"Attention is a very scarce resource" - Claudio Lumbiarres

 

Werbewoche.ch: You recently conducted a survey of 300 publisher brands worldwide on the subject of the Cookieless Future. Are they sufficiently prepared for the cookie phase-out?

Claudio Lumbiarres: Our publishers at Teads are working intensively on strategies to respond to the upcoming changes, especially with regard to the reach of 3rd party cookies. Of course, each publisher has different framework conditions and requirements, which is why individual solutions are used. As a long-standing partner, we have been in intensive exchange with them from the very beginning and offer the possibility for a sustainable, cookieless-ready monetization of the inventory through our direct integration. Overall, we therefore see our publishing partners and ourselves as being very well prepared for the coming changes.

 

And how well prepared are advertisers (advertisers, brands)?

Advertisers are also highly aware of the issue. Due to the diverse and different range of alternative solutions, it is a great challenge to find the appropriate targeting approaches for the respective brands or campaigns. We have therefore been conducting proactive cookieless tests with our customers for some time now in order to find the targeting strategies that are right for them and to gather empirical values.

 

What disadvantages does "cookieless" bring for your targeting solutions?

One challenge for all market participants is the activation of deterministic data, for example from user panels, surveys or cross-site tracking. The corresponding frequency capping will also require new approaches in the future in order to be used to the usual extent.

 

95 percent of Teads Audiences work without 3rd party cookies

 

 

How do your customers benefit from Cookieless thanks to your solutions?

Teads expanded its Cookieless targeting products early on, so that today over 95 percent of our Teads Audiences already function without the use of 3rd party cookies in delivery. This allows us to offer our advertisers the opportunity to use the full reach of our inventory. Accordingly, this also includes ad opportunities where we already do not see any 3rd party cookie-based information.

 

Teads is actively committed to the Privacy Sandbox. How do you benefit from this?

We opted for an open technology approach at an early stage: For our cookieless audience segments, we therefore rely on Contextual Signals, Unified IDs or Publisher 1P data, among other things. Topics as part of the Privacy Sandbox will also play a role here. The important thing with all approaches is to enable a balance between precise, granular targeting and relevant reach at the same time.

 

Helping advertisers get more attention is one of your big promises. Can you explain the problem of hard-to-get attention with a few numbers?

Attention is a very scarce resource, as various studies show. According to the English IPA study, when users spend just under 5 hours a day in the media, 31 percent of them are exposed to advertising, to which they pay only 1 percent of their attention. Other studies show that the number of advertising messages to which consumers are exposed is constantly increasing. This presents a major challenge for brands to capture the attention of users. Many of the existing metrics for measuring success - such as the pure visibility of the advertising medium (viewability) - are no longer sufficient for this. Viewability metrics have been standard in online advertising up to now, but a viewability only technically says whether an ad could be seen or not, without taking into account whether the viewer engaged with it. Attention goes beyond viewability and includes engagement. When users pay attention to an ad, they actively engage with the content. This increases the likelihood that they will remember your brand, absorb your message, and take the desired action.

 

Viewability only technically states whether an advertising medium could be seen or not

 

 

To this end, they have new measurement technologies in use that are supposed to help develop effective advertising media with the support of AI. We're naturally surprised by this. First, a few words about the method, please?

We offer our customers to measure the attention of their campaigns for free - for this purpose we have integrated Lumen's analysis tool into our ad server. Each ad is delivered with a script that can be used to evaluate the attention for each impression. The attention forecast is made on the basis of 3,000 panel participants, whose Internet use is observed "in-home" on all devices by means of eye tracking and processed into a forecast model with the help of an AI. An attention estimate can then be calculated live for each impression of a campaign on the basis of the forecast model. The attention metrics obtained in this way - the number of attentive views as well as the total duration for which an ad is also attentively viewed - open up a completely new possibility for campaign control. Advertising media can thus be selected specifically according to their communication strength. A/B tests of formats, environments and target groups can thus be realized.

 

And what are the tips to advertisers and their agencies from the data they have collected so far?

The individual advertising medium is the focal point of a campaign, whereby perception is significantly influenced not only by the target group but also by the environment. Based on existing information about the attention of past campaigns, advertising media can be optimized for specific target groups and environments. The following are the most important factors for generating attention:

Relevance: Users pay more attention to messages that are relevant to their interests, needs and desires. Targeting advertising to the preferences of the target audience is crucial.

Placement: Ad formats that fit seamlessly into the browsing experience and are placed at the center of the content are more likely to grab users' attention, studies show.

CreativeMatching the advertising medium to the respective placement and optimizing its content significantly increases attention and accounts for a large part of the success.

Qualitative environmentsAdvertising in high-quality, journalistically prepared or curated environments has been proven to achieve higher attention values.

 

The individual advertising medium is the focus of a campaign

 

 

Decreasing attention span coupled with the disappearance of cookies. Is your Teads Ad Manager coping?

Our Teads Ad Manager is the most efficient way to use Teads and already offers the possibility to deliver campaigns completely without cookies and to fully utilize all our targeting options (Audiences and Contextuals). In addition, we have integrated a Cookieless Translator that converts predefined cookie-based Audiences that do not rely on cookie technologies with just a few clicks. The evaluation of the Lumen Attention values per campaign can also be viewed and optimized directly in our Teads Ad Manager. Our Teads Ad Manager thus combines both topics and maps them directly in our system.

 

Who is the Teads Ad Manager suitable for?

For all advertisers and agencies who are looking for reliable advertising solutions in a high-quality environment and want to handle them quickly and efficiently.

 

How does this differ from comparable AdTech platforms?

Our Teads Ad Manager is an end-to-end platform that enables our customers to reach a scalable, cookie-free audience in a premium environment. It is easy to use, yet offers many options to set up and bill the desired campaigns on different KPIs. Our AI optimizes the campaigns to the desired targets and we have direct integrations from various 3rd party vendors such as MOAT, Lumen, IAS, DoubleVerify which allow verification of various measurements such as Attention, In-View Time or even Brand Safety.

 

The sustainability issue has now also reached advertising. Can you explain your commitment with a concrete example?

Sustainability and emissions avoidance are very important topics for all of us. In collaboration with OMG/annalect, we are currently completing a research series across 11 campaigns, investigating how to reduce the length of an advertising video without losing advertising impact. The length of the video and its file size are important technical levers to reduce emissions. Preliminary results show that attention-based content optimization and shortening the video by 30% have no impact. On the positive side, there is even a significant increase in awareness due to attention-based optimization.

The strongest example is a video that was shortened from 15 to 6 seconds. Here, we save 50 percent of the emissions measured with Scope3 in technical terms alone. Another important factor is the way digital advertising is purchased. Depending on how it is integrated on websites and the number of different systems used, this significantly increases emissions. Thanks to our directly integrated end-to-end platform, we already have a decisive advantage here over other types of purchasing.

 

Another topic is "brand safety. What pillars do you have in your quiver for this?

Teads' inventory has a "built-in" Brand Safety approach and can be strengthened and specificized with additional levels. Since our inventory consists of high-quality editorial content, many potential cases of negative Brand Safety, known for example from User Generated Content, do not even occur. Of course, individual undesirable environments can also be specifically excluded and we enable so-called Custom Brand Suitability segments that cover individual campaign requirements.

 

Your personal biggest challenge at Teads for the next 12 months?

One of the biggest challenges, not only for me personally but for the entire industry, is certainly the issue of sustainability. The digital advertising industry needs to work together to minimize its environmental footprint while achieving its business goals.

 

And your personal greatest joy at Teads right now?

My greatest joy at Teads right now is the incredible collaboration and engagement of our talented team. Add to that recognizing and leveraging the tremendous possibilities of Teads Ad Manager. This results in great innovation and playing an influential role in shaping the future of the industry. At Teads, we don't just have a stake in the development, we actively shape it.

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