If advertising is declining for residential real estate, can we really infer there is softness in the market? After all, perhaps less advertising means there is simply less supply for sale. Here’s some more evidence that continues to suggest there is softness.

1. If there was less supply, prices for property would be increasing. But this is not the case. According to Corcoran, one of New York’s largest real estate firms, inventory is up 17% while average sale price is down 7%.*

2. US Housing starts are down 5.3% year-over-year in April 2016, the most recent month available from the US Department of Housing and Development.

3. Advertising in B2B construction trade journals is down.  Trade journals range from Construction Equipment, Pavement Maintenance And Reconstruction, to Concrete Contractor.  Both online and print advertising have contracted by almost 6%.  Almost every media property in the market is down.

4. Caterpillar announced layoffs of 4000-5000 positions, all full-time by the end of 2016.   Most of the impact they say is expected in their US operation. 

[*] The Corcoran Report, Manhattan Monthly Market Snapshot, April 2016

Number of real estate advertisers online. 

This is both firms and individual properties placing ads online.

Number of real estate ad pages in magazines and newspapers. 

* Major brands Corcoran, Stribling, Halstead, Sotheby’s, Luxury Portfolio, Douglas Elliman

Methodology:

This looks at advertising placed in NY/NJ/CT or NYC media specifically in Jan-Apr 2016.

It’s especially interesting that print still dominates with the most standalone advertisers at 141,254 compared to only 889 TV-only advertisers.  

Mobile ads are still significantly under-utilized, with most advertisers placing on desktop. 

The biggest takeaway is the amount of opportunity for ad sales teams. Many campaigns still are only integrated across 1-3 touch points. Encourage advertisers to place ads comprehensively across the ad landscape for better results, ROI and brand awareness. 

Where do you stand–are you selling across all media channels?

YouTube was founded in 2005 and received 8 million views a day by the end of the year. Since then it’s evolved into a major digital platform for publishers. MediaRadar has taken a close look to identify industry trends and to glean key insights for publishers.

Online video is a key driver in digital ad spend with $9.6 billion predicted ad spend for 2016. In 2015, $1.5 billion dollars shifted from TV to digital. MediaRadar found that 10% of TV advertisers bought online video ads in Q1 2016. What’s interesting is that 4% of TV advertisers that didn’t buy online video in Q1 2015 have started adopting online video in Q1 2016. The online video landscape consisted of 2,073 online video advertisers in Q1 of 2016. And publishers are still adapting to sell more video spots and acquire necessary tech needed for hosting videos.

Trend #1 Video is Becoming Shorter

Seventy-six percent of online video ads are 15 or 30 seconds in length. However, we noticed an increase in shorter video spots. In Q1 2016, 15 second spots overtook 30 second spots as the most popular video length in online video advertising. Forty-one percent of video ads ran 15 seconds while only 35% were 30 second spots. In Q1 2015, the 15 second spots and 30 second spots were more evenly tied in popularity (38% vs. 39%).

Trend #2 The Majority of Video Ads Cannot Be Skipped

Eighty-five percent of online video ads are un-skippable. Shorter video ads are less likely to have a skip option. Almost all of the video ads (98%) that run less than 10 seconds are un-skippable. Ninety-three percent of 15 second spots are un-skippable. When it comes to 30 second spots, 78% of them do not have a skip option.

Trend #3 Digital Bundles

Twenty-six percent of online video ads are accompanied by display or rich media ads. For example, many advertisers run page takeovers, where all ads are for a specific product or service (regardless of ad format). This further engages consumers and makes a greater impact on moving consumer perception more than a single ad unit.

Trend #4 Industry-Wide Adoption

Media and entertainment have the most advertisers (451) placing video ads in Q1 2016. This is three times more than the number of automotive advertisers (132), the top advertiser group in linear TV. More than half of them were television shows and movies. The technology and retail category follow in second and third place, with 196 and 186 advertisers respectively. Financial, professional services and food are also the top categories in the adoption of online video.

Trend #5 Tech and Auto at the Top

Microsoft Cloud was the NO.1 video advertiser in Q1 2016, placing video ads across 103 websites. TurboTax and IBM Watson were the other two technology brands that gravitated to online video in Q1 2016. Both placed video ads across 82 websites. For the automotive industry, Lexus RX (a luxury crossover model) was the top car model advertised in video in Q1. Lexus RX bought video ads across 70 websites. Land Rover and Mazda USA were also top advertisers for online video.

Use these key industry trends or gold nuggets to increase your viewership and increase your ad sales. The gold rush of online video will endure—so continue to improve and adjust your online video offerings based on best practices.

Example: Canon placed one video ad along with skin ads and display ads on the homepage of NationalGeographic.com in May 2016.

Desktop Dominates

Desktop ads still lead in terms of sheer volume of advertisers. There were 17,931 desktop advertisers placing ads on consumer magazine publisher’s websites in Q4 2015. Does this make desktop the inadvertent winner? Desktop ads can be very effective in garnering high reach with a broad audience.

More than half of digital advertisers came from top 5 brand categories–Media & Entertainment, Retail & Wholesale, Professional Service, Technology and Financial & Real Estate. If these categories aren’t already your bread and butter industries, you may want to consider expanding your reach to these low hanging fruits.

Mobile and Native Gaining Traction

While desktop is still king, mobile continues to increase in year-over-year market share with 32% of digital advertisers buying ads on a mobile platform in Q4 2015. In addition, native is quickly gaining traction with native ads growing by 42% in Q4 2015 year over year. What digital ad formats are you selling? Mobile, native and online video are the high performing formats right now!

Auto-Start Video = More Engagement

Video is becoming the new ad format of choice—whether for linear TV or online video. Many publishers are initiating auto-start videos for higher user engagement with 64% of magazine media websites selling auto-start video ads in Q4 2015. Length of time for video ads is also key—but surprisingly, short ads seem to be most popular. Thirty-four percent of video ads sold in Q4 2015 were 15 second spots and 32% were 30 second spots.

Print Stays Strong

Print still has a definitive impact with 9,799 print advertisers placing 34,973 ad pages in national consumer publications in Q4 2015. Encourage advertisers to make the cross platform buy for print, video, mobile and digital to reach users on every touch point.

We forecast continued growth in high CPM ad units such as native and digital with new innovations on the horizon. It is now essential for advertisers to have total cross platform integration across print and digital.

From June- September, ad creatives placed by Bernie Sanders promoted his many appearances at speaking events across the country. In these ads, some of the content was kept general while many of them promoted Bernie’s policies and opinions.

In September, Hillary Clinton’s affiliated Super PAC attacked Bernie after months of watching him surge in the polls. By the end of September, early October, Bernie responded with defense ads against Super PAC attacks.

By November, Bernie shifted strategies. He made it clear that he was going to confront Hillary in a “cleaner” fashion by differentiating his strategy from Hillary’s. The ads changed to quotes highlighting the differences between Hillary’s policy plans and his.

From what we could find, it seems as though Hillary did not place ads to respond to Bernie’s shift in ad strategy. What we do know is that before Hillary officially launched her presidential campaign in June, she had already begun advertising in April. Throughout the year, ad creatives were mostly images of herself, ads promoting policy proposals, and fun campaigns like Mother’s Day, her birthday, and “Dinner with Hillary.”

Also, don’t be afraid to engage with us. Have a question? Tweet it at us. Find an interesting article about something you think we’d like? Post it on our wall. We love hearing from you!

Susan Adams, Forbes, sat down with Todd to explore his past and how he looked towards the future to what is now MediaRadar. This fantastic profile piece is a great read about Todd, how he overcame obstacles, the origination of MediaRadar and our current success. For everything in between, take a look at the full article found here.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

MediaRadar’s CEO, Todd Krizelman, asserted that although it’s not 100% guaranteed, we are able to predict performance based on their marketing tendencies. Like poker, Todd explains, “when you see the signal once, you don’t know what it means. But when you see it over time, you see what it means.”

We are so excited to explore this potentially new and profitable opportunity for our company where we incorporate Wall Street needs with the data we’ve already amassed.

For the full article, where we discuss predicting Panera Bread’s performance before quarterly results were released, click here.

To watch Todd discuss this further on CNBC’s “Closing Bell,” please click here.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you.

Yes, it’s the right idea to create the convenience of buying programmatically with native. There are concrete benefits: This will lower the friction of buying a desirable media format with very attractive response rates and will allow native to move from a niche business to a scale model . Additionally, companies like OpenX correctly point out that publishers can retain significant control over what gets sold.

However, the world is awash in ad inventory, and programmatic native will only continue this trend. This has been wonderful for middlemen and buyers who seek scale and demographic targeting at the lowest possible price. But is programmatic native good for ad sellers?

B2B and consumer brand name media companies with established audiences and limited inventory need to be wary about commoditizing what, today, is high CPM advertising. There is a herding effect coming to native advertising. What was once the purview of BuzzFeed and a small cast of players is going completely mainstream. At MediaRadar, we see that almost half of the largest 10,000 national advertisers have already sampled native. The ANA also reported that two-thirds of their 640 members polled will place native in 2015. Like all markets subject to supply and demand, this will lower prices.

I’m a huge fan of programmatic, but I’m not a fan of knowingly commoditizing your own ad sales business. Like Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons,” it may be that publishers, each acting in their own best interest to automate native advertising, are in fact reducing their share of pie and creating downward pressure on price. What was once novel will no longer be.

Tim Armstrong of AOL follows a balanced “barbell strategy” when it comes to programmatic, and I agree with this approach. Publishers should have high-end, high-touch CPM units in addition to programmatic options for ad buyers. This way you’re able to service both kinds of buyers. But I see native advertising quickly moving from one side of the barbell to the other, and publishers will soon need to find another solution that is unique.