In April of last year, IAS partnered with Amino to ‘bridge the transparency gap in programmatic’ by delivering a solution to show advertisers the true cost of their qualified media. The solution, called Total Visibility, provides advertisers with impression-level financial insights and media quality verification.

As a result of the acquisition, Total Visibility is now solely an IAS brand and Amino Payments will be retired.

“Programmatic advertising continues to grow at a tremendous pace, and with this acquisition we’re bringing comprehensive transparency to the entire industry,” said Lisa Utzschneider, IAS CEO. “By welcoming Amino Payments to IAS, we will unleash the full potential of programmatic advertising for marketers who need their campaigns to be highly effective and cost-efficient.”

Amino Payments CEO Will Luttrell added, “As even more digital media is transacted programmatically, the need for transparency will continue to be critical for advertisers. The Amino Payments team is thrilled to join IAS, the market leader in verification, to pursue a joint vision to bring unprecedented transparency into programmatic advertising.”

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Parenting Plus, led by the Netmums sales team, creates an alliance boasting an audience of 11.9m unique users, 140m ad impressions per month, and 13m video impressions.

Advertisers will be able to activate programmatic campaigns across the online publications, targeting people across all ages and stages of parenting, including 1.2m pregnant parents, 47 per cent audience with primary school children, 67 per cent with secondary school children, and 2.3m grandparents.

“Netmums is delighted to be spearheading this alliance offering bespoke scalable audiences across the full gamut of UK family life,” said Rimi Atwal, Managing Director at Netmums. “This one-stop shop for display, video and rich media activations is further enhanced by the richness of campaign insight on offer from this alliance of the UK’s most trusted family focused publishers. We’re excited about bringing Parenting Plus to market and delivering increased performance, reducing wastage and fully leveraging our combined reach and scale.”

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The deal will enable Meitu to monetise video ad inventory sold on its BeautyPlus, Beauty Cam, and Meitu Xiu Xiu platforms via SpotX’s supply side platform in the Asia Pacific region.

“There’s great demand for beauty editing tools outside of China, with over 30 per cent of our users from abroad, we’re seeing huge potential in markets like Indonesia and Thailand in terms of user growth and programmatic monetisation,” said Cyrion Wang, Head of Programmatic at Meitu. “With SpotX powering our video ad programmatic capabilities, we’re excited to offer a premium and engaged audience to video advertisers in the region.”

Meitu’s ‘selfie enhancement’ and social sharing apps are used by 250m users around the world each month. 112m of these users come from outside of China, with Indonesia and Thailand among its top markets.

“As consumer behaviour and trend change it is crucial for advertisers to understand their changing needs. SpotX’s partnership with Meitu is an exciting opportunity for brands to reach a generation of active social media users who express themselves with selfies and photos,” said Gavin Buxton, Asia Managing Director at SpotX. “We are thrilled to be selected to help scale Meitu’s video ad monetization capabilities and support their ambitious growth plans.”

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The Trade Desk will offer access to Channel 4’s inventory programmatically, giving advertisers the means to target 23m viewers across connected TV (CTV) and other devices.

“We’re delighted to be integrated with The Trade Desk,” said David Amodio, Deputy Head of Digital and Innovation at Channel 4. “The partnership enables our advertisers an important choice when buying brand safe broadcaster video programmatically across multiple platforms.”

In order meet regulatory rules, The Trade Desk will transfer a Clearcast clock number through the bidstream, meaning the origins of each ad will be clearly identifiable.

“As advertisers recognise the data-driven potential of CTV advertising to maximise ad relevance and improve the viewer experience, this partnership with Channel 4 represents a further boost in their ability to execute,” said Patrick Morrell, Director of Partnerships EMEA at The Trade Desk. “Broadening access to Channel 4’s inventory for brands across the open internet means better targeting for brands and greater revenue for broadcasters.”

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Mobile Marketing: What are the biggest trends you see in the market at the moment?
Alex McIlvenny: There are lots. There are a lot of brands post-GDPR, and with the new California Consumer Protection Act coming in soon, now overtly aware of data, what it means, and what the consent mechanisms need to be. But the main thing that they’re looking at is how they can protect their data, but also how they can use it. So, if we split that into two perspectives, a lot of brands – particularly direct to consumer entities, so the likes of banks, insurance companies – are really wanting to make sure that they can understand more about retention, so helping to drive their propensity models. A lot of other brands are really wanting to understand how that first-party data can be utilised for eCommerce, for website traffic, how they can use that for upselling and cross-selling opportunities, how they can utilise their DMPs or their CDPs in a much more accurate manner – particularly as they’ve invested a lot of time, effort, and resources in it.

If we flip it, from a publisher perspective, they’re the ones that have a lot of cookie-based data but a lot of them also have a lot of the login data and a lot of loyal customers from a newsletter perspective. For them, understanding more about their users, where they’re spending their time, what their wider attributes are, so they can utilise that information to really drive engagement and retention with their users and also make sure that any customisable website context that they’re going to be pushing is as relevant as possible for them.

If we were to take a final jump with agencies, a lot of them are really keen to make sure that their campaigns are reaching the right audience, so data is extremely important for them to utilise as best as possible. But, also, more-and-more as they’re moving into these consultancy-led roles, there are getting more involved with brands on first- and second-party data and really starting to understand the ecosystem as to where DMPs are getting in and how that data can be utilised from an agency perspective – be it for targeting, be it analytics and business intelligence, or be it just activation.

MM: Taking into account those trends, what is the ad tech space looking like for 2020?
AM: Next year, for some people, is looking quite scary. We’ve seen in the press this year that the cookie is dying and it’s no longer a currency to be able to understand what people are doing online. A big trend we’re likely to see is adoption of more universal identity graphs. I think there will be a lot more alliances between publishers that have some sort of conformances as to the way they’re addressing data. Publishers that have a lot of first-party data will be utilising that within DMP environments. We’re seeing the likes of Lotame and Permutive really driving maximum value for that as well. We’ll likely see Google coming up with other identity strategies themselves. Potentially, even Apple. Obviously, a lot of their engineering work happens behind closed doors, but I imagine there are a lot of exciting things on the horizon there as well.

A key thing, when looking at that first-party data, is ensuring that publishers still have addressable audiences, making sure that within the programmatic ecosystem people are buying the right inventory at the right price.

From a marketer’s perspective, I imagine we’ll see more data scientists and more technology-led teams being involved with marketing executions, particularly when it comes to privacy compliance because of the level of consent that is now required for sharing first-party data and I imagine there will be a lot of ongoing conversations about legal, ethical use of the first-party data and the iterations it can be used in as well. So, from an advertising perspective, there will be more people getting involved in marketing. Those brands will be investing more heavily as well in a lot of their DMP infrastructure and making the most of the data they can share on that. And agencies will be forced to adapt and use a data-first approach to what they’re doing, just given that a lot of their data lakes can still be quite cookie-centric. But a lot of them are picking up quite quickly and acquiring data businesses as we’ve seen from the likes of IPG, Publicis, Dentsu with all the brands they’ve invested in.

A final point on that is connected TVs and how that, from a data perspective, is going to be integrated within the ecosystem. To be able to create linkage to data graphs is absolutely going to be a key thing for people to discuss next year.

MM: You’ve touched on the idea of the cookie-less web. What does that mean for advertisers and what can they do about it?
AM: We know that cookie data is becoming less and less. The data that we can store against each one of those cookies, in terms of where people are going, upstream or downstream, is becoming extremely limited. So, a lot of publishers – especially those with first-party data – are in quite a good position because they’ll be able to utilise that linked to DMPs or other third-party identity graphs to create an addressable audience from a first-party perspective.

Those that don’t have as much reliability from cookies – those that still get a lot of upstream or downstream traffic from Facebook, for example –there’s a big opportunity for them, but a key thing is really addressing where that data is stored and how they’re collecting consent. So, publishers that are still very reliant on cookies will be addressing much more detailed consent mechanisms, where we’ll not only be looking at acceptable cookies, we’ll actually be going line-by-line of different use cases, of different data partners that may be tracking or utilising information on particular web pages and making sure the explicit consent is there. I also think you’ll see a lot of those publishers working much more closely with DMPs to ensure that they have a first-party data strategy to make sure they aren’t losing their addressable audience.

MM: You’ve also mentioned privacy concerns. Are there growing privacy concerns for brands? And what can brands do about it?
AM: Consumers are much savvier now when it comes to their data footprint and what value it holds, particularly when it comes to tracking people through an entire product lifecycle or user journey, regardless where that information comes from – whether it’s consented or not. There’s definitely a lot more users that are more inclined now to really want to understand about what digital footprint they’re leaving. Where brands should be concerned, it’s those that don’t have those direct-to-consumer relationships. So, the bigger brands that rely on eCommerce stores or wider retail stores to be able to sell their products. I think it’s really key for them to make sure they’re addressing things now – and, by ‘now’, I mean by the end of Q1 – and really making sure that their levels of consent is either addressed by reconsent or the renewed customer acquisition etc., that they’re using every opportunity that’s handed to them to collect that data as well.

Brands, themselves, are in a better position than some others. Those that own the relationship with the customers are fine – they have that data, they would’ve already invested a lot in DMPs and CDPs. For those that don’t necessarily have a lot of first-party data and really rely on second- and third-party, they need to be working hard with their privacy teams, their legal teams, their ethical teams. Particularly with the ICO hanging over our heads with decision making, they really need to make sure that they’re watertight with the legal teams, with the ethical teams, to make sure any data they are using has the full consent, not just through legitimate interest but through individual line items that the consumer has permitted them to use.

MM: We’ve spoken a lot about first-party data. What is the importance of having first-party data strategies?
AM: First-party consented data is really important to anyone in the ecosystem – be it for us, be it for our competitors, be it for publishers or brands. Those that have the ability to ascertain consent directly have a lot more future-proofing potential because you can utilise emails, phone numbers, generally more persistent identifiers to understand more about those customers as well. Those that are working hard now to build out their first-party databases are those that are going to win short-, mid-, and long-term off the back of that. So, it’s super important they have that because it simply allows them to have a much easier way to talk to their customers but also understand what they’re doing as well.

MM: Are there any examples of this?
AM: If we were to look at a big bank we’re working with – unfortunately, we can’t name them – they had quite an ongoing problem with retention. We’re constantly bombarded as consumers with zero per cent offers or ‘move your bank account here and we’ll reward you for that’. This particular bank came to us to really address retention and to make sure they were increasing the value of their customers, but also increasing the numbers of customers that they have.

What we were able to do in that particular instance was onboard their first-party data. We were able to append attributes to that, so we could look at patterns in terms of basic demographic statistics. We were able to append behavioural segments based on what apps customers were using, what websites they were frequenting, what their purchasing intents were. In turn, they were able to feed that data into their propensity models to be able to understand who their customers were, where they were spending their time, what their triggers were, what their online behaviour was. And, within their matrixes of the low churn customers of the highest value to them, we were able to feed directly into analytics metrics and help them improve retention rate by up to 15 per cent. One they’re not losing customers and, two, they’re making sure they can make more money out of those customers as well. It  also means they can understand more about that data so they can align better for acquisition strategies moving forward because they know much more about their customers and who they are, so it will provide much greater efficiency in their media buying and hopefully less wastage and driving down the performance costs of that as well.”

MM: Thanks Alex, any final thoughts?
AM: For marketers, make sure you’re really closely aligned with your tech teams and your legal teams to understand all the permissible uses for your first-, second-, and third-party data in any instance.

From a publisher perspective, it’s really key they invest in infrastructure now to be able to ascertain as much first-party data as possible. Or utilise a technology that can provide them with assistance in knowing more about their customers to be able to then create linkage across the digital ecosystem.

And, for agencies, it’s really about making sure that everything you’re pushing forward – particularly in media planning and activation – has a data-led or audience-first strategy to make that the media buying is efficient as possible, especially as we’re now moving into a much more transparent world and will continue to do so. Having everything as data-first is really key but making sure that the legals, the consents, the privacy, and the ethics are all addressed before you’re utilising that data.

Zeotap was one of the sponsors at our recent Programmatic Lunch event. It is the world’s first identity resolution and data provider. With a presence in 16 global markets, it helps brands to understand more about their first-party data to drive better analytics, better customer understanding, to drive better return on investment from people-based marketing.

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Check out more coverage surrounding our Programmatic Lunch event and how the industry is evolving here.

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The holidays are historically the busiest shopping time of the year, with spending predicted to be over £2bn in the UK in 2019. By the year 2021, worldwide retail ecommerce sales will reach $4.5 trillion. In the UK, it was predicted shoppers would spend £21 more (up to £224) than in 2018, with transactions predominantly online (77 per cent). What does this say about the consumer market? A couple of obvious things – people are spending (a lot), and people want the easiest path to purchase.

During this time of year, shoppers are bombarded with ads for products. You have Black Friday sales, the approaching Christmas holiday, and New Year’s deals. How do you differentiate yourself to get a customer’s attention? Programmatic isn’t evolving fast enough: but messaging apps are.

Simplify the experience

The data shows that shoppers are moving their transactions online. It’s no secret that they want a seamless experience that allows them to avoid the chaos of the stores, find what they’re looking for, and handle their purchases quickly and efficiently. And this transition online goes one-step further – consumers want to be able to make their purchases wherever they are, whenever they want. 66 per cent of adults feel that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good experience online. (Forrester, 2018) This means the transactions need to be done easily on mobile. Research shows that by 2021 almost three-quarters of all global retail commerce is expected to be transacted on mobile devices.

This is where messaging apps strengths come into play. Messaging allows a brand to reach the customer in the palm of their hand. Starting a conversation with your customers allows personalisation, the ability to build trust, and encourages consumers to take a promotion and see it through to a transaction.

What works

Messaging is a much better way to have a one-to-one conversation than a generic ad. Providing a space for consumers to interact directly with your brand removes all of the noise found on social media and gives the brand a chance to respond immediately. By sending promotions, reminders, or updates directly to your customers, you are breaking through the clutter of the billboard of ads found on every other platform.

From promotion to transaction

On Viber, brands have several ways to make the process easier for a potential consumer to become a buying customer. Through the integrated shopping keyboard, consumers can find what they’re looking for without ever leaving the chat screen. Through business messages, brands can share promotions with users who already have a relationship with the brand. You can open up a two-way conversation for customer support and elevate a customer’s relationship with your brand. Platforms, like Viber, help marketers answer specific needs around the Christmas chaos with customised and personalised solutions and at the time of year when people connect the most.

Its critical for brands to differentiate themselves and gain a competitive edge in a busy holiday season. Consider going beyond programmatic and leveraging messaging applications to provide an optimized customer experience.

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