Category: Blog

Written for AdWeek, Thursday 12th May. 

A round-up report from eMarketer, specializing in mobile advertising, recently landed in my inbox. On page three, a table of completion rates for U.S. digital pre-roll caught my eye. It claimed that, on average, completion rates for pre-roll ads on smartphones was 77 percent, rising slightly to 79 percent on tablet.

The vast majority of brands and advertisers understand the difference between a non-skippable pre-roll, which obliges a user to watch an ad before viewing video content, or a skippable format, which allows the user to decide whether or not to watch the ad. What is perhaps less well understood is the difference in performance across KPIs that these two buying options will deliver. A non-skippable pre-roll can achieve the highs of 80 percent completion pretty easily (after all, how many people abandon watching a video because of a 15-second ad?) whereas a very successful skippable pre-roll would be looking at a 40 percent completion rate.

This does not mean that the skippable pre-roll is delivering poor results, although seeing them side-by-side in an Excel spreadsheet might make a junior planner very nervous.

There are arguments for using both types of advertising—skippable ads are far more user-friendly, and the people who do watch your ad are probably genuinely interested in the message, unlike users who cannot skip and merely want to watch the video content after the trailer. On the other hand, non-skippable ads do mean more people see your message and, on average, this type of advertising tends to be cheaper.

Read the full article on AdWeek here.

Trust Smart Car to make something actually watchable as well as making products that are remarkably easy to park and drive. In terms of high quality, natural comedy, this ad takes the biscuit – telling its users to undergo a lie detector test whilst driving the new smart fortwo car across a town square.

It’s a fantastic video with some hilarious moments – people are always side tickling when put on the spot and making some frank and slightly disturbing confessions.

Check out the new smart advert here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKQLiBF7eEw

 

The concept is startlingly good – the sort of tongue-in-cheek video campaign completed by short snappy footage – and means that Harvey Nichols should hypothetically be onto a winner. Pick famous people through history, make a joke about their fashion sense; the whole series makes some great comments about the looks of eminent individuals – including Obama, Einstein or Darwin.  However, for a brand that deals specifically with both male and female branding, it feels strange that they’ve only picked out men – why not make a note about the looks of Marie Curie or Aung San Suu Kyi? History may be dominated by men, but why not put some women in the mix. Also, since when was Boris Johnson a great person? The former mayor doesn’t exactly rub shoulders with Obama or the person who discovered the nature of relativity.

Anyway, we’ll leave you to it.

This week was a hot one for LoopMe’s video of the week. Our first choice was Reebok’s timely video for mother’s day, showing a woman slowly de-aging whilst doing fantastic feats with fantastic feet. You can watch that one here.

But, since we work in mobile video and advertising, the top spot has to go to Apple for their Onions based skit. Despite its overwhelmingly negative thumbs down reaction on YouTube (comments have been disabled), the hysteria surrounding a fundamentally trivial video event is a nice cheeky wink at a media industry constantly striving towards this ‘new’ concept or idea. A video shot by a 10 year old girl could definitely capture the hearts and imaginations of ad execs – what does the onion mean? Why is it being sliced? What does the loop add to the experience? Why is it looped that specific number of times? All questions you could instinctively ask – if you had the right / wrong instinctive behavior.

Watch the advert here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gHeBVyqJRo

 

The babies are back. Evian rocked the world last time they brought forth the CGI concoctions last time, so now they’ve returned, and in greater numbers.

Accompanied by a rather fantastic cover of the Beach Boys’ Kokomo (you can listen to that here), this high budget epic is the perfect back for kicking back, taking in the sun, and sipping on some smooth, premium, bottled water. The ad itself is, however, also a bit creepy – a world surrounded by sentient, cogent babies, owning property and running beverage stalls. Do babies have the economic savviness and logistical awareness necessary for working in retail? Who knows: we’ll let Lord of the Flies Part 2: Surf’s Up speak for itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWG3rtGoIlI

Runner up for this week: Ryan Reynolds continues his dominance of the world.

Published in MediaPost on 4/25/16 A quick search of Google Trends, and it’s clear interest in ad blocking has reached an all-time high. According to a study by Retale, 20% of adults are now using an ad blocker on their mobile device. The industry is facing a challenge when it comes to convincing the blockers to embrace advertising.

To resolve the issue, the industry need to understand why users are implementing ad blockers. The main reasons usually cited by the industry are normally data consumption, load times and battery use. These are all valid, but when looked at closely, they don’t seem to be the main cause of ad blocking. Research by Global Web Index found that only one third of users state page load times are the reason for using an ad blocker, while just three in ten said battery life was the motive for installing the software.

The real key to the problem lies in irrelevant advertising. Poorly targeted ads annoy users, do not generate high revenues for publishers and waste brands’ advertising budgets. While most advertising online today employs some level of targeting, it tends to focus around building audience profiles. This is, without a doubt, a hugely important part of targeting, but it neglects a huge amount of data.

Read the rest of the article on MediaPost here.

Just hear us out on this one.

What might seem at first to be a random reason for a live streaming event (starting today, lasting the full week), has actually been turned into a rather fantastic marketing niche. Waitrose, with their brand of earnest simplicity and premium rural luxury, are proving how all their cows are given normal, everyday grazing opportunities, how all of their bees are real, free-flying bees, how their crops are grown and livestock flourish. The tranquil idyllic environment is allowed to speak for itself – Waitrose are innovating in a fun and accessible way. (Though, after a half hour watching bees slowly crawl out of a hive, it does get a bit dull)

You can watch the live stream here:

 

 

 

On Thursday 14^th April the IAB released their biannual UK Ad Spend study revealing spend figures for 2015. Last year was an exciting year for digital, seeing a 16.4% increase in overall spend, notably also the highest growth rate since 2008. Overall digital adspend now totals £8.6bn – a consistently growing figure.

This growth has been bolstered by the gains in mobile adspend, which soared by 60.3% over the course of the year to hit £2.65bn– now accounting for 30.5% of all UK digital advertising. Mobile has secured itself as a dominant player in the digital advertising space, and going forward marketers will undoubtedly factor it as an even more significant part of their campaigns and strategies.

Even within mobile, video and display has progressed massively. Over the course of the year, adspend on mobile video rose from £179m to £353m – a 98% increase. 55% of all standard display adspend is now on rich media formats – a growth of 11% since 2014. Marketers are moving towards more sophisticated and exciting ad formats capable of being delivered to devices.

All of this comes during an exciting time for mobile. Smartphones are now the most popular internet device (with an average of 2.1 per household) and a 21 percent increase in smartphone ownership since 2014.

For the first time, programmatic spend was factored into a separate category within the report. What is clear is just how significant programmatic spend is for both mobile and the digital space. By 2019, the IAB expect for programmatic to account for 80-90% of all UK display adspend, and potentially even higher for mobile video. At the moment this figure the total spend is £0.35bn around 71%, with 47% on direct and 24% on indirect.

The stats were an exciting continuation of the existing trend, with Tim Elkington, CSO at the IAB, noting ‘The increasing array of devices people use to go online has helped digital ad spend hit another gear as advertisers look to reach them and time spent online increases. Smartphones are the major driving force behind this, as people increasingly use them for activities they used to do on desktop, from searching and shopping to social and watching video.’

You can read the full adspend report on the IAB website here.

 

 

LoopMe are happy to announce we’ve been nominated 5 times at The Drum’s MoMAs (Marketing on Mobile Awards) – a celebratin of campaigns, brands and agencies at the forefront of the mobile industry.

The award nominations were:

• Interactive Entertainment, Mobile Strategy / Campaign – Paddington with Target Media
• Travel/Leisure/Sports Mobile Strategy / Campaign – Celebrity Cruises with Goodstuff
• Best Use of Video / Rich Media – The Forest with Icon
• Best Use of Video / Rich Media – Legend with Target Media
• Best Use of Video / Rich Media – Paranormal Activity 5 with MEC

Great results for our sales, AdOps and all the agencies involved, and we look forward to celebrating these fantastic results!

Roll on the awards evening on the 18th May!

Published for the Wall Blog on the 13th April. 

Driverless cars, personal assistants and a robot Scarlett Johansson have all made headlines in the past three months. Artificial intelligence is taking the world by storm. But how can AI have an impact on your advertising? Here are five reasons it should be overlaid onto every single campaign.

Only reach relevant users

When running any advertising campaign it’s accepted that the ad will be shown to some people who, while fitting the target audience perfectly, are not interested in your product. By using AI it is possible to dramatically reduce the number of impressions wasted in this manner.

AI analyses information from billions of data points to determine what a user is likely to engage with. If a user has never exhibited any behaviour to suggest they will engage with a car ad, despite fitting the audience profile, they will not be shown this advert, eliminating wasted impressions and saving campaign budget.

On the reverse, there may be users who would be interested in your product, despite not fitting the audience profile. AI can identify users who have exhibited strong engagement patterns with similar content and target them with relevant adverts.

Optimize in real-time

Each time an ad request is logged there are thousands of variables, all of which can impact the results of a campaign. Should one variable in the chain change, the ad which is most likely to generate an engagement could be different.

This data cannot be used by ad ops teams to optimize a campaign, it happens too quickly. AI can process and act on this data in milliseconds, enabling campaigns to be optimized in real-time.

Viewable, brand safe advertising

AI is able to improve brand safety and viewability rates by optimizing delivery towards environments that deliver the best viewability results. It can also identify patterns which could be linked to suspicious behaviour, blocking these impressions and only serving ads in placements, which guarantee human traffic.

As AI optimizes in real-time it is possible to ensure viewable, brand safe advertising 24/7, and not just when ad ops teams are in the office.

Read more: https://wallblog.co.uk/2016/04/13/five-reasons-to-use-artificial-intelligence/#ixzz48FEgj3eV