How Brands Can Gain Traction Through Festival Culture

To put it in perspective, from 1999 to 2009, North American live music revenues shot from $1.5 billion to a peak of $4.6 billion while actual music sales plummeted.
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And now, when you go to Coachella or SXSW, you’ll see everyone snapping pictures and shooting videos to document the experience. Social media is what matters now. Because of this, sponsored onsite pop-up activations have become the key to creating real ROI for the short, mid and long term. At almost every festival today, startups, car companies, music blogs, restaurants and digital agencies all vie for brand recognition and influence distribution.
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The growth of dance music and outdoor festivals mirrors trends in Europe with longer traditions. England has several historic outdoor events, such as Reading and Leads and Glastonbury festivals. They have been in existence since the early '60s and '70s, respectively. The Glastonbury Festival draws more than 175,000 a day.
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Explosive festival growth in Europe has sprouted 2,500-3,000 festivals yearly and 670 in England alone, a 73 percent increase since 2003.

http://www.latechwatch.com/2016/02/brands-can-gain-traction-festival-culture/
http://www.laweekly.com/music/the-economics-of-music-festivals-whos-getting-rich-whos-going-broke-4167927
 

The Basics of Programmatic Advertising

According to Business Insider, in the last several years, programmatic advertising has quickly grown to a $15BN industry today. This represents over 53% of all digital advertising in 2015.

At the center of the ecosystem are the ad exchanges (like DoubleClick, App Nexus, Rubicon, PubMatic, OpenX, Mopub, Smaato and AdTech). These are platforms where advertisers can set up ad campaigns to buy impressions and publishers can offer up inventory to be sold. This computer-driven system replaces the need for human driven ad networks or sales teams.

Wrapping around the ad exchanges are three key players: (i) the data management platforms, or DMPs (like Adobe, X Plus One, Blue Kai, Aggregate Knowledge Knotice, Core Audience and nPario), who collect and store all the internet user data in one central database; (ii) the Demand Side Platforms, or DSPs (like DoubleClick, MediaMath, DataXu, Rocketfuel, App Nexus and Marin Software), who enable marketers to bid on and buy ads from ad exchanges, including all campaign analytics; and (iii) the Supply Side Platforms, or SSPs (like OpenX, PubMatic, Rubicon Project, App Nexus, and Right Media), who enable publishers to offer inventry for sale through the ad exchanges, including all revenue analytics. In addition, the huge sites like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and Facebook have set up their own programmatic ecosystems, as well.

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On average, assume CPMs (cost per 1,000 impressions) in the $0.50 to $2 CPM range via programmatic. Which is material savings vs. the $10 or higher CPMs that are typically in the human-driven, non-programmatic world.
http://www.latechwatch.com/2016/02/basics-programmatic-advertising/