Point to an industry of any sort and you can almost guarantee there’s a space within it for intermediary parties. In law, you’ll find mediators; in entertainment, you’ll find agents. And in most (or many) cases, these intermediary figures play an important role, even if the earnings seem to be a tad disproportionate. In the digital advertising industry, ad servers have long been the intermediaries whose presence is generally taken for granted.

The work of creating product markets, converting clicks into transactions, and maintaining a clear picture of the process as its unfolding - these are the responsibilities and challenges required of businesses of all sizes, regardless of the space in which they operate. The last of these, maintaining a clear picture of the process, is arguably the most demanding and technologically dependent of those actions, as it is predicated on the business’s ability to track consumer behavior in ways both accurate and sustained while extracting from their findings an actionable data set.

Meet Our Newest Integration: TapClicks! Recently, we announced our integration with NinjaCat, a trusted reporting and monitoring platform that can aggregate all our clients’ campaign data in a single place, simply by pulling data from numerous sources–including Genius Monkey. And today we’re proud to announce our newest integration partner - TapClicks! TapClicks is a leading marketing dashboard and reporting platform for publishers, marketing agencies and media companies. Their marketing solutions platform features reporting, analytics, and management tools.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, can we put a number on a video? Believe it or not, the answer is yes. As a brand, it’s easy to shy away from video advertising or dismiss it all together. The tendency is to assume that the worth and effectiveness of video lands in that giant gray area of ambiguity. But videos have received a lot of attention in research recently.

Introduction Based on what you’re looking to find, data (and information more broadly) are often entirely free. Now, this certainly isn’t true of trade secrets and the like, but otherwise there’s a lot to be gleaned from simply paying attention to current events and, where your own business is concerned, to consumer patterns. That’s what data really is when everything is taken into account – information we’re willing to acknowledge and, to the best of our ability, act upon.

Shopping used to be more of a sport than a necessity. People would look forward to leisurely walking the malls, stopping in at each store to see if there were any good deals on things that might interest them. Well, that ship has sailed! Nowadays, everybody is in a hurry, and they want to spend every moment they can in the most efficient manner. We are now a nation of instant gratification, getting what we want now, and not having to wait until we happen to be in the right area of the store we suspect might have the merchandise.

As the New Year approaches, the excitement for the coming year fills the air as we race to the finish line of 2019. But, in the advertising world, this anticipation can feel more like a race to the starting line as marketers hustle to glean as many insights as possible from the closing year in order to prepare for the one up ahead. Of all the marketing insights unearthed in 2019, there were a few we found particularly compelling.

What is your target audience up to? Quite a bit, in fact. The prospective consumers you’re hoping to reach are doing all sorts of things at any given moment. Some are entirely disconnected from their various devices, while others are checking their mobile phones as tablets stream media content of some sort a foot or so from where they’re seated. Your audience may have a common interest in what you’re selling, but their online engagement is far from uniform.

There’s so much of it - video footage, that is. The art/act of filming dates back well over a century… nearly a century-and-a-half, in fact. And during its early decades, the opportunity for an individual to create footage of their own was limited by the expense and relative unwieldiness of the available technology. Jump cut ahead a few generations and you’ll observe that the advent of smartphone technology has created an entire population of individuals capable of capturing life images via quality photographs and videos.

As anyone with more than three hours of corporate experience has perhaps observed and noted, it is true that all major companies presently doing business have to exist in two ways: 1. In the public-facing way their customers know and expect; and 2. In a behind-the-scenes way that allows them to maintain a competitive edge. Now, wherever these two can overlap, they almost invariably do. But often these aspects of a company’s identity run necessarily and inevitably parallel to one another.