Want to Save Display? Cut Supply
Many of us in this industry have been fighting the good fight for a long time now to make display advertising a better outlet for brand dollars. And, if we get it right, everyone wins. But up to this point, the focus has almost entirely been on better technology. That’s not going to cut it.
From my rough calculations, the vast majority of venture-capitalist dollars, roughly $2.5 billion of $5.7 billion in the first half of 2011 alone, and strategic exits have focused on the automation of the sales and buying process, targeting and optimization.
Improving technology obviously has its benefits, but as an industry we have a bigger problem to fix: the essence of display advertising itself. We are all so caught up on acronyms and technology that we sometimes forget what it is that we are doing: We are in the business of advertising. The problem? A lot of display ads are not noticed. Beyond click-through rates hovering at fractions of fractions of a percent, 43 percent of users say they ignore and disregard banner advertising. To fix this, we need to change the economics: fewer and bigger ads. Not just bigger ads, but fewer.
Read More: Digiday
Meet Your Audience (for the Second Time)
These days, advertising and data platforms are giving marketers a wealth of information that can be used to validate their strategies and optimize their digital campaigns for better performance. There’s a lot of data to sort through – some more useful than others. Sometimes, good campaign optimization comes down to the basics: understanding who your audience is, and why they are doing what they are doing.
Let’s look at a real-life example of a digital display campaign, run through the digital ad agency of a popular mattress retailer. The agency wanted to test new inventory sources for the campaign by running broadly on general interest sites, evaluating the demography of audiences that showed purchase intent, and optimizing over the course of the campaign to maximize impact.
A theory being tested was that older audiences, who report more difficulty sleeping than younger demographic groups, would respond more favorably to the retailer’s online display ads. Campaigns were initially skewed to sites that over-indexed against an audience composed of ages 50 and older.
Read More: ClickZ
Unruly Adds $25M In Effort To Scale Social Video Campaigns
Anxious to scale its social video advertising platform, Unruly just secured a $25 million Series A investment from Amadeus Capital Partners, Van den Ende & Deitmer and Business Growth Fund. Since its debut in 2006, the London-based company claims to have executed over 1,400 social video campaigns, while delivering, tracking, and auditing 1.34 billion user-intended video views.
“We set out to help brands capture the massive opportunity in social video,” said Unruly founder and Group CEO Scott Button.
Unruly’s proprietary technology, RAMP (Real-time Amplification and Measurement Platform) powers social video campaigns for Old Spice, Electronic Arts, adidas, Unilever, T-Mobile and Coca-Cola.
It also had a hand in spreading Evian’s “Roller Babies,” T-Mobile’s “Life’s for Sharing,” Coca Cola’s “Happiness Factory” series, and Old Spice’s “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaigns.
Profitable since 2009, Unruly reported full-year revenue of $25 million in 2011, and a current revenue run-rate nearing $50 million.
Industrywide, social video campaigns generated 2.7 billion views in 2010 and more than 8 billion views in 2011, and are predicted to generate 20 billion views in 2012, according to Unruly.
Read More: MediaPost
Measurements Differ, But Online Ad Spend Up
Despite a lack of measurement standards, local online ad spending will show double-digit growth over the next few years, and will continue to increase its share of total local ad spending, according to a new report from eMarketer.
As consumers turn to local search, mobile devices, hyper-local sites and daily deals to satisfy their need for highly relevant news and information, local online ad spending will rise up to meet them, insists eMarketer analyst and report author Lauren Fisher.
“Local online ad spending is growing as fast as — if not faster than — total online ad spending,” according to Fisher. “National advertisers shifting dollars to follow the U.S. population online will largely fuel this growth.”
As of May, 90% of U.S. agencies surveyed by local forum site Topix said their clients had asked for geographically targeted ads. Although the agency sample was small, it included large firms that represent a greater number of national advertisers.
For eMarketer, any company using digital ads to reach an audience in a specific area is engaging in local online advertising. Most research firms agree on this general definition, but they largely disagree on how to apply it across advertiser type, ad format and online property. The result: conflicting local ad-spending estimates.
Read More: MediaPost
How Search Marketers Expect To Use Data In 2012
About half the search marketers participating in MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit survey during the three-day conference said they take responsibility both for search and social campaigns — making the range of topics discussed at last week’s MediaPost Search Insider Summit all the more important.
Most marketers — 72.7% — who participated in the survey said they rely on interest-based targeting in search campaigns. Targeting beyond keywords continues as a trend in search engine marketing, as well as social. Evidence of the movement can be found in a recent Twitter campaign connecting AMC TV brands to consumers.
Search marketers also clearly understand the benefits of tying social and social data into search engine marketing campaigns, as well as search engine data into social media campaigns. When asked whether their company has a Google+ account, 82.4% of respondents said yes.
It turns out that 60% of marketers said they tie search data into two or more online campaign media. Aside from social, some of the options discussed at the MediaPost Search Insider Summit include tying search data into display advertising or campaigns supported by demand-side platform providers.
Read More: MediaPost
SAY Media Releases Online Ad Targeting App For Non-TV Viewers
SAY Media has unveiled a platform that identifies individuals on the company’s network who have stopped regularly consuming live television and then targets ads to them online. Working with Quantcast, the offering pulls together online and offline data to give advertisers insight into behavioral changes for video and television consumption.
SAY Media recently began testing the platform with one unnamed brand. The companies will monitor the target audience for behavioral changes. The platform targets through traditional Web browsing rather than mobile devices, but that will change as the technology develops.
In its development of the offering, Quantcast ran a statistical model against profiles that SAY Media developed that identify consumers who are “highly likely to be off the grid” — meaning those who have curtailed watching live television content.
Read More: MediaPost
How Big Data Analytics Can Save Publishing
Private Exchanges Are The First Step Toward Reclaiming The ‘Premium’ in Premium Publishing
Traditional newspaper and magazine publishers, responsible for most of the high-quality and original content we consume, have seen a huge decline in advertising revenues. While it’s the easy and obvious call to support premium publishers as they point fingers and blame VCs for investing in disruptive buy side tech, I’m going to go out on a limb and say something blunt: Publishers, you deserve every bit of this.
Publishers have not generated much of the almost infinite supply of channel-choking inventory, but they have also done next to nothing to preserve what is good and proprietary and “premium” about their own inventory. In some cases, they have chosen lowest common denominator ad networks, exchanges and supply side platforms to do the hard work of selling.
Publishers of high-quality content with large, desirable audiences need to reclaim their online ads inventory. Only big data tools can dig them out of the undifferentiated, over-supplied, machine- driven nightmare of the sell side by enabling publishers to scalably and cost-effectively analyze, price and allocate inventory in the new environment.
Read More: AdAge
