Taming Online Chaos

For years, Web media planners have lived in fear of The Screenshot. That’s the e-mailed evidence from a client that shows its ads running where they shouldn’t, such as a pornographic Web site. More brand advertisers than ever are turning to the Web and they are now seeking to solve this problem by engaging verification tools and services to alert them when their ads run on sites they deem unacceptable. Misplaced ads aren’t a problem unique to the Internet, but the digital medium makes the problem even more acute. A client and agency can easily pick up a magazine and see their ad ran as agreed to on the insertion order. Yet the Web is incredibly fragmented, with attention spread across millions of sites. That’s led to an automated system of ad placement that is far from transparent, with many ad networks not even showing clients where their ads ran.  “There’s more opacity in the system than there’s ever been before,” said Joe Mele, managing director of media and marketing at Razorfish. “There’s less visibility into what’s going on. For some clients, that’s just not OK.”  Service providers in the ad-verification space, including DoubleVerify, AdSafe and AdXpose, use tracking pixels and human analysis to identify misplaced ads and give advertisers the ability to get them taken down — not to mention refunds from publishers and networks.

Read More:  AdWeek

Attribution or Media Mix Models for Search Marketing?

I’ve never been a big fan of attribution models and have always preferred econometric models that do their best to generate a practical media mix model.  I’ve explained my reasons in different ways to clients, prospects, and show attendees, but I doubt I’ve communicated them as clearly as Avinash Kaushik did recently in his SES NY keynote. Kaushik pointed out the lunacy of some of the attribution models being used by search marketers who think of themselves as fairly advanced. Also, I’ve always been a fan of monitoring bounce rates of landing pages as closely as one monitors eventual conversion to leads or sales.  One of Kaushik’s now-famous pearls of wisdom regarding bounce rates is fully self-explanatory and never grows old: “I came, I puked, I left.” Clearly, for most of us looking at any analytics program, it’s boggling how high bounce rates can be, even for our most relevant and best-performing pages. Getting the bounce rate below 50 percent is doable, but it takes a lot of landing page tuning, copy testing, and layout adjustment.  If you take one thing from Kaushik’s crusade for better user experiences, it should be “watch your bounce rate.” While not everyone is capable of designing media mix and marginal attribution models, everyone has the ability to start improving bounce rates now.

Read More: ClickZ

The Display Market in 2010 – Revolution or Anarchy?

In the eleven years I have worked in and covered the display advertising market, I have never seen such a frenzy as I do today. In the past week, I  learned of three more DSP’s, two data companies and an attribution vendor.  Agencies are also in the game this time around. So what is causing this pile-on of new ad technologies to the market? There are a few things:

- Leveled playing field on the exchanges: The ad exchanges allow for innovation in ad optimization and bidding. Additionally, small companies can suddently compete for inventory that used to be locked up by ad network contracts.

- Better technologies: Cookieless tracking, container tags, real time bidding, data targeting and dynamic ad generation are all innovations that are hitting the hocky stick curve right about…now.

- Opening purse strings: We know that display advertising spending was essentially flat from 2008 to 2009. It appears that 2010 will show improvement. Marketers are getting budgets back and are ready to spend them.

- Desperate publishers: Publishers are grasping to find ways to make more money on their sites, so they are handing over the reigns to sell side platforms to help them optimize.

Read More: Blogs.Forrester.com