Category: Blog

Tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is Tom Hunter Smith, I am originally from the Scottish Highlands from a very small, very remote, very Scottish and very unheard of village called Aultbea. If anyone has heard of it please come and see me now. I’ve been working as a Data Scientist at LoopMe for just under 4 months.

Before joining LoopMe, I worked at the Office of National Statistics in Wales for 3 years. It was there I learnt my trade as a Data Scientist, working on outputs including Consumer Prices Index, Social Deprivation Statistics and perhaps more interestingly, on a research project analysing Twitter data as a proxy for measuring demographic change. They say that a career in government is either 3 years or 30 years so I hop, skipped and jumped down to the big smoke to work for PHD media where I worked on developing a set of tools for measuring digital journeys of consumers and evaluating campaign performance.

Why did you decide to join LoopMe?

Having already worked in digital media, I was looking for a place to work which was a bit more fast paced where I could be more involved in the growth and development of the company. LoopMe had been popping up in conversations at work more and more since first moved to London and already had a remarkably good reputation in the media world given the size of the company. The good words I heard spoken weren’t only that of the product (which is of course fantastic), it was also about the people who worked there. You guys all have a good rep – keep it up!

What’s your job role and day to day task at LoopMe?

Our Data Science team is roughly split up into 3 different parts; PurchaseLoop, Real Time and Device Matching. Me and a small team in Ukraine focus our time on the Device Matching – which is exactly what it says it is – matching together an individuals phones, tablets and laptops so that our targeting is more dynamic, relative and flexible. This involves a lot of coding – since we are attempting to match different kinds of device to each other, the models we train each have their subtle differences and require large volumes of data to be engineered to gain the desired level of precision.

What’s been the best moment at LoopMe so far?

Not to make it sound like it has been all downhill since then, but my first day was pretty spectacular when I was whisked out of the office to a posh manor house to eat, drink and play games for LoopMe’s 5^th Birthday Party. It was also my birthday. It could well be the best first day that anyone has ever had ever.

Tell us a fun fact?

Last year I was the subject of a Channel 4 social experiment called “Life Stripped Bare” where they removed all material possessions from my life for 21 days.

 

 

 

iOS 11 was released to all last week, which will accelerate Apple’s ‘long-held policy of elbowing the cookie into obsolescence.’

For marketers and agencies who are currently using cookies for tracking and optimising, this update puts them in a troubling position. The update restricts cookie application to 24 hours, and after 30 days (without a subsequent interaction) the cookies will be purged from the device.

This new development has not been without criticism, with the likes of the ANA, the 4A’s and the IAB have penned an open letter and called it ‘heavy-handed’. It’s worth noting that while adoption has been fast (currently sitting at around 20%), it wasn’t as fast as when iOS 10 was released and only time will tell the long-term impact.

For the moment though, there are two main steps that concerned mobile marketers can take to circumvent this issue.

 

Align yourself with app solutions

In the US, app time accounts for 86% of smartphone time (eMarketer, 2016) while in the UK it accounts for 82% (comScore, 2017).

With this the predominant way of accessing the internet, marketers should look to find mobile solution providers who can leverage the app time. Using apps also allows for further data collection via SDKs, allowing marketers a work around the new iOS developments.

 

Rely on other data sources

Cookies are now defunct for mobile marketing. Choose an attribution and delivery partner who don’t rely on cookies for optimising.

Our own robust device-ID heavy DMP has registered over 2 billion devices – no cookies required. In addition, our Artificial Intelligence, which takes into account hundreds of different data points which includes first-party data via surveying consumers allows us to optimize to metrics which really matter.

To find out more about our data-driven solutions, contact your local sales rep or email marketing@loopme.com

After the popularity of our last breakfast, ‘How to sleigh your Christmas campaigns’, and with several requests to host a similar event, we’re excited to launch our auto-specific learning session taking place in London on October 25^th.

Join us for breakfast from 8.30am to discover how you can leverage Artificial Intelligence to meet your automotive brand metrics, whether its to achieve purchase intent, brand affinity or footfall.

We’ll be hearing from industry thought leaders to discuss tips and best practises as well as a deep-dive into some first-class automotive campaigns to explain how they stood out from the competition. Leveraging data from our DMP, attendees will also receive an exclusive first-look at our global analysis of automotive campaigns.

RSVP here to be the first to hear about speaker details.

Spaces are limited, so ensure you RSVP to avoid disappointment! Get in touch if you have any further questions: marketing-uk@loopme.com

We look forward to seeing you!

We’re delighted that LoopMe has been ranked at Number 20 in the Sunday Time Hiscox Tech Track 100. This is our first year in the league table and we’re delighted to be recognised for our growth among some other great British-based companies.

The Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100 league table ranks Britain’s 100 private tech (TMT) companies with the fastest-growing sales over their latest three years. In recent years those making the Top 100 have included SkyScanner and FarFetch. Other notable alumni of the Tech Track 100 include Sophos, JustEat and Zoopla.

This year has seen incredible growth for LoopMe as we’ve opened new offices in Atlanta, Chicago and Singapore, while also celebrating our fifth birthday. In the last 12 months, we’ve launched PurchaseLoop, PurchaseLoop for Foot Traffic and a cross-screen solution. We’re pleased that our team has been recognised for their hard work in growing revenue for the company.

Much of our growth has been fuelled by PurchaseLoop, the brand optimisation product. This allows advertisers the opportunity to optimise beyond clicks to real brand metrics, whether its purchase intent, brand affinity or consideration.

An analysis of PurchaseLoop campaigns found that the average PurchaseLoop was 120% more effective than standard advertising optimization at delivering uplifts against a control. View our analysis here to learn more. To find out more about PurchaseLoop, watch this video or get in touch.

The full list of the Tech Track 100 will be available online and in-print on Sunday, so ensure you pick up your copy this weekend! Congratulations to all the winners – we look forward to joining you at the awards dinner to celebrate in November. Join in the conversation online with #TechTrack100.

Calling all Football Fans!

Whether your team is riding high at the top of the Premier League or languishing close to the regulation spots, sign up to LoopMe’s Fantasy Football League, create your virtual team and battle it out for a chance to win some stellar prizes. These include Barclay’s Premier League tickets, a FitBit, Football boots, luxury hampers and much more.

How to enter

To enter LoopMe’s monthly Fantasy Football competition, Click here and fill out this form. Once completed you’ll receive an email with the code to sign up and register your team.

Points will begin from Game Week 4 which means you have until 11:30am on 9th September to be included in this month’s competition. We will be handing out prizes for Monthly Points, Best Team Name and a LoopMe raffle.

Contact Fantasy_Football@LoopMe.com if you have any questions.

Did you know?

87% of consumers use more than one device at a time while they’re watching TV? With an estimated 1.7 million* tuning in each week to watch live games, learn about where users spend their time and who the audiences are.

Download our Football One Pager to gain more insight on the football audience, preferred devices and more.

 

We’re delighted to announce that LoopMe’s campaign for Microsoft has been shortlisted for the Mobile Marketing Association’s (MMA) prestigious Smarties award. The campaign, in which we worked with our client, The Story Lab has been shortlisted in the ‘Brand Awareness’ category alongside R/GA London for Nike, Yonder Media for Shoprite, Cereyan Media for GarantiOne and Wunderman Dubai and Panadol Arabia GSK ‘Tales of Tough’.

The Smarties recognises and highlights marketing campaigns that have created the biggest business impact through the power of mobile.  Chris Babayode, Managing Director of MMA EMEA had this to say about the Smarties:

“Our awards celebrate the excellent work being done in mobile by both brands and agencies, inspiring marketers to push the boundaries with their own marketing campaigns as they strive for business growth. The focus of the Smarties has thus shifted and we created our new Business Impact Index, ranking mobile marketing companies that are achieving the biggest business impact.”

The Campaign

The campaign with The Story Lab and LoopMe used PurchaseLoop (patent pending) to drive purchase intent for Microsoft’s new HP Spectre x360 laptop.

The campaign was the first globally to combine AI brand optimisation in real-time with a programmatic buy. This resulted in a rise in CTR by over 160%, while VCR was boosted by 15%. Using PurchaseLoop increased purchase intent by over 40%, driving consumers closer to the point of purchase.

To learn more about the campaign check out our case study video below.

We’re thrilled to see this campaign recognized by those at MMA and hope to win our 4^th Smartie, the most recent in 2016 in the ‘Mobile Video’ category for our work on Samsung’s ‘Project Hero Campaign’.

The winners will be announced on the 25^th of September, best of luck to all shortlisted!

It’s that time of year again, dmexco 2017 is just around the corner, and we’re excited to be attending. This years event is shaping up to be better than ever, bringing together the world’s leading thought leaders, influencers and decision makers in the global digital industry. From Septmber 13^th – 14^th the hall will see a diverse range of businesses from start-ups to major brands discussing their views and best practices under the motto ‘Lightening the Age of Transformation’.  That in mind, we’ve picked out 5 things you simply can’t miss.

Human Touch: Men and Machine Transforming for The Better

There’s been a lot of debate and fear-mongering around how AI will affect humans in the future. Will computers eventually replace us? Who is going to regulate it? Elon Musk recently even commented that AI could be more dangerous than North Korea. Sonja Moosburger and Limor Schweitzer of Mediamrkstaturn Retail Group and RoboSavvy respectively will look to combat these claims, instead discussing how machine’s data analytical prowess and man’s creativity can work as one. As we move closer to a world in which all marketing will become data driven this seminar is a must attend.

Creating Digital Content – New Formats, New Platforms, New Storytelling

Tom Punch (Chief Commercial & Creative Officer) at Vice Media and Kevin Allocca (Global Head of Culture & Trends) at YouTube will be 2 of a 4 panel line up which you can see here. This seminar which will be held in the new Experience Hall on day 2 is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated events. Tom and Kevin will be discussing the all things video, from new and emerging formats such as Gifs and live streams, to how a mobile first world, coupled with increased video consumption is changing the way that advertisers, creators and producers convey their message to their audience.

Preparing for GDPR: Embracing the inevitable regulations

2018 is a landmark for in terms of data protection, as the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into effect as of May 28th 2018. The new GDPR, put in place by the EU to regulate the use of personal data by business and entities is the biggest shake-up in data protection law in the last 20 years.

The ‘Preparing for GDPR: Embracing the inevitable regulations’ debate features Stephan Loerke of the World Federation of Advertisers and will look to analyse the key challenges facing the digital advertising industry. Companies are now required to have direct user consent before using an individual’s data and if they don’t could face huge fines of up to 4% of their worldwide turnover. Make sure you don’t miss this seminar in the debate hall from 14:05 to 14:35 PM on day 1.

Is mobile everything? Blurring boundaries VS. Channel specific thinking?

The big conundrum on every marketer’s lips: the mobile web V the stationary web. Should the modern marketer see these as two separate entities or one big ‘thing’. This talk will feature Maike Abel and Katja Reis from Nestle and Publicis Media is sure to be a thrilling debate as it looks to tackle this burning issue.

dmexco Video advertising VIP private networking event

Last, but certainly not the least of our must go to events at this year’s dmexco is the ‘video advertising VIP private networking’ event. This which will be held on day 1 will contain two exclusive sessions with main focus on video advertising.

In this session, the panel will be discussing where programmatic businesses should invest and the potential challenges it faces.

LoopMe are fortune enough to have four free tickets to this exclusive event, so if you’re attending dmexco this year and would like to attend this networking event, or similarly  would like to learn how our cutting-edge AI can boost your brand video campaigns. Click here to register your interest.

Last week, Facebook announced that it will be releasing a new feature called ‘Facebook Watch’, which will allow users to view videos both live and pre–recorded in a new tab titled ‘Watch’. Facebook has released the ‘watch’ tab to a small group of users in the US before releasing it globally.

Facebook’s latest innovation will be available cross–platform including on mobile and TV as the tech juggernauts look to share some of YouTube success. Earlier this year YouTube announced that people were watching a billion hours of video content on their website every day – and Facebook wants a piece of the pie. It makes sense – recent research from comScore found that mobile devices dominate the total minutes spent online. in the UK and USA, mobile’s share of total digital minutes is 61% and 71% respectively.

Facebook also announced that they’ll be partnering with several publishers from the likes of the NBA to NASA who will earn 55% of ad break revenue. It looks to be short and medium form original content in the lifestyle, reality and sports verticals. You can expect to see programmes called ‘Science @ Nasa’ which will explore topics in quick four to five-minute episodes, Gabby Berstein answering questions in live and recorded segments and a behind the scenes look at the Golden State Warriors’ NBA Championship 2016-17 season.  

This is major shift from Facebook as it joins the likes Snapchat, YouTube, Hulu and Netflix in assault to break the traditional TV model. This move by Facebook to enter the already cluttered video streaming market confirms that we’re moving to a mobile first world and video content is at the forefront.

At LoopMe, we’ve seen a huge appetite for mobile video as brands can convey their marketing message in a more engaging fashion. Mobile also gives multiple data points which allows Facebook and other partners the ability to provide more accurate targeting so brand budget isn’t wasted. Additionally Facebook’s focus on short-form content reflects the need for shorter content on smaller screens. Mobile screens require a different approach and strategy than solely desktop video and it’s great to see the industry waking up to this.

If you’re interested in seeing how we use data to provide targeted video advertising, check out our video of PurchaseLoop.

 

 

After registering with TAG in December 2016, we’re delighted that as of August, LoopMe have received TAG’s Certificate Against Fraud.

For those who aren’t familiar, TAG are a cross-industry accountability program, created for transparency in the digital ad industry. Its focus is in four areas: eliminating fraudulent digital ad traffic, combating malware, fighting ad-supported Internet piracy to promote brand integrity, and promoting brand safety through greater transparency.

The 2016 ANA/White Ops Bot Fraud study estimated that advertisers lose $7.2 billion per year globally to bot-generated, non-human traffic. This is a criminal enterprise and as a result, advertisers end up paying criminals who generate ad impressions that are never seen by humans. TAG’s Certification Against Fraud aims to combat this.

LoopMe are committed to quality advertising, with stringent internal and external brand safety measures used.

What does being Certified Against Fraud mean?

LoopMe’s team have worked to meet the following certification requirements, as outlined by TAG. 

Comply with Media Rating Council IVT (Invalid Traffic) Guidelines

Developed in 2015, this gives guidance on the filtering of invalid digital traffic. For this LoopMe have adopted the General Invalid Traffic guidelines which filters traffic through applications of lists and other parameter checks such as known data-center traffic, bots, spiders and other crawlers. This traffic is filtered and ads are not run through it.

Employ Domain list filtering

We have developed and are subscribing to a list of internet domains identified as ‘high risk’ for invalid traffic and invalid ad impressions, which are applied to all current and future transactions within LoopMe’s platform.

Employ Data Center IP list filtering

To reduce the volume of illegitimate ad inventory in order to avoid untrustworthy parties in the supply chain, we have developed and subscribe to a list of IP addresses that have been identified as the origin of invalid traffic and invalid ad impressions, which are also applied to all current and future transactions.

Implement the Payment ID Protocol

This is to reduce the volume of illegitimate ad inventory sold by buyers, to avoid untrustworthy parties and to take action if a party is supplying illegitimate inventory. This allows full transparency around who is buying and selling inventory, a major step towards limiting the impact of fraud in the ad ecosystem.

As part of our continued commitment to brand safety, all of the above are reassessed on a quarterly basis by our TAG Compliance Officer.

Next steps

We are working to finalize our other TAG certifications against Piracy, against Malware and in support of TAG’s Inventory Quality Guidelines, and we hope to have more milestones to announce soon.

Get in touch if you have any further questions around our brand safety measure and our work with TAG.

The Digital Revolution

We’re in the midst of a digital revolution; the mobile phone has transitioned from a device for voice calls to a handheld computer. With increased speed of data connection and availability of Wi-Fi, we’re seeing a monumental shift from people using their desktops to mobile.

Just as in the third industrial revolution with the transition from radio to television, we’re now seeing a similar pattern occur from stationary platforms such as TV and desktop to mobile devices, which has led to them becoming the primary digital tool.

This is backed by a piece of research conducted by comScore called ‘Mobile’s Hierachy of Needs’ which looks at mobile consumption across the globe showing that mobile devices dominate the total minutes spent online. As fig 1.1 shows, in the UK and USA, mobile’s share of total digital minutes is 61% and 71% respectively.

Fig 1.1
ComScore reports that in nine markets over 80% of the time spent on mobile is in-app due to increased storage, ease of usage and better user experience.

Content is king, but Context is core

The report establishes a link between Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory and consumer’s modern day motivation to use their mobile devices. Self-Actualisation, esteem, love/ belonging, safety and physiological are the fundamental reasons why we use our mobile devices.

Physiological needs are those which need to be met first and are traditionally the needs essential to human survival. Although we don’t rely on our mobile devices for air and water there has been a significant increase in consumers using mobile devices to order food.

Figure 2.1 shows how reliant consumers have become, applications such as Deliveroo and JustEat have experienced exponential growth due their overall convenience. Using apps such as these doesn’t only streamline the process but gives consumers the ability to track where their delivery in real time. Due to this ordering food has outpaced the growth of general mobile usage.

2016 total mobile minutes (as a percentage of January 2015 total)

Fig2.1

 

As the comScore report confirms, mobile is the go to destination for video viewers. Video is a powerful way for brands to convey a message to their audiences. We all know that content is king, but context is core. Through data and AI, advertisers can ensure their videos reach their audience in the moment they are mostly likely to engage, watch or change their opinion on their advert.

Our recent report found that using PurchaseLoop on mobile resulted in 2X better results than traditional advertising on brand outcomes, whether this was purchase intent, brand consideration, awareness or favourability. Download the full report to find out more.