The ‘Creative’ Category
It is well-chronicled that the "creative" element among the optimization triad of audience, context and creative remains the biggest wildcard when driving a campaign's performance. And for search marketers moving into display, addressing "creative" isn't just about text ads anymore as they must deal with the nuance and complexity of creating compelling graphical display ad units.
So, AdExchanger.com asked a group of industry experts from the search side of the ad ecosystem the following question:
"How do search marketers overcome the creative challenge in graphical display advertising?"
Click below or scroll down for more to read the answers:
- Kirstin Peters, Director, Performance Innovation, Performics (Publicis)
- Josh Shatkin-Margolis, CEO, Magnetic
- Alex Funk, Senior Manager for Paid Media, Covario
- Erica Barth, VP, Products & Partnerships, Resolution Media (Omnicom)
- Dax Hamman, CRO, Chango
- Frost Prioleau, CEO, Simpli.fi
- Shivan Durbal, Senior Search Strategy Director, Reprise Media (IPG)
Kirstin Peters, Director, Performance Innovation, Performics (Publicis)
"The creative elements to graphical display advertising are definitely more of an opportunity than a challenge for search marketers. Search marketers thrive in testing and optimization environments, so moving from limited character text to larger ad units in multiple sizes and formats means more components within the ad to test/optimize and add unique value.
Dynamic creative optimization tools will be key in enabling marketers to do this efficiently and without an army of designers and traffickers. Headlines, images, products, and calls-to -action can be tested individually and/or as part of a composite ad unit, giving search marketers a high potential for optimization over CTR. Dynamic creative units can also be optimized against specific audience segments, providing even more optimization opportunity.
Ultimately, marketers taking a search-like approach to biddable display (via DSPs) should be able to integrate dynamic creative optimization with audience buying and real time bid decisioning, which offers search marketers unprecedented potential to impact conversion/ROI via display."
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According to multiple sources, and the company itself has now confirmed, Collective will announce the acquisition of dynamic creative ad tech company Tumri shortly as the ad tech ecosystem M&A has continued to accelerate in recent weeks (AdMeld by Google on June 13, Performable by Hubspot and MediaMind by DG on June 16).
After competitor Teracent was acquired by Google in November of 2009 - as well as Adroit Interactive by MediaMath, Dapper by Yahoo! and ADISN by CrowdGather in 2010 - Tumri has gone through a change in management and a strategy shift which moved the company towards providing multi-variate, creative ad tools versus services.
Last September, Tumri CEO Hari Menon told AdExchanger.com (AdExchanger.com Q&A), "Going forward, we believe that value will come much more from our clients using our software and less from Tumri providing direct services to those clients. Either way, what is important is that the advertiser sees the value of our solutions and achieves their objectives."
With this announcement, Collective will have made its third acquisition of the year after buying Oggifinogi, a rich media ad tech company focused video ad creative, in February, and UK-based WebTV Enterprise, a video ad network, in March. Tumri not only brings display ad multi-variate tech in-house but additional staff familiar with the details of today's display advertising challenges and opportunities.
In general, dynamic ad creative tech has been increasingly seen as a "point solution" within a larger media buying, ad tech platform or end-to-end marketing stack which Collective appears to be building.
According to CrunchBase, Tumri had raised $31 million since its founding in 2004. Investors include Time Warner Investments and existing investors Accel Partners, Shasta Ventures and Tenaya Capital.
UPDATED at 1:30 p. ET: Collective formally announced the acquisition of Tumri. Release is below:
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Ben Kartzman is CEO of Spongecell, a creative ad technology company.
Click below or scroll for more:
AdExchanger.com: How much has the company changed - or not - in the last year?
BK: We've significantly expanded the team - 35 today. And, we're starting to look at a bigger opportunity here - not only on the product side, but also the global sales opportunity for us, too. We've got more clients, and those clients being big brands domestically.
It's interesting that you added the “how much has it changed or not.”
Part of the core mission and product hasn't changed all that much in that we've stayed focused on building a technology platform that allows ads to be very professional, curated by creatives, yet can be built in a short amount of time.
I think we've stayed true to the mission and will continue to focus on enhancing the product, but at the same time build the architecture so it can scale.
What trends have you noticed on the client-side in the past year?
People are starting to realize that display is working for them, and it's a part of the media mix that is increasing.
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Rob Lenderman is Co-Founder, CIO-CMO of BoostCTR, a crowdsourced marketplace the optimization and testing of online ad creative.
AdExchanger.com: Where did the idea come for "BoostCTR"?
RL: A few years ago I was working at a company that inherited an AdWords account for a multi-million dollar company. They had not had a single text ad changed in three years. We knew the leverage that you get from a better ad, so I started an internal contest at the company to see who could write the best ads. I was so overwhelmed with my other responsibilities that I needed the help and figured a contest was the fastest way to get help and make it fun. We had 10 people from the admin to the VP write. It was taking forever for me to get the ads, put them in the account, analyze the data, etc. so David and I had the idea of creating a tool to automate this. That was the first part of the idea.
It also turned out that I won the contest and some of the other marketing people involved actually wrote some of the worst ads, which was unexpected. The admin finished in the middle of the pack. At that point David and I realized that the best person to write is not always the one managing the account: it’s generally the best writer with the best skillset, and sometimes just someone with a fresh perspective. So the idea of creating a network of professional writers was born. When we put the network of writers together with a tool that saves the SEM manager hours a week you have BoostCTR.com.
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Jonah Goodhart and Noah Goodhart are the Co-CEO's of Moat, a creative company.
AdExchanger.com: Please share a brief background on the executive team at Moat.
JONAH GOODHART: The company was founded by myself and Noah Goodhart. We brought on Ant Taylor as part of the founding team to serve as our GM. Mike Walrath serves as our Chairman.
Noah and I got our start in digital advertising in the late 90's with a company we founded called Colonize. Colonize earned revenue through online customer acquisition. We had clients such as American Express, Paypal, and AT&T. Display advertising was our largest distribution source and we became a very large buyer of display inventory, spending millions of dollars per year. In fact at one point we were advertising so much that we actually had more traffic than Google! Our media buying technology at that time was essentially Mike Walrath and some spreadsheets. Mike was working at DoubleClick where we bought a large portion of our inventory. We worked with Mike to find efficient ways to "bid" for inventory from choice publishers.
Overall though, the buying process for display was very manual and inefficient. In late 2002, Mike decided to leave his job and launch a new company to address this problem. We talked and decided to partner - he would start Right Media and we would fund it.
I imagine that most AdExchanger readers know the Right Media story so I'll skip that part but after Yahoo! acquired the company, Noah, Mike and I decided to form WGI Group in order to make angel investments (we've made over 20 so far). When Noah and I decided to launch a new venture, we surveyed the display landscape and saw several good companies working on the science of online advertising, but saw very few focused on the creative side - the art. So, we decided to launch Moat to work on the creative opportunity. After launching the company, we went about building our team and brought on Ant Taylor. Ant had been a rising star at Right Media and had decided to leave Yahoo! after spending a few years there managing the exchange. Ant saw firsthand the importance of creative as he worked with some of the biggest CPG companies in the world and decided to join Noah and I to help build Moat.
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Seattle-area creative shop, POP, recently collaborated with Microsoft to create a Games for Windows Marketplace as the digital agency was tasked with engaging the frenetic audience of online games. Read the release.
Nick Theil, art director on this project for POP, discussed the ins and outs.
AdExchanger.com: From a creative standpoint, how do you balance between creating excitement and interest for the end user, and getting them to buy something?
NT: This often depends on what you're trying to sell. Nike focuses on the exhilaration of competition and the thrill of the victory. Apple highlights beautiful and accessible design that will make your life better. In this case, Games for Windows (GFW) uses the brand power of the game titles to engage the user and a simple, clear interface to give them the most direct access to buy. Oh and offering some great prices definitely helps.
What are you trying to accomplish with the big images on the home page?
Great products usually speak for themselves, however the brand selling the product can sometimes get in the way. In this design the Games for Windows brand stepped quietly into the background in favor of elevating the individual game titles by making them larger than life. Ultimately the GFW brand accounts for only a fraction of the overall page design. Utilizing Microsoft's "Metro" visual style (seen in the new Windows Phone 7), the content, in this case the game titles, became the design.
How much usability testing did you do with gamers? Any learnings you can share?
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In a press release, creative ad technology firm PointRoll announced new research that it says showed, "Through ad sequencing, advertisers can actively and frequently engage users on a one-to-one basis by developing an ad sequence based on a user’s previous exposure or engagement with ads. The study found that by using sequencing, advertisers are able to better engage their audiences and facilitate them through the purchase funnel." Read the release (PDF).
PointRoll vp of business development and analytics Max Mead discussed sequencing and its attributes.
AdExchanger.com: First, please define what you mean by "sequencing."
MM: Sequencing is defined as a series of distinct creatives served within a single campaign. The triggers can be time-based (e.g. the creative changes daily), view-based (e.g. the creative changes after the user has seen a creative), or engagement-based (e.g. the creative changes after the user has interacted with a given creative). The latter two methods are currently only possible in the digital realm.
We get a lot of questions about how sequencing differs from retargeting. While both have the same goal of delivering a more personalized message based on a previous event, retargeting is set up as a distinct campaign, and the event triggering the retargeting is often an activity on a marketer’s website, email or other marketing channel. Sequencing, however, can be triggered by engagement with the advertisement itself. Because we typically see 5%-8% of people interacting with our ads, this creates a sizable pool of people available for future marketing. We have started working with some advertisers on a concept that we’re calling “upper-funnel retargeting” that brings this same ad engagement trigger concept into the retargeting realm and helps with scale.
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AdExchanger.com reached out to a cross-section of executives from the digital advertising ecosystem to gauge their reaction to the acquisition of display ad technology firm Dapper by Yahoo!
Bill Wise, CEO, MediaBank
"While the acquisition is reactive to Google's acquisition of Teracent last year, it is an deal that actually makes a ton of sense to Yahoo & its shareholders, and should be accretive. More holistically, Yahoo needs to become THE UNDISPUTED LEADER in display like Google became in search, which will require a much more proactive, innovative and visionary approach to driving share shift. Thus, I look forward to more deals like this and hope the integration leads to synergies across the Yahoo properties, as well as the Right Media Exchange..."
Elizabeth Blair, CEO, Brand.net
"The Dapper acquisition shows Yahoo! is moving forward again in display advertising technology. Most people forget that Yahoo! pioneered this technology in 2006 with "Smart Ads" and led the industry. It worked beautifully and clients loved it. But previous management decided to rebuild it from scratch, shutting it down (!) in the interim and outsourcing to Tumri and Teracent. Like most display initiatives, it fell behind Search projects (Panama) and Newspaper Alliance projects (APT). The error was compounded by letting Google pick up Teracent (and cheaply). So - it's symbolic of how and how badly Yahoo! lost its way. Positively, it's a sign that Yahoo! is serious about resurrecting its history of display advertising technology innovation. Google, Microsoft and Facebook are moving fast and closing the gap quickly. I want to see more, bigger, faster Yahoo! announcements focusing on technology and talent acquisitions, and superior execution, to catalyze promising first steps."
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Dev Patel, VP, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions at Yahoo!, discussed the Dapper acquisition (read the release) and its implications.
AdExchanger.com: Can you discuss how Dapper's technology will enable SmartAds going forward?
DP: Dapper's technology will use consumer ingights from across the Yahoo! network to understand user intent and dynamically generate the creative in real time to message to the user, anywhere on the Yahoo! network.
Dapper's technology is focused on retargeting. Why is retargeting important to Yahoo!?
Dapper is not just focused on re-targeting, its primary tech function is to generate ad creatives dynamically based on user intent and pixel based information from any site is an input to understanding intent.
How will the Dapper team be integrated into Yahoo!?
Dapper's team will continue to be based in their offices in San Francisco and Israel but will soon start working with the appropriate Yahoo! teams.
How does the Dapper acquisition sync with Yahoo!'s overall product vision?
Dapper is one step further in realizing the product vision of being able to offer the right message to the right people at the right time. Dapper's technology is superior to others in the market and when combined with Yahoo!'s assets
accelerates advertiser/marketer adoption of Yahoo! Smart Ads.
Do you see this as purely a Yahoo! media offering or could this be wrapped into the Right Media Exchange as well?
Dapper will enable dynamic ads both on guaranteed and non-guaranteed inventory and in the Right Media exchange.
By John Ebbert
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Hari Menon is CEO of Tumri, Inc., a dynamic marketing solutions company for display media.
AdExchanger.com: What has happened with Tumri in the past year?
Tumri has undergone a major shift in strategy and management in the last year. Tumri has always had a powerful technology platform that has allowed us to deliver on a broad range of capabilities in the dynamic creative space. Our technology platform has been leveraged by more than 300 Dynamic Ad Campaigns – more than any other vendor in the space.
For the past year, we have been focused on two key areas: 1) making dynamic creative easy by building agency and partner self-serve capabilities that allows them to develop, manage, and analyze their campaigns directly, and 2) building high-value solutions based on our platform that speak to specific business needs.
How are you positioning Tumri today? Is it still a dynamic creative solution?
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