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5 Types Of Performance Marketing Fraud

Monday, April 15th, 2013

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Bodhi Short, SVP of Operations & Product Development at Integrate.

It often takes only two words to pause a deal with brands and agencies: performance marketing. This effect is reinforced every time industry newcomers test a performance buy and end up in a rapid retreat to lick their wounds. So it’s worthwhile to learn how to avoid these failures.

Affiliates and lead generators fall into two groups. One consists of the most advanced marketers in the industry who are risking their own upfront capital on CPM or CPC media buys and thriving on profits generated from their customers’ larger CPA payouts. The other group focuses on the most efficient methods of producing low-quality leads or even fraudulent conversions.

To the performance marketing uninitiated, the entire performance space seems wrought with fraud, especially compared to the relatively transparent programmatic world. For this reason, I’d like to point out five common practices that contribute to the degeneration of performance marketing, and how marketers can access the tremendous scale available without putting client relationships at risk.

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Programmatic Reserve: Let’s Solve The Right Problem

Tuesday, February 19th, 2013

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is by Andy Atherton SVP at AppNexus. It's the first in a series on the emergence of programmatic reserve.

There has been no shortage of attention paid to programmatic reserve of late. The meme of “programmatic” as opposed to “RTB” has dominated the discourse for the past several months. I expect the trend to continue at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting later this month in Phoenix and onward from there. 2013 appears to be shaping up as the year of programmatic reserve (and the year of mobile, of course!).

Programmatic reserve is a topic near and dear to me, so all this attention is exciting. However, in much of the dialog there appears to be an embedded assumption that programmatic reserve will be a simple extension of RTB. I disagree. It's much more likely a successful approach to programmatic reserve will involve different technology and different players, solving different problems. So before we get too far ahead of ourselves, it’s worth taking a moment to carefully define this new opportunity -- how it’s different than what has come before, why it’s important, and what success in programmatic reserve looks like. Let’s start with a quick level set on RTB.

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Shiny New Toys (Or: Data Comes From The Darndest Things)

Tuesday, January 15th, 2013

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Kyle Barber, SVP Global Performance Lead at McCann Worldgroup.

The holidays are a wonderful time to catch up with family, unwind, eat a little too much. Yet all I’ve been hearing about this holiday season are the gifts - the fun or ingenious new gadgets my friends and coworkers recently acquired.

Electronic gizmos are adult toy substitutes that brings back memories of childhood wonder. As a marketer, though, I'm captivated by the streams of data they collect and spin off. The ease of transferring data between devices via physical and wireless connections, coupled with the now-prevalent oversharing via social media, has resulted in a data bonanza.

These devices, much like tablets over the past few years, blur the rules of active engagement. Take the Nike+ series of electronically enhanced sportswear, for instance. Not only have the products sold fairly well, Nike has also extended the brand from a tool of athletic pursuit into a new community of passionate brand enthusiasts. Rather than just assembling a spreadsheet of personal best running times, Nike+ enables you to share all your personal bests with an audience.

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Why Viewable Impressions Won’t Matter

Monday, January 14th, 2013

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Alex Calic, Chief Revenue Officer at The Media Trust.

Based on the velocity of articles written on the topic last year, "viewable impressions" has displaced "ad verification" as the hot delivery topic in the ad tech industry for 2013. But when you consider how the media consumption habits of Internet users are changing, viewability fades in near-term importance.

Consumers are spending ever more time on social networks -- more than any other category of sites on the web -- and as such are becoming accustomed to a content experience that differs significantly from what is offered by typical website content management systems. The traditional web page is an adaptation of legacy print media, which pieces together multiple columns of static content with blocks of ads in a portrait layout. Led by Facebook’s News Feed, social networks are popularizing a different approach that displays standardized units of content, in the form of text, links and images from a user’s social graph. Those content elements appear in a single column that updates with new information in real time.

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Beauty of Digital GRPs Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Monday, November 26th, 2012

"Data Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Kevin Haley, Chief Scientist at Videology.

Verification is good. Everyone wants to know that what they bought is what they got. With regard to online video, for years the case has been made that gross ratings points (GRPs) are the best way to verify performance, since, for even more years, GRPs have been the measurement standard in television.

With the rollout of Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) and ComScore’s Validated Campaign Essentials (VCE) we’ve certainly come closer to having a ratings verification system that replicates the GRP system used for TV. Which will prevail? In this case, beauty is in the eye of the beholder -- different advertisers will come to different conclusions. Where the industry lands on this question, however, is less important than the role that digital GRPs will play within the multiplicity of measurement metrics currently available to marketers.
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Viewability: The Path to Less Digital Waste

Tuesday, November 20th, 2012

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Jessica Sanfilippo, group media director at 360i.

Below the fold, partial ad loads, and other related (and unwanted) occurrences on the island of misfit banners are the digital equivalents to the TV commercial bathroom break. What’s the value in an ad that no one ever sees? With all of the advancements we’ve made in digital tracking technologies, we have not, as an industry, been able to assure our clients that they are paying for ads which are truly viewed by consumers. Let’s face it. We operate in a view-through attribution world, where the term “view” is loose at best. With the public release of the pilot results from the “Making Measurement Make Sense” (3MS) initiative, we finally begin to scratch the surface of a viable means of defining ad viewability, and potentially eradicating the plague of unseen banners that pervade our industry and numb our consumers.

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The Banner Blindness Cure: How Fewer Ads Can Equal More Revenue

Friday, November 16th, 2012

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Dave Zinman, CEO of Infolinks.

The economics of online advertising are at best confusing and at worst completely backwards. We've got a zillion systems to target ads and auction them to the highest bidder. Yet more often than not, the advertiser willing to pay $10 CPM gets the same amount of real estate as an advertiser willing to pay $1 CPM!

Why do we create the ad space on the page regardless of how much it is worth to an advertiser and how relevant the ad is to the consumer? There have got to be smarter ways to operate.

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Why Marketers Shouldn’t Compare Google ROI to Facebook ROI

Tuesday, November 6th, 2012

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Brian Kaminski, President US of iProspect.

In the battle for digital advertising dollars, Google is the established leader and Facebook is the scrappy newcomer. While Google offers an expansive array of advertising products, marketers have built a clear understanding of which are best for driving awareness and which deliver solid transactional value. Facebook is still a young marketing channel, and while it has had an undeniable impact, marketers are still struggling to define exactly how to best utilize Facebook’s advertising solutions.

Often overlooked is that Google and Facebook are unique sites offering different experiences—which deliver different value to marketers. Google isn’t a destination, but a resource. People use Google to find things -- and while this can happen on Google’s network of owned sites, they also utilize Google as a portal to other web destinations. During even a brief interaction with Google they’ve opened the door to multiple advertising opportunities—beginning with a user-initiated paid search ad, which provides immediate transactional value.

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Brand.net Acquired by Valassis; Viewability Extends To PubMatic; Gradient X Launches DSP

Friday, June 22nd, 2012

Here's today's AdExchanger.com news round-up... Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Brand.net Sold

Direct-mail, newspaper coupon marketing, and, yes, digital ad company Valassis announced the acquisition of online ad network Brand.net yesterday to enhance its "Valassis Audience Network, the components of an expansive network of online and offline data, state-of-the-art ad serving and targeting technology, come together." Read more. All Things D's Peter Kafka broke the news, "A source familiar with the deal pegs the purchase price at less than $50 million; Brand.net raised a reported $27 million, primarily from Interwest and Norwest Venture [Partners]." And, read the release. To give some context to Valassis, it has been dipping its toes in digital and display waters for a while now. For example, two years ago Valassis made a deal with Yahoo! to sell local display - see that AdExchanger Q&A with John Lieblang who has since left the company.

Viewability And The Sell-Side

PubMatic announced that it will integrate comScore's viewability product into its publisher-side app platform. comScore Validated Campaign Essentials is essentially the next generation of AdXpose (which was acquired in August 2011) and other comScore enhancements. The idea with this deal is that publishers who sell through PubMatic will be linked to buyers who want to buy according to comScore's viewability-influenced metrics. Read more. The comScore web extends.

Tuning Facebook Frequency

Omnicom's Resolution Media and buying platform Kenshoo announced the results of a new study about Facebook ads. Stick this in your algo: "The ideal Frequency Rate for ads across Facebook platforms – once a user has seen the ad seven times, there is a dramatic drop in engagement." Read the release. And, download the white paper (pay with some PII). Another finding is higher CTR means lower CPC for facebook ad buyers. But does a click translate into real value (ROAS) for the advertiser? Ahhh, that's the question.

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