TechnicalQuestion: If we pass over our proprietary macros, how long does it take for C-S NEXT to ingest? Answer: 3 business days maximum, unless we are already integrated with them. Question: Can we have data passed through our DSP for retargeting segments? Answer: Generally, yes, except for DV360- their framework isn’t open enough for us to pass data through. What DSP are you using? We can do a quick feasibility check and get back to you. Question: Are you able to deliver on a reservation and programmatic as well as cross-device? Answer: Yes we are agnostic to media being integrated with all the main tech platforms of the media ecosystem (DV360, MediaMath, The Trade Desk, Rakuten, etc..) and we can deliver our content on mobile, desktop, and Connected-TV simply with a VPAID / VAST tag in full redirect. Question: Can I change impression levels and campaign flights in the dashboard as I’m working on a campaign? Answer: Yes you can always go back and change campaign details before setting it live Question: Can Connected-Stories be activated on social media? Answer: No, Connected-Stories technology cannot be implemented on social media platforms. We can deliver on every inventory outside the walled garden. Question: Is it possible to activate a “line item” in Reservation? Answer: No, the line items can be associated for programmatic campaigns only because they come from the DSPs. | Customer Success/ServiceQuestion: Will someone from C-S NEXT be able to onboard members of our team who will have access to the platform? Answer: Yes! We’ll provide demos for all who have access to the platform. We can provide thorough training for every module of the platform to provide complete transparency on the process even if the seat/workspace is managed by the Connected-Stories NEXT team. Question: For managed service, how long does onboarding take? Answer: Setup of the account takes just a few minutes and subsequentially campaigns can go live right after. We often say Connected-Stories NEXT can be used at many different levels allowing for fast executions and the fastest campaign deployment times in the industry. Question: What account support will be available? (E.g. sales, account, adops, creative, etc.) Answer: We can provide support of any kind to our partners. Within the Connected-Stories NEXT team, we have AdOps specialists, creative solutions, and account managers, alongside sales and business development support. Also, we pride ourselves to support our partners with the highest level of dedicated tech support and accessibility to resources all the way up to the C-suite level. Question: Would resources on our account be dedicated or shared? Answer: It depends on the agreement in place regarding partnership spend level. Here’s a chart for reference: Question: How are technical problems escalated, and what are the SLAs against resolutions? Answer: Support availability also comes in different tiers based on the SLA in place. Our enterprise-level client/partners are given 24/7 support for critical issues with immediate response and a small resolution window of a few hours max. Then for other cosmetic and non-critical issues, the resolution window is extended to a few more hours. Our teams can be accessed via a live chat directly on the platform, as well as via email or phone. We can also offer a dedicated slack account for our enterprise-level partners. Question: What services do you provide? Answer: We support both a total self-service solution with enterprise-level support through our platform solutions manager, while also supporting a fully-managed service via our account and creative solutions managers. With the self-service solution, the user will be able to manage completely its own account by creating new workspaces, assigning a new user to workspaces, managing roles and permission as well as managing the complete lifecycle of campaigns, from the strategy and the ad designs to optimizations and final reporting. With our managed-service solution, it's the Connected-Stories NEXT dedicated team is responsible for every aspect concerning the management of the partner's workspace/seat, while still providing transparent access to every single piece of the platform. Question: What does the full service and support entail? Answer: Our full-service/managed support includes every aspect, building, automating, and decisioning- all available through our platform tools - to be handled by Connected-Stories NEXT’s internal team. Question: What sort of onboarding support does a self-service partner receive? Answer: Our platform solutions managers are dedicated to onboarding, training, and supporting partners' teams with the objective of bringing them up to speed with every single module of the platform. Partners soon become experts in the use of Connected-Stories NEXT NEXT NEXT NEXT NEXT. Our product marketing team is responsible to create cheat-sheets, video tutorials, and best practices in order to have our partners fall in love with the Connected-Stories NEXT platform while also helping them to use it at their best. Question: Are there different permissions for user logins? E.g. Agency, client, publisher access Answer: Yes, Connected-Stories NEXT supports conditioned access to any of the platform's features/tools including the dashboards. The account owner, whether that's the agency, the brand, or the publisher, can decide what to make available/visible for both standard/advanced reporting features and building/assembling tools. | IntegrationsQuestion: Are you integrated with Prisma? Answer: Not currently, although it's part of our roadmap for 2022. Question: Are you integrated with BlueKai, Krux for programmatic/dynamic strategy targeting? Answer: Connected-StoriesNEXT implements data pipelines as a batch process, for bulk data up/download, or as a streaming process, which processes data as it becomes available to the pipeline. Bluekai data can be currently vehicled within Connected-Stories NEXT in order to allow dynamic content personalization using the DSPs as a proxy. Question: Are you integrated with Neustar for programmatic/dynamic strategy targeting? Answer: Thanks to our native cloud services foundation, the Connected-Stories NEXT platform can support any type of data service: real-time data streaming; time-triggered data bucket transfer; bulk data transfer. Neustar integration is currently on our roadmap while data can be currently exchanged through any type of data transfer mechanism. We also support any Neustar trackers or pixels within our ad content. Question: Are you integrated with Adobe Audience Manager for programmatic/dynamic strategy targeting? Answer: Connected-Stories NEXT implements data pipelines as a batch process, for bulk data up/download, or as a streaming process, which processes data as it becomes available to the pipeline. We are also an Adobe Exchange Partner and we have developed our IN/OUT connector for AAM that is currently in the alpha stage. It is scheduled for 1Q2022 submission to Adobe. C-S NEXT also supports the AAM audience taxonomy through mapping on IAB's standard audience taxonomy. Question: Are you integrated with any additional DMP or other data sources for dynamic strategy targeting? Answer: All DMPs data can be leveraged by the Connected-Stories platform in order to personalize video and display content on the fly using the DSPs as a proxy to leverage the incoming data in real-time. Question: Are you integrated with LiveRamp, Viant, Neustar, Datalogix, or any other CRMs for programmatic/dynamic strategy targeting? Answer: Through the most advanced data architecture based on a data warehouse built on the most scalable technology and data pipelines, Connected-Stories NEXT supports both bulk batch upload and data streamings. We do not currently have a server-to-server integration with Liveramp, although we can use the DSP as a proxy in order to leverage incoming data via macros. Question: Are you integrated with Google Data Studio, Tableau, or any other visualization partners? Answer: Connected-Stories' data architecture is organized according to the most advanced best practices. The system ingests data from clients using an elastic, serverless framework for unbeatable scalability (100sK events/sec). Raw data are stored to be the source of truth for the platform. Data transformations are processed through different pipelines depending on the latency requirements (real-time or batch processing), each transformation process is executed by a serverless auto-scaling system. The step is orchestrated by a data workflow management system based on Apache Airflow. Finally, the data warehouse is based on the high-performance petabyte database BigQuery. Native connectors are available for the most popular business intelligence tools, notably Tableau, Looker, Google Studio, and more. C-S data architecture doesn't need an extra configuration per user and it is organized to process data into 3 different tiers depending on the customers' needs: Tier 1: Data are collected to report all standard campaigns' KPIs. Tier 2: Data is collected to express all advanced features of C-S NEXT platform and monitor in near real-time fashion the status of the campaigns aim to make an opportune live optimization. Tier 3: All data collected are cleaned and arranged to best meet the user needs, data are exposed by the top performance industry-lead cloud services ready to be used with 3rd party tools with standard connectors. | Reporting & DataQuestion: What type of insights are you able to provide? Answer: Our creative intelligence dashboard will provide you with the most granular information about creatives from the more standard metrics (VTR - CTR - Engagement rates) to the more sophisticated ones (user interactions analysis - A/B testing comparison etc.) Question: How often is reporting data updated? Answer: Connected-Stories NEXT offers multiple reporting tiers and data updates are based on those tiers.
Question: How often is conversion data updated within reporting? Answer: Conversions are treated like any other metric in terms of availability within the Connected-Stories data dashboards and therefore subject to the different tiers available. Question: How is cross-environment/user/device recognition accomplished? Answer: Connected-Stories uses the so-called C-S ID, which is a proprietary hybrid solution capable of leveraging device IDs alongside leveraging the ETag through the HTTPS protocol within the browsers' cache, in order to map users across different environments and reconcile the entire consumer journey. Question: Do you record mobile, video, and desktop display impressions on (impression served/count on decision) (impression rendered/count on download) Answer: Yes Question: Do you have the ability to define the time period of the report, and export either total reach or incremental reach for a given time period? Answer: Yes Question: What metrics are considered standard reporting metrics within your platform? Answer: All of the standard media metrics and ratios down every single creative variation are considered standard metrics. Question: What engagement metrics can you capture? Answer: Any engagement metrics and user interactions with the ad units. These metrics are part of our advance reporting tiers also named "creative intelligence insights" Question: Do you offer visualization of reporting? Answer: Yes. All of Connected-Stories NEXT dashboards are native to our platform and have been developed by our internal product team. They feed from Google Big Query giving end-users a visual and granular understanding of campaign performance. Data visualization architecture uses a layered caching system to let the user query a very large amount of data with blazing performance. C-S data product is divided into two different tools: Data analytics interactive dashboard and Campaigns Creative Intelligence. The data dashboards allow the user to query data to get all major campaign metrics and KPIs, filtered and grouped. Campaigns Creative Intelligence allows users to deeply understand in near real-time user behavior on each creative, video, and display, and a compelling visual fashion. Campaigns Creative Intelligence allows the user to make a time-based Ad analysis on all different creative versions and understand the drop-off curve, engagement rate, and so on. This gives the user the power to perform changes and granular optimization of the campaign while running. All the raw data that feed the data dashboards can be organized to be exported by the user through a standard interface, this allows the design of custom intelligence on the data alongside an ML model training to best feets the user's needs. Question: Do you offer viewability reporting? Answer: Yes, with granularity on every single creative variation both video and display Question: How granular can reporting be broken down? I.e. by date, by week, day of the week, device, browser, location (DMA/city), etc. Answer: Connected-Stories reporting can be broken very granularly using date and time, day of the week, week, month, device, browser, OS, geolocation such as zip codes, DMA, city, publishers, context, and more. Question: For video ad serving, is data available on impressions, quartiles, completed view, content, player size, etc.? Answer: Yes Question: How often are false impressions, clicks, etc. removed from the data? Answer: Connected-Stories reports immediately false traffic or clicks generated by bots or by suspicious activities happening on the creatives or the publishers' pages. Question: What method is used to remove false impressions, clicks, etc., generated by non-standard means? Answer: We implement both user behavior analysis as well as analyzing the device vitals and other signals to detect suspicious activities. Question: How do you handle click fraud after reporting is processed? Answer: We remove those suspicious clicks from the overall report and highlight suspicious activities separately in the reports. Question: Does the ad server track post-event activity (post click and post impression)? Answer: Yes, via our C-S Pixel which needs to be set up on the advertisers' landing pages. Question: Do you provide a dedicated attribution solution? Answer: Yes Question: Do you provide click or exposure attribution based on the count of exposures? Answer: Yes, this is again subject to C-S ML Algorithms which take into consideration user behavior and exposures of different creatives thoroughly. Question: Does the company track post-even activity and provide customized weighted attribution that can be defined by the agency? Answer: Yes, although the weight cannot be currently customized externally or over-imposed. Connected-Stories ML Algorithms take care of that and cannot currently be modified by an external agent Question: Do you offer customized modeling or recommendation of attribution that can be viewed alongside last-click/last-view? Answer: Yes, subject to C-S ML Algorithms which take into consideration user behavior and exposures of different creatives thoroughly. Question: Does the platform have the ability to provide time between ad exposure and conversion activities? Answer: Yes Question: Is reporting for all mediums available within the reporting UI? (Display/Video/Search/Social)? Answer: Yes for both display and video, while we don't do search or social currently. Question: What is your stance on data collection and ownership? Answer: We are committed to protecting the privacy and security of your content and your customers' data. You own your data and hold all rights to your content and IP (source). The product is integrated with the IAB consent management platform and its creative distribution service implements the consent string handling. The personalization features of NEXT are designed to dynamically adapt the granularity to what is requested by the consent string. Additionally, we undergo regular audits from advisory firms. Question: Is Deterministic data utilized in some capacity for ad server decision-making or reporting? Answer: Yes, we use a mix of probabilistic and deterministic data in order to personalize creatives in real-time. Question: If so, is leveraged deterministic data collected directly through the platform or an affiliated platform owned and operated under the same parent company, or is it provided by an outside source? If able to disclose, please provide the outside data provider. Answer: Usually by leveraging our integrations with DSPs or DMPs. Question: What is the scale of leveraged deterministic data? Answer: This depends on each partner/advertiser and the DMPs/DSPs they use as part of their ad tech stack. Question: Do you do data matching? Answer: We don't do data matching as we are not a classic ad server. Question: Can you ingest offline data into your reporting suite? Answer: As long as we have shared IDs or a joint lookup table, offline data can be ingested within Connected-Stories NEXT either via APIs (the same used to extract data from our raw databases) or by uploading structured CSV files sent through FTPS Question: How far back can reporting data be pulled and for what type of reports? (Quarterly, yearly) Answer: Any report is available at least up to 12 months prior. More custom reports and integrations are decided upon the formalization of the agreement. Question: Can you report down to the creative version & variant levels? Answer: Yes Question: Are you able to report conversions at the creative version & variant levels? Answer: Yes Question: Do you have the ability for the reporting tool to allow users to save and share reports? Answer: Yes Question: Is there an option to schedule reporting from the interface? Answer: Yes Question: Do you have the ability to identify poor performance (as defined by the user), and automate alerts to a pre-defined contact list upon discovering under-performers? Answer: Yes, this is part of our most advanced analytics tier. Question: Do you offer auto-reporting options for advanced reports? Answer: Yes, custom and standard reports can be produced automatically via Connected-Stories tier 2 and 3 dashboards. Question: Do you have the ability to upload offline conversion data into the ad server? Answer: Yes, Connected-Stories can reconcile conversion data using our own C-S Pixel to track goals on an advertiser's landing page or as well as reconcile separate 3rd-party measured conversions. Question: Does the ad server have the ability to provide audience delivery and performance reporting? At what granularity? Answer: Audience delivery reporting is based on the DSPs/DMPs information we can retrieve at the ad call, like for creative personalization. Granularity depends on the data available from those 3rd-party platforms which Connected-Stories is able to tight with creative variations performance. Question: Is the ad server able to report GRPs? Answer: No, as we are not a pure ad server Question: Is the ad server able to provide cookie-level reports? Answer: Yes, based on Connected-Stories NEXT unique IDs or via 3rd-party IDs if shared with Connected-Stories NEXT at the ad call. Question: Are additional metrics such as Advertising or Device ID able to be collected and ingested by other 3rd parties? Answer: Yes, Connected-Stories data feedback look leverages the Connected-Stories ID, thus allowing to track anonymously user behavior with any single creative and creative elements, in order to enable 3rd-party platforms to leverage the data for alternative use such as buying media or reconciling the consumer journey. Question: Do you offer cross-device reporting? If so, how granular can you go? Answer: Connected-Stories NEXT offers cross-device reporting to a pretty extensive granularity taking into consideration all the limitations and changes happening in the industry. Question: What is your methodology behind your cross-device capabilities? Please elaborate on what fuels it deterministically or probabilistically Answer: We rely on an ML-based probabilist approach which takes into consideration a number of signals (context, geo, device, location, etc.) and then mixes them with the Connected-Stories NEXT ID, in order to map users with as much precision as possible. The amount of data available in any region affects the granularity and effectiveness of the solution. Question: Do you offer any current solutions for ITP? Please elaborate Answer: It's an alternative solution we have developed in order to work around ITP Safari implementations which allows Connected-Stories NEXT to use the user's cache instead of traditional cookies. Question: How long are log files available? How far back is historical data available? Answer: There is no limit to the extent to which we can preserve and store historical data. As partners choose to engage with Connected-Stories Tier 3 data solution, this can be subject to the agreement. Question: What fields can be captured within log files? Answer: Any raw information and metrics we are capable to report on through our Tier 1 and 2 data dashboards. Question: Do your log files contain a universal user ID? Answer: We both report Connected-Stories NEXT IDs alongside any 3rd-party ID or Universal ID if shared with Connected-Stories at the ad call. Question: How long does the setup for API delivery take? Answer: This depends on the sort of integration needed. Ours are standard APIs built on the Google Cloud Platform and already compliant with most industry-leading platforms in the market. Estimate time for integration float around 3 to 10 business days. Question: What is the cadence in which log files can be delivered? Answer: This depends on the service calling on our APIs. It can be set up in any sort of way the partner chooses to execute the integration. Question: Are external reports available via API, Log Files, and/or CSV? Answer: All data collected by Connected-Stories NEXT is cleaned and arranged to best meet the user needs, data are stored and processed by the top performance industry-lead cloud services ready to be used with 3rd party tools with standard connectors. This means that with Connected-Stories Tier 3 custom reporting, partners can tap into our data either utilizing our APIs or leveraging CSV structured files delivered via FTPS. |
Audience MeasurementQuestion: Are you able to integrate with custom audience measurement solutions? Answer: Yes, our open infrastructure allows Connected-Stories to support integration with any 3rd-party technologies, including custom audience measurement solutions. Question: Are you integrated with DoubleVerify? Answer: We work with all the main brand safety players in the industry including IAS, DV, Moat, Meetrics, and many others. Our platforms support ingestions of any of their pixels or JS tags, while our tags can be wrapped by their solutions before being trafficked via DSPs or direct publishers' IOs. Direct API integrations are on our roadmap. Question: Does this integration push data to the ad verification platform for reporting? Answer: Not yet Question: Does this integration pull data from the ad verification platform into the UI? Answer: Not yet | Creative ProductionQuestion: How long does the creative development process typically take for dynamic video? Answer: Connected-Stories development building and assembling process for dynamic and interactive videos is probably the fastest in the market. Clients and partners can use the C-S Studio independently or be supported by our creative solution managers through our fully-managed service. In each case, even the most complex video units can be brought to life in a matter of hours. Question: Can I leverage existing video assets or do I have to create new ones specific to Connected-Stories NEXT’s specs? Answer: You can upload/bulk upload existing creative assets inclusive of video, graphics, etc. | PlatformQuestion: Are you able to deliver across any publishers / DSP? Answer: We are agnostic to media and our platform is integrated with the main tech platforms in the media ecosystem. From a DSP perspective we are integrated with:
For Connected-TV we are integrated with the below broadcaster:
| Costs/PricingQuestion: Is there a minimum investment (budget/volume/campaign duration) required to activate Connected-Stories NEXT? Answer: There is no minimum investment/spending required, however a consistent amount of volumes and duration of the campaigns allow us and the client to gather better and more meaningful insights into consumers Question: Is there an incremental cost associated with advanced reporting features? Answer: Yes, Connected-Stories NEXT creative intelligence dashboards are part of our tier 2 and 3 analytics/reporting solutions and are charged separately. |
Brand & Attribution StudiesQuestion: Are you integrated with Millward Brown, Nielsen, Phoenix, or other vendors? Answer: Not directly, but we support their pixels/trackers and we enable brand studies on any creative versions. Question: Does the integration enable control and exposed brand studies including exposures to specific creative versions? Answer: It does, although without direct API-based integration. Question: Do you offer an in-house, proprietary brand study solution? Answer: Yes, we are capable of managing Brand Studies directly via Connected-Stories NEXT, leveraging our Journey Designer in order to set up control groups and compare Connected-Stories NEXT ads performance against any standard creative (video or display) not enriched or personalized with our tools. Question: Does your in-house brand study enable control and exposed methodology including exposures to specific creative versions? Answer: Yes it does. It provides as much granularity as one can think of in order to get a thorough understanding of the performance of each creative version. | SecurityQuestion: What security measures are in place to protect from security or data breaches? Answer: All our data are encrypted at rest, using the AES256 encryption schema. Accessing data is allowed only to selected and authenticated personnel having a specific role. Access to data is registered in audit logs and retained for at least 30 days. Access to data is shielded by an intrusion detection system. It detects network-based threats such as malware, spyware, and command-and-control attacks and generates network-based threat data for threat investigation and correlation Question: What is your security infrastructure? Answer: Connected-Stories NEXT uses a combination of clouds and open source software, rather than relying on a single service provider or closed technology stack for their needs. It is totally designed and implemented by the internal R&D team, rather than by aggregation of products collected through corporate acquisitions. The cloud gives us a faster way to technically meet their customer needs. Our open cloud transforms the way our clients operate their business, instilling freedom in how they innovate and drive differentiated customer experiences. Question: Where are your servers located? Answer: We have servers located in Milan, Frankfurt, Virginia, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Singapore and we can open an instance with Google Cloud in a matter of hours in 200+ countries covering every geographic area for planetary scalability. Question: What database tech do you use? Answer: Google Big Query and all the other services offered by the Google Cloud Platform Question: What CDN (content distribution network) do you use? Answer: Akamai Question: Are your servers securely housed? Answer: Yes, we rely on best-in-class tech solutions and architecture completely in the cloud. Question: What is the impact on the customer in the event of an SLA breach? Answer: Serious problems may arise only if a specific service is unavailable in two regions or more. In case of a single region fall, our service is still available with little latency increase. If Connected-Stories NEXT, for any reason, is made unavailable to correctly render its ad delivery services, customers have the right to receive credits. Any credits owed by Connected-Stories NEXT to CUSTOMER pursuant to Section 1 above will be calculated as follows: the percentage set forth in the table below multiplied by the aggregate amount paid or payable by CUSTOMER to HYPERTV for the month in which the credit accrued: Ad Serving Availability 99.50-99.89% Service Credits 10%, Ad Serving Availability 99.00-99.49% Service Credits 15%, Ad Serving Availability 98.50-98.99% Service Credits 20%, Ad Serving Availability 98.00-98.49% Service Credits 25%, Ad Serving Availability 97.99% or fewer Service Credits 30%. Question: What’s your internal monitoring & alerting tech and process? Answer: We monitor each cloud service we use; alarms on service unavailability are sent on several channels (slack, email, etc. ) to the personnel responsible for the Connected-Stories NEXT tech infrastructure. In addition to each service, also the application is being constantly monitored in order to receive alarms also in case of connected stories software failures. Question: Are you bound by any SLA on your tech platform? Describe. Answer: Yes, the majority of our master service agreements include a technical SLA. Details: Connected-Stories NEXT ensures that its Services are Available for CUSTOMER’s use at least 99.9% of the time, calculated on a calendar monthly basis. “Platform Availability” will be measured each month by adding the total number of minutes in such month that the Connected-Stories NEXT Platform delivered or was available to deliver Content in response to requests for such Content from CUSTOMER’s ad server divided by the total number of minutes in such month that the Connected-Stories NEXT Platform should have been available to deliver Content. The Connected-Stories NEXT Platform will be considered unavailable if, for instance, no Content is being delivered in response to a request for Content from CUSTOMER’s or its vendors’ ad servers, or Content does not display properly to end users due to any cause within Connected-Stories NEXT reasonable control. If Platform Availability falls below 99.9% in any month, then CUSTOMER will receive a credit. Connected-Stories NEXT will acknowledge and respond to issues according to the Severity Level of the reported Issue. Connected-Stories NEXT NEXT NEXT NEXT will use best efforts to correct the reported error(s) consistent with the Severity Level of the issue, as follows: Severity 1) critical business impact on CUSTOMER’s operations; Services are not usable. Response Time: within 30 minutes. Updates: every hour. Reasonable workaround within 6 hours, final resolution within 24 hours. Severity 2) significant business impact where Services are usable but is restricted; loss of functionality. Response Time: within 2 hours. Updates: every 4 hours. Reasonable workaround within 12 hours, final resolution within 48 hours. Severity 3) some business impact where Services are usable with less significant or non- critical features unavailable. Response Time: within 1 business day. Updates: every 48 hours. Reasonable workaround within 5 business days, final resolution within 10 business days. Severity 4) minimal business impact where the Issue is causing little or no impact (e.g., questions, etc.). Response Time: 2 business days. Updates: every 5 business days. | ||
What's the difference between Rules Engine at campaign level and story level?
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