Despite its promise, online media companies and brand-name publishers are wary. They saw what happened to online display advertising, as new players with a reliance on direct marketing techniques, self-service, automated buying and selling, and cheap inventory drove CPMs ever closer to zero. Based on in-depth interviews with several mobile marketing executives at organizations including premium mobile publishers, major marketing service companies and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), this report explores the landscape of mobile advertising and discusses what it will take for both buyers and sellers to take advantage of the opportunities it offers.

Key findings from our analysis include:

• Mobile marketing is undergoing a period of rapid growth and maturation and has adopted many innovations first pioneered in web display ads, including programmatic inventory sales. Mobile ad spending more than doubled to nearly $18 billion in 2013 and is on track to grow another 75 percent, to over $34 billion in 2014.
• The mobile advertising market is still faced with several significant strategic obstacles, including a fragmented market ecology, a lack of reliable and widely adopted format and data standards, a lack of buyer awareness and sophistication, and an uncertain future for targeting in the cookie-free mobile app environment.
• Mobile publishers anticipate growing advertising revenues in the years to come, as brand advertisers are wooed to the channel by its increasing reach and sophistication.
• One of the most promising models for mobile ad sales is via programmatic direct (PD), which can provide publishers with premiums of 5-10x compared to inventory sold via RTB exchanges and ad networks. Mobile PD offers a “best of both worlds” scenario, allowing buyers to recognize the efficiency and transparency of auction sales while leveraging publishers’ brand halos.
• Mobile PD adds a new, middle tier to the mobile ad sales “waterfall” model, between highly customized, high-premium “Tier 1” inventory sold directly and highly standardized, low value “Tier 2” inventory typically brokered via RTB exchanges and ad networks. Call it “Tier 1.5.”

Thumbnail image courtesy: iStock/Thinkstock

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These concerns are only a part of the larger debate surrounding 3D printing, which is forcing legislators and regulators to rethink a broad range of legal issues, from patents to copyrights to liability. Below, we will briefly review a few of these legal issues with the greatest potential to shape the future of this market.

The post Legal challenges and opportunities for 3D printing appeared first on Gigaom.

Yet despite the hype, there is much still holding back this technology’s full potential. Conflicting standards, proprietary patents and lingering mechanical challenges continue to limit the practical applications for 3D printing, and cast a shadow over its future. While this is a source of frustration for the “makers” who embrace the technology and the entrepreneurs and investors who hope to mainstream it, the obstacles represent a window of opportunity for traditional manufacturing industries to reassess their long-term strategies and to find a place in tomorrow’s economic landscape.

This report will address 3D printing from a variety of angles:

• The limits of the technology today, and how will it evolve in the future
• What will drive adoption among consumers and enterprises
• How 3D printing will change jobs and economies in the U.S. and around the world
• How 3D printing will affect traditional industries such as healthcare, toys and apparel, and how companies in these sectors can best prepare

The twelve experts interviewed for this report represent a diverse array of interests and vantage points. Some are executives and entrepreneurs in the additive manufacturing industry. Others work in traditional industries that face potential disruption. Still others are researchers focusing on the law, economics and/or material sciences that underpin this emerging technology. While each point of view is different, they converge on a common vision of the future, and this vision suggests a set of six key recommendations for any company concerned about the future of 3D printing:

• Embrace the makers
• Reevaluate your supply chain
• Give consumers the best of both worlds
• Don’t just sell – service!
• Protect (and grow) your assets
• Don’t fight the future

The post 3D Printing: hype, hope or threat? appeared first on Gigaom.

This change has been largely invisible to consumers, yet relies heavily on data about them. Within a fraction of a second of loading a web page, the consumer is identified, categorized, matched to several databases, evaluated and bid on by dozens or more of competing bidders, and served an ad by the winner. The RTB market is already worth billions of dollars per year and is expected to grow sharply for the foreseeable future.

This report, which draws on interviews with 10 senior digital marketing executives, will assess the role of RTB in today’s marketplace and anticipate its likely development in the coming years. Key findings include:

• Bidding isn’t the only thing done in real time. Data analytics tools enable marketers to do real-time targeting and optimization of campaigns and buy target audiences separate from the media they’re found on. That analysis and separation makes targeting more efficient overall.
• The RTB ecology is complex and cluttered, with multiple, often-overlapping categories of service provider vying for their share of a relatively narrow margin.
• Today, RTB is primarily the domain of direct-response advertisers. While the potential for programmatic brand-buying is significant, the ecology still is evolving to serve this market adequately. Suppliers likely will solve contextual transparency issues before they address the real-time impact on branding metrics.
• The RTB marketplace will consolidate significantly in the coming years, with players such as Google and Facebook the likely providers of end-to-end programmatic marketing services, while companies like AppNexus and PubMatic specialize on media buyers or publishers.
• Traditional agencies and premium publishers will face the steepest challenges from RTB as traditional buyer/seller relations can be supplanted by automated bids and as brand advertisers become more comfortable and adept at reaching their target audiences across a broader array of properties.
• RTB faces some serious challenges to market maturity, such as a growing incidence of fraud and a rocky outlook for the future of third-party cookies. Yet solutions to these challenges are already underway, and the market will adapt and thrive.
• Ultimately, the long-term prospects for RTB growth are significant; the two major inflection points will be mass adoption by brand advertisers—particularly for video inventory–and the shift of offline direct-marketing dollars to online display and mobile platforms.

The post The revolution will be targeted: RTB and the future of programmatic advertising appeared first on Gigaom.

This report will demonstrate how online media companies enter into these bargains, and how they evaluate the strategic dimensions of social media. Key questions include:

• What are the benefits of partnering with Facebook, Twitter, Google, or Pinterest?
• What are the “pain points” that characterize these partnerships?
• What downsides are media companies willing to accept in exchange for the upsides?

The 10 executives interviewed for this report are from a range of media sectors. They offered a fascinating glimpse into the intersection of traditional media and social media, revealing opportunities for innovation and growth as well as a number of risks and threats. Ultimately these interviewees described a situation of turbulence and change in which powerful companies thrive or fail depending. Success depends on how effectively they can predict and accommodate the ever-changing ambitions, whims, and reversals of their social media “partners,” and of the millions of customers who use social media to discover and share the content they love with others in their networks.

Despite the many benefits that accrue from working with social media partners (e.g., customer acquisition, retention, authentication, and analytics), the pain points are numerous. They include:

• Lack of control over the consumer experience
• Consumer data and privacy issues
• Unstable and frequently changing platforms
• Poor partner relations
• Mistrust over code
• Limited research and analytics

The post Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies appeared first on Gigaom.