Month: April 2016

On Thursday 14^th April the IAB released their biannual UK Ad Spend study revealing spend figures for 2015. Last year was an exciting year for digital, seeing a 16.4% increase in overall spend, notably also the highest growth rate since 2008. Overall digital adspend now totals £8.6bn – a consistently growing figure.

This growth has been bolstered by the gains in mobile adspend, which soared by 60.3% over the course of the year to hit £2.65bn– now accounting for 30.5% of all UK digital advertising. Mobile has secured itself as a dominant player in the digital advertising space, and going forward marketers will undoubtedly factor it as an even more significant part of their campaigns and strategies.

Even within mobile, video and display has progressed massively. Over the course of the year, adspend on mobile video rose from £179m to £353m – a 98% increase. 55% of all standard display adspend is now on rich media formats – a growth of 11% since 2014. Marketers are moving towards more sophisticated and exciting ad formats capable of being delivered to devices.

All of this comes during an exciting time for mobile. Smartphones are now the most popular internet device (with an average of 2.1 per household) and a 21 percent increase in smartphone ownership since 2014.

For the first time, programmatic spend was factored into a separate category within the report. What is clear is just how significant programmatic spend is for both mobile and the digital space. By 2019, the IAB expect for programmatic to account for 80-90% of all UK display adspend, and potentially even higher for mobile video. At the moment this figure the total spend is £0.35bn around 71%, with 47% on direct and 24% on indirect.

The stats were an exciting continuation of the existing trend, with Tim Elkington, CSO at the IAB, noting ‘The increasing array of devices people use to go online has helped digital ad spend hit another gear as advertisers look to reach them and time spent online increases. Smartphones are the major driving force behind this, as people increasingly use them for activities they used to do on desktop, from searching and shopping to social and watching video.’

You can read the full adspend report on the IAB website here.

LoopMe are happy to announce we’ve been nominated 5 times at The Drum’s MoMAs (Marketing on Mobile Awards) – a celebratin of campaigns, brands and agencies at the forefront of the mobile industry.

The award nominations were:

• Interactive Entertainment, Mobile Strategy / Campaign – Paddington with Target Media
• Travel/Leisure/Sports Mobile Strategy / Campaign – Celebrity Cruises with Goodstuff
• Best Use of Video / Rich Media – The Forest with Icon
• Best Use of Video / Rich Media – Legend with Target Media
• Best Use of Video / Rich Media – Paranormal Activity 5 with MEC

Great results for our sales, AdOps and all the agencies involved, and we look forward to celebrating these fantastic results!

Roll on the awards evening on the 18th May!

Published for the Wall Blog on the 13th April. 

Driverless cars, personal assistants and a robot Scarlett Johansson have all made headlines in the past three months. Artificial intelligence is taking the world by storm. But how can AI have an impact on your advertising? Here are five reasons it should be overlaid onto every single campaign.

Only reach relevant users

When running any advertising campaign it’s accepted that the ad will be shown to some people who, while fitting the target audience perfectly, are not interested in your product. By using AI it is possible to dramatically reduce the number of impressions wasted in this manner.

AI analyses information from billions of data points to determine what a user is likely to engage with. If a user has never exhibited any behaviour to suggest they will engage with a car ad, despite fitting the audience profile, they will not be shown this advert, eliminating wasted impressions and saving campaign budget.

On the reverse, there may be users who would be interested in your product, despite not fitting the audience profile. AI can identify users who have exhibited strong engagement patterns with similar content and target them with relevant adverts.

Optimize in real-time

Each time an ad request is logged there are thousands of variables, all of which can impact the results of a campaign. Should one variable in the chain change, the ad which is most likely to generate an engagement could be different.

This data cannot be used by ad ops teams to optimize a campaign, it happens too quickly. AI can process and act on this data in milliseconds, enabling campaigns to be optimized in real-time.

Viewable, brand safe advertising

AI is able to improve brand safety and viewability rates by optimizing delivery towards environments that deliver the best viewability results. It can also identify patterns which could be linked to suspicious behaviour, blocking these impressions and only serving ads in placements, which guarantee human traffic.

As AI optimizes in real-time it is possible to ensure viewable, brand safe advertising 24/7, and not just when ad ops teams are in the office.

Read more: https://wallblog.co.uk/2016/04/13/five-reasons-to-use-artificial-intelligence/#ixzz48FEgj3eV