This is a combined post, where I note about some news articles I have read.

Snapchat Home Page Takeover

The first article is: Snapchat's home page takeover. This article describes a new offering Snapchat is giving advertisers. The offering is:

Snapchat’s version guarantees that a brand’s ad will be served to everyone in the US who is shown a Snap Ad on a given day.

I found this use of takeover surprising, as I had previously thought that a site takeover was a bad thing. In my glossary post it's described as when a single brand own all of the ad-slots on a particular website. From my perspective this is inefficient use of real estate, but I think that the terms use in mobile advertising is different. A brand may want to have massive reach, and some kind of guarantee that everyone will see an ad could be good for a brand. It's interesting that something that could be seen as a bug, actually is now a premium feature!

Ad metrics not really a thing

The second article is: Ad metrics not really a thing.

A key point of this article is that younger executives in advertising companies believe viewability (the tracking of whether an ad was viewed or not), to be much more important than older advertising executives. The article goes on to suggest this is because TV was difficult to measure, so it is considered OK for digital video to also have poor metrics by older executives.

I must admit, I'm not sure what they mean by agency executives in this case. Is this referring to the executives at advertising agencies, brand's, some other organisations, or everyone?

Dangerously for digital video, 60% of the under 30's felt that video was an ineffective medium. The article briefly mentions some terms with regard to metrics:

• good audience metrics 56% of executives thought this was important. I going to assume this means a good understanding of who the target audience is.
• context and quality 62% of executives thought this was important. I don't understand how it is different to good audience metrics.
• GroupM, AVOC (audible and viewable on completion): were mentioned as "advanced" metrics in use for video ads. AVOC sounds self explanatory, but I'm not sure about GroupM.

Importantly, the survey suggests some offers that are not successfully convincing executives to invest more on-line:

• fraud-free guarantees A guarantee that no ad-fraud will happen?
• standardised success metrics Perhaps the claim that metrics are too difficult to understand is not really true.
• premium inventory I guess this is the takeover option Snapchat is offering above?

The survey then lists some things that would entice executives to invest more:

• pricing transparency I wonder how we could improve this?
• inventory quality This is related to the earlier comments on context and quality
• new formats such as vertical or 360 degree video Something that would convince 51% of executives to consider more advertising.

I think this survey was quite interesting, I'd love to see the raw data. Apparently it was from a company named Turn, but they are not linked on the website.

Digital Advertising Surpasses TV

The third article for today is: Digital Advertising Surpasses TV.

This is actually a review of a recent IAB report, which was covered in another article I've reviewed. So this is a review of a review!!!

The key takeaway is that Digital Advertising is now bigger than TV, with digital video alone having grown 53% in the last year to $9.1 Billion. Other important statistics were: mobile revenue grew by 145% to $4.2 Billion, largely driven by mobile search, and that Digital radio is supplanting terrestrial radio.