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 Ajay Sravanapudi, CEO at LucidMedia.
“If it is in fact a hand puppet, which finger is the head of the pony?” This question nicely sums up the brand safety fears while running a display campaign. In my last column, I explored the recent demand-side platform (DSP) trend focusing on its potential benefit to agencies. This month, I want to look more closely at one specific aspect of the DSP movement: brand safety in real-time bid (RTB) inventory.
Real-time bidding is the latest positive evolutionary change sweeping the display advertising industry this year. Despite its promise of efficiency and scale, many buyers view RTB inventory as potentially brand unsafe. Contrary to these expectations, we have found that, with the right technology, RTB is the most effective and efficient means of procuring brand-safe inventory at scale. This is so because (a) impression bid requests come with a lot of useful data attached and (b) the DSP can use this impression-level data to filter for brand safety in real-time. Much of the impression level data can be used with minimal effort to implement a poor man’s brand safe filter like geographic, site level, day parting, etc. Any DSP worth the price of admission should implement this kind of minimum filtering. However, this is just scratching the surface. What is really needed for true brand safety is technology that can perform a deep semantic analysis at the page-level.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data-Driven Thinking | No Comments »
"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 Mike Lewis, President and Co-Founder of Ad-Juster, an ad server discrepancy management company.
Whether relaying target coordinates of hostile and friendly forces on a battlefield or passing digital ad tags for 3rd party served campaigns, the points where data changes from one system to another are critical to the success or failure of that transmission. These points are commonly referred to as "hops". Having come from the Defense industry, I'm familiar with disparate, stove-piped data networks which are fraught with hops. As a rule, the more automated the hop, the greater the chance it has of success. This is why I remain so amazed that in an age of transformation in the digital advertising industry, when many ad serving platforms are in their 3rd and 4th generations, the standard operating procedure for passing ad tags from agency to publisher remains email. I've even heard cases of clients receiving tags over instant messenger.
Most local ad serving platforms utilized by digital publishers have started to incorporate sophisticated tools to help ad ops professionals insert cache busting, click tracking and other common modifications. However, there is currently no clear digital path to get these tags into the ad server when issued to them by their agency customers. Ad trafficking personnel are required to cut and paste these tags from messages, emails, or spreadsheets. Most times an entire insertion order worth of individual tags will be pasted into their local ad platform. This is a manual process potentially resulting in human error that is costly in both lost revenue opportunity (unnecessary discrepancy) and time (re-trafficking ads).
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data-Driven Thinking | 1 Comment »
"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, CEO at Peer39.
When watching an NFL or NASCAR event on TV, you expect that most of the commercials aired will be for beer, restaurants, shavers, or cars. Although television does not possess the granular targeting technologies we utilize online, advertisers are expert in predicting what sort of audience these events will attract and they buy ad time accordingly. It’s the proven way to reach an audience.
Reaching audience at scale in the digital environment proved to be much more complicated. With content distributed across nearly infinite locations, it became nearly impossible to build critical mass in audience by targeting to specific types of content alone. It became necessary to for advertisers to work with behavioral and audience targeting providers, who could leverage cookies and vast content networks. This became the one way to reach targeted audiences at scale to meet campaign goals online - buying audiences using in-market and other traditional data sets.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data-Driven Thinking | No Comments »
"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 Andy Monfried, CEO at Lotame.
There’s been a lot of chatter in the marketplace of late on the evolving nature of DSPs, networks, SSPs, agencies, and data providers. Like it or not, direct response advertisers have moved the market—they started with ad networks over 10 years ago, took early control of search advertising, were among the first buyers of mass exchange inventory, and now gobble up cookies in DSPs.
Good for them.
If you look at the list of Fortune’s top 1,000 companies, Inc’s 500, or Forbes biggest companies, few of them sell or will ever sell products online at scale. Even for those that do, to wit, I suddenly didn’t wake up this morning and intend to buy an iTouch for my twins; there was awareness, which Apple has done across all media, consideration, deliberation, favorability, and finally intent. The current rush to the bottom of the purchase funnel devalues or otherwise ignores the top.
What constitutes a disproportionate share of buying on Demand Side Platforms today?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data-Driven Thinking | 4 Comments »
"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 Ajay Sravanapudi, CEO at LucidMedia.
Demand Side Platforms (DSP) are hot! I can tell by the huge agency interest, and even more eager venture capitalists anxious to get in on the latest craze. Traditional ad networks and newfangled technology platforms are declaring themselves to be DSPs. Others who did much of the evangelical spadework for DSPs appear to be stung by the sudden rush. There is now an attempt to define a "true DSP". At this stage, a "true DSP" as defined by a list of features serves little purpose and is as much a disservice to the industry, as it is disconnected from reality. In fact, many of the current DSP competitors—those with the most significant solutions already in-market—are successfully violating that definition of a "true DSP" to the benefit of their agencies partners.
The truth is that a "fully self-service DSP" would be far too disruptive to most agencies at this early stage. There are far too many levers, knobs and buttons in a DSP robust enough to deliver the optimum cross-section of pacing, performance, and price for an agency to take on today. They range from mundane tasks like dealing with objectionable impressions and buys from non real-time sources to more arcane optimization tasks, RTB source integration, bidding strategies, discrepancy management, and post-campaign reconciliation.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data-Driven Thinking | 11 Comments »
"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.
Last week the folks at Admeld threw a tremendous event on the topic of Real-Time Bidding (RTB) at the Time Warner Center in NYC. There were hundreds of people in attendance talking about RTB, DSPs and our emerging space. One of the conversation topics that emerged was how to define the various terms, and in particular: What is a Demand-Side Platform? As someone who has been in the space since the very beginning, before we were even called DSPs, it was exhilirating to see enthusiasm from so many in defining what it is we do.
So, what is the proper definition for a DSP? As a technologist, my predilection is to focus on the technology innovations making this whole space possible, the most important being the advent of RTB. RTB has enabled a single platform to connect to multiple disparate inventory sources and make real-time buying decisions on each impression-by-impression. Buying decisions are thus powerfully transferred from the inventory vendor directly to the actual media buyer.
In the past, if this media buyer wanted to buy media, they would work with a provider like Right Media, ValueClick, Google or one of the tens of thousands of publishers and ad networks out there. Ad buys were achieved by either inputting rules-based buying instructions on various fragmented interfaces, working with an account rep, or using an API to communicate with an ad server. Once these buying instructions were defined, a provider would serve an ad, and make a buy, when an impression occurred on that particular network or site fit within the defined criteria. Buyers could then login to run reports, optimize campaigns or make minor tweaks and changes. Media buyers (and their clients) who needed mass impression inventory would have to perform this task over dozens, if not hundreds, of sources to achieve scale, since in this highly fragmented space no provider has a dominant share of the inventory. A big agency could work with as many as a thousand digital media vendors when you count the publishers, exchanges, ad networks, and intermediaries. Suddenly, buyers were logging into numerous interfaces, pulling and collating disparate reports and are left trusting dozens of black boxes to run their ads in the right places. Very simply, the fragmentation in the display space made digital media buying a nightmare. Moreover, the vendor was in control of where the ads ran, which inhibited transparency and targeting for the buyer.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data-Driven Thinking | 12 Comments »
"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 Ken Rona, PhD, V.P. Data Strategy and Client Analytics at [x+1].
Over the last couple of years, I have been in the data business, selling and buying, respectively. My colleagues call me "the data guy." But I don’t think about my work that way at all. As I see it, I am a user of data; I provide data-driven advice (and I think our clients would agree). But, when I am faced with a new business problem, the first thing I do is spend some time understanding where the data comes from. I analyze how the variables are defined; I ask for the data dictionary; I get some descriptive statistics. One other thing I do is ask "What rights do we have to the data?" That is, what can I contractually do with the data? This opens up an important issue – what’s known as data rights.
At a previous employer, my teams had access to the entire US household file. By that, I mean that we had data for every single household in the United States. That’s a lot of data. We would use the data for customer insight and database marketing. As far as I was concerned, if the data were in the database, we could use it for anything we wanted It was someone else’s job to make sure we could use the data. I never thought about it at the time, but in fact we did not own the data. We rented it. Data from third parties is not sold, it is licensed.
Then, when I worked for a company that provided data to others, I became aware of "data rights." When we licensed the data, we specified what a customer could do with the data. I am not a lawyer, but the idea is that a user of data acquires certain rights to use data in ways that are specified by legal agreements. The more rights the user wants, the more the data provider gets to charge for the data.
You could think of the length of time of an agreement, or term, as the simplest right. The term, specifies how long you have access to the data -- say for a year or a campaign.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data-Driven Thinking | 4 Comments »
"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.
Audience targeting has come a long way, baby. In the last 5 years, we've evolved from simple intra-site and intra-network retargeting to advanced, algorithmically-driven audience targeting across the web with multi-variant data sources. Customized segmentation is available across an ever-growing list of data suppliers, and audiences can be analyzed & targeted based on buying history, content engagement, offline data sources, social media engagement, etc. It's a Chinese-menu of demography, psychography, and implied attributes that is simultaneously exciting and dangerous.
Much of the dialogue around data today is focused around appropriate best practices; providing clear disclosure of data utilization, easy opt-out paths, consumer awareness campaigns, and more. The consumer will be empowered with greater and greater controls to determine what data is used by whom. If we operate from the principle that in the near future a détente will be reached between digital marketing professionals and consumers (including data privacy lobbyists), there will still be a great unanswered question: who owns the data?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data-Driven Thinking | 1 Comment »
"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 Nat Turner, CEO, at Invite Media.
If you asked a group of people in the display industry to pick the biggest theme for display in 2010, I would be surprised if it wasn't the concept of real-time bidding and the advent of the so-called "demand-side platform" (DSP). It seems that there's a new "DSP" launching every week these days, each with its own twist or differentiation. Over the last several years, I've met or spoken with a number of agencies and marketers on the topic.
The good news is that many of these buyers have started to realize the massive potential impact that a DSP technology can bring to the table. The bad news, however, is that their decision-making process for figuring out what this all means has become extremely muddled and complex (and is only getting worse). What I've realized is that very few people really know what a "true DSP" is or how to evaluate one (and to no fault of their own), or even how to tell one DSP apart from another. Any company can claim anything on their website; any company can build a nice PowerPoint deck or tell a great story about real-time bidding or rocket science optimization. At the end of the day, what really matters is that the agency makes the right decision for their client(s) and chooses a well-evaluated and thoughtful path in order to take advantage of this tectonic shift happening in the industry.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data-Driven Thinking | 10 Comments »
"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 Brad Terrell is VP and General Manager of Digital Media at Netezza, a data warehouse and analytic appliances company.
Agency holding firms face significant strategic and operational challenges in adapting to the digital transformation of the advertising industry. Data-driven competitors are shaking up the market and threatening to disrupt their current positions of power.
So what? This is not exactly news. The WPP Group’s Sir Martin Sorrell made the threat clear years ago when he dubbed Google a “frenemy.” Agencies and technology firms are increasingly encroaching on one another’s turf, making it critically important that every firm identify and leverage their sources of differentiation for competitive advantage.
Unique resources are the building blocks of a firm’s competitive advantage. Creative talent is arguably one of the most prized resources within an agency. Significant client relationships are also difficult for competitors to reproduce. Most importantly, the agency holding firm model that emerged in the 1980’s in response to media consolidation and globalization made scale an important resource. Scale gives agencies the global reach required to serve worldwide clients and the buying power required to negotiate the best possible advertising rates.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data-Driven Thinking | 2 Comments »
"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 Pascal Bensoussan, VP of Products at Aggregate Knowledge, a buy-side optimization platform.
Over the last two years, ad exchanges have brought an unprecedented level of targeting and efficiency to display advertising. However, early adopters may have already reaped the greatest benefits of the ad exchanges (the lowest hanging fruit has already been eaten). Over the next two years, as adoption grows and more ad exchanges, ad networks, and publishers fight for the same cookies, it is going to become increasingly more difficult to achieve sustainable value from media arbitrage decisions.
The true winners of the ad exchange era will be those few companies that will be able to leverage a company-wide business strategy, a proven operational discipline, and a unified platform to excel in the following three areas:
- Centralized data collection and custom audience management
- Cookie-level retargeting and impression-level bidding
- Creative optimization and personalization
Everyone else will merely fight for what’s left.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data-Driven Thinking | 3 Comments »
