Real-time bidding for online video ads is a market that's about to blow up, but it’s not easy tearing away brands from their cherished TV metrics in favor of impressions and clicks. A key step on that path came last September when the Media Rating Council accredited Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings, which measure overnight audience reach, frequency and gross ratings points (GRPs) for online display and video ads.

Now TubeMogul is bringing Online Campaign Ratings to its RTB video ad platform. The agreement between TubeMogul and Nielsen means advertisers and agency trading desks can cross-reference GRPs for audience age and gender demographics with impressions and clicks to get a fuller sense of a campaign’s performance.

“GRPs change the calculus by letting us allocate budgets purely based on where viewers are and make apples-to-apples comparisons with television,” said Mark Wagman, product manager at Omnicom's digital media trading desk Accuen, in a statement.

TubeMogul CEO and cofounder Brett Wilson said the closer comparisons between online video and TV should facilitate the shift of money from TV to digital “because people know what they’re getting.”

However, while TubeMogul is able to relay metrics like impressions and clicks in real time, Nielsen’s GRP numbers are only available daily, as with their broadcast GRP metrics. Also TubeMogul’s advertisers will have to log in to the Nielsen dashboard separately to view GRP numbers alongside metrics on TubeMogul's platform.

“We aspire to work with Nielsen to make it more real-time than it is, but it’s a whole lot better than anything that’s available right now where you’re not really sure if you reach the audience you think you did and furthermore you’re not sure how your digital buy compares with your TV buy,” said Wilson.

Digital video has helped one of advertising's fastest-growing sub-industries find a new foothold: a Forrester Research study commissioned by TubeMogul, an RTB buying platform, shows both the potential and the pitfalls of the RTB market, which Forrester suggests will reach some $687 million in gross sales as early as next year.

RTB allows advertisers to purchase inventory a la carte—directly from the company running the ads. These days, it's almost entirely a digital proposition, with purchasers going to eBay-style websites and buying up display, pre-roll and other video ads simply by entering in the desired metrics (audience type, price range, penetration) and clicking a button. It's a very simple system and one that RTB marketplaces and proponents believe will change the face of digital advertising by moving the entire industry away from a model mediated by ad agencies.

But that's not happening quite yet. Briefly, the obstacles to be overcome include problems with measurement, which continue to plague the digital marketplace in nearly all of its forms—Nielsen and comScore, among others, are still fighting it out for supremacy in the marketplace, but neither technology yet inspires total confidence. Still, TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson contends that RTB's perks make its growing pains easier to bear.

"Everything's completely transparent that's enabled by real-time bidding," Wilson said. "The targeting is more precise and more discrete, and those are pretty significant advantages over ad network buying." Wilson sees clients exercising greater autonomy, and thinks that trend is likely to continue as those advertisers begin to see their margins increase. "These executives are moving from a world where they lean on vendors—'Here's what I need done, don't tell me how you did it'—to a world where they need control."

There are going to be problems, of course. Inventory bundling—in which a publisher requires a client to buy one property in order to buy another—doesn't just exist because it increases the size of each deal. It's also a way for a website or network owner to push its less popular products on advertisers who would ordinarily avoid them. "We need more publishers and websites to make their inventory real-time biddable," Wilson admits.

Still, there's almost always inventory that doesn't get sold, even on popular websites and videos, and while RTB has been a venue of last resort for many companies, some are finding that they get traction for even their less popular properties, providing the pricing is fair. And where there are good deals on premium advertising to be found, you'll likely find big-ticket advertisers, too. "Publishers originally viewed real-time bidding as where you go when all else fails," Wilson said. "That's changing."

As measurement standardizes, RTB is likely to become more popular with clients; the question is whether or not it will eventually become the way most business is done in online advertising. Wilson believes that it will. "Honest to god, if you and I worked at a publisher and looked at the cost of this, we'd eliminate our sales forces immediately," Wilson said.

As the Web video ad industry grows, so do the number of questions about the legitimacy of some of the available ad inventory out there. Such questions as: Where are my ads running? And how do I know if anyone can actually see them?

To head off such queries before doubt solidifies, a group of companies in the video ad sector formed a consortium aimed at establishing a common standard for measuring Web video viewability, dubbed OpenVV (Open Video View). The idea is get all the players on the same page when it comes to criteria for defining whether a video ad can actually be seen. And hopefully, the result is that brands get more comfortable—and dollars flow to the medium.

The group includes such frenemies as TubeMogul (which built the tech), BrightRoll, Innovid, SpotXchange and LiveRail (and notably doesn’t include YouTube, Hulu, AOL, Yahoo or the rest of the NewFront crew). That’s because DSPs like TubeMogul, SSPs like LiveRail or ad networks/exchanges like BrightRoll run ads all over the Internet, and thus face the most questions about ad viewability.

"It’s definitely coming up a lot," said TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson. “It’s not as bad as display, but I think when it comes to video that lives in the wild, more clients are wondering.”

The hope is to assuage clients with a common definition of video viewability. But that’s not quite what OpenVV is just yet. Rather, it’s just pieces of open source code, and any publisher is welcome to test and improve upon it. “I think this is the first open source tool in ad tech," said TubeMogul's chief strategy officer, Jason Lopatecki.

Per Lopatecki, the code will let publishers identify the portion of a video ad that is in view and measure the amount of time it's viewed. The code requires no changes to a publisher’s site and doesn't screw up any other ad serving tools or viewability tracking employed by the publisher, he said.

The thinking behind an open source code is that a standard developed and set by the industry as a whole has a much better shot at general acceptance than one dictated by an individual company. "We don't think there’s a sustaining competitive advantage in maintaining viewability," said Lopatecki.

"If we solve it for ourselves it was meaningless," added Wilson. "It needs to be an industry approach."

To that end, the consortium developed—in conjunction with ANA, the 4A's and the IAB—Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) principles, which are being submitted to the 3MS leadership and the Media Rating Council (MRC). The system has been successfully tested across hundreds of millions of video ad impressions and thousands of publisher sites, and all parties plan to share each others’ data as things move forward.

Next up: getting more video purveyors on board. Google’s been invited, as have others. "We've just spent the last few months of putting all the pieces together," said Wilson.

TubeMogul, the online video ad-buying service, has appointed a new chief revenue officer: Chip Scovic, the former head of Google's Media Platforms.

Originally an analytics service for video distributors, TubeMogul has morphed into a video DSP over the past few years, focus on advertising; it has since become the biggest buyer of real-time video ads, per TechCrunch. The company hopes that as chief revenue officer, Scovic will help boost revenue and expand into new markets.

Scovic has worked in the digital ad world for over a decade, with stints at Yahoo and DoubleClick. At Google, he helped build the company's programmatic business for brands and agencies.

"I have watched TubeMogul's tremendous growth among brand advertisers and their agencies from the sidelines and am excited to now be a part of it," Scovic said. "In an industry still dominated by analog methods for buying and delivering ads,TubeMogul's platform clients are logging in every day and adjusting media strategy based on real-time data – that's virtually unheard of."

Fast-growing TubeMogul has hired 75 new employees so far in 2013, with plans to more than double its staff by the end of the year. Having raised $20 million from investors in December, and with its sights set on global expansion, the company announced a slew of executive appointments on Thursday. CEO and co-founder Brett Wilson hopes the fresh faces will, "help in furthering the company's position as a leader in digital brand advertising."

Advertisers want TV-like ad buying for Web video. Publishers want TV money. Which is why retrofitted metrics like Nielsen’s Online Campaign ratings have taken off big time, despite imperfections.

The problem, according to some industry executives, is that OCR and the comScore equivalent VCE (validated campaign essentials) are great for evaluating how Web video campaigns deliver. But not so great for planning. That’s a problem, since that’s how budgets get divvied up.

Thus, there’s a need for a TV-esque planning tool that helps agencies, particularly TV buyers, plot Web video campaigns in a language they and their clients understand. That’s TubeMogul’s thinking with BrandPoint, which the company claims can help agencies plan Web video campaigns, projecting everything from GRPs to demographic ratings to anticipated CPMs.

The push to sell using OCR or VCE, "is kinda wreaking havoc right now," said TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson. "Publishers are having to over deliver 30 to 40 percent of impressions, and it’s a big planning and buying problem. Publishers are getting screwed. And they only have data after the fact. With this tool, you can really precisely control what you buy."

TubeMogul’s not the first company to attempt to create a universal buying dashboard for Web video (see Tremor’s Video Hub). But Wilson demonstrated BrandPoint to Adweek, and it does look like tools employed by TV agencies. Buyers can tinker with various buying scenarios and audience demographics and quickly see how those tweaks impact projected cost and reach.

TubeMogul partnered with several agencies to help develop BrandPoint before it was ready to launch. “Instead of jerry-rigging it, they came to us and said, ‘how do you plan? How do you look at GRPs?’ said Rob Bochicchio, evp, chief media investment officer for ID Media. “It’s very compatible to the way we buy.

“You gotta know what you’re doing to use this thing. But you can go from planning to buying to optimizing, start to finish. I haven't seen anyone else put it together like this.”

Sounds great for agencies. But how does this help publishers, who are still flying blind when it comes to selling video with OCR guarantees? Wilson said that TubeMogul is so confident that BrandPoint will work, it will offer publishers guarantees, meaning that if some sites’ fall short on delivery, TubeMogul will cover the cost.

The company sees that factor as being key to the product’s success, and something that will encourage bigger video players to use BrandPoint in direct buys. “We think this should elevate pricing for premium sites.”

A pernicious and sophisticated new form of online click fraud has been uncovered and it’s aimed at digital video advertisers, according to ad software firm TubeMogul. The ad tech agency has published a hitlist here of websites that are contaminated with bot traffic, generating phony views on video ads for major advertisers like Nissan and Samsung.

TubeMogul, which recently filed for its IPO, said that publishing the list of shady websites at the center of the newly uncovered bot schemes is a first for the anti-fraud community. TubeMogul is calling the fraud detection operation the Clear Skies Initiative, introducing some transparency into the fight.

“Someone who operates these sites hired botnets to make them look really popular,” said David Burch, TubeMogul’s communications director. “All these sites have botnet traffic associated with them.”

TubeMogul discovered three new botnets—Blog Bot, Annex Bot and 411 Bot—that are alarming in their sophistication, TubeMogul’s chief strategist Jason Lopatecki said.

“There were three major bots identified that haven’t been reported yet,” Lopatecki said. “They’re using a number of technologies that haven’t been seen before. So the complexity is getting bigger with each generation of fraud.”

The bots generate 30 million phony video views a day, but could potentially serve 80 million fake views if unwitting advertisers bought all the fraudulent inventory. Lopatecki said that the bots enable one computer to look like 1,000, creating a thousand times more clicks with the same number of infected computers.

Also, the bots are contaminating advertiser cookie data, Lopatecki said. The bots go to sites that gather user data for advertisers—like a cars.com—and plant thousands of fake target segments. This increases the likelihood that advertisers who tap that data wind up buying fake audiences on the bots’ preferred websites.

The websites look legitimate if not generic, and videos shown are of seemingly high quality because in many cases the clips were hijacked from elsewhere online. An advertiser could be forgiven for not realizing these are mass created, spam-style websites with names like celebritygaze.com, athletestoday.com and babyraise.com.

The sites pretend to deliver audiences that advertisers covet like new moms or car buyers, but they are just faking millions of views on valuable video ads from major brands.

TubeMogul shared the list of dozens of these bot-infected sites with Adweek and it is publishing the names publicly to alert advertisers.

“People are buying traffic they don’t know is bots,” Lopatecki said.

In fact, the three newly discovered bots could make the fraudsters almost $10 million a month. TubeMogul has not been able to identify who is behind the bots, because they likely operate overseas and are well concealed.
 

A new advertising platform is set to inject automation into the buying of television commercials, thereby replacing the mechanics of an industry that still sells ads the old-fashioned way.

Software company clypd is launching a system that lets media partners sell commercial television space using the same tools that deliver ads online. Clypd and partners like Cox Media said this is the first step to a programmatic television future.

“We’re finally getting to the point where we have the technology and the interface to bring traditional linear TV to programmatic,” said Mike Zeigler, vp of business development at Cox. “Legacy systems are focused on scheduling 30-second spots in a traditional fashion, but now we can do it in a much more automated manner.”

Google, BrightRoll, DataXu, Accordant Media, TubeMogul, Turn, Collective and The Trade Desk will use clypd to buy commercials from television providers like Cox, which also handles inventory for DISH Network and SuddenLink.

Clypd’s new software API is trying to make programmatic TV advertising uniform for the ad tech companies to buy and the media providers to sell. 

“It’s a big moment for the industry and it’s not just about clypd, it’s about the partners we’re engaged with,” said Joshua Summers, CEO of clypd. “We have to make sure we get this right.”

Summers would not say how much ad inventory or what size audiences would be available through the new software platform. 

Television has been slow to adopt any programmatic tools, as some fear that programmatic will devalue highly coveted ad time on the most popular media properties, including the Super Bowl. If programmatic creeps in, then it could open the whole system to selling ads in auctions, just like online where the highest bidder wins, the thinking goes.

Clypd’s technology enables ad buyers to place orders and TV providers to deliver the commercials in an automated way, but it's not a real-time bidding platform for trading ad space in millions of auctions a second.

That capability isn’t impossible, but it’s still a ways off. There are plenty of technological hurdles left in television. For instance, broadcast is more limited than cable in its ability to sell through digitized channels.

The big innovation for the TV industry is to change how media planners buy audiences, Zeigler said. With programmatic buying it won’t matter what show a ad appears against but rather what household it targets. For example, a buyer places an order for a million men in their 20s, and the commercial gets shown anywhere that fits the profile.

“It runs like a meter until however many impressions get delivered,” Zeigler added.

The programmatic TV players admit there is more work to be done to get the level of data and sophistication that powers online advertising. They are trying to build the infrastructure that makes cross-screen marketing a possibility, and helps advertisers hit a consumer on a tablet or in front of a TV. Clypd’s tools are meant to help identify the right targets and track the data that measures the campaigns and how they performed.

"The world of TV and digital advertising are colliding and major players in programmatic video are investing in technology to enable cross-screen execution—but there's still a long way to go before standards, workflow and measurement allow buyers and sellers to transact across screens,” said a BrightRoll representative.

Illustration: Alvaro Dominguez

YES
Who needs ratings when you can buy TV impressions? All you need is a defined audience, the ability to deliver an ad wherever a person is viewing and automation to deliver that ad millions of times across multiple channels. Those are the basics of a programmatic vision for television—a vision that doesn’t care which show a viewer is tuned to but only who that viewer is.

Programmatic is eating the media world, and that means television, too. Media buyers, advertisers and tech companies are preparing for a future that’s platform agnostic, that distributes digital video spots across screens whenever a person fires up a smartphone, tablet, connected TV or cable box.

The question “Will TV embrace programmatic?” misses the reality: The medium already embraces it.

Just last week, Clypd launched a software interface for ad buyers to place automated orders for TV ad space. Cox Media, representing local TV providers and Dish Network, among others, is opening inventory to demand-side ad-tech players like Google, Turn and TubeMogul.

And brands are moving more and more toward programmatic buying. For example, Mondelez International, encompassing brands like Cadbury, Oreo and Wheat Thins, recently announced it would run all its digital video buys in North America through TubeMogul.

Does a brand like Oreo care if its ad shows up on Food Network, Hulu or Facebook as long as its target audience gets the message? That’s how more media planners are thinking about ad buys, and what programmatic offers.

Mike Zeigler, vp of business development at Cox Media, says buyers will be able to order TV spots seen by, say, 1 million men who are sports fans and aged 25 to 35. Ads will be served through cable boxes to households that fit the demographic and will keep being served until the target is reached. “When a client buys programmatically, they don’t know precisely when or where they’re going to run,” Zeigler points out. “What we believe will happen is that ad buyers will truly start buying audiences.”

Programmatic TV is still in its infancy. Today, the best technology can automate insertion orders and leverage basic demographic data. There’s still no telling whether the consumer on the other side of the screen is the target for an ad for sugary cereal or his older brother or his grandma.

Those on the tech side say to give it time—the more programmatic pipes that are put into place, the more marketers will know who is watching.

Still, programmatic is feared among TV’s old guard, who’ve seen technology commoditize online ad inventory and don’t want to devalue premium commercial space in prime time. But there’s a crucial difference, and that is that programmatic TV buys, at least for now, are not subject to the real-time auctions that drive online ad sales.

Programmatic TV can benefit everyone simply by automating the buying, selling, delivery and measurement of ads, the argument goes. To fight it is akin to telling a company in the 1980s not to computerize. —Garett Sloane

NO
Part of the problem with talking about a programmatic revolution on TV is that not everyone is clear about what programmatic TV means.

Is it exchange-based real-time buying? As we’ve already seen, an advertiser can buy a lot of different TV spots via programmatic exchanges mostly by buying (at flat rates, not auction rates) time owned by MSOs like Cox and Dish rather than from the networks. Most everybody with a distribution agreement gets two minutes an hour to sell on a given channel. And some conglomerates, notably NBCUniversal, are experimenting with making inventory from smaller networks available on exchanges to test their efficiency. “Some networks are putting TV remnant inventory into platforms like Adap.tv and Simulmedia, [which] sell it in a programmatic fashion,” explains one media buyer. “It’s a lot of long-tail networks that put unsold inventory into these options—the bigger networks tend to sell their remnant for higher rates via direct response.”

It is important, though, to understand what that toe in the water does not include. Nobody can buy, for example, any over-the-air broadcast inventory in these marketplaces—or, of course, anything that is sold during the upfront where ad inventory on new shows is sold at a discount in order to hedge against potential failure, then sold at a large markup in “scatter” after the season’s hits have been established. It’s just not a system that’s compatible with the rapid-response ad exchange—and it’s how networks amortize the massive costs of programming. It’s pricey to option promising properties, produce pilots from a few of them, send a choice few to series, and then give everyone a raise when one or two shows prove to be hits and take a write-off when others tank.

Sometimes programmatic just seems to mean data-driven, and that’s already happening at forward-thinking TV networks. Jay Sears, svp, marketplace development at Rubicon Project, who sees platforms like Adap.tv and Simulmedia as the TV equivalents of early online ad networks, points out that the transition to data-driven buying in TV is much less radical than a massive shift to third-party sales. “The idea there is [that] the big ad-holding companies deploy more resources against strategy and programming and bespoke programming and fewer resources around faxes and Excel spreadsheets,” he says.

Everybody with two laptops to rub together is trying to guarantee against ROI data culled from credit cards and cable boxes. But they’re simply buying it from third parties (or, in the case of NBCU, taking it from parent company Comcast) and using it in a proprietary way in order to leverage their own inventory and keep the market from becoming an early bird special at the buffet next to the old folks’ home. At the end of the day, networks own their ad inventory and are going to do their best to sell it at a premium, or demand that advertisers buy it in exchange for access to more desirable inventory on sister networks. Exchanges, even Web video at auction rates, remain a buyer’s market—so much so that multiple hedge funds have shown interest in buying and reselling the exchanges’ inventory. And if Wall Street sees inefficiency in remnant ads, you can bet TV does, too. — Sam Thielman

TubeMogul's first day on Wall Street started off with a pop of the champagne cork—and was followed by a huge jump in stock price. The ad tech company held its public stock offering today at the Nasdaq exchange, and shares were up nearly 50 percent by noon.

TubeMogul is a software company with brand and agency clients, who use its service to buy online digital video ads. Its CEO Brett Wilson was in New York today to kick off trading in his newly public company.

Yesterday, TubeMogul set the price of shares well below the expected value, partly because of uncertainty in the ad tech market. A number of companies that have taken the public route have been struggling—Millennial Media, Tremor Video and YuMe, to name a few.

TubeMogul sold shares at $7, when originally it expected to ask for up to $13.

The lower price worked out for first-day investors whose shares were worth $10.35 by noon.

By selling stock, TubeMogul raised $44 million. Wilson actually bought shares in the company, 15,000, at the IPO price of $7.

"I'm a big believer in our team, in our differentiated position in the market, and the massive opportunity that's in front of us," Wilson said today.

Brands like Mondelez International use TubeMogul software along with their media buyers to execute digital video campaigns. Wilson said the company is committed to brand advertising and could expand to other media beyond video.

Also, the company is interested in using programmatic methods of buying television ads.

"There's an opportunity to automate buying video ads across all screens including television," he said.

In the first three months of the year, TubeMogul saw $48 million in media spend through its software, a year-over-year increase of 194 percent.

At today's stock price, TubeMogul is valued at about $240 million.

Oreo is back to its old savvy marketing self with a plan for the Super Bowl that's sure to excite ad geeks. Its parent company, Mondelez, is the first to buy Super Bowl ads with programmatic technology, although they will only show regionally. 

Its ad tech team is calling this a milestone for the future of programmatic buying of TV commercials, which is among the last mediums to resist the automation of selling, inserting and reporting on ads.

The Oreo spot will show regionally, where broadcast affiliates appear to be more eager to embrace a new way of ad buying that cuts out some manpower and a lot of paperwork, according to TubeMogul, the software platform employed by Mondelez for all its programmatic video buying.

"This is the very first Super Bowl ad bought through software," said Brett Wilson, CEO of TubeMogul.

Mondelez is running 15-second spots during the halftime show for Oreo and Ritz, and the commercials will only show in Erie, Pa., to about 100,000 people. (Scroll down to watch the animation-driven commercials.)

Mondelez only bought the airtime this week, and said that shows some of the promise of programmatic advertising to streamline the ordering process.

"This is just a glimpse of the future of automated TV buying," said Laura Henderson, associate director of media and communications at Mondelez. "This is more about showing what's possible and showing where all this is going."

Oreo is no stranger to Super Bowl marketing. Two years ago, it sent the most popular tweet after an unexpected blackout during the game in New Orleans. Its quick thinking represented a seismic shift for brands, which are increasingly trying to generate social media attention at live events.

There is some fear in the industry about the programmatic future, because the technology is seen as a threat to the ad world's glamour and creativity. Also, ad space sold programmatically is often viewed as being lower quality.

This ad buy chips away at that argument. "Accessing local broadcast programmatically was not possible prior to recent months," said Eric Mathewson, CEO of WideOrbit, the software platform employed by broadcasters for managing ads. "And this is the first Super Bowl spot, which of course is preeminent TV."

The company would not say how much it cost to run the ads compared to others. The ads are not bought through a real-time auction, which is another form of buying that many associate with programmatic buying.

Also, TubeMogul and WideOrbit said they are still in the early stages of realizing the benefits of programmatic TV. Eventually, it is meant to make serving digital commercials seamless on any screen, so a campaign could just run ads and pick up targeted views from TV to tablets to laptops.

The benefits of programmatic TV is that the advertiser gets analysis of those views within 24 hours. "So if you're running spots across 150 designated marketing areas in the U.S., you know the next business day exactly what ran," Mathewson said. "Otherwise, you won't know until the invoice is received by your ad agency 30 to 45 days later."

Sandwich chains can serve fancy food, too. Just check out Quiznos' lobster roll offering, which—like many fish-sandwich pitches this week—is back in the Lental limelight, along with the company out of bankruptcy.

Last summer, Quiznos looked all but dead, with 2,100 sinking stores around the country and overseas. However, it's emerged from bankruptcy like a giant lobster clawing out of the sea, which happens to be the theme of its new video ads effort. The agency Windowseat developed the spots.

Post-bankruptcy, Quiznos has rethought its marketing while bypassing agencies to place digital promos. Instead, it hired TubeMogul, a digital video ad-buying platform, to help execute online campaigns and forgo more expensive TV ad buys, according to the company, which spoke to Adweek about its new advertising approach.

"This is our first foray into online video," said Tim Kraus, Quiznos' head of digital interactive. "I mean, we've done YouTube before but never anything like this at a mass scale."

A TubeMogul spokesman added, "Video is now Quiznos' primary brand-building medium as their target is young males."

A number of brands have started going around agency gatekeepers to control their own programmatic ad buys, going direct to services like TubeMogul, which uses technology and data to automate online marketing.

Some brands feel they have the homegrown how-to for programmatic, including the talent, the data, the ability to target the right users, etc. Agencies and media holding companies contend the complexities of digital ad buying require their unique brand of expertise to win at these online ad auctions. Indeed, therein lies a bit of marketplace friction. TubeMogul counts brand clients like Allstate, Hotels.com and Foxtel that rely on its programmatic buying platform.

"Programmatic helps companies and large organizations move a lot faster," said Brett Wilson, TubeMogul CEO.

For Quiznos, the reliance on data-powered ad buying is a cost-control measure to only serve ads when it is confident that the user on the other end is a relevant consumer, Kraus said. The company is keeping close watch on its marketing spend now that it's emerged from bankruptcy.

"We only want to pay when the data [shows] that we know this is the right customer," Kraus said.

Part of that strategy is to only display ads to consumers in ZIP codes near its stores during times of day they are likely to eat. The company also is incorporating other technologies like iBeacons, which are installed in retail locations to measure traffic and show how effectively the digital ads were driving customers. "The goals are to send text offers to people to drive in-store visits and tie back data on in-store visits to mobile advertising." Quiznos said in an email about the iBeacon tests.

L'Oréal has evidently found a video advertising vendor in Mediabong it's very high on.

Mediabong—which is announcing a $5 million Series B round of funding today—said it achieved a 90 percent "video-through rate" for L'Oréal in a recent five-week ad campaign across various publishers. Video-through rate (VTR) measures the number of pre-roll video ad impressions served divided by the promos viewed in 100 percent of the video player for half the spot, per the Paris-based company.

The cosmetic player's effort delivered well beyond the industry norm. When it comes to chargeable impressions, the Media Ratings Council's video viewability standards call for branded spots to be watched for two seconds and in cases where only half the video player is viewable in the browser.

"Anything less than that, then we don't charge," said Mediabong COO Priyesh Patel, referring to the MRC's mandate, which is backed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

What's more, Patel said L'Oréal achieved a 12 percent clickthrough rate for its 30-second promos starring actress Andie MacDowell who pitched women's hair-care products. 

This is how Mediabong's system, SyncRoll, works: First of all, it boasts semantic targeting that's designed to serve viewers ads with products they'll be interested in. Secondly, the ad unit floats with the viewers while they scroll pages, keeping a brand in front of them. While this may sound potentially annoying, early tests on consumers have gone well.

"We help publishers with their monetization strategies," noted Mediabong CEO Laurent Bury.

Mediabong operated in a handful of European countries for three years before launching in the U.S. in late 2014. It's working with publishers like Newsweek, CBS, Reuters, Bloomberg Media, AFP and Associated Press while attracting brands like Chanel, Land Rover and Unilever—in addition to L'Oréal—as clients.

Entrepreneur Venture and Conegliano Venture, two European funds, led the aforementioned investment round.

Meanwhile, Mediabong competitors TubeMogul and Invodo are also attempting to tackle viewability, which continues to be a hot topic in digital advertising.

Just last week, Google released a report that said 53 percent of video ads are considered viewable on desktop and 83 percent on mobile. And on May 7, the MRC and IAB revealed temporary viewability standards for mobile advertising.

Specs
Current gig Vp of strategy at TubeMogul
Previous gig Head of technology at Ikon Communications
Age 35

Adweek: Describe your role as vp of strategy.
Phil Cowlishaw: It's a little bit like Navy SEALs. I take a high view of our most important strategic accounts and then deep dive into them to get a deep understanding of exactly what business drivers will make a difference for them and then how TubeMogul, the platform, can deliver this. My job is to lead a team that helps these accounts, to truly align their business models with our software features. At the end of the day, it's ultimately helping them get the most value out of our platform. It's really about how they can pull the triggers inside of our platform to shift more product or brand awareness.

What clients have you been working with?
L'Oréal USA, Jose Cuervo, Mondelez, Allstate, Heineken, Quiznos, Hotels.com and Lenovo.

What trends do you see emerging in digital advertising?
There's an increased interest in this space on the brand side. We're seeing brands trying to understand exactly what programmatic is and how it could potentially help their business. We're seeing a significant shift into the programmatic space and a drive and adoption by big brand advertisers and their agencies to try and understand the power of programmatic, especially in online video, and how it can drive business results.

What is one of the biggest misconceptions about programmatic that advertisers have?
It's the definition of programmatic. As a business we talk about programmatic being the use of technology to automate a previously manual process. I think in the early days, programmatic was kind of thought of as a reach play, a way of monetizing lower-value inventory. What we're seeing now is a significant shift and adoption of the use of technology to automate across the entire buy—whether that is digitally endemic websites, whether that is networks such as ESPN—and being able to use technology to precision across the entire buy and to make it more effective.

You came to TubeMogul after working in Australia. What's been the biggest adjustment for you stateside?
The most exciting thing is that we're undergoing a significant change in the way that media is planned, bought and optimized. That change is being driven out of technology companies primarily based in the U.S. Being closer to the heart of that change is exciting, and that's been a fundamental shift.

This story first appeared in the Oct. 5 issue of Adweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.

Even yogurt is going programmatic. As part of a move to take roughly 15 percent to 20 percent of its video buying programmatic in the next year, Dannon recently became one of the first brands to run a campaign using Facebook's LiveRail platform, which effectively helped it reach 90 percent of its target audience.

In August, Dannon inked a yearlong deal with video vendor TubeMogul to beef up its ad targeting while also automating a portion of its buying. One of the first efforts to come out of the partnership was a campaign for Activia, a line of yogurt that helps with digestion, that served preroll videos to specific people based on their age and gender.

"The early results were really promising where we saw nearly 90 percent of the ad impressions were on target with the audience," said Brett Wilson, TubeMogul's CEO. "That's much higher than we would normally expect."

The results were indeed a success, and Dannon plans to test data-driven buying for all of its brands through 2016.

"Each brand has an individual segment," said Claudia Sargent, vp of media and marketing services at Dannon. "The great thing about adding a data layer is we identify data sets that allow us to target [age and gender]."

A yogurt brand may seem like a strange fit for navigating the sophisticated waters of programmatic buying, but it's the latest evidence that brands want more data to understand what works with online video, said Wilson.

Unlike other brands such as Quiznos, Mondelez and Progressive that believe they have the know-how to bypass agencies and handle programmatic on their own, Dannon is enlisting its agency, Carat, to oversee media strategy.

"We think you'll see a lot more deals like this where the advertiser chooses their own technology partners, but there's still an agency involved for the strategy and execution layer," Wilson said.

With the ad-targeting technology nailed down, Sargent said creative is the next big push for Dannon to reach specific groups of consumers online.

"We're a traditional CPG advertiser where TV and video has always been our primary channel," she said. "This has the same benefit in terms of sight, sound and motion. However, it also adds the complexity that a typical 30-second spot on television isn't the best way to message. Now, we need to push the content so that it reaches the right consumer."

Marketers interested in buying targeted video advertising on Facebook and Instagram based on television viewership and publisher data can now do so through TubeMogul, a programmatic advertising platform.

Emeryville, Calif.-based TubeMogul's new integration with Facebook allows a brand to hit a target audience on Facebook and Instagram that it may have missed with its television advertising. By integrating with Facebook's API, TubeMogul helps advertisers retarget on the social media platforms based on data from Nielsen. Marketers will receive reporting metrics such as likes, comments, shares and video completion rates. Other metrics include purchase intent and sentiment.

"We think that's what advertisers want," TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson told Adweek. "They want holistic buying, they want unified reporting, and they need the help of technology to make sense of this fragmented world that we're living in."

During a closed beta program, at least 40 advertisers ran more than 100 campaigns on Facebook and Instagram through TubeMogul's partnership. Brands including Expedia, Lenovo Australia and Kraft ran campaigns through advertisers like Publicis Health Media and Starcom Mediavest.

Wilson said TubeMogul's platform essentially inverts the way Facebook has traditionally been used for advertising. Normally marketers see the social network as a lower funnel, direct-response vehicle. However, Expedia has been using it to expand reach and frequency.

Expedia has used TubeMogul to promote travel packages by first launching a campaign on television. Then, after understanding who it reached there, the travel brand could plan its social push to fill the gaps. 

Vic Walia, Expedia's senior director of brand marketing, wouldn't share exact results, but said the campaign was "one of the strongest" the brand has run in recent years. He said the efforts netted a nearly 70-percent completion rate—much higher than the average 30 percent to 40 percent rate. Expedia's digital spending accounts for about 20 percent of its overall marketing budget, but Walia said that might increase based on the cross-platform campaign.

"We want to make sure we get the right eyeballs," Walia said. "So that's where TubeMogul comes in and helps us get those incremental eyeballs across a series of different publishers."

On the publisher side, Playboy has been working with TubeMogul to bring its first party data to advertisers for retargeting the magazine's online audience both on its website as well as on Facebook and Instagram. Earlier this month, the publisher partnered with Tullamore D.E.W. on a St. Patrick's Day campaign. During the campaign, anyone who visited Playboy.com would see an ad for the Irish whiskey. Then, when those visitors were on Facebook or Instagram, they'd see the same ad again. What Playboy and advertisers could previously do with images, they can now do the same with targeting video.

Think of it as a way for Playboy to use its own data for targeting on the social media platforms, rather than only relying on Facebook's own undisclosed data. Phillip Morelock, Playboy's chief digital officer, said it plans to grow its distributed advertising business by 25 percent to 30 percent. He said data is increasingly playing a part in the magazine's overall plans.

"Our strategy has been to get the Playboy brand in front of as many consumers and on as many platforms as possible," he said. "For partners to work with us, they get access to those audiences, and so the elimination of barriers to that audience acquisition and distribution is an important part of our strategy."

Imran Khan was an internet-focused investment banker at Credit Suisse, where, in September 2014, he orchestrated Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba's high-profile IPO. Three months later, his star rose higher when he was named Snapchat's first chief strategy officer, charged, many observers figured, with prepping the tech darling for its own eventual IPO. But in fact, Khan's marching orders from CEO Evan Spiegel at the outset were more fluid than one might imagine.

"I was, like, the 171st employee. And in a small company, you don't have a defined role—you just jump in and start doing things," recalls the executive.

You just jump in and start doing things. Those eight words could serve as a pithy user manual for newcomers to Snapchat and its array of unusual features that have confounded more than a few folks who were born before 1985. It's part of the job of Khan, 39, to "get" what Gen Y loves so much about the app, transforming their days into mobile reality TV episodes with stories (what Snapchat calls posts) they share with friends, a kaleidoscope of colorful filters, face-swapping effects and other, often wacky functions.

Khan and his army (the company is now 900 employees strong) have basically flipped the script on the advertising community, where, not so long ago, it was widely assumed that Snapchat's leadership was too immature to fully take advantage of its teen-idol status among millennials. And yet, Snapchat has rapidly built its ad business since emerging as the talk of last year's Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. And next week, when the industry again converges on the Riviera, the company may well find itself the belle of the ball once more. Today, the company announces the launch of Snapchat Partners, its long-anticipated advertising API (application programming interface), which will hook up more than 20 tech-minded companies. The API promises to expand advertising dramatically on the platform in the long run. "Different marketers have different objectives, and we just want to make it easier for them to buy ads on the platform," Khan explains. "We want [brands] to have a place where they can tell their stories, you know, in a better way."

The API means that Snapchat ads will, for the first time, be sold by third parties, and will be divided by two kinds of collaborators: Ads Partners and Creative Partners. The first group will develop software for Snapchat advertisers, enabling buying, optimizing and analyzing of campaigns. Ads Partners includes 4C, Amobee, VaynerMedia, Brand Networks, SocialCode, TubeMogul, Adaptly and Unified.

The Creative Partners, meanwhile, represent a mix of players with expertise in social content and experience with Snapchat's vertical-video format, 3V, which the company plans to rebrand in the coming weeks as Snap Ads. That group includes Big Spaceship, The 88, Alldayeveryday, Matte Finish, VaynerMedia, Virtue, Refinery29, BrandLab, Moment Studio, Stun Creative, The Mill, Studio Number One, MediaMonks, Unit9, Contented and Truffle Pig, which is the agency Snapchat launched at Cannes last year in partnership with WPP and The Daily Mail. (It's worth noting that VaynerMedia is the only player that will be both an Ads Partner and Creative Partner at launch.)

API inventory will be sold via an automated, auction-based system. Snapchat would not disclose much financial detail about the relationships on its API, but Ads Partners members, via their software, will sell video inventory to be automatically invoiced to Snapchat, after which the vendors will collect their fees.

The ads won't be spotted in the wild for a few weeks yet, as Snapchat Partners just got clearance to coordinate with brand marketers. Snapchat will work closely with its partners to ensure marketers have their ducks in a row—the quality of the ads will be a priority, for example. In fact, Snapchat will inspect every ad, much as Instagram did for years.

What does all this mean for ad pricing? Snapchat's premium video ad inventory—when sold directly by the company, as it has been for the last year or so—has so far been priced on a cost-per-thousand-impression rate that is sometimes competitive with TV, meaning in the $40-60 range, per industry sources. Marketers can expect both API videos and the newly launched Snap Ads Between Stories to be less expensive, though special events like July 4th or Black Friday will likely jack up prices due to the supply-and-demand forces in an auction-based system. Snapchat predicts that the wider availability of its video ads will be a hit among brands, claiming they get five times greater consumer engagement—or "swipe ups," in the company's vernacular—when compared to clickthrough rates on most mobile ads.

Snapchat could, in theory, attract the ad spend marketers might otherwise throw at mobile banners or lose to ad fraud—neither of which exists on the platform, a proverbial "walled garden" of the social sector. If Khan's sales team does its job, Snapchat—reportedly with 150 million daily users, presented with full-screen ads on their smartphones—could stand to steal away a chunk of millennial-focused brands' TV budgets. The stats are irresistible to advertisers chasing the coveted demo, with Snapchat on any given day reaching 41 percent of consumers 18-34 in the U.S., according to Khan.

This spring, Snapchat implemented auto-advance stories, letting users swipe right to quickly catch up with their friends' stories. Going forward, Snapchatters will begin seeing video ads—the aforementioned Snap Ads Between Stories—in between their buddies' messages. Ten test partners are in tow, including Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Verizon, Procter & Gamble, Warner Bros. and Express. "We are spending a tremendous amount of time and investment with Snapchat," says Jim Hilt, CMO at Express.

What of those faithful Snapchatters who fear the user experience will turn into an advertising hailstorm? They can go ahead and fold up their umbrellas, assures Peter Sellis, the company's head of monetization product. "We have to be thoughtful about the inventory, ad load and the ad experience. But we also know that we cannot build custom ad-tech solutions for every big type of advertiser, for every vertical. And so these [partners] really excel in those kinds of ways," he says.

With the rollout of Snap Ads Between Stories, Snapchat is promising once again to avoid pelting users with marketing messages. "By doing this the right way, focused on creativity and doing it early, it allows us to be extraordinarily conservative," says Sellis. "Something that I think often gets lost is that ad effectiveness can be inversely correlated with the number of ads that the viewer sees. If you see 50 ads in a day, the probability of you remembering them is low."

Snapchat may be as hot as summertime right now, but not all advertisers are feeling the warmth. Nearly one-third of brands with a Snapchat account, according to a study from L2, don't bother posting even once a month on the mobile app. Expect that number to plummet before the holiday season, as more marketers wake up to what others are saying about the platform.

Lance Neuhauser, CEO of 4C, an API partner with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and now Snapchat, says he's never seen advertiser interest in an emerging social media platform grow as fast as it has for this app—not even Facebook. "We've been told that new buckets are actually being opened up for Snapchat specifically," he explains. "We've been told that there are new budgets raring to go."

Cathy Boyle, mobile analyst at eMarketer, predicts that over the next year more marketers will experiment with Snapchat—and, she adds, "the brands that have already been in the experimental phase will then likely begin shifting more dollars toward the platform."

The L2 study, which examined hundreds of marketers across sectors, also reveals that brands average 26 posts per week on Snapchat, significantly outpacing Instagram, where only the fashion category averages double-digit posts. What's more, Thalamus, an advertising company research portal, reports that Snapchat is searched by media planners more than any other term on its site.

Digital marketers who are not getting religion with the app seem to be on the brink of an embarrassing confessional. According to the gospel of L'Oréal, marketers must be ahead of the curve about engaging with consumers where they spend their digital hours. "And right now, that's Snapchat," says Marie Gulin-Merle, U.S. marketing chief for the cosmetics giant.

Last week, Snapchat brass appeared to lean in while addressing campaign measurement—one of brands' biggest concerns about the platform—by forging a deal with Moat to provide an ad performance score. The score appears to take aim at the digital ad industry's de facto measurement authority, the Media Ratings Council, which states, controversially, that a chargeable impression needs to include only 50 percent of a mobile or desktop screen while an ad runs for just two seconds.

The new Snapchat-Moat metric comes from a different set of criteria, generating a quality score from 0 to 100, by calculating screen real estate (3V ads are full-screen) and time exposed to video and audio. For now, the score is meant to guide advertisers as they weigh a campaign's effectiveness, but Clement Xue, head of revenue operations at Snapchat, says it may become Snapchat currency, i.e., the system that determines how advertisers pay for Snapchat impressions.

Xue and his team are taking a particularly strong stance on audio, stressing its importance in ad effectiveness. That would seem to fly in the face of players like Facebook. Advertisers with the world's largest social network have, for the last year or so, been advised to create spots with the idea that they won't be heard in the Facebook news feed, where the default audio setting for video ads is off. Snapchat's default is set to on, and the company says more than two-thirds of its videos are viewed with sound. "We ultimately believe that [audio] drives results, and we have seen that through our studies," Xue explains.

Snapchat recently worked with Austin, Texas-based MediaScience to survey 320 consumers aged 16-56, which compared, during 552 sessions, Snapchat video ads to those on TV, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. The study encompassed biometric testing to capture emotional responses, as well as eye-tracking and exit surveys. Snapchat says its ads garnered twice the visual attention of Facebook, 1.5 times more than Instagram and 1.3 times better than YouTube. When compared to those platforms and TV, Snapchat claims that its ads generated greater emotional response and twice as much purchase intent.

Shock Top, an Anheuser-Busch brand, participated in a different study, repurposing its Super Bowl spot by cutting it from 30 seconds to 10 seconds and reformatting it for vertical video. On Snapchat, it saw brand awareness among largely millennial consumers improve 15 points and purchase intent rise 22 percent. Meanwhile, 90-second ads grew purchase intent, at times, by 40 percent—notable considering the subjects were supposedly impatient Gen Y consumers. "It drove people to purchase," says Shock Top vp Jake Kirsch. "[These are] folks who are just coming of age when it comes to premium beers."

Snapchat is also now working with Google's DoubleClick to pump out ad data, bringing the mobile app's measurement partners to 10. Internally, Xue's team has built a service called Snapchat to Store that yields stats on whether its ads lead to visits to brick-and-mortar stores. In a clear grab at retail budgets, the service looks at the impact of the platform's video ads, sponsored Lenses and sponsored Geofilters.

On that topic, both Snapchat and its API partners are mum about what the new ads platform means for the app's branded Geofilters and Lenses. For now, their focus is on video ads, but it is easy to imagine sponsored Lenses and Geofilters being added to the Snapchat Partners mix—there is simply too much money to be made. Up to now, sponsored Lenses have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for a 24-hour window, and brands dig them.

For example, heading into Cinco de Mayo, Taco Bell launched a sponsored Lense that turned consumers' heads into giant taco shells, resulting in 224 million views in one day—a Snapchat record, beating Gatorade's Super Bowl campaign, which garnered more than 165 million views. The average user engaged with Taco Bell's ad for 24 seconds before sharing it with friends. The results surprised even the brand. "I will say, with a bit of a wink and a smile, that when I started to see some of the creative ideas for this, this is where I suddenly felt a little old because I thought, I don't know if this is on brand," says Marisa Thalberg, Taco Bell's chief marketing officer. Thalberg's team has tracked the brand's Snapchat engagement, finding an average of 100,000 views per video with a completion rate of better than 80 percent. Thalberg notes that when it comes to such campaigns, she's learned to give her social media team a lot of leeway. "We don't corporatize this," she says. "We don't hyper-manage it."

Taco Bell's Cinco de Mayo campaign was created in-house, in cooperation with the Snapchat team—and that marketer-working-directly-with-platform storyline has become more common. Kansas City agency VML, which handled Gatorade's Super Bowl effort, says it has floated ideas to Snapchat before pitching them to clients, underscoring how tech is impacting creative. In terms of execution, VML's "dunk" filter for Gatorade, which went viral on Super Bowl Sunday, resulted from the agency putting together a 3-D rendering of the beverage brand's iconic orange water cooler, handing it to Snapchat, then letting the company essentially take it from there. One can see why Snapchat will rely on its API partners to start handling the technical aspects of campaigns moving forward.

Snapchat does face a challenge maintaining its upward trajectory in the minds of marketers. It requires custom content more than perhaps any digital channel to date, rendering ads potentially too expensive for some marketers. And while it offers targeting based on location, gender, wireless carrier, device type and content affinity, media buyers accustomed to Facebook's interest-level, hyper-targeting options may want more. "I haven't heard any promises from them in terms of advanced targeting," says Sae Cho, manager of social influence at Horizon Media.

Big-time marketers demand big-time scale, of course, and while Snapchat has reportedly achieved 150 million global daily users and is now bigger than Twitter, it has nowhere near Facebook's 1 billion-plus user base. But the app may be poised to become larger in the coming months. Adweek commissioned research firm Survata to conduct a study of 2,000 U.S. consumers aged 16-54, which found that of those who had not downloaded Snapchat, 11 percent of the overall sample and 15 percent of millennials said they planned to try it, while nearly 28 percent said they were not aware of the app. Just last week, eMarketer projected that Snapchat will grow 27 percent this year to nearly 59 million users in the U.S.

That growth is essential if it is to hit its goals. According to recently leaked documents from inside the company, Snapchat, a $59 million business as of last year, aims to haul in $250 million to $350 million this year and $500 million to $1 billion by the end of 2017. To accomplish that, the company will have to convince a greater slice of the population that they need another social network on their mobile devices; it must persuade consumers that an app that opens as a camera—often confusing to first-time users—is a vital addition to their digital lives. And it is no small feat to go from more than 150 million daily users to, say, 300 million. Just ask Twitter.

Khan shrugs off any question about whether Snapchat will struggle to rope in users who remember the '60s, '70s or '80s, noting that half its users are 25 or older. "It doesn't matter if you are 60 years old or if you are 20," he contends. "Everybody likes to see their friends' Stories."

One of the truer measures of a social platform's impact is not how it makes money for shareholders but rather how players within its ecosystem thrive. BuzzFeed and Daily Mail are particularly bullish on their experiences as Snapchat Discover publishers. BuzzFeed says the weekly watch time of its videos has grown 33 percent on Discover this year, and the company has consistently convinced advertisers like Macy's, Hulu and Lay's to come aboard.

At the Digital Content NewFronts in New York last month, Daily Mail editor in chief and publisher Martin Clarke relayed a story about how his son—normally apolitical, he says—recently asked about GOP presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump because of something he saw on the mobile app. "Snapchat Discover is exposing our news and our content to a brand-new audience," Clarke proclaimed.

And just as Facebook ultimately gave birth to vendors like Buddy Media, Wildfire and Involver a few years ago and as Instagram, more recently, essentially spawned notable interactive agency Laundry Service, Snapchat is inspiring marketing entrepreneurs. Delmondo and Naritiv are two influencer-focused startups to base their business on Snapchat.

"Our revenue will probably hit $1.5 million this year," says Nick Cicero, CEO of Delmondo, which he founded in December 2014 and which counts UFC and AT&T as clients. He reckons that annual revenue of $5 million isn't far off. Those are more-than-decent expectations for a startup.

Snapchat also has very large ad players trying out new strategies. For example, Nissan has been testing the platform's new app-install ads, nabbing 38,000 downloads in one month for its auxiliary Diehard Fan mobile app. Nissan vp of marketing communications Jeremy Tucker says Snapchat was a natural fit because the ads invited "users to add virtual elements to their own photos and share with friends."

From the API and new ad products to additional measurement tools, Snapchat's growing enterprise would appear to be catching up to its runaway buzz. Yet, much groundwork has been laid, including the hiring of sales teams in New York, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Detroit, Toronto, London and Sydney. Khan has become a red-eye Jedi; he and his team are jetting around the globe on agency visits. They've also invited partners and prospects to Snapchat's home base in Venice, Calif., to powwow about the possibilities around Geofilters and other branded placements.

Just 18 months ago, Snapchat had virtually no ad business to speak of. How did the company do so much so quickly? Hiring 730 people had something to do with it, of course. But Khan also credits Snapchat's digital predecessors such as Facebook, Google, AOL and Yahoo. "They all really paved the way to educating the market, the value of the digital," he explains.

Still, those such as Kenny Mitchell, senior director of consumer engagement at Gatorade, point to Khan as the catalyst, comparing his achievements at Snapchat to what Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg did right out of the gate after leaving Google. "We feel good about where they are heading," says Mitchell.

But will Khan steer Snapchat to Wall Street like Sandberg did with Facebook in 2012? Like Khan himself did with Alibaba? The likely answer is yes, and it could happen in a matter of months as opposed to years. Khan brushes aside such speculation, characterizing an IPO as "a financing event."

"I think advertising is a very large opportunity," he says, "and we're just getting started."

This story first appeared in the June 13, 2016 issue of Adweek magazine.
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To Scott Goodstein, the world of political advertising for a high-stakes campaign like the current presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump comes down to just three things: "Time, people and money," he said, referring to the audience they're trying to reach on a given day for a given price.

Goodstein would know, after helping propel Barack Obama to the White House in 2008. And more recently, as CEO of Revolution Messaging, he spent the better part of the past two years deep in the digital trenches serving as digital agency of record for Bernie Sanders' spirited campaign.

As the online battleground for the attention continues unabated in the final seven-week stretch before the presidential election and plenty of other key national and local races, marketers from both sides of the aisle see digital efforts—particularly those in the mobile realm—as integral to reaching the right voters.

"If I'm trying to reach young people in California where they have a higher propensity to cut the cord, why am I buying cable TV [ads] for young people channels?" he said.

According to a new report by AOL, 53 percent of political advertisers say they've increased digital and mobile spending from 2012 to 2016, with about half of all such expenditures being bought programmatically. And with audience behavior now front and center in the most data-minded White House race to date, smart targeting is more valuable than ever.

In some cases, targeted buys could substantially help a candidate. A survey conducted by TubeMogul found that 35 percent of more than 1,000 voters said seeing an online ad for Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, made them more likely to vote for her. On the other hand, just 31 percent said the same for Republican Trump.

But a campaign can't rely solely on online targeting, noted Peter Pasi, vp of political sales at Collective. Pasi said an effective campaign requires balancing scope and scale—while mixing the old with the new. In fact, Collective's research this campaign cycle has shown that preroll ads are still "highly, highly effective" when combined with a TV spot.

"Data is helpful, but it can be a handle or it can be handcuffs," Pasi explained. "You need to figure out the best way to manage data and optimize it without being so dogmatic about it that you lose sight of the goal, which is to win an election."

This story first appeared in the September 26, 2016 issue of Adweek magazine.
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In a deal to bolster its video offerings for advertisers, Adobe has acquired demand-side platform TubeMogul for $540 million.

Programmatic-geared TubeMogul works with brands like Dannon and Quiznos to run digital, mobile and video campaigns by powering the ad-tech pipes in platforms like Facebook and Snapchat.

According to Adobe, TubeMogul will get plugged into Adobe Marketing Cloud, the company's tool to help brands manage digital campaigns, primarily in display, social and search. As brands' spending on digital video continues to increase, the addition of TubeMogul will theoretically help Adobe grab bigger digital budgets. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2017.

"Adobe and TubeMogul will provide a unified advertising and data management solution that enables brands to precisely identify the right segments and plan, execute and measure paid media across any device," TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson said in a statement.

Due to the uproar over President-elect Donald Trump's decision to appoint former Brietbart chairman Steve Bannon to his administration, a growing number of ad-tech companies are pulling the plug on the site's access to advertising dollars via their systems.

A spokesman for programmatic video company TubeMogul said today that the company has removed the alt-right website from a list of default websites for ad buys because of concerns over offensive language and hate speech. Ads that run on the programmatic exchange are typically served across hundreds of publishers' sites automatically, but to purchase inventory on Breitbart through TubeMogul, advertisers now have to manually type the website into the site-selector section of the company's ad-buying software.

A slew of brands—including Kellogg's, Allstate and Warby Parker—have pulled their Brietbart ad buys because of hate speech concerns in the past week. Last week, ad-tech company AppNexus also shut down Breitbart's access to its advertising marketplace after an audit revealed that "there were enough articles and headlines that cross the line, either coded or overt language."

The TubeMogul rep added that its quality-assurance team has been instructed to monitor Breitbart for other brand-safety categories in addition to hate speech and offensive language that advertisers may be concerned with. The company's software also includes brand safety filters that automatically prevent ads running on other websites with similar offensive content.

According to Ghostery's Trackermap software—which tracks the digital advertising companies that publishers work with—dozens of ad-tech firms are plugged into Breitbart.

"There are dozens of companies that have access to Breitbart inventory—sometimes they know it's Breitbart and sometimes they just know that it's a particular cookie profile of a user who has the behaviors that they're looking for," said Scott Meyer, CEO of Ghostery. "The challenge and the requirement for big brands is to ensure that the level of visibility is there as they buy."

Additionally, Adweek has learned that ad-tech player Rocket Fuel stopped serving ads to the site in mid-November, but Breitbart may still be loading its tracking pixels that collect data to serve ads. "This may be done by publishers to make their web page more attractive to companies that operate in the programmatic space. Rocket Fuel does not have any control to deploy a pixel on a publisher website we don't control, including Breitbart," the company explained in a statement. 

Meanwhile, Breitbart today started a petition dubbed #DumpKelloggs, encouraging its readers to boycott the packaged-goods company's products because of its decision to remove ad campaigns from the site.

"Kellogg's has shown its contempt for Breitbart's 45 million readers and for the main street American values that they hold dear," said Breitbart president and CEO Larry Solov in a post."Pulling its advertising from Breitbart News is a decidedly cynical and un-American act. The only sensible response is to join together and boycott Kellogg's products in protest."