Highlights of the London IAB Upfronts

Highlights of the London IAB Upfronts

The IAB Digital Upfronts took place last week in London. The Upfronts aimed to provide a platform for media owners, tech companies and content creators to showcase their most innovative and coveted creative inventory packages. Here is a sum up of the 3 major events Mozoo Group attended throughout the week:

The Facebook Event

• Steve Hatch, MD of Facebook UK, insisted on the fact that consumers and brands are beginning to understand how easy it is to create and upload a video, and to make an impact.He took the example of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge video as 17 million people uploaded videos for this cause, and those videos were in turn seen by 440 million people.

• Ed Couchman, Facebook UK’s Head of Agecy Relations was also keen to stress that, while TV is still the leading platform for video consumption, the numbers watching video on digital devices are ‘exploding’ 

• Facebook presented their video advertising products and announced that native Instagram adverts are now available in the UK

• The “cross-devices” trend: More than 60% of adults use at least two devices every day and nearly 25% use three. Facebook launched cross-device reporting for their ads, enabling advertisers to understand how people are moving between devices — across mobile apps and the web — before they convert. This will offer more insight into how well digital campaigns are performing
• 62% of Facebook’s advertising revenue now comes from mobile.Clare Valoti, Head of Agency Sales, said that if brands really want to drive results for their business, digital has to be a key part of their communications strategy

The Yahoo Event

• Ben Page, Chief Executive at Ipsos MORIintroduced some consumers insights

• Yahoo launched Ad Manager Plus, a platform offering pre-campaign planning, reporting, sales measurement and analytics

The Microsoft Event

• Microsoft revealed and explained the redesign and added functionalities of MSN. More specifically that MSN can also now be synced with third-party services such as Facebook and Twitter.

• Microsoft spoke about its ‘story telling’ tool across all Microsoft devices and platforms(Bing, MSN, Xbox and Skype). Using the Microsoft ID, brands can sequentially target their chosen audiences with chapters of their story across all of the Microsoft screens to meet the consumers where they are, on the device they are on.

• An interesting cross-channel experimentwas presented at the conference: Adidas – Push the Beats (unavailable online as it is a trial). The idea was to swipe different characters wearing Adidas clothing, each singing or beatboxing a particular tune, from a mobile screen onto a TV screen. This allows users to create and customise a song as they swipe each character in and out with their mobile device.