In just over a week’s time, Mx3 Barcelona will take place in the Catalan capital. In this interview, InsurAds CEO and Co-Founder, André T. Parreira – a premium event partner – explains how publishers can boost and protect their clients’ ad campaigns using the world’s first ‘Attention Management Platform’ and the world’s first insurance for digital advertising. (P.S. there are still a few tickets left for Mx3 Barcelona).
Advertising is still the primary revenue generator for most publishers, especially news publishers (accounting for 43% of total revenue according to WAN-IFRA’s World Press Trends Report for 2023-2024). However, even with digital advertising seeing modest growth for 2024 (3.4% YoY), competition is intense and the advertising landscape is undergoing a dramatic period of AI-fuelled transformation.
At Mx3 Barcelona (March 12th/13th 2024), one of the premium partners will be InsurAds, an ad tech specialist that leverages AI to create a unified live audience across its worldwide network of publishers. The goal is to empower publishers to effectively monetize live attention time, on a unique user, per impression level.
In advance of the event, we spoke to InsurAds’ CEO and Co-Founder, André T. Parreira, about the current advertising challenges facing media brands, and how InsurAds aims to transform how advertisers engage with publishers’ audiences in real time.
Mx3: We’re all familiar with the same ads tracking us around the web – how big a challenge is audience overexposure? Are you able to measure it?
AP: Overexposure in digital advertising is substantial and typically overlooked. Approximately 65% of campaigns experience overexposure, primarily affecting a small subset of users. This echoes the sentiment of John Wanamaker’s dilemma, where advertisers struggle to discern effective ad spend. As Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
At InsurAds, we are attempting to address this challenge head-on by identifying and rectifying not only underexposure but also overexposure. By halting ads when saturation occurs and reallocating resources to underexposed users or using the recycled resources to resell to new paid campaigns, we mitigate waste and enhance reach.
We have also developed a ‘storytelling feature’, which allows advertisers to present a sequence of timed creatives to the same user without ad overlap. Through smart creative sequencing tailored to each unique user impacted by the campaign, we can maximize engagement and resonance.
This approach heralds a new era of attention-centric advertising, enabling precise measurement of campaign effectiveness and eradication of wasteful spending. Live and original content is the key to success (and no one can achieve it better than publishers), and real-time management of its impact and monetization is the necessary foundation to achieve it.
Finally, at a time when brands are increasingly questioning the carbon footprint of their ad partners, this approach promotes environmental sustainability by issuing carbon credits whenever impressions are saved from being erroneously used within the programmatic ecosystem, empowering advertisers to adopt greener practices while enhancing campaign effectiveness.
Mx3: What is ‘digital insurance’? Could you provide us with an overview of the concept and how it’s reshaping the digital advertising landscape?
AP: The Insurance MAW, or Marketing Assurance Warrant, is integrated with our InsurAds Attention Time Management Platform and addresses the industry-wide issue of ad overexposure by ensuring ads are seen for the necessary time to achieve optimal results. This eliminates overexposure, ad overlapping, and wastage, maximizing impressions and revenue potential for publishers while enabling more focused and effective ad spend for advertisers.
Additionally, our Sustainable Face Time Warrant (SFTW) guarantees advertisers pay for every unique user that reaches the desired amount of facetime or attention, revolutionizing traditional CPM campaigns by enabling cost-per-view pricing. It’s a significant evolution from ‘Frequency Capping’ to ‘Exposure Time Capping’, presented in the form of an insurance, and it opens up new avenues for selling display ads at a cost per view.
Mx3: Could you go more granular into how Digital Insurance benefits both publishers and advertisers?
AP: It’s a win-win solution for publishers and advertisers alike. For publishers, it maximizes revenue by eliminating overexposure waste and ensures a balance between monetization and user satisfaction through exposure time caps on a unique user basis. This drives up revenue potential while enhancing the user experience.
Advertisers, on the other hand, benefit from increased campaign effectiveness and reduced wasteful spending. By guaranteeing exposure time, the MAW allows advertisers to optimize ad delivery and maximize ROI. What sets it apart is its focus on attention time rather than just viewability, providing a more accurate measure of ad effectiveness and ensuring a positive user experience for all parties involved.
In short, by leveraging real-time analytics and unique user tracking, the MAW ensures that ads are displayed when users are active on the site engaging with the content, giving their attention, thereby maximizing ad effectiveness and revenue potential for both publishers and advertisers.
Mx3: The ad industry faces numerous issues, from cookie deprecation to sustainability as well as transparency and ad fraud (as Dr Augustine Fou regularly makes clear). What are your thoughts on these challenges?
AP: Staying ahead of the curve means addressing these challenges proactively. This is where an effective measurement strategy, leveraging data to derive insights that maximize business impact, can really help.
Real-time data, particularly exposure to real people, opens up limitless possibilities with the aid of AI. Publishers, in particular, can explore novel concepts like ‘attention packages,’ shifting away from traditional metrics like impressions or clicks to focus on active engagement with audiences.
With cookies on the decline, publishers must navigate significant hurdles in maintaining sustainable ad revenue and adapting to new reporting and targeting strategies. Yet amidst these challenges, there are always opportunities for growth and innovation, and InsurAds can help publishers by providing solutions that assist in adapting to these new strategies and ensuring ad campaign effectiveness and environmental savings.
Looking ahead to 2024, it’s essential to anticipate how global industry leaders will reshape the digital advertising landscape and embrace key trends to future-proof campaigns for lasting success. Collaboration is key for all stakeholders.
Mx3: Finally, could you share your thoughts about how InsurAds plans to support advertisers and publishers not just this year, but beyond 2024?
AP: We are convinced we have a very good product line, an appealing business model, and a system that scales limitlessly, adhering to current and future industry challenges, and with the capability of creating a unified Live Audience across a worldwide network of publishers all under one umbrella.
We truly believe that InsurAds’ Attention Operating System (AOS) can help shape the future of digital advertising and drive significant changes in the industry. To give you an idea of the scope, right now, our Insurance alone is making more transactions than Visa and Mastercard together…
For publishers, the advantage of serving ads to only active, engaging audiences, as well as dynamically changing ad content, or adjusting the environment based on a user’s behaviour is clear – improved ad performance leads to better ROI as well as returning advertisers. It’s a virtuous circle.
Meet InsurAds at Mx3 Barcelona on March 12th/13th. Featuring a world class line up of international speakers, the event focuses 100% on innovation in the media sector. Tickets can be purchased here.
