Author: Joseph Gray

System Status – 10/2/23

Joseph Gray System Status

There is an issue with AdSphere this morning where proper data is not showing from last week. It’s currently 6:50AM so working to contact technical resources to assess the problem. More updates to follow. Apologies to everyone for the issue. Our team has been doing a lot of things in preparation for moving our systems to Amazon Cloud and expanding our coverage of networks, including the addition of broadcast stations in the top 40 markets. With all of the infrastructure changes going on, something unexpected may have happened.

9:00AM Update. Data from last week is now properly showing in AdSphere. Weekly reports will be re-run this evening for Tuesday AM delivery. If the need is urgent, one can log into AdSphere, visit the filters dropdown, find your weekly email reports, and re-run them as needed. We apologize for the inconvenience this morning.

System Status – 9/26/23

Joseph Gray System Status

AdSphere is exhibiting unstable behavior when accessing data prior to 2023 broadcast year. Our team is working on a fix for this issue by rebuilding our historical database but the fix is taking longer than expected. We will post more details here when we get a firm ETA.

3:03PM PDT Update – Very sorry for the delay! We have all of 2022 back loaded and currently working on 2021 and prior years. This issue cropped up during our migration to Amazon Web Services which promises to speed up our services and allow for more scalability. Some of the data didn’t migrate over properly so we’re updating the historical data as quickly as possible!

11:41PM PDT Update – Historical database has been restored & AdSphere is back to normal. Thank you everyone for your patience!

7th Annual AdSphere™ Award Winners Announced

Joseph Gray AdSphere

7th Annual AdSphere™ Awards

 Recognize Top Direct-to-Consumer Advertisers in 2022

 

AbbVie, Geico, Adaptive Health, CarShield, E. Mishan & Sons, SharkNinja, Luminess Direct, Ideavillage, among those taking top honors.

SAN DIEGO- (March 6, 2023) – Direct-to-consumer advertisers spent over 22 billion on national cable and broadcast networks in 2022 according to DRMetrix, an iSpot company.  To celebrate the industry’s accomplishments, the AdSphere™ Awards will honor the direct-to-consumer industry’s top advertisers and brands.

Awards will be presented to the winners at PDMI EAST 2023, where the leaders in Performance-Driven Marketing will come together in Miami Beach, Florida from March 20-22nd, 2023.  The AdSphere™ Awards is the first awards program to be inclusive of the entire direct-to-consumer industry with advertisers such as T-Mobile, Universal Pictures, Chime, Golo, Wayfair.com, Southern New Hampshire University, Sheex, ZipRecruiter, NortonLifeLock, Consumer Cellular, Sleep Number, and many others being honored.

“The AdSphere awards recognize best-of-class advertisers and brands across four industry classifications including brand/direct, lead generation, short-form products, and 28.5-minute infomercials,” said Joseph Gray, founder of the AdSphere Awards and DRMetrix.  “Direct-to-consumer campaigns achieving this level of scale demonstrate consumer popularity and best-in-class creative and media execution.  The AdSphere Awards are the most inclusive award program for the entire direct-to-consumer industry recognizing nearly 60 honorees including all of our best-of-category award recipients.”

AdSphere monitors a universe of 140+ national networks on a 24/7/365 basis.  In just over nine years, AdSphere has identified over 16,000 direct-to-consumer brands.  In addition to detecting over 800,000 infomercial (28.5 minute) airings, AdSphere has detected over 110 million spots of varying creative lengths up to five minutes in duration.  The awards recognize top brands across a wide range of industry categories representing all facets of the industry.  AdSphere segments campaigns across over 190 major categories and sub-categories. The complete list of AdSphere Award winners is online at www.drmetrix.com/adsphere-awards.html.

About DRMetrix

DRMetrix, an iSpot.tv company, monitors over 140 national TV networks 24/7/365, tracking direct-to-consumer ads using all creative lengths including spot, 5-min, and long-form which include web addresses, mobile app response, SMS, or toll free numbers.  For more information, please visit www.drmetrix.com and be sure and download our latest direct-to-consumer industry study!

System Status – 3/6/23

Joseph Gray System Status

DRMetrix is experiencing technical difficulties this morning causing our database server to be slow to respond. As soon as our West Coast staff becomes available this morning, the underlying issues should be quickly resolved. Unfortunately, our development team is on holiday tomorrow so weekly reporting will be delayed 48 hours this week. We expect these reports to run Tuesday evening for early Wednesday delivery. Also, reports currently stuck in queue should begin processing as soon as the underlying issues get resolved this AM. We apologize for the inconvenience!

System Status – 2/14/23

Joseph Gray System Status

Happy Valentines Day! We regret to inform that a bug was introduced with our recent QR code build that was remedied today. The issue caused AdSphere to under report airings for certain brands that may have incorporated a QR code in their creatives. With default filter settings, all airings should now be properly reflected for current and prior weeks in AdSphere. To report any discovered issues, please email support@drmetrix.com

January 2023 – Build

Joseph Gray AdSphere

Happy New Year everyone! We are excited to finally release our latest AdSphere build. We’ve added “QR Code” under response types which allows one to filter for these types of campaigns.

When testing the use of QR codes, marketers are able to add or remove them from creatives on the fly. For this reason, DRMetrix had to build a solution that would audit for the presence of a QR code at the airing level. Because DRMetrix is monitoring networks in SD (standard definition), the accuracy of our QR code reader will improve later this year when DRMetrix switches to HD (high definition) monitoring. In the interim, there will be some airings where a QR code is present but not necessarily detected. To insure that all reported QR code airings are of the highest confidence, DRMetrix will only report airings where both a QR code is detected as well as the encoded URL.

The goal in this early phase, is to provide a conservative estimate of airings and spend where DRMetrix has detected the presence of QR codes with a high level of confidence. It was also important to implement a solution where one could playback the QR code version of a creative. To accomplish this, DRMetrix began saving the most recent QR code version of each creative. For older QR code creatives, that were discontinued before this feature was implemented, DRMetrix will not have video playback of the QR code version of the creative. Instead, the system may only be able to playback a version of the creative without the QR code. That said, users will be able to use DRMetrix’s airing level video thumbnails to see the QR code implementation in many cases.

For questions, or to report any bugs, please email support@drmetrix.com.

System Status – 10/31/22

Joseph Gray System Status

AdSphere went down around 5:30A PST this morning due to a power related issue. We’re working on bringing our systems back online. No firm ETA as of now but we’ll post updates here. Sorry for the inconvenience and happy Halloween!

11:49AM – Some systems are back online and it appears AdSphere is up and running. That said, our platform is not running at 100% and there are issues with report generation. We hope to have everything back to normal by tomorrow AM if not sooner. There’s still a lot of work going on behind the scenes. We apologize for the inconvenience!

Tracking of QR Codes in TV Advertising

Joseph Gray AdSphere

Over the past year, there’s been a lot of industry buzz around the use of QR codes in direct-to-consumer and direct response advertising.

Thanks to Covid-19, the use of QR codes was popularized by the restaurant industry for accessing menus. This has helped to create mass consumer awareness of QR codes and how they work. Both iPhone and Android devices have integrated QR code readers into their native camera apps further popularizing the use of QR codes.

The rich data that can be included within the QR code can serve many purposes including tracking which TV network and specific creatives consumers are responding to. QR codes are great for tracking digital activity and also provide advertisers with a novel way to engage consumers. Over the years, there have been far less elegant solutions used such as visible codes appended at the beginning or the end of a URL. Examples include: www.brand.com/TV1, www.brand.com/TV2, 1brand.com, 2brand.com, etc. Advertisers using this approach have struggled with various problems. For example, consumers would often ignore the appended codes. Also, many advertisers feel that messing with the visible URL dilutes brand awareness. In comparison with such approaches, the QR code is arguably a more elegant and versatile solution.

The team at DRMetrix has been working to be able to detect when QR codes are used in television ads and to be able to extract and report the data contained within the QR code at the airing level. This supports the use of differing QR codes running on the same network / creative where additional segmentation is required.

We are excited to announce that this capability has been integrated into DRMetrix’s Airing Verification Service (AVS) system. A new “QR Code” field can be enabled in any AVS output or pulled via API.

DRMetrix has also added a new response type filter for “QR Code” in AdSphere which will allow subscribers to better understand the use cases and growth of QR codes. At the time of this writing, 374 creatives using QR codes have been identified across the 140+ networks monitored by DRMetrix. To provide some context, that is roughly 2% of traditional direct response airings including long form 28.5m infomercials.

For more information on our new QR Code filter in AdSphere, please click here.



September 2022 – Build

Joseph Gray AdSphere

Today we released a new build of AdSphere that includes a new response filter “No Response” under which we will include creatives for certain DTC brands that may have dropped use of a dot com address in their creatives. Think of dot com brands that have become household names such as Chewy, Amazon, Geico, Instacart, Wayfair and many others. Eventually these brands are able to drive online traffic without having to include a web address in their TV commercials.

By default, such creatives will be included in AdSphere despite not having a visible web address thanks to the new “No Response” filter type as shown below.

This will primarily impact campaigns with the brand classification of “brand/DR”. One can remove these types of creatives, and associated units and spend, by toggling response type to “At Least” and unchecking “No Response”. Or, if you want to checkout all of the new creatives in the system that meet the criteria of “No Response” change the response type selector to ONLY and only select “No Response”.

As a new build, we’re on the lookout for any issues/problems! Should you encounter any, please email support@drmetrix.com