Good afternoon everyone, my name is Phil Schraeder and I’m the COO of GumGum.
As a quick introduction, GumGum is known best for inventing the in-image advertising category in 2008. We now offer multiple products with the same fundamental mission: to deliver beautiful advertising in-line with premium content where consumer attention is actively engaged. And we’re doing this at scale, with a global reach of around 340M unique visitors per month.
Today I’d like to share some of our thoughts about the power of images, and how GumGum’s brand clients are using in-image advertising to capture attention and drive higher engagement than other display advertising options. But before we do, let’s talk about the current landscape for images.
First, images are everywhere
1B smartphones will ship this year and now everyone is a photographer (IDC)
350M photos are shared daily on Facebook and 60M photos per day are shared on Instagram
More than 1.8 billion images are uploaded and shared around the world each day (Kleiner Perkin)
And by some estimates there are more than 5 trillion images online
[CLICK] As a result of the rise in quantity and popularity of images, there has been a huge investment in the visual web
The latest evidence of this was Pinterest’s recent Series E investment valuing the company at $3.8B
Not to mention Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1B last year and Facebook acquiring Instagram for $1B
Beyond these social media titans, over $100M in venture funding has been been invested image-based advertising startups over the past few years
[CLICK] Finally, and most importantly, is the power of images to capture the attention of consumers and create engagement for brands
There’s a reason why people say “a picture is worth a thousand words” – images are powerful. They evoke emotion, and sometimes they can create visceral reactions. People share and talk about photos because they are often the most interesting thing on a page.
From a publishing perspective, images are the last untapped piece of un-monetized content, and the place consumers focus the majority of their attention
Articles containing relevant images receive 94% more views than those without (Skyword)
Consumers spend more time on Pinterest than Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ combined (MediaBistro)
Another reason images are so valuable to brands has do do with the way we consume content. Images appear in-line (some would say natively) with the natural flow of the page. Banner blindness continues to be a real issue, as shown here in this heat map which demonstrates how attention is drawn to headlines and images before advertising and other text on the page.
The most prominent feature of in-image advertising is its ability to capture context. By analyzing a publisher’s photos programmatically at scale, we’re able to dynamically overlay relevant brand ads in the lower portion of the images on their page. An obvious example of this is placing ads for kitty litter on photos of cats. But I’d like to show you a few other live examples for those of you who may not have encountered an in-image before.
http://demo.gumgum.com/nydailynews_com/katy_perry.html?c=katy_perry
Paramount – In this example, Paramount wanted to target images of Katy Perry to promote her new film. Several of our advertisers, especially in the automotive category, use this tactic to conquest their competitors’ images. As you can see, we also have the ability to overlay a video light box to run a trailer for the film or a brand’s 15-second spot.
http://demo.gumgum.com/concepts/budlight/index.html
Bud Light – This example for Bud Light shows our Canvas unit taking over the entirety of an photo, in this case the objective was to surround sports images. All of this works equally well on mobile, because our ad units are associated with the individual images resident on the publisher’s page.
Whether it’s identifying your own product images (or celebrity personalities) or conquesting others in your category, in-image advertising is a great way to be top of mind when consumers are engaged at viewing related images.
In this example, Dove was one of four advertisers that purchased all of our image inventory surrounding the Oscars in 2014.
During June and July we sold through 100% of our World Cup inventory. You can read more about this and how we use images to help brands surround major events on our blog at blog.gumgum.com.
Another unique feature of in-image advertising, and a big differentiator for GumGum, is our team of image scientists who are looking beyond context to understand at a deeper technical level what images are about. In this example, which was featured in the May 26 issue of AdAge, we are identifying the color of hair in photos containing faces across our platform, and serving a corresponding ad for the relevant L’Oreal hair color product.
And we are doing this at scale. Today approximately 2,000 content sites run GumGum’s ad code, which collectively gives our advertisers access to about 340 million unique visitors worldwide.
Because in-image ads only load when a photo is in the viewable pane of a browser, GumGum units are inherently viewable. We’ve been following the viewability issue closely and have integrated with several of the MRC accredited viewability measurement providers, including DoubleVerify, comScore and Moat. Since last year, we’ve measured dozens of campaigns and have seen an average of 81% viewability across our platform.
In this example, which we published with Nielsen in December, Toshiba achieved a campaign-wide purchase intent lift of more than 12 percent in for its new LED TVs. During the important holiday shopping season, this number nearly tripled to 32 percent. The full study is available for download on both the Nielsen and GumGum blogs.
In the “In-image Advertising Primer” we co-authored earlier this year as chair of the IAB Image-Based Advertising Working Group, Nielsen cites a 30 percent lift in overall awareness for multiple campaigns studied across three in-image providers. When awareness was the primary objective, the lift was 37 percent. You can download the full report on our site or at iab.net/inimage.
Finally, the reason we believe in-image advertising will grow as a scalable media channel is because all of the stakeholders win.
Consumers receive contextually relevant advertising that is politely delivered and oftentimes additive to their content experience.
[CLICK] Publishers gain access to a new revenue stream with a unit that minimizes disruption to the user experience of their audience.
[CLICK] Marketers gain a natively placed units that are consistently driving significant lift in the metrics marketers care about most, including viewability, engagement and brand lift.
I’d like to thank you again for your time and attention and look forward to hearing your thoughts as we have a chance to speak throughout the rest of the day.
