The True Cost Of Domain Spoofing; Customer Referrals Beat All

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Domain Spoofing <3 Fraud

Advertisers spend about $1.3 million a month buying inventory they incorrectly suppose will run on the Financial Times, Digiday reports. Although the subscription-focused publisher only sells on Google AdX and TrustX, it found FT.com ads on 15 different exchanges. As usual, video drew the most bad apples. Some exchanges offered up a month’s worth of video inventory in just one day – and FT doesn’t even sell video programmatically. The fraud issue has hurt Financial Times’ reputation with clients, some of whom have reached out in the past about poor performance on spoofed inventory. Read more.

Measuring Trust

Customer experience barometers like the Net Promoter score aren’t new, but their entry into paid media plans and advertising are far more novel. “The thing we’re measuring now at the end of every transaction is, ‘Would that customer recommend our brand to someone else?’” Elizabeth Rutledge, Amex’s EVP of global advertising and brand management, said during an Advertising Week panel on building brand trust. Even the best ad can’t hold a candle to a brand referral from a friend or family member – or a positive experience with Amex itself. “We’re not just protecting the security of the transaction, but security around identity,” Rutledge said. “Consumer expectations are higher than ever. Experience and trust will be what drives our bottom line.”

Creative, Meet Data

The relationship between creative agencies and media agencies is “primed for disruption,” said Amy Avery, chief intelligence officer at Droga5, onstage at Advertising Week in New York. They should operate “hand in hand,” said Jessica Spaulding, head of marketing strategy and creative at PepsiCo. “They have to drive each other and optimize each other along the way – and it’s important that at the very beginning, before the brief, that relationship is super-tight.” Although the lines of communication are opening up, the data team isn’t always brought into the brief process early enough. “People tended to assume that [as a data person] I didn’t need to be involved until the work was done – and then I’d measure it,” Avery said. “Part of it is learning to speak each other’s language and bringing data and insights to the front of the process to inform the brief up front.”

A Sadoun Sit Down

Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun is positioning the French holding company as a vehicle that can enable total business transformation. “You can’t say to a client that ‘we’re going to reinvent your omnichannel strategy, and we’re going to build a consumer-based approach,’ if you don’t work with them in reinventing their own model,” he told Ad Age. Sadoun argues that his holdco peers (WPP, Omnicom and IPG) can execute on the marketing side, whereas consultancies like Accenture enable digital transformation – but only Publicis can link both. More.

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