RSS FeedArchive for the ‘One Question’ Category

One Question: How Are The Slices In The Marketing Dollar Evolving Today?

One QuestionOften, a question doesn't have an easy answer in the digital advertising business. This is a new column devoted to an answer to a single question - and providing a bit of space for it.

Today's participant is Tolman Geffs, Co-President of Jordan, Edmiston Group, which provides investment banking services in the media and information industries. He recently answered the following question during a conversation with AdExchanger.com...

AdExchanger.com: From the Internet Advertising Bureau annual meeting over a year ago, you offered a slide which showed all the slices being taken from the marketing dollar before it ever gets to the publisher. How are the “slices” in the marketing dollar evolving today?

TG: I think right now the chain is even more fragmented. Pricing is even more opaque - particularly with the separation between data and inventory and a more robust market for both. The $1-to-$5 spread can be even wider now than a year ago.

Simply put, publishers are willing to sell “remnant” inventory for a $1 or similarly low CPM. To often, “remnant” means “what our sales team did not know how to sell” rather than “audience that no marketers value”. Ad networks and other intermediaries are able to associate those impressions with desirable audiences using user data and tracking cookies, delivering those to advertisers who are willing to pay something on the order of $5 or more for that user. While difficult to broadly measure, our view is that this spread has if anything been widening – publisher pricing for second tier inventory remains soft while the ability of intermediaries and agency trading desks to package desirable audiences based on user data has been accelerating very rapidly.

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One Question: Why Is Cross‑Channel Attribution Important To The Marketer?

One QuestionOften, a question doesn't have an easy answer in the digital advertising business. This is a column devoted to an answer to a single question - and providing a bit of space for it.

Today's participant is David Skinner, SVP Client Solutions / Account Management at [x+1], an online targeting platform. He recently answered the following question during a conversation with AdExchanger.com...

AdExchanger.com:  Why is cross‑channel attribution important to the marketer?

DS: It's important for several reasons. 

One is just from the accountability standpoint. It's the expectation that your marketing is going to be measurable and you're going to be able to associate an ROI with it -certainly in digital –and, ideally across other channels. It's the “executive mandate,” if you will, that you've got to put an ROI around the marketing you're doing.

Another reason cross-channel attribution is important is because media channels all interact. As a consumer, we know how we consume media. You can be watching a commercial during a TV show and then you’ll do a search on it. Or, you may do a search and then come upon a display ad -and then come back to the site.

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One Question: Do You Think An Agency Trading Desk Can Be Successful?

One QuestionOften, a question doesn't have an easy answer in the digital advertising business. This is a new column devoted to an answer to a single question - and providing a bit of space for it.

Today's participant is Hooman Radfar, CEO of Clearspring, which provides content sharing platform AddThis. He recently answered the following question during a conversation with AdExchanger.com...

AdExchanger.com: Do you think an agency trading desk can be successful?

HR: It’s not going to be easy, but if you look at the fundamental economic shift corresponding to the rise of RTB platforms that is driving the growth of trading desks, and couple that with aggressive approaches to building out their capabilities, success is possible.

As exchanges and real-time bidding platforms enable a new ecosystem of DSPs, Data Platforms, and SSPs to replace the function once served only by ad networks, holding companies have the opportunity they’ve long hoped for - the chance to deliver better pricing and service to their clients while increasing their margin from media.

In the beginning the world was run by "Mad Men.” Agencies owned it all – from creative to media. As media purchasing has become increasingly technology-driven, however, the same technologies that have made purchasing at scale easier, have also resulted in greater value being captured by traditional third party networks. Third-party ad networks hired huge publisher teams to aggregate inventory, created yield optimization technologies to balance publisher payment with advertiser demand, and – of course – developed demand-side technology to fulfill insertion orders. This cost money. Now agencies have a chance to shift the scales back in their favor by purchasing media directly from publishers via real-time bidding platforms.

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One Question: How Does The Complex, Digital Ad Ecosystem Today Get Simplified?

One QuestionOften, a question doesn't have an easy answer in the digital advertising business. This is a new column devoted to an answer to a single question - and providing a bit of space for it.

Today's participant is John Donahue, CTO of BuzzLogic, a conversational media solution company, who recently answered the following question during a conversation with AdExchanger.com...

AdExchanger.com: How does the complex, digital ad ecosystem today get simplified?

JD: Good technology simplifies our lives.  For example, think of how word processing has simplified authors’ lives with the ability to revise and edit each sentence on a real-time basis.  The same is true for digital advertising.  Good technology should simplify marketers’ lives -which is my core belief.  A technologist in advertising needs to create an enablement platform to simplify marketers’ lives when they advertise online.

I can see your point, however.  Many vendors focus their energy on disrupting the marketplace through technology, rather than simplifying and improving it.  If a vendor improves and simplifies the process ‑ they will, in fact, be seen as an enabler that improves digital media advertising and increases understanding of how to leverage digital advertising to achieve results.

An ad technology company justifies its team’s position on the media plan because an agency and a marketer right now can't scale their marketing ops and logistical organizations to handle 300+ sites that would be activated against in a standard execution.

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One Question: What Do You See At The Heart Of The Debate Around Consumer Privacy?

One QuestionOften, a question doesn't have an easy answer in the digital advertising business. This is a new column devoted to an answer to a single question - and providing a bit of space for it.

Today's participant is Spanfeller Media Group CEO Jim Spanfeller who recently answered the following question during a conversation with AdExchanger.com...

AdExchanger.com: What do you see at the heart of today’s debate around consumer privacy?

JS: Well, let me preface by saying - I actually had this idea long before the U.S. Federal Trade commission came out with its paper. And the idea begins with recognition of the ongoing evolution of media in general and that it has been around different types of formats of content, whether they be audio, video, data, prose, text, what have you. All of this is coming together – something we all know as convergence.

And then, of course, there is the much‑yapped‑about consumer control. People think of consumer control as this notion of time‑shifting, which of course is true. We started thinking about it a couple years back at Forbes as what I called "Entwined media, " which was the ability to control not just when and where I was involved with a specific storyline, but also how I was involved with that storyline.  Was it a video, was it text, was it data? Was it some combination of all of the above? Or was it social, which is another phenomenon that had to come along as soon as we realized that the web was indeed interactive.

And I think this growing notion of consumer control is actually at the heart of the whole privacy issue. It actually is a way to make the privacy issue less about a religious conversation and more about a business conversation.

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One Question: How Does Programmatic Buying Become Attractive To The Brand Marketer?

One QuestionOften, a question doesn't have an easy answer in the digital advertising business.  This is a new column devoted to an answer to a single question - and providing a bit of space for it.

Today's participant is TRAFFIQ Chief Product Officer Eric Picard who recently answered the following question during a conversation with AdExchanger.com...

AdExchanger.com: How does programmatic buying become attractive to the brand marketer?

EP: I love this question. I personally believe that all of the interesting things that are happening in the online display advertising space relate to audience-based buys designed to reach specific audiences -which are basically premium brand buys.

Display advertising, while it can be used for performance, it can only really be used well for performance when the inventory is incredibly inexpensive. It's just a basic, simple fact that performance ad buys either have to drive very high conversion rates, or they have to be very cheap and you can see it in every media to some degree - and especially in online display.

Brand advertisers are willing to spend significant amounts of money to efficiently and effectively reach potential customers that fit the profile that they've developed around their target audience. The reality is we talk a lot in this industry about accountability, the ability to control the way that ads are displayed as if it's new and interesting.

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