The ‘Online Advertising’ Category
For many years, the deliver of display media impressions through ad serving on a single media buy had resulted in a disconnect between what two different parties said was delivered in the ad serving food chain - think advertisers/agencies, ad networks and publishers .. they're are all in this mix. Industry initiatives and innovation has continued to drive at solving the discrepancy issue. So, where are we today?
We asked several industry executives to chime in with their views on the following question:
"What's your take on trends you're seeing with discrepancies in ad delivery reporting today?"
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- Mitchell Weinstein, SVP, Director of Ad Operations at Universal McCann
- Jay Wright, Yield Management Group Leader, Cars.com
- Bart Boughton, VP, Advertising Operations, TheStreet.com
- Mike Lewis, CEO, Ad-Juster
- Daniel Davies, Director, US Ad Operations, Adnetik
- Manu Warikoo, SVP of Solutions, Operative
Mitchell Weinstein, SVP, Director of Ad Operations at Universal McCann
"Discrepancies have not been a major issue for the past couple of years at our agency, ever since the revised IAB/AAAA T&C document was released. As long as we are using an industry accredited ad server, we have been able to use our agency ad server counts for billing. That's not to say discrepancies don't exist between agency and publisher counts, because they do. But the back and forth over how to handle billing has been greatly reduced.
One area where discrepancies still cause some issues is between the different agency ad servers. We will often use multiple ad servers for a single campaign (standard, dynamic, rich media, video, etc.), and those ad servers will never agree 100% on the impression counts. So it’s important to identify up front where the billing numbers will come from. Complete and open communication with our media partners is key to making this work properly."
Jay Wright, Yield Management Group Leader, Cars.com
"For Cars.com, the trend has gotten better. But that’s only because we switched to DFP and most of our advertisers use DFA. Interestingly, this fact brings up a whole different issue. I find that the advertiser’s choice of agency side server makes a huge difference. For a while, we were tracking discrepancies by 3rd party system. Probably not surprisingly, different 3rd party servers have discrepancies with completely independent (and predictable) means and standard deviations. Some are normally distributed around 3%, but others are predictably 5% or 7%.
I’m completely in favor of accountability and I’m more than willing to have my site be held responsible if we don’t deliver on a contract. However, I’m not willing to lose 5% extra revenue because of the agency’s choice of ad server. The short term fix is to simply pad the impression goal up by the estimated loss from a particularly wasteful server. But often, those padded 5% or 7% of impressions are in valuable content areas that could be monetized by other campaigns. I understand there are different business reasons for agencies to choose different 3rd party systems, but it seems very unfair to push the cost of that decision onto the publisher.
In the long run, there are only two ways I see to be fair to the publisher (assuming the publisher is reputable and they are using reputable technology too). The first is to pay on first-party numbers. The second is to have a rate card based on the agencies choice of ad server.
For the time being, this doesn’t seem pervasive enough to take either of those actions. But, if we continue to see agencies running increasingly elaborate creative on new platforms and technology, the variable pricing is something that I’d strongly consider implementing at our company."
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Glen Hartman is an Accenture Partner and serves as Global Managing Director, Digital Consulting for Accenture Interactive.
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AdExchanger.com: What's Accenture's view on the opportunities for the company in advertising and marketing?
GH: Well, I imagine that when people think of Accenture, they don't necessarily think of marketing, advertising or digital media. The first things that come to mind are technology, system integration, and what we're best known for. But we've been working with marketers for quite some time, and we have a large CRM practice as well as analytics practice.
Accenture Interactive came together a few years ago when our CMO clients were starting to see the convergence of technology, data, and creative, and then they asked us to get into this business. We took the best from a variety of different areas that we're touching – i.e. the things that CMOs and brand managers care about - largely through enabling technologies, and we blew it out.
When we created Accenture Interactive, we took our offline marketing team that was doing traditional TV, print, radio, mixed‑media modeling, direct mail, etc., and made them do segmentation, econometrics, and all the things that we know and love for a given market and brought that within Accenture Interactive.
And all of this is around one key takeaway: we've found a way to bring these offerings together to help marketers and brand managers drive performance. By taking data and analytics to drive more relevant experiences across multiple channels, that's really where we see the future and most of the things that are happening for marketing and advertising - and all the media spend that we're helping advise our clients on.
Do you see Accenture replacing the agencies that marketers are enlisting these days?
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Joe Apprendi is CEO of Collective, an online advertising technology and services company.
As part of its "State of..." series of articles with industry executives, AdExchanger.com sat down with Apprendi to discuss his company, his views on the space, and the state of Collective today.
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AdExchanger.com: Can you talk a bit about how the acquisitions of Web TV Enterprise, Tumri, Oggifinogi have evolved within Collective in the past year?
JA: First and foremost, let me say that Collective has been on a mission since day one: how do we build demand among brand advertisers versus what everybody else has done successfully? - which is monetizing the direct marketing stack. We think that has been the first evolution of display advertising, which includes a lot more now than just a straight, banner ad format. We've been trying to figure out how Collective can be the audience platform for brand advertisers and brand publishers. Everything we do is illustrated for that vision. It's different than what the DSPs, trading desks and legacy ad networks are doing. It is more emblematic of what brand advertisers have been searching for in all media but maybe with the measurability they couldn't obtain in other forms.
If you look back at 2011, we invested in two buckets. First, we entered the U.K. in late 2010. We wanted a level of critical presence so we acquired a company –but not a performance ad network. We acquired the leader in online video, of which 70 percent of that demand was from broadcast video decision makers versus digital decision makers, formerly Web TV. That was a geographic expansion, in order to selectively get bigger and better among brand advertising demand, and not just in the U.S.
What's more material around our audience platform for brand advertiser strategy was the acquisition of Oggifinogi early on in the year - and then Tumri to complement it. Our combination of dynamic creative optimization coupled with a suite of rich media and video formats blended with the audience data that we've had plus the distribution in quality ad environments and the measurement that we provide brand advertisers versus clicks and conversions - this comes together with Ensemble. It’s not just a capability married to our Collective video and Collective display network, but a technology platform that brands can utilize at scale.
What do you think are the hurdles that you need to overcome in order to get brand advertisers to buy into Ensemble?
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It's been quite a year on AdExchanger.com as events encompassing the ecosystem of advertisers, publishers, agencies, tech and data companies have not disappointed and included many twist and turns.
In that spirit, please climb aboard the AdExchanger.com time machine and re-live the excitement as you sip on your holiday cuppa or cocktail. The next post for AdExchanger.com will be Tuesday, January 3... Get ready for another wild ride into the data-driven maelstrom!
2011 Industry Reactions
A Selection of 2011 Opinion
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It's the end of the year and it's time to look forward, but it's also time to look back and see what's happened - or not.
In its final plunge into the crystal ball of "predictions," AdExchanger.com reached out to members of the venture capital community and asked them to critique their predictions of last year as well as share an idea or two for 2012.
Well? How'd they do?
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- Gil Beyda, Genacast Ventures
- Jeff Crowe, Norwest Venture Partners
- Roger Ehrenberg, IA Ventures
- Chris Fralic, Partner, First Round Capital
- Jonah Goodhart and Noah Goodhart, Moat, WGI Group
- Seth Levine, Foundry Group
- Jerry Neumann, Neu Venture Capital
- Satya Patel, Twitter
- Bipul Sinha, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners
- Andy Weissman, Union Square Ventures
Gil Beyda, Managing Partner, Genacast Ventures (see 2011)
2011 predictions with my comments in [ ]...
- Rise of Data 2.0 - next generation "smart" segments. [Right. Introduced by a number of data players.]
- Consumer privacy policies implemented in technology platforms. [Right. OBA, though still slow to adopt.]
- Consolidation in the online advertising ecosystem. [Wrong. Some but not much.]
2012 predictions...
- Today's social commerce is neither social nor commerce...discuss. Social is a two-way discussion. The days of pimping your friends for "$10 off" will soon be gone. Look for real social commerce models in 2012: collaborative experiences driving commerce.
- "More" is the new "new." Innovation will take a temporary backseat to scaling. Buyers, sellers and folks in between will take a deep breath in 2012 to absorb and roll-out existing solutions at scale, focusing less at doing new in favor of doing more with what is already working. It isn't about new in 2012, it is about more.
- Early-stage investing in adtech companies will slow but later-stage investing will accelerate. Gone are the days of optimizing ever smaller slices of the online advertising pie. Investors will double-down on companies that can make a meaningful difference perhaps at the expense of the early pups.
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The 2012 version of the AdExchanger.com "predictions" piece comes with a twist as a selection of industry execs offer their thoughts on the following question:
"What's going to happen next year in advertising that hasn't happened before? And why?"
Neal Mohan, VP, Display Advertising, Google, offers his views.
I'm excited about a ton of things, but if there is one thing I'd be banking on - it's that cross-platform display is going from niche to mainstream. We got a taste in 2011, but it's nothing like what 2012 has in store.
In 2011, collectively, we took a business model and buying and selling infrastructure that had developed around ads viewed on a desktop computer, and expanded it to include mobile and video formats. In 2012, this more holistic way of looking at display will not just be a promising technology, but an essential platform for publishers, advertisers and agencies, all of whom want the ability to seamlessly buy and sell display ads across multiple screens: PCs, smartphones, tablets and video players. And I think we'll start to see other devices and screens joining the mix.
For publishers, this will mean the ability to manage their entire yield from a single place -- no more relying on disparate, siloed information and not being able to see the full revenue picture. I'm confident that publishers want this because we've already seen it - we rolled out video support in DFP earlier this year and have seen 50% quarter-over-quarter growth in video ad volume.
We also know that advertisers and agencies ideally don't want a separate buying platform for each type of media -- they want a way to buy across all formats, and in 2012 I think they'll get it. Real-time bidding (and by extension audience buying) has proven to be a transformative technology for buying desktop display -- on our exchange, it currently accounts for 60 percent of all transactions. In 2012, we'll start getting into that ballpark for mobile and video as well.
I'd describe the landscape for buyers and sellers today as "cobbled-together", particularly when it comes to non-desktop formats. By the end of 2012, we'll be much closer to having a completely customizable platform across all devices and formats.
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The 2012 version of the AdExchanger.com "predictions" piece comes with a twist as a selection of industry execs offer their thoughts on the following question:
"What's going to happen next year in advertising that hasn't happened before? And why?"
Rik van der Kooi, Corporate Vice President, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group for Microsoft, offers his views.
2012 will be a year in which major trends converge to bring us closer to the long-heralded digital economy. These trends include:
- Multi-device and multi-modal offerings will become first-class citizens. A shift towards mobile form factors, the appification of the web, and emerging forms of interaction with media through voice, gesture and touch will create new opportunities for marketers. Brands that deliver solutions across all formats will win.
- There will be a meaningful shift towards end-to-end solutions for marketers, at the expense of standard advertising. Related to that, a growing opportunity will emerge to enable closed-loop digital connections directly between brands/merchants and consumers. Digital ad solutions that act as real “commerce enablers” will occupy first-chair status.
- Social will evolve to become a means to an end, not an end in itself.
All of these trends have a common catalyst: a popular "uprising" among digital consumers. Users will expect more in 2012 – and marketers will have a growing need to reach them directly with clear, evocative messaging. If not a “never been seen before” moment, this acceleration of digital empowerment by consumers will be a watershed event for the industry.
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The 2012 version of the AdExchanger.com "predictions" piece comes with a twist as a selection of industry execs offer their thoughts on the following question:
"What's going to happen next year in advertising that hasn't happened before? And why?"
Ross Levinsohn, executive vice president of the Americas region for Yahoo!, offers his views.
One word– premium. While often maligned and ill-defined, true premium is going to change the way we think about social, video, mobile, everything.
First, "social media" is going to be redefined. No longer will we see social media as just the sites where users post, publish, or tweet content. Instead, social will expand to include the premium content that users are sharing socially every day. Data captured from this "social-ized" and shared content across platforms will create new opportunities for media buying and planning models.
Second, we are finally on the road to changing advertiser attitudes towards online video. Video, which consumers now watch for 21 hours on average per month, will continue to gain traction from ad agencies, which will lead to more premium branded video content and custom video experiences.
Lastly, mobile. Advertisers’ campaigns will need to have even more robust mobile components, if Black Friday 2011 was any indication. This year, there was a huge increase in the number of people using their mobile devices to make purchases. Next year will bring even more premium campaigns with apps and new content experiences for mobile users. What's the golden ticket? Premium.
Overall, 2012 will be the year when the focus on premium content and experiences changes how our industry thinks about social, video, mobile and everything else for that matter.
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The 2012 version of the AdExchanger.com "predictions" piece comes with a twist as a selection of industry execs offer their thoughts on the following question:
"What's going to happen next year in advertising that hasn't happened before? And why?"
Matt Seiler, Global CEO, IPG Mediabrands, offers his views.
Clients will pay their agency in direct correlation to the value the agency contributes to the client’s bottom line. We call it Pay For Performance. It really equates to an agency-client partnership versus the agency role as a broker of client marketing dollars. It’s a smart, deliberate way of managing the clients’ investment in the media space. In the end, when the clients succeed in making or exceeding their sales goals, the agency succeeds in a far more lucrative way. The agency takes the risk, but also, when successful, reaps the rewards along with the client.
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The 2012 version of the AdExchanger.com "predictions" piece comes with a twist as a selection of industry execs offer their thoughts on the following question:
"What's going to happen next year in advertising that hasn't happened before? And why?"
John Battelle, Founder/Chairman of Federated Media, offers his views.
We expect to see tremendous consolidation and clarification in the premium, Independent Web space in 2012. Up until recently, there has been no single, clear leader in the space we've often referred to as "the rest of the web" - that part of the Internet which isn't Google, Facebook, the portals, or a major media company. We call that the "Independent Web" and it is truly an enormous and very influential audience. 2012 will be the year it gains a foothold and breaks out as an efficient, scaled, quality marketing platform for brands who are looking for an alternative to standard, dependent media offerings. In short, 2012 will be the year the Independent Web roars and takes its place at the table with traditional media.
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