Silverbullet Launches 4D – A Contextual Intelligence Solution For The Post-Cookie Era
4D helps brands, agencies, publishers and ad platforms to survive in the post-cookie era, by ensuring ads are aligned with specific content and context across all channels. In fact, some studies suggest contextual targeting can increase purchase intent by 63% versus audience or channel level targeting.
With global turmoil surrounding political bias, diversity and equality top of mind at the moment, brand safety, contextual relevance, and data privacy are key as further pressure falls onto marketers to safeguard their brands. 4D allows marketers to classify content using text, video, audio, and images, resulting in better recommendations, and ensuring that marketers brand safety and targeting works in the environments that matter most.
4D also leverages valuable first-party data from any supported DMP, CDP, or Ad Server. This can be transformed into contextual iIntelligence to power the creation of actionable omnichannel contexts, saving time-poor marketers and advertisers considerable time and effort by creating and deploying the perfect context once. 4D then ensures the delivery of optimal messaging in a brand suitable environment across Display, Video, Native, Audio and Addressable TV.
SVP of Product at Silverbullet, Marco Godina, says he is thrilled to be launching 4D globally. “4D will help pave the future in a world without third-party cookies. Our unique ability to ingest data from a platform like a DMP or CDP allows us to provide first-party powered contextual intelligence, helping brands deliver targeted and brand safe advertisements across text, video, and audio content.”
4D includes several unique features, such as:
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Contextual video: Using state-of-the-art computer vision, 4D can provide targeting and brand safety within video advertising placements, ensuring advertising – and brand image – is not only in the right display and text context, but also within the right video environments.
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First-party data ingestion: 4D’s open platform can ingest first-party data from DMPs, CDPs, ad servers, and other sources, which once fed through its intelligence engine, draws out contextual insights to be applied in programmatic advertising.
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Contextual Marketplace: 4D has built an industry-first contextual marketplace that enables technology partners to plug in their algorithms and technology as additional intelligence and targeting layers. 4D partners, such as Factmata, offer brand protection from racist or toxic content and can be applied to ensure brand safety and suitability are managed correctly.
Co-founder and CSO of Silverbullet, Umberto Torrielli, says recent news has seen multiple advertisers pulling their ads from social channels in light of seemingly conflicting rules and inappropriate content.
“When we think about the sensitivity surrounding certain topics, we want to ensure that brands are aligning their image to the right setting. 4D’s unique features are set to provide brands with the utmost confidence in their marketing, ensuring they are always seen in the most relevant context, regardless of channel, and never associated with questionable topics or unsafe environments. Further, 4D insights are powered by a brand’s first-party data to help determine relevancy and gain deeper intelligence – this is at the core of what we excel at within the Silverbullet group.”
Content Owner Playbook: What’s The Value Of My Customer Data?
Our Playbook series focuses on core verticals and how they are utilizing data to supercharge their businesses.
Today, content owners are seeing a shift towards digital content; they now have the opportunity to engage with end users on a personal 1:1 level.
Our latest playbook edition delves into these opportunities, exploring how publishers, media owners, and broadcasters alike can take advantage of the data marketplace.
Download our playbook today, and discover the perfect blend of data, tech, and human expertise.
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How Sports Organisations Can Be Data-Smart To Kickstart Success
As Australia moves slowly back to normal following lockdown, sporting clubs are getting back into the swing of things. Far from normal however, the 2020 season will be a season like no other before it, with changes to crowd capacities, training restrictions, and the consequent impacts on membership, sponsorship, and revenue, many sporting clubs are facing a year ahead with a devastating dent in their bottom line.
So what can you do if you are a club, and you want to minimize that revenue hole as much as possible? The answer is to laser-focus on driving a compelling dialogue with fans and to use that dialogue to power your fan engagement program like never before.
Focussing On Fans Post-Lockdown
Fan loyalty in Australia is second to none. Aussies avidly watch and attend games and want to interact with clubs and players. However, most clubs are struggling to capture data on these fans and their behaviours, and what data they do have is either not used or too ‘piecemeal’ to be effective. This presents a challenge as it means most clubs lack the ability to reach out to fans in a meaningful and personalised way and understand the negative effects of non-personalised communications over time.
Every club knows that an engaged fan is worth more to them than a peripherally engaged fan, and that a super-fan is worth more than that. Every club also knows that a large, highly engaged fan base also increases the number of sponsors wanting to invest. But without understanding the individual fan and their current level of engagement, clubs battle to take them on a journey from the periphery of the sport, to becoming passionate and high-value.
The reason for this situation is historical. Chief Commercial Officer at Melbourne Storm, Nick Haslam, says that clubs have traditionally relied on TV-driven metrics to sell sponsorships, so they’ve been a little slow on the uptake of data and analytics to move to a more personalised connection with fans to drive revenue.
“Moving forward, we see data and analytics as pivotal to the growth of our business. We see significant value in using data to grow consumer revenue by engaging existing ticket holders to spend more with us, through things like merchandising and memberships, by better understanding their journeys,” he said.
So given the collection and use of this data can make all the difference to sporting clubs, how can clubs and organisations kickstart becoming more data-smart?
Having A Clear View Of How Fans Build Their Loyalty Will Turbo-Charge Your Efforts
Fans go through a clear and predictable journey to becoming engaged. The key is to understand where your fan is in their engagement journey and deliver content and experiences that move them from one stage of that journey to the next. Each step on that journey means you know more about the fan, their turn-ons and turn-offs, and along with that increased knowledge, comes a greater opportunity to drive revenue and a greater value to sponsors.
Every Experience Is An Opportunity To Learn From Fans
Every experience that marketers create is an opportunity to gather insightful data about fans and drive further interactions. There is a wealth of information that you can discover such as demographics, living situation, sporting heroes, participation rates at games, favourite brands, merchandise purchases and more. But the key to gaining access to this data is the right ‘value exchange’ coupled with the right technology.
Clubs should be actively developing new and exclusive experiences and content to gather data, and then use that data to deepen understanding of their audience and build programs to amplify engagement. There are many ways to go about this. For example, a club might want to hold an exclusive competition, where fans willingly share their details for a chance to win. Apps are also becoming an increasingly popular way of harnessing fan data in exchange for exclusive experiences and content.
In our fan engagement model, we focus on collecting data on fans and their actions as early as possible. This is done through two primary tactics:
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Promotions, competitions, and content intended to elicit engagement and start building the digital picture of your team’s fans. This could be simple promotions or competitions like quizzes, or give-aways, social content designed to be spread the fun socially, or other mechanics designed to get fans to leave their details or spread. Or it could be content designed to bring home the drama of the season and help your peripheral fans get under the skin of the back-story of the players, and their weekly achievements, the highs and lows, the emotion of the game and the competition across clubs.
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Introduce a free membership tier. Currently paid memberships serve as a large barrier to overcome to start the data-driven and personalised communications program with fans. A free tier with light incentives should enable your team to rapidly amplify their knowledge of the club’s fans by giving them a reason to interact and allowing you to start targeting them with relevant and engaging content.
Driving Fan Engagement Through Data-Driven Strategies
Collecting data is only the first part of the strategy. Using data to understand the fans and where they are on their individual engagement journey is the key to maximising their lifetime value. The data collected provides signals and insights which the club can use to ‘nudge’ the fan from one stage to the next – moving them towards becoming passionate, high value, ‘super fans’.
This data can also be used to unlock deeper insights, such as how members and fans like to get involved, what content they consume, their demographics, or why they cease membership. Profiling with the power of data can also enable clubs to test and learn about how to best approach fans in the most relevant way.
All this information can be used to deliver personalised marketing messaging across multiple channels. Once a rhythm is established, it’s easier to scale marketing efforts off the back of learnings and successes – and this is where clubs will achieve return on data investment. Remember, the deeper you go, the more value you’ll get.
In our fan engagement model, as a fan becomes more engaged a few key things change:
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The financial value derived from each fan increases. This happens through membership fees, game attendance, attendance at member-only events, merchandise sales, and consumption of exclusive content.
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The mix of tactics employed to drive engagement slowly shift from digital/virtual to physical or real-world experiences. This is done in-line with a membership program that, like a frequent-flyer program, creates forward momentum through a combination of money-can’t-buy rewards that convey social status, and are anchored to a set of activities designed to drive value for clubs and members (game attendance, event attendance, merchandise sales, etc).
Expanding Your Data Efforts Also Drives Value For Sponsors
Beyond marketing and communicating to fans, better data opens up other key opportunities for clubs through their sponsor relationships. At a time when corporate sponsorship is difficult to obtain as businesses contract spending, a better data environment presents a superpowered value case for corporate sponsorship. Richer profiles of fans, and a better data-environment offer up two key opportunities for sponsors. Firstly, it enables profiled and targeted member-only offers, increasing relevance and affinity between the sponsor and the member and giving the sponsor an additional path to market. Secondly, it allows the club to provide an additional layer to the sponsors’ customer insight efforts, helping the sponsor understand their customers at a level and depth which would be unavailable otherwise and can power real and tangible value.
Key Tips To Getting Your Club Back On Track:
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Treat every interaction as an opportunity to collect data and learn. Leverage your website, apps, email program, events, games, social presence and content. Start by visualising your fan engagement from a bird’s eye view. Our comprehensive fan engagement poster will give you a clear starting point.
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Expand your marketing channels beyond traditional media to reach a modern, digital savvy and diverse audience. This has the added benefit of giving sponsors a richer insight into their customers and a more effective channel to market.
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Technology plays a critical role in enabling data collection and profiling. Speak to an expert about how to quickly deploy the right mix of Customer Data Platform, Digital Marketing Platform, and Data Insight platform. It is likely that you already have access to some of these and a professional can help you drive more value from them, or that access can be arranged at a budget to suit and it doesn’t have to be a long and complicated process.
Data Innovation With Adobe
The Data Clinic
With Adobe & Silverbullet
Adobe and Silverbullet joined forces to host the first Data Clinic Virtual Event, designed to bring together industry leaders to discuss and debate the wonderfully complex world of data and technology.
Our first Data Clinic welcomed special guests from Channel 4 and Bidstack, who joined Adobe and Silverbullet spokes people to discuss:
- The immediate challenges faced in light of Covid-19
- Daily challenges and opportunities throughout the data and technology landscape
- Building a smart data strategy for the future
Download the recording now!
Data and Tech With Tealium
Utilising Data And Technology During A World Pandemic
Experts from Tealium and Silverbullet aim to drive the conversation on how brands can better utilise their data during the world’s pandemic crisis.
The duo will provide specialist advice across the data-driven marketing landscape, delving into topics that span from the voice of the CMO, the future of a ‘cookieless’ world, and what it means to have a data-centric strategy during uncertain times. This exclusive ‘one-off’ webinar will focus on reimagining the nuts and bolts of your digital transformation.
What will you learn during this session?
– Gain tips on the immediate challenge, to get through the pandemic
– Understand the importance of a data strategy – in a cookieless world
– How to hit the ground running, when ‘normality’ resumes
Key Crisis Data Points And Statistics For Marketers
Ad Spend
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74% of media buyers, planners and brands, think the current crisis will have a bigger impact on advertising than the 2008 financial crisis.
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70% of buyers have already adjusted or paused their planned ad spend.
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16% are still determining what actions to take.
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24% of respondents have paused all advertising spend for the remainder of Q1 and Q2.
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46% indicated they have adjusted their ad spend for the same time period.
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73% of buyers are indicating the coronavirus will have an impact on the Upfront 2020/2021 spend commitments and expect a 20% decrease in Upfront spend vs their original plan.
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Digital ad spend is down 33% and traditional media is down 39%.
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Google and Facebook together could see more than US $44 billion in worldwide ad revenue evaporate in 2020, Cowen & Co. analysts estimate.
What this means for marketers is advertising channels are struggling to make revenue currently, and there are now amazing opportunities to pick up advertising at a great rate. If you can afford it, use this opportunity to advertise on more channels to increase market share.
Marketing Through A Recession
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The companies which increased ad spend during a recession didn’t experience any increase in profitability either during the recession. In fact, on average they saw decreases in the short-term ROI from their increased ad budgets. But these companies did enjoy significant increases in market share from their increased budgets.
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Companies increasing ad spend by up to 20% saw an average share gain of 0.5% and those that increased beyond the 20% threshold recorded average gains of 0.9%
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Estimates suggest advertising investment is likely to be reduced by between 30% and 60% over the rest of 2020 and beyond.
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86% of marketers are now delaying or reviewing marketing campaigns, up from 55% just in the three weeks prior.
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90% of marketers say their budget commitments have been delayed or are under review, up from 60% in the three weeks prior.
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81% say tech or infrastructure spending has been suspended due to the spread of the virus, compared to three weeks ago (43%).
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69% of marketers have experienced a drop in demand for their brand’s products and services.
What this means for marketers is clear: Marketing budgets may have been cut, but they will stretch further. While some companies are pulling back on messaging, this will leave a void which must be filled. Clever marketers will do just this and come out ahead when the economy recovers.
Emerging Channels
Marketers often struggle with what channel to choose for what messaging.
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Media spend on inventory sold direct using ads.txt, the IAB programmatic advertising transparency initiative, increased 45% in Q4 2019 compared to the equivalent period in 2018, while spend on reseller and unauthorised supply decreased.
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Emerging channels are being adopted as ‘traditional’ as media moves to programmatic. Bid requests for DOOH inventory grew 107% between 2018 and 2019, connected TV was up 39% and audio increased 16%.
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Native advertising is increasingly strong. Bid requests for native ad spots grew 70% during 2019, compared to the 7.5% increase seen by display.
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First price auctions accounted for almost half (48.25%) of media spend in 2019, compared to second price, representing a 181% year-on-year growth.
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Header bidding spend grew 54% globally in Q4 2019 and eCPMs were up 18%.
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Neilsen’s Digital Content Ratings shows overall time spent on digital news sites and apps is up 29% for March to date compared to the same period in February and records continue to be set daily.
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Australian online advertising market growth has slowed, but still achieved 5.6% year-on-year to reach $9.3bn expenditure for the full calendar year 2019.
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There has been a 71% increase in time spent on online food and cooking websites.
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Australians aged 13-24 increased their time spent online with food and cooking content by 144%
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Sunday 29 March recorded the highest daily time spent consuming food and cooking content in 2020.
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Mobile devices generated more than 60% of organic site visits
Tech Boom
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Over Q1 of 2020 there was an unsurprising fall in deals across the digital sphere, with fewer deals in ad tech and martech, as well as in Digital Content, compared to Q1 of 2019 (~50% and ~20% respectively).
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Ad tech and martech both suffered a fall in their aggregate market value, with ad tech experiencing a particularly sharp decline.
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The global customer data platform (CDP) market is predicted to reach over $3.2 billion by 2023, up from $903.7 million in 2018.
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North America is expected to hold the largest market size in the global CDP market, while APAC is expected to grow at the highest compounded annual growth rate.
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40% of marketing and sales teams say data science encompassing artificial intelligence and machine learning is critical to their success as a department.
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By 2024, AI identification of emotions will influence more than half of the online advertisements you see.
What this means for marketers is: Embracing tech moving forward will be crucial for success.
Customer Loyalty
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80% of growth organisations use customer surveys to collect CX data, compared with just 58% of non-growth organisations.
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43% of product managers at growth companies are using analytics to collect and analyse customer perception and sentiment data. This is compared with just 22% of product managers at non-growth companies.
What this means for marketers is: Successful companies communicate and get feedback from their customers in order to better service their needs, even in periods of downturn.
Silverbullet Acquires Leading Italian Independent Trade Desk, Videobeet Italia S.R.L.
Silverbullet, the data-smart marketing services company, today announces the acquisition of independent trade desk Videobeet , in a move to provide a full service offering for marketers including data analytics and audience activation.
Tim Beard: Making Digital Media ‘Work’ – Why Collaboration In Times Of Crisis Is Key
More than two years into the global ad fraud scandal, how successfully is the industry solving the problem? And how can we make progress in today’s volatile environment given the significant shifts in priorities, budgets – and perspectives?
Two years ago, an Association of National Advertisers’ report shone a light on critical issues holding the digital media industry back globally. Its Media Transparency Initiative revealed a system of agency kickbacks and rebates stealing efficiency from digital ad buyers, while ad-tech platforms also stood accused of charging excess fees and giving poor control.
While the report was US-based, the issues have been global in scale. The last two years have been transformative for those involved in the digital media supply chain. Fraud, backhanders, data misuse, and loss of trust have been in the headlines, and leading players have taken significant steps to address them.
To this end, the ACCC has just launched a digital ad tech inquiry, following its digital platforms inquiry, which concluded last year. This new inquiry, which is currently seeking submissions, will focus on competitiveness, effectiveness, efficiency and transparency of suppliers of ad tech services, and ad agency services.
The inquiry hopes to uncover whether market participants have enough information to make informed choices about the use of ad agency and ad tech services, and whether competition and efficiency are being affected by supplier behaviour.
The Way Forward
Advertisers have become much more demanding buyers, heeding a number of best practices and insisting on only verified ad inventory, demanding viewability, and only buying when prices are fully transparent.
Many ad-tech platforms have pretended to move in exactly this direction, and some actually have. But relying on external agencies and/or various adtech suppliers is still leaving many ad buyers with a sense of inequity, and causing many to take their programmatic and buying in-house. In fact, Juniper research suggests the global cost of ad fraud will more than double to US$44 billion by 2022.
Australia is behind the rest of the world in that there’s not hard and fast legislation yet to prevent ad fraud. There’s ‘guidelines’ and ‘best practice’, and associations can only assist by lobbying to the Government or the ACCC and providing principles to follow.
And while many clients and buyers are agency-savvy and know to demand transparency, and some are taking it in-house, some are still a little lost when it comes to asking the right questions to get the best results from agencies and ads alike.
Fortunately, there are a number of organisations to help point buys and users in the right direction.
In 2018, the Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA), the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and Media Federation of Australia (MFA), released a set of digital practice guidelines which aim to define the areas of responsibility and requirements for all involved in digital advertising to improve the online consumer experience.
The 25-page guide covers digital transparency, viewability, ad fraud, and data protection, and aims to re-establish trust in the industry following the fraud scandals.
The fact is, advertisers and buyers should not have to wrestle with suppliers. They need to be empowered, and the best way of achieving this is by seeking out the support and collaboration of industry groups and specialist organisations for guidelines and best practice for media, agencies, and clients.
Read the full article here.
Bad Data Handling Is Holding Marketers Back, Survey Reveals
Poor data handling is costing businesses millions on resources and lost opportunity, with less than a third of CMOs feel the industry has the right skills to deal with customer data privacy, a new survey revealed. Lack of skills in data privacy compound the problem and form part of a subset of growing issues to do with a lack of internal capability and capacity.
Silverbullet’s new report Whose data is it anyway? How UK marketers navigate data management as consumer privacy concerns grow, surveyed 100 UK CMOs and a wealth of consumers to uncover the ongoing concerns with brands who use data to provide a service.
It found that half of UK CMOs estimate poor data handling skills are costing their business between £250,000 ($USD300,000) and £5 million ($USD6.4m) every year. Alarmingly, only 27% of CMOs say the industry is ‘ahead of the game’ with having the skills needed to deal with customer data privacy.
There’s No Secret Sauce
CMOs are under more pressure than ever before to ‘get it right.’ On one hand, CMOs are under the pump to invest in the right people, resources, and technology to drive Digital Transformation. On the other hand, the pressure is on to keep BAU ticking over and meet both ROI targets and rapid shifts in customer expectations. But in the big scheme of things, there’s no ‘utopian way’ any marketer is really achieving all this, and everyone seems to be looking at each other for the secret sauce.
In the age of GDPR, tighter regulation, Cambridge Analytica scandals, and the ‘crumbling cookie,’ throwing money at the MarTech stack, then ‘worrying about data privacy later,’ simply isn’t going to work. There’s no point in jumping on the MarTech bandwagon, without first getting your ‘data ducks in a row.’ And yet we see this mistake being made by marketers time and time again.