StrikeAd partners with uKnow to increase ad engagement and offer mobile brand safety

StrikeAd last week announced a partnership with uKnow, a provider of targeting and optimisation solutions. StrikeAd will incorporate the uKnow solution into its mobile platform to offer advertisers contextually relevant distribution channels for mobile ad campaigns, while protecting brands from undesirable and unsafe pages.

The uKnow integration was carried out in partnership with the StrikeAd SSP partners and the contextual categorisation is performed at the SSP level, before the data is passed to StrikeAd. This allows blind and unnamed traffic to still be contextually categorised, and for the information to come through to StrikeAd for all traffic from that SSP. The independent third party verification element further enhances this data, compared to traditionally unverified publisher data sets on which media buyers normally have to rely.

The partnership provides StrikeAd with accurate targeting, even on blind inventory, for advertisers to increase engagement and improve performance of individual campaigns by providing RTB media acquisition with brand protection and audience-interest data. This ensures that StrikeAd's clients do not bid on inappropriate pages and provides relevance to improve the performance and results of each individual campaign.

Alex Rahaman, CEO of StrikeAd, comments: "We are delighted to be partnering with uKnow in this space. Many of the brands and agencies which we work with are particularly sensitive about where their content gets placed, so being able to contextually target is a great asset for us. We're able to ensure that our clients' adverts are featured in relevant content to their market or audience, helping them to interact with existing and prospective customers, and ultimately improving brand safety and conversion rates as a result."

Peter Gasparini, Co-Founder and CEO of uKnow, adds: "All results shown to StrikeAd's DSP have our negative categories automatically applied to each result set, ensuring that campaigns aren't being featured within inappropriate web pages to improve brand safety. We're pleased to be working with StrikeAd in this capacity, and look forward to expanding our relationship further by offering uKnow’s BluePrint App for customised targeting channels, in line with the company's rapid growth and support for agencies."

StrikeAd offers the first mobile-specific advertising Demand Side Platform (DSP). It allows media agencies to manage and optimise multiple global mobile advertising campaigns from multiple advertisers from a single platform. Advertisers can buy best-performing inventory to provide effectively filtered and optimised sales leads.

Adfonic Announces TV-like Ads for Mobiles

Global mobile advertising marketplace Adfonic announced last week the availability of its new integrated mobile video advertising product, which enables advertisers and agencies worldwide to replicate the power of a television or online video ad on a mobile-device screen. Advertisers can plan and buy mobile video campaigns across Adfonic’s global iOS and Android inventory, providing access to 200 million unique users each month via a network of approximately 10,000 publishers.

The newly-available mobile video campaigns make use of a device’s native iOS or Android video player to offer a seamless transition which takes the user from the ad within a mobile site or app straight to a high-quality TV-like video commercial. As soon as the video concludes, the user is returned to the app or mobile site. This level of user experience has previously eluded mobile video ads, which required navigation to a remote player such as YouTube to view the video clip.

The new offering delivers the industry’s first end-to-end video product aligning mobile with traditional audio visual experiences, parallel to those of cinema and TV, and integrating real-time measurement of user engagement. Adfonic’s engagement score metric tracks individual users’ viewing time of a video in order to assign it with an engagement score. This score can be used alongside traditional metrics such as number of clicks and the clickthrough rate to empower advertisers with a real-time view of user engagement time with their brand as their campaign runs.

Paul Childs, Chief Marketing Officer, Adfonic comments: “Mobile sites and applications are now attracting audiences comparable with those of popular television programmes, and mobile video advertising campaigns can bring the brand engagement experiences and quality of TV and cinema advertising to mobile. We are proud to have developed the industry’s first end-to-end engagement metric, giving advertisers real-time insight into how users are interacting with the video elements of their mobile ad campaign. This level of visibility over campaign effectiveness is unheard of with TV or cinema advertising and offers the Holy Grail of campaign measurement.”

Nielsen: Global Consumers' Trust in “Earned” Advertising Grows in Importance

Ninety-two per cent of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as word-of-mouth and recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising—an increase of 18 per cent since 2007, according to a new study from Nielsen, with 70 per cent of global consumers surveyed online indicating they trust this platform, an increase of 15 per cent in four years.

Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising Survey of more than 28,000 Internet respondents in 56 countries shows that while nearly half (47%) of consumers around the world say they trust paid television, magazine and newspaper ads, confidence has declined by 24 per cent, 20 per cent and 25 per cent respectively since 2009. Still, the majority of advertising dollars are spent on traditional or paid media, such as television. In 2011, overall global ad spend saw a seven per cent increase over 2010, according to Nielsen’s most recent Global AdView Pulse. This growth in spend was driven by a nearly 10 per cent increase in television advertising, with countries, including the U.S. and China, attracting more advertising dollars versus the year prior.

Randall Beard, Global Head of Advertiser Solutions, Nielsen comments: “While brand marketers increasingly seek to deploy more effective advertising strategies, Nielsen’s survey shows that the continued proliferation of media messages may be impacting how well they resonate with their intended audiences on various platforms. Although television advertising will remain a primary way marketers connect with audiences due to its unmatched reach compared to other media, consumers around the world continue to see recommendations from friends and online consumer opinions as by far the most credible. As a result, successful brand advertisers will seek ways to better connect with consumers and leverage their goodwill in the form of consumer feedback and experiences.”

The Nielsen Trust Index:

- 58% trust “owned media” (messages on company websites)
- 50% trust content in emails they consented to receive
- 42% trust radio ads
- 40% trust product placements in TV programmes
- 40% trust ads in search engine results (up from 2007’s 34%)
- 36% trust online video ads
- 36% trust sponsored ads on social networking sites
- 33% trust online banner ads (up from 2007’s 26%)
- 33% trust video or banner display ads on tablets or smartphones
- 29% trust mobile phone texts (21% increase from 2009 and 61% increase from 2007)

Beard adds: “The growth in trust for online search and display ads over the past four years should give marketers increased confidence in putting more of their ad dollars into this medium. Many companies are already increasing their paid advertising activity on social networking sites, in part due to the high level of trust consumers place in friends’ recommendations and online opinions. Brands should be watching this emerging ad channel closely as it continues to grow.”
Ad Relevance

When considering ad relevance, 50 per cent of global online consumers find TV ads to be personally relevant when they are looking for information on products they want or need, particularly among consumers in the Middle East, Africa and Pakistan, where 65 per cent find TV ads to be highly pertinent to their needs. By contrast, only 30 per cent of European respondents consider TV ads to be relevant.

One-third (33%) of global respondents find online banners ads to be relevant, compared to ads on social networks (36%) and online video ads (36%). Forty two per cent of global consumers find ads in
search engine results relevant.

“The high cost of advertising in today’s fragmented media world forces marketers to strive for the most effective and efficient ads,” Beard continues, “In order to boost advertising ROI, marketers need to make sure an ad’s content and message are relevant to the consumer who sees it. While we expect to see high relevance levels in ads where the consumer is actively seeking information, such as on a brand’s own website or solicited emails, Nielsen’s survey shows that there is still much potential for marketers looking to reach the right audience through advertiser-driven messages.”

About the Nielsen Global Survey

The Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising Survey was conducted between August 31 and September 16, 2011 and polled more than 28,000 online consumers in 56 countries throughout Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and North America.

The sample has quotas based on age and sex for each country based on their Internet users, and is weighted to be representative of Internet consumers and has a maximum margin of error of ±0.6%. This Nielsen survey is based on the behavior of respondents with online access only. Internet penetration rates vary by country. Nielsen uses a minimum reporting standard of 60 per cent Internet penetration or 10 million online population for survey inclusion. The Nielsen Global Survey was established in 2005.