Transforming digital in-content advertising to deliver global scale

Project Information

LONGTAIL

Grant agreement ID: 684016

DOI

10.3030/684016

Project closed

EC signature date 26 August 2015

Start date 1 September 2015

End date 30 June 2017

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 3 699 993,75

EU contribution

€ 2 499 999,00

Coordinated by

KIOSKED OY AB
Finland

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - LONGTAIL (Transforming digital in-content advertising to deliver global scale)

Reporting period: 2016-03-01 to 2017-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In this project, the Kiosked platform was developed into an automated, end-to-end service, thereby allowing quality publishers of digital content to onboard the service at any time. Project brings new capabilities and tools for process automation like sales and customer onboarding and fully programmatic capabilities to manage advertiser demand and yield. Data drives programmatic advertising performance while ensuring relevant and non-intrusive end-user experience. This project enables Kiosked to efficiently connect Publishers’ audience with programmatic advertising buyers delivering unique data-driven value to the industry ecosystem.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the project Kiosked platform and service offering was developed to match our vision in few steps. In the first part of the project automated financials and dashboard were key improvements to the publisher offering which will also allow us to scale. The Kiosked Supply Side Platform (KSSP) was implemented and launched for Europe and North America for effective ad serving and onboarding of publishers to our Real Time Bidding environment. The new version of the MUST tool was developed as the foundation for the customer sign-up service and automated onboarding. The ‘Sniffer’ has been developed to speed up the platform and two brand new ad units were created to improve the monetization for publishers.

During the latter part of the project we implemented the second version of the Platform and progressed with the planned commercial rollout. Scalable Publisher ad service requires that yield management is fully programmatic and automated. To reach the automation, the following features were completed: header bidding support and integrations to all key global ad exchanges with ad network backfill optimization built into Kiosked Supply Side Platform (KSSP), launch of the KSSP instance in Asia Pacific markets, algorithm development in KSSP to optimize the yield further either by a target CPM strategy or by utilizing header bids to raise bid price competition.

3rd party viewability verification together with brand safety and fraud prevention were also implemented as integral part of the Kiosked technology stack in order to secure continued advertiser interested to commit spend with Kiosked.

End-user advertising experience is growing ever more important. For publishers to be able to understand and manage the experience, the platform collects audience value metrics, such as session length and frequency of sessions. To surface these metrics and enable Publishers to control the Ad experience, a new version of dashboard was introduced with vastly extended visibility into audience behavior and resulting long-term revenue prediction.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The second version of the self-service delivered during the project is now in commercial beta with a handful Tier 1 publishers as an offering titled Audience Value Platform.

The engine powering the platform is the Kiosked JavaScript sniffer on page and the programmatic monetization solution delivered earlier in this project. The Audience Value proposition comes from the behavioral analytics, big data processing and user lifetime revenue prediction model built into the Kiosked backend that is visualized in the new Publisher dashboard. The offering ties together the signals from user’s engagement with the publisher’s content and advertising in a completely novel way.

This Life-Time Value (LTV) approach enables Publishers to optimize their core business - long term, sustainable revenue generation from free digital content - from a single platform. The key publisher challenges the platform and the LTV approach is designed to solve are

1) user experience: more ads without optimization of UX has led to rapid adoption of ad blockers costing publishers 30-40% in revenue loss

2) user retention: shorter and less frequent sessions result in overall lower monetization potential for publishers, unless they can identify user segments that are loyal, returning readers and the type of content they engage with

3) user acquisition: all publishers buy traffic, but unable to measure the ROI on the marketing investments without knowledge of the acquired users’ LTV.

Much of the recent years’ innovation and market cap has been on the buy-side. Recent examples include Oracle’s acquisition of MOAT worth $850M and Salesforce acquisition of Krux $700M. Nothing dramatic has changed in the past 10 years on the digital publishing and sell-side, leaving a considerable market potential for innovative and agile companies like Kiosked.

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