Jack McNamara says, “Traditional advertising is dead.I don’t mean that it’s waiting on deck for the Pearly Gates in hospice, or being read it last rites. I mean the era of Mad Men has full-on flat lined. With a Super Bowl ad boasting an infamous price tag of over $5 million in 2017, the appeal of purchasing 30 seconds of airtime for the cost of a series A seems less attractive than an ex-girlfriend in bad mood. Consumers yearn for something authentic. They want you to earn their attention, on numerous platforms, in a split second through raw emotion, true value and a unique proposition.... [...]

Patrick Kulp says, “Ads sold through Google have turned up in some pretty horrific corners of the web lately, and many big advertisers are outraged.The search giant responded to the growing uproar among its client brands on Friday with an unusual public apology and a promise to “do a better job.”“We’ve heard from our advertisers and agencies loud and clear that we can provide simpler, more robust ways to stop their ads from showing against controversial content,” Google U.K. managing director Ronan Harris wrote in a blog post.Google is the biggest advertising... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Google’s programmatic advertising network is coming under fire for supporting extremist sites and content at the expense of the brand safety of its advertisers.On Thursday, The Guardian reported it has pulled its advertising from Google and YouTube, after learning its ads were appearing next to extremist content. It was not alone. The British government also found its ads running next to inappropriate content and has summoned Google to address the British Cabinet Office about the issue. British advertising trade group Ibsa has called on Google to address brand safety... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Adblock Plus’s parent company, eyeo, is transitioning the Acceptable Ads program to an independent group. The Acceptable Ads Committee (AAC) will oversee the whitelisting program that enables ads to pass through some of the most popular ad blockers: Adblock Plus, AdBlock, Adblock Browser and Crystal.Eyeo launched the controversial Acceptable Ads program in 2011 in which large companies like Google, AOL, Yaoo and Criteo pay to have their ads whitelisted. Smaller firms are not charged for whitelisting privileges. Many in the industry have equated this model to a type... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “Mobile brand agency Kargo has published a study that argues “premium editorial” digital environments are more effective for brand ads than search or social media. The findings are based on a comparative study of ad visibility and recall.One hundred smartphone owners were exposed to “premium editorial, social and search content in a live in-market test.” Participants were given “10 minutes within each environment to experience the content as they normally would in a use session.” Eye tracking and post-exposure surveys were used to measure reactions and later... [...]

Dale Lowell says, “AI gets a bad wrap. For the most part conversations on the topic tend to revolve around loss of jobs and the redundancy of human labour.The Sunday Times has even gone as far as producing a list of the jobs most likely to become automatised in the coming years due to artificial intelligence. While some jobs are at a higher risk than others, it’s estimated that those in advertising have only a 3.8% chance of being replaced by a machine.In reality, AI will actively work with us, not against us, making our business processes more streamlined and efficient. Infosys, a global... [...]

Cynthia Johnson says, “Native advertising: The refreshing and unobtrusive form of advertising that syncs beautifully with web content and is receiving the attention of many publishers.The traditional advertising system has been dismantled by the heightened interest of the likes of adblockers. Therefore, an increasing number of publishers and advertisers are now using native ads on their websites and blogs to augment their existing ad revenues.The biggest thing that works for native ads is their ability to flow seamlessly within the blog/website content to the extent that it doesn’t really... [...]

Patrick Kulp says, “The mad men and women of the ad industry have plenty of reasons to toss and turn at night.Money is increasingly trickling from television commercials to digital media — a market that Facebook and Google currently have in a duopolistic chokehold. Inter-agency competition is at a fever pitch. Unconventional upstarts are eating their lunch. If Don Draper were around today, there’s a good chance he’d work at Facebook.But it’s not internet advertising giants that keep the industry’s top chief up at night. Nor is it his three-month-old daughter.It’s…Amazon?“It’s... [...]

Eric Enge says, “When it comes to paid search, there is a lot to optimize. Amidst all of the keywords, bidding and landing page refinements you have to do on a regular basis, it can be easy to wonder, “Does my ad copy actually make a difference?”To make matters worse, there’s nothing exciting about tweaking ad copy. Redesigning a landing page is like creating a piece of art. Eliminating keywords can dramatically cut your cost-per-conversion. But ad copy? Does tweaking a word here or there really make a difference?As it turns out, the answer is a resounding, “Yes!”The fact of... [...]

Jeff Rajeck says, “Data from ad campaigns has, in some ways, never been so important.Data has become the way marketers know whether the brand messaging is right, what drives customers to purchase and where they should advertise in the future.Fortunately, advertising data has also never been more available. Google, Facebook, and other ad platforms offer hundreds of ways to divide up their reports into segments and countless metrics for us to see how well various segments are performing.So with how important and available ad data is, it is quite puzzling that there is so much fraud in digital... [...]