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 Karl Siebrecht at AdReady.
"Media Is From Mars And Creative Is From Venus"
Cheesy title for a column? Perhaps.
Critically important topic that has been vastly underrepresented amidst all of the renewed innovation, growth and hype within the display advertising industry? Absolutely.
Here’s the thing, most—if not all advertisers—share a common goal: to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time. Yet despite the inherent structural potential of the Internet to deliver on this mission through display advertising, and fifteen years of investment and innovation in the industry, this goal remains unmet for many marketers.
Why?
I believe it is because media and creative have been managed separately from one another for far too long. From marketing strategy through tactical campaign execution, and from the services layer through the technology providers, the media and creative disciplines have not yet fused to the degree necessary to reach their collective potential.
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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 Scott Portugal, CRO at TRAFFIQ.
"Confused sea conditions are best avoided since there is no getting around them... Confused sea conditions occur as a result of major shifts in wind direction that occur quickly. This causes waves coming from differing directions, resulting in waves that are irregular and unpredictable. So called rogue waves are caused by two waves from differing directions coming together at oblique (very wide) angles. Like two boat wakes coming together, the net effect is to create a yet higher wave, up to two or more times the height of the originals. These can be downright dangerous due to their unpredictability.
When caught out in confused seas, one needs to be particularly alert for those big ones that suddenly pop up out of nowhere. With a bit of experience one can come to anticipate them soon enough in advance to take evasive action."
- Dockside Reports, as printed by John Riley, Chief Strategist, Cornerstone Investment Services.
Confused seas & rogue waves. Read the above paragraph and tell me that it doesn't appropriately capture the sentiments in the industry about how challenging it is to make sense of where this ad market is headed. The analogy works: rapid changes in technology create confused ad markets, and hot trends tend to come together to form a huge wave that is unpredictable. Sound familiar? The most recent rogue wave, real-time audience buying, was built by the waves of inventory scale and audience data crashing together. So in this type of environment, who is well positioned to win in the next few years? Based on the "confused seas" concept and it's inverse, the television ad buying world (static and unchanging in any significant way for 50 years), I believe there are three critical factors to look for:
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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 Alan Pearlstein, CEO at Cross Pixel Media.
I have been overwhelmed by Zappos retargeting ads recently. Apparently, I am not the only one. Michael Learmonth wrote a piece in Ad Age yesterday about the subject and I think it about it a lot. Data driven marketers are walking a very fine line, balancing what we can do and what we should do, and I believe that certain retargeters that focus on automated, dynamically personalized retargeting creative have crossed it. What’s worse is that there is no need to cross this line because I don’t believe that this approach to retargeting improves performance and I know it pisses a lot of people off and can hurt a brand.
I am a big believer in retargeting and we do a lot of it because it is an effective strategy. My concern is with retargeters that use tactics that scare the consumer by exposing too much information in the ads. One popular tactic is to utilize the last products searched as the basis for the ad creative. The theory is that the ad will perform better because it is being personalized (dynamically) to the specific products that were of interest. It makes sense, in theory, but it can be annoying to consumers in practice.
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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, an online advertising company.
It’s a convenient fiction: the CPMs garnered from real-time bidding (RTB) are high and going higher right now, taken by enthusiasts to mean that it is working and driving CPMs up for publishers. After a fair bit of personal experience with RTB bidding and buying and the requisite analysis, I can confidently say that this view of the world is still fanciful. Certainly, the dynamic of higher CPMs is happening right now, with prices being higher for RTB impressions in comparison to similar non-RTB inventory, but the reason for this cuts to the heart of the fundamental problem with display inventory: advertising space is not the simple commodity we may think it is where every impression from a given site (or even a given placement) is worth the same.
Let’s set aside all the oft-mentioned problems about cost, scalability, number of possible bidders in the marketplace and so on (statements by some market participants about these issues show a fundamental misunderstanding about how this stuff works – I’ll come back to these issues another time) and just look at how things are running right now. At Leadscon NYC in July 2010, Michael Barrett (CEO of Admeld) said that “all of [their] publishers have price floors in place” and that in no case is a publisher “making all of their inventory available” to real-time bidding. He also mentioned that their publishers don’t want more fill from ad networks and DSPs at low prices.
Here are the factors in turn that are leading to the over-inflated RTB prices:
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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 Amiad Solomon, Founder & President at Peer39.
In an effort to improve the accuracy of its search engine, Google recently acquired Metaweb, a semantic Web company with a robust database of thousands of “entities” that the company claims are easier to match to search results than regular keywords, which can have multiple, confusable, meanings. Google’s hope is that this technology will help it return more relevant search results and increase the accuracy of targeted ads on its paid search platform by matching the best keywords with queries.
A quick view of Metaweb’s intro video reveals that the company believes it is too tricky and messy to try to understand text on the web; instead the company prefers to organize the web by “entities,” or titles for singular objects with one meaning. As innovative as this may seem, this platform is one of many that focuses only on isolated keywords, and ignores strings of text or phrases, which add a richer layer of meaning toward understanding text.
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Joe Doran is a board member at Legolas Media. He was previously founding CEO of Media6Degrees and GM for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions.
A few years ago, online publishers were told that salvation was just around the corner if only they’d sell their inventory on ad exchanges. Buyers would bid—in real-time no less—on available inventory & audiences that the publisher hadn’t sold. Selling the unsold inventory the expensive salesforce didn’t move and at near premium pricing due to a competitive liquid market. Enabling the publisher to maximize yield and rolling in cash. Unfortunately, ad exchanges haven’t always worked as advertised.
Even when put to good use, inventory sold through exchanges doesn’t represent the bulk of a publisher’s revenue. While some in the exchange business believe this is because they haven’t yet convinced publishers that ad exchanges produce value on several key fronts…
First, ad exchanges continue to face a crisis of transparency and control. Yes, transparency is getting better, and increasingly publishers have the ability to control which advertisers buy their inventory (on some exchanges). But there’s still a strong perception among publishers that ad exchanges are beyond their control. It is a terrifying proposition for a publisher to have their audience & data to be sold (or worse yet – stolen) without their input. It means they have no real control over their business and their future. As long as that perception continues, fearful publishers won’t anchor the bulk of their business around ad exchanges, and I don’t blame them.
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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 Scott Portugal, CRO at TRAFFIQ.
"We can build an DSP to manage RTB's, leveraging data exchange segments for hyper-targeting and optimizing against CTR and eCPA to improve ROAS and hit our KPI's."
The above sentence reads like media buying 101 to many of us in this space; it's clear, concise, and explains precisely what we're trying to do these days. However, for a large swath of the media buying universe, this hodgepodge of acronyms reads like an organic chemistry assignment. It's almost indecipherable, unnecessarily complicated, and very likely overwhelmingly complex. Yet at its' core it is fundamentally a simple sentence – use auction-based audience buying to maximize performance and hit our goals. But if we ask a new display media buyer to make sense of the above, they'd be lost.
How can we ever expect the long tail of media buyers to start buying display advertising en masse if we're not making it easy to understand, buy, and evaluate?
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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 Zach Coelius, CEO of Triggit, an online advertising technology company.
Now that Google has bought Invite Media and publicly stated that the purchase was all about real time bidding (RTB), the market seems to have woken up to the fact RTB is not hype and it is here to stay. The early claims that RTB wasn’t real, then that it was too expensive, then too small, and then too dangerous for publishers have been proven wrong. Yet, the positive reasons for why RTB is winning have never been well defined. So here goes.
The most important reason why RTB wins is that it makes publishers more money. The cause of this is very simple; the more buyers who are active in any market looking at a good for sale, the higher the price will be; such is supply and demand. In an RTB enabled market, every impression has literally tens or hundreds of thousands of media buyers with their own unique requirements and data looking at each impression and bidding for those that suit them best. These ad impressions are not interchangeable commodities, but in fact unique events with highly differential values for different types of advertisers. Thus, it is easy to understand that the more bidders there are looking at each impression, the more likely it is that one of those bidders will be willing to pay a very high price. Compare this with a publisher’s sales force that might sell to a handful of advertisers or an ad network with maybe a hundred active advertisers at any given point in time, and you can see how RTB results in higher effective prices than other status quo options.
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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, a behavioral analytics platform for publishers.
As Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley recently pointed out, 28% percent of consumers time is spent online yet only 13% of ad spend is there. The percentages are out of whack by approximately $50B. Contrast that to TV where consumers spend 31% of their time but garners 39% of ad spend. For all the talk of performance improvements with audience buying and selling, there is an overlooked topic -- attention. The share of attention given to ads in TV and other channels outperforms online. Consequently, attention economics drives dollars into those channels. Online advertisers and publishers have a $50B opportunity and improving impression quality will be critical. Maybe that statement is obvious, but it is not how the market behaves today.
Attention is one of the few scarce commodities on the Web. Even though the mobile movement creates more time to leverage the Web, an individual’s options for news, entertainment, socializing, purchasing, and learning are exploding, and like it or not, any one person has a limited amount of attention to provide on any given day. Attention simply doesn’t scale like the web does.
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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 Brian O'Kelley, CEO at AppNexus.
Ad networks are an integral part of today’s display advertising ecosystem and I find the oft-cited reports of their demise greatly exaggerated. In one form or another, this industry is dependent upon ad networks and the important role they play, and sophisticated ad networks are continually evolving their businesses and capitalizing on exciting new opportunities like real-time bidding.
There are still challenges that networks must face as new players emerge. In order to remain relevant to clients and keep them investing resources online, networks should focus on a few key areas:
1. Be squeaky clean. Running deceptive ads or representing low-quality or ad-heavy sites WILL get you in trouble – and you may not get a second chance. Be wary of running tags from other networks that don't have the same standards you do. Every week, major publishers and networks are hit with malware because they ran third-party tags that looked clean, but weren’t. Common sense and best practices are paramount, but also consider technology solutions that can sniff ad tags for malware, script, rotating tags, and other risky behaviors.
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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 Amiad Solomon, Founder & President at Peer39.
Look up the word "remnant" in a dictionary and you'll find definitions that pretty accurately describe how the word is used in any situation. Except one. In the online advertising world, remnant is not "a small part", or a "fragment", and it's certainly not a "scrap" of anything. Online advertising's dirty little secret is that remnant represents the vast bulk of available online impressions. For some well-known publishers, the great majority of their inventory is unsold, unloaded, and unloved.
It has become fairly clear from the recent and ongoing growth of innovative networks, DSPs and yield optimizers that many publishers have chosen to make their non-directly sold inventory available to the highest, or sometimes lowest, bidder. Till the emergence of these platforms, content owners were stuck getting very low CPMs on the majority of their content as long as their ad spots were filled.
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