YouTube Announces 2018’s Top TrueView For Action Ads

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Grammarly, Monday.com and League of Legends made YouTube’s top 10 True View for Action ads in 2018. The leaderboard showcases the ads with the best performance determined by an algorithm factoring total reach, clicks and engagements. The top ten videos range from a proofreading app to a mattress company. All the ads have one thing in common, they break down and explain their product clearly.

TrueView is YouTube’s opt-in ads—allowing users to continue watching if they wish, and brands will only pay per opted-in view. Viewers can click on elements to take direct action in TrueView ads and there is a link on the bottom left-hand corner inside the video and another link in the right column outside the ad.

Grammarly’s “Enhance your writing” video shows different people talking about how much Grammarly helps their daily life. In the first few seconds a woman says, “if you write anything on your computer, you need to get Grammarly.” Viewers can download it for free, the text “download for free” remains on the screen the entire video.

In project management tool Monday.com’s ad, the compaby explains “What using monday.com feels like.”

League of Legends’ad “What is League of Legends? Told by Nevercake” shows main character Nevercake explaining the game with a quirky, unique humor. “If you had friends they would already be playing” the character says.

Top 10 TrueView for Action leaderboard:

  1. Grammarly “Enhance your writing” – 301,742,418 views
  2. Monday.com “What using Monday.com feels like” – 50,192,818 views
  3. League of Legends “What is League of Legends? Told by Nevercake” – 23,367,136 views
  4. Nectar Sleep “Make America sleep again” – 11,943,412 views
  5. World of Warships “Why haven’t played World of Warships yet?”- 44,615,138 views
  6. Honey “Never search for a coupon code again – 25,454,890 views
  7. Wix “Create a professional portfolio website, Jay Pharoah” – 69,354,686 views
  8. Netflix “The Kissing Booth” – 4,560,290 views
  9. GlassesUSA “You Need New Glasses” – 35,432,509 views
  10. Udemy “Learn drawing on Udemy” – 79,216,770 views

In October, the YouTube announced the changing criteria for the ads. They now count an engagement whenever a user clicks or watches 10 seconds of a TrueView for Action ad.  A conversion is counted by default when a user takes action with an ad within 3 days of an engagement.

Lyft Launches L-Less OOH Campaign; Aims To Help New Yorkers During L Train Closure

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Lyft is jumping in to help out Brooklyn train riders. In April, the L Train is shutting down for 15 months. The MTA will suspend service between Bedford Avenue and 14th Street/Eight Avenue. The shutdown will cause a major disruption for many NYC residents—about 400,000 of them.

Lyft launched an OOH campaign called “Something’s Missing,”  that drops the letter L from its copy and logo in solidarity with those affected. Examples like “ong ive Brook yn” have already started to pop-up around New York. The big pink billboards and transit wraps direct locals to yftpan.com to explain all the travel remedies the company has created.

Lyft will match shared ride passengers heading in the same direction for a low fare letting drivers use the carpool lane, there will be at least 3 passengers. There will also be more fixed pickup spots in congested areas for more efficient pickups.

Cars won’t be the only method of transportation. The ride-sharing company partnered with New York City to acquire Citi Bike earlier this year. It will triple the size of its bikeshare service to 40,000 during the shutdown. 

https://twitter.com/MusaTariq/status/1070731109837680640

Out-of-home has seen a bit of a resurgence with similar messaging from other brands. Last year, Spotify launched “2018 Goals”for the holidays. It used its data (listener habits from 2017 combined with current events) to conceive some funny sayings such as “Eat vegan brisket with the person who made a playlist called ‘Leftist Elitist Snowflake BBQ.’”

For the Lyft campaign, the brand is also cutting the price of its all-access plan to $169—to get 30 rides for 30 days. A big discount from its usual price of $299.

New Yorkers are currently getting a taste of the closure, there’s been a few weekend shutdowns this year.  Lyft encourages users to share their commuting solutions through the site or social media with the hashtag #RideOnBrooklyn.

This campaign launched before another big announcement.

On Thursday, Lyft beat rival Uber in filing for an IPO giving the company a “first-mover advantage.” It was valued at $15 billion in a private fundraising round.

The filing is expected to become publicly available in early 2019. It will be an assessment on how much investors want tech companies and the ridesharing business.

Gaining Actionable Understanding of Your Brand’s Personality

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By J. Galen Buckwalter, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Advisor, Soulmates.AI and CEO of psyML.co

Everyone responsible for a brand knows it has a personality, but turning that knowledge into action is not easy. Personality in people can be tracked in ways that help you leverage what you discover, but brands have not had the same metrics available to them. That has finally changed with research that led to the first true personality survey for brands, providing them with a dimensional view of their companies’ goals and values.

This was long in the works. For the first time in early 2004, psychologists settled on a universal definition of the dimensions of human personality. The effort to define traits began at least as far back as when Greek philosopher Hippocrates used the four bodily fluids to guide his thinking on personality. More empirically valid efforts began in earnest during WWI, when it became painfully evident that not everyone could be exposed to the carnage of war and return home with the same cognitive and emotional profiles they had when they left. While theories and assessments abounded, it wasn’t until the end of the 20th century that we started to see a consensus emerge. With the HEXACO personality inventory and the power of a machine learning technique called Natural Language Processing (NLP), it is finally possible to analyze written language at scale to get the most direct expression of one’s personality.

The American Psychological Association defines personality as something like the characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that make an individual unique. Slow down and think through what that sentence means, this explains that personality encompasses how we think, feel and behave. What HEXACO provides is understanding on a level that allows us to measure the very essence of what makes us unique. After 10 years of research using HEXACO, it has proven useful in predicting outcomes in leadership ability, job preference and satisfaction, political attitudes, fidelity in relationships, Machiavellianism, academic performance and credit risk. The best-known example of using personality measurement for this purpose is eHarmony, a company that matched single people based on profiles observed among successfully married couples.

The success of eHarmony was a key factor in leading the Soulmates.AI group to explore situations where this logic can be applied to other relationships, particularly those related to marketing. To consider how to understand the relationship between individuals and companies, we needed to understand how to measure the traits of companies.

We are not considering, as the Supreme Court had to do recently if corporations are people. But companies and brands, in general, must adopt personality characteristics if they hope to distinguish themselves as unique from other brands and stay relevant in an era when shopping on Amazon can make brands invisible to consumers.

Consumers interact with brands as they do with people; they develop feelings, stereotypes, even a sense of loyalty or distrust. Consumers make decisions based on these feelings, behaviors, and emotions. So, if we engage with brands in the same way we do with people, the logical conclusion is that we should be able to measure and research brands along the same dimensions of personality found in people. While it is one thing to argue that brands have a personality, it’s an entirely different pursuit to measure this in a way that allows us to match social media creators to brands for collaboration that feels authentic. With this hypothesis, Soulmate.AI and my company, psyML, began work to show we could capture brand personalities with a survey tool and use natural language processing to analyze social media content produced by both brands and social media creators. We began with 122 items and with three iterative factor analyses along with several methods of estimating reliability and we ended up with the first psychometrically valid HEXACO assessment of brand personality. Our hypothesis was shown to be strong and results promising.

In exploring a hypothesis, one needs to explore what’s been done elsewhere, hoping to find indications to suggest you aren’t tilting at windmills. Applying HEXACO to brands threaded that needle. As we worked on our research, three University of Belgrade researchers not only had the same idea, they recently published a study demonstrating the presence of a HEXACO-like structure when analyzing 120 brands. The study showed that HEXACO traits predicted substantial amounts of variance in such aspects of consumer-brand relationships as attitude toward the brand, perceived quality of the brand and brand loyalty. These results support findings by the Soulmates.AI team that using HEXACO as a means of measuring and researching brands is on an appropriate path.

The first use of the Brand Personality Survey (BPS) is two-fold. The BPS is being used to provide companies with an in-depth understanding of their current brand personality as recorded by a brand expert. This information is then used to algorithmically match the brand with social media creators based on the brand’s personality. This one-of-a-kind analytic and matching system is available as a beta at Soulmates.AI to enhance existing social media creator matching platforms.

The BPS on its own can be used to truly understand how concepts most important to your company can be used to properly plan the message you send to consumers, the content you create for them and ultimately, the products and services you offer to consumers. By reviewing the results of the BPS, you can gain greater clarity into how you are appearing to your consumers. Importantly, BPS can be matched with NLP analysis of your brand’s social profiles to ensure that your content is accurately portraying the persona you want to project.

Through deep analysis by both psychometricians on our team and branding experts with decades of experience in the field, the report from the BPS effectively explains how brands can act based on the insight provided by their HEXACO scores.

 

Digital Data Assets Surpass Traditional Data For First Time, IAB Report Says

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According to IAB’s State of Data 2018 report, for the first time in history marketers are investing more in digital data assets than traditional “terrestrial” data. Digital assets being those typically taken from consumers’ anonymous website behavior, with traditional being “direct mail and other offline communications.”

The research for the report was gathered by Winterberry Group and is based on several in-depth interviews with senior-level marketers in addition to aggregation of publicly available financial information.

In 2018, third-party digital data will account for $3.67 billion—up 36.9 percent from last year—compared to the $3.62 billion invested in terrestrial/PII assets. This expected increase is due to a rise in programmatic advertising. It also comes despite increased scrutiny on the use of consumer data.

“This year, as we build upon that first effort to provide the first historical view of domestic data expenditures and the dynamics undergirding them, we have another conclusion to make: data expenditures aren’t just big- they’re growing at a more rapid pace than the media channels with which they’re typically associated,” said Jonathan Margulies, managing director of Winterberry Group.

The report also found U.S. companies are accelerating their spending on third-party, audience data for advertising and marketing efforts.

This year, companies are expected to spend about $19.2 billion on U.S. audience data acquisition ($12 billion) and data activation solutions ($6.1 billion)—a 17.5 percent increase from 2017.

The growing investment in third-party audience data comes from the challenge marketers face establishing an understanding of who their individual customers and prospects are as they go over various touchpoints such as transactional, digital, traditional and promotional.

“Programmatic advertising has taken a central role in the marketing landscape and this study shows how increasingly vital third-party data has become as a result,” said Orchid Richardson, vice president and managing director, IAB.

“Third-party data provides insights—from geolocation to interests and more—that can help brands deliver highly personalized messages to consumers and expand audience.”

Investing in solutions to adequately combine the functionality of numerous established tools (CRM databases and DMPs) with a long-term view of creating a central view of prospect and customer audiences is one of the driving points in audience data activation solutions.

New regulations further impacted the growth within data management, processing and integration.

This year, GDPR changed the dynamic of third-party audience data forcing providers, who didn’t track the origin or supply chain of their audience, to exit or refine their approach to achieve agreement.

The passage of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), to take effect in 2020, will most likely have a similar impact as GDPR—marketers and data providers will look to anticipate any effects.

In 2019, experts believe the industry will get closer to solving attribution, get new transparency standards and there will be increased spending on data management and governance.

 

 

Report: Most Consumers View AR Ads Favorably, Share With Friends

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Augmented reality (AR) is a bustling new landscape for audience engagement and a majority of users actually enjoy advertising on the platform. According to SuperData’s new mobile augmented reality (AR) report, brands can no longer ignore this demographic, but not all AR users are the same.

SuperData estimates the AR market to be over one billion users. These figures were calculated using information from proprietary data sharing partnerships, consumer studies, web and search analytics, publicly announced revenue and sales figures and information from trusted industry sources, SuperData explained.

Two in three AR users view augmented reality ads at least once per month, the report suggests, and 74 percent of those that see ads share them with their social media followers. It should come as no surprise, then that the most popular type of AR mobile app is social media at 84 percent, with companies like Snapchat and Instagram’s wide array of filters and camera effects.

When it comes to AR advertising, most users in SuperData’s study consider the format a good thing, perhaps because of the novelty—56 percent of users see them as a creative use of technology.

That’s good news for Shazam, which launched its AR marketing tools last March. Since then, the tech has been used to promote a number of brands from whisky brand Glenlivet and grocery chain Asda to Michael Jackon’s album “Scream” and Netflix’s Stranger Things.

Ecommerce brands like Amazon and furniture retailer Wayfair are also engaging users with AR formats. The standard Wayfair app lets users apply “stickers” to their spaces—2D silhouettes of furniture items that users can zoom in and out on to imagine how they’d fit into their spaces.

According to SuperData, the largest AR demographic is women between the ages of 18 and 34. To reach this segment, the study recommends using AR social features. In-game advertising, on the other hand, would likely be more effective for reaching men of the same age.

Digi-Capital forecasts that AR (mobile AR, smartglasses) could approach three and a half billion installed base and $85 billion to $90 billion revenue within five years. Consumers spent $3.4 billion last year on augmented, mixed and virtual reality in 2017, according to SuperData.

Burger King Just Used Geofencing As A Defensive Marketing Tactic

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Burger King is offering Whopper sandwiches for a penny, but consumers have to get near a McDonald’s to unlock the deal. This unusual offer leverages the disparity between the number of Burger King versus McDonald’s locations, thus turning a hindrance into a tactical advantage.

Beginning on Tuesday, hungry consumers can open the newly revamped Burger King app and venture within 600 feet of a McDonald’s location. Doing so will trigger a deal within a geofence, allowing them to order a Whopper for one penny. Consumers are then directed to the nearest Burger King location for pick up. The promotion, dubbed #WhopperDetour, will run for a limited time through December 12.

Geofencing uses GPS or RFID technology to map out an area of choice, allowing brands to trigger an event once a user enters. HBO used RFID wristbands to send shareable Game of Thrones content to visitors at San Diego Comic-Con last year, for example. Aside from the occasional coupon, the technology is still finding its marketing footing. Burger King is offering a coupon, sure, but using geofencing around a competitor’s location is definitely a unique way of utilizing the tech.

The quick-witted quick service restaurant “announced” the promotion with a cryptic tweet that quickly earned over 15,000 likes and 4,600 retweets. An hour later, Burger King launched the promotion with the slogan, “The Whopper Detour: Only ‘at’ McDonald’s.”

https://twitter.com/BurgerKing/status/1069969574597058560

Sending your customers to your biggest rival sounds counter-intuitive, but consider the fact that Burger King has around 6,600 locations in the US compared to McDonald’s’ 14,000+. According to parent company Restaurant Brands International (RBI), Burger King experienced growth of seven percent in Q3, with new restaurants popping up at just over six percent.

The promotion makes it easier to unlock the deal than sending them directly to Burger King, while allowing consumers to join in the brand’s competitiveness.

When it comes to Burger King marketing, their motto seems to be, “it’s so crazy that it just might work!” It often does.

Just look at the series of gibberish tweets the restaurant sent last week. A series of random characters managed to go viral—something even the most carefully planned campaigns often fail to achieve—before Burger King revealed the return of its Cini Minis.

RBI recently unveiled a new, modern “Burger King of Tomorrow” restaurant image with plans to roll out across the US. Part of the connected experience includes mobile ordering.

IAB Opens Beta Testing For Mobile Version Of Ads.txt Anti-Fraud Tool

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The IAB Technology Laboratory has released app-ads.txt, a mobile extension of its fraud prevention tool, for beta testing and commentary.

App-ads.txt applies the original ads.txt functionality to mobile and OTT video apps. The tool works in a similar fashion, in that an app developer adds the app-ads.txt file to their website, creating a centralized online resource that lists companies authorized to sell on their behalf. This allows marketers to verify that the app developer is a trusted seller. In addition, marketers will be able to purchase advertising with the confidence that they are not being scammed by impersonators.

IAB says that the app-ads.txt beta can be implemented now and then app stores can adopt a standardized way of making the information available. Minimal changes are expected, the company added. The tool will be available for public beta testing and comments through February 4.

It is estimated that marketers lose around $7.2 billion per year to ad fraud, piracy and malware. Ads.txt was created by the Interactive Advertising Bureau Tech Lab’s combat inventory sales fraud. Earlier this year, The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) added a requirement that all publishers implement the ads.txt standard if they want to become TAG Certified Against Ad Fraud.

The new mobile version would extend the tool to the mobile economy, which would help solve multiple problems, according to Google.

“Expanding ads.txt to mobile app inventory is a great move forward for the industry,” said Per Bjorke, senior product manager of Google Ad Traffic Quality in a statement. “It promises to increase transparency in the apps ecosystem, adds a new layer of protection for advertisers, and helps ad dollars flow to the right developers.”

Some IAB members are already implementing the tool and planning internal policies around it. Ad seller Centro, for example, will begin enforcing the app-ads.txt specification in the first quarter of 2019. Centro’s director of RTB platform operations said their platform will bid only on supply paths authorized by participating publishers, calling app-ads.txt an “essential step in eliminating the scourge of fraud from the advertising industry.”

Rakuten Marketing called the app-ads.txt “another step in the right direction to reduce counterfeit app inventory and the reach of bad actors.”

The new tool will also support other supply chain safety initiatives, such as ads.cert. Beta testing is open to anyone interested and access can be requested by emailing openmedia@iabtechlab.com.

Niantic Partners With UNWTO To Encourage Sustainable Tourism

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Niantic has partnered with the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) to promote responsible tourism with augmented reality. The partnership will include “new adventures” inside Niantic’s popular games and a campaign around playing safely.

UNWTO will work together with Niantic to create a “variety” of ways to combine tourism and AR technology using Niantic’s mobile games. According to Niantic, each activation will be built to “inspire and support exploration, build awareness around UNWTO’s Travel.Enjoy.Respect campaign, and promote good practices to play games safely and responsibly.”

Niantic launched augmented reality adventure game Ingress in 2012, but it wasn’t until Pokémon GO in 2016 when the developer achieved worldwide fame. The overnight sensation paved the way for augmented reality adoption, development and advancements across the mobile ecosystem. The AR gaming market is estimated to reach $284.93 billion by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 152.7 percent between 2017-2023, according to Reuters.

Now, Niantic wants to positively impact the tourism and environmental ecosystem through its partnership with UNTWO. For the past several months, the brand has worked with UNWTO to encourage global tourism and worldwide civic engagement in a fun, friendly, and novel way for travelers.

Although the partnership announcement doesn’t indicate which games will receive new content, Pokémon GO is a safe bet, as is the upcoming AR Harry Potter title.

UNTWO launched its Travel.Enjoy.Respect program in August. Sustainable tourism is the practice of enjoying a new place without negatively impacting the local culture or damaging the environment. This term is often interchanged with “responsible tourism.”

As the world becomes more connected, tourist spots are feeling the pressure to attract new guests without sacrificing the environment around them. Urging tourists to be respectful doesn’t have to be a negative experience, however. In fact, games like Pokémon GO already encourage players to explore new places, so the battle is partly won, so to speak.

Other organizations are getting creative with how they promote responsible tourism. Last year, the Palau Legacy Project earned two Grand Prix Lions for its sustainable tourism campaign, “Palau Pledge.” The campaign required visitors to sign a promise that they will respect the island, which quickly spread to other mediums and gained worldwide acclaim.

Lyft, Uber Announce Competing Loyalty Programs As Both Companies Prepare For IPOs

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Uber and Lyft announced their customer reward programs last week—two days apart. The competition for consumers preference continues, while both ridesharing giants also plan to go public next year.

On November 12, Lyft disclosed whenever a customer uses their app they get points for every dollar they spend. If a customer earns enough points, they can unlock rewards like an upgrade to Lyft Lux or savings on future rides. It’s expected to begin next month.

Uber’s program already kicked-off in nine cities. The loyalty program is similar in concept to Lyft. However, Uber’s program gives one point for every dollar spent on Uber Pool rides and Uber Eats orders. It also gives two points for ordering an UberX, UberXL, Select, or WAV ride, and three points for ordering Black and Black SUV rides.

There are four membership levels: Blue, Gold, Platinum and Diamond. The higher the rank, the better the perks.

This announcement came shortly after with Uber announced its Q3 earnings report. In self-reported financials, the company lost just over $1 billion due to investment and business diversification inbikes, scooters and its food delivery service. However, revenue rose 38% from the same quarter last year. Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s CEO has claimed that in 10 years, only 50% of the company’s business will be from ridesharing.

As Uber heads into 2019 for its anticipated IPO, bankers estimate it is worth up to $120 billion, doubling from its last valuation of $62 billion. Lyft recently got JPMorgan Chase to lead its own public offering in hopes that it will set its market capitalization to over $15 billion.

Uber does not self-report market share data, and thus it is imperfect, but, according to the analytics platform Second Measure, in March Uber held 73% of the market for ridesharing. Lyft disclosed in May that it currently holds 35% of the market.

According to a Certify SpendSmart report, Uber was the most expensed vendor in Q3. They consisted of 11 percent of over 10 million T&E transactions the report processed for Q3. Lyft joined them on the top 10 list ranking sixth with 3 percent of transactions.

Report: Two-Thirds Of The World’s Digital Ad Trading Will Be Programmatic Next Year

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Programmatic ad value will reach $84.9 billion in 2019, according to new forecasts by Zenith. Growing at an average rate of 21 percent a year, the company says it won’t be long before the global display market is fully programmatic.

Zenith has released its Programmatic Marketing Forecasts that examine the state of ad trading across the world. Two-thirds (67 percent) of the world’s digital display advertising will be traded programmatically by 2019, the company predicts, compared to 59 percent in 2017.

Canada, the US and the UK are hosts to the most advanced programmatic trading, Zenith observed. A majority of digital display advertising will be traded programmatically in these countries in 2019 at 81 percent, 78 percent and 77 percent, respectively.

The US has the largest programmatic market, accounting for 57 percent of the global total and valued at $32.6 billion. China is a distant second at $5.3 billion and accounts for 29 percent of programmatic digital display advertising worldwide.

This is a bit less than forecasts from eMarketer, which places total programmatic ad spend around $46 billion in the US this year. Emarketer also estimates that 82.5, not 78 percent, of digital ads in the US are purchased through automatic channels.

Programmatic ad spending is common among digital channels but predicted to reach $5.6 billion this year across television, radio, cinema outdoor in the US. This will represent six percent of the total ad expenditure but is expected to rise to $13 billion in 2019.

“We will be keeping a close eye on developments in the US as a guide to likely developments in the rest of the world,” noted Jonathan Barnard, Zenith’s head of forecasting and director of global intelligence.

Roku launched its Audience Marketplace in June, which quickly attracted media giants like Fox, Turner and Viacom. During the company’s Q2 earnings call, Roku CFO Steve Louden said that data-driven selling and programmatic are the future of TV, both OTT and traditional.

Native programmatic ad buying is helping to drive growth, but brands are still concerned about brand safety, i.e. where those ads appear. For this reason, many brands are taking programmatic in-house.

According to recent data by the IAB Data Center of Excellence, these reasons vary beyond safety. Forty-four percent of respondents hoped to improve ROI tracking and 34 percent wanting better cost efficiency. Additionally, 44 percent predicted both better audience targeting and more effective campaigns as rewards for bringing programmatic in-house.