Nicole Whitesel, SVP of Enterprise Strategy at Publicis Media recently discussed the increased experimentation with OTT by agencies and their clients in an interview with BeetTV:

OTT is the Next Step in the Digital Revolution for Ad Buyers

One of the things we’re seeing is clients appetites being larger than ever before to explore. In the past, OTT was seen as a nascent channel with limited reach. I think now you’re seeing a lot more inventory there available to them to buy. I think their willingness to test things where they’re unsure of outcomes has been increased more than ever before.

We’re really talking about kind of the next step, the digital revolution maybe seven years ago and people were early movers in that space and they had an advantage.

We’re thinking about the space in a similar way. There’s an opportunity to get in early and test things, build operational muscle between teams that maybe haven’t worked together as closely before. We really see that as an opportunity this year to do a lot of that work.

Agency Teams Working Together to Buy OTT Inventory

You have teams where historically broadcast teams and national teams have bought broadcast. Then you have teams that are more precision or audience driven that buy programmatic. You’re seeing a lot of work between those teams now to think about the way we’re buying connected TV, inventory if you will, or OTT.

You have a broadcast team that might be negotiating as part of an upfront and then you have an activation team who’s actually activating within a quarter against a specific audience, buying that inventory in-quarter.

Those are teams that historically don’t work as closely together on an ongoing basis outside of upfront. We’re seeing that that’s an opportunity to bring those teams closer together and working more closely with clients who learn these new channels and understand that. That goes as well to analytics and measurement. How are we measuring them? What’s the contribution when compared to historically traditional channels like linear TV?

Opportunity for Direct to Consumer Companies

I think there’s an opportunity for direct to consumer companies (DTC) to enter the space through these new channels that didn’t exist before from a linear broadcast perspective. A lot of inventory was sold in the upfront and there was limited inventory available on an ongoing basis. That’s changing with these new channels in inventory that’s available through connected TV or FEP inventory.

They have an opportunity to buy that in a way that benefits their business model and works with the way that their business has set up to run with retail quarters, seasonality, the things that make sense for them. They don’t have to make a commitment a year in advance. They can do it when it makes sense for their business.

Getting Smarter With Broadcast Partners

I think there’s an opportunity for us to get smarter about the way we partner with our broadcast partners. Historically we’ve gone in and we say we want this CPM and this flexibility and this is the programming or dayparts we want to buy.

I think there’s an opportunity for us to say, hey, we want to buy this from an upfront perspective, but here’s all the other inventory that you manage that we also want to think about buying. We can collectively leverage dollars and get things that are valuable for our brands and our clients that allows them the flexibility to test these new channels.

TV Attribution – A Big Next Step for Ad Buyers

I think TV attribution is one of the big next steps for our industry. Being able to understand a contribution of a specific channel and its cost and associated with an outcome the brand’s care about is I think the next big opportunity for us. Then we’ll understand investment in media mix across those different video channels.

The project in question is an effort to standardize the formatting of SMS messages that are used in two-factor authentication by applications, websites and more. As AppleInsider reports, “first proposed by Apple WebKit engineers and backed by Google in January, the initiative seeks to simplify the OTP SMS mechanism commonly used by websites, businesses and other entities to confirm login credentials as part of two-step authentication systems.”

As the project’s GitHub page points out, “Many websites deliver one-time codes over SMS.

“Without a standard format for such messages, programmatic extraction of codes from them has to rely on heuristics, which are often unreliable and error-prone. Additionally, without a mechanism for associating such codes with specific websites, users might be tricked into providing the code to malicious sites.”

The GitHub page lists Theresa O’Connor of Apple and Sam Goto of Google as the authors. While the two companies directly compete with one another on many fronts, their largest point of competition is the smartphone market, where iOS and Android dominate. Apple and Google working together to standardize something that impacts all users, regardless of their smartphone of choice, is good for everyone involved.

Oracle has partnered with the Internet Society in an effort to improve internet security. IXPs are what’s responsible for connections between different networks, but they also represent a vulnerable point, where connections can be routed incorrectly—either by mistake or maliciously.

According to Oracle, “implementing route filtering at IXPs offers the opportunity to make real progress in the improvement of internet routing hygiene. IXPs serve a vital role in the infrastructure of the internet by facilitating thousands of connections between the networks of telecoms, content providers and other major businesses.

“However, the implementation of route filtering can be complicated and to date there has been no way to independently and programmatically verify whether an IXP was appropriately filtering its routes. Using data graciously published by Packet Clearinghouse (PCH) and data processing supported by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the Oracle Internet Intelligence team developed IXP Filter Check to analyze route filtering at nearly 200 IXPs around the world.

“By monitoring the routes passed by route servers at these IXPs, and identifying those routes that should have been filtered, IXP Filter Check identifies gaps in route filtering and aims to assist in technical compliance of MANRS IXP requirements.

“In the course of its development, IXP Filter Check has identified major filtering misconfigurations at three IXPs including a month-long RPKI filter outage at one of the world’s largest IXPs. By detecting these problems, IXP Filter Check enabled cooperating route server administrators to fix their route filtering and also validated the need for third party technical review of route server filtering.”

With IXP Filter Check system admins will have one more tool in their arsenal to protect networks and improve the security of the internet.

Matt Liebowitz, Global Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Leader at Dell EMC, discusses how to migrate enterprises to the multi-cloud in an interview with theCUBE at Dell Technologies World 2019 in Las Vegas:

Multi-Cloud is Not Just Using More Than One Cloud

The most common thing we see from customers when they say I’m doing multi-cloud is they’re actually using more than one cloud. That’s not multi-cloud. You really need to tie it together with a cloud management platform, something that can bring all the pieces together that’s API enabled so that they can programmatically access resources. When customers tell us they’ve got multi-cloud but they’re really consuming something in Azure and something in AWS they’ve just created more IT silos. We’re trying to get away from that. They can use all those clouds but wrap it together in that common control plane so you can understand your estate and actually manage it and consume it.

I think most customers are responding. The needs of the business are changing and they need to respond more quickly so they just consume cloud resources as they can. That often leads to the sprawl. We try to just wrap it together, do an analysis, figure out what’s out there, and help them not only understand where the applications should live but wrap an operating model around it so they can start consuming it properly. They can then understand what they’re going to advertise in their service catalog.

Are You a Digital Laggard or a Digital Leader?

We take what analysts do and we also have our own studies and indexes all the way starting from what we call digital laggards all the way to the digital leaders. What we found is actually most of the customers are either laggards or they’re just starting out. Maybe they’ve made some loose investments but they haven’t walked the path that far. There’s stuff kind of everywhere. Customers don’t often know where to start but I think they’re responding to the needs of the business. I don’t think it’s anything that they’re doing that’s wrong but it’s a little bit of the Wild West for sure.

It’s all about business value and business outcome. The customers who are the most successful have a business reason for what they’re trying to do. They’re not going to public cloud because Gartner said they should, they’re doing it because they know they’re going to get an outcome. They’re going to be able to go into new markets or operate faster and deploy applications faster. Those are the ones that are further down the line. I would say the ones that are the laggards are the ones that are just sort of peeking under the covers of what they should do. They’re just starting out there. They’ve got some workloads in multiple clouds and they need to get a handle on it but they’re just starting.

Customers Need an Easy Button for Cloud

Customers need in a lot of ways, I hate to say it, but almost an easy button for cloud. Often when they try to build it themselves, they bring the components together themselves, but it’s really difficult to do that integration work. I’m in consulting so we’re all about the outcome. But this product, Dell Technologies Cloud, is going to help accelerate for us in consulting so that they can quickly get to a state where they have a functional cloud that they can start consuming. Then we can help them with the day two to actually drive business value, consumption of the cloud and that sort of thing.

We have a framework on how we approach things for multi-cloud and for lots of other things. We use a methodology that we call as-is-to-be where we determine their current state, project where they’re going to be in the future and build a roadmap that’s actually actionable. Then I think what differentiates the methodology is we tie it to a business case. We tie it to an outcome and a financial outcome so that executives and IT leaders can see that this is not just another IT project. They’re going to get true value out of it. We build a roadmap pretty quick, within three to six weeks, that’s actually actionable. We build consensus and that’s how we get started.

Doug Fleming, Head of AdvancedTV at Hulu, discussed Hulu’s embrace of programmatic advertising via their new private marketplace in an interview with BeetTV:

March Towards Automation

Since the inception of programmatic advertising, the goal always was that it was on equal footing with direct sold. We didn’t separate it. This wasn’t a remnant solution. As we’ve grown to 25 million subscribers we now have enough inventory and enough access that we have decided to create a team under me to go out and affect those agency trading desks and those folks that have decided to bring programmatic buying in-house.

When we look at the landscape you can see this march towards automation and we’re not going to get in the way of that. We’re going to embrace that and we’re going to do it  in a very private curtailed way. There is no concept of a remnant provider reselling our inventory. Everyone has to be blessed and driven through the Hulu process.

Hulu Works with Telaria But Owns the Delivery Logic

On the demand side, it’s a mix of everyone. There is client direct, there are agency trading desks, and then the DSPs are good partners too. In each of those scenarios, we need and identify the brands before they come in so that they are attributed to the appropriate seller on our side. There’s no semblance of a DSP just hanging on and reselling in an always-on situation. We actually curate that environment and make sure that all of our t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted so that we know who the advertiser is coming in and we can manage that.

What’s unique about our work with Telaria is really that the Hulu ad server owns the delivery logic. So in this case what separated Telaria was that they enabled us to do things the way we wanted to do them. They kind of powered us. We have very smart people in place who oversee these positions and they came in and worked with us to develop the appropriate technology for us to go to market the way we wanted to go to market.

Hulu Private Marketplace Gives Advertisers Choice and Control

What it’s given us is the ability to take all advertising in. We can category block appropriately, so people maintain their category exclusivity within pods. We have the ability to take multiple advertisers and a single deal ID and manage all that blocking. It also allows us to open up to the programmatic marketplace a full suite of products. We’ve always run a private marketplace. However, in the past, we had automated guaranteed and unreserved fixed. Those are fixed price deal types. Unreserved gave you the ability to make a data-driven decision and if you chose to take that impression you paid the fixed price that we agreed on.

The invite-only auction, which is I would say our new shiny toy that’s getting wrapped in the PMP, provides us the opportunity for a variable floor price. So now the advertiser pays what they deem appropriate for that specific audience. It gives them more choice and control. When we look at our offering that’s what it’s about. It’s the genesis behind us rolling out a programmatic offering. Advertisers want choice and control and we want to allow them to have that.

“Marketing has evolved significantly over recent years, and the old way of operating is no longer sustainable,” said Cadogan.  “As we look at the programmatic market today, we see a sector that has experienced massive growth and adoption, but at the same time has stalled in its ability to deliver real innovation for marketers and publishers.  We believe it is time to take a completely fresh look at the market and place a major bet on building the infrastructure necessary to drive the next wave of innovation.”

The company says that prior to 2019, almost one-quarter of the OpenX tech workforce was dedicated to maintaining legacy infrastructure. They say that the transition to Google Cloud Platform will free resources to focus on new growth areas for the company, such as people-based marketing, video, and CTV.

“Both OpenX and Google Cloud are dedicated to helping customers achieve their goals with cutting-edge technology,” says Chris Klayko, Managing Director, Americas, Google Cloud. “This collaboration will allow for continued innovation leveraging both OpenX’s Exchange Platform and Google Cloud’s commitment to performance, collaboration, and big data optimization at scale.”

Timothy Cadogan, CEO of OpenX, discussed why OpenX is moving its platform to Google Cloud Platform on Bloomberg Technology:

We Process Over a Trillion Transactions a Day

We run one of the largest advertising exchanges which means we process over a trillion transactions a day. The volume that we’re working with is huge. As we started to think about all of the new innovation we want to bring to the market over the next couple of years we realized that’s going to require even more computing power. We also need that computing power to be extremely efficient.

We started to map out a path to move to the public cloud, which is Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon (AWS). We really wanted to focus on a system that would give us an incredible amount of scale and enable us to innovate at a rate that would really make a difference in the industry. We didn’t want to have to continue to work on a lot of the maintenance of our own infrastructure that we had to do with our own servers.

5G Requires Rapid Compelling Advertising Experience

An example of the importance of this is moving to 5G. When consumers start to move to 5G on their phones and have a very rapid experience, the advertising experience needs to be incredibly compelling. We wanted to make sure that we could run on infrastructure there. That’s why we wanted to move to the public cloud.

With Google, what you have is really the largest advertising infrastructure in the world and they do a lot of the foundational work that we can build on top of.

After two decades, Google is retiring AdWords and DoubleClick names and rebranding them instead. They are also being reorganized in order to better showcase their capabilities and growth trajectory. DoubleClick products and the Google Analytics 360 Suite will now fall under the umbrella of Google Marketing Platform. DoubleClick Ad Exchange and DoubleClick for Publishers will be integrated into the Google Ad Manager while AdWords will now be called Google Ads.

Google AdWords is officially becoming Google Ads! Meet our new brand and read more about the full announcement here: https://t.co/7lal06WGGX pic.twitter.com/MiD5xGaGvR

— Google AdWords (@adwords) June 27, 2018

The newly introduced Google Marketing Platform is designed to assist clients in planning, buying, measuring and optimizing their digital media and customer experience. The decision to merge the DoubleClick and Analytics 360 Suite brands was the result of marketer feedback regarding the advantages of using analytics and ads technology to create improved customer understanding and bigger business results.

Meanwhile, Google Ads will represent the extent of the company’s advertising capacity across its numerous properties, like Google Maps, Google Play, and YouTube. Google Ads will also roll out a new type of ad strategy called Smart Campaigns. This feature will be utilizing machine learning technology and focuses on small businesses. It will be the default experience of start-up companies.

As for the Google Ad Manager, the unified programmatic system is developed to help partners to generate higher revenue in a more efficient manner.

The three new brands are being hailed as a way to help all advertisers and publishers pick the right solutions for their business, regardless of the size. It also aims to make it easier for companies to provide consumers with trustworthy ads and an improved experience regardless of the channels and devices used.

The restructuring of its ads business was announced on Tuesday by Sridhar Ramaswamy, the SVP of Ads at Google. According to Ramaswamy, the company’s extensive ad offerings is challenging for advertisers, ad agencies, and publishers to navigate. He also mentioned that while advertising opportunities have never been greater, it has also become more complicated.

“It is harder for advertisers, publishers, and agencies that help them choose the right products for their business and know how to use them,” Ramaswamy said.

Despite the changes, brands have nothing to worry about as Ramaswamy emphasized that Google’s “underlying products aren’t changing.” But while the rebranding is basically just a name change, there will be small changes in some ad interfaces that will streamline the different services that the company’s advertising and marketing products offer.

In this age where data breaches are a fact of life, securing company data has become even more important since businesses are now moving their systems into the cloud. In response to this need, cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) just launched a slew of services that provide businesses with easy-to-use tools to help them secure their cloud data.

Psst, can you keep a secret? Now AWS does it for you! Announcing AWS Secrets Manager to secure & rotate your secrets. https://t.co/HiIXgBwmyx pic.twitter.com/r58Z09Mru4

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) April 4, 2018

One of these new services is the appropriately named Secrets Manager, which can be used by companies to store very important information such as passwords. AWS’s new offering is timely considering the latest round or reports saying that improperly stored passwords on the platform had been compromised by cyber attacks.

“You never, ever again have to put a secret in your code,” Amazon CTO Werner Vogels assured audiences during the AWS Summit. Vogels added that the service “allows us to build systems that are way more secure than we could ever do in the past.”

#AWS Secrets Manager: Store, Distribute, and Rotate Credentials Securely /by @jrhunt – my favourite launch from the San Francisco #AWSSummit https://t.co/eFW92pBASQ pic.twitter.com/5YWNJq9fs1

— Werner Vogels (@Werner) April 4, 2018

The Secrets Manager tool is not  AWS’s first tool geared toward enhancing cybersecurity for its clients. The company previously introduced a simpler security system which was capable of storing encryption keys and worked with dedicated hardware modules.

This time, however, the brand new AWS Secrets Manager has a broader use. Aside from storing passwords, the tool can also be used for storing database login data as well as keys to application programming interfaces for other services.

Along with Secrets Manager, AWS also launched the Firewall Manager. It gives clients centralized control over security policies across their entire organization and can also be used for control over multiple accounts and applications. The tool makes it easier for clients’ security teams to spot non-compliant applications and resolve issues in minutes.

The recent tools are well-timed to address the security concerns clients might have raised in light of the recent incidents of data breaches in the cloud service. In October 2017, Accenture’s data stored by AWS was leaked and over 40,000 passwords were compromised. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation also experienced a data leak which included login information in November of last year.

Of course, the new AWS tool isn’t free. The company charges 40 cents per secret per month as well as 5 cents per 10,000 programmatic requests.

[Feature image via AWS website]

“With the addition of video to our native ads solution, publishers can now capture premium video advertising budgets on their non-video content,” said Jonathan Bellack, DoubleClick’s Director of Product Management of Publisher Platforms.

Chris Quinn, Head of Commercial Operations at Kijiji, which is a subsidiary of eBay, commented on their tests with native ad video:

“The [DoubleClick] native video templates — content and app-install — enable Kijiji to give our advertisers an alternative to banner and static native. We were excited about the ability to run assets seamlessly without embedded video players, which will hopefully give us a jumpstart in the video space. Testing has just begun across our iOS app, and we look forward to seeing positive results and potentially incorporating into our greater offering in 2017.”

DoubleClick Extends Exchange Bidding to Mobile

DoubleClick has also expanded the beta of Exchange Bidding to include mobile apps.

“Exchange Bidding helps publishers maximize demand for every impression by letting them put multiple exchanges into competition in real time without adding any new client-side code,” said Quinn. “Since we announced it earlier this year, the number of participating publishers has grown 4x, the number of exchange partners has doubled, and we’ve moved the product from alpha into closed beta in the US.”

Christian Sieweke, Senior Product Manager at Smaato, commented on their use of Exchange Bidding:

“By integrating directly with DoubleClick for Publishers, Smaato can compete in real time for ad impressions based on price and priority, in parallel with other exchanges. We’re delighted to be an early participant in Exchange Bidding and look forward to expanding this solution to all of our partners.”

DoubleClick Extends Dynamic Ad Insertion To VOD

They also announced that they were extending Dynamic Ad Insertion to video on demand (VOD). Dynamic Ad Insertion delivers seamless, personalized ad experiences to all screens, especially TV.

“Publishers like A+E Networks are now inserting relevant, highly targeted ads into both long- and short-form VOD content across all devices, and delivering personalized ads while eliminating common pain points like buffering,” noted Bellack. “This feature will be capable of serving both direct-sold and programmatic campaigns – in both cases delivering smarter, data-driven ads that perform better.”

It’s a huge problem and many in the industry think that it’s immoral, illegal, anti free speech and is killing journalism. Some also point to one positive that was spawned by adblocking, making sites leaner and more enjoyable to the consumer. Adblocking has forced publishers and advertisers, however unfairly, to own up to their own faults.

This report is designed to bring perspective to the rise of adblockers and how they are impacting the internet ecosystem and what the future is likely to bring.

Some in the industry are exasperated that we continue to let adblockers have such a negative impact on publishing and advertising.

“The reason it has to happen is just like video didn’t kill the radio star and just like Netflix hasn’t killed live TV and just like Napster never killed music, adblocking will not be allowed to kill journalism,” stated Anna Hickey, Managing Director Maxus UK at the 2016 Shift conference. “Journalism is too important to us culturally and economically and we all have our part to play in making sure that it survives.”

“Why did we lose track of user experience?” asks IAB President Randall Rothenberg. “For much of the past decade, the digital ad industry, aided and abetted by venture capitalists with no long-term stake in the viability of media and marketing businesses, have been in a headlong rush to subvert industry standards, hoping they can own the single business model that can lock in proprietary advantage and lock out competitors in the $600 billion global ad industry.”

As Much as 40% of Ads Are Blocked

“Where is it heading and will it actually be more of a storm in a teacup when we look back on this or is it the beginning of a major reform of the advertising ecosystem?” asked Rufus Olins, CEO at Newsworks, a UK based marketing body for national newspapers. “Adblocking is a key topic for this industry and it continues to develop as an issue not just in the UK but around the world.”

A March 2016 IAB/YouGov study on the state of ad blocking in the U.K. shows that 22% of British adults currently use adblocking software, up from 18% in their Oct. 2015 study. According to “The Cost of Ad Blocking” 2015 report by PageFair and Adobe (PDF), 16% of the US online population blocked ads during Q2 2015, which is just slightly less than in the UK, and at this point in August 2016 is likely the same or higher than the UK.

An IAB study in 2014 paints a much grimmer picture, concluding that over a third of US users, and 41% of Millennials, had installed ad-blocking software. The main reason people was a concern that advertising could infect their computers or smartphones with viruses. However, more than two-thirds also believed that advertising slowed interrupted their online experience and slowed them down.

40% THINK They’re Using an Ad Blocker, 26% Actually Are

According to a July 2016 IAB report, “Ad Blocking: Who Blocks Ads, Why and How to Win Them Back” (PDF), the actual number of consumers blocking ads is 26%. Many people think they are using adblock software when they are simply blocking popups.

This recent IAB report says that most adblock users are men 18-34 years old and that these same men make up the 15% of smart phone users that block ads.

Of consumers not blocking ads, 20% are past adblockers that were motivated by publishers who are blocking their content from them. The study also found that 17% of users not blocking ads may do so in the future.

So, why do people block ads? The study concluded the obvious, that consumers using ad blockers, want uninterrupted, quick browsing and a streamlined user experience. There is a perception that sites are easier to navigate without ads. This is also true for mobile phone users with adblockers.

The most annoying ads; Ads that block content, long video ads before short videos, ads that follow down the page as the user scrolls and auto-start ads. The main difference between people who use adblockers and those that don’t is that they are simply less tolerant of ads.

Adblocking Costs $12.1 Billion Now and by 2020 it will be $27 Billion

According to The Drum News adblocking will cost US publishers $12.1 billion in lost display ad revenues. Optimal.com predicts that this will is 23.8% of total earnings.

A new study from Juniper Research estimates that online publishers will lose over $27 billion by 2020, which will account for almost 10% of the total digital advertising market.

Is Adblocking Stealing?

Rufus Olins hosted a session on adblocking at the 2016 Shift Conference in London. The session looked at where adblocking would be in 5 years and how it would impact online publishing and advertising and whether or not adblocking would put us all out of a job, as Piers North put it.

North equates adblocking to literally stealing, the same as someone breaking into his house and taking property. “As we speak there are tens of thousands of people coming into our properties and consuming our content and there is no value exchange, absolutely none,” said North. “Should I be worried about that? Can I do anything about it? Is it worth me doing anything about it?”

“Adblocking continues to grow and if we do nothing about it, it will continue eating into our audiences and therefore taking away revenues from publishers and also take away audience from agencies and brands,” North said.

Adblockers Are Profiteers Holding Us For Ransom

“Adblocking has reached a tipping point,” said Hickey. “We know this because, bizarrely enough, adblocking was featured in an episode of South Park recently, which is very odd. Adblocking is literally being written about in hundreds and thousands of articles, but the thing that i think is not being spoken about enough is the truth behind this trend. The truth is that adblocking is really a bunch of profiteers that are holding our industry for ransom.”

“What’s actually going on is they are going into our publishers and demanding a significant proportion of their revenues in order to be included in a white list,” she said. “It simply is not acceptable. The reality is that if you play that scenario out of the next 4-5 years, it causes the death of journalism, because journalism is funded by advertising.”

“Most important, the publishers are starting to take action already,” says Hickey. “They are starting to deal with adblocking in a way that suites their audience. What I believe will happen next and is absolutely critical, is that the publishing industry will come together and act collectively to tackle the racketeers. Probably it will get legal quite soon which means it will get messy before it gets better.”

“Many of their business models are undoubtedly illegal,” says Rothenberg. “Already, Shine’s model of ISP-level ad-blocking has been cited by regulators as a probable violation of net neutrality principles.”

Is adblocking really about censorship? “This is why I hate the ad-block profiteers,” Randall Rothenberg told the audience at the opening keynote of the 2016 IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Rothenberg is President & CEO at Interactive Advertising Bureau. “Now, you may be aware of a kerfuffle that began about 10 days ago, when an unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes at a for-profit German company called AdBlock-Plus took to the digisphere to complain over and over that IAB had “disinvited” them to this convention. That, of course, is as much a lie as the others they routinely try to tell the world.”

Rothenberg continued. “We had never invited them in the first place. They registered for this event online. When we found out, we cancelled the registration and reversed their credit card billing. Why? For the simple reason that they are stealing from publishers, subverting freedom of the press, operating a business model predicated on censorship of content, and ultimately forcing consumers to pay more money for less – and less diverse – information.”

“AdBlock-Plus is: an old-fashioned extortion racket, gussied up in the flowery but false language of contemporary consumerism,” says Rothenberg. ”

“I’m far from the first person to notice this,” he said. “Writing up an interview with AdBlock-Plus’s leaders more than two years ago in Salon, Andrew Leonard said: “It still sounds to me like something that bears more than a passing resemblance to a protection racket. Pay up, or we’ll break your windows! Pay up, or millions of Adblock Plus users will never see any of your ads.”

“Surveys repeatedly show that upwards of 75% of consumers prefer ad-supported Internet sites where the content is free over ad-free sites where they would pay fees for content,” Rothenberg said. “Fewer than 10% of consumers want to pay for content. By driving digital publishers, including some of the most prestigious news organizations in the world, to impose fees on consumers in order to continue to support their business and content-development objectives, the ad-block profiteers are subverting the will of consumers.”

The Bad News is AdBlock-Plus is Not Alone

IAB President Randall Rothenberg noted that for-profit adblockers have become the “darlings of the venture capital industry and angel investors” and include otherwise mainstream advertising technology and publishing companies.

There’s Shine, an Israeli startup that sells adblocking software for mobile phone networks so that they can block ads at the network level. Shine is backed by Horizons Ventures which backed Spotify and Facebook.

Then there’s Brave, that was launched by former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich. Rothenberg says that “his business model not only strips advertisements from publishers’ pages – it replaces them with his own for-profit ads.”

“The ad-block profiteers are building for-profit companies whose business models are premised on impeding the movement of commercial, political, and public-service communication between and among producers and consumers,” says Rothenberg. “They offer to lift their toll gates for those wealthy enough to pay them off, or who submit to their demands that they constrict their freedom of speech to fit the shackles of their revenue schemes.”

Can Consumers Be Persuaded to Stop Using Adblockers?

Can adblocking kill the free internet? “It’s inconceivable, I think, that we would simply just allow this threat from adblocking to continue without actually having a strategy,” says IAB UK’s Steve Chester. “It’s something which we will have to develop. I don’t underestimate that it’s potentially an existential threat.”

The IAB study looked at how many people would turn off adblocking if requested to by a site as a condition to view content. Of those that are using adblocking software, 64% have seen notices on a website requesting that they turn off their adblocker. Over half (54%) said that they would sometimes temporarily switch off the software if it was the only way to access the content. For 18-24 year olds, 73% are willing to turn off adblocking.

The IAB study showed that 20% of people who have tried an adblocker no longer use one. The main reason is because of changing to a new device but the second most popular reason, not being able to access content, gives hope to publishers and advertisers that they can eventually change the mindset of people.

“The IAB believes that an ad funded internet is essential for providing revenue to publishers so they can continue to make their content, services and applications widely available at little, or no cost,” stated IAB UK’s CEO, Guy Phillipson. “We believe ad blocking undermines this approach and could mean consumers have to pay for content they currently get for free.”

“Part of the solution to tackle adblocking lies in making consumers more aware of the consequences, which seems like it’s starting to filter through,” Phillipson added. “If they realize it means they can’t access content or that to do so requires paying for it, then they might stop using ad blockers. It requires reinforcing this “trade-off” message – ads help to fund the content they enjoy for free.”

“More and more publishers are initiating what IAB calls “detection-notice-choice-and constraint” regimes,” says Rothenberg. “They are installing scripts that enable them to see when consumers coming to their sites have ad-blockers installed; they are providing notice to consumers about that and about publishers’ business models, which largely require advertising to support otherwise free content.”

“They are offering consumers choices – to turn off their ad-blockers, to pay a subscription fee, or another alternative,” he added. “And absent one of those choices, the publishers are constraining consumers’ access to content, reinforcing the immense value of what they deliver.”

Less Ads Would Be Blocked if Ads Weren’t So Annoying

The IAB study found that 45% of people would be less likely to use an adblocker if ads didn’t interfere with a page. In other words, people are tired of bloated Flash ads or sites that block content with popups or interstitials and the use of adblockers are simply a logical response to them. If there were less ads, 29% would be motivated to not use an adblocker and 12% would consider this if the ads were more relevant.

Adblocking has had some positive impacts on publishing by motivating publishers to stop serving annoying ads like pop-ups and interstitials. “We are organically moving towards formats that are more acceptable,” Piers North, the Strategic Director of Trinity Mirror Solutions told the Shift audience. “Yet having said that, if you look at the mobile experience, in-specials and pop-ups have had a resurgence. Adblocking is accelerating the need for us to get our house in order to make sure that the ad experience is as good as possible.” He noted that pop-ups and interstitials are a short-term play and that if you continue to do that you are going to kill your audience.

A Better Ad Experience

“If you provide website visitors with choice, and that’s what we advocate at the IAB and that’s where we see the industry going,” North said. “We’ve created the idea of lean standards or lean ads which are much leaner. We are looking to create a charter around that, so we are asking businesses, no matter where you sit, the buy side, sell side, intermediary to sign onto this charter as best practices.”

“LEAN stands for advertising and ad operations that are light, encrypted, AdChoices-supporting, and non-invasive,” says Rothenberg. “We believe LEAN will be as important to the future of the digital advertising industry as the first IAB Universal Ad Package was to its creation.”

Rothenberg says the the IAB intends to make LEAN the foundation of their activities for the foreseeable future. “And among our very first goals is introducing a public LEAN scoring system by which all publishers, all advertisers, and all agencies will be able to measure their activities against rational, reasonable, and consumer-friendly performance benchmarks,” he said.

“LEAN is the basis for a sustainable advertising ecosystem. We firmly believe that a combination of LEAN advertising and media, and publisher implementation of detection-notice-choice-and-constraint, will limit the impact of ad-blocking.”

“We want to actually give people a choice at the point of access,” says North. “You can come into this property and have a range of choices. It might be pay for this content, accept the ad experience, but it will be a better ad experience, or it might be some other form of payment like micro-payments or even a survey in exchange for access to content.”

“I think in 5 years ad blocking will continue to exist, but it will be on the fringes because we will have gotten our house in order, delivering a great ad experience and giving people choice,” he said. “I also think that we will move more toward native advertising in order to avoid adblockers. Remember, adblocking doesn’t kill all forms of advertising.”

“As agencies we are already taking significant steps to add value back into that consumer journey,” Hickey said. “Let’s face it, things like programmatic, launched a few years ago, some of it was done really badly, so we understand that younger people have had really bad advertising journeys and were incredibly annoying. Really good agencies are getting really good at adding value back into that whole journey and also getting much better at the nuts and bolts behind it.”

“The major driving force behind adoption of blockers is because users feel that advertisements are intrusive and detrimental to the user experience,” says Sam Barker, an analyst for Juniper Research and author of the May 2016 study ‘Digital Advertisers Vs the Ad Blockers’. “To make the browsing experience user friendly, advertisers need to find ways to serve ads that do not obstruct the objective of the user. Ad formats such as interstitials and pop-up ads are seen as very intrusive but, on the other hand, native advertisements work very well.”

Adblocking is a Brutal Countermeasure

“I’m not to make any predictions about adblocking, and nor should you, at least not with confidence,” says Ian Lesley, author and brand strategist at the Shift adblocking session. “Ten years ago everyone knew that TV advertising was dead and DVR’s meant that ad skipping was about to become the norm.”

“Skip to 2016, last years spend on interactive TV broke the $5 billion barrier for the first time,” said Lesley. “The question is why didn’t we see this coming or rather why didn’t we see it not coming? Simple, we fixated on the technology and we forgot about the human.”

“TV or print ads don’t take much time,” he said. “They don’t require anyone to think or make a choice or do anything. The cost of ignoring them is zero and when they are good, they are really good. Forgetting about the human is a perennial problem. Five years ago everybody knew that digital data meant that we could send people relevant information instead of this terrible flimflam called brand image. Clever us. Lucky consumers.”

“What’s the reality? Humans care about all sorts of things, but most of them most of the time do not care about brands,” stated Lesley. “I know it’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s why the dream of interactivity, engagement and brand conversations has all but died and it’s why people will reach for the ad blockers if the ads continue to be so insanely annoying.”

“Here’s another thing about humans, they make terrible predictions,” commented Lesley. “I’ve almost given up on prediction but not quite. I will predict that unless online advertising changes its form radically in the next five years humans are going to send it the way of interactive TV.”

“The point is that adblocking is an equal and opposite reaction to the brutally bad nature of online advertising,” says Lesley. “This is not a platform that has found its form. There was a moment when TV advertising discovered that you could do stuff with a 30 second ad that was really great and entertaining. People found ways to make that a very rich experience. That hasn’t happened yet with online advertising.”

“The experience of online ads is not pleasant and it actually gets in the way of them enjoying what they want to enjoy,” Lesley said. “So there is a distinct possibility that they will reach for a brutal countermeasure. Unless we get better at doing online advertising, creating things that people enjoy or at least can passively disregard and passively absorb when they want to then I’m afraid the adblockers will march on.”

Adblocking Goes Mobile

Some quick facts from the PageFair 2016 Mobile Adblocking Report:

• At least 419 million people (22% of the world’s 1.9bn smartphone users) are blocking ads on the mobile web.
• Both mobile web and in-app ads can now be blocked.
• As of March 2016 an estimated 408 million people are actively using mobile adblocking browsers (i.e., a mobile browser that blocks ads by default).
• As of March 2016 there are 159 million users of mobile adblocking browsers in China, 122 million in India, and 38 million in Indonesia.
• As of March 2016 in Europe and North America there were 14 million monthly active users of mobile adblocking browsers.
• A further 4.9 million content blocking and in-app adblocking apps were downloaded from the app stores in Europe and North America since September 2014.

“Although consumer adoption of mobile level ad blockers is lower than the desktop market, Juniper Research believes that adoption is set to witness a sizable increase,” said Juniper Research analyst Sam Barker. “Drivers of this include Apples inclusion of ad blocking compatibility with Safari and increasing consumer awareness.”

He adds, that much like desktop browsers, mobile ad blockers are not able to block all types of advertising:

• Internet Search and Display Adverts will be blocked, however like the desktop space, native adverts are not able to be blocked.
• Video Display Adverts are able to be blocked, except if the video is channelled through a mobile application.
• The possibility of blocking in-app advertising has been explored, however when speaking to players in the market many feel the practice to be morally unethical or the technical challenges too costly.

“In comparison to the desktop space, the mobile ad blocking market is still fairly nascent,” said Barker. “Since the announcement from Apple in September 2015 that iOS’s native browser would be able to support ad blocking applications there has been a rise in the number of users adopting the technology.

Sites are Fighting Back Against Adblockers

Forbes has taken an aggressive approach to adblocking, revealing that of those blocked, 44% of them turned off their ad blockers in order to access their content. Forbes is continuing to test other strategies including a version of the IAB Lean Ads concept.

According to Digiday, Slate has been using messaging to try and persuade users to turn off ad blockers and to sign up for their premium low ad content plans.

Wired says that 20% of their traffic comes from people using adblockers and in response to that they have restricted access to those using them. They offer 2 options to site visitors with adblockers:

1. You can simply add WIRED.com to your ad blocker’s whitelist, so you view ads. When you do, we will keep the ads as “polite” as we can, and you will only see standard display advertising.
2. You can subscribe to a brand-new Ad-Free version of WIRED.com. For $1 a week, you will get complete access to our content, with no display advertising or ad tracking.

Bloomberg has taken a different approach, cleaning up their site and adding more white space. “Everyone’s screaming and yelling, so let’s not scream and yell — let’s do the opposite,” Chris Briseno, digital creative director at Bloomberg LP, told Digiday.

“Think about that for a minute,” said Muret in a post on the DoubleClick Publisher Blog this week. “That’s a long time! Not only is this frustrating for users but it’s also a huge missed opportunity for publishers.”

A web surfers sensitivity to website speed have gone up significantly in the last few years. In a recent study of google.com search, the Google team found that every four hundred millisecond delay in delivering search results resulted in a half point drop in overall search volume. “It’s about the time it takes to blink and on mobile the situation is even more important,” commented Muret in a talk at the DoubleClick Leadership Summit earlier this week. “Creating a great user experience necessarily means making it super fast, but an alarming 77% percent of publishers today, their web pages take more than 10 seconds to load, and the average is actually 19 seconds.”

AMP for Ads

Google’s main initiative to make the mobile web faster is a the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP), launched last Fall, which is an open sourced global community of publishers and other tech companies. Google’s analysis shows that mobile web pages that use AMP HTML load four times faster and use 10 times less data on average than non-AMP mobile web pages. Over 145 million AMP pages have been created so far from 640,000 demands. Google sees AMP as a first step because it only covers publisher content, but not the ads, which means opening a web page still involves “much slower loading javascript bundles.”

At the DoubleClick conference Muret announced AMP for Ads, a new initiative to incorporate AMP technology into the ads themselves in order to make the entire mobile experience faster. In an example that Paul Muret gave the Washington Post, which is an early adopter of AMP and AMP for Ads, instead of the ad taking 4 seconds longer to load than the publishers content, with AMP for Ads it loads seamlessly at the same time as the mobile page content.

AMP for Landing Pages

Google announced “AMP for Landing Pages” to make the click-through fast as well. This much speedier experience is likely to significantly increase conversions for mobile marketers.

“Making experiences fast is the first step, but they also need to be really well integrated into their environments into the context that they sit in,” said Muret. “If ads are not integrated well it can lead to ad blindness, or worse, annoyance and ad blocking. As an industry we need to come together and think about creating better ads for all of our users.”

Muret believes that good integration starts with native advertising. He said that we need the ads to really fit into the context of experience.

DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM)

If you are a DoubleClick user this will be of interest to you, Muret announced programmatic native in DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) which “brings the power of native to all advertisers to be able to run programmatically at scale across all their campaigns instead of delivering arbitrary of rectangles of content all over the place.” He said that advertiser’s can create asset bundles that can include headlines, images, and colors that are “dynamically fit to the form and function of the page it’s on.” This should make for a much more integrated experience which Google hopes will result in less ad blindness, less blocking and more clicks!

Google’s DoubleClick also wants to make sure that there is enough inventory for these dynamic programmatic ads. That’s why Muret also announced that DoubleClick was expanding their support for native and Double-Click for Publishers to include ALL app and web content and ALL deal types, programmatic and reservations. What this means for DoubleClick is that they now offer full coverage of the massive shift to native advertising.

Muret noted that DoubleClick’s new technology, in a test with eBay, caused a 3 times increase in user engagement compare to eBay’s normal non-native ads.

Programmatic Video

Video is the future of internet advertising without a doubt, and of course DoubleClick and Google are on top of this trend. Muret said that an amazing 85% of “Ad Age Top 100 Advertisers” have already bought programmatic video ads on DoubleClick Bid Manager. More importantly, they are seeing a 550% increase in programmatic video revenue from TV & media companies year over year.

Google, like many other tech media companies, is at the forefront of the video advertising revolution that has been long predicted, but is now finally happening. One of the key trends is multi-device viewing which Google sees as an opportunity to deliver video ads in even more places while users seamlessly move back and forth between different content formats.

“Over 90% of people use multiple devices sequentially to accomplish a task,”said Meghan Lee, Agency Development Manager for Google AdWords. “Adwords advertisers are used to a very simple and clear way of measurement and they have that same expectation on mobile.”

Outstream Video

Muret also announced a new product from DoubleClick, Outstream Video, which is for non-video content. “For advertisers this means getting additional reach with the power of sight, sound and motion,” Muret told the conference audience. “For publishers this means tapping into TV budgets and driving yield even when the the content is more traditional.”

Outstream Video ads are served outside of a video player, often between paragraphs of text, typically without sound. According to Google, interstitials, native, and in-feed are types of outstream video. An example of outstream video ads is the autoplay silent video on Facebook, for instance.

VR & AR Ads

Google is also very aware of another massive disruption and opportunity in digital advertising, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Research by Digi-Capital predicts that VR and AR will be a $150 billion industry by 2020. The study forecasts that AR (augmented reality), a less intense experience, will take the lion’s share around $120 billion and VR $30 billion.

Virtual Reality is a technology that can be very disruptive in that it has the potential to impact how we live and what we do and from a marketers perspective it opens up a whole new world.

“Obviously virtual reality and augmented reality are coming are are here and are being incorporated,” said Muret. “Rest assured we are going to be your partner in delivering those experiences as we get those built into our advertising system.”

“The promise of VR is what the industry calls “presence”—the feeling that you’re really somewhere else,” commmented Aaron Luber, who is in charge of Google and YouTube partnerships.

TrueView Discovery Ads

A prelude to true VR and AR is already here, 360-degree TrueView ads, which Muret announced they are now making them available to all advertisers. YouTube is king of 360-degree videos, of which uploads of 360-degree videos are growing and have doubled over the past three months, according to Luber.

Google announced, just yesterday, that they were changing the name of “TrueView in-display ads” to “TrueView Discovery Ads.” They didn’t stop with just the name change though, they also made significant enhancements to the product, TrueView Discovery Ads will now appear on mobile search results.

They’ve also made TrueView Discovery Ads more relevant on search results pages and are being used across the full inventory of YouTube videos, which Google says has increased ad click-through by 11%.

With TrueView Discovery Ads, your videos can be discovered across YouTube, YouTube search results, video watch pages and on the YouTube homepage, no matter what device you’re on,” commented Josh Rubel, Head of Brand Product Strategy at YouTube, in a promo video for TrueView. “Users initiate the ad by simply clicking your video, which takes them right to your videos watch page. By bringing the user to your channel environment, the level of engagement and activity… subscribes, shares, and additional views is impressive.”

“This means you can now work with your preferred buying platform to buy highly visible ads that help you reach and engage the right buyers and build your brand in the premium context of LinkedIn,” commented the Head of Products for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, Russell Glass. “Our goal with programmatic buying is to give our customers more flexibility in how they work with us, and expand the ways we can partner to meet their marketing goals.”

LinkedIn says that you can purchase programmatically through either an Open Auction or via LinkedIn Private Auctions. They also note that “If you’re already buying programmatically, Open Auction is the fastest way to buy LinkedIn Display Ads programmatically.” The Private Auction provides marketers more targeting options.

When using your own first or third party data like website visitors and CRM contacts, our Private Auction offers the ability to explicitly target LinkedIn.com as a placement. As another option, the Private Auction can leverage our proprietary member persona targeting features (e.g., target “IT decision makers”) if you don’t want to use your own first or third party data.

We support majority of the demand-side platforms (DSP’s) and agency trading desks (ATD’s). We currently have more than 4,000 premium brands enabled to run across our site to ensure customers can buy through the one that is best suited for their business.

“Accessing LinkedIn programmatically has given Essence access to quality inventory, at scale, while allowing us to monitor performance in-house, in real time. Not only can we efficiently reach our desired target audiences–such as SMBs; we’re able to leverage our own tools, leading to high viewability and performance across LinkedIn,” stated Agatha Isabel, Programmatic Media Planner, Essence.

LinkedIn has two targeting options for programmatic buyers:

Learn more about LinkedIn programmatic ads here.

“Gannett has historically and traditionally been a newspaper business. We like to think of ourselves as a full-fledged media company at this point,” stated Wolfe. “What’s unique about Gannett is that we have a national to local reach. We’ve got over 90 local markets across the country as well as our flagship brand USA Today.”

Wolfe added, “Some of the challenges we face selling our audiences programmatically is that we have had a lot of demand for a very specific subset of our audience. Gannett leverages DoubleClick for Publishers First Look across the network to increase yield by allowing some of our preferred advertisers and preferred relationships to engage with the top 1% of our audiences.”

“Once we started to understand the impact across that 1% we’ve really started to evaluate what our pricing strategy was and needed to be,” said Wolfe. “We at Gannett are pulling in all of the data from all of our different sources into a centralized data depository. From there we’re making the decisions around what pricing we want to set.”

Wolfe added details:

As part of the transparency that the Google Ad Exchange provides us we’re able to look into the Open Exchange details as well as the Private Exchange details and better understand who’s winning with high frequency across our audiences. We want to monazite all of our inventory and all of our audiences to the greatest extent that we can. Introducing First Look as well as Enhanced Dynamic Allocation and a lot of the other products and suites that Google has offered us has been tremendously helpful.

First Look has been a great compliment to our monetization and to our ad stat. Since implementing First Look we’ve seen a 15% lift in eCPM’s of our programmatic channel vehicle. As we look to the next 5 years we anticipate programatic to be a driver and a leader of monetization across the entire digital ecosystem including desktop, mobile and video.

For one, Google Search will start showing live TV listings serving as your TV guide in a way that you probably hoped it had in the past. You can edit your provider for accuracy. It works for both shows and movies, which is cool.

The company also announced DoubleClick’s Dynamic Ad Insertion, which it says makes ads “hyper relevant” for viewers across any screen.

“By creating individual streams for every viewer using server side ad insertion, we are able to deliver a better, more personalized viewing experience that looks and feels as seamless as TV today,” explains Daniel Alegre, President of Global Partnerships at Google. “And not only will this work for both live and on-demand TV but it works across directly sold and programmatic.”

For DoubleClick for Publisher clients, Google announced that it will “seamlessly enforce” the level of control that has been established in TV across all inventory, whether sold directly or indirectly.

“That means, we are able to honor competitive separation – so two automotive ads don’t appear in the same commercial break – and other rules like making sure an alcohol and children’s cereal ad don’t appear in the same commercial break,” says Alegre. “This has been major blocker to enabling programmatic to work for TV. And now you no longer need to turn down attractive opportunities from advertisers interested in transacting programmatically because of compliance concerns.”

New TV partners include MCN, Roku and Cablevision, which have all signed on to use DoubleClick for Publishers to serve ads.

Finally, Google announced that it is collaborating with Autodesk on a new cloud-based rendering solution called Maya for Google Cloud Platform ZYNC Render. More on this here.

Image via YouTube

DoubleClick for Publishers First Look was first announced in beta several months ago, and in the meantime, the company has accumulated over 200 partners to test it. Publishers have seen their programmatic revenue increase by double-digit percentages, Google says.

“While First Look makes it easy for publishers to capture new revenue from high-paying buyers, we are also testing a new technology to help publishers manage yield between multiple exchanges and supply-side platforms (SSPs),” says director of product management Jonathan Bellack.

“Exchange bidding in Dynamic Allocation will allow publishers to invite trusted third-party exchanges and SSPs to submit real-time prices using industry-standard RTB calls,” he explains. “These prices will be considered along with bids from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and the publisher’s reservation campaigns to pick the highest-paying ad. Exchange bidding also empowers publishers with unified and accurate reporting on the revenue they are earning from each exchange/SSP. And just like First Look, exchange bidding works with no additional client-side code.”

The company is working with Index Exchange and Rubicon Project as well as About.com, Hearst, Meredith Corporation, and Zillow on the new technology. They’ll be testing this before rolling it out to more partners.

Image via DoubleClick

As part of the announcement, which came from Mark Zuckerberg himself, a drone floated above the stage. It’s using the API to stream from the conference to Facebook Live as the event goes on.

Facebook has already announced a ton of new Facebook Live-related features over the past week, and as the streaming service becomes integrated with more and more apps and devices, these (particularly the discoverability features) will become significantly more important.

Kurt Wagner makes a great point in that the API could “help entice bigger media players to go live, those that are used to producing video with a little more production power than a smartphone can capture.”

Product manager Daniel Danker discusses the API in a blog post:

Publishers with verified pages can get started with the Live API via Publishing Tools or by contacting one of our Media Solutions partners. These partners have built video production, editing, and streaming products that publish directly to Facebook Live and bring live video to life with features like camera switching, instant replay, on-screen graphics and special effects.

Developers can learn how to integrate directly with Facebook Live using the Live API Documentation. The Go Live Dialog makes it particularly easy to get started. If you’re a developer and would like to integrate Facebook Live directly with your app or device, sign up to request access.

The API can be used to build video streams that mix multiple video and audio sources and special effects. These can include programmatic sources including games and screencasts.

The API can also be used in combination with Facebook’s Graph API to reflect viewer engagement in real time and create on-screen graphics that show poll results, analyze comments, or enable comment moderation.

More here.

According to the company, it can be easily integrated with “nearly any” digital ad campaign, and can be used to measure “nearly any” digital media buy. This includes display, video, native, and cross-device.

Foursquare President Steven Rosenblatt, who is known for launching iAd for Apple, writes in a Medium post, “In the past few months, we’ve successfully run about a dozen pilot tests with marketers, agencies, publishers, and programmatic partners, and we’re proud to launch with TGI Fridays, Brown-Forman, Flipboard, Drawbridge, and Adelphic.”

“In an initial test campaign, Flipboard used Attribution powered by Foursquare to measure the performance of an ad campaign that it ran for a major retail brand,” he adds. “Through this test, Flipboard was able to demonstrate that the brand’s ads drove 12% incremental lift in visits to retail locations within a week.”

Foursquare is now making Attribution available to more brands, agencies, and other partners.

Foursquare announced last month that co-founder Dennis Crowley was handing over the CEO role to Jeff Glueck while becoming Executive Chairman of the company. Rosenblatt took the President role at the same time after four years with the company. As mentioned at the time, he would oversee Foursquare’s B2B offerings, which obviously includes this launch.

Rosenblatt has plenty more to say about how Attribution works here.

You can request a demo from the Attribution site.

Images via Foursquare

For starters, if your app is in the Google Play Store, you can now automatically track installs of the app as conversions in DoubleClick without making any changes to code.

“If your app is in the Apple App Store or if you work with an app measurement provider, we support integration with popular third party app tracking platforms (initially announced in September), so that you can track installs measured by those systems as conversions for your campaign,” notes product manager Steve Chang.

There are new templated app install creative formats in DoubleClick Bid Manager that can instantly generate programmatic display ads. They pull in app info from Google Play or the App Store to create app install banners.

Also now available are universal ads in DoubleClick Campaign Manager to help advertisers build traffic and serve one rich media unit that works across the web and app environments.

DoubleClick Search has new app extensions to link to your app from Google Search text ads.

Chang shares some more features that can help you reach customers here.

Image via Doubleclick

Cost per click on ads was down 13% year-over-year. Paid clicks were up 31%.

CFO Ruth Porat said, “Our very strong revenue growth in Q4 reflects the vibrancy of our business, driven by mobile search as well as YouTube and programmatic advertising, all areas in which we’ve been investing for many years. We’re excited about the opportunities we have across Google and Other Bets to use technology to improve the lives of billions of people.”

The company’s headcount jumped from 53,600 in Q4 2014 to 61,814 this past quarter.

Here are the numbers:

See the full report here.

Do you think Instagram ads are worth paying for? Have you seen success with them? Discuss.

The report shares the findings of a six-month study of over 1.6 billion Instagram ad impressions served in 2015. It found that advertisers (especially in CPG, fashion, and retail) are flocking to the platform. Advertisers have been heavily experimenting with video ad formats and took advantage of significant dates throughout the holiday shopping season.

Brand Networks CEO Jamie Tedford said, “We anticipated that pent up demand for programmatic, native advertising solutions on Instagram would drive rapid adoption and eventually scale. However, the pace and scale of investment from our clients in key verticals exceeded our expectations dramatically. This year, we expect to brands from a wider variety of industries will invest heavily on the platform, and experiment with a variety of ad formats—especially video—to stand out in the Instagram feed and reach valuable audiences. In addition to brand-building objectives, we’re also enabling more testing with direct-response ads, as social media users become more accustomed to CTA buttons and more apt to engage in social commerce.”

The study found that increasing demand caused a surge in pricing.

“Cross-industry benchmarks for cost-per 1,000 impressions (CPM) on Instagram have climbed, as advertiser competition has increased since the platform first opened its API to advertisers in August 2015,” Brand Networks says. “As part of the mounting groundswell of Instagram advertiser interest, Brand Networks witnessed a fluctuation across industries in cost-per-thousand views (CPM), as global average costs grew from $5.21 in September to a peak of $7.20 in November, before cooling off at $5.94 in December.”

Total impressions served on Instagram through the firm’s platform increased to 50,000,000 in August (during the beta), then doubled to 100,000,000 in September, and again to 200,000,000 in October. The company expects to deliver over a billion Instagram ad impressions per month by the end of the quarter.

You can find the full report here.

A recent report from Locowise analyzed fan growth and engagement on Instagram in 2015, finding that both have been on the decline. The main takeaway from that is that much like parent Facebook, Instagram appears to be headed in the “pay to play” direction.

According to that report, follower growth was down 88.21% in 2015 while engagement was down 61.43%.

“In the nine months of studies the follower growth on Instagram has declined 88.21%. From the high of 1.95% in April to the low of 0.23% in December,” wrote Locowise’s Marko Saric. “Engagement rate has decreased as well. From the 2.8% engagement high in April to the 1.08% engagement low in December. This is a 61.43% decrease.”

“Instagram has gone from one of the most ‘viral’ social networks to a pay-to-play platform during the year,” he added. “If you want to achieve a great growth on Instagram you do need to consider alternative tactics. Organic growth will not get you far.”

Marketers are of course familiar with similar issues presented by Instagram’s parent company.

On Facebook’s earnings call this week, COO Sheryl Sandberg said they’re pleased with the growth in advertise adoption of Instagram and the “positive results” advertisers are seeing from it.

Later in the call, she said, “On the Instagram question, certainly in the short-run, some of the spend is incremental and some of it isn’t. Some of our clients approached us where they have a social budget or Facebook budget and some of that moves to Instagram and some people, it’s incremental spend. In the medium to long-run however, we believe that we’re really well-positioned to take share from other platforms out there. We believe both Facebook and Instagram have this combination of an ability to do great creative with the best targeting in a most sophisticated measurement which shows businesses how we help them move products off shelves.”

“And we want and we tell our clients we want to be the best dollar, the best euro, the best pound and the best minute you spend. And we really encourage them to measure their ROI and compare us to other platforms. We think that comparison bodes very well for our growth. We also think that continued consumer shift to mobile devices bodes well for our growth as well. That said, we have to continue to execute. We know this won’t be easy. We have to continue to build the right products. We have to continue to measure all the way through from seeing an ad impression to sell. And so it’s up to us to stay focused in the coming year and years.”

Do you think Instagram ads are worth paying for? Let us know in the comments.

Image via Instagram (Facebook)