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The Gym Group has always put digital at the heart of its strategy to deliver customer experience, but this in itself presents challenges. After all, websites and other aspects of the digital infrastructure need to be updated to keep in line with competitors, but this can be disruptive. Working with Rufus Leonard, the company managed to implement an extensive website upgrade without taking the site offline. To understand the full extent of this feat, it’s worth stating that this meant 115 sites...

Agency Wire emerged victorious in a dramatic live Final of The Creative Shootout 2019, which IAB UK are proud to support. The Creative Shootout is an annual ‘live’ creativity show and award, involving the best creative agencies in the UK - and a real, pressing brief from a chosen charity or cause each year. Finalist agencies had just four hours to crack the brief from this year’s cause A Plastic Planet, before presenting their creative back to a live audience and celebrated Judging Panel at...

Using UKOM approved comScore data, the DMO shares insights into what the UK Population is doing online by providing a top-line snapshot of audience behaviour each quarter. UKOM has approved comScore’s multi-platform data which reports audience behaviour across desktop, tablets and smartphones. Key insights for December include: Smartphones now account for 65% of time online, up from 60% a year ago. Females spend the greatest share of time on mobile devices (smartphone and tablet) at 84% compared...

Skills are undoubtedly the mainstay of professional success as they determine how much you can contribute to your workplace, and in the era of AI, soft skills emerge as the more valuable ones because they cannot be replicated by machines. No wonder, 57% of the senior leaders give precedence to them over hard skills. Here are the soft skills that will be on top in 2019. When it comes to professionals’ skills, you need to inculcate both soft skills and hard skills to become a dream resource for...

In the 25 years since the first banner ad, digital advertising has got itself hooked on click-through rates. They made more sense back in 1994, when our measurement capabilities were much less sophisticated and click-through made a decent proxy for actual success. Also, it probably helped that the first-ever banner ad had a CTR of 44%. Of course it did – back then, there wasn’t anything else to do on the internet and clicking through rewarded you with an ad narrated by Tom Selleck. Today, though...

In March 2018 a review was launched looking into the sustainability of high quality journalism, chaired by Dame Francis Cairncross. The review included a public call for evidence, and we made a written submission and met with Dame Cairncross and her team. The resulting report and recommendations have now been published, along with a study into the online advertising sector by consulting firm Plum. The IAB has been working with our news publisher members to showcase to advertisers and agencies...

On this, the day of love, innovative digital influencer marketing platform indaHash, whose main focus lies in connecting social media power users with brands, have compiled some fascinating research on influencers and how they can leverage Valentine’s Day to promote products and brands. The international study was conducted in January 2019 via the indaHash app with 1038 influencers. Comments and insights are based on study results, their research, and data delivered by partner InfluencerDB...

Most online services are funded by advertising. We probably all know that, if we stop to think about it, but it’s often taken for granted as we’ve have become used to accessing so many digital services for free in our daily lives. Whether you’re keeping track of the news, keeping in touch with friends or constituents, or using an online map to get from a-to-b, if you’re not paying directly for it, it’s usually because of advertising. This online advertising industry is an economic success story...

The IAB UK is calling on brands to move past click-through rates as a way to measure the effectiveness of digital advertising. In a letter sent to more than 100 advertisers, including brands such as BMW, Diageo and Sky, the IAB urges marketers not to be “clickheads” and to instead embrace National Anti-Click-Through Rate Day (NACTRD). The tongue-in-cheek messages aims to get the industry talking about how best to measure the effectiveness of online media and highlight some of the current...

Digital audio has made huge strides in 2018 and as the audience continues to grow, more brands than ever are investing significantly in their audio strategies. One of the biggest areas of progress has been the increase in robust effectiveness case studies. B&Q ran a campaign using dynamic ads based on weather, location and DIY activity and were able to measure an increase in footfall to stores throughout the campaign. Virgin Atlantic promoted their new Economy classes by syncing their audio to...

Nicholas Graham, Digital Strategist at MC&C Media, had a close read through and identified the key trends and opportunities for advertisers who wish to capitalise on this. Mobiles are still the device most used to listen to digital audio . As the industry still tries to devise an ad format truly native to mobile, why have we not given more consideration to audio ads? Travelling in to work, it’s noticeable that everyone is very much ‘plugged in’. Coupled with Bluetooth noise cancelling headphones...

This year’s IAB Listening Britain Infographic showed that 24.8 million of us, or 46% of the UK, are now listening to digital audio. That’s 15% more than last year. But how can creatives use this expanding audience to impact consumers? Audio and speech intrinsically shape how we think and what we feel so it’s already a great asset and here’s how creatives can excel at connecting brands with consumers: Audio ads amplify the effect of your media mix Audio is an intimate, brand safe environment...

This article was first published in ExchangeWire on 19 February 2019 IAB UK recently launched National Anti Click-Through Rate Day to highlight the industry’s over reliance on vanity metrics for measuring digital ad effectiveness. This lighthearted message underlines a more serious need for advertisers to move away from CTR, which only provides a very narrow view on campaign success. To support this message, the IAB released a Measurement Toolkit to help support advertisers as they transition to...

Let me tell you a story. It will be familiar to anyone in digital advertising, I think. A year or so ago a large media agency booked a large campaign, for a large advertiser, with us in the UK. We asked the client for KPIs. This was the response: " They just want to reach as many people as possible. Viewability is key. But reach is what we want across premium publishers. The client website is really basic and the client knows the creative/landing pages we are running are not the most ‘clickable...

You may have seen news over the past 24 hours that a group of privacy campaigners has filed complaints with Data Protection Authorities (DPA) in the UK, Ireland and Poland, which make specific reference to the IAB OpenRTB Protocol and IAB Europe Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF). The complaints allege that programmatic advertising using real-time auctions are inherently incompatible with EU data protection law. The premise of these challenges is based on communication between IAB Europe...

We are an industry caught in a conundrum. While we celebrate the uniqueness of each campaign, with its specific KPIs and measures of success, we simultaneously have the need to measure market trends and understand if our pricing is competitive. This conflict, between the overly-complicated bombardment of metrics and overly-simplified reduction to the lowest common price denominator, often stems from the disconnect between the campaign manager and the procurement manager. The digital campaign...

Ad-verification is on the verge of disruption as AI begins to revolutionise the way we look at brand-safety and ad-fraud. While first-gen technology has typically relied on rules-based system, blacklists and whitelists, the emergence of new tech is expected to drive change and give birth to new trends. Below are 6 such trends in ad-verification we believe will be accelerated by the AI revolution: 1. Brand Safety is Going to Get Personal In contrast to blacklisting & whitelisting, the adoption of...

Any rapidly evolving, rapidly innovating industry comes with plenty of room for debate. Questions stir around what emerging technology is worth pursuing, which practices have become outdated, how to differentiate between truly innovative advances and passing fads — particularly in the world of programmatic. At present, one of the most hotly contested topics is on the difference between first-price and second-price auctions. To start, it’s important we explain what both of these terms mean. First...

The Advertising Association has launched its new report: ‘ Arresting The Decline Of Public Trust In UK Advertising’ at the ISBA conference. Among other actions, the report states the industry will take steps to improve the user experience online, helping to build sign-up to the IAB UK Gold Standard. For the past few months the Advertising Association and its president Keith Weed have made rebuilding public trust in advertising their top priority. Speaking at LEAD ’19, the industry’s flagship...

To quote Jimmy Cliff, “I can see clearly now, episode 2 of the IAB podcast is here”. Yes, we’re tackling a big issue in digital advertising: transparency. Where is your money going when you buy ads online, and who is adding the most value? There’s plenty being done by the IAB to tackle it, but this episode gets the view of Rowly Bourne from Rezonence and Lauren Dick from MailMetroMedia to hear why it’s an issue they care so much about. The IAB’S Chief Digital Officer Tim Elkington boldly takes...