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Brand safety concerns are growing. According to a survey commissioned by Oath and conducted in April by the research firm Advertiser Perceptions, 99% of advertisers concerned about their ads appearing in brand safe environments, and 58% said they were more concerned about brand safety this year than they were in 2017.

Oath learned advertisers thoughts on brand safety, and the action they are taking to ensure the integrity of their brands through the survey.

Check out the Brand Safety Infographic to find out more.

The 2018 eSports season has kicked off with Lenovo’s second Yahoo eSports Game On Event, inviting the top LoL players across Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau to prove who best deserves the throne this year.

The finale of Yahoo eSports Game On Event

Taiwan winning team, 「妳倒楣嗎？」(also known as：地獄倒楣隊) and the Hong Kong & Macau winning team will compete for the champion at Harbour City on Saturday, September 22, 2018. The champion will take home HK$70,000, while the first-runner up will take home HK$35,000. However, both teams will get a chance to pit against other LoL fans in the third “Legion of Champions” finale in Thailand later on.

Aside from bearing witness to the next legend at the Yahoo eSports Game On Event, celebrities Jason Chan (陳柏宇), Super Girls, Ken Hung (洪卓立) and Rose Ma will also show off their skills there.

Making its first appearance in Hong Kong is Taiwanese eSports team and five-consecutive LoL Master Series winner - Flash Wolves (閃電狼職業電競隊聯手). Hanabi (Top role), MooJin (Jungle), Maple (Mid role) , Betty (AD carry) and SwordArT (Support) will be here to meet and play with Hong Kong eSports fans. Catch them live!

Yahoo TV eSports program《Yahoo柏拍機》

Aside from broadcasting the finale live on Yahoo TV on September 22 (Sat), Yahoo TV has launched an eSports program《Yahoo柏拍機》earlier this month. Hosted by celebrity gamers, Jason Chan and Lok Tung Tsang, the program promotes the talk-of-town topic of eSports across six episodes.

Celebrity guests Super Girls, Ansheles, Ken Hung, Rose Ma and Mischa will also show-off their skills throughout the series. Filled with laughter, the show sees players and the best of the best gamers Daisy and Humanbomb give audience a taste of the action as well as discuss tactics of LoL, PUBG, Arena of Valor and more.  Watch the show now.

Check out the Yahoo eSports Game On Event here: https://yahoo.digitalmktg.com.hk/summeresports2018/#event

We are delighted to be crowned the Media Owner of the Year at The Spark Awards for Media Excellence 2018, along with 18 additional recognitions including 5 awards for our in-house marketing campaigns and 13 awards for our client campaigns.

Having launched Yahoo TV in June 2017, we are thrilled to receive Gold for the Best Launch/Relaunch, Best Entertainment Platform and Best Engagement Strategy, followed by Bronze for the Fast Growth Award. Our annual, celebrity-packed outdoor event, Yahoo Asia Buzz, also took home a Gold recognition for the Best Function Activation.

In addition to our in-house marketing rewards, we are also grateful to our clients who have given us support and trust to run their campaigns on our platforms; and we were very pleased to see them shine under the award show spotlight. To name but a few: HUAWEI Mate 10 Series Launch was awarded Gold for Best Sponsorship Campaign and Best Custom Events; while Wyeth Illuma captured Gold for Best Use of Branded Content and Most Innovative Technology; and American Express took home Gold in Best Acquisition Strategy. See the full list of our awards below.

The impact of fraud is significant, and expected to grow, as more advertising shifts to video formats and mobile devices. As large as the fraud problem is, it's only one part of the inventory quality equation. Other concerns include brand safety, fake news, and viewability. 

We'll break down some of the differences in more detail in the eBook below, but it's not surprising to see that advertisers are concerned with essentially everything under the inventory quality umbrella. Research initiated by Oath, via the Advertiser Perceptions Omnibus study, found significant level of concern across a plethora of brand safety topics.

View eBook

Yahoo TV continues to strive for the best video platform for Hong Kongers by providing their daily must-watch videos and hot off the press news around the globe. In the month of May, Yahoo TV broadcasted a couple of live programs - ranging from Global Finance and News content to Local Sports event - that attracted mass audience group and scored notable viewership results.

Global Events on Yahoo Live

May 19, 2018 was a big day as the wedding of Prince Harry and Ms. Meghan Markle took place.  While every media around the world wanted to catch the eyeballs of their audience by delivering news of The Royal Wedding, Yahoo TV worked around the clock to deliver The Royal Box Live.  Yahoo TV broadcasted the Live across screens on Yahoo Frontpage, Yahoo TV Homepage and Yahoo News App, along with chatroom hosted by Yahoo Editor to build up the dialogue for the talk of the town.  Tremendous feedbacks and results earned.

Another big day in the month of May was in the Financial Sector, as Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting took place on May 5 at Downtown Omaha. Investors, big or small, all looked forward to hear from Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett and his right-hand man Charlie Munger who shared their unscripted views on the company, the markets, the economy, and more.  

Besides being the exclusive online host of the program for the third consecutive year, Yahoo Finance Team in Hong Kong specially added a local touch by inviting Mr. Vincent Lam (林少陽 - 以立投資董事總經理) to be the guest host of the chatroom to share his experience on value investment.  

Local Sports on Yahoo Live

Besides the Global events, Yahoo TV also broadcasted a Local Sports event in May - The All Hong Kong Schools Jing Ying Badminton Team Tournament on May 9, 2018.  The two final matches played by Heep Yun School and Diocesan Girl's School, as well as La Salle College and Diocesan Boys' School had attracted a lot of Sports Fans to watch the LIVE on Yahoo TV.

Top 5 Original Programs in April

Original program is the backbone of Yahoo TV and the core reason why our audience keeps coming back to visit us.  Here are some of the most viewed programs in the month of April.

Yahoo TV will continue to innovate and produce more premium infotainment for Hong Kong people. Stay tuned for more!

For advertising opportunity, please contact us.

Yahoo Native Advertising Suite continues to innovate and create new features that cope with the market and enhance audience engagement.  Brands can now base on different campaign objectives to adopt various formats and features of Native Ad to improve campaign ROIs.

Besides displaying a single image in a standard Native Ad, Native Carousel Ads allow brands to use multiple images to tell users a visual story. With each image links to a unique landing page, now you can take users to different pages of your website, driving much deeper user engagement. Users can also scroll through the Carousel Ad to find out offers or to learn more about the brand. A recent comparison has shown that advertisers who ran both Native Carousel Ad and Native Image ad revealed a 43% higher CTR for Carousel Ads.

More creatively, a long ad image can be divided into 3 - 5 long sequential portrait-oriented images, enticing potential users to navigate through the Carousel Ad to find out more.

With Carousel Ads, advertisers have the ability to serve ads that:

Deepen Engagement: let users scroll through the Carousel Ad to find out more about the brand and look through various offers and/or products.

Uplift Branding: better brand recall/association with a bigger canvas (up to 5 vertical screens), and each screen contain an image, an ad description and an unique URL.

Reach Quality Audience: Carousel ads are served to Yahoo Network including Yahoo News App, Finance App, and throughout the Yahoo Portal.

How our clients are getting the best out of Carousel Ad?

Client: Tourism Australia

Objective: Increase flight bookings to Australia among US travelers

Strategies: In June 2017, Tourism Australia worked with Oath to run a native advertising campaign designed to engage its target demographic of high-value U.S. travellers who have the time to head down under. After seeing success with Oath’s targeting capabilities in previous campaigns, Tourism Australia was on board when its media agency, Universal McCann, suggested a month-long of Yahoo Native Ad campaign.  

UM was confident that native ads would reach the right person while they were “ in the right mindset, ultimately driving qualified prospective travelers to partner sites at an efficient rate. These native ads were a perfect fit for a travel promotion because they leveraged compelling visuals showcasing Australia’s natural beauty. The campaign featured traditional native ads and a new native carousel ad that enabled potential travelers to truly experience the land down under through multiple photos.

Client Testimonial:

“This successful native ad campaign inspired travelers across the US. Oath drove a tremendous number of visits to our website, plus a high number of click-throughs to our partners at a very low cost per lead. The campaign hit our goals on all levels.” — Jane Whitehead, Vice President of Tourism Australia

Results:

Yahoo Native Advertising suite will continue to innovate and provide additional functions and features to help our clients build their brands.

Campaign Name: BlackRock x Yahoo Content Marketing Campaign (http://inspiredtoinvest.com.hk/)

Client Name: BlackRock Asset Management North Asia Limited

Ad Solutions Used: Content Marketing, Audience Targeting, Native Ads, Social Strategy

Campaign Objectives:

To provide investors interesting, approachable content to help them take actions with their cash and inspire them to invest.

To foster investment interest towards those who are aged 25-54 at different life stages and financial goals.

To boost BlackRock’s image as a company that always prioritises investor interests by leveraging on BlackRock’s professionalism and its rapport with its customers.

Strategies:

1. From Insights to Creating Topics of Interest Leverage Yahoo’s audience data and analysis to identify lifestyle topics that will create awareness and be relevant to the target audiences. The hub is viewed from the perspective of the user’s journey – so instead of focusing analysis on just one component, we look at results in each stage of the journey to understand how users engage and then generate insights and actionable recommendations. The real-time analytics dashboard enable us to analyse the effectiveness of our content across traffic sources and media channels, and make strategic decisions about what to promote where. End-investors will learn about the hub via native and display advertisements and Yahoo! HK Facebook page. Impact will be amplified via social media and retargeting to drive traffic to BlackRock’s website.

2. Create Inspirations to Invest via Engaging Contents and Game An always-on approach to connect consumers with lifestyle contents and interactive game with investment concepts that prompt them to start investing today.

Learning from the August report, over 60% of the content hub traffic is driven by mobile. With that in mind, we created a mobile first experience for our Asia Franchise campaign launch. The experience started with native and social media ads that led to a mobile friendly content hub with bite sized content, short infographic videos, polling, and online quiz game. The online quiz drove target audiences to read our articles and learn more about investment opportunities in Asia for a lucky draw to win a free travel to explore Asia.

3. The Brand that Helps Investors to Build Better Financial Future Build a connection with BlackRock and spur interest in investment by making investment more approachable. Through a series of weekly articles, we aim to build a connection with readers and encourage them to take control of their financial future. We highlight investment ideas in a more ‘lifestyle-oriented’ manner, e.g. by explaining the benefits of diversification through whiskey investing or the rise of impact investing through the concept of urban farming. Readers are also introduced to investment concepts and tools, such as the BlackRock Plan, to help them better plan for their future.

Results:

Total page view of the INSPIREDTOINVEST content hub reached 172K+

Time spent on the content hub >4 minutes on average

Successfully reached and exceeded the campaign target audience demographics

Three in four shoppers abandon their shopping cart, which makes retargeting a vital tool in re-connecting with high-potential customers. Dynamic Product Ads (DPA), in our Yahoo Native Advertising suite, is a feed-based retargeting solution personalized to users’ unique shopping history. It helps capture and retarget shoppers during different stages of their shopping journey.

As an example, a campaign with DPA adopted can indentify the following types of shopper for retargeting purpose:

Product viewers who only visited your page but did not select anything for the shopping cart.

Potential customers who have added a product(s) to the shopping cart but did not complete a transaction.

Purchasers who have completed a purchase.

With stages of the shopper mentality identified, advertisers can then set bids to retarget different kinds of shoppers, base on the purchase funnel, to lure potential ones (the ones who showed interest sans purchase) with a DPA that repeatedly entices them with products they are interested in. As a result, a healthy and prospective stream of revisiting shopper are attracted back in to your website to close the deal, hence increase campaign conversion rate.

With DPA, advertisers have the ability to serve ads that are:

Relevant: Show products from your website to shoppers that have visited your website and viewed your products.

Dynamic: Use your catalog feed to automatically create native ads that immediately capture their attention.

Scalable: Rely on Yahoo’s extensive reach to connect you to your target audience from search to purchase.

How our clients are getting the best out of DPA?

A Sportswear company who have adopted DPA found a significant improvement in campaign performance and ROI:

An Online Beauty Store had adopted DPA and experienced a 6x improvement in conversion:

Yahoo Native Advertising suite will continue to innovate and provide additional functions and features to help our clients build their brands.