8^th Annual AdSphere™ Awards

 Recognize Top Direct-to-Consumer Advertisers in 2023

 

AbbVie, Progressive, St. Jude Children’s Hospital, E. Mishan & Sons, Great Healthworks, SharkNinja, and LifeLock by Norton among those taking top honors.

SAN DIEGO- (March 8, 2024) – Direct-to-consumer advertisers spent over 20.3 billion on national cable and broadcast networks in 2023 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 2024, where the leaders in Performance-Driven Marketing will come together in Miami Beach, Florida from April 8-10, 2024.  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, University of Phoenix, Consumer Cellular, Sleep Number, Chewy.com, Burger King, 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, an iSpot.tv company.  “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 over 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 17,000 direct-to-consumer brands.  In addition to detecting over 900,000 infomercial (28.5 minute) airings, AdSphere has detected over 170 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!

7^th 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!

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.



6^th Annual AdSphere™ Awards

 Recognize Top Direct-to-Consumer Advertisers in 2021

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

SAN DIEGO- (February 28, 2022) – Direct-to-consumer advertisers spent over 20.2 billion on national cable and broadcast networks in 2021 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.

The awards presentation will take place at PDMI EAST 2022, where the leaders in Performance-Driven Marketing will come together in Miami Beach, Florida from March 13-15^th, 2022.  The AdSphere™ Awards is the first awards program to be inclusive of the entire direct-to-consumer industry with advertisers such as Amazon, Samsung, Southern New Hampshire University, Consumer Cellular, Zip Recruiter, NortonLifeLock, Wayfair.com, Chewy.com, Quicken Loans, PetSmart, 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 70 honorees including all of our best-of-category award recipients.”

AdSphere monitors a universe of 130+ national networks on a 24/7/365 basis.  In just over eight years, AdSphere has identified over 14,000 direct-to-consumer brands.  In addition to detecting over 700,000 infomercial (28.5 minute) airings, AdSphere has detected over 90 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 130 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!

Dear Clients,

Since iSpot.tv acquired DRMetrix in October of 2021, we have been working together to improve the accuracy of DRMetrix’s automated content recognition (ACR) which is the core technology that tracks TV ad occurrences. As a result of this collaboration, we are pleased to announce that DRMetrix has migrated to its new ACR backend technology powered by iSpot.tv!

Media Week 8 (Week of 2/14/22) marks the first full week running on our new ACR technology platform and we are really excited about the improvements that have been made.

The team at iSpot.tv has been amazing and they have worked very hard to accommodate the unique needs of DRMetrix, and the direct response industry, including the development of 28.5 minute infomercial detection, airing level videos, video thumbnail images, and so much more.

We are looking forward to building upon this new technology framework to bring a number of industry firsts to market. To begin, over the course of the next few weeks, we will begin expanding the number of networks monitored and, later this year, we will begin tracking ad occurrences across ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX affiliates in the top 27 markets.

We are grateful for the support of our clients during this transitional period and we look forward to bringing many new innovative capabilities to the DRMetrix platform.

Please stay tuned for more exciting announcements!

In this latest build of AdSphere™, our team has worked hard to squash many bugs while adding some great new features!

A new “Media Week” field has been added to airing detail reports to assist users who like to pivot table data by media week when running multi-week and lifetime exports.

Track When Networks Are Added or Removed From Schedules!

We are also debuting some enhancements to our network details page which will be expanded over the next couple of development sprints. The idea is to help users better track when networks are added or removed from schedules. Eventually, you will be able to setup reporting for any brand or creative that you wish to monitor to alert you when any of its networks go online or offline from week to week!

For this current release, you’ll notice at the bottom of the network details page two new columns have been added named “Active Weeks” and “Consecutive Weeks”. Active Weeks will reflect how many historic weeks there has been activity (at least one airing) for each network. Note: The system is using calendar day/weeks. Consecutive Weeks will show the number of continuous weeks of activity for each network. In the example below, the addition of a “new” flag shows networks that are new from week to week. Intended to be used as a weekly reporting feature, the new flag will only be shown when running reports for “last week” timeframe. When a network has been added back to the schedule, its consecutive week value will be zero and it will be flagged “new” in the Active tab for the week. As you can see below, Fox, GSN, and Discovery Life meet this definition. Starting at zero, the consecutive week value for these networks will increment each subsequent week as long as there continues to be activity. Should a network experience a week with zero airings, then its consecutive weeks counter will revert back to zero and it will appear in the “inactive” tab.

The newly added “inactive” tab shows lifetime statistics for all “inactive” networks for the period being studied. Also, when you are using “last week” date range, any network that was on the air two weeks ago, but had zero airings last week, will appear in the inactive tab and flagged as “new”. All other inactive networks will be shown with their lifetime data. Consecutive Weeks column will not appear on inactive tab as it will always be zero for inactive networks.

Please note that the default sort of both active and inactive tab favors any networks that are flagged new. These will be sorted first by spend and then all other networks will be sorted by spend. Whenever a network’s status changes in the last week period, either going from active-to-inactive or inactive-to-active, these networks will be flagged new on both active and inactive tabs as appropriate.

In an upcoming AdSphere release, we’ll activate the weekly tracking email feature whenever there is a network that changes status. Also, the new excel output for inactive tab will become operational at that time.

Keeping Track of your Filter Settings!

Over the years, there have been a lot of filters added to AdSphere. Many of us have experienced that moment when you run a report and something just doesn’t look right. Thus begins a game of discovering the offending filter and/or you can click the blue edit button, find and click the “reset”button, and have all of your filter settings put back to default.

Now, there is a better way. We are excited to release the following new feature as it will make AdSphere™ even easier to use! When you use ANY filter in the system, AdSphere will now track which filters are being used and allow you to reset any of them individually. In the following example, 5 different filters have been applied including custom date range, brand classification, creative duration, category, and a network filter. To reflect this, AdSphere shows the number of filters applied (5) with a small drop down arrow menu that you can expand for more details.

As you can see below, all of the filters options are listed. The status of all filters are shown so you can see which have been applied. In this example, it’s easy to see the 5 filters that have been changed/applied. Now, if we’re having a problem with a report caused by a rogue filter, it will be easy to find the culprit and reset just that one filter.

Global Search – Creative Export with Play Buttons!

Let’s say you want to create an excel output for all creatives in AdSphere that have the word “Hockey” in the creative name – or any other word or phrase of your choice. First step is to use Global search and enter the search term or phrase. Note: Global search allows you to put quotes around phrases when you only want to return results that match the phrase exactly. Next, click “View All” link for creatives. As you’ll see below, there is now a blue Excel button on the creative details page that will allow you to export the entire list of creatives with all details and creative play links which are valid for 30 days.

As always, we would appreciate reports of any new bugs or issues that you may experience with this new build.

We look forward to receiving your thoughts, ideas, and feedback on how we can make these features work better for you! Feel free to comment below.