It was big news when Microsoft announced that Hotmail would come to an end and be replaced by their Outlook internet platform. And from an advertising perspective, it left us with a hole to fill as Hotmail was one of our go-to publishers.
With Outlook we were left wondering what our ad choices would be as nothing had been officially announced (though we suspected that the space to the right of the page, filled with internal messages, would come in handy!).
For the past year, we have heard a lot of noise surrounding the growing concept that is showrooming, the term brick-and-mortar retailers either embrace or resist. The reality of the fact is that retailers are falling into a catch 22 situation, with in-store price comparisons becoming the most common showrooming activity. The evolving consumer is gaining control and this can only hurt retailers if they choose to ignore the changing retail experience. A recent study has identified that two-thirds of UK smartphone users have retail apps on their phones, and are the most likely to be searching for a bargain.
Coke has had to defend the statement they made in March about how social doesn’t help them much but display is where it’s at. Of course, we in media love this kind of article. The study Coke performed showed that social buzz has “no measurable impact on short-term sales, but online display ads work about as well as TV”. The company found that for short-term sales impact digital display was nearly as effective as TV (90%). This is obviously a very different industry to, say, a completely online retailer for instance, however with such an impactful brand making that kind of statement people have stood up to take notice.
Last month there was a lot of chatter about Facebook serving retargeting ads in people’s newsfeed. After they made the announcement the main concern is, of course, privacy. Many of us have been retargeted with a very specific product ad after visiting the same product page on a retailer’s site. Certainly we have all raised our eyebrows at the obviousness of it. However in its most simplistic terms, retargeting exists to serve relevant ads – it’s just advertisers taking their best guess at what you want. And this is yet another tool to get there.
There’s no doubt that Programmatic Buying has caught on with “nearly one in five display ad dollars this year to go to RTB”. It is thought this will increase to almost a third of digital display budgets by 2017. How to make the most of it? Incorporate video buys into your RTB plan and give video’s already higher CTR an extra boost. Clearly this is catching on with RTB video spending projected to “grow at nearly three times the rate of overall video spending”. If you have video assets to hand then RTB would be a good, safe place to trial.
It was a busy month for display advertising, with Twitter stepping up its offering as well.
This month the industry was all aflutter about Firefox’s announcement to block third-party cookies by default on their Firefox 22 release (set for June).
Everyone is aflutter about comScore’s 2013 UK Digital Future in Focus report, here’s why: