The breaking down of walled gardens

fourthsource.com

Apple’s admission that it needs to address its monetisation system for publishers who distribute their content in the company’s News app is another crushing blow to the walled gardens of the digital media ecosystem. Tired of giving away proprietary content for free to Apple News, Facebook, and Google – closed platforms that offer immense audience reach but restrict access to lucrative advertising inventory and data – publishers are threatening to pull out unless their share of revenue increases.

Apple’s suggested solution would allow top media partners to use their own technology to fill the ad space on their content, effectively turning the News app into an extension of the publishers’ own website. This would mean publishers would make as much money from views in Apple News as they do on their own sites.

The demand for a more transparent and open digital advertising ecosystem will only continue to intensify. In 2016, Facebook and Google alone collected nearly half of the global digital advertising spend and now account for the lion’s share of spending growth in the online market. This helps explain why we’ve seen the Associationfor National Advertisers (ANA) call for the breakdown of walled gardens, with 90% of their members supporting independent audits of these platforms.

The realisation by publishers and advertisers alike of the existential threat posed by the Facebook-Google duopoly came to the fore amidst the rise of ‘fake news,’ as it became apparent that their closed supply chains are not offering advertisers a 100 percent brand-safe environment. Indeed, the Institute ofPractitioners in Advertising (IPA) recently criticised Google and Facebook for not moving fast enough to tackle problems with brand safety, viewability, and measurement, further amplifying appeals for greater control and accountability for ad placement.

Opaque and inefficient supply chains are two of the biggest challenges the open internet must address to stop a disproportionate share of advertising spend flowing to a handful of closed platforms. As the ecosystem continues to consolidate and products become commoditized, it’s clear that the industry needs to tackle issues of price transparency and platform openness.

First, it’s time to start thinking about viewability as the default currency, where advertisers only pay for viewable impressions. Advertisers lost a reported £606m to non-viewable adverts last year. If viewability were to become the standard—as we expect it will—advertisers’ budgets will go further in getting their messages in front of real consumers’ eyes.

Second, moving our industry towards delivering 100 percent viewable, fraud-free, effective digital advertising requires us to clean up the programmatic supply chain. We need to build an efficient marketplace that enables quality publishers to pocket the majority of advertising spend. That means cutting out low-value intermediary actors and directing spend along the most efficient path between buyers and sellers. Such an open ecosystem promises and prioritises giving advertisers and publishers a fair auction, resulting in a fair price. New technology like blockchain is also helping usher in greater transparency into the marketplace.

For publishers, header bidding has transformed their monetisation efforts. No longer beholden to Google’s DFP / AdX black box, they’ve been able to dramatically increase revenue. Header bidding was created to address a major pain point in programmatic advertising: publisher ad servers have historically been unable to efficiently evaluate bids from multiple demand partners at once. Moving away from the traditional waterfall setup, header bidding allows publishers to source bids from all of their demand sources at the same time by making ad calls to all of them simultaneously. This eliminates the inefficient hierarchy of the waterfall, ensuring every demand partner gets a chance to bid on every impression, and increases yield for publishers by allowing greater competition.

More recently, moving header bidding server-side has been shown to decrease latency, a user experience problem that may occur when a publisher has too many demand partners in their header bidding solution. Already, by using this disruptive technology, publishers are retaking control of their businesses and using independent partners to help them acquire, engage, and monetise their audiences across the open internet.

For advertisers, the creation of an ad tech consortium provides a standardised framework to utilise programmatic technologies outside of the Facebook-Google duopoly. By integrating identity resolution into programmatic advertising, this consortium will help marketers deliver the right content at the right time, enhancing the online user experience. This collaboration of digital advertising business is crucial for building a better, more efficient marketplace.

This new marketplace will require unity across the industry and a shared commitment to changing the programmatic landscape for the better. The walled gardens in digital advertising are stumbling amidst technological innovations and collaboration amongst key ad tech players. Ultimately, the aim is a better internet that provides advertisers with open transparent alternatives, and publishers, the ability to regain control of their audiences and yields.Second, moving our industry towards delivering 100 percent viewable, fraud-free, effective digital advertising requires us to clean up the programmatic supply chain. We need to build an efficient marketplace that enables quality publishers to pocket the majority of advertising spend. That means cutting out low-value intermediary actors and directing spend along the most efficient path between buyers and sellers. Such an open ecosystem promises and prioritises giving advertisers and publishers a fair auction, resulting in a fair price. New technology like blockchain is also helping usher in greater transparency into the marketplace.

For publishers, header bidding has transformed their monetisation efforts. No longer beholden to Google’s DFP / AdX black box, they’ve been able to dramatically increase revenue. Header bidding was created to address a major pain point in programmatic advertising: publisher ad servers have historically been unable to efficiently evaluate bids from multiple demand partners at once. Moving away from the traditional waterfall setup, header bidding allows publishers to source bids from all of their demand sources at the same time by making ad calls to all of them simultaneously. This eliminates the inefficient hierarchy of the waterfall, ensuring every demand partner gets a chance to bid on every impression, and increases yield for publishers by allowing greater competition.

More recently, moving header bidding server-side has been shown to decrease latency, a user experience problem that may occur when a publisher has too many demand partners in their header bidding solution. Already, by using this disruptive technology, publishers are retaking control of their businesses and using independent partners to help them acquire, engage, and monetise their audiences across the open internet.

For advertisers, the creation of an ad tech consortium provides a standardised framework to utilise programmatic technologies outside of the Facebook-Google duopoly. By integrating identity resolution into programmatic advertising, this consortium will help marketers deliver the right content at the right time, enhancing the online user experience. This collaboration of digital advertising business is crucial for building a better, more efficient marketplace.

This new marketplace will require unity across the industry and a shared commitment to changing the programmatic landscape for the better. The walled gardens in digital advertising are stumbling amidst technological innovations and collaboration amongst key ad tech players. Ultimately, the aim is a better internet that provides advertisers with open transparent alternatives, and publishers, the ability to regain control of their audiences and yields.

The Rise of Streaming Won’t End Our Addiction to TV

fortune.com

You have probably heard that binge-watching television on platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime leads to depression, chronic illness, weight gain, sleep disorders, and even a suffering sex life. While those claims are still being debated against evidence that suggests cord-cutters are more engaged politically regardless of what they watch online, it is indisputable that television has changed drastically in form, interface, and content in the last decade.

Indeed, recent studies indicate that we are watching more TV than ever, mainly thanks to an increasing array of apps that are transforming TV into a fundamentally different process of production and consumption through engaging, sharing, and instantly commenting. With a team of researchers that I lead at Boston University, we call this TVing, and it is fast becoming the new normal in our always-on lives.

The media industry has shifted from a top-down hierarchical model of schedules and "must-see TV" at the time it is broadcast to apps that provide access to TV shows—often original series—regardless of where you are or when you want to watch. Recent high-profile examples include Apple budgeting $1 billion for producing original content, and Disney starting its own streaming service. But the field also includes other players such as Newsy, Cheddar, Sling, and many additional apps and services that deliver TV a la carte.

In a recent, still-unpublished study of 420 nationally representative college students that researchers and I conducted through the Division of Emerging Media Studies at BU, we found the appetite for such apps is nearly insatiable. Here, just 10 respondents (0.2%) reported not subscribing to at least one television-viewing app, and 97.1% subscribed to between one and five services to watch television. A much smaller percentage—2.9%—of respondents had from six to 10 online TV app subscriptions.

Not surprisingly, the most common apps were Netflix (86.2%), Amazon Prime (42.4%), and Hulu (36.2%), but also included iTunes or Google Play (21.2%), HBO Now (15.5%), ESPN Now (6.0%), and Crackle (6.0%). The most commonly binge-watched programs were Stranger Things, Orange is the New Black, and The Walking Dead, and 36.2% binge-watched more than three television series in the last month.

Altogether, when considering the average time spent viewing across screens, we found that our respondents spent a total of 15.36 hours streaming television per day on all of their devices—sometimes used simultaneously. The majority of time (3.36 hours per day) was on TV through online streaming platforms like Xbox One, Roku, or Apple TV, but included another 3.02 hours of TVing on smartphones, 2.88 hours on laptops, 2.80 hours on traditional TV through cable, broadcast, or dish, 1.71 hours on desktop computers, and another 1.59 hours on tablets.

In terms of what people actually do while TVing, 98.6% reported multitasking in something else, with the most popular activities including eating (98.1%), browsing the Internet (96.9%), and interacting with friends via texting or online chatting (95.5%).

These findings suggest that engaging with streaming platforms, which use algorithms to personalize content options to users, is a substantively different activity from simply seeing “what’s on” broadcast or cable television. Rather than just watching TV in a more passive model of traditional TV consumption, streaming viewers are using a system that lets them watch whatever they want, whenever and wherever they choose.

These transformed processes of producing and using TV translates into agency, but also dependency, and effects. Our research thus far suggests that there are actual residual benefits of TVing more frequently, like engaging with and talking about politics more often, but just as importantly, it is clear that the marketplace for TV-watching apps will continue to grow, and audiences love them and the flexibility they provide.

Of course, this means that the market share for each will be less, and users will come and go more easily, but they will watch more apps and more television more often across more devices. More really is more, especially when it comes to TVing.

In-App Advertising: A Promising New Frontier for Brands in a Mobile Saturated World

brandinginasia.com/

It is the middle of the night. The lights are off, and underneath your blanket, you are engrossed watching a ‘ghost sightings’ video on an app rated highly by your friends.

The moment on the video is racked with suspense. As your throat runs dry and your heartbeat starts to escalate anticipating the impending arrival of the poltergeist, the sudden appearance of another entity ruins it all: An in-app ad displaying Amazon’s latest sales bonanza!

Dammit! The impending poltergeist appearance vanishes from of your mind, only to be replaced by irresistible deals on a plethora of goods!

Oh, the power of a 30-sec in-app advert.

According to the latest figures, the number of available apps in the Google Play Store was 3 million as of March 2017. From virtual games to stocks to news, people are hooked on apps for literally everything.

While the web itself is an enormous playing field for brands trying to get noticed, apps are a subset of this universe offering a personal, more customized world.

Thus, for advertisers, the writing on the proverbial wall has never been clearer: in-app advertising is the go-to spot in order to grab eyeballs and build brands.

In-app advertisers consider India an untapped treasure trove, and the increasing number of mobile phone users is a significant reason. India’s mobile user base at the end of June last year was second only to China. With a connection-per-100 citizen ratio of 91.08, mobile phones arguably form the most integral part of the Indian social fabric these days, breaking across multiple social and economic layers.

Therefore, it’s no surprise that mobile phones have become the most-preferred screen for users to purchase products as well. As a result, brands are finding it much easier to promote themselves on mobile in the hinterland as well as in urban spaces, rather than via conventional media such as print, radio or TV.

The effect of in-app advertising can be gauged from the fact that Amazon has offered an incentive to mobile developers to motivate them to carry Amazon’s advertisements on their on-screen applications. In-app advertising ensures that your product remains visible in the user domain as with every app download, users would view the in-app ad and recall the brand as well as the product.

In-app advertisers make customized offers to users based on the data accumulated, which leads to micro-targeted advertising and minimum waste of the marketing budget.

While the web itself is an enormous playing field for brands trying to get noticed, apps are a subset of this universe, offering a personal, more customized world. Every app download provides extremely useful data regarding the tastes and preferences of a user, and implementing predictive analytics on the data generated through in-apps helps to identify micro-target groups better and easily.

Thus, every online advertiser works on two aspects; the first is to inform consumers regarding the product or service through various channels and then specifically ensuring an access path through in-app advertising as it is the only interactive tool that consumers are using almost 24×7. Advertising via applications helps to generate a loyal customer base as users engage with apps almost every day.

Additionally, in the era of Big Data and predictive analytics, advertisers have access to the specific demands of customers. In-app advertisers make customized offers to users based on the data accumulated, which leads to micro-targeted advertising and minimum waste of the marketing budget.

A user also knows other users in need of similar products or solutions, which combined with the hyper-connectivity of online platforms, creates a marketing chain comprising only users that enhance the reach and productivity of the advertisement manifold.

Every individual, through their own friend lists, has created a core group of people who form a closed network of buyers that ratify purchases. Likewise, in-app advertisers try to find out the common preferences of such groups and then seek approval/concerns regarding the product. The ready target audience combined with direct feedback gathered makes it comfortable for advertisers to keep upgrading the product.

Finally, advertising on online media and apps allows marketers to maintain a systematic feedback mechanism. Through analytical tools and data reports, marketers can easily quantify the productivity and ROI of marketing efforts. App and mobile oriented advertising brings in quick, action-oriented and quantifiable results, a correct analysis of which can be the make or break determinant of a product’s success or failure in the competitive marketing environment of today.

Context effect: How to assure brand safety in the digital ecosystem

thedrum.com

In cognitive psychology, 'context effect' holds that an event or object is more favorably perceived and remembered when the surrounding environment is comfortable and appealing. For advertisers and marketers, this means a brand’s value can increase or decrease in worth based on the context in which it’s seen, or by what’s next to it. Context effect can be a positive force when ads are placed alongside premium content, but it cuts both ways: Since the dawn of advertising, buyers have been concerned about damaging their brand equity if they are inadvertently juxtaposed against something unseemly. This concern has been put on overdrive with the rapid expansion of digital advertising.

With the digital ecosystem growing rapidly, threats to brand safety are everywhere. Baby food ads can appear next to hate speech; global luxury campaigns can show up on a fake news site; airline banners can appear alongside reports of a grisly plane crash. And if the digital advertising business feels big now, it’s still growing: US digital ad spend is expected to reach $77bn this year, marking the first time marketers in the U.S. will spend more money on digital advertising than on television ads. As a result, brands have more reason than ever to seek reassurance that their marketing dollars will improve consumers’ perception of their brand image rather than put it at risk.

In a programmatic world where advertising transactions occur in milliseconds, billions of times a day, across millions of websites and mobile apps, with countless intermediaries - protecting brand safety can seem like a daunting, even overwhelming, challenge. But while there’s no magic wand that brands can wave to wish away the problem, there are several concrete things brands can do to help minimize risk.

Site and App Whitelisting

A fundamental step that brands can take is whitelisting, or specifically enumerating the environments where it’s safe to run ads. Whitelisting provides better protection than blacklisting, or excluding environments that are known to be inappropriate, because thousands of new ad-bearing sites and apps, some of them questionable quality, crop up daily. It’s safer to assure the worst, and run ads only in verified locations, rather than assume something that hasn’t yet been evaluated will be safe and then block it only after finding the opposite.

Whitelisting sounds like it can be a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be. Brands can rely on an exchange that has a rigorous inventory approval process to do the heavy lifting. At Rubicon Project, we enforce strict inventory quality guidelines that require human review and pre-approval of new publisher relationships and new sites or apps within existing relationships. Sites and apps that aren’t approved by our inventory quality review team aren’t able to monetize on the exchange.

Transparency and Spoofing Protection

A brand’s ability to avoid being placed on a problematic site is only as good as the transparency and accuracy of the data it has about a placement. So ensuring that inventory attributes are passed transparently and accurately is critical. While Rubicon Project allows certain inventory sources, notably the publisher co-ops that are common media aggregators in some regions of the world, to offer inventory to bidders in a masked form, our platform ensures that inventory is transparently available to us and meets our inventory quality guidelines before we offer it for purchase in the programmatic auction.

Buyers can also be deceived by spoofing -- when a seller labels inventory as belonging to a property it’s not really from. One way spoofing can occur is when a seller misrepresents a domain; to protect against this possibility, work with an exchange that only allows domains to monetize through the accounts it knows to have rights to monetize on that domain. (You’d be surprised to know how often sellers approach us claiming to have inventory on premium sites we have direct relationships with and that vigorously prevent others from reselling.) Widespread adoption of the IAB’s recently announced ads.txt specification will help prevent several common forms of spoofing and misrepresentation.

Partner Up

Third-party tools can help provide additional confidence when it comes to brand safety. When it’s not enough to know you’re running on a generally safe site - if you want to avoid specific controversial articles on a premium news site, for example - you can use the page-level brand safety scores available from several vendors to help make a more fine-grained decision. These same vendors can also check placements at render time in a user’s browser to verify that they ran where you thought they did. One area that’s still challenging for most brand safety vendors is measuring brand safety in mobile app environments.

Leverage Private Marketplaces

If the digital ecosystem feels like the Wild West at times, private marketplaces can offer a more civilized environment. Private marketplaces give buyers and sellers the opportunity to explicitly negotiate their terms of engagement, then execute deals efficiently over familiar, high-scale programmatic infrastructure. Because private marketplaces are based on a direct relationship, it’s easier to build trust and to establish and enforce any special quality restrictions you may have. This additional safety is one factor driving increased demand for private marketplace deals, especially for premium inventory such as video and audio on top-tier sites and apps.

Use Common Sense

Finally, listen to your gut. A deal that sounds too good to be true probably is. For example, quality pre-roll video is in short supply in programmatic marketplaces, and often has clearing CPMs over $10; if someone claims to have premium video inventory at a much lower price, be as suspicious as you would be if someone in Times Square offered you a great bargain on a Rolex.

More than ever before, brands are seeking protections and guarantees to assure their confidence as they grow their investments in digital. By working with partners that combine strong policy, technology, and business processes committed to the service of transparency and brand safety, brands can win at the 'context effect' game even in the fast-growing and rapidly-evolving programmatic world.

13 Brilliant Ads That Know How to Grab Your Attention

bandt.com.au

Sometimes an advertisement that you watch leaves such an impact on your mind that it remains etched in your memory forever. Advertisements have the power to move you, motivate you and bring about a change. Let us take a look at 13 brilliant advertisements that left us intrigued, and figure out what worked for them:

1.    The Google App and The Voice

Google partnered with an immensely popular show called The Voice. This was done in an endeavour to aid the Aussie Millennials discover the true power of the Google App. Over 9 weeks, 29 unique spots were created, some of which responded to the show in real time. Google took live footage of the show, edited it instantly and made it available to its viewers in less than five minutes. It also made the process of voting easier and the final announcement of results a little more dramatic. Google featured the most memorable moments from the show on social media. The results were phenomenal with brand visibility of Google uplifted by 19.4% among Australian millennials. The campaign was awarded with “The Media Campaign of the Year Award” by AdNews Agency of The Year Awards.

Check out the links below to understand how video clips from the show were used to promote the Google App.

2.    Snickers Hungerithm Campaign

Mars Chocolate Australia and Clemenger BBDO Melbourne came together to create an algorithm that lowered the price of a snickers bar with an increase in the anger quotient on the internet. The philosophy behind the same was simple: you’re not you when you’re hungry. The angrier people got, the cheaper got Snickers. The price fluctuated about 140 times a day and plummeted as much as 82% of Snickers’ normal shelf price. Hungerithm worked based on a 3,000-word lexicon that recognized even angry slangs and sarcasm. Analysis of about 14,000 social posts a day determined the revised price of snickers. In order to claim the bar, users were simply supposed to log on snickers.com.au to generate a bar code to be used at any 7-Eleven store.  This brilliant idea was given the “Digital Campaign of the Year” and “Best Use of Data” awards by AdNews Agency of The Year Awards.

3.    Meet Graham Campaign

Clemenger BBDO Melbourne created an advertisement for TAC (Transport Accident Commission), Victoria, to illustrate how vulnerable drivers are in the face of a rising road toll. Graham was demonstrated as the only person designed to survive on their roads. His physical appearance signified how the human body would need to metamorphose in order to survive a car crash. Using an interactive sculpture, medical research, and several years of road safety data, the impactful campaign was designed with an endeavor to educate drivers on road safety. A theme of evolution corroborated by evidence was used by a team of 3: a road safety engineer, a trauma surgeon and a renowned artist, who came together and pulled the act that won the prestigious “Ad Campaign of the Year” title.

4.    You Never Lamb Alone

MLA (Meat and Livestock Australia) launched its Spring Lamb Campaign last September. The campaign demonstrated lamb as the meat that did not discriminate and brought together people from varied races, castes, sexual orientation and walks of life to celebrate modern Australia. The Monkeys did a fabulous job in demonstrating the Aussies as an inclusive and welcoming lamb-loving society. They showcased a large group of people getting together over a lamb barbecue. The advertisement successfully stirred the emotions of the public and acquired a special place in their hearts. It was also awarded with the title of “Ad of the Year” by AdNews Agency of the Year Awards.

5.    Pocket Patrol, Samsung

Surf Life Saving Australia and Samsung came together to develop Pocket Patrol. This first of its kind app displayed exact positions of beach perils. Its unique AR algorithm is used by Lifesavers to prevent accidents at the beach. The app inputs real time data of shallow sand banks, rip currents, sudden drop offs and stingers. This useful information is instantly passed on to everyone on the beach. The app is a blessing for lifesavers, who are able to save valuable time and focus on monitoring the beach. This powerful tool helps beach lovers identify dangers. This helps them modify their swimming behaviour accordingly. The campaign was, thus, awarded with “Best use of Mobile” title.

6.    From Apathy to Action: NSW Rural Fire Services

This campaign designed by J. Walter Thompson Sydney aimed at encouraging people to develop a safety plan against fires. The campaign illustrates that what fire fighters fear the most is apathy. People need to learn to be their own saviours and protect themselves as well as their families. The ad demonstrates the urgency of creating a survival plan, procrastination could be catastrophic. The campaign won an award in the Government category of the prestigious “Effie Awards”.

7.    Free Puppies Forever Campaign

A division of Vision Australia called Seeing Eye Dogs Australia came up with an incredible campaign to recruit puppy careers. As a part of this campaign, you get a puppy for free along with free vet care, food and even boarding for while you’re away. You get the pup when it’s 8 weeks old and send it off for training when it’s 12-15 months of age. You could then get a new puppy, all over again. The primary purpose is to find people who can care for the dogs until they are old enough to be trained as service animals for the visually impaired.

8.    Push for an Equal Future

This national campaign by ANZ promotes gender diversity. ANZ launched an entire range of initiatives to encourage women to grow financially and build an equal future for them. The theme is simple. It highlights how girls end up way behind boys on the financial front, even though they outperform the latter in many other facets. The film that was shown online depicts bright, young girls being faced with brutal inequality. The follow-up videos of this advertisement showed how women can make extra income through ANZ’s initiatives. The advertisement struck a chord with men and women alike.

9.    #MyFamilyCan

Leo Burnett Melbourne designed a small budget campaign for SPC Ardmona. The labels of SPC’s brands were redesigned and a new series of cans was created. This series was called #MyFamilyCan. The ad comprised of heartfelt content that successfully triggered an emotional connect with the audience. Australian farmers were featured in the ad, thus giving them a platform to voice their stories. The campaign became a massive hit and won an Effie award in the “Small Budget Ad” category.

10.Lucy The Robot

Atomic 212° was successful in launching a telepresence robot created by the company Double Robotics in the most innovative manner. The purpose of the campaign was to create brand awareness and generate leads for sales. Thus, the robot was given a human story so that people would relate to it. This gave birth to Lucy, a girl excited to get the new iPhone 6s in possession. However, instead of standing in long queues waiting for her turn to buy one, she sent her telepresence robot to make the purchase for her. Lucy thus became one of the first few people to be able to buy the iPhone, creating much hype. As a result, brand recall and favorability shot up by 780% and 1200% respectively.

11.Captain Risky

Budget direct was able to successfully demonstrate how they offer effective phone claims service to their customers, through this campaign. The ad clearly demonstrates that the services are provided round the clock in the face of an accident. Others, who are not insured by Budget Direct, bear the brunt, just like Captain Risky.

12.This Bike has Multiple Sclerosis

MS Limited Australia has been organizing a 50 KM Cycle riding event in support of patients with Multiple Sclerosis, for a decade. The ad campaign aimed at generating awareness about the same and eventually attracting participation and funds. It was successful in doing so by virtue of its simplistic portrayal of the disease. The campaign served as an educational tool for all to understand and help those living with MS.

13. Shonky Savers

RaboDirect Australia launched a humorous campaign depicting a television news program exposing shonky savers. This is the term given to describe those unfortunate souls who deposit their money in low-interest-bearing transactional accounts. The campaign reinforced the brand promise of empowering customers to make the most of each penny saved. It was awarded with the Bronze prize in the “Financial Services” category at the prestigious Effie Awards.

Musical.ly has lots of users, not much ad traction

digiday.com

With over 200 million registered users, Musical.ly, a lip-syncing app developed by Chinese entrepreneurs Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang in 2014, is catching on in America. Musical.ly is known to be focused on user growth at the moment, not monetization. But the platform is pitching some agencies in the U.S. three ad products.

Musical.ly allows users to make funny faces and strike poses in front of their phone cameras as they lip-sync hit songs for up to 15 seconds. Most Muscial.ly users are 13- to 24-year-old girls and women, according to App Annie. The app’s niche user demographic presents an ad opportunity for brands that want to engage with mobile-first teens. Yet Musical.ly seems to be struggling to find ad products that resonate in the U.S. market due to outrageous prices of its ad packages and the company’s limited sales outreach, according to media agency executives.

Two media buyers — who prefer anonymity — said Musical.ly is selling three ad formats: vertical video ads that show up in a curated section on a homepage tab, custom challenges where people — typically social stars — create videos around a brand prompt and challenge their followers to do something similar, as well as standard influencer video posts. They said that Muscial.ly introduced vertical video ads around three months ago and debuted custom challenges and influencer posts last summer.

One agency executive from the West Coast said that his clients rarely spend on Muscial.ly because its ad pricing — very much like Snapchat in the early days — is out of touch. He said that early price points were around $300,000 per day (Snapchat’s early ad productsreportedly cost about $750,000 for 24 hours, in comparison), and Musical.ly’s sales reps even quoted ad packages upwards of $2.5 million, which was “too extreme for an unproven entity, and turned off a lot of early investment potential in the platform.” Then one rep recently claimed that average pricing is in the $75,000-$150,000 range for custom campaigns on the platform, according to the West Coast executive.

“We’ve always had inklings of interest in testing Musical.ly across a number of brands and verticals, but it has been too expensive,” he said. “I’d imagine the entry point pricing on [Musical.ly’s ad offerings] will have to come way down if it wants to be a scalable business. The question then becomes, what can you get on Musical.ly that you can’t get on another platform through standard video ads?”

Meanwhile, the West Coast executive said that perhaps since Musical.ly is still small, it has nowhere near the level of account coverage that other platforms do, so Musical.ly’s sales reps don’t talk to his team often. (Musical.ly’s limited sales outreach in the U.S. may also explain why six out of the nine agencies this reporter reached out to don’t even know Musical.ly’s ad offerings exist.)

Another media director from a New York-based agency echoed that sentiment, adding that ad offerings on Musical.ly are still very nascent, and some ad packages are flawed. For instance, while most social stars on Musical.ly strike branded deals through the platform, brands can also reach out to those creators directly without talking to Musical.ly at all.

“Very few of us are seeing vertical video ads running on Musical.ly, so I’m not sure how many ads the company has sold,” said the New York executive. “Also, you cannot buy ads on Musical.ly through API partners. But to be fair, it’s a very young app and still figuring out what its ad deals should be.”

Musical.ly didn’t reply to Digiday’s request for comment before deadline.

For agencies that are unaware of Musical.ly’s ad offerings, few are running unpaid promotions for brands on the platform. Executives from shops like Grey, Arnold Worldwide and Attention all said they are still “evaluating opportunities on Musical.ly.” Brands like Disney and Coca-Cola have tested influencermarketing on Musical.ly.

“Musical.ly has generated a great deal of traction recently and brands are regularly asking about the platform. But Muscical.ly typically falls under an experimental budget and is generally not a top priority,” said Brendan Gahan, evp of social media agency Epic Signal. “It’s something we’ve pitched and explored but have yet to execute a campaign on. Thus far, most brands seem to be dipping their toes in the water, often with influencers.”

Eli Chapman, vp and managing director of R/GA, is bullish on Musical.ly, saying the platform will become the next generation’s go-to social network, and his team is exploring ad deals with the platform under a nondisclosure agreement, although some packages are “too expensive for what a brand would want to pay for a campaign.” At the same time, he warned that since the audience on Musical.ly is so young (with some being under 13), advertisers may face compliance issues.

“Brands are curious about Musical.ly, but none of them yet said that Musical.ly is the thing that we want to crack right now,” said Chapman. “But as the platform gets more mature from a monetization perspective over the next year, and legal questions about the age of audience get solved, I believe that more advertisers will spend there.”

Compared to brands and agencies, publishers seem to be more active on Musical.ly. For instance, media companies like Viacom, NBCUniversal and Hearst-owned Seventeen magazinepartnered with Musical.ly for original short-form shows last June in an effort to connect with younger audience.

A complete guide to minimising the size of Android and iOS apps

itproportal.com

It is no coincidence that two of the most popular apps- Facebook and YouTube also offer a “lite” version of their app beside the regular one.

In an ideal world, if you were the sole provider of any service through app and the users had unlimited resources on their devices, there would be no question of optimisation and terms like ‘agility’ and even ‘user experience’ would be redundant. But as you might know, the current state of app industry is anything but ideal. There are dozens of apps competing for even the simplest of services and no matter how premium device a user has, there is always a limit to the number of apps it can operate smoothly. The worst part, however, is scenario where after spending considerable amount of time, money and resources into developing and marketing an app, the users perceive it to be bulky and either never install it or uninstall after they find the memory it consumes is disproportionate to the value it brings.

And be it iOS app development or Android app development services, this is one problem where both stand on the same page. For that reason, it is no coincidence that two of the most popular apps- Facebook and YouTube also offer a “lite” version of their app beside the regular one. If you are in iOS or Android app development business, you would realise that the problem isn’t just about those hesitant users, but keeping up the performance and even maintenance of large apps is exponentially tougher than small ones. So, let’s take a look at some of the tools & techniques using which the size of these apps can be reduced.

For iOS app development

App Thinning Tools

Apple offers a host of tools at both levels- store and OS, to help an app minimise its size, leverage device features and accommodate to future updates. The two most useful of such tools are:

Slicing- It enables the developers to upload a single full version of their app to the store, which then is converted into different variants and is distributed accordingly to the device.

On-Demand resources- Instead of packing everything in the initial app, it is much better to simply offer a basic version upon which the users can get only those content that they actually want. For example, if you have an app for magazine, instead of giving them the full version, offer them the option to download each section separately. 

Media Optimisation

Though media like image, audio, videos, etc are what drive user engagement, they are also responsible for shooting up the size of any app. Simple tasks like using proper resolution and formatting can help developers cut-short the size without compromising on the content quality. For instance, developers can choose to use PNG formats for displaying images, which not only consumes lesser memory, but also generates quality on par with more popular formats like JPEG.

Memory Allocation Manager

Unlike garbage collection in Java, iOS development never had a efficient memory management technique. Even with Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) that it does have, there are certain issues and lapses that keep happening over time. From simple issues like over caching to more complex ones like retain cycles, there are a host of problems that if paid proper attention, can not only resolve a lot of bugs, but also free up a lot of memory. 

Scanning IPA Files

.ipa files are the ones that stores the iOS app along with the binaries of ARM architecture upon which the operating system is based. These data in these files are continuously updated and when they get old enough, there can be plenty of irreverent data and outdated items which you easily delete after scanning.

For Android app development

Resource Shrinking Tools

Resource shrinking can be availed from the Android plugin for Gradle, which removes unused resources from the packaged app, including those in the code libraries. Also, since it works in conjunction with code shrinking tools, the moment you eliminate some part of code, the resources corresponding to it are also eliminated.

Image Compressor

As discussed for iOS, images are a crucial part of Android apps as well and since majority of the content in modern apps are image based, compressing them to consume less memory is perhaps the simplest of step you can take to reduce the app size. Also, reducing the size of images will also make them load faster, thus contributing to better user experience.

Code Shrinking Tools

Code shrinking is available with ProGuard, which detects and removes unused classes, fields, methods, and attributes from the packaged app, including those from included code libraries. It also optimises the bytecode, removes unused code instructions, and obfuscates the remaining classes, fields, and methods with short names, that is known to drastically reduce the size of the .apk file and even aid in its security by some degree.

Architecture Reduction

Creating am elegant app is no less than a work of art. While two mobile applications may perform similar tasks, the underlying architecture is what actually determines the size and consequently their performance. A clean architecture is one where different layers of the software align similar to that in an onion, with progressive dependencies pointing inwards. When compared to common architectures where the dependencies and connections between different components appear more like a mesh, this model drastically reduces the size and makes further improvements a breeze.

For both

Static Code Analyser

There are a number of static code analysing tools available for both iOS and Android development which when deployed can quickly detect any unused functions, variable, logic flaws, etc., and thus reduce the overall size.

Code Recycling

Creating an app is not a one-time feat but more like a continuous process. If you wish you app to preserve its compact size and performance, you should consider recycling the code every chance you get. Also, every time you update an app, there are bound be some sections of code that lose relevance, which you must promptly remove to keep the size from escalating. 

Final thoughts

While there are no debates over the efficiency and higher adoption of apps with smaller size, the procedures to achieve that goal requires sophisticated tools and expertise that only those companies with ample experience in both iOS app development and Android app development can bring.