Enhancing the value of custom ads

BuzzFeed will surpass Vox’s valuation, if reports come true. Recode, which is owned by Vox Media, reported that NBCU is also nearing a deal to invest $200 million into BuzzFeed at a $1.5 billion. Vox Media employees are smart, passionate, hard-working, and accomplished professionals who also strive for a healthy work/life fit. While we sometimes log late hours, we know that everyone needs to rest and recharge. We recognize that your personal commitments don't end when you start work for the day. We offer flexible arrangements depending.

Custom ad formats deliver added value for everyone — more engaging experiences for consumers, better performance for media buyers, and more efficient costs per thousand impressions (CPMs) for publishers versus standard banner ads. However, scaling these top-shelf formats is becoming increasingly difficult for publishers. This is due to the high-touch nature of these deals and the fact that the direct reservation budgets typically used to buy custom ads are slowly being shifted to programmatic channels.

On Tuesday, Vox Media agreed to acquire New York Media, the company behind the biweekly print magazine and five popular online offshoots, in an all-stock transaction. Neither company would. ICYMI: Vox Media to buy Cafe Studios, publisher of Preet Bharara’s podcast. Ben Mullin over at the Wall Street Journal had the scoop on Sunday evening — who scoops on Sunday evenings!C’mon. But Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff says that company is bucking the trend, with traffic to Vox Media brands up 20 percent this past January compared with the prior year. At the Code Media conference in.

Vox Media Valuation 2019

Google Ad Manager is working with Vox Media and other partners to address these challenges. The solution — Programmatic Guaranteed with custom creatives — marries custom rich media ad formats with programmatic demand, all while streamlining the operational workflow. It works by changing where the creative is being hosted from the advertiser’s server to the publisher’s. This small but strategic change allows media buyers to set up Programmatic Guaranteed deals using Google Display & Video 360. They then link their deals to their creative, which is being hosted on Google Ad Manager using a Creative ID. This way when an advertiser’s deal wins an auction, the associated ad is served instantaneously via the publisher’s server.

While the deals are still executed one-to-one, Programmatic Guaranteed’s thoughtful workflow and built-in automation dramatically simplify the process for both parties. Additionally, it connects publishers with a growing pool of programmatic advertisers.

Programmatic Guaranteed with custom creatives allows us to scale our custom ad campaigns. Instead of requiring a team of four or five as with typical direct insertion orders, the new workflow in Google Ad Manager allows us to have one account manager oversee the design, operations, and delivery of the ads from request for proposal, to optimization, to billing.

, Director of Programmatic Operations, Vox Media

Aligning with a growing demand

Programmatic advertising now represents how the majority of digital advertising dollars are transacted in the US. In a recent report, eMarketer estimated that 78% of all US digital display dollars will transact programmatically in 2017, totaling a market size of about $32.5B. The report also noted that Programmatic Direct will represent about 56% of that budget ($18.2B) in 2017, and is expected to grow. [1]

As more ad dollars shift towards programmatic, Vox Media is working quickly to educate its clients on how the company views the future of media buying.

Our job is to make sure we're unlocking capabilities and educating advertisers on the value of programmatic. It's not a race to the bottom in terms of CPMs, it’s a race to the top in terms of the value we can offer. Programmatic Direct, whether it's through the programmatic marketplace or leveraging Programmatic Guaranteed with custom creatives, is going to become a larger part of our business.

, Director of Programmatic Operations, Vox Media

Programmatic Guaranteed with custom creatives not only exposes publishers’ custom ad products to more demand, it also creates a new performance standard for programmatic advertising.

A new standard for programmatic creative

Forward-thinking publishers are embracing the intermediary role of “publisher as agency,” as they realize the unique value and performance lift they can provide their customers.

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We fundamentally believe advertising performance can be better industry-wide. The entire premise of our custom ad products is: if you’re engaging users and not annoying them, they're more likely to interact with your ads. Programmatic Guaranteed with custom creatives bridges the gap between how buyers have always thought about performance and the future of programmatic advertising.

, Executive Director of Revenue Product, Vox Media

Ultimately, even the most technically advanced standard banner ads are limited to inside the box thinking. This constraint inspired Vox Media to create their sleek “Athena” unit. Athena, demoed below, delivers rich media experiences on both desktop and mobile devices, and can now be transacted and aligned programmatically through Google Ad Manager.

To illustrate the dramatic performance gains custom creatives produce, we evaluated Athena’s performance benchmarks against standard banner ads run across Vox Media’s properties. Here’s how Athena performed:

• 165% lift in CTR

• 310% lift in universal interaction rates (non mobile)

• 300+% increase in touch rates (mobile)

• 23+% increase in attention quality

• 40% lift in video completion rates

Given the scarcity of premium instream video inventory in the industry, offering video ads in custom creatives is an attractive solution for publishers looking to scale their video ad products. Especially since units like Vox’s Athena are delivering a 40% lift in video completion rates across their media properties.

Right now it’s all about video, agencies want to say to brands, ‘We can get you video views,’ so that's what we're focused on. Most brands today have videos on their sites and try to drive people to them. This is logically inefficient. We’re working to distribute their videos within our ad products to help them reach more people faster and without them having to click through.

Vox Media Valuation Portal

, Executive Director of Revenue Product, Vox Media

The future of custom creatives and programmatic advertising

Programmatic Guaranteed with custom creatives marks an important moment for the future of programmatic advertising. It empowers publishers to take creative and programmatic strategies into their own hands, and it allows media buyers to no longer sacrifice performance to achieve scale and efficiency.

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Stay tuned for more updates on Google Ad Manager in the coming months.