Ginny Marvin says, “Adblock Plus’s parent company, eyeo, is transitioning the Acceptable Ads program to an independent group. The Acceptable Ads Committee (AAC) will oversee the whitelisting program that enables ads to pass through some of the most popular ad blockers: Adblock Plus, AdBlock, Adblock Browser and Crystal. Eyeo launched the controversial Acceptable Ads program in 2011 in which large companies like Google, AOL, Yaoo and Criteo pay to have their ads whitelisted. Smaller firms are not charged for whitelisting privileges. Many in the industry have equated this model to a type... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “Mobile brand agency Kargo has published a study that argues “premium editorial” digital environments are more effective for brand ads than search or social media. The findings are based on a comparative study of ad visibility and recall. One hundred smartphone owners were exposed to “premium editorial, social and search content in a live in-market test.” Participants were given “10 minutes within each environment to experience the content as they normally would in a use session.” Eye tracking and post-exposure surveys were used to measure reactions and later... [...]

Dale Lowell says, “AI gets a bad wrap. For the most part conversations on the topic tend to revolve around loss of jobs and the redundancy of human labour. The Sunday Times has even gone as far as producing a list of the jobs most likely to become automatised in the coming years due to artificial intelligence. While some jobs are at a higher risk than others, it’s estimated that those in advertising have only a 3.8% chance of being replaced by a machine. In reality, AI will actively work with us, not against us, making our business processes more streamlined and efficient. Infosys, a global... [...]

Cynthia Johnson says, “Native advertising: The refreshing and unobtrusive form of advertising that syncs beautifully with web content and is receiving the attention of many publishers. The traditional advertising system has been dismantled by the heightened interest of the likes of adblockers. Therefore, an increasing number of publishers and advertisers are now using native ads on their websites and blogs to augment their existing ad revenues. The biggest thing that works for native ads is their ability to flow seamlessly within the blog/website content to the extent that it doesn’t really... [...]

Patrick Kulp says, “The mad men and women of the ad industry have plenty of reasons to toss and turn at night. Money is increasingly trickling from television commercials to digital media — a market that Facebook and Google currently have in a duopolistic chokehold. Inter-agency competition is at a fever pitch. Unconventional upstarts are eating their lunch. If Don Draper were around today, there’s a good chance he’d work at Facebook. But it’s not internet advertising giants that keep the industry’s top chief up at night. Nor is it his three-month-old daughter. It’s…Amazon? “It’s... [...]

Eric Enge says, “When it comes to paid search, there is a lot to optimize. Amidst all of the keywords, bidding and landing page refinements you have to do on a regular basis, it can be easy to wonder, “Does my ad copy actually make a difference?” To make matters worse, there’s nothing exciting about tweaking ad copy. Redesigning a landing page is like creating a piece of art. Eliminating keywords can dramatically cut your cost-per-conversion. But ad copy? Does tweaking a word here or there really make a difference? As it turns out, the answer is a resounding, “Yes!” The fact of... [...]

Jeff Rajeck says, “Data from ad campaigns has, in some ways, never been so important. Data has become the way marketers know whether the brand messaging is right, what drives customers to purchase and where they should advertise in the future. Fortunately, advertising data has also never been more available. Google, Facebook, and other ad platforms offer hundreds of ways to divide up their reports into segments and countless metrics for us to see how well various segments are performing. So with how important and available ad data is, it is quite puzzling that there is so much fraud in digital... [...]

Justin Freid says, “In late January, Amazon made the announcement that they are looking into how to monetize their Echo and Dot smart home devices through paid advertising. This sent the advertising industry into a state of excitement. With Amazon having sold more than 5 million devices since launch, there is ample opportunity for advertisers to reach consumers. With so many functionalities of devices like Amazon’s Echo and their competitor, Google Home, the possibilities for advertisers seem endless. But how exactly could Amazon allow advertisers to engage their user base? Promotion of... [...]

Daniel Gilbert says, “We all love to know what our competitors are up to. We shouldn’t care that much — we should probably just get on with being the best. But we just can’t help ourselves. The best (and only empirical) source of competitor data is the AdWords Auctions Insights report. The only problem with this report is that it’s not easy to see changes over time, you can’t do any filtering, and you can’t add in any of your own performance data to see how competitor changes affected anything. And it can’t be pulled automatically, even after it’s been available for four years. Anyway,... [...]

Matt Umbro says, “I’ve been in the paid search industry for a nearly a decade. A lot has changed since I first learned how to write a simple ad with a 25-character headline and two 35-character description lines. Though the fundamentals of ad copywriting and testing remain in play, text ads have evolved to the point where you must consider many different components. Between devices, formatting, ad extensions and audience types, writing effective ad copy is more reliant on multiple factors than ever before. Just last month, AdWords rolled out IF functions to add another layer of ad customization.... [...]