🔊 DOOH industry moves to standardize ad inventory

Six leading players in the highly competitive digital out-of-home space this week announced an initiative to standardize descriptions of screen and venue for ad inventory. The companies are Adomni, Broadsign, Place Exchange, Verizon Media, VIOOH, and Vistar Media.

The initiative is aimed at reducing confusion, especially in the programmatic space where multiple inventories sold by different SSPs can describe the same opportunities in different ways — e.g. “retail” and “mall.” “It was a bit of a free-for-all in terms of how a media owner would describe their inventory,” said Leslie Lee of Vistar Media, speaking for the group. “[It] caused confusion on the buyer side of the equation. Instead of describing it as ‘a screen in a mall,’ one provider would call it ‘a screen in a food court,’ one would say ‘this is a retail location,’ one would say ‘a shopping center.’”

An initial standard is already publicly available and in use. The project has been running for about a year, and has involved consultation with media owners. “The idea is to continue to review and update it as new inventory types emerge,” Lee said.

Read more here.

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The Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp announced yesterday that it is adding the ability for users to add multiple products from a merchant’s catalog to a shopping cart on the service. “Once you’ve successfully updated your cart, you can send it to the seller as a WhatsApp message,” the company explains in the how-to documentation. Sellers then confirm the orders. Carts are rolling out globally.

Why we care. Facebook is looking to commerce as WhatsApp’s monetization strategy. WhatsApp says it is becoming “a store counter to discuss products and coordinate sales.” Carts are aimed at making commerce easier through WhatsApp messaging. However, there’s still no way to actually checkout and pay businesses after placing an order via carts. As TechCrunch notes, “both parties are left on their own to figure out how money will exchange hands.”

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Oftentimes, when we visualize the perfect buyer’s journey, we’re looking at it from a marketer’s perspective, imagining what we’re trying to achieve with our initiatives. But, ultimately, the definition of the perfect journey is in the eye of the buyer. The buyer doesn’t really care about your programs, your channels or what technologies you’re using, they’re just trying to get enough information to make a purchase decision.

We recently spoke to Integrate CMO Deb Wolf about the perfect buyer’s journey and the obstacles marketing teams face when trying to deliver the ideal customer experience. In the lightly-edited conversation, Wolf shares specific tips for building connections between siloed channels, technologies and teams, as well as the reasons why this is so important today.

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The EU wants to make it easier for non-SEO professionals, especially small businesses, to understand how search rankings like Google’s work, and to be able to improve their visibility in Google search results.

That effort is embodied in regulatory guidelines released on Monday. They ask search engines, “online intermediation services” (e.g., marketplaces) and travel sites to disclose ranking factors and update them each time a meaningful algorithmic change takes place. This extends to the influence of payments and ads on organic rankings.

Their stated purpose is “to improve predictability and help users improve the presentation of their goods and services, or a characteristic of those goods and services.” In other words, the EU wants to demystify search and marketplace rankings for marketers, merchants and publishers.

Read more here.

Email marketing platform Campaign Monitor yesterday announced the release of two new features, Link Review and My Branded Templates.

Link review provides automated alerts for any broken, missing or incorrect links in outgoing email campaigns. My Branded Templates allows users to automatically set up brand consistency by pulling in logos and colors directly from an input brand URL.

Why we care. Brands are leaning heavily into email to reach customers in this almost-all-digital marketing environment. Consistent branding and fewer errors in content should help generate and maintain engagement.

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