The ‘Data-Driven Thinking’ Category
"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 Tom Chavez, CEO, Krux Digital.
The battle for consumer data just reached a new, much more feverish pitch.
The day before yesterday, Apple announced what a lot of people in our industry have feared and mostly known for some time: they want use the iPad to further disintermediate publishers from their audiences. In addition to claiming a 30% share of any publisher app sales, Apple’s new rules of play (WSJ) would:
- Prevent linking of content delivered on apps to the publisher’s own website, effectively keeping iPad users behind an iron curtain of Apple’s construction;
- Prevent movement of customer data outside Apple’s iTunes environment under the auspices of protecting consumer privacy, except in the unlikely “yes, share my email” opt-in of the end user.
Google immediately countered by announcing One Pass, which dominates Apple’s offer along every dimension. Barring any lurking gotchas, Google is claiming a 10% revshare relative to Apple’s 30% and allowing customer data to flow freely from Android to third-parties at the direction of the publisher, presumably without any of Apple’s strange restrictions on linking.
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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.
Eric Bamberger, SVP, Performance Marketing Group, SearchIgnite, a unit of Dentsu's Innovation Interactive.
2010 was a banner year for the Display industry – no pun intended. Truthfully, Display has made a remarkable come-back over the past few years, just when it needed it the most. For several years, Search steadily dominated the lion’s share of media buys, giving little leeway to Display. Then along came the new kid on the block – social media – leaving ad banners abandoned in the wake of media buyers stampeding to cash in on the latest craze. Marginalized by other channels, beset with fraud, suffering from poor performance, Display looked like it was ready for the bargain bin.
But then, a funny thing happened on the way to the ad exchange. A light bulb went off in the heads of ad networks and technology vendors, who realized they were sitting on a gold mine of user data. When they combined their data with that of other online and offline sources, they realized they were able to deliver incredible user insights, create detailed audience profiles and target ads to the right person at the right time. Thus, DSPs were born and became the platform of choice for agencies that licensed and white-labeled third-party platforms, or built their own internal trading desks and private exchanges. After all, an agency’s goal is to deliver the best performance for their clients (while keeping their own overhead costs low), making DSP technology a logical investment.
And the proof continues to be in the pudding. According to Google, Display advertising will grow to a $50 billion market by 2015. DSPs, data providers and verification solutions should get much of the credit for breathing new life back into Display, as they’ve put the control back in the hands of the advertiser and agency.
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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.
During the summer of 2008, I was having one of those NY business breakfasts – the kind of meal you can’t get anywhere else on the planet. It was like a $38 meal of poached eggs and French Press. I was meeting an old friend, a very smart hedge fund alum. I had this notion about capturing terabytes of media transaction data, and I wanted his opinion. The thinking went, media markets are utterly irrational, sellers don’t know up from down, velocity is picking up, fragmentation is in full blossom. And all the while, everyone is standing around shrugging their shoulders as to why the ‘big money’ was not moving off the sidelines and headlong into this new electronically traded media market. But I had it all figured out. It was clear as day to me: there was no market signal, no data. Every transaction formed its own market. And that was going to limit severely the development of market liquidity and keep dollars from flowing to these marketplaces.
My guy was a veteran of a couple of the most profitable and aggressive derivative desks in the world. He traded at the top, traded everything, every instrument, every market, every city. This guy would structure a trade around whether your car started in the morning, and make money regardless of outcome. Until one day my guy recognized that there was no Tums big enough that it could keep him in the game – basically he was gonna explode. So he retired at 34. This guy is a monster, a trading animal in a very expensive suit and tie, and very little gets past him.
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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 Niel Robertson, CEO of Trada, an online marketplace technology company.
Driving between Boulder and Denver the other day, I did something completely old school – I turned on the radio. It was during rush hour, and I couldn’t help but notice the continued emphasis on the ad-free drive-time show (yes, the irony didn’t escape me they were advertising no ads). I started to think about the pros and cons of ad-free time segments on the radio, and it dawned on me this might apply to the web as well.
One of my predictions for this decade is that content monetization is going to go through a renaissance as content sites have an ever-increasing number of ways to monetize. To date it’s been display ads and a cost-per-impression (CPM) model. Now sites can monetize with affiliate links, real-time content ads, display ads, in-text ads, in-context stores (daily deals on your site), sponsorships and sponsored Twitter feeds. The number of ways content sites can generate money will only continue to expand as the amount of content on the web expands.
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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.
What’s an ad network anyway? Some would say: an entity that manages yield for both publishers and advertisers, and cuts checks to publishers that are a percentage share (usually fixed) of revenue of deals they source with advertisers. I’m not sure if there’s a different name for a company that just decides what percentage they want to pay to their publishers based on whim, but I still think it’s an ad network, and, 2011 is going to show us again just how powerful and persistent this model still will remain. Here’s why:
Reason 1: Improving margins. Why wouldn’t you want to be a big, bad ad network? The world’s biggest ad network has “over a thousand engineers working on display” according to what their vice president of product told a group of partners gathered at the Doubleclick AdX dinner in San Francisco two months ago. Naturally I’m talking about Google. And things seem to be getting better in terms of margins there for them, not worse. In moving towards “more transparency”, Google disclosed what they are paying their AdSense publishers on average in a posting on the Inside Adense blog in May 2010, namely 68% of revenue. Naturally it’s an average, and variable based on publisher in ways that are never disclosed to the publisher, and of course something akin to this data has been available via Google’s public filings for some time. Unfortunately for the publishers out there, these numbers have been dropping as you can see here. Though there is a small difference between these quarterly traffic acquisition cost figures and the amount revealed by Google to its publishers, it’s clearly on a downward trend from 75% to 72% in 2009 from Q1 to Q4, then down to 68% by the time the May announcement rolled around. In reading some of the comments on the Google Adsense blog - a lot of publishers are excited since they assumed the split was 50-50! It’s the same thing as a prospective employee getting excited about a 50,000 share option grant -- the number means nothing without knowing what share it is of the pie. At the end of the day - it’s really about how many cents of every advertiser dollar gets into the end-publisher’s pocket, regardless of where those fees are shaved off from. Nobody can fault Google for doing a very nice job of creating a contextual match engine that improves monetization for almost any page that has content on it... and then building a behavioral/display business on top; but transparency is not what their model is built around.
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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.
Darren Herman is Founder, Varick Media Management and Chief Digital Media Officer of The Media Kitchen, kbs+p.
It’s that time of year again when business and trend forecasting articles start hitting the magazines and blogosphere. I’ve contributed a blog post each year since 2006 about future trends, and I’m going to change it up a bit this year. Historically, I’ve aggregated many different trends into one cohesive resource, but this time, instead of being the “techmeme” of trends, I’m going to actually contribute one.
If I’m wrong with this forecast, I’ll be drowned out by all of the other forthcoming opinion pieces and you won’t remember mine. My prediction is that because the API-driven buying platforms that have proliferated in the past few years are overwhelming the market, in 2011 we will see these platforms drop out, be consolidated, or be acquired by agencies. Furthermore, businesses will begin to build up the services associated with the platforms in order to create more value. Note: these are my opinions and not necessarily reflective of the companies by which I’m employed.
2008 through this year [2010] was all about the API-driven buying “platform.” We’ve seen platforms label themselves as Demand Side Platforms (DSP), which is a much better self-imposed name than “Behavioral Targeting,” and quite a few of these platforms have bloomed. Invite Media, TerminalOne, Trade Desk, Turn, Triggit, AppNexus, DataXu, X+1, LucidMedia and others have all built (or pivoted) platforms that are, in some cases, both self- and managed-served. There have been quite a few acquisition rumors over the past few years about DSPs, but we’ve really seen only one come to light: Invite Media to Google. There are some rumors and bets that AppNexus will see a Microsoft term sheet in the near future, but that’s pure speculation at this point.
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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.
Over the past ten years, the search advertising industry has grown tremendously. In no small part due to companies like Google and Yahoo, advertisers have largely formed their online footprint with text-based ads adjacent to contextually relevant search results. This approach was long perceived to be an advertiser’s best friend from an ROI perspective, and it was also safe and simple. However, I believe display advertising will steal the mantle from search as the most effective and efficient strategy on the web.
The shift in balance is largely attributable to the vast improvements that have been made in display targeting technologies in the past year. Additionally, brands can target display ads on a very granular level and create a safe environment for their brands. Now, it’s safe to come out and play.
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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 Marc Kiven, Founder and CRO BrightTag.
Fall is upon us. It’s that time of year when experienced gardeners are preparing their plants for winter. It’s what you do now that predicts the quality of your garden next season.
What does gardening have to do with data management? Well, it seems everyone is looking for the digital equivalent of Miracle Grow, and just as with your outdoor garden, ignoring the basics and looking for quick fixes in your data strategy can have ramifications for years to come.
If data is the soil that supports and nourishes the digital media ecosystem, then you have to make sure your soil can nurture what you’ve planted in it. For some gardeners, this means breaking up hard and rocky soil that’s never been used to give trusted partners access to data. For most, however, it means rehabilitating soil that has been over-farmed, rooting out the weeds of data misuse, and building a solid foundation for partnerships that deliver real value.
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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.
Engagement is the unit of monetization in the ad world, yet engagement is not what is bought and sold in online advertising. Instead ad placements are priced and sold based on impressions. Whether that impression lasts 1 second, 1 minute, or 10 minutes, the price of the impression is the same which doesn't make sense in attention economics.
The reality is an audience member is not likely to consider an advertisement until the publisher has truly caught his or her attention, i.e., until the person is engaged. Consider an interstitial advertisement that comes up between a search result click and viewing the content. The audience member is interested first and foremost in figuring out if the content is even relevant. There is little or no chance that person is willing to sit through an ad when they don't even know if the content is relevant. If the audience member does make it to the page, the person will quickly scan the content to determine relevancy. If it is irrelevant, guess what, the person moves on without considering the ads that were served. If, on the other hand, the content is relevant, the person will spend time on the page and often considers contextual content provided, e.g., relevant ads and referenced content. Think about it in other forms of media whether TV, print, radio, or live events, the producer gets the audience engaged and then inserts the advertising.
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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.
Context comes from the Latin word contexere. The literal meaning is “joining together by weaving”. The Greeks had a word not just for context but also for the very moment someone weaves together two textures – “Kairos”. Context and timing have been pillars of persuasion since Aristotle.
In today’s world links weave media together and clicks are those most valuable moments when it is joined. With context built into the structure of the web it’s no accident the three most successful digital ad platforms – Search, Email and Affiliate – have context at the core of persuasion. As we move forward into an ever more media fragmented yet always connected world we can easily see how the value of context and those moments are increasing.
For publishers, proof points that context creates the most value in digital media are Quigo and AdSense. Quigo stands as one of greatest digital ad technologies ever created. In many ways, especially around pricing, delivery and creative it was much more advanced than Applied Semantics (AdSense) started two years prior. However, it is the abundance of AdSense and its contextual advertising that is all over the web. AdSense is a $8B+ channel for GOOG, 30% of overall revenues and up 23% from last year. For publishers context remains king.
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