RSS FeedArchive for the ‘The Sell Sider’ Category

At What Price Safety? At What Price Targeted Advertising?

spanfeller-sell-sider“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.

Today’s column is written by Jim Spanfeller, CEO of Spanfeller Media Group, a new-age media company.

As the news about the U.S. government’s Prism program attracts full-blown global attention, raising questions about our privacy and our safety, I think it’s a good time to re-examine the ongoing debate around third-party tracking cookies and their value to end users.

I’ve long said that the answer to the online advertiser tracking debate (like many other things in ad tech) hinges on transparency. The population is generally smart enough to decide what is appropriate and what is not. When faced with clear choices, they will almost always let you know what they really want and what they think is right.

In the case of PRISM, of course, transparency is a far more complex issue. The government would have us believe that it needs to keep these programs secret so that our adversaries cannot take countermeasures to overcome these “safeguards.”

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Location Is The New Cookie; Here’s How To Get A Bite

steinberg-twc-sell-sider“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.

Today’s column is written by Jeremy Steinberg, Senior Vice President of Digital Ad Sales for The Weather Company.

One of the most important tasks I have in my role as the head of a digital ad sales team is increasing mobile revenue. How can I do this? My plan is to use location as the new cookie.

Location data is relevant to a moment. It’s personal, but not too personal – a privacy-friendly alternative to the cookie. Location is digital but bridges the real world. It’s specific and reliable; there are 44,000 ZIP codes in the United States. And location encompasses both where you are now and where you’re going later.

Location is also one of the few targetable attributes on a phone. If you want to provide a marketer with a solution to reach all your consumers across all your platforms, you need location data. Not much else works.

But location in and of itself is not enough. Here’s what else you need to take your mobile business to the next level:

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The Key To Web Traffic? It’s The Content, Stupid!

spanfeller-sell-sider“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.

Today’s column is written by Jim Spanfeller, CEO, Spanfeller Media Group, a new age media company.

There have been some recent musings on BuzzFeed about what would happen to publisher traffic if Facebook went the way of MySpace. Unlikely as this is in the near term (a fact that the folks at BuzzFeed readily admit), the question does prompt some basic but important answers.

To give the fine people at BuzzFeed their proper due, their primary argument is that Google’s position as the dominant traffic driver on the Internet has slowly but surely given way to Facebook (although some would say these trends have been overstated due to “dark” Google). But now Facebook is seeing some declining numbers in both users and time spent, begging the question “What happens if Facebook becomes less of a traffic engine for content sites?”

Well, in the aggregate...nothing. These sites facilitate for what people want to do in the first place. One might even argue that, on balance, their efforts to help with content discovery are at the core of their value to end-users. In the case of Google, of course, this is without question.

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Firefox Cookie-Block Is The First Step Toward A Better Tomorrow

sell-sider“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.

Today’s column is written by Jim Spanfeller, CEO, Spanfeller Media Group, a new age media company.

Mozilla recently announced that the next version of Firefox, one of the most popular web browsers in the world, would come with a default setting that would not allow third-party tracking cookies to be installed on users’ machines.

This is the first major step down a road to a better tomorrow for business online, to an age where consumer privacy and corporate transparency is respected and practiced.  By doing what we say and saying what we do - by doing unto others what we want done to us - we will enter into a more trusted ecosystem. Business, information exchange, spontaneous discovery and overall satisfaction will thrive in ways that have become increasingly difficult due to black hat activities perpetrated partly in the name of advertising efficiencies.

The IAB has jumped to protect the currently crippled state of the industry by protesting Mozilla’s move.  As a one-time chairman of the organization, this saddens me to no end.  I feel this way for several reasons.

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The Myth of Unlimited Inventory

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“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.

Today’s column is written by Jim Spanfeller, CEO, Spanfeller Media Group, a new age media company.

It has often been said that due to nearly "unlimited inventory", pricing on digital advertising will continue to decline.  This is a thought that has been taken as gospel for some time now, but in the light of day is, in fact, simply not true.

How so? Well let's look at this from both ends of the telescope. The first is the belief that an overwhelming abundance of impressions results directly in lower CPMs; the second is the reality of those impressions in the first place.

Is the apparently unlimited amount of available banner inventory at the root of the continuing downturn in average online CPMs? I would tell you no. In just about every other medium out there (with the possible exception of Network Television) there is available inventory well beyond what the demand curve calls for. One can always add another form to the folio in a magazine or newspaper, there are more than enough available placements in radio, and spot, fringe and cable television rarely sell out.

So the implied supply and demand curve logic might be true for widgets, but has never been true for media. Media costs have always been the result of ongoing negotiations between buyer and seller. Of late, and especially true in the digital world, the buyer has been doing a much better job of negotiating than the seller.

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If You Are Not All In For Multi-Screen… Good Luck!

steinberg-twc-sell-sider“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.

Today’s column is written by Jeremy Steinberg, SVP, Digital Ad Sales at The Weather Company.  

I started writing this post from my iPad. I finished it on my iPhone. Then I wordsmithed it on my MacBook. And I did it all while watching TV. It was easy, seamless, and I expected it to be that way. I am your modern media consumer and I am not alone in my behavior. This is the future of media consumption and the future is now. And if you are in the media business and you are not all in for multi-screen…good luck!

Screens are everywhere in my life. I have a tablet and phone with me at all times. I add a third screen, my computer, to the mix at work. Then I add a TV screen to my screen portfolio when I am home at night. It is almost impossible for me to escape a screen.

And there are millions more like me, presenting a massive opportunity for media companies to help marketers create cross-platform messages. But this is not news to you. Many publishers and marketers I talk to about multi-screen know that this is a big opportunity. They just don’t know how to deal with it. The reason is that this brave new world of screens is fraught with obstacles:

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Why Publishers Should Be Wary of Optimizing Their Direct and RTB Demand Sources Together

esco-sell-sider"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.

Today's column is written by Esco Strong, Director, Marketplace Strategy at Microsoft.

If you’re a publisher managing a sizable direct-sold, guaranteed-delivery display ads business, you’ve almost certainly been tempted by the prospect of squeezing a few more dollars out of your business by optimizing your guaranteed and non-guaranteed demand sources as a single, unified supply pool.

The pitch is relatively straightforward: rather than having reserved campaigns sit “first chair” and gobble up all of the impressions they want ahead of downstream demand, instead allow “discretionary demand” to pick off some of those impressions where they are willing to pay a premium above and beyond the reserved rates. One key assumption here is that the “cherry-picking” can be done in a controlled manner such that enough inventory will be left over to fulfill the volume guarantees of the reserved buys.

While I have little doubt that technology in our industry today can tidily solve for the problem of meeting the delivery guarantee in this situation, our focus really should be on the question of the long-term effects on the brand businesses and the quality of the inventory that they will receive in this scenario. One challenge is the lack of “expressivity” – or targeting parameters - of brand buys.

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Environment: Whither Goest Thou

sell-sider

“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.

Today’s column is written by Jim Spanfeller, CEO, Spanfeller Media Group, a new age media company.

It was a long-held belief in media buying circles that environment mattered greatly in the final efficacy of a media plan.  That getting in front of the right people at the right time was not enough. For a foolproof strategy, it was considered key to present your marketing communication at the right time, to the right people and in the right places.

It’s a belief that has been supported in the past by countless research studies delving into advertising efficacy.

In recent years, however, this philosophy has been pushed to the sidelines in a great many media buying operations. While one could argue that clients still hold this thought to be true, a great percentage of their end buys are shoved into automated audience - and audience alone - criteria when it comes to execution.

This trend actually started some time ago, it is not simply a symptom of the digital age. One can trace its roots back to network television buys. Certainly the initial efforts of buyers of network television were to place ads in specific shows, but as competition for reach increased and the marketplace matured, it quickly devolved into simply trying to get the best deal (as defined by the lowest CPMs) for a specific season.

Of late, digital buying has further intensified this thinking.  Planning and buying, especially by individual site or product, is time-consuming and hard.  Simple economics have greatly incentivized digital buying and planning operations to push as much money as possible into bulk audience buying.  The effects of this move have had a profound impact - much of which was not intended.

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The News Of My Death Has Been Greatly Exaggerated! -The Banner

“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.

Today’s column is written by Jim Spanfeller, CEO, Spanfeller Media Group, a new age media company.

There has been much talk lately about the demise of the banner as an effective communications tool. These conversations can be self-centered, pointless, naïve, or all of the above. We know with great certainty that banner ads work. There are literally warehouses of research measuring and supporting their efficacy to drive brand lift… and of course the CPW (cost per whatever) data speaks for itself.

I find it amusing that often times the very practitioners of advertising science will sit back and suggest that brand lift studies (Dynamic Logic, Insight Express, Vizu) are somehow less accurate because a vast majority of them show lift. What was it they were expecting? Advertising works. And thank God it does because if it didn’t, most people reading this post would not have a job.

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What Is The True Value of Big Data In Advertising?

“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.

Today’s column is written by Jim Spanfeller, CEO, Spanfeller Media Group, a new age media company.

Today’s media buyers and sellers are playing on a whole new field, where preying on consumer behavior is the norm and big data is the apparent vehicle to do so. For buyers, big data comes with big expectations, which are repeatedly being met under false pretenses. The harm of such a facade is especially serious when considering the fact that millions of dollars are being thrown at the acquisition and management of this information. Media buyers don’t have the time to investigate algorithms, nor do they have the skill-set to fully comprehend them, leaving plenty of room to be oversold and over-promised.

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