The 614 Group and AdMonsters conducted a survey throughout December, where they contacted over 10,000 members of the digital media and publishing community to get their insights into what they expect in 2015. The survey is broken down into four main categories, which are programmatic advertising, native advertising, viewability and digital ad fraud. According to the publication, the goal was, “to gain insight as to what digital publishers believe the year ahead will bring as well as the current state of AdTech.”
This type of information is always valuable as it can help to trigger new ideas and strategies on what you need to be doing to remain or become successful. The following are some of the results that I found particularly interesting.
One question asked the publishers how strongly they agreed that work still needs to be done to fix programmatic advertising if it is to remain an influential option throughout 2015. This was a follow up question asking whether or not these publishers felt programmatic has driven the broader interactive marketplace forward throughout 2014, to which over 80% of respondents said yes.
To this follow up question, over 80% said they strongly agreed, and another 15% said they somewhat agreed. This is significant because it shows that even though a lot of effort was put into programmatic in 2014, the vast majority of people agree that there is still a long way to go.
The third question in the survey asked what the average revenue percentage difference was between the respondent’s programmatic pricing and their direct pricing. To which they got the following breakdown of answers:
- About 16% of respondents said ‘Zero Percent’
- About 11% of respondents said ‘Ten Percent’
- About 31% of respondents said ‘Twenty Percent’
- About 22% of respondents said ‘Fifty Percent’
- About 18% of respondents said ‘Eighty Percent’
The next section of questions focused on native advertising. Looking at each of the questions and the responses, it seems that publishers tend to agree that this type of advertising is a significant move away from the standard ad units of the past. In fact, over 90% of all the respondents expect that native ads will be either ‘very pervasive’ or ‘somewhat pervasive’ in 2015.
The viewability of ads was another topic of questioning. In this section, the survey asked, “Which of these issues do you expect to be digital publishing’s biggest challenge in the next year?” They were given the option for ad fraud, viewability, reputation management, malware and other. Respondents choose viewability over 60% of the time, with ad fraud coming in second at just under 30%. To make it worse, over 60% of respondents also said that they don’t believe that the majority of digital publishers will attain the high viewability standards that they want in 2015.
Overall, the full survey provides a lot of good insight into what publishers are thinking about how 2014 went, and what they are expecting in 2015. If you would like to review the full survey, you can get a free PDF copy HERE. Note that they do require you to give them your information in order to get the survey.
