With LinkedIn IPO, B2B Marketing Gets The Spotlight
Let’s face it: In the family of all-things-marketing, business-to-consumer (B2C) has long been the beautiful butterfly, showered with attention and accolades, with business-to-business (B2B) the boring bookworm relegated to reading heavy textbooks through thick glasses. The bookworm, however, is about to become a butterfly: LinkedIn, a B2B social network, is going public at what promises to be a huge valuation.
But first, why the raw deal for B2B historically? Granted, B2B marketers can be a little bit acronym heavy (you mean you don’t know what CRM or ERP means?), but really it’s just simple math. The marketing dollars spent trying to reach and sell products or services to businesses are significant but dwarfed by the hurricane of dollars unleashed annually by companies trying to reach consumers to sell them their next car, mortgage, vacation, cellphone or diet pill. In terms of advertising spend specifically, B2C ad spend will exceed $300 billion in 2011, with B2B about 10-15% of that.
Read More: Forbes
Getting the most from creative optimization tools
Online marketing is notorious for going through fads faster than you can say, click. But for many industry veterans, dynamic creative optimization (DCO) was different. It seemed like the real deal. Companies like Tumri and Teracent pioneered this new technology back in 2008, and ushered in an exciting change and opportunity for advertisers. The promise of self-optimized campaigns where machine learning algorithms shoot millions of ad variations into the virtual ether and ensure that consumers get the most relevant messages seemed to have marked the beginning of a new era. This really was the “next big thing.”
But was it all for naught? Even with all the buzz, creative optimization never really outgrew its awkward teenage phase; today, it’s still more of a niche solution. There are no formal figures that exist for this market, but our recent analysis looked at the commonly accepted categories of creative optimization: targeting, retargeting, and optimization/testing and estimated revenue for companies that provide solutions for each. This rough analysis suggested that in 2010 the combined revenue of these companies totaled around $100MM — $120MM, which doesn’t really spell success. (If you come up with different figures, I would love to see them.)
Read More: iMediaConnection
AOL Starts Mapping Plans For Huffington Post
AOL plans to focus more on video during the next year, expanding into Asia with products and offerings after setting up the infrastructure in the U.S. The company has high-definition studios in New York and California and recently bought a company supporting a network of videographers to provide production, distribution and monetization of content, according to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, speaking at the Signal L.A. conference in Los Angeles Tuesday.
Armstrong and Arianna Huffington, AOL president and editor in chief for the newly created Huffington Post Media Group, provided insight into the $315 million deal announced Monday. Federated Media Executive Chairman John Battelle led the discussion.
Some reports suggest that the political content attracted AOL, but Armstrong calls that theory “a red herring” because 85% of content or traffic on HP doesn’t have anything to do with politics. “Our interest in buying the Huffington Post was about the social content and the future in distribution and, frankly, Arianna’s TLC around the content space,” Armstrong said.
Read More: MediaPost
Specific Media CTO McCartney joins VisualDNA
He was instrumental in building the Adviva ad-serving platform which Specific Media acquired and on which its offering is based. He joins VisualDNA as CTO to help the company scale up.
According to VisualDNA founder and CEO Alex Willcock, “McCartney started last week and is building out our platform to enable massive scale. It’s a big coup for us.”
In the coming weeks, VisualDNA intends to tie up with demand-side platform AppNexus, synching data so that media agencies can buy against it.
“We’re getting a lot of traction in that we collect first-party, opt-in data, when there’s very little high quality data around,” said Willcock.
Read More: New Media Age
5 ad operations tips for the year ahead
As we evaluate our successes and shortcomings from 2010, and set expectations for 2011, it’s always good practice to review the work that your team developed, and the processes by which they did so. I wanted to take a moment to share, with the online advertising community, some of the observations and ideas that we’ll be using to build a stronger ad operations process for the year ahead, and beyond. Here are five ad operations tips to get your 2011 off to a great start.
1. Review workflow, processes, and templates
In all probability, the last quarter of 2010 was a hectic time, with your ad ops teams working extended hours, implementing makeshift processes, and coming up with temporary solutions. Traditionally, workload drops drastically in Q1 and the pressure is significantly lower. Hence, the beginning of 2011 presents an ideal opportunity to review workflow, processes, and templates.
Read More: iMedia Connection
Cox Merges Adify With Digital Sales Arm
Aiming to reduce redundancy and offer more integrated online ad services, Cox Media Group said Tuesday it will merge its Cox Cross Media and Adify units to form Cox Digital Solutions. The new company will be led by Cox Cross Media head Steve Shaw and promises to facilitate online buys across Cox Media properties and third-party niche content networks.
Adify, which helps publishers build vertical networks and serves ads across the 180 networks it powers, was acquired by parent Cox Enterprises in 2008 for $300 million. The move has helped Cox expand its online ad operations and create vertical networks around its own properties, which include newspapers and radio and TV stations as well as related Web sites.
In 2009, for instance, Cox used Adify to build an auto-related ad network around its AutoTrader.com brand. Now the company will tie the Adify platform more tightly into its own digital ad operations to offer agencies and advertisers more efficient placement across its 1,300 local media sites in 145 markets as well as national reach through the more than 7,000 specialty publishers it works with. That adds up to traffic of about 135 million unique visitors a month, according to Cox.
Read More: MediaPost
New Year, New Attribution Model
A few years ago, marketers discovered that most of the conversions happened without an associated click in display advertising. Then, a little while later, view-based conversions were added to the performance metric. While it was a small step forward, the obvious question is: if the last click is not always indicative of the user’s decision to convert, why would the last view be any better? In short, it’s not.
In an earlier ClickZ column, I discussed the importance of going beyond the last click or last ad impression and described why an incorrect attribution model will lead to suboptimal results. Well, a new year calls for a new model – multi-touch attribution where all interactions within an association window are considered to have influences over a user’s conversion.
The power of digital advertising offers more than just targeting with higher precision; it also provides instantaneous feedback on how ads perform. With consumers exposed to increasingly more ad impressions and interactions of different media types, it’s become harder than it should be to explain how each event along the path to conversion affects the user’s decision. In the analytics sense, the current flawed last-touch attribution model suffers from the lack of a probability framework. Since the last touch (click or view) is defined by the conversion event, it’s difficult to calculate the probability. Therefore, it’s nearly impossible to measure the true influence of the last touch.
Read More: ClickZ
