becoming the Norm, Apple/Android Wrestle on Click-Throughs and Quality
Research by mobile ad network solutions provider Jumptap suggests that mobile devices will become the norm for Internet access, and that advertisers must take a cross-market approach to the Apple and Android operating systems: they must cater to both.
Tablet network traffic jumped 229% over an average projected for the day after Christmas, based on historical network traffic, Jumptap reported in its just-released January MobileSTAT report.
January 2, 2012 also saw a bump, with a 263% traffic increase (most likely from recipients uploading holiday photos and getting familiar with their devices).
Jumptap found that the Kindle Fire experienced the greatest tablet growth throughout December. The new device held 10% of tablet market share on December 1 and finished the year with 30% market share. This year-end surge suggests a 2012 trend for lower-priced tablets.
Mobile to overtake desktops, laptops?
"Mobile is quickly becoming the primary access point of the internet. Advertisers have seen this movie before with PC based digital advertising and are allocating mobile budgets that are larger and larger," said Paran Johar, Chief Marketing Officer, Jumptap. "The surge in tablet adoption rates and rise in mobile subscribers support the expectations that mobile will eventually outpace online."
In 2011, the mobile ad industry broke the billion dollar barrier for the first time. This month analysts at eMarketer changed their predictions about mobile ad spending growth, estimating the market would be roughly $6.5B by 2014, much higher than their September 2010 estimate of $2.5B by 2014. Jumptap believes even that revised estimate is conservative.
Android versus iOS: Neither can be ignored
In 2011 Android and iOS continued to battle for mobile OS share. When the dust cleared, Android had beaten iOS. The January MobileSTAT found that Android's share grew 21% (38% in December 2010 to 59% in December 2011), while iOS dropped 7% points (29% in December 2010 to 22% in December 2011). Still, iOS tripled in overall traffic on the Jumptap network of more than 95 million unique visitors, while Android more than quadrupled. The lesson to marketers, says Jumptap, is that both operating systems are growing at break-neck speeds and a cross-platform approach is essential to reach their audiences.
But, Android mobile ads and apps can be improved, the research suggests. While Android’s share is increasing, its click-through rate is dropping, compared to iOS. The latest Android 3.x has a .59% CTR, while iOS 5 has about .9%.
Apple earns that higher rate, says Jumptap’s Johar. "With every new iPhone release, he says, Apple's designers "seem to be optimizing the user experience. It's no secret that they are obsessed with design and usability. Their obsession with functionality and the user interface is paying off."
The challenge to Android is that it retains little control over the use of its ecosystem. It licenses out its operating system and device manufacturers customize it. Its open technology enables developers to create both elegant and irritating, poorly-working apps.
