On the bidder, we added a feature for Flights at the Campaign level where users are able to set different budgets for specific date ranges within the overall Campaign’s date range. This enables more granular control of pacing, spend, and scheduling, helping teams optimize delivery throughout a Campaign’s lifecycle.
The new Flights feature includes:
The bidder now supports seat-level currency display settings, allowing users to select a preferred currency (e.g., AUD) for campaign setup and reporting. While all billing and pacing continue in USD, bid prices, budgets, floor prices, and spend metrics are shown in the selected currency using daily exchange rates. Conversions occur during campaign/line creation, daily updates, and when generating reports. UI elements across platforms (CTV, DOOH, Origin) will display the applicable currency, and new admin billing metrics provide side-by-side comparisons in both USD and the selected currency.
On the bidder, in the ‘Custom Reports’ two new dimensions have been added to the Custom Report and Path to Conversion Report types:
On the bidder, when a new Line or Campaign is created, Microsoft is added as a default exchange. Currently, the default exchanges include Magnite, Index, Freewheel, and Microsoft.
On the bidder in the Line Setup section, estimated daily values for cost and impressions are shown based on the assumption that the full budget is evenly distributed across the selected date range. These figures represent projected daily spend or delivery and are not the actual daily budget settings.
On the bidder, a new Max Bid Price field is being introduced for Lines using Advanced Bid Controls within the Line Setup section. This value defines the maximum bid allowed across all deals on the Line. If a bid set on any deal exceeds the Max Bid, the platform will not bid on that deal.
A new Templates tab is now available on the bidder, providing access to both Campaign Templates and Line Templates. Campaign Templates display key details such as status, ID, name, line count, and description, with expandable rows showing associated Line Templates. Both campaign and line names are clickable, linking to their respective detail views. Users can edit or clone templates, with editable descriptions and support for icon uploads. Cloning a campaign template replicates its settings and allows selective inclusion of line templates. Line Templates listed separately are standalone (not tied to a campaign) and editable or cloneable with similar functionality.
See the following wiki documentation to learn more: Templates
On the bidder, Multi Field Targeting allows a Campaign or Line to match across multiple content attributes simultaneously: channel, network, publisher, genre, series, or title. If any value from the list appears in any of these fields, the bid becomes eligible. Enter each value on a separate line. This enables flexible yet precise targeting across varied content types.
On the bidder, a new Time Frame Days dropdown (1–14 days) allows setting Line frequency caps over a selectable time frame. Additionally, the Line Recency setting controls the minimum interval between ads served to the same user within a Line, with options including None, 1 min, 5 min, 15 min, 30 min, 1 hr, and 6 hr. Together, these features help users manage how often ads are served at the Line level, preventing overly frequent exposure within customizable periods.
This new feature enables users to share IP pixels between the CTV and Origin platforms when they have access to both. Each pixel can only be shared with one advertiser on the other platform, and once a pixel is shared and saved, the selection becomes locked and cannot be edited in the pixel dialog. Users can also choose to create CTV and Origin audiences, where CTV audiences have editable expiration, while Origin audiences are fixed at 30 days. Audience expiration settings can differ between platforms for the same pixel. Importantly, sharing the pixel is not required to create audiences on either platform; access alone enables the audience creation options. The “Track Chrome Conversions” option is now visible in both platforms for users with CTV access, with a note that conversion tracking via Google’s Privacy Sandbox is only supported for CTV campaigns.
On the bidder, when a user associates an expired audience to a Campaign or Line, the names are greyed out in the Audience dropdown section. This applies to all audience types: ART, contextual, custom, and third-party.
In the Advertiser, Campaign, and Line Details screens, new tabs labeled Setup and Performance are being introduced to separate configuration details from performance insights. This update improves usability by organizing information into clear sections, making it easier for users to review campaign setup and monitor results at each level without navigating away.
On the bidder, in the Geo section of the Targeting tab for CTV campaigns and lines, users can now apply Allow and Block filters independently for each geo type. For example, a user may allow specific regions while blocking certain DMAs on the same campaign or line. This added flexibility supports more precise geographic targeting and better aligns with complex campaign strategies.
Custom audiences can now be created from the Pontiac IP pixel. When creating or editing the pixel, select the ‘Create Audience’ checkbox. The audience will appear in the Custom Audiences section of Origin with the name and ID of the IP pixel, and will automatically populate with IPs. The expiration window, or ‘days to live’ for the records in this audience is 30 days. This means that users that visit the page where the pixel is placed will remain in the audience for 30 days.
In Origin and DOOH, the ‘custom date range’ option was added to the reporting interval dropdown for metric tiles on the lines and advertiser details screens. When selected, a start date and end date can be entered and metrics on the tiles will update accordingly.
Note that metrics will be reported in the seat time zone. If today’s date is selected in Origin, metrics will be on a 3-hour delay. For DOOH, metrics become available in the morning (EST) for the previous day’s spend so today’s date will not be selectable.
On DOOH line items, in the ‘Edit Targeting’ section users can now apply dayparts to specify the days of the week and hours of the day when the line can serve:
As of Thursday, August 22nd, Pontiac will be making a change to the IP conversion attribution methodology. Pontiac will start counting conversions that resulted from a business IP. Prior to this date, all IP conversion metrics were filtered to include only actions taken by home IP addresses. With this change, a dimension has been added to the IP Conversion reports for ‘Home or Business’ that will enable users to identify the type of IP for each conversion registered and filter events as needed.
As of September 2, 2024 Xandr is no longer supporting inventory in the following countries:
Afghanistan, Aland Island, Angola, Antarctica, Bhutan, Bonaire Saint Eustatius and Saba, British Indian Ocean Territory, Burundi, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Chad, Curacao, Equatorial Guinea, Falkland Islands, French Southern Territories, Ghana, Isle of Man, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Mali, Micronesia Federated States, Morrocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Palestinian Territory, Saint Bartelemy, Saint Helena Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha, Saint Martin, Sao Tome and Principe, Sint Maarten, Soloman Islands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, South Sudan, Sudan, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Swaziland, Timor-Leste, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Western Sahara
These countries will be deprecated in the Origin platform.
The Pontiac platform will be making a change to IP conversion attribution. As of Monday July 15th, Pontiac will start counting conversions that resulted from a user entering a brand’s website from a non-browser environment — e.g., a link in an email, or a mobile in-app experience such as an Instagram sponsored post. Prior to Monday, if a user saw an ad, then saw an ad on Instagram, clicked on it, and made a purchase, the Pontiac platform was not attributing this conversion event to the ad. After Monday, Pontiac will start start attributing these conversions toward the ad served via Pontiac.
Due to this change in methodology, custom reports run after July 15th for previous dates may not match the IP conversion metrics in the UI. The custom reports will use the new methodology, but UI metrics will not be updated to reflect this change.
New API documentation has been released for DOOH & CTV platforms. All documentation has been migrated to a new site:
‘Create Research Report’ is a button added in the Audience Discovery report details screen. This button will open the audience research report builder, exporting the zip codes found by audience discovery report, to easily create a detailed profile to better understand other characteristics this audience may have.
For example, if an advertiser is looking to target women aged 20-40, an audience research report can be created to find the zip codes that over-index for these characteristics. Then click ‘Create Research Report’ and select other demographic or interest categories such as ‘Households’, ‘Political’ or ‘Health & Fitness’ etc, to create a comprehensive profile of the target audience and their browsing behaviors. As you can see below, we find that zip codes that over index for women aged 20-40 also over-index for income of $100,000+
The DOOH platform has expanded from U.S. and Canadian inventory to include all venues available through Vistar globally.
Each line item can only target venues in a single country, this is a dropdown in the line settings. When the country is selected, the venues table will be filtered to show only inventory in the selected country. Once the country is selected and the line is submitted, this cannot be changed.
Across all platforms, the filters in the custom report builders are now multi-select dropdown fields that are also searchable. This allows a report to be built from a select list of advertisers, lines or campaigns.
A new option for automated report delivery – custom reports can now be configured to deliver by Google Cloud Storage
On the tables with metrics in the platform, use the menu icon to customize the table columns and select the metrics you want to view. Hover over the edge of a column to grab and drag to adjust column size.
As of Sunday (4/21/24), video hosting fee charges on the Origin platform will be migrated from the current methodology as a separate account balance deduction, to be charged as a fee associated to each line item where applicable. This change is an effort to improve the overall experience when managing your campaign budgets by including the fee directly in the total spend for each line item.
Note, that existing line items that are currently closing around the bid price with hosted videos may require a $0.50 CPM bid increase to account for this fee if you see any interruption in delivery. For more information on pricing, see here: Pricing
A new dropdown menu in custom reporting allows the data in each report to be pulled in any time zone. Reporting in the seat time zone will match the metrics displayed in the interface, both in the Advertiser tab and the Reporting dashboard. Billing & account balance deductions are made in UTC time zone.
In Audience Research, when publishing an Audience from an IP pixel placed on the Advertiser’s website, users can now select the audience type they would like to publish:
Using the ‘Input Type’ dropdown, users can select to create a contextual AI audience from a set of URLs or from several paragraphs of text (for example, you could prompt chat-GPT to write a few paragraphs about why Chianti is the best wine for a dinner party and use that as an input/’seed’ data to find related articles). This gives advertisers the ability to fully customize & fine tune the input used, without the need to search for and rely on existing articles from the web.
Leverage the Audience Research Tool to learn more about the users that are showing interest in a specific topic across the web. Custom interest categories can be created from a set of example articles related to the content, by creating a Contextual AI audience. For example, here is a Contextual AI audience recently made about Chianti Wine.
The following articles related to the product were entered to ‘define’ the interest category:
The Pontiac Contextual AI tool found 7,362 related articles, including the following examples:
In this section we look at this example in Audience Discovery: Audience Research: Custom Interest Categories
The custom contextual AI audiences can now also be used in the Audience Research tool to run reports.
In the Audience Discovery report when we select this audience, the tool will find all the zip codes that have been visiting these sites. We can then target these zip codes as an audience to reach users interested in Chianti Wine.
But what if we want to know more about the audience? Who are the people reading about Chianti Wine? We can select this contextual audience in Audience Research and the attributes we want to research – households, labor, education, etc to create a complete audience profile. For our Chianti Wine audience, the users fit the profile of age 20-40, predominately female, HHI of 100k+, democrats and other interests include Italian & French cuisine, books & literature, government & politics.
From this complete profile of demographics & interests, the Audience Research tool will also produce a lookalike model of zip codes that are the most similar across all characteristics to the zip codes with the desired browsing behavior.
An update to the scheduling capabilities for automated reports that provides more flexibility and customization to when reports are delivered and what date ranges they include. Select from common report frequency & interval settings in the dropdowns or select custom to configure your desired delivery schedule and lookback for the report.
In the ‘Geo’ tab of the Line Item targeting section, change the dropdown to City to select cities from any country across the globe for targeting. In countries and regions where zip codes are less common and DMAs may not be available, city targeting provides more granular geo targeting to serve ads only in the designated area most relevant to your campaign.
Leverage the Audience Discovery Tool to find the zip codes showing the most interest in any topic across the web. Custom interest categories can be created from a set of example articles related to the content, by creating a Contextual AI audience. For example, here is a Contextual AI audience recently made about Chianti Wine.
The following articles related to the product were entered to ‘define’ the interest category:
The Pontiac Contextual AI tool found 7,362 related articles, including the following examples:
These custom Contextual AI audiences will now appear under ‘Custom’ in the Audience Discovery report builder as an interest category. Selecting this interest category will create a report of the zip codes that have higher than average viewership on the sites from the audience. In this case, the report provides insights into the zip codes that are reading more about Chianti wine than other zip codes across the U.S. This data can be exported into a targetable audience that can be used on campaigns of all media types.
Top Zip Codes viewing the sites about Chianti:
A new App Name column where bundle ID appears in ART reports. Now both the targeting ID and the name are displayed so that the app can be more quickly and easily identified.
An additional chart under the ‘Inventory’ section for Audience Discovery and Audience Research reports that shows the top Genres that your audience is streaming for CTV. For example, this audience has higher than average viewership for Indie movies and content related to Cooking. These genres can also be targeted on CTV campaigns – another strategy to place CTV ads where they are more likely to reach your target audience.
In Audience Discovery Reports, a zip code list can now be applied as a ‘block’ list in the Filtering section. Blocked zip codes will not be returned in the audience, allowing reports to be refined to meet the exact needs of your campaigns.
New filters for Audience Research reports filter out input that doesn’t match a reasonable amount of statistical significance to build a more reliable report. Traffic filtering will remove zip codes from the ‘website analytics’ that have a small number of unique IPs (one person visiting the site over and over that could potentially influence results) and zip codes that have very few loads.
This update included changes to Custom Audiences, Custom ART Audiences and Custom Contextual Audiences to unify the structure for updates & expiration:
On the custom reports for IP Conversions, the lookback field was changed from a drop down with set options to a customizable text field. This field is used to set the attribution window for the report. The default and max value for this field is 30 days.
More in-depth detail into exactly what your audience is watching with new charts under the Inventory section of ART reports for ‘Series’ and ‘Title’. These charts display the top CTV series and the title of the episode being streamed by the selected audience in the report.
For extended reach, we have added the option to ‘Target Audience Size’ dropdown for 10,000 zip codes. In both Audience Research and Audience Discovery reports, this will increase the number of zip codes returned in the audience to 10,000.
Streamline the activation process for cookieless audience targeting on all your campaigns with a new catalog of free Pontiac ART for any demographic category. Swap out your third-party segments for Pontiac ART equivalents and activate instant cost savings across campaigns of all media types. This privacy-compliant targeting solution will reach your audience within the confines of privacy regulations regardless of device type, operating system, browser, etc. In initial tests ART audiences have been proven to reach Apple users on 23% of campaign impressions compared to 6% on third-party audience targeted campaigns, while maintaining higher CTRs and lower CPCs.
Select these audiences in the ‘Associate Segments’ section of a line item, under ‘ART Audiences’ -> ‘Public Audiences’.
Streamline the activation process for all of your campaigns using ART audiences with the new feature to publish data directly to your account’s ‘Audience’ section.
Once you have created an Audience Research or Audience Discovery report, the report data can be published as a custom audience for cookieless targeting across all your Pontiac campaigns.
Published audiences will then appear in the ‘Audiences’ tab under the ‘Custom’ section of the ‘ART Audiences’ table. These audiences can be added to any Line Item using the ‘Associate Segments’ button.
On the ART Report, the field ‘Auto Refresh’ will determine the cadence at which the report data will refresh. Interest & Inventory data are updated every 30 days and new data may change report results. If a report is set to auto refresh and the matched zip codes in the results of the report are updated, this will automatically update any published audiences associated to the report.
To track Order ID and Order Value using this pixel, select the boxes for these values once the pixel has generated. This will add the parameters and placeholders for the values to the pixel. Work with your web developer to dynamically replace these placeholders with the intended values. These values can then be pulled in Custom Reporting to gather additional insight about conversions driven by your campaigns & optimize towards ROAS.
In the Inventory Data section of reports you can review the specific CTV networks, publishers, channels & apps that your audience is currently watching. Our CTV Bidder provides the capabilities for targeting down to the channel level, so these are all actionable insights. Build detailed CTV targeting plans to serve ads across the inventory your audience watches the most.
Here is a sample model for CTV Network viewership for Mother’s in Louisiana with high household income that are showing interest in boating:
A new feature in the Line Item set up, the ‘Allow for Cookieless Users’ feature will enable impressions to serve to users that may have cookies disabled or for impressions where there is no cookie shared by the publisher. This feature is automatically applied for all CTV, OTT, and In App line items as requiring cookies in these environments may prevent campaigns from serving. It is also recommended to apply this feature for streaming Audio campaigns where cookies are unlikely to be available for targeting.
Including users without cookies will limit the accuracy of frequency caps and conversion tracking when cookies are not available.
For mobile web campaigns, ‘Allow for Cookieless Users’ must be applied to serve to Safari users, as Safari disables third-party cookies by default.
A feature in Custom Reporting to copy all of the settings from an existing Custom Report into the new Custom Report dialog and save as a new report. For automated scheduled reports where report settings cannot be changed, easily clone the existing report and make any needed adjustments without having to start from scratch and re-create all the report settings.
A new custom report type that can be found in the ‘Reporting’ tab, under ‘Custom Reports, the full domain custom report can be used for insight into the full URL pathway where ads were served. For Web campaigns running Banner, Ad server tag banner or HTML5 creatives, this report provides full transparency on the exact article where your ad was placed:
To create a Full Domain report, go to the ‘Reporting’ tab and select ‘New Custom Report’. Enter the required information, and select ‘Full Domain Report’ from the dropdown for report type. Select ‘Full Domain’ and any other dimensions or metrics you would like to include in the report, then ‘Save’. The report can then be downloaded as a CSV file.
Now available in the Audience Research and Audience Discovery tools, select one or several of over 300 contextual categories to incorporate interest data in all of your audience insight reports. Interest data leverages deep contextual analysis through natural language processing to understand and categorize the content consumed by topic for users in each zip code across the U.S.
In the Audience Research tool, leverage contextual categories to find out which topics your existing audience is currently reading about. By analyzing both the demographic and interest data from your current website visitors, create a detailed insight report on the users of highest potential to your brand and generate a lookalike model to find new potential targets with these same characteristics.
In the Audience Discovery tool, select contextual categories to find an audience of users showing interest in these specific topics for prospecting in new markets.
New features and improvements released in the DOOH UI, including a filter for Venues by ‘City’, the ability to add a specific venue to campaign targets by selecting it directly on the map, and map enhancements to improve pin accuracy and avoid marker overlap. The ‘Select All’ button on the table will now respect search criteria to select only the venues matching the parameters entered in the search bar.
A parameter added to the CTV Landscape report in ART for ‘Full IP Reported’ by Publisher. This parameter will display the percentage of bid requests from a publisher that contained the full IP address of the user.
A table and graph added to the CTV Landscape report in ART to provide data on transparency by Deal on the CTV Bidder. In the table by ‘Deal’ you will see the data for the Bidder specific CTV Deals that your account has access to.
A new tool within the Audience Research platform, the CTV Landscape tool provides transparent insights into the data available for targeting and reporting across the accessible networks through the CTV bidder. With great inconsistencies in the information shared by each media owner across the CTV industry, this tool can be leveraged in the research and planning process to align campaign goals and expectations with available targeting and reporting capabilities.
By aggregating the data in bid requests from the proprietary Pontiac CTV Bidder, we can provide full transparency on the level of data shared by each seller:
An integration with GlewedTV to access inventory on the open exchange and PMPs through the Pontiac CTV Bidder.
As privacy regulations evolve and cookies deteriorate, Pontiac is focused on developing innovative and efficient targeting technologies for the future of advertising. We are excited to announce the release of Contextual AI, an AI-based targeting solution that performs deep content analysis to find the best contextual placements for your ads.
Contextual AI uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to digest the content of articles across the web and understand the text the way a human would. By processing entire websites, the AI overcomes the ambiguities in language that over-simplified tools such as keywords can overlook, accurately assigning meaning to the words in context. (For example, does the word ‘Apple’ in this article refer to a company or a fruit?)
Leveraging this rich contextual analysis, Advertisers can build custom lookalike segments from a few sample articles or select from our list of curated contextual segments for over 300 IAB content categories.
How it works:
For recommendations on selecting sample articles and more information on how the AI works, see here: Contextual AI
Custom Reports can now be scheduled to automatically deliver to an AWS S3 bucket. To configure a report for delivery by S3, follow the set-up guide here: Custom Report Delivery by S3
We are launching a customizable CTV Bidder.
All the high-quality CTV inventory. All our own pipes.
Our proprietary CTV Bidder is a solution built for advanced clients who are looking to gain efficiencies and utilize a new CTV PMP Management Platform. The CTV PMP Management System is available on a Bidder-as-a-Service model or a percentage of media model.
We have identified an area of the market that is mispriced. When purchasing CTV deals on Hulu, Roku, Discovery, Xumo, FuboTV, TubiTV, SlingTV, and others, the technology behind the purchase does not need to be as robust as it needs to be for complicated display banner campaigns. These CTV publishers define the audience, the channels & shows, the times, the geography and many other specifics when setting up CTV PMPs.
Leverage our account management team to assist with setting up custom deals with the largest CTV providers in the world. The CTV Bidder is focused on CTV Deals and PMPs via integrations with Magnite, SpotX and Telaria to start!
Through the proprietary IP Conversion Pixel and fully integrated Foot Traffic Studies, conversion attribution is available for all media types and provides flexibility in conversion definition – from online purchases to in-store visits. To increase the visibility and ease of access to these key performance metrics, IP Conversions and ‘Foot Traffic Attributed Visitors’ are now included in the quick metrics available in the Advertiser and Line Item views. Also incorporated into the Line Item ‘Performance’ graph, Advertisers can quickly visualize campaign trends across all conversion metrics.
Read more about Foot Traffic Attribution here: Foot Traffic Attribution
Read more about IP Conversion Pixels here: IP Conversion Pixels
Through the Audience Discovery Tool, Advertisers can select the demographics and characteristics that align with the target user for their brand, then run a report to identify the zip codes that index the highest across these variables. These insights can then be used for privacy-compliant targeting on campaigns though all channels and media types to reach your target demographic across all their devices and even the billboards outside their homes.
To further fine tune Audience Discovery results, there are new filters that can be applied to your reports. Zip codes with incredibly small total populations often index very highly across the selected variables, but the number of potential users may be unscalable for campaign targeting. To find larger audiences that still rank highly on your selected variables, you can now filter out zip codes that are under your specified threshold for population or number of households.
When you create a new report, open the ‘Edit Filtering’ section to filter your report results to meet a specific criterion. Under the ‘Population’ tab, you can filter results to zip codes that meet a specific threshold of population or # of households. For example, the set-up below will return a list of zip codes in the U.S. that rank above average in the percentage of individuals that identify as Democratic, Female, and have a bachelor’s degree and the report will remove any zip codes with a population under 5,000.
Read more on the ART here: ART Documentation
Through new platform features and a comprehensive OTT & CTV Guide in the Wiki, Pontiac is striving to make the OTT and CTV buying experiences as streamlined and seamless as possible. In addition to the existing CTV inventory type, a new inventory type has been added to the platform for OTT. OTT is defined here as TV content delivered via an internet connection that is streamed on Mobile, Desktop, and Tablets ONLY. Select the ‘OTT’ inventory type to target Mobile & Desktop devices and the Line Item will default settings to the best practices for OTT inventory. Just choose from a list of pre-negotiated PMPs or a pre-set OTT Deal List, add your budget, flight dates, and your Creative for a fast and easy set-up.
The Inventory Availability Report allows advertisers to estimate availability and costs across different targeting combinations before creating a line item. See pricing patterns, CPM ranges and impression projections by hour. Understand how your targeting will impact delivery. Make informed decisions on your CPM and budget.
Read more about this tool here: Inventory Availability Tool
Easily track progress on monthly budgets with a new reporting interval that was added to the both the reporting suite and all of the metrics in the Advertiser tab for ‘Month to date’. This will show data from the 1st of the current month, to ‘today’.
Within all three tools of the ART platform, you will have the ability to create a public link and share this report with clients or partners that do not have access to the Pontiac platform. Share insights with an Advertiser about their web traffic and their ideal target audience for future campaigns. This link can be opened to view the full report as it appears in Pontiac and will be valid for 30 days.
There is now a ‘Download’ results button on both Audience Research and Audience Discovery reports designed to facilitate the export of correlated zip codes to be imported as a custom audience for targeting. The user filter results to select ‘all results’ or the ‘top 10%’, ‘top 20%’, ‘top 50%’ of matched zip codes depending on how closely matched they would like the zip codes to be.
Customize the attribution lookback window for your IP Conversion Pixels by selecting from ‘5’, ‘7’, ’15’ or ’30’ from the ‘Lookback window’ dropdown when building your custom report.
A new report type under IP Conversion Pixel Custom Reports that allows users to easily analyze conversion rate day over day to track the effectiveness of your ads with the ‘Conversion Rate Report’. To calculate conversion rate for each day, divide ‘Conversions’ by ‘Imps’.
Read more on IP Conversion Pixel reporting here: IP Conversion Pixel Report
Pontiac admins have the ability to change the user roles of other users on their account. In the ‘Admin’ tab, under ‘Seat Settings’ there is an ‘Edit’ button next to each user. Click on the ‘Edit’ button, then select the new role for this user from the dropdown. This allows users to be switched from ‘Read-only’ to ‘User’ or vice versa. The ‘User’ role will have full access to all aspects of the Pontiac account as well as the ability to make changes to campaigns. The ‘Read-only’ role will be able to see campaigns and pull reports, but cannot make changes. For Pontiac Partners, the seat-admin role, will give the user full access and control of both the Master seat and Sub seat accounts.
IIf you need to remove a user from your account, the ‘seat-admin’ can do this with the ‘Delete User’ button. Once this user is deleted, a new user CANNOT be created with the same email address. To change the username of a user, reach out through the Help Center.
A second Vistar integration, the Canada DOOH platform provides access to DOOH inventory across all of Canada. If you are looking to purchase inventory in Canada, a separate DOOH seat will need to be created for you. To get started, reach out through the Help Center and request a Canada DOOH account. Once this account is created, you will be able to access it using the ‘Switch Seat’ tool in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. All reporting and billing in Canadian DOOH seats will be in CAD.
In addition to the U.S. Census data available in the Audience Research and Audience Discovery tools, ART reports now also include political data from the 2020 election. This data comes from Harvard Dataverse.
A new feature within the ‘IP Conversion Pixel’ custom report type, there are two types of IP Conversion reports that can be utilized to gather insights from an IP Conversion Pixel.
The ‘Path to Conversion’ report provides data on the IP conversions registered as well as on the impressions served through Pontiac campaigns to those users that converted. This report can be utilized to see the entire pathway to conversion from each impression the user viewed to the action they completed on your website.
The ‘Page visit’ report will provide data on ALL page visits or loads for this pixel. ‘Page visit time’ indicates the time of the page visit. This is not a Conversion event attributed to your campaign, it is total page visits independent of media served.
Read more on the IP Conversion Pixel reports here: IP Conversion Pixel Report
For in-app campaigns (including CTV and OTT), there are new dimensions available in custom reporting that will return the App ID and the App Name for impressions delivered. Include these dimensions in your custom reports to more easily evaluate the quality and performance of the apps your campaigns are running across. Filter through the properties your campaigns are buying and make manual optimizations to target the highest quality apps, or block apps that do not align with your campaign’s goals or target market. The standard ‘App’ dimension will still return the full app URL. Here is a sample of what this report would look like:
In addition to open exchange inventory, DOOH can also be purchased through PMPs. These Deals can be either Biddable First Price or Fixed Price, and provide access to inventory that may not otherwise be available through the open exchange. These Deals are readily available to all users directly in the Pontiac platform, create an DOOH Line Item, then under ‘Deals’, select the PMPs you would like to target. The Pontiac system will automatically increase your bid on the Line to meet the price floor of the Deals selected.
To better inform the Deal selection process and provide clarity into how each Deal should be used, the following information has been added for each Deal in the Deals list in the Inventory tab:
For more information on Deals see here: Deals
Select from the 5 Pontiac curated lists, or create your own custom Deal lists. Similar to a Site or App lists, you can now create custom PMP lists that can be associated to any Line in your seat for easy re-use. To create a Custom Deal List, select ‘New Deal List’, then add the Deals you would like to include. When creating a Line Item, open the ‘Targeting’ menu and in the ‘Deal Lists’ tab, simply add the list you created to associate all the Deals to the Line. For example, create a custom list of all Spanish deals and easily add this list to all CTV lines for Advertisers with a Spanish speaking Audience.
In the Audience Research Tool, users can now select between using their IP pixel as the Audience, or selecting certain Zip Codes. By changing the ‘Audience Type’ from ‘Pixel’ to ‘Geo’, the ‘Select Geos’ button will appear where users can then enter a list of zips. The Report will display the breakdown of demographics for those zips as well as zip codes most closely correlated to the zips entered.
In the Audience Discovery Tool, after picking the desired demographic variables, users can then apply a filter by state to only show the correlated zip codes in specific regions. For example, select ‘Females’ and ‘New York’ to produce a report of the zip codes in New York state with the largest variance from the mean percentage of females in the population.
A sub-section of the ART platform, the Audience Discovery Tool allows you to create your target Audience profile by hand-selecting from the desired demographic variables, to discover new zip code targets with the highest propensity match to your desired Audience profile. Leveraging the correlation between zip codes and demographics, ART uses U.S. Census Data to find the zip codes with the largest deviation from the U.S. mean across the selected variables. Export these zip codes to target across all channels and media types to efficiently reach your target audience without depending on cookies or Third-Party Audiences.
Read more here: Audience Discovery Tool
The new Pacing tab is a report designed to facilitate the management of many Line Items at once. From pacing to performance, this report summarizes all key metrics for each Line Item in your seat, making any potential issues easily identifiable at a glance. Check for a pulse on all your active campaigns, identify any issues with pixel placement, and assess pacing for all your Lines and Advertisers in one consolidated report. This report is updated each day at 6 am EST with metrics for the previous day.
Read more here: Pacing Report
Custom Audiences expire 180 days after they are created. However, in many cases the data in the Custom Audience could still be valid for targeting. For example, Zip Codes, Subdirectory URLs and Lat/Longs do not expire. When a Custom Audience expires, you can now have the option to open the Custom Audience and click the ‘Force Refresh’ button. This will re-submit the data and extend the expiration date for another 180 days.
Read more here: Custom Audience Expiration
In the Inventory tab, Pontiac provides access to a wide variety of Private Marketplace Deals. We have added additional fields to this list for ‘Device Type’ and ‘Media Type’ to make it easier to find the best Deals for your campaign’s goals. The Media Type will indicate the type of ad, or creative type, that should be used on the Line – either Video, Audio, or Banner. The Device Type will indicate the options for Devices that can be targeted on the Line:
These fields provide additional clarity as to how each PMP should be utilized to ensure that your campaigns are set-up to be successful.
Read more here: Deals
The Help Center is a direct line of communication with the entire Pontiac Team that can be accessed in the Pontiac platform. In an effort to improve the Help Center experience we have added the option to include ‘Additional Recipients’ when you create a ticket. This allows all members of your team to be CC’d on any emails or updates regarding your cases. We continue to encourage all clients to send their questions through the Help Center to ensure the message is received by the proper Pontiac team members and expedite responses.
Read more here: Help Center
With the launch of The Audience Research Tool (ART), Pontiac Intelligence provides an innovative solution for privacy compliant audience insights and targeting.
The Audience Research Tool (ART) is a proprietary cookie-less identity solution designed by Pontiac Intelligence to enable Advertisers to both better understand and better reach the users of highest potential value to their brands. As privacy updates push Advertisers into a cookieless world and the days of layering Third-Party Audience segments are ending, ART focuses on ad personalization through clever geo targeting, delivering privacy compliant audience insights and targeting strategies to maximize ROAS.
Create an IP Pixel in the Pontiac platform, place it on the Advertiser’s website and generate detailed insight reports. Leveraging the correlation between zip codes and demographics, ART uses the zip codes of an Advertiser’s site traffic combined with U.S. Census Data to build a detailed profile of the brand’s audience across variables such as age, gender, income, education, and more. Through look-a-like modeling, the ART report will also output new zip code targets with the highest correlation to your existing web traffic across the selected demographic variables. Export the correlated zip codes for a powerful cookieless targeting solution across all channels and media types.
Read more here: ART Documentation
A powerful attribution technology that utilizes the user’s IP Address to track actions driven by your campaigns, the new proprietary Pontiac IP Pixel provides Conversion data as a primary KPI in previously unreachable environments. These pixels can now be created under each Advertiser in the Pontiac platform, placed on your website, then associated to a Line Item to attribute online actions (browsing a page, loading the shopping cart, purchases) to CTV or Streaming Audio campaigns.
Read more here: IP Conversion Pixels
Introducing 2 new ways to enter Foot Traffic locations for increased accuracy and customization. Locations can now be added with Lat/Long coordinates and a surrounding radius or through a custom geofence drawn on the map. This is great for buildings with odd shapes, or in cases where the desired area cannot be defined by the commercial address. If you have locations entered by address that have not tracked any ‘Attributed Visits’ or that are showing 0 ‘Average Daily Visitors’ on the Line, we recommend trying a custom geofence.
Read more here: Adding Locations for Foot Traffic Attribution
