Get Ready for the ARF Annual Conference on March 20th and 21st 2017

The ARF is holding their annual conference next week that will herald not only the arrival of new President and CEO Dr. Scott McDonald, it will also highlight the continuation and enhancement of three major research initiatives on mobile advertising research and the impact of advertising pod context.

New Leadership

According to the press release, Scott McDonald has held senior research positions at Time Inc., Time Warner, and Conde Nast, working closely with all five of The ARF's constituent groups – media, advertisers, agencies, research companies and ad tech. In a meeting with the press this past week, he explained that he comes to the ARF at “a critically important time for the media industry, partly because technological change has introduced at least a doubling of the number of consumer touchpoints available to marketers - many of which don’t involve media at all.  This has fundamentally changed how we think of ‘audience’ and has made the term more ambiguous and confusing than it was 10 years ago.”

He sees the ARF as focused on a range of issues from “methods for message development and understanding the consumer to highly technical problems of cross platform measurement, advertising effectiveness attribution and ways of integrating big data. These technical topics are very wonky but consume us because they remain unresolved problems for the industry.”

We are entering a complicated world where there are many challenges to the ad-supported media business model. He noted, “Going into the Internet of Things, you are going to have more and more marketing opportunities to connect with consumers in conditions that are devoid of media like on the fitbit, driving in your car, etc. The nature of advertising is changing in response to changes in technology and consumer behavior. Getting a clear view of consumer behavior and advertising impact has never been more important, more difficult or more complex.”

ARF Research Initiatives

As the industry gets more complicated, it is a great time for research. The ARF is continuing on some major research initiatives as well as introducing new ground-breaking work from member companies and suppliers. “One of the studies that will be talked about at the annual meeting,” explained McDonald, “is an effort by the ARF Research team, in collaboration with several of the member companies, to try to quantify the value of specific media context.  How is the performance of an ad affected – for better or worse – by its media environment?  How is it affected by the other ads around it?”

Jasper Snyder, EVP Research and Innovation outlined the continuation of three major research initiatives by noting that, “We have studies on creating effective mobile advertising, optimizing mobile research quality through the impact of emojis in mobile surveys and exploring the ROI impact of different types of context effects.” Previous How Advertising Works studies by the ARF have focused on the ROI of cross-platform advertising, and using neuroscience to understand how brands are built in the brain. “These studies not only quantified the impact of cross-platform advertising for the first time but also established, through neuroscience, the ways in which advertisers can optimize creative to take advantage of cross-platform effects," he continued. 

“Biometric and neuroscience measurement has proven that optimizing creative to a specific platform provides a great opportunity to boost ad effectiveness,” noted Dr. Manuel Garcia-Garcia, SVP, Research and Innovation, who added, “The challenge we face now is how to improve mobile ad creative so they are perceives as valuable and non-disruptive by the users.”

“One of the jobs of the ARF is to lead with quality research that is pivotal to the industry,” concluded McDonald, “Not only in providing quality research but also trying to provide conceptual clarity that makes it easier for all participants – media companies, ad agencies, advertisers and research companies - to be clear about where they are operating and which questions are being addressed.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com

PROPHET-izing the World of Data. Interview with Ashley Swartz, CEO of Furious

Ashley Swartz, CEO of Furious, started her career in manufacturing finance in enterprise and supply chain optimization software. But in this world of Iot, she was able to move into the manufacturing or products and mobile phones as a first introduction to mobile content and advertising. “I started my own agency in 2003 and then moved over to consult for the sell side of MVPDS, publishers and technology providers,” she explained, before founding Furious Corp in 2013 and building our platform which we call PROPHET. PROPHET connects and normalizes data from over 40 disparate advertising systems to report, forecast and optimize inventory and revenue across all sales channels and ad formats.

Charlene Weisler: How did you choose the name Furious?

Ashley Swartz: My nickname given to me by Matt Seiler when I worked for him years ago is Red Fury so I decided to name my company Furious. Matt Seiler, was CEO of PHD US when I worked for him and met him and most recently he was CEO and Chairman at Mediabrands.

Charlene Weisler: What MVPDs did you work for and what data did they use at that time on the sell side?

Ashley Swartz: I previously worked for Intel's On Cue platform, and we are currently working with multiple MVPDs today at Furious Corp. The datasets vary based on whether it is linear, linear addressable or digital. It included various 1st party data, set top box data, Nielsen data, Rentrak, 3rd party data including meta data, targeting data, etc. And, IF they had a DMP they might have ACR data (if needed) and or video player data.

Charlene Weisler: Tell me more about how the Furious platform works.

Ashley Swartz:  Furious' platform, PROPHET, is a horizontal platform that connects all the disparate advertising systems for a seller, automating the ingestion and cleansing of data to enable [near] real time reporting across all inventory, revenue (price) and audience for all platforms.  Its primary value as an enterprise system is in using this data to optimize yield at a portfolio level to maximize revenue and efficiency. It is powered by the most advanced state of the art optimization and forecasting algorithms known in the Data Science industry and we enhance them using domain specific knowledge of the media space and client specific data, thus creating best of breed adaptive and robust algorithms which present unprecedented accuracy and reliability. This is what powers PROPHET's forecasting, planning, pricing, allocation and optimization.

Charlene Weisler: Who is your competitive set?

Ashley Swartz: SAP, Freewheel, IBM and Accenture

Charlene Weisler: What other industries do you incorporate and what are their best practices that work in media?

Ashley Swartz: PROPHET leverages lessons learned from other large industries who have used Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software like SAP to connect their business, automate workflow, increase yield and productivity, as well as finance portfolio management tools to manage a mix of assets, optimize and rebalance portfolios over time. PROPHET utilizes methodologies from manufacturing, like Kaizen (continuous improvement) in its business logic using machine learning to power its self-correcting predictive and optimization algorithms.

Charlene Weisler: What is your definition of programmatic?

Ashley Swartz: The use of data or technology to improve the ROI on media.

Charlene Weisler: What do you think the impact of smart TVs will have on TV sales, content and measurement.

Ashley Swartz: In the short term, very little. As the owners of smart TVs begin to be more representative of a population, more valuable. We still have immense privacy issues to overcome to make the data actionable, and OEMS have a long way to go in ensuring the integrity of the data and establishing a realistic perspective on fair market value of the data.

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Programmatic Attribution Modeling

In an environment of cross-platform media and the Internet of Things, marketers are grappling with programmatic attribution modeling. Attribution, according to Cynopsis, is defined as “the process of identifying a set of user actions that contribute to a desired outcome, and then giving each of those actions a specific value.” Ideally, good attribution would enable marketers to get the correct and fair sequencing of events that truly influenced a consumer’s behavior.

Last Touch Attribution
Most common is last touch attribution, which gives full credit to the last-touch point before the desired action takes place. This essentially negates the value of all previous actions leading to activation. The IAB is addressing programmatic attribution modeling, specifically on last-touch, with an update to their 2012 guidelines. According to Benjamin Dick, director, industry initiatives, IAB in a recent Mediapost article, the update was to, “account for the many developments in cross-screen measurement, data collection, and usage, and ultimately provide a common language when discussing attribution tools, technologies, and methodologies.” The intent was to show the limitations of, and alternatives to, last-touch methodologies.

Read my full article on the Videa blog.

IoT Data: The Opportunities and Challenges

The interconnectivity of all of our devices and appliances with the internet of things (IoT), and the data that allows us to collect, brings both simplicity and complexity to daily life. As consumers, we can facilitate cross-device usage to enhance our media consumption experiences while juggling the vast array of options for connectivity. For marketers it’s a chance to tap into more and more first-party data sets that assess a consumer’s holistic lifestyle behaviors from media habits to the places we visit and even how we get there.

According to EY, IoT data will enable unprecedented levels of content personalization for consumers and new opportunities for advertisers. Media and entertainment companies are increasingly using highly sophisticated sensors in the areas of 4D, animation, gaming, video images, camera stabilization, and sports, which opens up new experiences for consumers. But at what point does this behavior monitoring, data collecting, and message targeting start to infringe on privacy? It can be a slippery slope from convenience to intrusion.

Read the full article on the Videa blog.