Category: Blog

Today 6-second ads are everywhere – we’ve just seen the first of them on linear TV, but not long ago they were revolutionary. Where did 6-second ads come from? In 2016 YouTube introduced the 6-second video and upended the industry’s dogged loyalty to the tried and tested 30-second format. For years advertisers had been struggling with a big dilemma – place ads ahead of popular video content and either have them skipped or make them unskippable and risk angering their audiences. The 6-second ad promised to change all that. YouTube’s unskippable new format threw advertisers a lifeline when it came to engaging with the millennial attention span that was fine-tuned to respond to snack-sized content. Where YouTube stepped, other social channels and media owners followed. Competitions and festivals

Each day this week we will be giving you a quick rundown of our highlights from Cannes Lions, and a summary of the emotions that people have felt across the festival. Last night we caught a performance by Craig David near the marina, explored some of the amazing yachts, caught some rooftop jazz and spent some much-deserved chill out time on the beach! We caught an inspiring discussion in the Lumiere Theatre this morning, focussing on diversity in gender representation and the amazing #ShowUs project from Getty Images, Dove and Girl Gaze. Today was a day of meetings for most of the team, catching up with clients, and meeting lots of new faces. Our VP Client Partner, Nigel Ashton, spent an amazing afternoon with Unilever and caught up with

In our next in the A-Z of adtech series we look at optimising creative for sound off, and whether audio metrics are still a valid way of measuring ad performance. It’s a tense time for publishers… On average, desktop traffic is declining in favour of mobile. Using the US as an example, 63% of online traffic comes from smartphones and tablets, which means that desktop display traffic, currently sold via direct sales team and SSPs is also declining. On the face of it, that might not sound like a big deal. It’s not like people are giving up the internet, they’re just consuming more content on their phones. So what’s the problem? The problem is that the online advertising landscape is changing. Recent headlines made by Apple about

On Monday, Tim Cook took centre stage at Apple’s yearly WWDC event to announce a roster of new software and hardware updates (including the return of the cheese grater). This yearly event is not only a huge deal for Apple geeks across the world, but for the tech industry as a whole, as the company is notorious for shaking up how things are done. An announcement that has been overlooked by many in the tech scene this year was the announcement of Apple’s very own Sign In service. Without getting into the nitty-gritty, the service is essentially a security tool which uses your iPhone to verify your credentials, stopping you from being tracked online. It also goes as far as creating a fake email address for you when

The gaming industry has grown significantly over the past decade and there’s no sign of it slowing down, especially within the mobile space. In 2018 Candy Crush made just over $1 billion in revenue, and Pokemon Go, yes the same Pokemon Go the world went crazy for three years ago, is on track to do the same. Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go, will soon launch its next game set in the world of Harry Potter, which means it’s guaranteed to become a multi-billion dollar hit. What are RVAs? If you’ve ever played a mobile game, you’ll most likely have encountered an RVA. They often pop up when you’re out of lives or cash and offer you more in exchange for watching an ad. The mobile gaming audience

The Women’s FIFA World Cup kicks off in France next month and it’s set to be the most watched edition yet. More than 720,000 tickets have already been sold for the tournament, beating the number sold at this stage for the World Cup in Canada in 2015 (source: BBC). Photo by Ruben Lamers Many brands are set to capitalise on the popularity of this year’s competition. With the help of our emotional ad data and some insights from the UnrulyEQ Insight team, and our friends over at talkSPORT, we’ll paint a picture of the audience for women’s football, and what emotions brands should look to evoke to connect to audiences. To help us understand the emotions that engage football fans, we ran two of the most popular football

Last week, to mark one year since the GDPR came into force, the IAB UK hosted Quantcast’s Evolution of Data Privacy event and our Product Compliance Director, Kelly Jacobson Collins, went along. It was really interesting to hear the range of approaches that companies had taken to tackle the GDPR and to hear everyone’s plans going forward. Quantcast invited me to speak on ‘The Consented Ad Tech Space’ and I’d like to share some of my thoughts from this talk with you as I think it’s really important that we continue to collaborate and learn from the changes that are impacting the ad tech industry and beyond. What has the GDPR changed? I believe the GDPR has been really positive for the ad tech industry. For a long

Last week, Unruly CEO Norm Johnston, and our Global SVP of Data Partnerships, Sam Sherson, spoke to a packed room of brands and advertisers at the Manchester United football ground, Old Trafford on sports advertising, the future of media and Unruly’s Sports Buy-Out offering. Here are some highlights of the talk which includes the future of live sports programming, the new stadium experience and how voice will change the way we engage with sport. Watching the game, the battle is on! Technology (hardware and software), viewing habits, the battle between subscriptions, pay-per-view, OTT and free-to-air, the rise of mobile, and advertising spends all play a part in the battle for a slice of the huge revenues on offer, the stakes have never been higher! Even though people are

Our VP of Business Development in New York, Emily Kaufman, speaks about what she thinks the advertising industry would look like if it were launched from scratch tomorrow. With the rate at which technology is, and has, grown over the past few decades, the ad industry has had to adapt and change at an exponential rate and quickly understand and adopt new ways of advertising to consumers. This fast evolution is one of the contributors to the lack of clarity within the industry, which has had a rough time over the past few years. It seems like every few months a new story has arisen that’s pulled back the curtain on illegitimate practices including bid caching; wrapper neutrality; hidden exchange fees and concerns around third-party data. At the