The ‘Networking’ Category
"Networking" is written by members of the online advertising network community.
Today's column is written by Mark Zagorski is CRO, eXelate
I applaud John Garber for taking this subject on in his very well written and interesting piece (read it) yesterday. Although I think many of the concepts are right on, including the nascent nature of data valuation models and the added value of context+audience in determining campaign success, I have to take issue with a few of the points, which I feel undermine the general premise of maximizing the value of audience data for publishers, and which ultimately may confuse media buyers.
First, the idea that “the risk is all on the buyer in a straight data buy” is true only in models in which data is purchased on a “per user” basis and it is then up to the buyer to find these users either via their own direct media sources or media aggregators. The pay-per-user model may work for buyers in some cases, but for the increasingly real time, DSP-console driven nature of media buying it doesn’t make sense. That is why eXelate (and other data companies) also built data models on a “pay per use basis”, in which data costs are only incurred when a user is “found” and successfully targeted. In these cases, there is no buyer risk, and the publisher (data provider) shares in the upside on every impression when its data is successfully used. In this manner, publishers are not the guinea pigs in a “data buyer arbitrage” game, but active participants in the sale whose value rises as based on the ultimate worth and incremental use of their data.
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"Networking" is written by members of the online advertising network community.
Today's column is written by John Garber is VP, Business Intelligence, Lotame Solutions, Inc.
Much has been said recently about new and as yet unrealized data opportunities for publishers. Many companies are knocking on the doors of publishers and peddling our DMPs, SSPs, and DSPs, all as a way to “maximize revenue, yield, and ARPU.”
Today, the best way for publishers to monetize their data is to become part of a media coop and sell their inventory too. To repeat: the best way to monetize data is by selling inventory and becoming part of a coop.
Here's why. When a buyer buys data separated from the media, they take on the responsibility of monetizing what they just bought. They make zero money if they learn that a person is a male, interested in sports, but then never get a chance to put an ad in front of that person. The media is still the monetization vehicle at this point in the development of the data market. The risk is all on the buyer in a straight data buy. Because of that, buyers of data (today) can't afford to pay high prices for straight data and they have trouble understanding how much to spend because they don’t know if they'll get to use their new purchase once, a hundred times, or never. Ultimately, this means small checks to the publisher.
When a publisher both sells their media inventory and joins a data selling coop, they then remove the buyer from the responsibilities of finding the audience. 100% of the people who generated the data in the first place also generate media opportunities from the same site. They naturally go together. To maximize what you can make from the data you need to sell them both: straight data and data targeted media.
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"Networking" is written by members of the online advertising network community.
Today's column is written by Kirby Winfield is President and CRO of Mpire's AdXpose.
On a recent conference dais, Scott Knoll from Aperture shared a deceptively simple insight in regards to the topic of audience buying. He pointed out that simply buying an audience without attending to the other variables is foolhardy. Specifically, he mentioned creative, verified data, and placement as ‘must-address’ items on every impression purchased.
I agree but I think I’d be a bit more forward: placement trumps targeting, data, creative, content, and every other variable being solved for, by each of us in this space. Without premium placement, or at the very least, placement that is guaranteed to be visible to each user on each impression, there is an exponential waste factor in every online campaign.
In plain English: Multivariate creative testing, real time bidding, retargeting, brand safety and in-market audience data don’t add much value if your ad is unable to be seen by a human.
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"Networking" is written by members of the online advertising network community.
Today's column is written by Jeff Hirsch, President and CEO, AudienceScience.
A publisher that invests heavily in developing quality, valuable content correspondingly creates two primary assets that advertisers demand. The one we have grown most familiar with is space, or inventory. The one that is growing in value exponentially is their audience, expressed as data.
For years, publishers have spent countless hours and resources developing strategies around maximizing yield on their inventory. Sales programs are developed, third party technologies are deployed, sales channels are developed... all in the hopes of hitting the elusive 100% sold out bar. There are untold stories of publishers leveraging third parties, such as ad networks, to help fill their unsold space, and all the success stories and time bombs that have gone along with that strategy.
It is now time for publishers to thoughtfully develop strategies around their audiences. Publishers need to ask themselves: How will I leverage my own audience? Should I make my data/audience available to third parties? If I do make my audience available, how do I do so in a manner to maximize ROI including minimizing channel conflict? What third party model will work best for me? What technology with enable me to execute my plan?
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"Networking" is a column focused on the evolving roles of networks in online advertising.
Today's column is written by Tyler Moebius, CEO of Adconion, an online advertising network.
Traditionally, ad networks have been perceived as enablers, as tools advertisers and agencies can use to increase campaign efficiency, extend their reach and add scale. An agency or brand marketer would present goals for a performance campaign, and the ad network would deliver a solution that exceeded these goals. While perhaps not a science, the numbers are precise and easily measured.
However, ad networks have invested time and money in building out technology and products that not only enable successful performance campaigns, but also enable successful branding campaigns such as those in video.
Video is perhaps the most effective brand-building arrow in an advertisers’ quiver, combining sight, sound and motion in a manner that, when done well, elicits an emotional connection between the audience and the brand.
On the internet, video advertising has even more potential – targeting technology makes reaching relevant audiences more efficient, while interactivity allows the audience to react to the brand and learn more about it. In addition, the rise of online video advertising marks the first really effective branding tool, other than their own websites, that brand marketers have on the internet. (Of course, one major difference here is that video advertising is pushed out to prospective customers, while brand marketers have to wait for their websites to pull in customers.)
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"Networking" is written by members of the online advertising network community.
Today's column is written by Andy Atherton, COO and co-Founder, Brand.net.
My former boss, Wenda Harris Millard, had one of the most quotable, and quoted, lines in the online media industry in 2008 when she said, "We must not trade our advertising inventory like pork bellies", referring to frenzied interest in online media exchanges – interest which for good reason shows no signs of abating. Her remark was intended as a warning to publishers to maintain differentiation and manage indirect sales channels carefully. But consciously or unconsciously, Wenda also surfaced a fundamental distinction that, oddly enough, doesn’t get talked about in the context of online media: the difference between a Spot market and a Futures market (media contracts are not yet exchange traded, so technically this would be a “Forward” market, but I will ignore this subtlety in the interest of simplicity).
Since Futures market buying (e.g., the TV “upfronts”) is the standard practice offline for Brand advertisers, and Brand advertising is (rightly) seen as a huge growth opportunity for online, it behooves those of us interested in catalyzing that growth to identify where current market capabilities and technology infrastructure are lacking. To do that, let’s take a deep dive into a specific example, moving beyond the fashionable, but vague, notion of “Madison Avenue meets Wall Street” to the technical and operational details required to make this actually happen. So let’s (1) walk through an example of a Spot media transaction, (2) replay the same example in the context of a Futures transaction, and (3) evaluate the key capabilities required to enable Futures transactions for online media.
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"Networking" is a column focused on the evolving roles of networks in online advertising.
Today's column is written by Michael Katz, President, InterCLICK.
Ok, I admit I didn't come up with the phrase and I hate to be the bearer of bad news but (the top 25) networks aren't going away anytime soon. Recently there has been a tremendous amount of hype surrounding demand-side platforms (DSP) and real time bidding (RTB). DSP's are wildly popular among agency executives (and the media) while RTB is very popular among exchanges and yield optimizers (and the media). Seems like everyone still wants to displace the ad network, this time it's a group of companies that are basically ad networks but not calling themselves such, at least not yet. While there are some things the DSP's are doing right in terms of increased transparency, everyone needs to keep in mind these are primarily just ad networks operating without any real domain expertise. People are basically calling for the replacement of something proven to be effective with something that has really no proof.
While I hate predictions because nobody really cares who is right or wrong, I'm going to throw a couple of predictions out there. First, I predict that one of the agency trading desks calls it quits by mid-year. Second, some DSP's will start calling themselves ad networks (again) by the end of the year. The reason: the general approach is flawed and they don't know that they're wrong because everyone is telling them that they are right including investors, the media, and some agencies.
The Concept of a DSP
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"Networking" is a column focused on the evolving roles of networks in online advertising.
Today's column is written by Alan Schanzer, Chief Strategy Officer of Undertone Networks.
The media landscape continues to evolve as advertisers move away from impression-based demographic buying to audience-centric strategies. This shift recognizes that audiences more accurately reflect potential customers and provide a way to promote more targeted promotions and messages.
This trend is exciting for an industry that continues to demonstrate incremental value in an increasingly complex ecosystem. For ad networks, this is particularly exciting given the potential audience scale available across their aggregated Web properties and the technology deployed to find and target these audiences.
Over the years, targeting has taken many forms. One of the most widely used targeting techniques, demographic targeting, allows marketers to focus online ads on consumers with their desired demographics (i.e. age group, gender, household income, et cetera). Demographic targeting certainly serves a purpose and serves it well for broad messages and relatively simplistic buying models.
This type of targeting segmentation is borrowed from traditional media (TV) buying models and is, quite frankly, a result of limited insight into actual viewers and viewer behavior. While reach and frequency is gained, it comes with substantial waste and limitations on the relevancy of the message.
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"Networking" is a new column focused on the evolving roles of networks in online advertising.
Today's column is written by Richard Frankel, President, of Rocket Fuel, Inc.
- He says there’s no doubt about it
- It was the myth of fingerprints
- I’ve seen them all and man
- They’re all the same
One of the most popular and fastest-growing display advertising tactics is retargeting, also known as remarketing. But as with any marketing technique, retargeting can be misused, misunderstood, and abused. So, as marketers dive in to leverage this promising technique, it’s high time to examine retargeting’s potential issues.
(1) Retargeting doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
It’s a truism of marketing that advertising in multiple channels makes it hard to understand the unique effect of any particular channel. This issue is amplified online – a marketer may be using 2, 3, or even dozens of different tactics for engaging with audiences. All of these tactics will drive customers to your site. Every time someone shows up, your retargeting partner will notice him/her, and retarget them later somewhere else on the web. Some of these people will just show up because they know your brand, have a past history with the products, or are interested based on some other interaction. They too will be retargeted.
Smart marketers are trying to really understand what the true lift is provided by retargeting. This is possible – and not even that hard – by using a careful test & control methodology. By doing this you can learn what the real value of retargeting is. Rocket Fuel did this recently with IMVU, a client that runs a virtual world and virtual goods marketplace. We measured the exact economic effect of our retargeting, and built a solid, fact-based business deal around those economics. We even had a bonus learning ; certain demographics had greater lift in relative value from our advertising. This allowed us to fine-tune our targeting and focus on higher-value audiences (within the total population of re-targetable people) for the client.
Best Practice: Invest in understanding the real incremental value that retargeting brings you.
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"Networking" is a new column focused on the evolving roles of networks in online advertising.
Today's column is written by Alan Schanzer, Chief Strategy Officer of Undertone Networks.
Historically, media value was determined by a relatively simple calculation: divide campaign cost by the number of persons reached within a specified target segment expressed in thousands. Today, it’s clear that earned and social media are an increasingly important part of that equation. Reach, action, sentiment and engagement form the basis of a complex formula that is needed to determine media value.
First, a quick primer on terms, to ensure we’re all on the same page.
- Paid media = exposure gained through fee-based advertising.
- Earned media = coverage gained through editorial influence, like public and analyst relations.
- Social media = awareness gained through grassroots action, often referred to as viral or shared exposure.
The focus of this piece is to explore how advertisers can synchronize their paid and social efforts to maximize campaign return. With the rise of social media – from user-generated content (UGC), to mass messaging through Twitter, the ubiquity of smart phones, etc. – brands have quickly jumped at these new opportunities to connect with consumers.
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Andy Atherton is COO of Brand.net, an online advertising network.
A senior agency executive who manages the digital account for an Ad Age 50 CPG manufacturer recently delivered the best line I have heard in a long time. We were talking about Behavioral Targeting (BT) and he said, “In my experience BT is a much better sales tool than a success tool.” He then enumerated, through specific, practical examples, the many weaknesses of BT. Since I have been discussing this in private for years, this pithy formulation, delivered unprompted from an industry leader, convinced me that the time was right to do a little public debunking on BT.
I’ll frame the discussion using an example from another meeting I had the same week with a digital buyer for a major national peanut butter brand. A bewitching sales person had convinced this fellow that through the miracle of BT, based on Nielsen data, he would be able to run a mass reach campaign against customers of a named competitive peanut butter brand who were going to use the product for baking rather than spreading. In short, he could target, at scale, moms who are baking peanut butter treats for the holidays, but whose kids won’t eat PB&J sandwiches. I have to say that sounds amazing from a sales perspective. I mean, how could you not want to buy that? Unfortunately, the expectations the seller had set in the buyer’s mind were far from the reality of what’s possible.
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