Category: Affiliate Marketing Tips

The clear target is the connected TV business, which continues to grow ad revenue at a dizzying rate. 

Part of TrueTargeting’s secret sauce is its ability to incorporates what Gimbal/TrueX’s CMO Laurel Rossi describes as “true human behavior,” since the data collected comes directly from consumer first-party surveys, footfall behavior, cross-device interactions and media/viewership habits. It sidesteps cookie-related issues and, the company insists, is completely privacy-compliant because consumers opt in to share their data. 

“Our ultimate vision is, we will be able to sell through the funnel, right, all the way from attention or awareness through to a transaction and the delivery seamlessly — because that’s really what customers want,” said Rossi, who joined the company in late 2021 and is working closely with CEO Christa Carone, who also joined the privately-held parent company Gimbal last fall. “That’s what consumers are looking for. They’re looking for a frictionless opportunity to be acknowledged for their commerce or their shopping behavior, and also for their media behavior. We can bring those two things together.”

“We’re developing one company that sells a portfolio of advertising products that ultimately will be able to address every KPI in the funnel,” added Carone.

Carone noted that by concentrating on the CTV space, TrueTargeting is working to innovate its ad and data offerings, including voice-controlled interaction, layering in AR and VR innovations into into the ad experience, and enabling easy toggling between English and Spanish. 

Part of the appeal to advertisers and media agencies, said Carone, is how TrueTargeting gives viewers an active choice, which plays into the attention consumers pay to those served ads. “When we talk about a value exchange, we literally are saying, ‘Give us your attention’,” said Carone. “And in return for that we’re valuing your time, because we’re going to fast forward you through the rest of the ad break…And the advertiser only pays us if the viewer has engaged with the ad.”

“Everybody says they’re in the CTV business, so we want to [get ahead of that marketplace], to be aggressively leading the targeting conversation, because that is truly the next level of sophistication,” added Rossi.

Tom Rothenberg, Initiative/IPG’s president and global business lead for Amazon, which is one of TrueX/Gimbal’s bigger clients, along with Monster Energy and Panera, said he had been working with TrueX long before the merger with Gimbal, but he’s interested to see how the merged company will innovate.

“We plan to continue to support the development of the two companies together this year, as they turn out new products that bring their positioning to life,” said Rothenberg. “Because when we work with them on new formats and innovation, we get good results.” 

That track record includes work TrueX did for Amazon’s Alexa, building an interactive unit that simulated letting people experience having Alexa run their households. “We do lots of other digital stuff that is more of a volume game, but the TrueX stuff is good when we really need that high-impact [effect] or a marketing message that we want people to spend time with.”

“We like the focus they have on real attention from real people,” he added.

Though he was unable to speak with Digiday, client Kyle Maurer, Monster Energy’s vp of global digital marketing, responded via email that “Insightful data through solutions like TrueTargeting optimizes our media spend and helps us ensure consumers receive the messaging from Monster that means the most to them.”

Digital media is a prime example of this phenomenon. Metrics like viewability and video completion rate have created clear incentives and predictable outcomes: The more impressions or video completions, the better. Since neither has a robust defense against gaming, publishers can create endless video completions and viewable impressions.

The challenge for digital marketers is the same as that faced by Munger and Buffet, identifying metrics that are aligned with their interests and difficult to game. Recently, a movement has emerged promoting attention metrics as a potential solution.

Increased video consumption gamified metrics

In the beginning of the web, some of the reported impressions advertisers received weren’t even rendering on publisher pages. Advertisers fought back with viewability, requiring an ad to be 50% on screen for a second or two. Predictably, products were built to help publishers maximize — or game — the attempted quality measure.

Then, as video consumption shifted to digital mediums, spending against online video advertising ramped up. In addition to viewability, video buyers layered on the metric of completion rate — the number of times a digital ad finishes playing. 

The products dreamed up to game video completion rates were so brazen that advertisers commonly found that the totals outperformed viewability. How could a 15-second video playing through to the end occur more frequently than the ad itself appearing on screen for two seconds? As Digiday reported, vendors simply kept the video playing after leaving the screen.

Metrics like viewability and completion rate created predictable incentives. And the outcomes were just as foreseeable — a deluge of display placements and tiny video players.

This creates a problematic situation for premium publishers, as the true quality of placements isn’t reflected in price. A hard bargain emerged; publishers could either sacrifice their readers’ experience or lose revenue to publishers willing to do so. 

Defining and measuring media quality can level the playing field

An equally tricky situation exists for media buyers whose clients have tasked them with finding the cheapest viewable impressions and video completions. While most know they aren’t getting the best value for their clients by optimizing this way, they are incentivized to do so. 

Today, tiny video players with inherent high viewability and completion rate will command higher CPMs than large video players with lower viewability and completion rates. These incomplete measures of quality fail to consider a placement’s contribution to business outcomes, resulting in inaccurate calculations of media value. 

Other markets have fixed this problem by adopting metrics that are harder to game and more closely connected to outcomes, like how Carfax resuscitated the used car market. With media, some companies are realigning buyer and seller incentives around value by increasing the transparency of media quality. 

But how is the quality of media defined? A growing body of research points to attention as the leading indicator of media performance. 

Attention metrics take into account thousands of media quality signals, and most importantly, their weighted contribution to outcomes to reveal a multidimensional perspective of quality that moves beyond binary metrics. From there, advertisers can factor in cost data to calculate media value — and understand when they’re getting a fair deal.

This transparency, the ability to identify precisely which domains, formats, and placements possess the highest level of value, empowers meaningful optimizations that maximize ad spend and increase ROI. 

While quality takes different forms on every medium, attention metrics generally incentivize publishers to create fewer, higher-quality ad placements and buyers to place greater value in them.

As the industry embraces attention metrics, it begins to solve the hard problem of incentive design. Buyers who incorporate accurate measures of quality into their media value calculations will create positive incentives for quality publishers and promote better business outcomes for themselves. 

Finally, this positive feedback loop between buyers and sellers levels the playing field and establishes a vital component of any healthy market: A shared understanding of media value.

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