Category: Blog

Today marks International Women’s Day, a global celebration of the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity. Find out more about the campaign.

At LoopMe, our workforce is 51% women. When we look to our senior management, the split is again 50 / 50.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the norm. In London, the Tech London Advisory council found that in almost half of technology companies, less than 25% of senior management roles are held by women. And in the US, research from Silicon Valley found just 11%  of women hold executive positions.

Encouragingly, there are women making great strides. We crowd-sourced through the office to pick some of our most inspirational women in technology, media and advertising. We’d also like to acknowledge other influences for our team here – Nicola Mendelsohn at Facebook, Claire Valotti who’s GM at Snap, Karen Blackett, Chairwoman at Mediacom UK, Susan Gianinno, Chairman at Publicis Worldwide and many more.

Here’s to these trailblazers and trendsetters.

1)   Ada Lovelace. Ada is a favourite in the LoopMe team, so much so that we named one of our offices after her. Her friendship with mathematician Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Difference Engine (a calculating machine) saw her translating some work for him from Italian to English. While she was translating she found that she understood the plans for the computing better than Babbage himself. She is often referred to as the first computer programmer and is regarded as a symbol for modern women in tech.

2) Kim Perell. CEO and President at Amobee. Before joining Amobee, Kim was the CEO of Adconion Direct, a global digital marketing company, which was acquired by Amobee in 2014.  Forbes covered her amazing boom to bust story in a profile, and her career and achievements have gone from strength to strength ever since.

2)    Barbara Liskov is a computer scientist at MIT. She was one of the first women to be granted a doctorate in computer science in the USA and won the Turing award in 2009 for her pioneering work in the computer programming. As our Technical Account Manager, Ezgi put it: she created a programming language that became the base of current programming languages we use.

3)    Sheryl Sandberg. COO of Facebook and founder of Lean In. After graduating from Harvard, she worked at the World Bank and for the Clinton administration, before joining Google as VP for Global Online Sales and Operations. While her business acumen is hugely impressive, her best selling book ‘Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to lead’ has sold over one million copies and has been instrumental in creating global pockets of ‘Lean In’ groups to help women achieve their goals.

4)    Joan Clarke, Betty Web and Mary Every. Bought to mainstream attention in The Imitation Game, this trio (although they didn’t know each other at the time) worked as code breakers during World War Two in Bletchey Park, UK. It’s estimated that their work saved thousands of lives and shortened the war by two years. Read more about their work here.

5)    Mitchell Baker. Executive Chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organisation that exists to support and lead the open-source Mozilla project. She helped to pioneer open source internet applications. The Internet Hall of Fame praised her for proving ‘that the web should not belong to one company and one operating system.’

6)    Denise Coates. You may not know her by name, but she’s been named Britain’s highest paid businesswoman. She started out working in her father’s betting shops before training as an accountant and taking over these shops. Coates bought ‘Bet365.com’ and spend a year creating it prior to official launch in 2001 as the .com boom was taking off. Now it’s one of the world’s largest online gambling companies, and she’s the majority shareholder.

7)    #ThisGirlCan. Americans, if you haven’t seen this ad, then why not! After bursting onto our screens in 2015, the This Girl Can campaign was watched almost 100 million times, won more than 50 awards and helped convince nearly 3 million British women to become more active. Its second advert released in 2017 shows women exercising, but this time targets those who aren’t just concerned about appearance and athletic ability and face other barriers. Watch the ad here.

8)    Katherine Johnson. Another person propelled to further fame via film (Hidden Figures), Johnson is a physicist and mathematician. She worked as a ‘computer’ for NASA, calculating the trajectory for the first American space trips. John Glen refused to fly on his orbit around earth until Johnson verified electronic computer’s calculations. Johnson co-authored 26 scientific papers, all the while working in a state with federal workplace segregation, where Johnson and the other African-Americna women were required to work, eat and use restrooms separate to those of their white colleagues. In 2015, aged 97, Katherine Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s higher civilian honor. The non-profit, Black Girls CODE are supporting #FutureKatherineJohnsons. Learn more here.

9) Kathryn Finney is an author, tech entrepreneur and TV correspondent. In 2012  she used personal funds to found digital undivided (DID) a social enterprise which finds, trains and supports innovative leaders and entrepreneurs. She also launched the FOCUS Fellows, a program for black female founders of developed (but at early stages) tech companies. 80% of new women led business are founded by Black and Latina women, yet they receive just 0.2% of venture funding. Since 2013 they’ve impacted over 2000 people and helped to raise $15MM in investment. Find out more. 

We hope you’ve learnt about a few more people who have changed our industry. Let us know your suggestions over on Twitter @LoopMe.

While the revival of the Nokia 3310 caused a huge buzz at Mobile World Congress, many companies exhibiting used MWC as an opportunity to launch their latest ventures into artificial intelligence. We’ve rounded up the top developments so you can stay in the loop.

Answering to Alexa

Japan’s largest messaging platform, Line, have launched their AI platform. At the heart is ‘Clova’, which is set to rival the likes of Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri. Unlike Alexa, Line is designed with the Asian markets at its heart. It’s expected to launch in the next few months, but only time will tell how it will impact against other major platforms.

Meanwhile, Google rolled out Google Assistant to Nougat and Marshmallow operating systems in the US, English speakers in Australia, Canada and the UK, as well as German speakers in Germany. It means users can access their devices with a verbal ‘OK, Google’ to take photos, browse through apps and get directions.

Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete, CEO at Telefónica explained on the main stage why their AI assistant, Aura is “more than” an assistant because of the control that customer will have over the platform.

These developments seem to support the views of  IBM fellow and CTO, Rob High who told TechCrunch: ‘Everybody and their mother is out to create their own specialized voice-activated devices’

Better customer experience 

Nexshop Training, from Samsung SDS is an AI-powered virtual assistant that will teach retail workers how to manage customers and their space. It will help staff learn more about products (for example, ‘what are the features on XYZ’.)

Aside from the training, there’s also a marketing system and a sales assistance system. It was developed to generate marketing strategy by observing customers in stores, while the sales assistance is meant to make inventory management and logistics easier so retailors have a deeper insight into their historical transactional data.

Training the next generation

It’s been a long time coming (since December 2015), but the UK government launched their Digital Strategy plan during MWC. They’re undertaking a major review of how AI affects the UK economy, led by computer scientist Dame Wendy Hall and Jerome Persenti, CEO of BenevolentAI. They also announced a £17.3 million commitment to fund research into robotics and AI at UK universities.

Planes, trains and automobiles 

Robocar is a self-driving electric AI car. The developers feed data into a platform capable of 24 trillion AI operations per second and the cars can exceed 320KPH!

Ford unveiled their latest concept; an electric self-driving delivery van that can launch a fleet of drones to pick up and drop off packages in hard-to-reach places. This comes off the back of Ford’s acquisition of the driving start-up, Argo AI for $1 billion.

If you’re interested in driverless cars, learn about what they can teach marketers in a piece written by LoopMe CEO, Stephen Upstone and published in Digital Marketing Magazine.

Why-not AI:

The Olay Skin Advisor uses AI to deliver a smart skin analysis and personalized product recommendations, apparently ‘taking the mystery out of shopping for skincare products’.

Interested in staying up to date with the latest AI news? Our newsletter rounds up AI developments from all industries. Sign up here.

LoopMe has received some glowing testimonials from publishing partners recently – read the highlights here:

Polychroma:

“LoopMe offers solid eCPM rates without sacrificing consistency through unique and engaging ad formats, not to mention the great support they have in store. By starting with just a straightforward, easy integration, you can expect an ad network that’ll give you simply the best” -Micko Nulud

Word Search: 

“LoopMe has helped in the monetization of our games by providing seamless access to premium large-budget advertisers. Pursuant to integration there has been incremental growth in revenue. Fill rates are consistent and the LoopMe SDK is extremely simple to integrate. The support team has been exceptionally proactive.” – Rajat Agarwalla

Blacklight: 

“With premium eCPMs and good fill-rate LoopMe has done a fantastic job in helping BlackLight monetise the inventory with video ads. The high quality of ads lets us deliver best user experience. The team is wonderful and entire integration process was quick and smooth.”

Outfit 7: 

“We are delighted to Partner with LoopMe for monetizing on our apps. For more than 2 years we have been working with them and are pleased with the prompt support. We look forward to continuing our relationship as we build on more new avenues for entertainment with the Talking Tom and Family Franchise.”

Why not get in touch to see how we can help! Pop a message over to contact@loopme.com and one of us will be in touch as quickly as possible. Look out for more testimonials over the next few months!

MWC: The largest gathering for mobile specialists, this year being held from Feb 27^th – 2^nd March 2017.

As you’re pacing the many stands across the eight halls, running from the conference to meetings, here’s three things to keep an eye out for.

New releases -> Sources at PCMag say that Blackberry are coming back with ‘Mercury’ a keyboard Android phone. While Samsung failed to release their latest model, S8 at CES, they are apparently not launching at MWC either, choosing to shoot for an April date. Apparently the ‘biggest phone at the show’ is likely to be the LG G6, which is released the day prior to MWC.

Convergence of TV and mobile -> Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix takes the keynote slot on Monday evening, which has previously been hosted by Mark Zuckerberg. Reed founded Netflix back in 1997, and it now has over 86 million subscribers around the world.

Netflix uses a data-driven approach to help target their audiences, and according to their blog they consider data visualisation to be of paramount importance. An interview back in 2013 revealed that they regularly look at colour analysis between titles to see which cause the best reactions from their audience.

Let’s hope that Reed gives attendees some further insight into their data analysis (and some sneak peeks of new shows) as this is sure to engage the audience.

Internet of Things -> Expect to see things you didn’t know were possible. Last year saw ‘intelligent’ Air Con, a connected tooth-brush and the Halo smart bracelet – although we’re yet to find it retailing online, one year on. There’s lot of workshops about this, including ‘Solutions For Your Internet Of Things’ We look forward to seeing more wonderful developments this year.

Register your interest to meet with the LoopMe team at MWC. Learn about AI, the latest integrations and our PurchaseLoop product. See you there!

We recently announced that LoopMe have integrated with adsquare, the world’s neutral data exchange. As part of this integration, brands can now complement their DOOH campaign with LoopMe’s AI powered mobile marketing. You can read more about that here and on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

An MMA report released in November 2016 found that 46% of marketers and 47% felt that location data was critical to mobile marketing, while another 50% and 43% respectively saw it as important.

However just 10% of marketers and 13% of agencies used location-based targeting less than 20% of the time. Unsurprisingly, marketers are using location mostly on social and search, while video and rich-media lags behind at 40% and 42%.

Nevertheless, video has a key role to drive effective mobile campaigns and when paired with AI, can help you hit both brand and campaign goals.

Driving foot traffic – Most used by retailers, this strategy allows brands to target users with their video ad when they are in the location of the brand store, restaurant or offices. The most effective video format for these purposes is rich media or full screen video. At LoopMe we can also use our AI to optimise to those who are most likely to be in these locations and use a third party to verify this.

Competitor conquest – Similar to above, however here brands target users when they are in or approaching a direct competitor, to keep them front of mind instead. Suitable with any video formats, we would also suggest running a PurchaseLoop study which will allow you to measure user perception of your brand against that of your competitors.

Related locations – Taking the assumption that if a user visits a cinema, they will also be interested other entertainment activities like fitness and theatre. Advertisers can then actively target these areas of shared interest. Pair this with rich media and short form pre-roll videos which encourage consumers to watch the full trailers for an effective campaign.

Combining location data and AI leads to impressive results, as our case study with adsquare shows, with a 2x higher VCR than the control. Take a look at our suggestions to get the best AI results from your mobile campaigns.

Find out more about our integration with adsquare and get in touch: marketing@loopme.com

At LoopMe, we are pioneers in AI driven mobile video marketing. Our proprietary DMP processes over 1 trillion data points every day and we recently hit a new milestone with over 2 billion unique devices reached on the platform.

Some of our clients have asked what they can do to drive better results with AI. Here are our suggestions to get the most from your mobile video marketing:

– Wider site lists – Restricting your campaign to run on just 10 sites means that the AI is severely restricted with the pool of users it has to learn from. Opening your campaign to a wider network, while still remaining brand safe and viewable, gives the AI greater opportunities to reach audiences who can help you achieve your campaign KPI’s.

– Longer campaign duration – AI continuously self learns, typically creating new models of learning every ten minutes. The longer the campaign, the more time the AI has to learn and apply the lookalike models.

– Choose your KPI’s carefully – Giving the AI more than one KPI to work to – such as VTR and CTR can mean the AI is actually working against itself to deliver the campaign to target. Choose one and watch the uplift soar.

– Appropriate formats – If your KPI is completed views, but your format is an unskippable video, then is this a good measure of success? AI technology knows which format works best for each user and so we encourage brands to run multiple video formats with each campaign. With so many formats made for mobile like native and vertical, this will help your campaign make a real impact.

– Good creatives – AI can only do so much! Make sure your creative is designed for the mobile screen, is engaging and encourages consumers to interact with it. Then AI can get to work.

Our latest product, PurchaseLoop looks to optimise to metrics that go beyond clicks and views, but to ones which drive down through the funnel, like affinity, purchase intent or whatever the campaign KPI’s are. Find out more about PurchaseLoop.

In Marc Pritchard’s speech at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in January, he issued a clear call to the digital ad industry to clean up the supply chain.

It was there he announced that P&G are putting fraud at the heart of their clean-up efforts, and from now on would require all digital partners to participate in TAG’s ‘Certified Against Fraud’ program.

“At P&G, we decided this is an area for outside experts who have a much higher probability of staying ahead of the criminals than we ever will,” said Pritchard.

“We’re getting help from the Trustworthy Accountability Group, or TAG, a joint initiative of the ANA, 4As, and IAB. This is a powerful self-regulatory body aimed at eliminating fraudulent advertising and its partners in crime, such as sites that steal copyrighted content from our supply chain. We are insisting that any entity touching digital media must get TAG-certified during 2017 to help ensure they are free from fraud.”

TAG and LoopMe

It’s heartening to see a huge brand like P&G take a leading role and confirm their commitment to fraud free advertising. We believe that everyone in the digital advertising ecosystem should be working to the same goals. There’s no excuse for poor quality advertising and brands should be assured that with LoopMe, it is our top priority.

We are proud early adopters of TAG, when back in December 2016 we announced our approval by TAG as a participant in the TAG Registry, following a thorough background check and review process. We are also in the process of becoming TAG Certified Against Fraud, Piracy and Malware, as well as participating in TAG’s Inventory Quality Guidelines program.

We work to the highest possible standards to ensure brand safety and fraud free environments, and work with the likes of IAS, Moat and Forensiq to ensure third-party verification on our campaigns. As Marc Pritchard put it best: “We realize there is no sustainable advantage in a complicated, nontransparent, inefficient and fraudulent media supply chain.”

Find out more about TAG and our commitment to fraud free advertising: marketing@loopme.com

Written for GrowthBusiness – 17/1/17

With technology that can improve itself every 20 minutes, LoopMe works with eight of the top 10 global brands to use artificial intelligence and big data to improve brand advertising efforts. Stephen Upstone, chair of the UK Mobile Marketing Association’s Advisory Board and founder of LoopMe, talks about starting up, making it in the New York, and pushing for progress in UK’s fast-growth tech space.

What does your business do?

LoopMe has developed artificial intelligence software that self-learns which people will change their mind about products and services after seeing video advertising, and targets the moments that change their opinions.

We have reached over 2 billion different consumers on their mobile devices and process over 1 trillion data points every day, allowing the technology to learn fast, typically improving results by over 100% compared to manual human operated optimisation.

Where did the idea for your business come from?

The idea behind LoopMe was that the mobile data generated by each person should create a loop of data, which, when applied with artificial intelligence, could be used to optimise the user experience and improve advertiser results in real time.

How did you know there was a market for it?

​We had worked with artificial intelligence across major websites such as MSN, AOL, HSBC & Bank of America 10 years earlier, and observed the development of the mobile advertising market from its very early beginnings. It was clear to us that mobile would be the future of brand advertising, and that artificial intelligence would transform the entire advertising industry.

Read the rest of the article here.

Published about the iPhone in Campaign Magazine, 17/1/17

The iPhone may have secured its place in popular culture; but for marketers a decade of iPhone has failed to deliver on the promise of mobile marketing. From interruptive ads to clumsy display ads the drive to simply squeeze traditional advertising formats into the confines of the smartphone has created a highly unsatisfactory ecosystem for advertisers.

With this in mind, Campaign spoke to Stephen Upstone, chair of the Mobile Marketing Association UK, about the key lessons for brands from the broken promises of the last decade of the iPhone and what are the opportunities ahead.

Q: How has the iPhone changed advertising?

A: Despite the intense excitement surrounding the first iPhone’s announcement, the full implications of its arrival weren’t felt until the years following its release, and are still being felt now. In the last ten years, advertisers and creative teams have relished the iPhone’s (and other smartphones’) variety of opportunities for interactive, novel and engaging ad units. We are still in the middle of this development with live video, VR, AR, etc. – the smartphone, championed by the iPhone, is a piece of technology birthing a number of novel options for consuming media, and will no doubt continue to do so going forward.

Lastly, the iPhone was one of the first phones to develop the idea of attribution – advertisers now have the means of tracing and measuring the impact of ads in driving not only store footfall, but also physical purchases. For brands, having this specific ROI is key.

You only need to look at the original with its clunky design and thick, hard casing, to realise how far we’ve come.

Q: What lessons are there for marketers from the cult of the iPhone?

A: The rapid development and brand loyal nature of the iPhone cult is key. Consumer tastes can only have a certain lifespan, and companies like Apple are having to make sure they stay ahead of the game when it comes to their technology and the users buying their phones. Modern consumers don’t just love tech – they love having a top-of-the-range model with a premium brand image. Certainly, this message has been seen in other sectors, particularly fashion, but it is no more true than in the case of the iPhone.

Q: The TV industry attempted to label the smartphone the “second screen” but marketers were quick to recognise the central role of the smartphone. How has the iPhone revolutionised media consumption habits?

A: The way in which we now consume media is so much more snackable. Habits have changed. We now wake up in the middle of the night to check our messages, news or the scores of our favourite sports team. As a result, attention spans are at an all-time low (roughly 12-15 seconds as of the last count) and the advertising communications have become much shorter in response, giving way to successful ten-second mobile video ads for example

Read the full article here. 

 An audit revealed that just 0.00064% of impressions were affected at LoopMe

What happened?

In late December 2016, a sophisticated Russian hacking operation dubbed ‘Methbot’ was detected by ad fraud detection company White Ops. Cofounder and CEO, Michael Tiffany commented that ‘we’ve never seen anything like this. Methbot elevates ad fraud to a whole new level of sophistication and scale’. The figures being discussed reflect this, with White Ops predicting that it could cost publishers up to $5 million per day.

While this figure has been contested by the likes of AppNexus – their investigations found that they hosted under $500 in transactions on the fraudulent IP addresses – it has caused a huge stir in the industry and rightly so.

You can read more about how ‘Methbot’ operated on Business Insider and AdExchanger.

What are we doing?

An audit showed that just 0.00064% of impressions were served to compromised IPs in November.

We immediately took steps to blacklist the compromised ‘methbot’ IP’s into LoopMe’s system-wide pre-bid fraud filters and are blocking ads to all these IPs. We will not charge any client for impressions served to these IP’s.

At LoopMe, we are committed to fraud free advertising. We have pre-bid brand quality filters as well as manual ad spot quality vetting with banned categories for adult content, illegal activity and violence (among others). We also utilise URL and video keyword blocks to prevent your ads appearing against inappropriate content.

We work with all major third party fraud and viewability vendors, including Integral Ad Science, MOAT and Forensiq and received their highest classifications as viewable, brand safe and premium.

In addition, we recently joined the TAG Registry as early adopters to improve transparency in digital advertising. For this LoopMe’s inventory underwent a vigorous background check and review process powered by Dun & Bradstreet and approved by TAG.

We would like to reassure our customers that we are working towards the highest possible standards to ensure brand safety and fraud free environments. Please reach out if you have any further questions: marketing@loopme.com