The ‘Data-Driven Thinking’ Category
"Data-Driven Thinking" is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today's column is written by Michael Katz, CEO of interclick, a Yahoo! company.
With all the great data that data providers are making accessible today, it's possible to interact with consumers in ways that were never before possible. The tremendous breadth and depth of available data moves consumer views from one-dimensional to multi-dimensional, helping to paint a much more complete picture. The implications positively impact the entire value chain from the marketer all the way to the consumer. For all the progress however, we’re still very early on and there are still several misconceptions about the successful application of data.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that optimal data consumption is on an "as needed" basis since data is expensive and more data may not add incremental value. Utilizing data for targeting is only one of many applications however. One of the most important and innovative applications of data isn’t for targeting at all but rather enabling marketers to implement more effective customer segmentation strategies.
Many transaction-centric B2C companies rely on effective segmentation to align messaging with business objectives in order to maximize LTV (lifetime value). Successful implementation of segmentation helps these companies define business models, build customer loyalty programs, and further value proposition discussions. The exercise of creating an effective segmentation strategy should result in a comprehensive understanding of the various types of customers as well a coherent plan for achieving business results.
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"Data-Driven Thinking" is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today's column is written by Mark Hughes, CEO of C3 Metrics.
At the worst possible time, the digital marketing measurement business is again showing inconsistencies. The issue this time is the matter of "viewable impressions," and I'm taking issue with the information released last week by comScore. Whether we like it or not, Internet users are not seeing all served ads, and we need to find the most accurate way of painting this picture, which admittedly is not pretty.
Here's the quick background. One of the key findings delivered last week by a comScore study of 12 big brands is that 31% of the 1.7 billion ad impressions sampled recently in its study were never in view. The issue is that comScore is taking 12 big brands with huge budgets, and then sampling them on premium sites only. It would be nice if real companies could buy, plan and measure media that way. But it's not reality. It's like calling Palo Alto, CA and Greenwich, CT a true representation of America. Not accurate, and not projectable for the large majority of advertisers.
And Nielsen? Nielsen just told Adexchanger in response to comScore’s data that visibility of ads only makes up 10-15% of the importance in digital advertising. Come again? If ads didn’t show on TV, but advertisers were charged for those ads--don’t you think there would be some immediate fire and brimstone meetings?
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"Data-Driven Thinking" is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today's column is written by Jonathan Mendez, founder of Yieldbot.
One of the most exciting and disruptive things going on right now in digital media is the rise of new businesses harvesting intent and making it available for advertisers outside the confines of Google. Companies are building demand capture systems for advertisers that sit in other parts of the web ecosystem outside the Search appliance. These are truly new and vast marketplaces that can more directly connect consumers to relevant messaging.
Intellectually we know that Google neither creates nor fulfills intent. Google sits as a switchboard operator routing it and collecting a service fee to route it more directly and with more volume to your business. Google makes roughly $20B a year in Search advertising (2010) because technology has not advanced enough to remove the need for a switchboard. That will change.
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"Data Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today's column is written by Nikhil Sethi, who is co-founder/CEO Adaptly.
As we look at the emergence of social as a serious contender within a typical media buy, the marketplace is noticing an evolution of the medium rather than the creation of yet another new channel (e.g. video, mobile, etc.). Looking at the four seats of advertising we have our three traditional seats (Radio, TV, Print) and of significant importance in the past decade (Digital). Traditional media has always suffered from the untraceable nature of the beast, whereas Digital, by means of Display, and Search primarily has built itself on its trackable nature, put simply the ability to cookie.
And here comes Social.
Emerging truly as a digital vehicle (meaning it plays in the overarching web and mobile space), Social has presented itself as the FIFTH seat. It ignores most concepts that Digital has been born with. It plays kindly with the traditional metrics (clicks, impressions, CTR), but also embodies a very new idea around conversation, dialogue, and response metrics - creating value in an owned and earned media sense.
The game is not only about distribution anymore, it is now 1 part distribution, 2 parts
engagement.
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"Data Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today's column is written by Steve Sullivan, VP, Digital Supply Chain Solutions, IAB.
In the 1991 Australian film Proof, Hugo Weaving plays a blind photographer named Martin, who must rely on his other senses to determine how the world around him appears. In the film, he hires a trusted third party, Andy (played by Russell Crowe), to describe for him the contents of his own photographs so he can have "proof" that what he experienced was actually there.
Marketers seeking to allocate more of their budget to digital advertising are a lot like Martin. They have limited senses that can verify the value of the goods for which they pay. This is less of a problem when the goods are premium and the partnerships are stable and highly trusted. However, the increased use of networks and exchanges has intensified advertisers' need for their own proofs.
They need Russell Crowe's Andy.
In order to provide the industry with its own "Andy," the IAB is assembling an influential working group consisting of member companies with an interest in the ability to safely enable communication between an ad and the page. The goal of this group is to develop and present a set of standard protocols that any agency ad server could implement to address the proofs of viewability advertisers desire, in a manner that protects the contents of the page.
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"Data Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today's column is written by Matt Shanahan, SVP of Strategy for Scout Analytics.
The comparison of "analog dollars" to "digital dimes" is often an attempt to explain that paltry digital revenue is coming from commoditized advertising prices. When you dig deeper into rate cards, the reality is quite the opposite – digital rates are more expensive than print! The digital dimes issue does not stem from pricing but from size and quality of audience. Here some math to explain.
I reviewed individual media kits from 10 B2B publishers that contained both print and digital advertising units to get apples to apples comparison of print vs. digital within one publisher. A consistent theme emerged – digital advertising rates were higher than print advertising rates. For example, one publisher's media kit offered a full-page, color print advertisement to a controlled circulation of 115,000 with readership of 322,000 for 1 issue at a price of $28,325. This same media kit offered a welcome interstitial advertisement (closest digital ad to full-page print ad) for a $10,000/day with a guarantee of 15,000 unique visitors. The price per unique in print is $0.09 ($28,325/322,000), whereas in the digital, it is $0.66 ($10,000/15,000). The media kit's CPM rate for a leaderboard advertisement was $115 or $0.115 per unique. All of the digital ad units in the media kit when compared to print counterparts were more expensive per unique.
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"Data Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
David Danziger is Director of Data and Targeting Products at Acxiom Corporation.
The Future of Privacy Forum recently analyzed the top 30 paid mobile apps (across multiple mobile platforms including Blackberry, Android, and iOS) and found that 22 of them lacked a privacy policy. The statistic is fairly amazing in its own right, given that a lot of us will at least say as consumers "of course we care a great deal about our privacy!" How do I know? Because we say as much when asked about it. A recent survey by Harris Interactive indicates:
- 38% consider privacy their top concern with respect to mobile apps and 56% said it’s one of their foremost concerns.
- 52% said they’ve read an app’s privacy policy
- 98% said they want better controls over what can be collected and how it can be used.
And yet, 22 of the top 30 paid mobile applications still somehow managed to gain enormous popularity without even having a privacy policy. And among those that do have a privacy policy? Well…Let’s be honest about how often we really read those – almost never. Remember, only 52% of us said we'd read an (presumably meaning "one") app’s privacy policy. Some may have read a bunch. But I suspect most people have read somewhere between zero and … zero.
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"Data Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today's column is written by Matt Shanahan, SVP of Strategy for Scout Analytics.
The sciencification of advertising is on a clear, steady march toward greater and greater efficiencies, whether that be optimized cost for advertisers, agencies, networks, or publishers. Behind all the investment and strategy is the idea of harnessing the scale of the Internet. Unlike gaming, social networking, and daily deals, the digital media revenue model doesn’t scale with a network effect. This makes digital media the odd man out. Digital media should take notice, focus on segmenting profitable advertisers, and develop niche advertising strategies.
How did scale become so important, and why doesn’t digital media scale?
Advertisers want scale because the TV, newspaper, and radio audiences have been fragmented across thousands of Internet “channels” from social networking to social media, Internet radio, Internet TV, games and more. Scale for advertisers means the ability to re-aggregate their audience across this fragmented landscape using software and data.
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"Data Driven Thinking" is a column written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today's column is written by David Soloff, CEO, Metamarkets, a publisher analytics company.
Around the time he was busy founding a retail bank, my good friend Josh Reich offered the insight that ‘data trades inversely to liquidity.’ This presents two related use cases, relevant to all electronic trading markets including the one for online ads.
Use Case the First; in which the trade itself is the shortest distance to discovering price
In fast-moving, liquid markets, the best way to discover the value of a given asset is to trade it. This works beautifully in standardized markets like equities, options or commodities futures, reliant as they are on screen-based trading and standardized instrumentation. In these more advanced market structures, trade capture, high speed information distribution and clearing services are all tightly inter-networked with the result that in the selfsame moment a bid has been hit, price is revealed. The direct relationship holds true in all but the most broken of markets: trade these standardized assets at higher volumes and lower latency in order to get a more precise and reliable snapshot of valuation. None of this is to say that trading markets go even part-way toward perfectly determining price according to the philosophical definitions of ‘perfect’.
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"Data Driven Thinking" is a column written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today's column is written by Rob Leathern, CEO of XA.net. XA.net’s optim.al is a Social Media Ad Platform.
Names and signs were very much what early advertising was about: in the Middle Ages, these signs were the way to find the cobbler, miller, tailor or blacksmith. Many tradesmen even came to be named for their occupation – advertising has always had at its root a local, direct and often very personal communication between seller and potential buyer.
Not until quite recently has a company or brand again been able to point to actual people by name as customers or fans of their brand, instead of faceless 10-year-sized demographic groups like “women, 25-34”. The distance between the brand and an individual has appeared to greatly decrease, from both the individual’s and the company’s perspective. By wiring together customers, loyalists, fans and those that aspire to the brand, for the first time marketers can start to draw a kind of Social Brand Map for their brand.
The Social Brand Map is like a contour map that shows the topography of a product or service across the media and information landscape and indicates not just the breadth of its reach, but the importance (the elevation if you would) and attention that it commands in those various areas. What makes it more challenging for most brands is that while some of these territories are well-marked and familiar, others like the overlapping zones of Facebook-Twitter-YouTube, are brand new and incredibly data- and noise-ridden.
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