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

How Platform-Based Buying Helps Publishers – Part 1

We’ve heard it all.  Oversupply.  Glut in inventory.  Commoditization.  This exciting new era in digital marketing will be the death of the publisher.  Providers of quality content simply won’t survive.  All people care about is pushing for a lower eCPM and driving the cost down.  Yadda, Yadda, Yadda.  I go to a lot of conferences and attend a lot of panels (basically I don’t turn down free beer) and representatives of the buy-side always seems so charged up while the sell-side looks like they woke up to learn they managed the Pittsburgh Pirates. But it doesn’t make sense.   Digital spending continues to grow, budgets continue to shift online, and display spending is predicted to grow at a strong rate over the next five years.   Meanwhile, the number of people online has plateaued.  More dollars divided by same number of users should equal rising revenue and profits for publishers.  Right?  Well, actually, no, that’s not what is happening.  Publishers are seeing downward trends in pricing and are finding that buyers don’t actually care about them or their site, they simply want to find a specific audience and, barring porn and malware, they don’t care how or where they get it.  And the chorus screams “Commoditization!”  I don’t actually believe there is commoditization of display media.  And while the symptoms of it do exist, I believe this can and will be solved.  Commoditization implies that all individual units of a good are the same and are capable of mutual substitution.   I’ve seen site level performance reports and the data simply does not bear out that all media is created equal.  Rather than commoditization, what we have here is insufficient tools for buyers and sellers to really value impressions.  It all looks the same, or at least I can’t figure out how it’s different, so I’ll assume it’s all the same and not worry about it.  That’s how buyers are thinking.

Read More: DisplayAndSearch.com

Magnetic Makes Search Data Accessible for All Demand Side Platforms

Magnetic (www.magnetic.is) announced partnerships with several leading demand-side platforms (DSPs) today, including Invite Media, MediaMath, XA.net and [x+1]. The Magnetic data marketplace provides DSPs, advertisers and publishers with user search data, which is then used as a key indicator of intent that can be applied for any ad campaign. Other DSP partners include DataXu, Lucid Media and Rocket Fuel Inc.. Interactive media and data buyers interested in accessing the marketplace can visit www.magnetic.is or send email to signup@magnetic.is.

By making search data easily accessible to DSPs, Magnetic is evolving a new class of ‘search DSPs’ and empowering their businesses with the potential of the SEM market:

• “Our partnership with Magnetic offers our clients easy access to search targeting data,” said Nathaniel Turner, Invite Media’s Founder and CEO. “Our Bid Manager© platform gives media buyers a competitive edge through the effectiveness of SEM on highly targeted display media across a massive pool of inventory.”
• “MediaMath is focused squarely on delivering best-in-class technology that enables agencies to better manage day-to-day strategy without always having to contend with execution,” said Marta Martinez, MediaMath’s senior vice president of operations and business development. “Integrating Magnetic’s data into our industry-leading TerminalOne platform further enhances our ability to drive results for enterprise-class clients.”
• “Our CPMatic ad platform now allows large and small advertisers alike instant, easy access to keyword data for their display campaigns,” said Rob Leathern, CEO of XA.net. “Whether they are buying self-service via cpmatic.com or via our account team, every advertiser can leverage their keyword learnings to immediately benefit using search data from the Magnetic marketplace.”
• “We’ve been encouraged by data we’ve applied through Magnetic,” said John Nardone, CEO of [x+1]. “Together, we’ve allowed marketers to identify high-quality prospects who have made their purchasing intentions known. With the precise segmentation capabilities of our online targeting platform, enhanced with Magnetic’s search data, we are making display advertising more relevant than ever before.”

Read More: Magnetic.is

Software Is Media

I’ve made this point in several talks I’ve given recently so for those of you who attended or watched the talks on video aren’t new to this meme. But I thought I’d share it with the AVC community.  As software has moved from running on local machines to running in the browser a number of important things have happened. One of the most important changes is software has become media.  Here’s a definition of media I pulled from TechTerms

“media” refers to various means of communication. For example, television, radio, and the newspaper are different types of media. The term can also be used as a collective noun for the press or news reporting agencies.

Media are the tools that are used to communicate. And software that runs on the web is part of the media landscape. That has certainly been true for things like online publications and online video and they are accepted as part of the media landscape. But I think all software should be characterized and thought of as media.

Read More: AVC.com

Full Details on Twitter’s New Ad Model

With the inauguration of its ad model, Twitter has made its first direct overture to the thousands of companies – big and small – that use it to converse with customers and build awareness. The resulting ad product, “Promoted Tweets,” is both more and less than advertisers might have hoped. More, in that Twitter has promised targeted ads will eventually appear directly in users’ Twitter streams and on third party clients. And less, in that the program will begin modestly, showing up only in search results – where CEO Dick Costolo confessed Twitter’s volume of page impressions is tiny. “It’s a very small piece of the overall traffic,” COO Dick Costolo said yesterday at the AdAge Digital Conference. Additionally, Twitter is still vague on many of the platform’s crucial components – such as how pricing and targeting will work. But in his comments Costolo unleashed enough details to set agency execs’ mouths watering – and in some cases scratching their heads – as they dashed off point-of-view statements to clients. Below is a summary of what’s known, and what’s not, about Twitter’s new ad platform:

Read More: ClickZ

Calculating The True Cost Per Acquisition

I had a conversation with a travel CMO excited at finally having cracked the code on her Display retargeting campaigns (prior to Google offering its own version of this link). Her cost per acquisition/booking (CPA) from this campaign was, let’s say, $18. And, let’s say she makes an average of $36 on each booking. So, great — she’s got it figured out, with a 100% return on ad spend (ROAS). Well, not exactly. While retargeting is a great tactic to get lost leads back to your site, what the vendors won’t tell you is that it’s greatly biased to overemphasize conversions if evaluated on a post-impression (a/k/a view-through) attribution model. Don’t get me wrong — I, for one, am a believer in the post-impression conversion. While Display ads have suffered from declining click-through rates since they debuted in the 1990s, consumers are still measurably affected by them and clearly respond to them to some degree. They may see that great deal to Cancun and go to your site on their own, and a great many consumers do this (there is even evidence that good Display drives search). So, clearly, I believe there is some effect that isn’t related to clicks.

Read More: MediaPost

Rubicon Unveils ‘Permission’ System, Shifts Display Market Control Back To Publishers

In a bid to help publishers regain control over the sale of their inventory through third-party ad networks and exchanges, the Rubicon Project this morning unveiled a new platform that it claims will “balance the digital advertising ecosystem.” The new platform, dubbed “Permission Control 2.0,” is an apparent move to give publishers tools for dealing with the shift toward so-called “demand-side” players who have shifted some of the online display marketplace power to ad agencies and media buyers. Rubicon described the system as a new “infrastructure” that will give publishers “complete visibility and control over which demand partners can sell their inventory, at what level of transparency and at what price.” In a related move, Rubicon said it is simultaneously launching a “real-time bidding” (RTB) beta program with a limited number of undisclosed publishers it claims will enable them to “safely capture all potential ad revenue, from all buying methods.” Rubicon did not disclose details about how the permission control system or the real-time bidding beta work, but said that combined, they would give publishers the ability to see and control “money spent through all industry buying methods – including real-time bidding (RTB), cookies, audience segments, content/contextual segments and site buys – without putting their pricing and direct sales efforts at risk.”

Read More: MediaPost