“RTB allows advertisers to find the sweet spot between data and inventory,” Greg Coleman, President Criteo
OpenX Publisher Conference Guest Post Series
As he prepares for the conference, Greg took some time out of his schedule to answer the following questions about the recent developments he’s seen in online advertising. Greg Coleman, President of Criteo, will be speaking at the forthcoming OpenX Publisher Conference on May 14 where attendees will hear his thoughts on the challenges and opportunities within the digital advertising landscape.
1. What would you say are the main challenges facing digital advertisers today?
On any given day, there are past, present, and future challenges faced by digital advertisers. In the ‘past’, advertisers review how sales occur within a given time period and understand, retrospectively, which marketing efforts led to those sales in order to attribute marketing credit to those efforts. As the number of marketing channels proliferate, the ability to provide proper attribution to those channels becomes more difficult. In the ‘present’, the staggering amount of data that digital marketers have access to means that there is a real need to understand how to contextualize the data, and frankly to understand what’s relevant and what’s not. For example, what’s the value of a facebook ‘like?’ And in the ‘future’, marketers need to understand how to allocate their marketing dollars in a world where attention is more and more fractional, and split over many screens, sometimes simultaneously. But these issues are all on a marketer’s mind, all the time.
Read more: OpenX
Big Data Is Never Too Big When You Can Act On It
We all know that a tremendous amount of online user data is being compiled at an extraordinary rate. An unbelievable, somewhat unfathomable, amount of data is gathered every second of every day. But is all of this data being used to its potential, or are we (collectively) just spending a lot of money to mine and store massive amounts of useless information?
This phenomenon of data overload, known as Big Data, refers to data sets whose size are beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time, and it isn’t a new concept. In fact, Doug Laney has been talking about it for over 10 years. Laney is considered a pioneer in the field of data warehousing, and in a research report dating back to 2001 he described the emerging “Big Data revolution” as the outcome of the effect of the e-commerce surge. According to a study* commissioned by the Columbia Business School and the New York American Marketing Association, 96 percent of marketers said they believe successful brands use customer data to drive marketing decisions.
However, 36 percent of these respondents said they have “lots of customer data,” but just “don’t know what to do with it.” Even more troubling, 39 percent of these marketers admitted they “cannot turn their data into actionable insight.” This is a big problem, because in the universe of e-commerce, being able to interact with your customers based on the behaviors they’re displaying in real time is invaluable for driving revenue, creating brand awareness, and engaging with your customers. The key is being able to react to data instantly.
Read more: ClickZ
Retailigence Launches AdPOP™, First Mobile Ad Solution for National Retailers and Brands Powered by Local Store Inventory Coupled with DSP Capabilities
SAN FRANCISCO, April 3, 2012 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — Today, at the ad:tech industry event in San Francisco, Retailigence, a hyperlocal marketing platform that utilizes brick-and-mortar inventory data obtained directly from retailers, unveiled AdPOP™, its mobile advertising solution for national retailers and brands. Using DataXu’s industry leading digital marketing management (DMM) platform, DX3, AdPOP will deliver the first programmatic buying advertising solution that dynamically embeds local store inventory data into mobile display ad creative while targeting ads to nearby points of purchase (POP).
AdPOP from Retailigence enables brand and retail marketers to create dynamic mobile advertising campaigns that drive both brand awareness and local point of purchase activity. With data from Pew Research showing that more than half of adult cell phone owners reference their devices while shopping, AdPOP provides a powerful tool for brand and retail marketers to reach mobile shoppers as they zero in on a purchase. AdPOP’s automated features can be effectively used to add a local element to national campaigns for product launches, high demand/limited supply lines, or entire product catalogs; campaigns which are too granular to be constructed manually.
By leveraging DataXu’s #1 ranked demand-side platform capabilities, AdPOP will give brand and retail marketers the power to improve the efficiencies of their offline consumer acquisition strategy via programmatic buying across mobile ad exchanges and premium inventory. Combining AdPOP’s hyperlocal retail targeting with the reach and efficiency of DX3, marketers will be able to reach quality audiences at scale.
“Hyperlocal marketing platforms provide more effective ways to attract the customers advertisers want, more efficiently and with clearer ROI,” stated Julie Ginches, Vice President of Marketing at DataXu. “They’re able to reach a specific audience without casting a wide net and more effectively drive new and repeat customers.”
Behavioral Segmentation: How to Make the Most of Your Data
From Hello Kitty Band-Aids to artist-licensed iPhone skins and Subaru’s First Car Story animation app, the consumer demand for customization continues to increase across all industries. Advertisers in every industry are looking for ways to create unique user experiences that appeal to the different personalities of their customers.
In order to deliver a tailored experience to different shoppers, retailers must be able to segment their visitors effectively. Capturing data about how many people are visiting your site and how many pages they visit does nothing to inform you about the types of buying behaviors they exhibit and what factors actually play a role in their converting to paying customers.
This is where behavioral segmentation becomes crucial in optimizing your marketing efforts. Real-time data about the purchasing triggers for different segments of shoppers is essential when marketing teams are working to increase purchase conversion rates and average order values.
This behavioral data is also extremely helpful for increasing engagement rates for your brand loyalty program and email/newsletter sign-up efforts. When you know what people are seeking in an experience with your brand, or if you can narrow down shopping patterns or ingrained behaviors within a particular segment of site visitors, then you are able to serve ads and offers that are specifically designed to direct each segment’s behavior with the best possible conversion rates.
Read more: ClickZ
A Call for Transparency: Are Dynamic Price Floors Good for the Industry?
For years, the nirvana for digital display advertising has been targeting and efficiency that is as good as search advertising. Today, through dynamic, real-time bidding (RTB) and the emergence of technologies such as demand-side platforms, the industry is reaching this goal. It’s been exciting to watch RTB re-invigorate and grow the business of digital display advertising. Several years ago, I wrote several columns explaining how RTB works and received thanks and comments from many of you.
Today, as the uptake of RTB for digital display advertising grows, have you ever wondered how the markets operate behind the scenes? The ad exchanges aggregate individual sellers and conduct the auction. They allow publishers to provide agencies and advertisers with direct access to their inventory. Companies like mine manage the bids for buyers through intelligent, algorithm-driven platforms.
From the outset, exchanges were designed to be open marketplaces where buyers and sellers could meet and clear bids efficiently and transparently. However, a troubling and potentially pernicious practice is emerging in the way some ad exchanges are running their auctions – one that I believe the industry needs to examine closely and discuss openly.
Understanding the new practice, somewhat euphemistically referred to as “dynamic price floors,” requires a brief overview of auction theory. Most ad exchanges operate on the principle of the generalized second-price auction. This has proven over time to be a highly efficient auction model for goods or services of uncertain value and short shelf life – which is a perfect description of digital advertising. A second-price auction results in lively bidding (which creates robust liquidity) and stable, long-term equilibrium prices.
DoubleClick Experiment Could ‘Re-imagine’ IAB Display Metrics
Google said it will run a DoubleClick for Advertisers experiment, with help from brand measurement research firm Vizu, that could change the way companies measure brand lift from display ads.
The company will present the findings to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
DFA experiments began in mid-2008, but this could be the first with findings presented to the IAB that change brand lift measurements. The pilot aims to show that the use of experimental design principles — a research term — is a good way to address brand measurement challenges and to provide actionable insights to brand marketers.
Sherrill Mane, SVP of research, analytics, and measurement at the IAB, notes that if successful, the research could have far-reaching implications for the future of brand impact measurement of online advertising campaigns.
Surveys are a measurement tool already used by marketers to measure the effectiveness of a campaign, but, there are some challenges today with experimental design and how the responses are collected.
“We hope to move the industry forward by establishing a true experimental design form for this measurement,” said Sanaz Ahari, senior product manager at Google. “Online brand measurement for display is a pretty significant investment for the industry, and the IAB has been talking a lot about a solution around true experimental design, which is our focus.”
Read more: MediaPost
