Let’s face it, advertisers buy display ads in-app because that’s all they know. They setup a campaign with a DSP, pick targeting parameters, set their bid, and hope their message lands in front of the right user.
Stick with what you know, right? Wrong.
Or at least, wrong in this case.
It’s getting increasingly more important for brands, and especially retail advertisers, to get this right, as more and more consumers move to apps (in fact, they spend 90% of their time there according to eMarketer). 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile device in the last six months.
Brands are already responding.
A survey from PubMatic and Forrester found that advertisers are spending 45% of their budgets on mobile, split evenly between web and in-app.
This equates to 22.5% of total ad spend. That’s a lot, right?! This budget shift is happening despite missing the proper key performance indicators (KPIs) and measurement tools, and perhaps more importantly, supply-demand relationships and transparency.
Not least of which, fraud is a major issue, and it’s because all three stakeholders—the app owners, the advertisers and the technology vendors—aren’t aligned.
That same report found that 52% of brand advertisers are concerned over fraud, and that 36% of their agency partners consider it a key challenge.
When one or more of these players isn’t being well-served, nothing gets better, and based on the amount of concern from advertisers, is exactly what we’re seeing in programmatic today.
As advertisers continue to shift budgets into app advertising, it will become increasingly incumbent on app owners to deliver these missing pieces. We’ve already seen the beginnings of this with IAB’s Open Measurement SDK and the ads.txt for mobile apps standard.
But it’s not enough. How long can we rely on an unsustainable model?
Programmatic perils are real, and advertisers are tired of being a victim of fraud.
If you’re well familiar with the perils of this daisy chain, then you know that bad actors performing fraudulent activities lead to huge headaches for advertisers and app owners—bad traffic, the inability to accurately track viewability, adjacency, monitor brand safety and more.
It’s worse than you thought.
The Drum reported that 48% of agencies say viewability is their top concern, and 47% want some sort of verification.
Mediapost reported that 58% see identified inventory quality and a brand safe environment as a top criteria.
Adexchanger reported that it’s getting worse—now advertisers are facing declaration fraud, where they’re paying for less than 5% of the screen.
Advertisers, I hear you loud and clear.
Let’s face it, a lot of this bad activity has traditionally come from the demand-side platforms (DSPs) themselves. They’re not all bad, but if you’ve been burned before you’re right to be skeptical.
The safest way to fight fraud is to not enter into this foggy world where ads come in one end, are passed through a long line of people (where mistakes, and often wrong choices are made), and come out the other in an unknown place, which end up being worth much less than the input.
A dollar into this murky world is barely 30 cents out to the supply source, according to The Guardian.
But if you’re avoiding programmatic display, what else are you doing outside of advertising on the walled gardens of Facebook and Google (which have their own issues, but are still safer than the exchange)?
The only truly safe way is to work with app owners directly, but that’s inherently inefficient and you won’t be able to scale. The next best option is to partner with a technology that already has those direct relationships
Imagine this: app owners working directly with a technology platform that has secured dedicated, specific placements for sponsored content and video (no programmatic, no dancing monkeys, no belly fat), so you can know how, when and where your ads are being served to users at a genuine “moment of next”—the optimal time to reach your audience, more on that soon.
Exclusive, straightforward, transparent in-app advertising is within your reach.
Spoiler alert—we have the solution. Taboola is already doing all of this across 92% of the US desktop population. We reach 1.4B global users, generate 1.5B moments of next (or genuine clicks) on the open web.
In the last couple years we’ve expanded across a growing network of app partners, delivering advertiser messages in mobile moments of next—that critical time when a users has completed an in-app action and are ready to discover something new. Think Via—once you hail a Via, they see your content in the backseat.
There’s no daisy chain. It’s exclusive, direct, and we know where every impression is going—now you can too.
It’s 100% transparent. Bye-bye fraud.
If you’re interested in something that solves problems you’ve faced with traditional DSPs, we’re standing by—drop us a line.