Facebook launches easy-to-use, lightweight video ad format

More than a third of mobile Internet users in Saudi Arabia are respomsive to video ads compared to a world average of 22%.

Facebook is launching slideshow, a new lightweight type of video ad which is easy for advertisers to use, to help reach more people, on more devices at more connection speeds.

A recent report suggests that in countries like the Philippines where connectivity can be slow, expensive or both and where feature phones are prevalent, people are even more receptive to video ads*, Facebook notes in a blog post announcing slideshow.

Slideshow is both a video creation tool and a new ad format made from a series of still images which helps advertisers tell brand stories in emerging and high-growth countries. Slideshow can also be used by small businesses which do not have the resources to create videos.

Businesses can use their own images or simply pull stock imagery from Facebook's library, and the smaller file size helps advertisers reach more people regardless of device or connection. According to Facebook, a 15-second slideshow can be up to 5x smaller than a video of the same length.

Interested?

Read Facebook's blog post and view the associated video

Register to attend the webinar on November 18

*Millward Brown Ad Reaction, October 2015

MMA China issues guidelines to boost smartphone advertising in China

Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) China has released MMA China’s Mobile Application Advertising API Measurement Guidelines, which are specifically for the China market. 

“As the world’s largest smartphone market with more than 500 million mobile internet users, mobile advertising in China is experiencing rapid growth,” said Rohit Dadwal, Managing Director of MMA Asia Pacific.

“We applaud the MMA China Local Council for their leadership in developing these standards and are very happy to work collaboratively with them to drive the growth of mobile marketing in China. MMA China has set a great example for the other local councils of the MMA.”

These guidelines are intended to accelerate the further development of mobile advertising in China by:

· Unifying the measurement metrics of mobile application advertising;

· Establishing a detailed set of methods and common practices for data transfers;

· Offering more accurate ad performance measurement.

MMA China anticipates that these standards and guidelines will be adopted by all major third party ad measurement service providers, mainstream mobile ad platforms and major publishers in China.

The guidelines and measurement solutions were developed through the efforts of MMA China’s Mobile Ad Standards and Measurement Guidelines Committee, which represents the broad mobile marketing ecosystem, including brands, agencies, mobile ad platforms, publishers and third party ad measurement service providers.

“We’re very glad that MMA China’s Mobile Application Advertising API Measurement Guidelines have finally come true,” KF Lee, Co-Chair of MMA China said. “It would standardise China’s mobile advertising market in the long term and help it grow and expand steadily and healthily.”

“We thank MMA Global and MMA China’s Mobile Ad Standards and Measurement Guidelines Committee members for their support,” said Joshua Maa, Co-founder of MMA China and Chairman of the MMA China Mobile Ad Standards and Measurement Guidelines Committee. “With a specific set of industry guidelines in place, all stakeholders in the sector will have enhanced confidence in measuring the performance of mobile in-app ads.”

China's RTB ad spending grew 616% QoQ in Q214

Smaato, a mobile real-time bidding (RTB) ad exchange (SMX) and supply side platform (SSP), has highlighted the continued growth of mobile RTB in 2014 through its global mobile RTB Insights Report for Q2 2014*. 

Source: The Smaato RTB Insights Report for Q2 2014.
RTB spending in the APAC region for the top five countries. 

Smaato found that RTB spend grew 69% in Q2 2014, compared to Q1 2014. This quarter also saw a 456% increase in mobile RTB spending over the same quarter last year.

And while entertainment and media remain one of the top advertising categories, with 24% of the overall revenue share, the food and retail category grew from 8% in Q1 2014 to 25% in Q2, overtaking entertainment and media as the top category with the highest spend from advertisers. 

A similar up-and-comer was found in China, where RTB spend grew more than any other individual region. Compared to Q1 2014, RTB ad spend in China rose by 616% in Q2 2014. While the United States still reigns supreme with 65% of the global RTB spend coming from the nation, emerging countries like Indonesia and Thailand are following in China’s footsteps with very significant quarter-to-quarter jumps, proving that RTB advertising spend is growing fast worldwide.

“Brands are embracing RTB as a source for premium inventory,” said Smaato CEO Ragnar Kruse. “With programmatic advertising spend from new sectors like consumer packaged goods (CPG) and regions like China rapidly increasing, mobile ad spend is seeing a phenomenal growth, and that growth trend will continue in the foreseeable future.”

Click here to download the full report. 

*The report is an analysis of worldwide exchange data, auctions, bids and impressions across Smaato’s SMX platform. Smaato’s SMX platform serves 90 billion+ ad impressions per month to over 450 million unique visitors in the US, EMEA and APAC regions.

Xaxis Prime combats digital ad fraud

Xaxis, one of the world's largest programmatic* advertising platforms, is addressing ad fraud what it says is the ad industry’s first fully programmatic product to guarantee human viewership for advertisers’ digital brand campaigns. 

Xaxis Prime extends beyond pre-bid analysis** and post-campaign blacklisting to dynamically identify and block robot traffic and suspicious sites, the company said. Existing fraud prevention safeguards have been combined with new technologies including a proprietary human verification tool based on internal and partner technology from Adara, Solve Media and Moat.

Types of fraud Xaxis Prime protects against include botnets, ad insertion or redirection, CMS/OS hacking, robots designed to behave like humans and robot retargeting. In addition to helping advertisers, the new product introduces several powerful new tools for Xaxis’ publisher partners to ensure only humans are viewing their inventory. These include proprietary, internal detection processes and integrated third party verification tools. These tools enable Xaxis to provide feedback to publishers on the inventory posing the most risk, allowing them to identify the cause and eradicate it prior to selling to Xaxis or other buyers. 

One way that Xaxis Prime guards against fraud is through tracking genuine visitors through answered captchas, completed transactions or specific human behaviours such as creative engagement and social sharing. These verified visitors are then cross-referenced in the Xaxis data management platform (DMP) against pre-bid impression evaluations and post-bid analysis of traffic metrics to provide an assurance that the traffic is indeed human.

At rollout, Xaxis Prime delivers a no-fraud guarantee across the Xaxis Marketplace. In addition to the proprietary human verification tool, Xaxis Prime guarantees 90% viewability, 95% brand safety and includes ongoing audits of all inventory, pre-bid impression evaluation, post-campaign reporting to validate inventory and audience that was acquired.

“Xaxis Prime represents the next step in our ongoing efforts and investment to combat digital ad fraud and ensure our clients achieve the highest possible real performance,” said Larry Allen, SVP of Business Development at Xaxis. 

“Ad fraud is an international problem impacting both advertisers and publishers. With Xaxis Prime, brands get a simple and powerful guarantee for their digital brand advertising across the top premium publishers.” 

*Programmatic technology allows advertisers to bid for the privilege to display an ad based on various rules, such as the types of viewers or the type of content displayed on a page. 

  

**Data can be pre-qualified before a bid is placed so that bids on fraudulent inventory are avoided or minimised.

The more targeted the mobile advertisement, the more it earns

Smaato has found that in China, the advertising is most successful in the shopping, e-commerce, communication and technology categories, which boasted eCPM* highs of US$0.30 in Q1. 

In terms of mobile real-time bidding (RTB) ad spend, entertainment (30%) and games (22%) emerged as the top two categories in the country for the first quarter.

Smaato Chief Strategy Officer Ajitpal Pannu shared that monetisation and brand spend were driven higher when key parameters were passed globally to advertising partners.
 
eCPMs increased by up to 321% when location and device ID are included in a bid request, and increased more than 150% when gender and age range data were included.

According to Gartner**, global mobile advertising spending is forecast to reach US$18 billion in 2014, up from an estimated US$13.1 billion in 2013. Asia Pacific markets  have been generally receptive to mobile advertising – nine in 10 of smartphone users in China and 87% of smartphone owners in India have clicked on mobile advertisements in December 2013***. 

Source: Smaato Ad Exchange Global Mobile RTB Insights Q1 2014

*eCPM is a performance measure for advertisements that is calculated by dividing total earnings by the total number of impressions, multiplied by 1,000. 

**Gartner says mobile advertising spending will reach $18 Billion in 2014, January 21 2014

***The Asian Mobile Consumer Decoded

Criteo offers mobile solution to display advertisements within apps

Want to advertise on those smartphones and tablets that everyone has their noses glued to? Sounds easy enough, but it turns out that mobile users are spending much of their time in specific apps like email or Facebook than on the mobile web according to research firm Flurry, leading to significantly fewer opportunities for advertisers to display their ads to a target audience.

Criteo, which specialises in performance display advertising, has addressed this challenge with the beta release of a mobile in-app performance display advertising solution that could provide businesses with a cost effective, performance driven solution to engage and convert mobile users.

“According to recent studies*, mobile users spend more than 80 percent of their mobile device time in applications, while the remaining 20 percent is spent on the mobile web. The biggest challenge for our clients is uncovering an effective way to drive engagement through their mobile app after it’s already installed. 

"Criteo’s mobile solution sets itself apart from other approaches by going beyond basic audience and demographic targeting to offer a performance-based advertising solution displaying highly relevant ads to users and deep-links back to their specific product recommendation, helping drive sales and conversions," said Jonathan Wolf, Chief Product Officer, Criteo.

Criteo’s product combines real-time customer behaviour with the advertiser’s own product catalogue and creative content. Personalised, dynamic banners are generated in real-time to maximise conversions.

Rocket Internet, a Germany-headquartered incubator with offices in Asia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea and the Philippines, is a Criteo customer.

Steven Post, Head of Mobile Marketing, Rocket Internet said, “The cost of user acquisition on mobile continues to skyrocket, which is why we have a very specific and aggressive return on ad spend (ROAS) that we aim to achieve. By leveraging Criteo’s mobile in-app performance display ad solution we’re able to re-activate and engage our mobile app users with a personalised ad aimed at helping them complete their retail purchase.”

*Flurry Five-Year Report: It’s an App World. The Web Just Lives in It, Flurry Blog, April 3, 2013