In an interview with BIA/Kelsey Managing Director Rick Ducey, John McIntyre, Founder & CEO, Sightly said: “Programmatic buying, in its most simple form, is the automated real-time bidding and purchasing of digital advertising inventory.”

During a programmatic advertising session here at ad:tech San Francisco, panelists gave their own definitions:

“Programmatic is an evolution of media automation”

“Programmatic means relevance: the right message in front of the right audience at the right time”

“Programmatic means control over ad placement, based on [your company’s] unique goals and customer information”

Going deeper, here are some of the key points made by panelists:

— Agencies are a bit behind the curve in moving to programmatic [not surprising, considering it often costs them media commission dollars]. But advertisers can start buying programmatically using a DSP [Demand Side Platform].

— Programmatic is a TOOL; it isn’t a solution. It requires a robust understanding of customer segments, customer interaction points with the business, and messaging — in fact, using programmatic advertising successfully requires an even deeper understanding of these things.

–Although “viewability” may be a key metric in evaluating programmatic advertising, it’s a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a successful impact on the consumer. It’s about action, not impressions.

— Programmatic will become a primary sales channel for ALL digital media — although this may take several years. Advertisers will be buying all their media (particularly digital media) this way: algorithmically, and real-time.

So — is there poetry in programmatic for the SMB advertiser? Yes — although as with other leading edge technologies, SMBs are a few years behind nationals and brands in adopting this tool set.

But it should be clear to companies that provide advertising and marketing services to SMBs that they’ll need to master programmatic advertising (and the robust data/analytic platform upon which it rests) on behalf of their SMB customers. Sooner rather than later.

The post Dispatch from the ad:tech Trenches: Defining ‘Programmatic’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

What is “programmatic” advertising? It depends on whom you ask.

In an interview with BIA/Kelsey Managing Director Rick Ducey, John McIntyre, Founder & CEO, Sightly said: “Programmatic buying, in its most simple form, is the automated real-time bidding and purchasing of digital advertising inventory.”

During a programmatic advertising session here at ad:tech San Francisco, panelists gave their own definitions:

“Programmatic is an evolution of media automation”

“Programmatic means relevance: the right message in front of the right audience at the right time”

“Programmatic means control over ad placement, based on [your company’s] unique goals and customer information”

Going deeper, here are some of the key points made by panelists:

— Agencies are a bit behind the curve in moving to programmatic [not surprising, considering it often costs them media commission dollars]. But advertisers can start buying programmatically using a DSP [Demand Side Platform].

— Programmatic is a TOOL; it isn’t a solution. It requires a robust understanding of customer segments, customer interaction points with the business, and messaging — in fact, using programmatic advertising successfully requires an even deeper understanding of these things.

–Although “viewability” may be a key metric in evaluating programmatic advertising, it’s a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a successful impact on the consumer. It’s about action, not impressions.

— Programmatic will become a primary sales channel for ALL digital media — although this may take several years. Advertisers will be buying all their media (particularly digital media) this way: algorithmically, and real-time.

So — is there poetry in programmatic for the SMB advertiser? Yes — although as with other leading edge technologies, SMBs are a few years behind nationals and brands in adopting this tool set.

But it should be clear to companies that provide advertising and marketing services to SMBs that they’ll need to master programmatic advertising (and the robust data/analytic platform upon which it rests) on behalf of their SMB customers. Sooner rather than later.

The post Dispatch from the ad:tech Trenches: Defining 'Programmatic' appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Here we are in the middle of National Small Business Week, which seems like a great time to unveil the agenda and key themes of our upcoming SMB conference, which happens Sept. 29-30 at the Marriott Denver Tech Center. This event helps companies understand what makes SMBs tick so they can more successfully build and sell digital marketing solutions for small-business advertisers.

We are bringing a new look and feel to this year’s SMB conference — a faster pace, deeper audience engagement, a much more tactical focus and truly candid conversations about what it really takes to win in this exciting and challenging space.

​The preliminary SMB 2015 agenda reads as a road map of the most exciting opportunities and vexing challenges facing the local SMB digital marketing ecosystem. Keep an eye here as we add VIPs in the local SMBs as headline speakers, executive interview subjects and panelists.

Our Day 1 Headliner will be a joint session with Chris Terrill and Craig Smith, CEO and COO, respectively, of Home Advisor, a leader in matching home improvement leads with qualified merchants. Chris and Craig have been deep in the SMB trenches and understand what it takes to find the right business model for success in this space. Other headliners, including leaders from many of the premier SMB facing brands, will be announced soon.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll tackle at SMB 2015:

Making Big Data Small Enough for SMBs
Is Location the New Local?
Programmatic for SMBs — Is This a Thing Yet?
Is There a Play for the Long Tail SMB?
We’re Not Going to Say ‘Content is King’ — But It Kinda Is
Crowdfunding and Micro-lending — The Democratization of SMB Finance?
Bringing Hollywood to Main Street — Evolutions in Video Advertising

The post First Look at BIA/Kelsey's SMB 2015 appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

To kick-off BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL, the analyst team sits down to review 2015 – 2019 local advertising across 12 different channels and 94 industries, summarizing key issues for marketers over the next half decade.

Michael Boland, Chief Analyst and Vice President of Content, BIA/Kelsey
Peter Krasilovsky, Vice President, BIA/Kelsey
Steve Marshall, Research Director, BIA/Kelsey
Stacey Sedbrook, Vice President of Strategic Sales Consulting

Steve Marshall opens with our Local Commerce Monitor results on franchisees. They send $87K-plus, the highest level of marketing spend among the SMBs BIA/Kelsey tracks. They are highly engaged in digital — 42.9 percent of 2015 spending will be on digital; again, far ahead of the average SMB.

Franchises also spend at least 10 hours a week on social networks. About 85 percent maintain customer lists (compared to only about half of SMBs have customer lists in digital form). Seventy-one percent of franchises will have a loyalty program this year. This is a vindication of loyalty programs. Hand in hand with these loyalty programs, franchises are driving huge investments in discounting — 50.7 percent of revenue will be due to discount sales tied to loyalty programs.

This is the wave — loyalty and discounting — that will sweep the local space. There will be a much deeper, more committed relationship between the franchises and customers.

Franchises tend to favor buying through on-premise sales reps (feet on the street), even though many have national agency relationships. The franchises buy most through agencies and are extremely satisfied. Sixty-three percent are extremely satisfied with their agency relationships, though they prefer making individual purchases with assistance (expertise) from the agency. “They like a partner for these activities versus doing it themselves.”

Co-op advertising represents about $50 billion in U.S. spend annually and franchisees are the most prevalent users of co-op (more than 50 percent of all co-op monies flow through franchises). As a result, they want more analytics and analysis for their planning and assessment of campaigns.

Next up, Mike Boland discusses technology, particularly mobile.

Mobile ad revenues will grow from $13.25 billion in 2014 to $41.63 percent in 2019. In mobile, brands are the majority early adopters. YP, Yelp and other directories participate, but more than half is brand spending.

There are many flavors of ad targeting in mobile. It is no longer a matter of simply being geo-targeted, but must include contextually relevant information on the mobile devices. Using local area codes perform better than 800# listings, because they are perceived as actually local.

Bringing local inventory to bear on these opportunities, bringing POS inventory online as Google is doing, will be critical to market growth.

The static display ad is dying as live targeting takes on the role of providing context to mobile users.

Location-based programmatic ads are making headway. Weather, for example, can be used to address a customer with a topical offer. For example, a gym can send a coupon to a runner when it is raining: “Come in and run out of the rain.” These ads are starting to perform well.

Competitive conquesting works in retail, but struggles in restaurants. “There are so many different shades to these new opportunities, and it requires a lot of testing,” Boland said. Think of location as an audience profiling tool — where are consumers going and what does it say about the consumer that brands can use to create resonant messaging for consumers.

Contextual location targeting, such as a consumer at Wrigley Field, is a rich starting point for engagement. Drawing in other activities around that location and demographics.

“Everything I just mentioned can only happen when the location is accurate,” Boland concluded. “But the dirty little secret is that many location tags are wrong.” That’s a critical area for the market development and we have a session about this later this week.

Now Stacey Sedbrook: Are companies really learning use national and local brand targeting. Brand is centric, the location is subservient to the brand. And it is all over the board (for the same reasons that Gregg Stewart identified earlier). Talent development is going to be essential.

Stacey suggests it is important to “super-serve” the brand behind franchises, so we still need to be near the national brands, such as locating near Detroit for auto. The relationships matter more, and sales will continue to thrive.

Programmatic ads do not replace the human relationships that media companies have built with brands. Steve Marshall adds that he sees a tremendous need for integrators who do consultative selling with brands. Stacey: Make the local franchise group happy. So, send out a “hunter” to bring in brand deals, but hand fulfillment and account management to the local staff. Relationships matter.

Programmatic feels like “a buying method” to talk about targeting demographic, location with the “humble display ad.” Mike Boland: “This is bringing the tenants of search to the local display ads.”

That’s the session.

The post At BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL: Location Services Will Kill Traditional Display Advertising appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Three trends are changing the way brands find and engage with customer at the local level –the shift to mobile, the emerge of programmatic buying and the increasing ability to measure performance in real time.

These trends, and how marketers can take advantage of them, will form the foundation of Kenshoo CMO Aaron Goldman‘s Day 2 keynote address at BIA/Kelsey’s National conference, March 25-27, in Dallas.

“In today’s world, it’s all real time and you can make changes every minute of every day,” said Goldman. “And you can get really granular, especially at the local level, in an automated way. So you can have the right message, to the right person, at the right time, at scale.”

We asked Aaron to join us on a Google Hangout to give a preview of his talk at National. Goldman is author of the book, “Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned from Google” and also carries the unofficial title of Kenshoo’s “Head of Freestyle Rap.” Watch the video below for a preview of Goldman’s address and to get taste of his rhyming skills.

If you are interested in attending the National event, email me (claughlin AT biakelsey.com) to receive a promotional code that offers the best rate available.

The post BIA/Kelsey’s NATIONAL Preview: Freestyling with Kenshoo’s Aaron Goldman appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Three trends are changing the way brands find and engage with customer at the local level –the shift to mobile, the emerge of programmatic buying and the increasing ability to measure performance in real time.

These trends, and how marketers can take advantage of them, will form the foundation of Kenshoo CMO Aaron Goldman‘s Day 2 keynote address at BIA/Kelsey’s National conference, March 25-27, in Dallas.

“In today’s world, it’s all real time and you can make changes every minute of every day,” said Goldman. “And you can get really granular, especially at the local level, in an automated way. So you can have the right message, to the right person, at the right time, at scale.”

We asked Aaron to join us on a Google Hangout to give a preview of his talk at National. Goldman is author of the book, “Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned from Google” and also carries the unofficial title of Kenshoo’s “Head of Freestyle Rap.” Watch the video below for a preview of Goldman’s address and to get taste of his rhyming skills.

If you are interested in attending the National event, email me (claughlin AT biakelsey.com) to receive a promotional code that offers the best rate available.

The post BIA/Kelsey's NATIONAL Preview: Freestyling with Kenshoo's Aaron Goldman appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

YP has made a major push in the past week to become a bigger player in search and to do more to monetize its own search traffic on YP.com, as well as its mobile apps. In the past week the company has made two significant search related announcements.

Last week, YP unveiled ypSearch, a new search platform that is aimed at using YP’s sizable traffic, 80 million monthly visitors, in combination with major search engine traffic to deliver leads to small-business advertisers.

A unique feature of ypSearch will be its ability to fulfill and create search marketing campaigns across both major search engines as well as the core YP.com IYP portal, where ypSearch ad units will be displayed alongside relevant YP.com business listings.

By combining campaign fulfillment and management under a single search marketing platform, operated directly by YP, the company hopes to create greater efficiency in managing portfolio-wide cost-per-lead, as well as within high-traffic advertiser verticals. This will likely allow for margin increases in time, as third-party SEM vendor platforms are taken out of the process, and greater campaign transparency and control are brought in-house.

ypSearch will support campaigns across the major search engines initially (Google, Bing/Yahoo) — but may include other traffic and lead sources in the future.

This week, YP announced ypSearch Marketplace, which is a keyword-bidded local search marketplace that is aimed at pulling major brand messages into local markets. This announcement fits right into the national brands/local targeting theme of BIA/Kelsey’s National conference, taking place later this month in Dallas.

ypSearch Marketplace is the company’s biggest move into the emerging programmatic advertising space. The new platform allows agency and brand advertisers to directly purchase YP ad/search inventory in a similar fashion to other programmatic advertising.

Both announcements fit into some broader theme taking place at YP. One is the movement to own more of the technology that drives the business, and be less reliant on third parties to drive key businesses like search. The second is to make owned and operated traffic a bigger component of search, which of course means better margins for YP.

The company also argues that its owned and operated traffic is also good for advertisers. The company cited data from a study it conducted with comscore showing that people who initiate a search on YP are more influenced by advertising that those who begin a search elsewhere, with 66 percent making a purchase post search, and 61 percent searching for businesses that they saw in an ad.

In a briefing last week with BIA/Kelsey analysts, YP CTO Darren Clark discussed the larger context around these new announcements.

One key point was that YP is now generating much more of its traffic via organic means, rather than via paid search. The company used to be heavily reliant on paid search to bring users to its door.

“We have gotten a lot better at SEO,” Clark told us. “We are much less dependent on SEM.”

As YP launches new platforms to better monetize its own traffic, the company’s sales approach is evolving as well. The sales conversations are increasingly about getting found by ready to buy consumers and on targeting the right audience.

“We are tilting everything toward lead delivery,” Clark said.

BIA/Kelsey’s Abid Chaudhry contributed to this post.

The post YP Makes a Big Push in Search appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Heading back to Washington, DC’s snow, ice, and “wintry mixes” was not quite as stimulating as spending time networking and learning at Operative‘s second annual Ad Revenue and Operations Summit, aka “OP/ED” that attracted about 100 executive last week in Miami, FL. The invitation-only conference was held for Operative’s clients and partners to share best practices, insights and help set the agenda for 2015 and beyond.

Lorne Brown, Operative’s President/CEO and Founder will be speaking on BIA/Kelsey’s Programmatic Superforum at the NATIONAL show in Dallas, which is March 25-27. Among other things, Operative and BIA/Kelsey will be releasing a jointly developed local publisher cut of Operative’s publisher survey previewed at OP/ED that analyzed profitability practices and parameters. Brown will highlight this study at our conference and also speak to what’s on his mind for programmatic and ad work flow from the perspective of publishers.

At the top of the wish list at OP/ED was the goal of publishers being able to provide “One IO, One Invoice.” This ideal of having sellers prepare a single Insertion Order (IO) for an advertising package that includes multiple channels and offers and both have it fulfilled in an automated workflow….and have the client receive a single, integrated invoice listing out all the inventory purchased and billed remains a bit pie in the sky. But clearly this is a serious and committed vision that companies like Operative are building out.

There are so many pieces to this puzzle, it’s hard to know which thread to start pulling on. Operative’s strategy and really the industry’s, is to continue focus on building out its core platforms but to enable that One IO, One Invoice for its clients by adopting an API Stack Strategy to support interoperable database applications. There’s no other way to do it, so this is smart and extremely helpful for both publishers and clients. Operative clients including Comcast Spotlight, Hulu, NBC Universal, Verizon and Univision shared excellent and helpful insights and best practices based on their particular approaches to the sales process.

Digging deeper in to the topics, Digital Content Next’s CEO Jason Kint kicked thing off in his keynote by highlighting other areas of urgent concern, namely: Viewability, Fraud, Programmatic, Declining CPMs, dealing with the shift to mobile and better tools and information flows to support campaign optimization and revenue yield management. Compared to dealing with winter in Boston… a piece of cake!

Really one of the burning issues was dealing with viewability and fraud. In the wrap-up session, Kelly Blue Book’s Mark Bernstein; Gawker’s John Price and Eric Harris from BuzzFeed detailed out their vision for what needs to happen with viewability. In their view, supporting viewability and the “vCPM” (viewable CPM) metric requires a three-phased approach. The goal is for systems like Operative’s need to support automated delivery reconciliation and delivery, reporting and yield management. Phase 1 is to lay the groundwork to sell, execute and invoice viewable orders. Phase 2 is to automate delivery, billing reconciliation and invoicing. Finally, Phase 3 is to support viewable reporting, forecasting and payments.

For those interested, there’s a fairly rich Twitter stream at #OpED15, check it out.

The post One IO, One Invoice. The "Impossible Dream"? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Heading back to Washington, DC’s snow, ice, and “wintry mixes” was not quite as stimulating as spending time networking and learning at Operative‘s second annual Ad Revenue and Operations Summit, aka “OP/ED” that attracted about 100 executive last week in Miami, FL. The invitation-only conference was held for Operative’s clients and partners to share best practices, insights and help set the agenda for 2015 and beyond.

Lorne Brown, Operative’s President/CEO and Founder will be speaking on BIA/Kelsey’s Programmatic Superforum at the NATIONAL show in Dallas, which is March 25-27. Among other things, Operative and BIA/Kelsey will be releasing a jointly developed local publisher cut of Operative’s publisher survey previewed at OP/ED that analyzed profitability practices and parameters. Brown will highlight this study at our conference and also speak to what’s on his mind for programmatic and ad work flow from the perspective of publishers.

At the top of the wish list at OP/ED was the goal of publishers being able to provide “One IO, One Invoice.” This ideal of having sellers prepare a single Insertion Order (IO) for an advertising package that includes multiple channels and offers and both have it fulfilled in an automated workflow….and have the client receive a single, integrated invoice listing out all the inventory purchased and billed remains a bit pie in the sky. But clearly this is a serious and committed vision that companies like Operative are building out.

There are so many pieces to this puzzle, it’s hard to know which thread to start pulling on. Operative’s strategy and really the industry’s, is to continue focus on building out its core platforms but to enable that One IO, One Invoice for its clients by adopting an API Stack Strategy to support interoperable database applications. There’s no other way to do it, so this is smart and extremely helpful for both publishers and clients. Operative clients including Comcast Spotlight, Hulu, NBC Universal, Verizon and Univision shared excellent and helpful insights and best practices based on their particular approaches to the sales process.

Digging deeper in to the topics, Digital Content Next’s CEO Jason Kint kicked thing off in his keynote by highlighting other areas of urgent concern, namely: Viewability, Fraud, Programmatic, Declining CPMs, dealing with the shift to mobile and better tools and information flows to support campaign optimization and revenue yield management. Compared to dealing with winter in Boston… a piece of cake!

Really one of the burning issues was dealing with viewability and fraud. In the wrap-up session, Kelly Blue Book’s Mark Bernstein; Gawker’s John Price and Eric Harris from BuzzFeed detailed out their vision for what needs to happen with viewability. In their view, supporting viewability and the “vCPM” (viewable CPM) metric requires a three-phased approach. The goal is for systems like Operative’s need to support automated delivery reconciliation and delivery, reporting and yield management. Phase 1 is to lay the groundwork to sell, execute and invoice viewable orders. Phase 2 is to automate delivery, billing reconciliation and invoicing. Finally, Phase 3 is to support viewable reporting, forecasting and payments.

For those interested, there’s a fairly rich Twitter stream at #OpED15, check it out.

The post One IO, One Invoice. The “Impossible Dream”? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

BIA/Kelsey: John, your company provides targeted, cross-screen video advertising. Video and programmatic targeting are particularly hot right now in the market. So let’s talk about that. We’ve seen this moving from national into local media with increased acceleration lately. Let?s start with the basics, how do you define “programmatic”?

McIntyre: Programmatic buying, in its most simple form, is the automated real-time bidding and purchasing of digital advertising inventory. It is undoubtedly a powerful tool, but a relatively “dumb” one. It’s a “go fetch” mechanism designed to buy digital media at the lowest bid for a broadly defined target audience. But as video reshapes the digital landscape before our eyes, the requirements for programmatic buying are also rapidly evolving. First, a little context… The rise of multi-screen video and the related explosion of online video advertising are well documented. comScore reports that each month, 225 million Americans now watch video online — including some 40 billion video ads.

BIA/Kelsey: Our forecasts show that local online video ad spend will continue to increase by double digits in the coming years. Some of those dollars are new incremental spend, but most of it is shifting from display, print and TV. How does programmatic play in this mix?

McIntyre: If, as the forecasts indicate, video is becoming the preferred digital ad medium, then programmatic must get smarter. We see two keys to unlocking its potential: 1. Buying micro-targeted audiences and optimizing on performance. First, this requires we apply advanced levels of intelligence to segmentation. We need to integrate highly reliable data that allows advanced segmentation beyond demographics, e.g., location, current topical context, device, recent behaviors (search, browsing, purchase, etc.), day part, purchase funnel position, etc. Second, we need to be able to adjust bids and buys based on how audiences respond to ads during campaigns. In other words, we need campaigns to become self-learning and optimize intelligently. 2. Personalizing ad content and seamlessly integrating it with micro-targeted buys Message relevance is becoming the new creative mantra. Producing versions of ads that resonate with viewers in different locations, at different times, with different interests dramatically increases response and engagement. We need to be able personalize ads quickly, affordibly and at scale, then deliver them with the appropriate buys.

BIA/Kelsey: John, you will be speaking at our BIA/Kelsey National conference next month about some of the work you’ve been doing in programmatic at Sightly. Could give us a teaser here of what you’ll be talking about?

McIntyre: Our platform incorporates these technologies today as part of programmatic buys of YouTube TrueView inventory so we’ve already seen its potential first hand. For example, here are a couple success stories featuring campaigns we ran for Wendy’s in which we combined ad personalization with micro-targeting and intelligent optimization to deliver exceptional results that led to an annual commitment for 2015.

BIA/Kelsey: Thanks, John. Looking forward to your discussion on our Programmatic SuperForum next month in Dallas at BIA/Kelsey’s National conference March 25-27.

The post Unlocking Programmatic's Potential for Video Advertising appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.