On September 20, 2021, Caitlin Francke, Head of Enterprise Media for TIAA spoke with Rachel Tuffney, EVP of Dianomi USA about the past, present, and future for TIAA media spend and building brand awareness the right way.

Francke focused on how in order for companies to grow and prosper, they need to not only think about themselves, but their audiences. Companies need to think about how to give back to their consumers and add value to their lives.

Click the image below to watch the full livecast and learn about how TIAA’s media buying strategy is ever-evolving.

An old adage in business is that to keep a customer or client happy you need to give them what they want. While this sounds simple, in reality there’s so often a disconnect between what businesses think customers want and what they’re actually looking for. When it comes to the content global asset managers are producing, this certainly appears to be the case.

HOW ASSET MANAGERS ARE UNDERDELIVERING ON SOME OF THE MOST SOUGHT AFTER TOPICS FOR INVESTORS

By Rachel Tuffney, EVP of US Operations at Dianomi

As if digital marketers have not had to deal with enough disruption in the past months, Apple’s recently released privacy feature – IOS 14.5 (ATT) is the latest curveball in a wave of policy changes from platforms or regulators making life difficult for marketers. While brands knew Apple’s privacy forward approach was coming, the world is just now seeing the real impact of this ATT update, which is giving consumers more access and power when it comes to what information is shared with advertisers.

In spite of all these changes, there are clear avenues that brands can take to ensure their messages and content are reaching consumers who are most likely to be receptive to them. The most important of which is contextual advertising and while it is not a new solution it is a proven way to drive scale.

Google recently announced the delay of the cookie disappearing until 2023 but third-party solutions are still diminishing. Leading brands are preparing for this change and are getting creative with how they build first-party data and rethink their targeting strategies. Contextual targeting has been around for years but has not always been used to its fully scalable capabilities. Fast forward to today, contextual is one of the key viable solutions left — contextual strategies, via native advertising, are an enlightened and smart way to overcome regulatory complexity whilst maintaining a highly effective audience-driven advertising campaign. Brands are already placing relevant ads in front of potentially interested consumers without cookies and third-party data.

Contextual is a dark horse strategy for distributing high-quality content that many brands invested in during a no-event pandemic period — like podcasts or white papers or e-books — to connect with audiences predisposed to niche subject matter, whether it’s about clean energy or crypto or luxury travel.

Contextual distribution does not have to rely solely on keyword targeting, it can be broader and much more scalable than that; focusing on serving ads into related content across a private marketplace of publishers.

Now with the economy showing signs of roaring back, the race is on among marketers to reach new customers, grow business and send sales into overdrive. And it’s the advertisers who have experimented with new approaches who have experienced substantial growth, whereas brands who have been subject to pandemic paralysis or who have refused to acknowledge consumers’ new boundaries and demands are getting left behind.

Developing technology to help brands improve their consumer connections

The effective use of data is the core ingredient to any digital marketing strategy. When contextual targeting first made its debut, it came with multiple limitations. An example of this is the contextual hierarchies provided by IAB; they were proven to be too broad for niche targeting. Since then, the solution has pivoted and more brands are giving contextual a second chance. The advertising industry continues to expand year after year, the future of targeted advertising will pivot to utilizing machine learning models to predict audience addressability. Advanced and successful algorithms have the power to predict audience designations for a given programmatic ad opportunity.

There are many advantages contextual offers besides the ability to protect user data that advertisers may not have known about. Contextual, enables advertisers to deliver messages to consumers when they are in a receptive frame of mind. While users are browsing content about a specific topic, it signals their intent during that moment —  Leading to be a more reliable indicator of purchase behavior than targeting based on previous browsing habits. Contextual targeting does not use private consumer data so it is the suitable choice among emerging solutions and is expected to continue to grow rapidly through 2025.

Originally Posted on LondonStockExchange.com on May 24, 2021

London Stock Exchange today welcomes Dianomi, a leading provider of native digital advertising services to premium clients in the Financial Services and Business sectors, following its successful IPO on AIM at a market capitalisation of £82 million.

The Company successfully raised £37 million through a placing of both existing shares and new shares. The £5 million raised by the issue of new shares will be used to expedite the Group’s organic growth and to expand the Group’s sales and marketing capabilities in North America and EMEA. The Company will trade under the ticker “DNM”.

Dianomi was established in 2003 and operates from its offices in London, New York and Sydney. The Company provides over 400 advertisers, including blue chip names such as Aberdeen Standard Investments, Invesco and Baillie Gifford, with access to an international audience of 438 million devices per month through its partnerships with over 300 premium publishers of business and finance content, including blue chip names such as Reuters, Bloomberg and WSJ.

Adverts served are contextually relevant to the content of the webpages on which they appear and mirror the style of the page, which enhances reader engagement. Spending by the Financial Services industry on digital advertising in the US alone has grown from $10.85 billion in 2017 to $19.62 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $23.56 billion in 2021 (source: eMarketer). 

Rupert Hodson, CEO of Dianomi said: “The response from investors to our IPO has been very gratifying. Joining AIM is an integral part of our strategy to significantly expand our business. Digital advertising is a rapidly expanding market as people shift to doing more online and our objective is to benefit from this trend and grow our market share. 

“Our IPO was a team effort and I would like to thank all of our people and advisers, who have been instrumental in getting us to where we are today. I would also like to take this opportunity to welcome our new shareholders to the register. We very much look forward to life as a public company and to seeing our business continue its growth journey.”

Advisers to the IPO include:

– Panmure Gordon, NOMAD, sole bookrunner and sole broker
– K&L Gates LLP, Company legal counsel
– Fieldfisher LLP, Broker legal counsel
– RSM Corporate Finance LLP, Reporting accountant
– Novella Communications, Financial Public Relations Adviser

On April 27th, 2021 Rachel Tuffney spoke with MassMututal’s Kristin Lane, VP and Head of Consumer Activation & Engagement, in the Brand Innovators Consumer Engagement Summit. 

In their conversation, they focused on how MassMutual has pivoted successfully to a work-from-home environment and the different partnerships that MassMutual leverages to build and engage with their community.

 Click the image above to watch the full livecast and discover more content on the Brand Innovators website.

Dianomi’s EVP, Rachel Tuffney, spoke with American Express’ Courtney Colwell for Brand Innovators‘ Women in Marketing Livecast Series

On April 6th, 2021 Rachel Tuffney spoke with American Express’ Courtney Colwell in a fireside chat for a segment of Brand Innovators’ Women in Marketing Livecast series. The conversation focused on how Colwell users her role as a woman in leadership to support the women on her team and how American Express is helping female small business owners respond to the challenges of the pandemic.
Click the image above to watch the full livecast and discover more content on the Brand Innovators website.

On March 25th, 2021, Brand Innovators welcomed Dianomi’s EMEA Sales Director, Anand Sindgi, to their stage for their Brand Innovators Marketing Innovation – International Summit, featuring the BILivecast with Victoria Yasinetskaya, Chief Marketing Officer, PagoFX.

This fireside chat was a part of Brand Innovators’ Live from Europe livecast series and focused on marketing innovation.
Click the image above to be redirected to the full video livecast.

Bury brings extensive commercial development experience from Reuters, AOL, Reach PLC and News UK

New York, NY – March 4, 2021 – Dianomi, the financial and business-focused native ad marketplace for premium publishers (WSJ, Business Insider, and Reuters, among others) is pleased to announce the appointment of Jo Bury as the company’s first Head of Publisher Commercial Development. In his role, Bury will help to continue Dianomi’s strong record of revenue growth. He will be responsible for identifying new market opportunities, driving the publisher performance strategy and aligning Dianomi’s publisher Product Development, Account Management and Business Development teams for continued growth as the business expands further into the premium lifestyle vertical.

Bury brings over two decades of experience having previously led platform commercial development and strategic partnerships for publishers including Reuters, AOL, Reach PLC and News UK, where he was responsible for growing advertising and alternative revenues across display, programmatic, native advertising, e-commerce and video. He will play a key role in helping to grow Dianomi’s business by implementing a publisher centric approach to commercial development.

“We are thrilled Jo is joining the Dianomi team. He will be critical to the continued growth of the organization and our expansion into new verticals. Jo’s publisher experience in commercial development will be especially key to ensuring solutions from Dianomi help our customers grow yield whilst addressing pending privacy and data updates across the industry,” said Rupert Hodson, CEO at Dianomi. “This is the first time we have had a dedicated role to lead publisher commercial development at Dianomi and we see many areas of opportunities. Jo’s understanding of publisher needs as well as his passion for ad tech and innovation make him a great fit for our business as we continue to expand.”

“It’s an exciting time to be joining the Dianomi team. Dianomi’s native advertising platform is already delivering high yielding video and native demand into partners across multiple platforms through market leading contextually targeted formats,” commented Bury. “I’m looking forward to using my publisher experience to further grow the business through the development of improved analytics and insights, as well as new ad solutions and the expansion into new verticals.”

Bury will be based out of Dianomi’s London office and will report directly to Dianomi’s Chief Executive Officer, Rupert Hodson.

About Dianomi

Dianomi is the native ad platform for financial services, technology, corporate, and lifestyle advertisers providing publishers with high yielding demand across contextually targeted native and video ad units. Advertisers and Publishers trust Dianomi for our brand safety, transparent pricing, and insights. Our emphasis on high-quality audiences combined with contextually relevant content helps partners achieve higher ROI than other native ad platforms. For more information, go to http://www.dianomi.com.

Originally posted on MarketingProfs.

By Rachel Tuffney, EVP of US Operations, Dianomi

There’s never been a better time to understand the value of brand marketing. In 2021, people are hyper-aware of how brands are positioning themselves (as well as noting their silence) after the roller coaster of a year that was 2020. Moreover, the regulatory climate is compelling many marketers to find alternatives to third-party data and cookie-driven performance marketing.

At the same time, amid financial uncertainty, marketing leaders must defend every penny of marketing spend as CEOs and CFOs look for direct links between marketing spend and specific KPIs or business outcomes.

Yet, although marketers know it’s hard to measure their brand-building efforts, they also know it is that brand building via brand marketing drives loyalty and it can also lead to new consideration and intent that eventually increases demand.

So, how can marketers justify and defend budget for brand-building?

One concrete answer is to integrate brand marketing activity within a performance-driven campaign. In 2021, winning strategies will calibrate brand with performance execution. The secret weapon is contextual, or native, advertising.

Contextual strategies enable marketers to take brand-building assets and amplify them using performance-based strategies. That approach ensures that a brand’s message and content appear in precisely the right context, including the right environment, and that they are distributed efficiently at scale.

The combination can be an exponentially powerful brand builder.

Brand Marketing Within a Contextual Strategy

One approach is to deploy high-quality brand assets—whitepapers, infographics, e-books, or explainer videos—as part of a native content campaign. A contextual strategy allows for distribution of in-depth content—for example, service-oriented educational pieces from a financial services brand aimed at a first-time life insurance buyer—to the right audience (let’s say males age 40+) in the right environments (in business publications).

Most important, instead of using a standard cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) KPI, marketers can measure branded content via a cost-per-click metric in native. That’s a double win: Brand-building creative is delivered via targeted and measurable contextual platforms (wherein the brand pays only for the delivery that sparks a consumer engagement).

As privacy regulations go into effect and upcoming algorithm changes from big tech platforms force brands to rethink their reliance on legacy cookie-based targeting strategies, companies would do well to weave native content into the mix. People are hyper-aware of a company’s voice and reputation. They can quickly differentiate between meaningful and performative social responsibility initiatives, and that’s just as true for business-forward companies as it is for consumer-facing brands.

Contextual distribution strategies with a cost-per-click goal enable businesses to combine levels of quality control, audience targeting, and context that aren’t possible by relying solely on programmatic.

The combination of brand and performance can be an exponentially powerful brand builder—especially as a means to market effectively in an era when we’re still not back to a world of in-person events or business lunches.

Opting for the Right Context

The onset of the pandemic threw the world into anything-but-business-as-usual conditions. Companies and advertisers were quick to pull ads to avoid placements next to COVID-related content, leaving media publications hurting from ad revenue loss just as media consumption was at a high point.

The winners were the brands that didn’t pump the breaks on their marketing, but instead pivoted their creative to hit the right contextual note. Some financial companies, for example, offered timely advice on shifting investment strategies to account for volatility. Other companies, such as location data company Unacast, provided pro-bono data to reinforce the importance of social distancing as an essential measure in fighting COVID-19.

If we learned anything from the Stop Hate For Profit campaign against Facebook last summer, it’s that brand loyalty is on the line across the industry.

In short: identifying the right content is the first major step, followed by the context in which it is delivered.

Synergy of Performance and Brand Marketing

Despite the dynamics of the current climate, marketers are expected to deliver immediate ROI. Now is the time to reassess KPIs, marketing tactics, and creative toolkits, and to consider adding different delivery methods and measurement, such as cost-per-click options, to CPM-based campaigns.

Customers are paying close attention to the behavior, posture, position and positioning behind a brand message, and marketers need to prioritize methods that grant customers more control. Contextual or sponsored content can be a smart supplement or alternative to automated tactics to ensure brand messages are pulling through in a safe, premium environment.

As society struggles with COVID-19 and vaccines that signal light at the end of the tunnel, a strong brand message and presence are critical for companies to maintain customer loyalty. Service-oriented and authentic brand marketing can be important air cover that also influences customer acquisition and retention.

Using the right performance-based tactics to catapult pressing, engaging, and authentic native content in a premium, contextually relevant environment—and in front of the right audience at precisely their moment of interest—is a powerful way to augment campaign plans and deliver meaningful results.

Originally Posted by MarTech Series

By Rachel Tuffney

With third-party cookies gone from the ad industry’s menu, what’s the next substantial solution? Easy. Contextual targeting. While we’ve seen a few industry experts call for tech innovation to replace cookies, advertisers should be leaning in on what consumers are asking for from the ads they are served.

For instance, remember when publishers were blacklisted for seemingly no reason in March when their ads were considered offensive against pandemic-related news content?

Contextual targeting could have immediately been a workaround.

With 67% percent of consumers reporting that they are more likely to engage with contextual ads on trusted publishers, there is an opportunity for innovation in contextual and native advertising. Especially because whichever new identification process becomes the norm, advertisers will need to evolve as very few brands (B2B or B2C) have enough first-party data in their marketplaces.

Why Contextual Marketing?

Before digital advertisers implement a contextual strategy, it is important to understand that contextual targeting has evolved in the past decade. What was considered contextual in the past has, like most things, advanced. By using the latest technology, advertisers are able to identify relevancy at scale. Contextual targeting is privacy compliant since it is not based on consumer behaviors making it a quality solution in a cookieless world.

Another benefit is the transparency contextual provides and the ability for advertisers to look at the traffic being sourced from different publishers and determine which traffic source is the most profitable. Contextual allows advertisers to A/B test and adjust bids accordingly. Ads and content that are contextually aligned also help to improve ad attributions and brand lift compared to when ads and content are not aligned.

Keeping the Consumer Top of Mind

Having easy access to consumer data is something that advertisers have been able to leverage for many years. However, the evolution of consumer privacy law is making third-party data obsolete for digital advertisers.

Contextual targeting does not only meet the needs of B2B and B2C marketers and publishers but it also provides consumers with relevant content while meeting their own personal digital privacy needs. Advertisers should think through working with publishers who have created contextual targeting opportunities that truly understand a consumer’s behavior. For example, a consumer reading up on investment classes like ETFs across top business publications might be served a white paper on ETFs by a blue-chip brand at the end of the article.

Don’t Let Consumer Privacy Laws Scare You Away From Contextual Marketing

There have been many changes to GDPR and CCPA—as well as conversations at the state and national level in regards to adopting similar privacy regulations. This presents an opportunity for advertisers to educate key stakeholders on the importance of contextual as a solution and the opportunity to reach new customers.

While many U.S. companies are still waiting for the looming changes to third-party data, others like The New York Times and Dow Jones have already announced first-party data plans. The New York Times took a proactive approach to ensure the organization is GDPR compliant. The publisher made changes early last year due to a significant amount of subscribers being located in Europe.

Dow Jones, part of the News Corp group, recently shared that the publisher had released a tool that provides first-party data including audience insights both before and after a campaign is launched for advertisers.

New York Times immediately switched to contextual targeting and found they were able to continue to grow ad revenue. Even if a brand doesn’t currently operate in countries or states that have stricter consumer privacy laws they should experiment now with contextual. Californianians voted in November for stricter privacy guidelines with the CPRA signaling a wider trend that other states are already following (and new Vice President-Elect Harris, who championed CCPA in her home state of California, is rumored to be setting up a similar consumer protection bureau at the federal level). This is a trend that is just beginning.

Contextual is right for these times and will continue to play a role in targeting as we move into the new year. It helps publishers at a time when they’ve struggled with being blacklisted and are looking for solutions beyond cookies and third-party data. It’s also great for brands as it allows them to put their messages into context. Consumers benefit from relevant content that contextual provides. In a year in which everything has been turned on its head, marketing campaigns don’t need to be another headache. Consumers crave content they care about, and marketers want to provide the most relevant information to lead to conversions. Contextual targeting is not a maybe as we head into 2021; it is the only way forward.