We warmly welcome you back from the holidays, certain that you already started 2012 with plenty of new energies. Please find below important updates about Ybrant’s Digital Marketing products, news from media partners, and important upcoming events.

Ybrant Digital is the Platinum Sponsor at India’s second ad:tech. This year’s event will be opened with a keynote speech by Ybrant’s CEO and Chairman, Mr. Suresh Reddy. Facundo Maldonado, Ybran’ts Head of Social Media Development, will speak on Social Media Metrics and Measurement.

New Facebook Sponsored Stories Page Post Ads

The new format allows choosing the specific post to promote, as well as editing the message. The different types can be selected and edited according to campaign needs from within Ybrant’s Facebook platform, Ybrant FBM.

As ad formats on Facebook become more complex, our teams have designed tools that help understand the types of ads and the required set-up. See more below or contact your Account Manager for more details.

Old Insights Metrics are gone, New Insights soon mandatory:

In Q4 of 2011, Facebook launched new Insights for Pages and Apps.  The access to those metrics is already mandatory, and from February 15^th 2012, all the data of the old Insights will be removed. For page admins that want to keep that data, we recommend back it up.  This service is provided free of charge.  Contact your Account Manager in Ybrant for this issue if needed.

The new Insights: Bigger, better, faster. Courtesy of Insidefacebook.com

The new metrics include Check Ins, Negative Feedback and Like sources.  Now, page admins will have a much broader amount of data. This is complimented by Ybrant’s new Data Analytics tool for Facebook pages, which analyzes the advertiser page as well as those of competitors. Contact your Account Manager for more information.

Changes in Facebook policy for Gambling Advertisers:

Gambling advertisers can now run Facebook campaigns in any country where it is legal to do so, as long as they have a state-registered license to operate in the countries where the ads are shown.

As always, on any doubt, we will be happy to assist with inquiries about Ybrant’s products, through your point of contact, Ybrant’s website contact us, or our Facebook contact form.

More Exciting New Features:

- Facebook Page Tab targeting: Tabs in pages can be selected as destinations for ads through Ybrant FBM.

- SubID feature: Click URLs can be manually marked with unique sub ID chosen by the Ybrant FBM advertiser.

- Google Analytics Integration: Ybrant campaigns reporting and targeting is now fully integrated with Google Analytics for advertisers.

- Broad Category Targeting: Ybrant FBM uses this to choose from pre-defined categories such as people that “Like” Sport.

- Day Part Targeting: Ybrant is able to run Facebook campaigns on specific days and hours, pausing and restarting automatically.

- Increasing URL length to 1024 character: The limit for external ad URLs is now the standard 1024 characters, largely increasing tracking capabilities.

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Lately, an increasing number of advertisers avoid buying RON traffic (Run Over Network), and for good reason: You never know what is out there – and even apparently protected domains like Facebook can contain inappropriate materials, that you would not want your ad to appear next to.

Preventing offensive and inappropriate content has always been part of the industry, but lately it became one of the leading technological objectives in digital marketing. Yet, no one really managed to overcome the technical challenges of providing a 100% safe environment. So what can be done in order to be as safe as possible? Below are some ideas, most of which have been tried and tested, and the advertiser pros/cons for each:

1) Run on a list on specific domain list only on very specific and well know sites.

Pros: You run on good sites with good content, and you can make pretty safe assumptions about the quality of the audience.

Cons: Running on premium sites usually requires higher CPM rates, and even with very popular sites – you only get limited exposure.

2) Run on Channels – run on vertical channels of sites (Finance, Travel, etc), that you believe will get you the best results.

Pros: You can exclude unwanted channels.

Cons: You depend on your publisher network to correctly classify the traffic.

Considering the alternatives, technology may be a good option for filtering content. Courtesy of omgato.

3) Use a Semantic Engine which analyzes the web page before showing the ads, and excludes ads from running on sites with “bad” characteristics (sex, violence, copy infringement, etc).

Pros: Gets you a very high success rate of blocking bad content, as it applies directly on the ad tag – even if you bought the impression, you will show blank to the user, and not appear next to bad content.

Cons: Doesn’t read flash content and photos, and needs to support the language of the website

Those are only some of the solutions the industry has come up with – so which one will eventually emerge as the safest and most effective? The answer, I think, probably lies in the middle: a combination of specifically targeted channels, supported by a semantic engine, can maintain you the best ROI and traffic exposure you need,  while staying brand-safe at the same time.

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Jacob Nizri is President of Ybrant Digital, a global digital marketing solutions provider. Here Nizri discusses the Ybrant Digital offering, its multi-channel approach, and the growth of its business across Europe.

Can you give some insight into the Ybrant offering in Europe?

Ybrant Digital’s offering, in Europe as well as any other market it has a presence in, is the ability to engage the right users for advertisers, at the right time, across all main forms of digital media, by leveraging the knowledge and experience from our local teams. We invested heavily in proprietary technology and data processing to be able to custom fit any market.

We hold local offices in the biggest European markets: UK, Germany and France, and serve all other countries directly or through official representatives, namely in Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Turkey and Greece.

We also have an East European subsidiary in Ukraine which serves the interesting and fast-growing Russian-speaking market.

We are capable of designing and providing solutions worldwide. For example, these days we are running several Pan European campaigns for known brands who do parallel work offline on TV, print media, sponsorship etc, and at the same time we’re helping a smallish client form the financial sector reach customers in Estonia, a very specific and rare market.

How would you define the business? An evolved ad net – with expertise in different channels?

Overall, we can be defined in one very short sentence: “We deliver audiences through digital media.” On the technical side, yes, it requires expertise in each form of media such as display, social and mobile, constant investment in technology and effective accumulation of our global experience. On the practical side, it’s fueled by the passion to innovate.

The end goal is the audience, the people that our advertisers need to reach in order to pass the message or drive buying action. Ideally, we like to advise on the budget and the optimal digital mix, which can be improved and perfected during a campaign. Using technology like pixel tracking, we can identify and target types of users (travel, investment, shopping, etc). So instead of channels that are lists of sites, our channels are large groups of very relevant people for the advertiser.

You own and operate your own prop Facebook buying platform. Is this the fastest growing part of your business?

We have been active on the Facebook API since a very early stage. Social network advertising is the fastest growing vertical in the online industry in general. This is what’s largely responsible for reports and announcements all through this year which declared how Display is growing faster than search. So we naturally enjoy this growth, and we try to apply the same foresight to the next growing digital marketing verticals around the corner.

In terms of display, is your business focused on the agency media plan? Or do you get much of the spend from client direct?

Very briefly put, this varies greatly from market to market. This is affected by 3 main factors: The nature of the acquisitions or mergers we made in each market in terms of the customer profile that made their business, the penetration of digital capabilities into the main agencies in each market, and the patterns that characterize success for specific type of content per each media. For example, there are differences in the way the same media, even the same online destination, behave and perform for advertisers, even across a few miles like between French and Flemish Belgium, or between northern and southern Italy. This is the type of experience that we try to accumulate into each new click or impression that we serve.

Are you accessing inventory through the automated display channel – or do you have managed supply form publishers?

We have both of those and other forms of contact with publishers as well. We have exclusive representation for top global brands in some markets, for example Microsoft Advertising and Viacom in Latin America, and Yahoo! in Ukraine. Some campaigns require a very complex combination of media sources in order to deliver both the specific kind of audience and the volume or reach required by the advertiser. We can be extremely transparent about the sources and the budget pie chart, according to the advertiser’s needs.

Many third party buyers have developed in-house tech for exchange trading or have built on-top of platform APIs to differentiate their offering? Is Ybrant doing anything similar in the data-driven display space?

Data was and is a central aspect of our success to date. As said above, we were one of the first companies worldwide to connect with Facebook’s API. The crowded industry and constantly changing competitive layout is not new. The idea is to innovate and lead the data accumulation and leverage. As part of this prioritization, we recruited our CTO from Microsoft last year.

You bought the Lycos search engine last year. Was that a strategy to build out a PPC business? Or was it a move to secure data for other parts of the business – such as display? Has the acquisition been a success?

The short answer to all these questions is yes. The longer answer is that it was a success from day 1, since Lycos is a well-respected and recognized online brand, and a profitable business. We operate an XML PPC business since before the acquisition, and as said before, data has been and will be a default ingredient in every existing and new venture.

Ybrant has also got a mobile display division. Can you give some overview on how you are delivering for advertisers in the mobile channel? How are you addressing key problems like tracking?
It’s not just Mobile Display. it’s a complete mobile solution. We work with advertisers and publishers alike. The tracking technology existed from day one and is one of our strongest selling points. Within the first year we already have campaigns in all continents and repeating business from direct and agency advertisers

You are operating in over four different channels? Where does Ybrant see the biggest opportunity over the coming 12 months? Social? Mobile? Online Display? Mobile?

For many practical purposes, these are several companies inside the company, each with full teams dedicated to the success of their product or products, and their technology or media partners. That also includes our extensive activity with online publishers and media owners. Each of these teams will answer you that they are the next big thing, and they are all right. They compete internally for resources, priorities and R&D power, and the absolute winners of this competition are our customers and partners.

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By Emanuel Goldschmidt, Managing Director, Latin America @ Ybrant Digital

A few weeks ago Google + project launched and since then there is a lot of discussions on whether it is the “Facebook Killer”. While the conversation is kind of entertaining, it is less relevant to try and guess who will win this race. The “Google +” vs “Facebook Like” battle for the social user raises some other important and interesting issues.

The time users dedicate to social networking is very high. As an example, users are spending 25% of their total time on social networks, mostly Facebook, in the US alone. Combined with the time spent, the amount of users on Facebook is already so big (more than 720m worldwide) that Mark Zuckerberg already announced that Facebook will stop having this metric as the most important, since it is more relevant to measure the engagement level of users, rather than how many users there are.

Yet, Google + was celebrating its first 20 million users within a few weeks. Despite the focus in the media on the amount of users, the key factor here will be whether those millions of users will have a significant engagement rate that reflects their interests in the same way that Facebook does today, and combine that with Google’s tremendous search reach. If Google manages to pull this off, on top of creating a new social network that rivals Facebook’s reach, the most disruptive change would actually be in the search environment: Just imagine for a minute that the results that you get from your searches will also come with the recommendation (+1) of one of your closest friends, colleagues or relatives. That would significantly improve the relevance of those results. This concept already has a name: Social Search.

We have seen similar epic battles before, and everyone involved is still around to tell it

In fact, many people today use Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other social environments to get recommendations from friends about products, places and such. So it should be logical and very natural for the user to get search results powered also with the recommendation of someone close. This change already started when social networks began appearing. Facebook is already partnered with Bing to provide the users a better search experience, by adding all the information that FB has of the users.

Whether Google + will win acceptance among more gazillions of users, or Facebook will reach 1 billion users before the end of 2011, is a hard guess. Fact is, people enjoy interacting with each other, and they are willing to express what kind of music they like, which is the best pizza, and even where they are at any given time. What will dominate their time online for the next couple of years will always be the conversation in the digital marketing industry. The definite winners are the users who get better tools, more relevant content, and new options to find what they want online.

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When Digital Marketing professionals think of new and daring ways to capture and contain online audiences, they sometimes forget how human visitors are, and that they are still more biological than bionic. Our amazingly adaptable minds have the capability to compensate for lost ground very fast. Online users are bombarded by information in general, and advertising messages in particular. They are used to channeling their attention to areas where the content they are looking for is normally displayed.

In fact, research shows that most content is scanned by users, and that they only read more when it matters to them. So how do you advertise in the middle of their interest zone, without disturbing the user experience and alienating users from your content?

The answer again lies in our biology. We are hardwired to identify incentives and find shortcuts to our objectives. So if an online user can do something which requires less concentration but achieves the same or better entertainment or information value, then they will probably give it a shot. In-image advertising tries to answer this by putting a site’s images in center stage.

Most site images lead nowhere. This real-estate can be leveraged to benefit both the visitors and the site owners.  People respond to images easily and process their information very fast, because this is the way our minds work. In-image solutions make the images interactive, without disturbing the written content. There are two ways in which this benefits publishers:

First, just like YouTube monetizes its video views by adding a banner to the player, any publisher can monetize images the same way, by simply adding an ad on any image large enough to contain it, without disturbing the experience. Second, using web 2.0 technology, images can become interactive and capture the user’s center of attention by  showing similar images and/or relevant information.

Our eyes focus naturally on the place where we expect to find the most relevant information. Courtesy of Jakob Nielsen.

When users choose to interact with the image, they find extra related images and retrieve information without leaving the site and without losing focus. For the publisher, this prolongs the time spent on site, as users browse the images and stay entertained and engaged without leaving to other destinations as soon as they can.

To sum it up, users are naturally efficient about the amount of information they consume and process. In order to get into their shortlist, publishers must offer simple ways to display relevant content. While images are among the most practical tools for this, they are not used as much. In-image advertising uses images to make ads more relevant, and keep the visitors entertained.  In consequence, they stay longer on site and improve the monetization options for the publisher.

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I recently took part in a large debate about whether Digital Marketing meets all the characteristics of a well defined profession, just like Medicine, Law, Nursing or Banking. The recurrent counter-argument I heard is that the industry is only a couple of decades old, while most professions carry at least a century. My reply was that multi-billion-dollar ventures are not the only things that happen faster online. Despite its relatively young age, the Internet has transformed our lives as have many famous inventions, patents and buildings in human history. However, for the sake of the argument, we decided check how Digital Marketing matches up to the characteristics of a profession, as defined by Wikipedia:

Skill Based on Theoretical knowledge: We are already flooded with institutionalized terms (CPM, CPC, eCPM), and always know how a campaign should work in theory. Score: 9/10.

Professional Associations: IAB and its local or regional equivalents across the globe are proof enough. Score: 10/10.

Extensive period of education: Might be less common than “older” professions, but there are already universities around the globe offering Bachelors and Masters degrees in Digital Marketing. Score: 7/10.

Testing of competence: Lacking an official standard, although most serious companies hold entry exams to ensure a basic set of analytical and creative capabilities. Score: 6/10.

Institutional training: More common in the US than elsewhere, but the trend of hosting summer interns and trainees for key roles is certainly over the horizon. Score: 7/10.

Licensed practitioners: No such thing, although membership in key associations can be crucial for success.  Score: 4/10.

Work Autonomy: Certainly more and more companies are recruiting personnel with specific online marketing experience as a must-have. Score: 7/10.

Code of professional ethics: IASH, CanSpam, and updated communications laws are still forming in most countries, but have been around since the first commercial click. Score 9:10.

Self Regulation: I can hardly think of a more self-regulated industry. Score: 10/10.

Public service and altruism: Recent uprising in countries with repressive regimes, fed by Social Network activities, defend the need for an open and free online industry. The software that allows these freedoms was developed commercially, but contributed to public good. Score: 9/10.

Exclusion, monopoly and legal recognition: True, anyone can start an entry-level digital marketing position, but as you move up the ranks, proven experience and understanding of the market are crucial. Score: 6/10.

High Status and rewards: Executives and founders of today’s online giants, such as Apple’s Steve Jobs , Google’s Larry & Sergey, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckenberg, are in this century’s top list of cult figures. Score: 10/10.

Individual clients: There are many professionals in our trade who consult individually or work on contract rather than as employees. Score: 10/10.

Middle Class Occupations: It’s safe to assume that most Digital Marketing pros meet this definition. Score: 10/10.

Indeterminacy of knowledge: Many aspects of our industry depend on experience and cannot be communicated only by a set of rules or list of guidelines. Score: 10/10.

Did Vint Cerf and his internet-founding colleagues also invent a new profession called Digital Marketing?

Mobility: Any Digital Marketing professional can pick themselves up at any time and move to a competitor, or start their own shop. Score: 10/10.

Total score: 134/160 = 84%

In Conclusion, Digital Marketing is not yet as fully instituionalized as professions that have been around for centuries. However, at the rate that the industry is developing, producing as much annual business as its older cousins, and directly influencing the lives of billions of people within a much shorter period of time, it’s on the sure path to stardom. Architects, lawyers, doctors, beware!

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We live in an economic reality where commodity prices rise and fall daily, and there is no reason why digital marketing should be any different. If you are not the direct owner of the media, or its exclusive representative, you sell different kinds of media, which are probably sold by other media suppliers too: In other words – commodities.

There are some key points which are universally important for media buyers to make the right decisions: Service, Technology, Payments terms and RATES!

Every click, be it on Display Media, Mobile Media, or a click on Social Network Ads, is driven towards a standard rate card, and raises the same questions: Is this rate a deal breaker with the buyer or their agency? How you can know for sure that your rate card is competitive enough in your market?

Around the globe, agencies typically work with different kind of discounts on media buys: Agency Commission, Advertiser Discount, and “Kickback” or “Rebate”.

But not every agency uses all 3 discount methods, and the commission percentages are not standard in any market. So, why do media suppliers feel the need for an official rate card? Why take a “guess” on what should be the best rate in the market? And is this rate the best in terms of discounts or long term agreements?

Can you build a standard Rate Card for commodities? Seems unlikely. Source: IMF Research

We can do a much better service by understanding the specific needs of an agency and its environment, and by designing special rates for the negotiation prior to the campaign. This is what creates “win-win situations”.  A good relationship with your customers, and gaining their trust, are key factors to make this work. Yes, trust is the most important asset you need from a client. Technology, service, commercial and payment conditions are worthless without trust.

To sell under cost, one does not need a sales team. One can go out to the street with a sign saying that they sell under the market cost. So think how you can gain trust from the other side, and work to get results together and make a partnership. This is summed up very well by the famous quote: “The only place where SUCCESS comes before WORK is in the dictionary”.

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With 420 million users online and another 6 million joining each month, China is home to the largest number of Internet users. McKinsey reports that this number could easily mushroom to 750 million over the next 4 years.

What are all these people doing online? More than 200 million Chinese are experimenting with social networking sites (SNS), with most active users coming from the coveted middle-class. SNS sites like RenRen and Kaixin001 are winning converts from long-time audience favorites including portals like Sohu, making them attractive to advertisers. About half of China’s net users have registered an SNS account.

Last year, for the first time, SNS growth stalled as the rise of “Twitter-like” microblogs – particularly Sina’s Weibo – siphoned away user attention across every metric. As a result, advertisers are turning to niche players like Taomee, Jiayuan and Douban which appeal to users with unique interests, from children to urban singles looking for love. With fans less fickle, these sites act as a credible conduit to related e-commerce opportunities.

The Data Center of the China Internet (DCCI) and Chinese social platform and service provider Comsenz jointly released the 2010 China Social Network Service Report showing that SNSs still appeal to users who want deeper personal connections. In this way, they are different from microblogs, which are more about broadcasting events and opinions.

Compared to search engines and portals, the SNS platforms are not yet powerful enough tools for grabbing significant share from ad budgets. Contrary to our experience in the rest of the world, Digital Marketing in China is more about reach,  and less about user data-mining to intelligently place ads.

Virtual product placement within SNS games is becoming one of the most profitable sources of revenue for these properties, generating between US$200,000 to US$500,000 per month on product placement for sites.

Top interests for Chinese SNS users

Similarly to Facebook elsewhere, RenRen and Kaixin001 launched DIY ad platforms at the end of 2009 and 2010. DIY ads are a key revenue generator for Facebook, bringing in at least a half of its ads revenue. But we don’t expect China’s SNS sites to rely on them as much in the near future.

Ybrant Digital is closely monitoring the changing online ad market in China. Working with advertisers, publishers and a wide variety of Chinese ad networks, we are implementing strategies designed to ensure that everyone benefits from this activity.

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By Shirley Lowenstein, VP, Global Ad Operations @ Ybrant Digital

As internet users grew increasingly thicker skins to intrusive displayed messages such as pop-ups, banner creators invested in making banners less intrusive, and designing them in a variety of sizes to fill different locations on the page; a method which became an accepted industry standard. However, the standard sizes were soon not engaging enough for the users, and more formats were added in order to attract the users such as “Expandable Banners”, “Sliders”, “Floaters” and more.

Video ads began with TV-like “pre-rolls”, “mid-rolls” etc, and evolved to “text-on-video”, “overlays”, “interactive videos”, etc. Social Ads seems to be in the earlier stages of the same genetic development path….and who knows what’s next? After all, the main goal behind these formats is to show more information to the user in the ad itself, catching their attention without having them leave the page. Marketers are driven to think out of the box and find the best way to engage the user, while maintaining the general look and feel of their original content.

So display is maybe less new than video and social, and staying in front of the digital marketing game is becoming more complex, but as recent data shows it still is the major revenue generated from online advertisers, even when sticking to plain simple banner ads. It remains popular because it is still one of the less intrusive forms of online advertising, and was constantly able to allow new technologies and techniques.  Despite doomsday predictions during the 2009 recession, back in 2010 Display ad impressions were shown to regularly increase from year to year, outpacing other formats in growth. Many advertisers will spend more on display ads in 2011 than they did in 2010.

Besides the formats, also the way Advertisers think has changed: Not just new users, but the right users, and more information about them in order to more efficiently generate revenues. It increased demands by advertisers to know where and when their ads will be placed, as well as how consumers engaged their product or content. Data is a crucial aspect when managing online campaigns, used to make smart decisions such as whether to an ad at all, how to customize the creative according to where the user is in the purchasing funnel, and also how to monitor the ad budgets according to the specific end users.

Banners can step out of their boxes to take front stage and get more attention, only minimally disturbing the visitor’s experience

All of the above has proven to increase engagement and conversions, and combined with recent technologies such as Real Time Bidding, advertisers also have better access to ad pricing. While the auction model determines that only one buyer can purchase the impression at a time, the data gathered from the other buyers is stored for analysis and pricing determination on all future bids.

To summarize, Online Display has evolved and in order to engage the user advertisers must think out of the box and be much more creative than before. Correct use of data can help us develop new ways to grab the attention of the users without frustrating them, and at the same time to know how to deliver the message and to make them react to the advertised product or service.

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