Attribution in Real-Time Audience Targeting

The minute that marketers use multiple media buying channels for advertising campaigns, they’re faced with an attribution conundrum. At a basic level, attribution is the analytics process of determining how effective each media buying channel is at producing the desired advertising outcome. It drives most of the campaign optimization decisions, such as budget allocation and tuning of campaign tactics.  At first blush, the challenge of attribution may seem solvable by simply assigning tags, specifying conversion events, and then letting ad servers report the performances on all the tags. But like most things in digital advertising, it’s not that easy, and in a media landscape of multiple media buying channels with real-time bidding strategies, many marketers are left wondering if their less-than-perfect attribution model is providing sub-optimal performance or even wrong decisions.  The current attribution model is the “last-ad wins” model. Basically, the last ad impression before the user conversion event gets 100 percent of the credit. Savvy marketers know that this instant gratification model oversimplifies the consumer decision process. Let’s pretend you see a great ad while watching the World Cup finals online. Chances are that you’re not going to rush to your online store to make the purchase right away. However, the next time you shop online or in stores, the influence of that brand is very likely at work. Attributing this type of delayed influences gives marketers visibility into what combination and sequence of ad messaging leads to conversions. It also provides the needed dials to optimize during dialogs with their consumers.

Read More: ClickZ

Twitter Sees Sizable Ad Business

Twitter is ready to declare success in its initial revenue-building efforts, and casts an even wider net by launching limited-time deals feed @earlybird, which provides time-sensitive offers from advertisers.  Disney has signed up for the first offer: a two-for-one ticket promotion for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which debuts in the U.S. today. The tweet takes users to a Fandango page to purchase the tickets with a discount code.  The @earlybird program is the latest addition to a growing set of revenue makers Twitter is trying. Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief operating officer, said it would continue to test concepts that can accelerate activity already happening on the service. Many companies, including deal-of-the-day services Groupon and Gilt Groupe, use Twitter to spread deals.  ”There’s going to be lots of iteration and testing,” he said. “So far it’s working.”  The company divides its business into two pillars: advertising and commercial services. Under advertising, Twitter is offering brands both Promoted Tweets, which appear in search results, and Promoted Trends, which are on its home page. @earlybird falls into the commercial sector, which includes business tools.  Coca-Cola reported that it saw 86 million impressions in a day and a 6 percent interaction rate for its Promoted Tweets campaign tied to the World Cup. Those results, Costolo said, are “not atypical” for ad campaigns on Twitter.  ”I’m confident the ad platform already works for big brands in terms of the reach and engagement we can provide,” he said.  The key for Twitter’s advertiser approach is finding activities happening on the service and amplifying them, Costolo said. @earlybird, for example, will exist as a regular tweet from Disney’s account. The @earlybird account, which already has 46,000 followers, will retweet the message. Similarly, advertisers can only run a Promoted Trend for something that is already showing momentum on the service. Old Spice, for instance, ran a Promoted Trend yesterday to hype its ad campaign featuring the actor in its “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” commercials sending videos to well wishers in social media.

Read More: AdWeek

Social Location Companies (Four)Square Off On Panel

Despite a pair of boxing gloves prominently displayed, a confab billed as the “Battle of the Mobile Social Media Leaders” turned out to be more lovefest than cage match. That’s not to say all the startups on the panel held at Ogilvy’s Digital Labs in New York on Friday will still be standing as independent companies a year from now.  The hot social location space carved out by companies on hand like Foursquare, Loopt and Brightkite is becoming more and more crowded as venture investors, entrepreneurs and big Web companies flood in to strike digital gold. But for an hour at least, the top players in the niche could bask in the warm glow of a sunny May afternoon and a buzzing overflow audience.  Seemingly, none of the rival companies gathered are even riven by jealousy over all the attention lavished on Foursquare, the undisputed publicity champ of the social location set. “More media raises the tide for all boats,” said Nihal Mehta, CEO and founder of social city guide Buzzd. “We’re all benefiting from the Foursquare press.”

Read More: MediaPost

Demystifying Real-Time Bidding

Real-time bidding (or as we like to call it, RTB) is major buzzword in the ad industry today. It hints of the term “Behavioral Targeting” back a couple of years ago, where anyone who wanted a play in this industry claimed to do it. However, unlike behavioral targeting, RTB is quite real and very effective. Problem is its poorly understood and complicated to build against. I’ve read a ton of articles dismissing this solution due to lack of clarity (and just sat in another meeting discussing the how-to while typing this blog). What I hope to accomplish is to shed some light on both the advantages and disadvantages of RTB so you can make up your own mind and see if it works for you.

First and foremost, what is it?
Simply stated, real-time bidding brings the ad buy down to the impression level.  Historically, when you buy through an exchange (ADX, RMX, name it) you create bids that are pseudo-static — every time you see an impression that fits the criteria you are looking for, you bid a set price. There are obviously subtle complexities to all of this but for simplicity lets assume that if bid 25-cents, you will always bid 25 cents. If you want to bid higher or lower, or on different targets, you change bid price and/or create more line items and targets and hope for the best. Thus, bidding in the standard exchange is like bidding for a crate of goods, hoping the crate contains the items you sort of asked for, and praying everything is in good condition. Real-time bidding is more like buying each product in the crate, at varying prices, and assembling yourself. In other words, you can inspect a wide variety of attributes about the impression and make a dynamic decision with respect to price. You can still do the bulk buy and hope for the best, but you have all the information you need to make a quantitative decision (something you cannot do on historical exchanges without creating thousands of line items).

GRPs For Digital Marketers

As an undergraduate marketing major at NYU, I took a class called Advertising and Media Planning. There was a question on one of the written tests in that class: “What are Gross Rating Points?” I answered, “Reach times average frequency.” For some unknown reason, my answer was marked incorrect – an event that apparently still scars me 30 years later, because this is the second time I’ve written about it here.  Every couple of months, I turn a corner and find myself smack dab in the middle of a debate about the efficacy of the GRP as an online metric. It usually goes like this. On the one side: “Advertisers need GRPs to place digital media in holistic media context.” On the other side: “Dude, whatever. GRPs are, like, totally last century. We can’t shoehorn the power of the Internet into an old metric.”  I’m going to try and get us all past this. GRPs are a necessary, but in no way sufficient, metric for evaluation of online advertising. If you’re in a hurry, you can stop reading now. If not…Gross Rating Points originated in broadcast media. First radio, and then television, had audiences measured at the program level: how many listeners or viewers were in the audience for a specific show? The result was a program rating. On January 19, 1953, for example, for the episode “Lucy Goes to the Hospital,” “I Love Lucy” garnered a 72 household rating — 72% of all TV households in the U.S. were tuned to the program (at least, according to Art Nielsen.)  Advertisers, of course, ran schedules, which were simply collections of spots. Each spot ran in a program, and so could be associated with that program’s audience rating. The GRP emerged as a way to express the audience to an aggregate of spots, which is to say a schedule, and its calculation couldn’t have been more simple: the sum of the program ratings for all the spots in the schedule. If an advertiser bought 10 spots across 10 different programs, and each program had a 7 rating, then the Gross Rating Points — the sum of the ratings of the spots in the schedule — would be 70. If an advertiser had run two spots in that landmark episode of “I Love Lucy,” they would have bought 144 GRPs (which would be parsed as a reach of 72, with a frequency of 2.)

Read More: blog.comScore.com

There Will Be 4,000 DSP’s

People used to say that there were 400 ad networks out there in their hey-day.  I think there will be an order of magnitude more DSPs.  Here is why: Building a DSP is easy. Ad networks were vertically integrated examples of our marketplace.  To build an ad network, you had to build an exchange, sign up publishers, and build a DSP.  The market has evolved to a point now where getting dramatic reach and scale at a level unimaginable 5 years ago just takes 10 lines of PHP (so that is like one line of Python?) with Right Media’s PHP library: Fearsome.  I used to tell people all the time that starting an ad network is the easiest thing someone can do: Get some inventory, call 20 agencies and tell them you have a new algorithm to drive performance, and they each give you a $20k test budget!  Voila, you did $400k in your first quarter.  Agencies felt pressure to find test budgets for everybody because, if a client were to ask them “What do you think of X”, you can’t say, “Well, we never tried X”.  Agencies felt an almost fiduciary responsibility to try new stuff.  Now, if you didn’t perform, the next chunk of dollars was tougher, but you had runway instantly.  We are seeing the exact same dynamic in DSPs today.  If you mix the data and inventory a little differently (and it would be hard not to), voila, you are worthy of a test.  Agencies are playing the field today, the great rollup of DSPs that everyone is so looking forward to has not yet happened, and agencies expect to and are prepared to try lots of different things.  All you have to do is perform after that and you have a business.  If you eat your margins early on, offer layered in retargeting, etc., the odds that you can artificially inflate performance in a way that makes your business look interesting is high and this gives you more runway to work.  Convert 25% of your test budgets to $200k renewals and you have a Q2 business doing $1m in revenue.  Building a DSP is cake.  Locking in data or inventory or building an algorithm that creates great performance for advertisers over time by arbitraging data and inventory is what will separate the winners from the losers, but it will be non-obvious in the first 6 months of working together who those guys are for agencies.  Remember when Glam spent millions of dollars of VC money buying inventory at a loss to lock in exclusive access to inventory, then when they had the advertiser base, they crushed payouts to pubs? There are a lot of the same kinds of problems that get slathered over early on in this market. Building a DSP that can look at 10 billion impressions a day vs. 1 billion cost-efficiently is interesting, but no one will need that scale for a year, so no one will know who can do it better/faster/cheaper.

Read More: cogmap.com

News Websites Discuss Life Without Google

The Web 2.0 Expo kicked off in San Francisco on Tuesday with a discussion that would be unthinkable without social media: How Web publishers can be successful without Google. The panel, moderated by the Journal’s Jessica Vascellaro, noted that many news websites today are addicted to Google’s search engine, which in many cases is their single-largest driver of traffic.  Yet the traffic they get from social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter is growing much more quickly these days. For example, newspaper and magazine publisher Hearst is seeing traffic from social media sites grow at a 250% annual rate, said Heidi Perry of Share This, a company that integrates sharing capability into thousands of big and small publishers, including Hearst. Moreover, traffic from Google tends to take a U-turn, said Tristan Harris from Apture, a company that helps sites figure out how to hold onto traffic once they get it. Some 30% of top news sites’ traffic comes from Google and about 30% of it goes quickly right back to Google, he said. “What good is all of this investment you make in driving traffic to your site from Google if it goes right back to Google?” he asked.

Read More: blogs.wsj.com