This Week’s Newsletter: 2021 Wrap, Industry News & 2 New Videos

This Week’s Newsletter: 2021 Wrap, Industry News & 2 New Videos

We send a newsletter each week to cover industry news, including Bidtellect updates. Don’t miss out! Subscribe here!

Hello Bidtellectuals!

Happy New Year! Here’s to a bright 2022!

More Platform Videos? Yes Please!

We’re back with more Behind the Platform videos! Next up: Creative Bulk Upload. This is an easy way to save time on campaign planning.

Plus: What is Campaign Flighting?

Campaign Flighting can optimize campaign planning and improve your digital ad performance. Words flying past you? Land here: read our blog post or watch our latest Behind the Platform video to create campaign flights with ease.

That’s a Wrap 2021

15 Billion impressions served
3,642 Creative requests fulfilled
345+ Brand partners
25 New product releases
20+ Press releases, articles, & industry publications
16 New employees
03 Channels plus High impact units
1 Virtual all-hands
Countless hours of hard work, laughs, and learning to adapt to an evolving landscape.
…. that’s powering smarter advertising in 2021 with Bidtellect

 

 

Around the Industry:

  • Retail ecommerce will continue to boom in 2022! According to eMarketer, after almost 50% growth in ecommerce channel ad spending during 2020, advertisers increased those allocations by another 27.8% in 2021, and the same rate of growth is predicted for 2022. Not only that, the share of total retail sales that occur online has “jumped an unprecedented amount’ and will continue to grow. It is clear that businesses online are doing very well, so it is imperative for them to take charge of their growth by utilizing the resources available out there, from picking a supportive checking account (https://www.moneyunder30.com/best-business-checking-accounts) to building on their digital marketing strategies to reach a wider audience.
  • So keep making discovery content: eMarketer estimates that 92.6% of US internet users ages 14 and older will browse, research, or compare products digitally via any device at least once this year, making them digital shoppers.
  • Spotify has added clickable ads to their podcasts, reports Adweek. The new feature, called a Call to Action card, offers a visual, clickable accompaniment to audio ads. The cards then linger as an interstitial ad on the podcast page, the episode page and the now playing view when the episode is playing. The cards will live on those surfaces for seven days or until the campaign ends.
  • According to eMarketer, US Digital Ad spending is expected to rise 13.6% to nearly $240 billion in 2022.
  • Is this what Google was waiting for when it delayed the phase out of cookies on Chrome? The United States Patent and Trademark Office this week granted Google a patent that describes how its technology can attribute a click without using cookies, reported Mediapost.

Bidtellect Meditates!

Check your calendars: our guided meditation session started this week! Join your team members biweekly on Wednesdays from 3:30 – 3:45 pm EST via Zoom to get your ommm on.

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Post-COVID Trends You Need Now

The top trends in a post-covid economy include a new work normal, a looming cookieless future, ecommerce and native discovery. Read it now!

Read it Now:

Top 5 Trends for Digital Advertisers in a Post-COVID Economy (With Data!)

Thank You

Thanks to your donations, we raised nearly one thousand dollars for Feeding South Florida, benefitting those hungry in Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Monroe Counties.

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Joint Case Study: HPE Ezmeral & Bidtellect Partnership Reports Data Management & Performance Benefits

Joint Case Study: HPE Ezmeral & Bidtellect Partnership Reports Data Management & Performance Benefits

When Bidtellect recognized it was time to switch to HPE Ezmerel for its data needs, we knew migration would be a massive undertaking. Despite this pressure, we achieved it in just five weeks with no service interruption. In this joint case study feature published by HPE, read how Bidtellect was able to save money and improve performance. Here are 3 takeaways:

1. Change is good!

The motivation to switch came from increasing in prices along with the need for better functionality and performance. Change is (usually) never a bad thing!

2. The data needs

Bidtellect is a highly competitive demand side platform that runs online bid requests and auctions for digital advertising. With that, there is a lot of data that needs to be processed. Migrating to a new vendor would not be easy, and HPE Ezmerel would need to be up to the challenge of our data and performance needs.

3. Key advantages

The migration to HPE Ezmeral has allowed for real-time feedback. There are four key advantages that have been a direct outcome in this migration: more efficient date storage, higher performance, improved security, and an easy-to-access file system architecture.

Read more about our successful partnership with HPE Ezmerel for data and performance outcomes.

Bidtellect reports 4 data management and analytics benefits using HPE Ezmeral 

Steps to Success with Bidtellect

Bidtellect has built the world's greatest Native Advertising Platform.  Our Client Services team has put together some basic tactics to set you up for Native Success!By:  Nick Bollettieri, Dee Brodsky, Kristen McDonnell, John Sorrell and Jennifer ZeidlerEstablish...

Understanding Native Optimization

When it comes to making optimizations to most forms of digital advertisements, most analysts look at the composition of users, publisher-side supply, and device type. When it comes to native advertising

How to Make Your Native Ads NOT Suck

Everyone fast forwards thru advertising, thank you tivo for inventing the commercial skip. We thumb through a magazine or newspaper (whats that?) to get the real content – to read the stories. And we do the same thing online, every website since the 90s has looked the...

Native Advertising’s Church & State Challenge

Judging by industry buzz and press coverage in the past year, one would think that all publishers have embraced native advertising – ads that feel ”native” to the content -- as an important monetization driver in the age of programmatic, data-driven marketing. ...

1st Party Content: Native Advertising’s Untapped Treasure Chest

The past few years have seen the promise of native advertising converted into reality as more and more brand marketers invest in this methodology that is meant to create more effective consumer engagement.   With recent reports that consumer usage of ad blocking...

Why You Should be Using Engagement, Not CTR, to Measure Awareness

By Clark Cooper and Andrew Sugrue Creatives that attract a user's attention and compel them to click on your ad are vital, but an even more accurate measure of awareness is how that user interacts with the promoted content. Many brands are still focused on CTR as a...

Bidtellect’s Native Video Suite Empowers Marketers to Scale Quality Video Content

Bidtellect is excited to announce the expansion of our Native video suite, now the most comprehensive offering in the market. Marketers can choose from three distinct video products when delivering high-performing, targeted video content to consumers: Native In-Feed,...

Methods to Maximize Dynamic Pricing

As the digital advertising ecosystem has become increasingly crowded with multiple devices and formats, marketers must have the right strategies in place to drive optimal value for each campaign. To maximize the efficiency of direct response strategies, digital...

What Are OpenRTB 2.3 and the Native Ad API Specification and Why Should I Care?

When Native ads first began to gain adoption, they were largely considered to be customized executions due to their highly engaging and organic nature. Unlike banner ads, which consist of one fully formed asset, Native ads are primarily composed of three creative...

Pre-Bid Brand Safety with Bidtellect Powered by AdmantX

Bidtellect is proud to announce that its pre-bid Brand Safety is now powered by AdmantX, which can be layered onto campaigns as a targeting feature.

6 Tips and Trends for Your Holiday Campaigns That You Do Not Want To Forget

6 Tips and Trends for Your Holiday Campaigns That You Do Not Want To Forget

It’s the final countdown! While preparing your holiday advertising campaigns, we rounded up our top tips and trends you do NOT want to forget.

1. It’s the Happiest Time of Year – Keep it Positive!

Keep it positive! Consider making small tweaks to your website (if you don’t already have one, contact the likes of Cefar to get one designed) and use positive adjectives in headlines coupled with happy images to increase CTR. Cold, monotone creatives do not bring joy. Bonus: add puns or rhymes to make it even more…puntastic.

2. Which Images and Creative Units Perform Best?

Photographs perform better than animated images. Always. On that note, children, pets, and people in images perform best. Smile! Go solo: if using images with products, one solo “feature” product performs better than a group.

Take your static images up a notch with cinemegraphs, scroller units, and carousel units. These are highly effective at telling a short story and conveying a specific setting or emotion. They also drive maximum in-unit engagement. One advertising agency found that cinemagraph content tends to have more virality, with 71% higher organic reach than still photographs. Don’t believe us? Check out this case study or this one.

3. Make It Personable! Build Trust.

Holidays can be the most amazing, yet most stressful time of the year for families – especially given the last two years. As a brand, bringing a “human” and empathetic touch to your messaging can make your holiday campaigns more attractive and build trust with your consumers. When asked by eMarketer which emotions were most effective at making consumers feel connected to brands, admiration and trust were the overwhelming choice. Gain trust by being personable and building a connection with your consumers. This can be through family-forward images, warm and inviting copy, and inspirational content and stories. Don’t forget the importance of brand safety tech controls – i.e. where your ad is placed on the page – consumers can quickly lose trust in your brand if it’s placed next to unsavory and/or user-generated content.

4. Count on Heavy Ecommerce Holiday Shopping

Last year proved that consumers were just as – if not more – willing to spend money online while shopping for the holidays. Even with the ability to shop in-store this year, ecommerce will continue to grow, and forecasts predict record-breaking ecommerce sales this holiday season. So it is essential for small and local businesses that are online to see how Local Search Engine Optimization can work at this time, as well as take on other digital marketing steps. It would be important for them to start this off just before the season begins so it can have enough time to reach their intended audience and drum up business. They may also want to change their payment processing system if their current one has had faults, they do not want to have a jam or issue as the season begins because it could lose them money. Checking out websites like https://www.easypaydirect.com/merchant-accounts/high-risk-merchant-accounts/ as well as similar others, can show them what is available for the type of business they have.

Retail ecommerce sales are projected to make up 18.9% of total holiday retail sales, up from 17.5% last year according to eMarketer. Thanksgiving Day ecommerce sales are expected to hit a whopping $6.21 billion, per eMarketer forecasts. (For reference, Thanksgiving Day ecommerce sales reached $4.13 billion just two years ago in 2019.) And as we mentioned, Cyber Monday was the heaviest online spending day in history, rising 15.6% to $10.78 billion. This continued through the end of the year, especially online, driving a dramatic 47% increase in ecommerce sales during the traditional holiday season, according to Facebook.

5. Help Holiday Shoppers With Context Discovery

Half of all shoppers polled by Facebook experienced some difficulty knowing what to buy for others, while 63% of global shoppers surveyed enjoyed discovering items they weren’t actively looking for. Call it Discovery Commerce, online discovery, point of intent, content marketing – the point is the same: consumers want a bit of help when it comes to shopping, and there’s no shame in that. So, when you are planning your advertisements this season with your chosen resource, whether that be though a company like Creatopy or an in-house team, you will want to discuss the range that you can do for your customers so they can be helped along.

Creating digital ads – discovery aides – that help shoppers determine what to buy based on what they are likely to love (thanks to context clues and audience groups, for example) is crucial to success. Maximizing contextual targeting and context-driven optimization will ensure your ads and content find your target shoppers. Make your consumers’ holiday shopping job easier. Don’t just meet them at their needs; anticipate them.

6. Black Friday is Starting Early This Year​ – So Get Ahead

Companies are coming out with Black Friday deals earlier and earlier every year! Do not miss the chance to jump ahead on early deals in order to gain the attention of your target market – because they’ll be more likely to shop with you. New data from Criteo found that 30% of consumers will try a new online store because of early holiday deals, and one-quarter of consumers research purchases one month before their Black Friday buys. Amazon has already started rolling out their Black Friday Deals, and “when the biggest power in ecommerce sets an early start to a shopping season, others quickly follow to avoid missing out.”

Brands and advertisers, we hope tips for engaging holiday creative assets make your performance soar! The holiday 2021 shopping season is going to be a great year!

For more tips, check out our creative best practices: the naughty and nice list.

Steps to Success with Bidtellect

Bidtellect has built the world's greatest Native Advertising Platform.  Our Client Services team has put together some basic tactics to set you up for Native Success!By:  Nick Bollettieri, Dee Brodsky, Kristen McDonnell, John Sorrell and Jennifer ZeidlerEstablish...

Understanding Native Optimization

When it comes to making optimizations to most forms of digital advertisements, most analysts look at the composition of users, publisher-side supply, and device type. When it comes to native advertising

How to Make Your Native Ads NOT Suck

Everyone fast forwards thru advertising, thank you tivo for inventing the commercial skip. We thumb through a magazine or newspaper (whats that?) to get the real content – to read the stories. And we do the same thing online, every website since the 90s has looked the...

Native Advertising’s Church & State Challenge

Judging by industry buzz and press coverage in the past year, one would think that all publishers have embraced native advertising – ads that feel ”native” to the content -- as an important monetization driver in the age of programmatic, data-driven marketing. ...

1st Party Content: Native Advertising’s Untapped Treasure Chest

The past few years have seen the promise of native advertising converted into reality as more and more brand marketers invest in this methodology that is meant to create more effective consumer engagement.   With recent reports that consumer usage of ad blocking...

Why You Should be Using Engagement, Not CTR, to Measure Awareness

By Clark Cooper and Andrew Sugrue Creatives that attract a user's attention and compel them to click on your ad are vital, but an even more accurate measure of awareness is how that user interacts with the promoted content. Many brands are still focused on CTR as a...

Bidtellect’s Native Video Suite Empowers Marketers to Scale Quality Video Content

Bidtellect is excited to announce the expansion of our Native video suite, now the most comprehensive offering in the market. Marketers can choose from three distinct video products when delivering high-performing, targeted video content to consumers: Native In-Feed,...

Methods to Maximize Dynamic Pricing

As the digital advertising ecosystem has become increasingly crowded with multiple devices and formats, marketers must have the right strategies in place to drive optimal value for each campaign. To maximize the efficiency of direct response strategies, digital...

What Are OpenRTB 2.3 and the Native Ad API Specification and Why Should I Care?

When Native ads first began to gain adoption, they were largely considered to be customized executions due to their highly engaging and organic nature. Unlike banner ads, which consist of one fully formed asset, Native ads are primarily composed of three creative...

Pre-Bid Brand Safety with Bidtellect Powered by AdmantX

Bidtellect is proud to announce that its pre-bid Brand Safety is now powered by AdmantX, which can be layered onto campaigns as a targeting feature.

This Week’s Newsletter: NEW PRODUCT DROP: Target Age & Gender Demographics WITHOUT COOKIES

This Week’s Newsletter: NEW PRODUCT DROP: Target Age & Gender Demographics WITHOUT COOKIES

We send a newsletter each week to cover industry news, including Bidtellect updates. Don’t miss out! Subscribe here!

Hello Bidtellectuals!

Congratulations to Bidtellectuals of the Week Logan Bykofsky!​

PRESS RELEASE: Bidtellect Releases Cookieless Context Demographic Targeting Feature, Industry First

Bidtellect is excited to collaborate with BidSwitch to announce the success of its SmartSwitch technology to optimize bidstream processing, save on listening costs, and ultimately drive performance.

To quote Arthur Hainline, Bidtellect VP of Product: “Bidtellect’s Context Demographics has three distinct advantages over traditional third-party data demographics targeting. First, it is cookieless and so its scale will not diminish as the addressable web shrinks. Second, it is cheaper than the vast majority of third party demographics data. Third, instead of sifting through studies for various demographic providers, buyers can manage and balance their accuracy and scale directly. The accuracy of Bidtellect’s new targeting option is self-evident.”

Talk about powering smarter advertising.

Read the Press Release | Read Our Recap on the Blog | Watch the Video

What You Need To Know For the Holiday Shopping Season

New data from Criteo published in Mediapost found that 30% of consumers will try a new online store because of early holiday deals, well ahead of Black Friday. That means your creative assets should feature sales and deals in its headline/copy, and that you should start reaching consumers sooner rather than later. In fact, reach cosumers with “context discovery:” one-quarter of consumers research purchases one month before their Black Friday buys. Facebook found that 63% of global shoppers surveyed enjoyed discovering items they weren’t actively looking for.

Read Now: 5 Trends and Tips For Brands & Advertisers This Holiday Shopping Season

Read Now: Our 6 Mandatory Tips for Engaging Holiday Creative Assets

Around the Industry:

  • A study from MAGNA Media Trials and Disney Advertising Sales released today called “No News Is Bad News: Ads in News & Other Types of Content,” finds advertising in a reliable news source creates stronger brand effectiveness. People found news content to be more valuable, trustworthy and interesting. But reliability is key: 57% of respondents said marketers should vet news sources before advertising (Forbes).
  • Speaking of news, it continues to move online. The New York Times Company said on Wednesday that it added 455,000 new digital subscriptions in the third quarter, a gain that keeps the publisher on pace to reach its stated goal of 10 million subscriptions by 2025 (The New York Times).
  • US TV advertisers will increase their upfront TV spending by 7.6% this year to $19.90 billion – a return to pre-pandemic normalcy (BusinessInsider).
  • Holiday travel is returning, but lingering habits and health and safety concerns linger from the pandemic: About twice as many travelers plan to road trip (70%) versus fly (37%), citing enjoyment (38%) and convenience (28%) as the top reasons, above health (12%), according to Deloitte’s latest study. Another pandemic trend? Renting. 43% of those staying in rentals over the holidays tried this lodging type for the first time during the pandemic (Deloitte).
  • ICYMI: Facebook is officially changing its corporate name to Meta, distancing itself from its namesake social platform that launched in 2004. BUT apparently they may face a trademark battle, as a startup that sells computers, disk drives, keyboards, and other devices filed for the patent in 2020 – well before Facebook’s announcement (BusinessInsider). Each side will likely hire a copyright/trademark infringement lawyer, check here for more details on what this may entail, so they can fight the case in court if it goes that far.
  • Gartner released its fourth annual Magic Quadrant for buy-side technology and the buzz is: keep your eye on Amazon. It’s “rubbing shoulders” with the “leader” quadrant, which includes Google, The Trade Desk, Adobe, Amobee, Adform and Mediaocean. (Adexchanger).

Creatives of the Week:

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Each week, we’ll share some of our most engaging creatives out in the wild!

On the left, a top engaging creative in Spanish! We love our team’s multilingual capabilities, and above is proof of our commitment to performance no matter the market. On the right, a listicle in the headline always lead to high engagement, and this content will provide valuable information.

Read more about Bidtellect’s creative services team, [b]+studio.

5 WAYS TECHNOLOGY CAN CREATE A BRAND SAFE ENVIRONMENT FOR ADVERTISERS

How can advertisers ensure their ads are seen positively “in the wild” and not found somewhere that comprises their brand integrity, privacy, even safety? We cover 5 of the most common problems.

Download it now

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santa is watching you poster hoiday advertising

Post-COVID Trends You Need Now

The top trends in a post-covid economy include a new work normal, a looming cookieless future, ecommerce and native discovery. Read it now!

Read it Now:

Top 5 Trends for Digital Advertisers in a Post-COVID Economy (With Data!)

NEW CASE STUDY: Bidtellect Achieves 309% Overall IO Increase With Consistent Conversion Performance​

A favorite regional Zoo forced to close due to the pandemic turned to Bidtellect to let customers know about their reopening plans and newly-implemented safety and sanitization measures. To overcome conversion setbacks due to an antiquated web host, Bidtellect implemented sophisticated contextual targeting and retargeting measures that drove conversions and surpassed goals

Read more here.

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