RSS FeedArchive for the ‘Data-Driven Thinking’ Category

Read This Before You Spend Money On Mobile

tuleya-usethis“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 Chris Tuleya, Vice President of eDR at Underscore Marketing.

Smartphone ownership has skyrocketed in the last three years, with nearly half of the US population now using smartphones. The trend has left brands scrambling to “do something” in the mobile space.

All the scrambling, though, can lead brands astray if they spend money on mobile initiatives before they understand all the implications of becoming more active in the mobile space.

I’m not saying that brands shouldn’t launch mobile sites. Building a mobile site can be a good investment even if you decide never to drive traffic to it. If your brand needs to provide basic information to your customer regardless of which device they are using, for example, a mobile-optimized site is a necessity. Not surprisingly, a recent Google study found that consumers visiting a non-mobile site with a mobile device feel frustrated and annoyed.

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How To Steal Some Of Microsoft’s 76% Ad Tech Market Share

ohara-ddt-nextmark-usethis“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 Chris O'Hara, Chief Revenue Officer at NextMark.

When you think of advertising technology in the display space, the first names to come up are probably Google, PubMatic, Adobe and AppNexus. But Microsoft? Not really top of mind, unless you are thinking of its disastrous aQuantive acquisition in 2007. Sure, every now and then MSFT will pick up the odd Rapt or Yammer, but is it really having a huge impact in the ad tech space? Even if you’re a regular AdExchanger reader, you’d be justified in thinking it’s not.

But you’d be 100% wrong.

Microsoft has been quietly running the inner ad tech workings of digital display since the first banner ad was purchased in 1995. According to some recent research, the company’s ad-planning software boasts an amazing 76% market share among agency media planners. MediaVisor ranks a distant second with a measly 9.7%. Almost nine in 10 planners who use this software spend more than an hour a day on it, while almost 35% use it for more than four hours per day.

This software is called Microsoft Excel.

Released in 1985 (originally for Macintosh), Excel is nearly three decades old and has been powering digital media planning since its inception. Combined with Outlook, Word and PowerPoint in the Office suite of products, Microsoft tools have been central to the digital media planning process for a long time. Planners plan in Excel, publishers pitch in Excel and PowerPoint, contracts are made in Word, and everything is communicated via Outlook. And then we have billing and reconciliation tasks that occur within spreadsheets. Nobody ever seems to wonder why more than $6 billion in digital display media transactions (representing nearly 70% of all ads sold) use Microsoft tools and the occasional fax machine.

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Big Data: The Time For Talking Is Over

lunghuang“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 Lung Huang, vice president of digital advertising and global partnerships at dunnhumby.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy asks the wizard if he has ever been frightened. The Great and Powerful Oz responds, “Frightened? Child, you’re talking to a man who’s laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom and chuckled at catastrophe…I was petrified.”

Oz's brazen attitude offers an important lesson for modern-day marketing. It’s not his all-green attire that deserves respect from the marketing community but rather his action in spite of his fears.

In our industry, the volume of data is growing by leaps and bounds, rushing forward with such momentum that, frankly, it scares everyone from the highest-level boardroom executives to junior analysts in the deepest, darkest cube farms.

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Retargeting And Prospecting: An Integrated Approach

gurman-hundal-mediaIQ-USETHIS“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 Gurman Hundal, co-founder of Media iQ.

Ad network pitches usually go like this: Their proprietary technology enables them to prospect new potential customers for advertisers. The truth is that, in the past, many of these companies have actually retargeted existing leads instead of finding new ones, and their technology – and a historical lack of market transparency – combined to create a smokescreen that hid this fact.

All of that is poised to change. The growth of programmatic trading has brought increased transparency to the market. And that transparency, in turn, has pushed many companies to finally deliver on their historical promise to use data and technology to create new prospecting strategies. I believe this will be their true role moving forward.

That said, clients and agencies still have plenty to consider before they can effectively tap into this potential. Here are four key steps, which I collectively call C.A.M.P., to setting up a successful – and transparent – retargeting and prospecting plan.

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Programmatic Premium: Can We Settle On One Definition?

anthony-katsur-ddt“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 Anthony Katsur, CEO of Maxifier.

What’s in a name? Well, when it comes to “programmatic premium,” quite a lot. Interpretations of this term differ widely, as evidenced by the proliferation of remnant technologies that have been rebadged as programmatic premium solutions. In an attempt to differentiate their products, companies keep hatching new names and tags  – including Automated Direct, Premium Direct and Programmatic Guaranteed – which only add to the confusion. All of this overlap and obscurity have created a dangerous situation, mandating an industry-wide definition for programmatic premium that all players can agree upon.

To me, programmatic premium has become the industry equivalent of the classic “young girl vs. old woman” optical illusion, which appears to be a single image but can be perceived quite differently. While some see an old lady, others see a young girl, and it can often be very difficult to switch from one perspective to another.

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5 Types Of Performance Marketing Fraud

bodhi-short“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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Can Facebook Solve Its Relevance Problem?

tuleya-usethis“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 Chris Tuleya, VP of Direct Response at Underscore Marketing.

For months, the industry has been abuzz about Facebook’s Real-Time Bidding exchange, with pundits touting the millions of impressions it makes available to advertisers. But whether all the Facebook Exchange (FBX) hype is justified remains to be seen.

I, for one, remain skeptical. The FBX launch doesn't change my opinion that Facebook has plenty of work to do if it wants to stand out from other ad-supported publishers in terms of relevance. So far, the impact of advertising within its platform simply hasn’t proven greater than that of its competitors.
Opening up vast pools of inventory to RTB could bring even less relevant ads, which could result in poor consumer engagement and, ultimately, a quick divestment of agency and client funds. So while FBX opens up a significant amount of display impressions, it still faces a few challenges.

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How To Hire In Programmatic Sales

ed-carey-ddt“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 Ed Carey, VP Demand Sales at The Rubicon Project.

At this stage of the programmatic growth story, almost every business in the chain of marketers, agencies, platforms, and publishers has come up with a strategy to exploit the tide of automation changing how advertising is bought and sold. That naturally flows into new hiring strategies, too, because automation doesn’t obviate the need for people.

But while the industry has paid plenty of attention to how the buy-side marketers and agencies must adapt their businesses and employee skill sets, it isn’t quite as far along when it comes to understanding how the sell-side publishers and platforms are hiring their sales teams of the future.

Just as buyers need audience-buying experts adroit at operating sophisticated integrations and platforms, publishers need people to sell the programmatic inventory, platforms, data, and tools. And companies recognize this: Industry job listings are full of ads for programmatic publishing, as well as for ad network, platform, data, and mobile sales jobs.

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How Publishers Can Beat Agencies In Trading-Desk Advertising

ohara-ddt-nextmark-usethis“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 Chris O'Hara, Chief Revenue Officer at NextMark.

Worthless. That’s what I – and most of my colleagues – thought of leftover or remnant advertising when I was selling highly premium banner ad inventory to major advertisers a decade ago. At my workplace, we focused on sponsorships, advertorials, homepage, and index page banner ads. Today, much of this “transactional RFP” activity can be automated by programmatic-direct technologies via companies such as NextMark, Centro, isocket, and Adslot, not to mention Mediaocean. But back then, we were selling our entire premium inventory – mostly 728x90 pixel and 300x250 pixel banners targeting high-spending B2B readers – by hand for CPMs upwards of $50, compared to perhaps the high teens today.

In that market, remnant advertising was barely an afterthought. To fill most of the below-the-fold and deep-paged inventory, we ran house ads or bundled “value added” run-of-site impressions together for our good customers. Those were simple days, when the key to making money was thought to be selling more and pushing your editorial team to produce more content worthy of high-CPM banner placements.

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Display Advertising Fraud is a Sell-Side Problem

de-jager-ddt

“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 Douglas de Jager, founder of Spider.io. 

In Will Luttrell’s AdExchanger article of last week, he argues that if the display advertising buy side adopts better performance metrics then the problem of fraud can be solved across display advertising.

Luttrell is conflating two distinct problems across display advertising: (i) unscrupulous exploitation of broken performance metrics and (ii) fraudulent gaming of performance metrics.

This article will argue that no new set of performance metrics will prevent fraud. It will discuss how Google’s Ad Traffic Quality Team (formerly the Click Quality Team) has over time come to police Google’s search PPC ad exchange, namely AdWords. It will argue that display ad exchanges and other suppliers of display ad inventory (ad networks, supply-side platforms, etc.) should police the inventory they sell in much the same way. It will illustrate the surprising extent to which display ad exchanges and other suppliers of display ad inventory currently fail to police their inventory. It will also suggest an explanation of why this is so.

Display advertising fraud is pervasive


Fraud is endemic across today’s display advertising ecosystem. Luttrell estimates 20 to 30% of display ad inventory is fraudulent. For an empirical counterpoint, the Chameleon botnet spanned all the major US ad exchanges at the time of disclosure and was driving enough fake traffic—on its own—to account for 30% of the display ad inventory sold through one of these major exchanges. The Chameleon botnet is not unique. For example, we will shortly be disclosing details of a second major botnet, with a distinct signature, targeting a distinct cluster of websites. Botnet traffic is also not just limited to fraudulent publishers.  We have come to understand that the Chameleon botnet, for example, has supplied traffic both to the website of one of the most highly regarded US newspapers and also to the websites of one of the world’s largest online media companies.

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