3rd Annual AdSphere™ Awards Recognize Top DRTV Advertisers in 2018

Progressive, Nutrisystem, E. Mishan & Sons, Guthy-Renker, Luminess Direct, Proactiv+, and the late George Smith among those being honored

DRMetrix, the leading research company for the DRTV industry announces its 3rd annual AdSphere™ Awards honoring the most effective direct response television advertisements airing on national television outlets in 2018.

DRMetrix created the AdSphere Awards to honor the top advertisers and brands in the industry. The awards will be presented to recipients attending PDMI EAST 2019, where leaders in Performance-Driven Marketing will come together in Miami, Florida from March 31st – April 2nd, 2019.  AdSphere Awards is the first awards program to be inclusive of the entire DRTV industry with advertisers such as Allergan, AT&T Services, AbbVie, Vista Print, Zillow, TripAdvisor, Lens Crafters, and many others being honored.

“The AdSphere awards recognize best-of-class advertisers across four industry classifications including short-form products, lead generation, brand/direct, and 28.5-minute infomercials,” said Joseph Gray, AdSphere Awards founder and CEO of DRMetrix. “Performance-based campaigns achieving this level of scale demonstrate consumer popularity and also best-in-class creative and media execution. The AdSphere Awards are the most inclusive ever for the DRTV industry recognizing nearly 70 honorees including all of our best-of-category award recipients.”

AdSphere monitors a universe of 125+ national networks on a 24/7/365 basis.  In just over four years, AdSphere has identified over 10,000 brand-direct and direct response brands. In addition to detecting over 384,000 infomercial (28.5 minute) airings, AdSphere has detected over 40 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 DRTV industry. AdSphere segments DRTV campaigns across 20 major categories and 145 sub-categories. The complete list of “Best of Category” AdSphere Award winners for 2018 is online at www.drmetrix.com/adsphere-awards.html.

In addition to the “Best of Category” awards, the following top six advertisers of 2018 will receive the coveted AdSphere Award:

Advertiser & Brand of the Year
Classification -Brand/Direct
Progressive

Advertiser & Brand of the Year
Classification – Lead Generation
Nutrisystem

Advertiser of the Year
Classification – Short-Form Products
E. Mishan & Sons

Advertiser & Brand of the Year
Classification – Long-Form
Guthy | Renker – Meaningful Beauty

Brand of the Year
Classification – Short-Form Retail Products
Luminess Silk Infinite Beauty Collection

2017 – Brand of the Year
Classification – Short-Form Products
Proactiv+

Industry Veteran, George Smith, who passed away on 2/14/19 will also be honored with an AdSphere Award for his lifetime of achievements on behalf of the direct response television industry.

 

Bringing English & Hispanic Together!

No political statements being made here. That said, this month we’ll be combining airings for both English and Hispanic networks in our default AdSphere rankings and on our weekly Retail Reporting to make sure advertisers are getting ranking credit for both English & Hispanic buys in one integrated view. You’ll still be able to change the default filters and choose English only rankings (classic view), Spanish or “both” which will be the new default. DRMetrix looks forward to monitoring more Hispanic networks in 2019.

What Day of the Week is it?

Day of Week field has been added to Airing Detail Reports in AdSphere!

Speaking of Airing Detail reports, forget about manually downloading them! Did you know you can automate the monitoring and reporting of airing details for multiple brands / creatives with our AVS™ system? Now you can create a powerful BI dashboard to provide your clients with an unprecedented view of their competition. Discover the AVS™ API that makes it possible to create REAL TIME competitive tracking solutions.  AdSphere™ clients, ask us about AVS™ and get started today for free!

New AdSphere Build – 9-27-2018

A new build has been released today with a few new features.

VIDEO DOWNLOAD

You’ll find a new download icon to the bottom left of the DRMetrix Video Player (as shown below) which will download an .MP4 version of the video to your computer.

Please only click the download button once.  Then look at the bottom of your browser where you should see the file downloading (as shown below).  If you click the video download icon multiple times, you are instructing your browser to download the file multiple times which will count against your monthly download limit.

When the file is fully downloaded a little down arrow will appear.  Click the arrow and a menu will open.  It is recommended that you choose ‘Show in folder’ so that you know which directory on your computer the file has been downloaded to.  This will be helpful should you wish to email or access the file in the future.  On most computers, there is a dedicated download folder configured for such files although users can change the default download directory at will.  If you need additional assistance, please contact your company technical support or email support@drmetrix.com

To prevent abuse, there is a monthly per user limit of 100 downloads a month.  We recommend using the cloud based link sharing in situations where a hard copy download is not required.  There are no limits with the cloud based link sharing.  For example, the ‘copy to clipboard’ icon on the button right of the video player (see below) allows you to copy the video link for any video which you can then share by pasting the link into any email or document.  The cloud based links expire after 30 days.

 

NEW BLACK THEME

If you’ve ever found the light blue fonts hard to read in AdSphere then this feature is for you!  From the home tab of AdSphere, you’ll find a toggle switch located at the top right of the page.  You can toggle between our original theme and the new Black theme.  It’s easy to switch back and forth so give it a try!

 

The new black theme darkens all of the font colors making them easier to read and also toggles the light blue font to a dark underlined font which now denotes where the hyperlinks are located.  As you can see, the Brand, Advertiser, and Airing links are all underlined meaning you can click them to be redirected to the appropriate page.

 

ASSISTANT ADMIN FEATURE

Existing ADMN users please take note.  You can now elevate users to the role of ASSISTANT ADMN so they can help you administer the AdSphere Account.  Once you elevate any user to this role, they will receive an email notifying them with instructions.

The process to elevate a user to assistant administrator is very straightforward.  From the home tab of AdSphere, ADMIN users have a person icon located in the upper right of the page as shown below:

After you click the person icon, you’ll be taken to the user setup page listing all of your current users.  Find the user you wish to elevate to assistant administrator and click the little gear icon on the far right.  Then click EDIT USER.

 

You’ll now find a clickable box for Assistant ADMIN that you can check.  When finished click the blue SAVE button at the bottom.  If you wish to unassign the Assistant ADMN role in the future, please use the same procedure and uncheck the Assistant ADMIN box and click SAVE.

 

We hope everyone enjoys these new features!  Thank you for being our customer!

New AdSphere™ Build to be released on 5/23/18

Call it what you will!

If you click “Don’t show me this again” it will turn off Excel Popups system wide. You can always re enable them from within the My Reports Tab.

If you’ve ever wanted to customize, or change, the name of any file or saved FILTER inside of AdSphere, now you can!

Before we get started, please log into AdSphere™ and go to the MY REPORTS tab.  On the upper right side of the page, please make sure that Excel Popup is Enabled.

Assuming your Excel Popups are enabled, whenever you click to create an Excel output anywhere in AdSphere a window will popup as shown above.  You can click into the file name field and customize the name of the Excel file that will be created.  If you change your mind, you can click the refresh icon in blue and the system will reset the name of the file back to the system default.  Click OK to proceed.  When you go to the My Reports tab to retrieve your report, it will be named as you specified.  This is great if you wish to name reports on the fly as you create them throughout the system.

 

Rename Reports & Filters

You can also click on any file name inside of My Reports or My Filters and rename them at any time.

New Way to Share Videos!

DRMetrix has made it easy to share hundreds of videos in seconds with its multi-brand, advertiser, and brand level creative EXCEL exports.  But what if you only want to share one video?  In this build, we’ve added a COPY TO CLIPBOARD icon which you can see in the picture above.  Just click to play any video and then click this icon at the bottom right of the video player.   Once the video link is copied to your computer’s clipboard, you can PASTE it into any document, email, etc.  Now you can share any video in seconds!

To paste the video link into a document or email:

MAC – Use the key combination COMMAND+V

PC – Use the key combination CTRL+V

Videos Now work with IOS / iPhones!

Our development team has resolved the issues with iphones so Adsphere video links from Tracking & Alerts, Weekly Spend Index Rankings, and links from our new copy/paste feature can all be played back from IOS devices now.  Note:  Due to recent changes made by Google videos may playback with audio muted.  For now, you can click to enable sound but we are working on a fix which we’ll be rolling out very soon.

Web Profiles

For various contacts on Advertiser pages, you will find a new “webprofile” logo as shown below.  These will generally link to a web page where profile information on the contact exists.

More DPI information

Following on the lead of our last build, we have added DPI graphics to networks on our Airing Detail pages in both the network drop down and in the network list at the bottom of the page.  Many of our users leverage DPI to help isolate Per Inquiry schedules.  Please see the section in our AdSphere User Guide “Isolating Per Inquiry Schedules” for more information.  To learn more about DPI, please click here.

 

 

What’s the Network OTA?

You may notice a new network showing on the network list in AdSphere called “OTA”.  OTA stands for “Over the Air”.

For each broadcast digital network that DRMetrix monitors, we’re actually monitoring two local broadcast affiliates from different markets.  When we see a direct response ad appearing at the same time across both affiliates, we report the airing as a national clearance.  Using this methodology, DRMetrix is able to report airings running in the national ad breaks on the broadcast diginets.   This is different from the cable networks where DRMetrix monitors airings in both national and local DPI breaks.

DRMetrix may discover DR ads inserted by the local broadcast affiliates that we monitor.   Instead of ignoring and/or purging these creatives, we have decided to retain creatives of interest by assigning them to a fake network called “OTA”.  If you see a campaign that’s only running on OTA, please know it’s not running nationally and was picked up in one or more local broadcast markets.  Campaigns showing on the OTA network will be a small incomplete sample of the types of DR campaigns that are being aired by local broadcasters.  You may see airings assigned to OTA on occasion on various AdSphere™ reports including airing detail and summary reports and, for the most part, you can choose to ignore them.  These may also show up on your daily or weekly email tracking alerts.  If it’s obvious to our researcher that a new DR ad is only applicable to a certain market, these types of ads will not be included.

New AdSphere™ Build to be released week of 4-23-18

 

AdSphere™ is now faster than ever.  

You may have noticed faster login times from our last release which has been expanded to include quicker load times for the HOME tab as well as for default brand and advertiser rankings.

Checkout our new DPi flag…

DPi signals allow DRMetrix to segment airings between two types of national cable ad breaks.   Networks have been flagged which have local ad breaks and where DRMetrix receives DPi signaling.  The DPi flag graphic has also been added to the downloadable Network List in AdSphere™.  To learn more about DPi signaling, please click here.

New User Guide

The AdSphere™ user guide has been updated.  Given all the new features we’ve released over the past few months, the user guide has doubled in size.  Please grab a copy to go over some of the new features such as tracking & alerts, network log view, and many others.  Click the USER GUIDE link at the top right on the HOME tab of AdSphere™ to download your copy today!   For those of you interested in isolating Per Inquiry schedules, you’ll find this section has been updated to take advantage of our new DPi flags!

Enhancements to Network Log View

If you know the date you wish to research, now you can quickly choose any media day making navigation easier and faster!  The separate media year, week, and day drop downs are now optional to use.  As a helpful addition, you can now see the date when AdSphere™ began monitoring any chosen network.  In the example below, you can see that A&E was added on 08/04/2014 to make you aware that airings prior to this date are not available in the network log view.

In addition to the new calendar date picker, you can now choose between Filtered Results or All airings view (see below).  This is helpful in situations where you may wish to bring both short form and 28.5 minute airings into a single view.  As another example, let’s say you have set brand classification filter to 300 second spots before navigating to network log view.  The system would normally only show you 300 second airings but now  you can click to see ALL airings which will ignore your filter settings and bring 100% of airings captured by AdSphere™ into the view.  In the all view you will see all airings for the brand classifications: Short Form Products, Lead Generation, Brand/DR, and 28.5 minute.  Now you can filter the results in the  network log view results using any of the AdSphere™ filters with the option to remove the filters and show all airings without having to change your filter settings and/or leave the network log view.

Airing Analysis Enhancements

We really appreciate the input from our wonderful customers.  Because of your suggestions, we’ve added a new Dayparts tab, which maps the airings for any creative or brand across 6 standardized dayparts.   When looking at data for a singular network, Adsphere™ uses that network’s DR dayparts.  However, because DR dayparts are not universal, when visualizing data across all networks the best we can do is to create standardized dayparts in addition to our existing Hour of Day view.  We’re looking for feedback and would love to have your thoughts and suggestions for further refinements.

At the bottom of the page, you’ll find some new columns breaking out national airing and local airing counts for each network.  Additionally, a new Excel report is available that will allow you to export all of the summary network and nested creative details for any brand or creative including clickable play links.

Tab 1 “Networks” will display the summary network counts, based on your filter settings, for any brand/creative and time frame.

Tab 2 – “Creatives” will provide all nested creative summary detail by network including clickable play buttons which are good for 30 days.   If the specific creative has aired on the network within the last 10 days, the play button will play back a sample airing from that network.  Otherwise, the system will revert to playing a recent airing from another network and/or play an older version of the ad known as the “master’ which was captured when AdSphere™ first registered the creative.