Tech Talk: S4M, Innity, Ooyala, Zenith and more

S4M launches CPLP buying model

S4M has announced a Cost-Per-Landing-Page (CPLP) buying model to help advertisers in APAC avoid waste in their media-buying model and repurpose their mobile ad budgets.

The company stated that CPLP model recognises that fraud in the advertising industry cannot be completely eliminated, so the goal instead is to safeguard advertiser’s ad budgets from paying for fraud. This unique buying model is based on MRC accredited metrics for both mobile browser and app environments.

Gavin Buxton, VP sales APAC, S4M:

Today brands are evaluating their mobile campaign successes through buying models that only evaluate basic metrics, such as clicks and impressions. As an industry we need to move beyond these and define success by measuring human engagements with industry certified metrics. This is why we are pioneering the Cost Per Landing Page (CPLP) buying model for our clients. So we can continue to deliver quality mobile performances and filter out fraud.

Innity reveals new mobile ad formats

Online media and ad tech provider Innity has added five new mobile ad formats to its mobile advertising offerings, allowing advertisers the opportunity to reach target audience on mobile devices:

• Mobile Cube: The ad is displayed as a 3D cube that can be rotated horizontally either automatically or by swiping to reveal more brand images, maximising the allocated ad space.
• Mobile Grow: The ad format captures attention by gradually ‘growing' into a larger canvas as users scroll down the page. It becomes fully interactive when the ad has fully 'grown'."
• Mobile Underlay: Similar to Mobile Grow, Mobile Underlay is a large layer underneath the web site, revealed as users scroll through the page and auto-expands into a full-page ad once 70 percent of the ad is displayed on the page."
• Mobile Cards: A deck of cards are displayed over the page at the bottom of the screen. Users can swipe left or right to shuffle through the cards containing images or videos."
• Mobile Canvas:  This ad is a full-screen unit that appears after users tap on an invitation ad. As the name suggests, it offers brands extensive space (up to 4 times the screen height) to creatively showcase content and engage users.

Malaysia’s Media Prima taps Ooyala

Ooyala will be powering Malaysian streaming service Tonton, owned by Media Prima, as technology provider and strategic business partner to maximise revenue and audience engagement.

This includes its subscription-based (SVOD) service, Tonton VIP Membership, and its ad-supported (AVOD) service, tonton Free Membership.

Since moving to Ooyala, the company claims that overall user engagement and ad success has significantly increased. Tonton viewers are now watching nearly double the amount of videos and the duration per visit has increased 25 percent, reaching an average of 17 minutes. For advertising, click through rates (CTR) across all ad campaigns have doubled.

Kamal Khalid, CEO of Media Prima Television Networks:

Smart partnerships with service providers such as Ooyala are beneficial to tonton as competition amongst OTT players become more intense. Ooyala is helping us differentiate in ways that keep us ahead in our market. From driving more engagement to higher ad revenue, we work with Ooyala to obtain insights that enable us to make strategic decisions about our content, advertising and overall business.

 

Instagram Stories expands tools

The social platform has announced new tools for its Instagram Stories feature, its biggest update since launch.

Links can now be added inside Stories, allowing people to go deeper on content they see in stories. For example, a musician can link to her new song, or a media company can link to an article. Links in stories will begin as a test with verified accounts only.

Secondly, users can now add @mentions in stories, which works just like captions and comments. Lastly, users can now take a Boomerang, mini videos that loop back and forth, inside Stories.

Zenith unveils automated digital planning solution

Zenith has announced that it has developed “ground-breaking automation” of digital planning that claims to deliver significant improvement in effectiveness for marketers and is “set to fundamentally change the way that agencies and their clients optimise digital media.”

Using live Aviva campaigns, the network’s taskforce collected advertising cookie data from the technology stack of a leading demand-side platform (DSP) and matched it with corresponding first party sales data. Applying Zenith’s machine learning algorithm, the taskforce was able to precisely attribute sales conversions to specific digital interactions.

The network was able to automatically optimise Aviva’s digital planning by pushing the algorithm output back into the DSP’s stack. This move closed the automation loop – data collection, attribution and a full set of planning changes across multiple digital touchpoints were all done automatically.

Zenith claimed that this application of machine learning saw Aviva benefit from a 6 percent cost-per-quote (CPQ) improvement on car search through implementation of the automation programme. For display, Aviva saw a 10 percent improvement in CPQ through automation.

It will also be adding first party drivers-of-demand data into the algorithm in order to enhance the effectiveness of the automated planning changes. In this way, data - such as how price affects sales or the success of creative assets - will be fed into the automated optimisation.

The Asia-Pacific rollout of the new solution is expected in early 2017.

James Turner, head of marketing (trading) at Aviva:

We’re delighted that as part of our commitment to digital and media transformation at Aviva we are breaking new ground with this pilot automation of our search and display. The benefits of attribution modelling will be realised in terms of ROI improvement as well as through operational efficiency.

Insights from HubSpot Inbound 2016 conference:

• Today, search is bigger than just Google. Users go to Facebook to look for a specific person, or to visit Amazon to find a product. So, the way to win at SEO in this new environment is to focus on HEO, or human enjoyment optimization. Instead of solving for the search engines, marketers should solve for what creates the most joy for humans.
• With the rise of mobile, the world went wild for apps -- millions of apps. But, the vast majority of people spend their time using just a few -- most of them messaging apps. “So, unless your business has a crazy compelling, life-altering value proposition, a mobile app probably isn’t worth the effort.”
• Chatbots do far more than “chat”. Looking to the future, sales and marketing professionals will be able to use these powerful assistants to amplify and optimize everyday tasks, such as running reports, launching social ad campaigns, or creating a blog post.