The Unruly Blog
Stay ahead of the curve and at the forefront of ad tech with the Unruly blog, covering stories from across the Unrulyverse and beyond!
Moustaches at the ready!
Today we’ve been celebrating International Men’s day throughout the Unrulyverse. We ran a panel this afternoon where Unrulies from across the globe joined a discussion around mental health, equality, achieving a work life balance, and the expectations that are put on men. A number of men who work at Unruly have also been participating in Movember, the annual event where men grow moustaches during the month of November to raise awareness of men’s health issues. Through the awareness gained from tache-growers worldwide, Movember Foundation has now funded over 1,200 men’s health projects globally since 2003, ranging from partnerships with leading cancer researchers to grassroots projects to help suicide prevention. These are issues close to our hearts, affecting our families and friends, and the work Movember is doing is
Emotions run high in the new Elton John Lewis ad
They kept us waiting for what seemed like forever but the John Lewis & Partners’ Christmas ad is finally here! The UK department store released their Christmas ad entitled Elton John Lewis this morning (Thursday 15). The UK chain kept the public waiting for longer than usual and changed a number of their storefront names from John Lewis to John in the lead up which built up the excitement even more. This morning their ad was released to the world with mixed opinions. This year’s ad feels very different to anything they’ve done before. Years gone by have featured woodland creatures, penguins, and monsters, often with playful and youthful tones. This year was a step away from that, with the brand using the life of global pop star Elton
Premium publishers on bid caching, the open exchange and SSPs
Unruly’s latest Trust Talks event happened on the 6 November at the Hospital Club in London. The event featured four panels, all focused on the world of programmatic. It was standing room only at this massively popular event which brought together premium publishers and advertisers for open and honest discussions to take the industry forward. The first panel was moderated by Adweek’s Ronan Shields, and addressed the issues and opportunities facing premium publishers in 2018. For the panel Ronan was joined by Dora Michail, MD Digital, the Telegraph, Steph Miller, Head of Sales & Marketing Services at Zoopla, Danny Spears, Programmatic Director at The Guardian and Lauren Dick, Head of Emerging Platforms at MailOnline. Ronan Shields (RS): What do SSPs have to do to differentiate in this day and
Case Study: How we took Huawei’s brand global with UnrulyX
Huawei is a leading global provider of information and communications technology infrastructure and smart devices. With integrated solutions across four key areas; telecom networks, IT, smart devices, and cloud services. Unruly started working with Huawei on global video campaigns in 2015. Since then, 19 campaigns have been distributed across 10 markets in Europe, Asia and North America. The power of environment UnrulyX helped Huawei to grow its brand, and ensure it communicated the right messages to the right audience, by delivering more than 15 million views to high profile premium publishers and brand safe environments. At Unruly, we know that the environment of an ad is extremely important. The content that your ad sits next to can greatly affect how it’s perceived. Studies prove that ads delivered in premium environments
Sadie Spooner on trust in advertising and life as a Partnerships Lead
This week we sat down with Sadie Spooner from Unruly’s New York office to talk about trust in advertising, Unruly culture, and what life is like as a Partnerships Lead. “When bad actors are being called out it must be scary for some, but it’s a huge opportunity for a company like Unruly” Q: Hi, first of all, could you introduce yourself and tell a bit about what you do here at Unruly? Hello! I’m Unruly’s partnerships lead in the US, based in our New York office. I help grow Unruly’s US business by overseeing commercial relationships with key partners. This includes our biggest advertiser, and our parent company News Corp. Q: How did you find your way here? I had a friend who worked at Unruly and
Five qualities that make a great mentor
Our Vice President of Strategy, Nicola Spooner, recently took part in Nabs’ Fast Forward programme and spoke to us about her experience and what qualities she believes make a great mentor. Fast Forward is an eight-week training programme that brings together delegates from across the media industry in the UK to work on a live brief for a charity. Each year is different and this time around, we tackled a brief from the suicide-prevention charity Campaign Against Living Miserably. Being a mentor was an amazing experience for me, and something that I’d never done before. I learnt a lot about myself, how to work better with others, and how to pass my skills and knowledge in a helpful and engaging way. Over the next few paragraphs I’ve listed
The importance of culture in advertising
Earlier this month our Executive Director of Strategic Partnerships APAC Greg Fournier, and P&G’s Associate Brand Director Dominique Touchaud took to the stage at FUTR’s Asia Summit in Singapore. They delivered a brilliant presentation on the role of culture in advertising, and how it can define success or failure in marketing campaigns in Asia. The presentation was delivered to a packed room, and the pair received great feedback from a number of audience members on their theories, insights and examples. Over the next few paragraphs we’ve pulled out some of the key messages and takeaways from their presentation, with a number of ad examples, including one of our all time favourite ads from HSBC. Why does culture matter? Culture is informed by a society’s customs and traditions. It’s
Celebrating diversity and inclusivity at Unruly
One of the things we care about at Unruly is encouraging diversity across the business. Recently, inspiring Unrulies Sarah Young and Hannah Mackaness were approached by Sky and asked to do an interview on what it’s like to work somewhere where diversity and inclusivity are celebrated. The pair loved the conversation that spurred from the interview, and asked if they could re-film it so that it could be made available for anyone to watch. During the video the pair speak about the ProDev teams approach to diversity and inclusivity. They also speak about the changes they put in place that allowed the team to double the amount of women working in it. The pair also talk about the journeys that brought them both into ProDev, and the impact
Announcing London’s Trust Talks: The Great Programmatic Debate panels
On 6 November we kick off our next Trust Talks event in London. On a scale of 1-10, how excited are we to bring this event back to the UK? We reckon about 15! This edition of Trust Talks is focused on all things programmatic! The programmatic advertising ecosystem can be a confusing place – so full of acronyms, vendors and platforms that it can be hard to know who (and what) you can trust. The issues of brand safety have dominated the headlines in recent times, and this is only becoming more of a concern as programmatic buying continues to scale. In light of this we decided it was time to bring influential figures within the programmatic sphere in the UK together under one roof for the
