The ‘Research’ Category
Yes, it's another opportunity to "Learn About The Ecosystem" and reflect upon another four-month block of data-driven Q&As on AdExchanger.com.
Learn from, review and slice-and-dice recent insights and info from members of the digital ad ecosystem including web publishers, digital agencies, ad networks, exchanges, ad tech and data companies.
AdExchanger.com presents Volume III of its Q&A report, a 262-page publication consisting of all the Q&A interviews on the site from May to August of 2010.
Collect 'em all!...
- Volume I from all of 2009 is here.
- Volume II containing January-April of 2010 Q&As is here.
And now, select from two versions of Volume III:
You can buy a printed, bound copy
of the report from QOOP.com for the cost of the printed paper plus shipping - click here!
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Eugene Becker is Director, Analytics of the Media Innovation Group (The MIG), WPP Group's proprietary technology firm.
AdExchanger.com: What is your perspective on the attribution challenge within the broader context of measurement and analytics?
EB: We see the lack of a viable attribution metric as a central, if not the central dilemma facing digital marketers. The industry is drowning in data, but decision-making remains subjective because marketers know that the last ad model can lead to wildly suboptimal decisions. A typical case is where bottom-funnel tactics receive the entire budget, while the top-funnel sites that are actually driving demand get little or nothing. If no one has faith in the metrics, the accountability model suffers. At the end of the day, the growth and power of digital media is constrained because we are still facing this fundamental measurement challenge.
How is the MIG’s attribution offering unique?
In developing ZAP Attribution, we focused on two major gaps in the market – lack of objectivity and lack of accountability.
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Web publisher solutions provider Solbright released its initial findings from its new Digital Media Index™ (DMI) last week as the "premium" display advertising market rebounds in 2010. Among the data points, "Cost-per-thousand-impression (CPM) revenues in the first half of 2010 rose almost 9 percent from the same period in 2009, while pricing, after experiencing a recent decline, has stabilized." Read the release. And, download the report (sign-up required).
Solbright CEO Tom Pace discussed the new research.
Given your prediction that this will be the strongest year ever for "premium" display, why do you think this will be the case?
It’s all in the numbers. The Digital Media Index makes it clear that Q2 2010 has been the strongest Q2 we have ever seen, and 2010 overall has also seen the best sequential growth in recent years. As far back as we have tracked this data, we have seen very strong seasonal trends. The first quarter of every year has traditionally been the weakest quarter, with revenue trending up significantly in the second and third quarters, and the fourth quarter coming in the strongest. These strong seasonal trends, taken together with record-breaking and accelerating revenue for the second quarter, portend a very strong overall year for the premium display market.
What is the biggest surprise for you in the data?
One of the biggest surprises for us was the recent strength of the newspaper sites. These sites, taken as a whole, had about a 30 percent revenue increase in Q2 over the same period last year. While there were some other segments that had even better performance, 30 percent is certainly respectable. This strength may be attributable to a growing advertiser preference for local reach.
What is the value proposition for your clients in having this data made available publicly?
Keep in mind that we are not reporting any organization’s specific data here, and that all reported information is aggregated from across our client base. Our clients represent the top premium publishers in the industry, so they see tremendous value in being able to compare their own pricing and revenue data against the rest of the market. The trends we’ve identified help these publishers set their own pricing and packages in a way that gives them a competitive advantage.
It’s also important to note that the data we’ve been made available for the public only scratches the surface of the trends the DMI can identify. While a significant amount of information will be included in our quarterly public reports, our clients have access to a broader and more detailed view of the DMI findings, and it’s our hope that the information we present will help them make decisions that will have a positive impact on their bottom lines.
By John Ebbert
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DoubleVerify announced what it calls the "First Ever Trust Index" and a report on what the company sees as compliance to its brand safety metrics among a large group of ad networks, demand-side platforms (DSPs), exchanges and publishers. Read the release. And, download it here (sign-up required).
DoubleVerify CEO Oren Netzer discussed the research.
AdExchanger.com: What surprises you the most from the report?
We've been pleasantly surprised by how quickly media verification has become such an important component for every online player - not just advertisers and agencies but networks, DSPs, publishers and exchanges. The networks that are utilizing verification see it as a value add and together, partners across the board understand that increased transparency means increased trust - which ultimately drives more brand dollars online.
For this report specifically, we received an overwhelmingly positive reaction for touting the top performers in the industry rather than focusing on the negative aspects of non-compliance. We want to show that there is major progress happening in the space and it should be recognized. We plan to put this report out every six months to encourage the industry to move forward so we can all benefit.
Can you drill down on the exchanges Google's DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Right Media Exchange? What did you see there?
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Netezza has sponsored a new white paper by Winterberry Group called, "Changing Mission of Marketing Data," as the use of marketing data shifts online. The paper predicts, "U.S. marketers will more than double their annual spending on online-derived data sources over the next two years - investing as much as $840 million by 2012 on information about digital audiences, transactions and 'clickstream' behaviors." Read Winterberry Group's release. And, download the PDF (sign-up required).
Jonathan Margulies, a director at Winterberry Group discussed the paper's findings.
AdExchanger.com: Can you qualify what you mean when you say that spend will increase for digital data sources? What do these digital sources look like?
JM: When we started looking at the concept of digital data, our goal was to understand the extent to which online media channels (including e-mail, search, display, social and mobile) are moving towards audience-driven marketing--and, more importantly, attracting investment dollars from advertisers who want to drive better targeted marketing programs. By and large, the concept of "data" as a distinct budgetary line item is something that traditional direct marketers very readily understand; they know precisely how much they pay for analytics, lists and database hosting, and a mature industry has grown to support that enterprise.
In the online world, though, that maturation process is still ongoing and interpretations of digital data vary pretty significantly. So we took a top-down approach and focused only on targeted marketing applications, effectively asking "Where are marketers collecting information for on- and offline targeting? And how much are they spending to aggregate, manage and optimize that data?" From the digital perspective, that activity encompasses original data compilation (which might be performed by, say, publishers, retailers or lead generation platforms), segmentation and secondary transactions (the distribution of audience insight through an exchange, for example).
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DoubleVerify CEO Oren Netzer discussed his company's new research group called the "Advertising Fraud Detection Lab [which] will investigate advertising fraud in real-time and raise awareness of deceptive scams taking place every day across thousands of publishers." Read the release.
AdExchanger.com: How big a problem is impression fraud today?
Impression fraud is a huge issue in online advertising and it happens across thousands of sites a day. There are currently 4 million sites in the U.S. carrying ads on a daily basis and studies show that on average, 31 percent of all online impressions are non-compliant. A significant cause of this waste is due to common fraudulent activities and we have noticed quite a large amount of questionable activity on some sites already. There are potentially hundreds of ways in which a site can engage in advertising fraud. For example, publishers can stack 10 ads on top of each other, where the user only sees the topmost ad but all 10 advertisers pay for an impression. There are numerous other ways to do this as well (Professor Ben Edelman publishes other types of advertising fraud on his blog at http://www.benedelman.org.
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On Monday, DataXu released insights from a recent sample of client display ad campaigns that showed creative has more impact on conversions than context or audience. Read more on the DataXu blog about "Beyond Audience: What Drives Campaign Performance?" And, download the one-sheeter (PDF).
Sandro Catanzaro, VP of Products at DataXu, discussed the study's findings.
So are you saying that if context and audience remain equal (or remain the same) that nearly 1/2 the time, a change in creative led to a conversion? How do you pull out the fact that creative is the key here nearly 1/2 the time?
To provide some context, we initially conducted this analysis as an engineering effort. We wanted to see if our data would reveal any insights about which type of impression attributes are most important to a campaign. We analyzed converting impressions across a set of 19 of our campaigns for 30 days, and we found that for almost half (48%) of the campaigns, creative attributes of those impressions were more correlated to conversions than attributes related to context or the consumer. In the other half of the campaigns (52%), context or consumer attributes were more frequently correlated.
So, getting back to your question, for the 48% of campaigns in which creative was the most important attribute, with all else being equal, choosing the best creative was the most important decision driving the increased conversion rates.
While creative attributes were the "winner" in our study, the real takeaway is that there is not one approach or dimension of optimization that fits all campaigns, as campaign performance drivers can be unpredictable. Ideally, you need to consider all three data domains, at the same time—and for every impression— if you want to maximize performance.
Given the limitations of certain inventory sources and exchanges, did any of the campaigns run across non-RTB-enabled inventory? If so, do you have any estimate of the performance impact of a non-RTB-enabled environment?
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Demand-side platform DataXu has released a new monthly study called "DataXu MarketPulse." Among the insights: "DataXu analyzed the price paid for ad impressions across ad exchanges over the past 30 days, and discovered that the average daily price varied by over 100% during the period."
The company also compared CPM pricing volatility to other markets:
DataXu VP of Technology Bill Simmons discussed the studies findings and the use of financial market constructs in digital advertising.
AdExchanger.com: How do you determine a 100% fluctuation in CPM pricing? Isn't every impression potentially different so an apples-to-apples comparison is impossible?
BS: You are right, all impressions are different. However, the graphic in DataXu’s MarketPulse shows an overall average CPM across all of our campaigns. What this is showing is that even when you aggregate this average across billions of impressions bought on multiple exchanges; you might expect the cost of media to stay fairly steady over a thirty-day period. However, this is not the case. Over thirty-day periods, we typically see the average cost of online display media change by over 100 percent.
If we break down inventory into to smaller and smaller buckets, like individual content categories or audience segments, the volatility measurement increases dramatically (sometimes as high at 500 percent). This finding is significant, since traditional media planning methods --- where change orders may take days to execute --- can’t keep up with these kinds of price swings on a day-by-day, let alone a second-by-second basis.
Please discuss how the variables involved with CPM pricing differ from the pricing in other markets.
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Dan Salmon is an equity research analyst at BMO Capital Markets and covers advertising and marketing services.
AdExchanger.com: Please provide a bit of background on you and how you and Bank of Montreal got into the marketing services space.
DS: BMO Capital Markets is the investment banking arm of BMO Financial Group (aka Bank of Montreal) and it has been providing advisory and capital markets services in the media, advertising and marketing services industry for some time. However we increased our US focus in recent years including the creation of my role: equity research analyst. I began covering the industry for BMO in April 2008 and continue to add new companies to my coverage list. As for some background on me, I am a Canadian citizen and have worked in the equity research business since graduating from college. I began my career at Saloman Smith Barney on the Hotels and Casinos team from 2000-2003 and have been with BMO since 2004, where I began working on the Broadcasting and Internet Media team.
What has surprised you about the digital media space in 2010?
Slowly but surely, many people are beginning to expand their definition of "digital media" to include things like addressable IP-based television (IPTV) and digital-out-of-home (DOOH). For so long, the term was confined to lead generation, search, display and email, and then eventually rich media and mobile. It's no secret that the media and marketing ecosystem is evolving into an all-digital one, but up until recently my discussions with "digital media" companies were normally confined to "the internet" and maybe mobile. Now when I ask if they're beginning to think about evolving their offerings to handle DOOH and IPTV, the answer is increasingly 'Yes!'
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It's finally available online!
View the video - "A Few Good DSPs" - from last Monday's presentation at the IAB Exchanges and Networks Marketplace by GCA Savvian's Terence Kawaja..
And, see and hear Kawaja's complete PPT presentation...
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