At Xaxis, we talk a lot about outcomes. Outcomes are what we aim to offer to our clients, holding ourselves accountable to marketers who buy digital advertising.

That kind of thinking can be an adjustment for an industry used to spending millions of media dollars based on measures like CPM or CTR that are more than 24 years old and take us back to the days of the first AT&T display ad on Wired.com back in 1994.

Those metrics carry a presumption that, if you pay the right price for fraud-free, viewed impressions to the right audience in the right environment, you'll create enough “lift" or clickthroughs to generate more revenue for your brand.

Each of those measures, though, is really a proxy for what is almost always the real goal: increased sales.

Why Performance Marketing Isn't Enough

Sometimes the term “outcomes" is conflated with “performance." Online performance marketing tracks clickthroughs that lead to conversions. A well-optimized performance campaign will ensure that ad placements lead to cost-efficient and profitable clickthroughs. That can be a valid way of running a campaign.

Today though, aiming for a better kind of accountability is vital for marketers using digital advertising, especially programmatic advertising involving billions of data points and decisions executed in fractions of a second.

Sophisticated attribution modeling, econometrics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning along with the right supporting technology and expertise all help manage media toward serving strategic business goals, rather than just marketing precepts.

Take, for example, a high-ticket durable item such as a set of living room furniture. Clickthroughs on ads may indicate interest, but almost no person will buy the furniture they're going to live with for years by simply clicking on an ad.

It's inevitably better to optimize to a more sophisticated marketing mix proven to prompt more sales in the short and long term. Does the messaging, for example, need to focus on attracting showroom visits, newsletter subscriptions, or virtualized customizations on the store website?

Each of these metrics can be individually weighted for importance based upon the retailer's data-informed knowledge of which actions most assuredly trigger sales, and in what sequences. Doing this will ensure that subsequent online campaigns can be optimized towards driving the specific outcome of the retailer and maximize return on ad spend over the short and long term.

Demand for a New Expertise

It's incumbent on marketers and their media-buying partners to clearly articulate and discuss specific business goals, how these outcomes will be measured and what marketing mix will help achieve them throughout continuous cycles of optimization.

A recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit that we commissioned noted that brand managers are now demanding well executed, data-driven programmatic advertising that makes a measurable contribution to their company's bottom line.

By focusing on strategic business goals and using sophisticated econometrics, attribution modeling, and a wealth of experience and expertise, we can finally deliver on the long-held promise of making marketing budgets truly accountable.

We can create proven value for the companies that invest in digital media while making advertising more relevant and welcome for consumers.

Those are outcomes any advertiser should be glad to see.

Stay tuned for more on how Xaxis is changing the programmatic landscape through outcome-based media plans.

Nicolas Bidon, Global CEO

Originally featured in Campaign as part of the road to DMEXCO series.
 
Augmented Reality (AR) crosses the boundary between the digital and the physical, creates exciting immersive experiences for consumers and opens new perspectives for advertisers to reach audiences in innovative ways.
But while the industry is understandably excited, it is early days and advertisers should take time to understand fully how consumers will use these new technologies before jumping in with both feet and repeating some old mistakes…
While nobody fully understands yet how new experiences like AR will truly change the way people consume media in the long run, one thing is for sure: if they continue to capture users’ eyeballs and attention, marketers will want to be part of it.
The challenge for early adopters is to figure out how to cross the augmented reality boundary, inserting their brands into the experience without being too interruptive. I sincerely hope that as an industry we will not repeat mistakes of the past, including over-messaging, latency and poor creative execution which lead to consumers switching off. It’s all very well being able break new frontiers to reach audiences, but captivating their attention is where the magic happens.
 
Bridging the gap between digital and physical
If we go by the principle that everything that can be traded programmatically eventually will, it should not be long before the benefits of programmatic technologies (personalized advertising at scale) come to AR.
While we’re already able to deliver location-based ads programmatically, there isn’t a lot of programmatic trading directly linked to the real world. Augmented Reality should bring new opportunities for advertisers to start using physical as well as digital context to reach audiences and make ads more immersive and engaging: imagine for instance someone using their phone to take a photo, and after the shot has been taken, seeing an engaging ad telling them that the product they wanted to buy is just around the corner, pointing exactly to where they need to go.
If done well this has the potential to enhance the customer experience; if done wrong it will be considered another gimmick and add to any negative perceptions people have built around advertising.
 
Great things take time
With every new media, creating the right advertising formats is often a second step. First, the core experience has to be nailed down. The adoption of augmented reality at scale is such a new phenomenon that there are very few learnings about what will or won’t work with consumers beyond gaming, let alone in terms of advertising.
Only if (and when) AR starts offering so much value that people use it every day, will it truly have the potential to transform advertising. But we are still far from this: Pokemon Go has certainly experienced huge initial traction and interest, but it is already losing millions of users every day, suggesting the game hasn’t really been as immersive as we all thought.
It will be interesting to see where technologies like AR start fitting into our overall media consumption in the next couple of years and if they can truly deliver on their early promises. After all, aren’t we all supposed to be wearing Google Glass by now?

There’s a simple economic value exchange at the heart of the Internet. Consumers get a massive amount of content and services for free and advertisers foot the bill.
Yet as everyone in the ad world knows this model is under pressure. In 2015, adblocking consumers opted out of this unstated agreement to the estimated tune of $20 billion in lost publisher revenue. That consumers could be so irresponsible in not holding up their end of the deal has been a particular sore spot for the industry.
But are consumers really to blame? After all, none of us explicitly signed up for this value exchange in the first place. Rather than consider adblocking as treaty abrogation, it may be more helpful to view it as consumers simply trying to create a better Internet experience for themselves.
We shouldn’t assume that consumers are fundamentally against ads. They’re against the overbearing digital experience that the current advertising ecosystem has created. Fix the experience and consumers will no longer have a need to turn off the ads.
While re-creating the industry overnight isn’t in the cards, there are things that advertisers and publishers can do (and are doing) to turn the ship in a more consumer-friendly direction.
Treat advertising like content
Movies, books, articles and music succeed or fail based on the willingness of consumers to allocate some of their precious time to them. Meaning, success ultimately comes down to consumer choice.
Advertising on the other hand has typically had the luxury of operating in a world where consumers didn’t have a choice as to whether or not they would experience an ad. With the advent of adblocking, consumers are no longer a captive audience.
Rather than building a better mousetrap to prevent their escape, advertisers and publishers should focus on improving the experience so consumers no longer feel the need to leave. Or, even better, provide experiences that consumers actively seek out, enjoy and share with others.
Adopting a content focused mindset is one way for the industry to better engage with consumers in our attention economy. We all loved to be entertained, to learn something new and to get useful advice. This is exactly what great content does. And so can great advertising.
Make less ads and make the remaining ones more relevant
Whatever the Goldilocks balance of ads is, we are clearly far beyond it. In fact, we’ve come to the point where there are so many ads consumers have developed so called “banner blindness” for many of the most common placements.
Part in parcel with dialing ads back is making the ones we do show more relevant and less intrusive. One promising area is programmatic creative, also known as self-assembling ads. These are ads that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to build themselves at run-time to more exactly match the myriad of individual tastes and preferences we all have.
It’s a huge advance, allowing advertisers to get closer to the evergreen promise of 1-1 communication with their intended audiences.
Artificial intelligence can also be used to initiate and run campaigns based on real-time events that have engaged consumer interest. Think Oreo’s famous “you can still dunk in the dark” tweet during the Super Bowl 47 power outage, but on an automated level. While the technology isn’t yet at that level of capability, AI-driven marketing might soon empower brands to create campaigns at the speed of culture, delivering messaging that’s more natural, effective and ultimately welcome.
Go native
Enthusiasm around native ads is high because they tackle the consumer experience head on, engaging audiences with content that is similar in spirit to what they are already consuming.
Where native has struggled is in delivering scale across a fragmented market. It’s also been difficult to do effective cross-channel attribution for native ads which tend to operate in multiple silos (different silos for different native formats such as in-feed ads, outstream videos or social ads to name just a few) that are all too often separated from the rest of the digital spend.
Yet this is changing, particularly with the growth of programmatic native, which now allows advertisers to utilize the same audience data they use for their existing campaigns across all devices and channels. Additionally, by applying audience data to native formats, advertisers can target their native content even more effectively because of what they might know about the interests, intents and consumer path of the consumers viewing the content.
Don’t just think advertising, think customer service
Retailers, hotels and restaurants all strive to deliver a positive customer service experience because they know good customer service drives sales.
Amazon isn’t a category killer simply because of its prices. The seamless customer experience – fast shipping, easy returns and the ability to buy virtually anything – is a big part of the value proposition.
Customer service is about meeting the needs of the customer. It’s a helpful mindset for advertisers and publishers to consider in creating more effective connections with digital audiences. If we can build an advertising environment that delights and informs consumers while driving results for clients everyone ends up winning.
Ultimately, the question of whether consumers owe us anything is probably moot. What is clear is that it’s up to us in the industry to create a digital environment we can all enjoy and where advertising is welcomed. The survival of free quality content and journalism might well depend on it.
This was first posted on AdNews.