It was a big year for ad tech. As brands and agencies got more savvy and looked for safer environments to buy ad impressions online, private exchanges and programmatic direct took centre stage, while agency trading desks and networks faced increased scrutiny for closed-book pricing and Chinese firewalls that weren’t so fiery. Attribution got a lot better, viewability became table stakes, and for the first time, half of Canadians’ time spent online came from mobile devices.
At the end of AD-Vantage’s first year in circulation, we thought it would be fun and informative to look back at what you, the readers, thought were the most important and shareworthy stories. Here are the top 10, by eyeball count.
10. Time to consider ditching your agency trading desk? WFA guide says yes
In 2014 big brands like P&G started ditching agency trading desks and building their own internal media buying teams. Agency trading desks — the divisions of major holding companies that handle programmatic trading — have come under fire for lack of transparency and conflict concerns. The World Federation of Advertisers’ annual member survey backed that up with some marketer responses: 76% of the 41 multinational brands surveyed said they found ATDs less transparent than traditional media companies, and the number of brands using ATDs fell 15% from 2013 to 2014.
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9. Travel fastest-growing sector in Canadian programmatic market
Casale Media’s quarterly Index Report has a host of Canadian market data about where the money’s going in programmatic and where it’s coming from. In such a new space there aren’t a lot of reliable Canadian metrics available, but Casale’s Index Platform, one of the largest and most far reaching supply-side platforms in the world, just so happens to be based here. Its Q1 ranking of top brands by spend showed American Express leading the pack by a hefty margin, followed by GM and P&G. By category, travel showed the most growth, driven largely by Disney.
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8. Hudson’s Bay partners with Swirl, Snip Snap on beacon roll-out
Mobile beacons shot to the forefront this year, thanks to Apple’s decision to allow them to work with iOS apps. One of the first retailers on board was the Hudson’s Bay Company, which announced it was testing several thousand beacons across a handful of Hudson’s Bay and Lord & Taylor’s stores. Though HBC has yet to commit, it’s not every day a Canadian retail brand is first aboard the tech innovation train.
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7. We use programmatic because market research tells us to: Kellogg’s Smilanich
Kellogg’s U.S. programmatic lead flew up for the Brightroll Video Summit, and she had a lot of interesting stories to tell about the front lines of the programmatic revolution. For one thing, Kellogg’s has compared the effectiveness of running brand campaigns using programmatic audience targeting, versus buying premium placements on top sites — and found audience-based buys drive higher overall brand lift.
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6. Fraud, brand safety and viewability in Canada (infographic)
Ever wondered how much of Canadian inventory is created by fraudsters stealing ad money? Canada is actually pretty safe compared the U.S., says Integral Ad Science. Only 10% of the inventory they looked at on behalf of AD-Vantage turned out to be fraudulent — a lot less than the U.S., where fraud is thought to account for 15-20% of inventory.
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5. Dentsu Aegis opens big data consulting shop in Toronto
In a story that broke late last year, Dentsu Aegis introduced a Toronto arm of its big data consulting practice, Data2Decisions. The firm promised to help marketers understand and use their data to make better decisions about spending, improving both cost-efficiency and performance. Given that Canadian CMOs spent much of 2014 struggling to get value out of data, a consultancy focused on data seems like a really smart move by Dentsu Aegis.
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4. AOL moving 100% of Canadian inventory to programmatic
In 2014, AOL really took the lead in programmatic, launching a new integrated buying and selling platform, pushing forward on multi-touch attribution, and diving into programmatic TV. By Q3, the largest share of its revenue came from its tech platforms business. The next logical step was to back up its tech promise with its own media, by letting buyers use its advanced targeting and attribution tools on all of its Canadian ad impressions. That made Huffington Post Canada one of the first top digital media properties in Canada — and the world — to commit its premium and rich media impressions to programmatic.
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3. Watch This: A visual guide to how automated ad serving works
New York-based trading desk MediaCrossing created a video to visualize the digital advertising “waterfall,” where algorithms attempt to sell an ad impression first through direct sales, then private exchanges, and then public exchanges, all in the 200 milliseconds it takes for the user’s browser to load the page. It’s a fascinating and complex process that lots of people working in the tech world don’t even fully understand — fertile ground for a viral explainer video.
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2. Canadian consumers lead world in online engagement: comScore
A global comScore study found that through 2013, the average Canadian visited more sites per month than residents of any other country. In terms of time spent online, Canadians ranked third overall. We might not be many, but we sure are content-hungry.
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1. Watch this bot generate 10,000 fraudulent ad impressions
In October, Forensiq turned the invisible visible when they created a video showing how a bot goes about generating fake ad impressions. According to the company’s estimates, 31% of all online ad traffic is fake in some way.
Watch the video
