We know you’ve enjoyed our last week’s roundup. 

So let’s see what made the Ad tech industry ‘sleepless’ last week.

Facebook needs ‘Time’

Facebook continues to experience problems. Not just in the capitol, back home too. Pivotal researcher Brian Wieser analyzed ‘Nielsen’s digital consumption data’ and found an interesting report on the social network.  

The time spent on Facebook’s properties got reduced by 2% from last year and now stays at 16.3%. The properties include Instagram, Whatsapp, and messenger.

Takeaway: Brian Wieser said that data from Nielsen can be compromised and he wouldn’t expect this to be perfect. So, we have to wait for the exact results. And, Facebook itself said, as its experimenting News Feed Changes, drop in consumption is a predicted anomaly.  

Wait, what happened to Mark-Senator Standoff?

Truth – It was pretty weak.

With the publishing industry expecting the senators to throw some ‘real deal’ questions towards Mark, queries such as ‘Do Facebook and Whatsapp talk to each other without any human interactions?’, ‘Does facebook track users after getting out of Facebook, but staying on the browser? (hint: The senator doesn’t seem to understand the cookie concepts well) dropped the pressure level of Mark from ‘normal’ to ‘cool’.

Yet Mark admitted that his company has to work better to explain the users about its data policies and advertising industry (Good luck with that!). And, he says it may take some years to do this at scale.

Snapchat overturns Facebook to help Publishers

Snapchat is trying (kinda, heavily) to grab the publishers’ interest as the largest social media network, Facebook (not a media company) dropped its hand. Although Facebook says, it’s still testing the possibilities, Publishers’ traffic dip is inevitable.

A few improvements (such as more context on posts) might help publishers a bit but cannot replace what they did before.

Snapchat now jumps right into the empty space Facebook made in publishers’ promotion cycle. It recently started offering eCommerce functionalities to a handful of publishers through its discover utility.

Any details?

It lets users swipe up and buy from the recently launched ‘Store’. Hint: A store where it sells Sweatshirts and Hats.  

Takeaway: It’s not on a full run. So, we cannot predict the influence of the market. But one thing for sure, publishers can transfer some of their Social Media Marketing bucks to Snapchat as its planning to roll out more features soon.

Surprisingly, eMarketer says native advertising will grow a bit slower this year

Native Advertising will swallow 58.3 percentage of the total digital display market. In the marketer’s language, US$32.9 billion will be spent on native advertising. Yes, it’s big!

But the headline says ‘Slower growth’?

You’re right, again. Despite the humongous market share, native advertising seems to slow down a bit. eMarketer says the native advertising market has grown by 63.7% in 2016, 50.1% in 2017, but expected to increase just 31% from last year.

Who’s pulling it down?

‘Amazon’. As Amazon continues to expand its services in the advertising industry, the native share will follow the down-slope, per source.

Another reason to care about ‘Viewability’

‘Viewability’ isn’t just a buzzword. Here’s the proof – Viewable Ads drove 52.9% more store visits and lifted the conversion rates by 20.4%, according to a study conducted by Moat, Placed and Integer.

“To set up measurement of foot traffic to on-premise locations, Moat appended a Placed pixel to the campaign to differentiate between viewable impressions and all impressions.  Placed then compared the conversion rates for users served a viewable ad, users served a non-viewable ad, and control groups of users that weren’t exposed to the campaign, with the goal of determining whether users served a viewable ad exhibited higher visitation rates to on-premise (store visits) locations.”

We already got news from the MRC that it’s accelerating the 100 percent pixel viewability research with the goal of making it as a standard. Not just the premium publishers, every publisher should brace for the impact.

Need a guide in viewability? Get it at ‘Viewability’

Knock-knock! Brand-Safety Officer at your door!

There’s a new role on the rise, just to weed out the bad players in our industry. Recently, Digiday explored the advertising agencies across the landscape and showed that they were increasingly investing in ‘Brand Safety Officers’.

IPG Mediabrands appointed Joshua Lowcock as the global brand-safety officer this week. The job is to lead the advertising efforts to the right path and avoid getting along with ‘inappropriate’ content and create safety protocols.

Literally, that’s the job of each and every brand safety officers out there.

Takeaway: A good hit! As publishers keep adapting ads.txt, this will further linearize the market. I.e., fraudsters are expected to be kicked out faster and harder. Publishers should start working to improve content quality and strengthen their presence in the niche.