Posted: June 16th, 2010 | Author: vlad | Filed under: Random | 1 Comment »
Alright, I got a budget from a client. We have a job to do - it’s a big client, a big brand. Of course they want people to buy their products but we also know that it’s not going to happen on impulse. And it not necessarily going to happen online. So it can’t be all DR, it has to be somewhere in-between.
Breathe in, breathe out. SEM gets a piece, it’s a no-brainer. Lower funnel, gotta work it. Volume won’t be as high as I would want. That’s just common sense. And I read studies that show how display adds lift in search, maybe 155%. Google published a study like that recently, too. Great - let’s do display too. Hopefully there will be good offers in place and the creative is good. Alright.
Display. OK. Breathe in, breathe out.
Ad networks, DSPs, premium direct publishers.
How do we optimize? Is it on clicks? Nah, there is the “natural born clickers” problem. Can’t really do it on clicks. Well, I could, but I wouldn’t know how to justify to the client if he has read that study. If I optimize on clicks I am optimizing only for a small group of people who click - the client’s customers are much more diverse than that.
Well, there is also the viewthrough conversions or even visits. Google says it’s good - there must be at least some truth to it. We could do that to pad the results of the campaign.
For brand awareness lift we could use Dynamic Logic or something similar - it will always show a wee lift, we could extrapolate and say that for the entire campaign can expect the same lift as on premium sites where DL was used. Cool.
Speaking of sites, it’s much cheaper to go with any number of the hundreds of ad networks out there, plus, the vultures they are, they will optimize for me and schmooze me out for lunches. But I’ve read that online advertising is more effective when it appears on a site that you know and that you trust. So premium would be better, but if performance is 5 times better, and the price is 10 higher, it doesn’t make sense. Or does it? Plus I’d have to negotiate prices before coming up with the actual ratios. Would have to call a bunch of them and make deals. That’s annoying.
And what about frequency? The more ad nets and publishers I use, the higher my average frequency could be if there is duplication between those sites. And there is duplication between sites, of course. People hate high frequency. It would better to just do one buy over a DSP and manage frequency through one channel. Whatever - that’s the price we gotta pay, can’t put it all in DSPs for now. It’s going to take a while to figure out which DSPs to use - and since ad networks buy over exchanges maybe I could just throw all of my budgets through a respectable ad network.
Uh, but we also need to show the client that we’re an innovative media agency, have to create some strategic control.
Data.
We could buy data, accumulate data, work our data. We’re still using a DSP like other agencies, and we got a multi-year deal for a third-party ad server from GOOG/Microsoft, so it doesn’t really matter, of course - we’re not creating much strategic control, but it’s a message that sticks these days. And where is this data we’re buying coming from? Publishers who sell data don’t want to be upfront about it, so there is a lot of trust involved with data exchanges. Kind of like with “behavioral advertising”, whatever that means these days, it’s just that the use of the data is now my own responsibility instead of someone else’s.
And what about retargeting? Have to drop some pixels on the advertiser site. Ugh.
Almost forgot! What about auditing! Don’t want to be ripped off by any of the ad nets and direct publishers that throw junk inventory my way. Below the fold or above the fold? Does the creative even go through the viewport? And does the fold matter? Designers say it doesn’t! But it would make sense to at least track when the creative crosses the viewport. Oh but it will only be for placements where we don’t go through iframes and maybe some publishers or ad nets won’t let me do it. Will have to try anyway.
DING! New email in my inbox. Looks like it’s the creative for the campaign!
This creative makes no sense. It’s a set of the ugliest 300×250’s I’ve ever seen (or since the last campaign, at least). The animation is way too long before the message becomes comprehensible. The call to action is terrible. Don’t understand what the offer is. But this went through a very long round of client approvals and there is no way to go back.
…I guess I’ll have to make it work somehow.
Posted: January 25th, 2010 | Author: Everything Is Media | Filed under: Random | No Comments »
Hulu and Targeted Marketing » Sociological Images
This is a really good execution of the simple idea of self-profiling, makes it look more like a quiz or a game.
Imagine if this was powered by hunch, which could inflect all sorts of other information on the person based on just a few answers.
Posted: January 8th, 2010 | Author: Everything Is Media | Filed under: Random | No Comments »
“While it is in everyone’s best interest (theoretically) to have fewer, better performing ads on a page, in an exchange where little is known about any given placement, a bad actor can exploit good actors in the system to unfairly maximize his yield at the expense of other players. This results in a prisoners dilemma situation. The result is that, in many tests, publishers may find themselves in a death spiral of adding more ads to inventory to increase the effective yield of a page.”
- Cogblog » Blog Archive » Managing Commoditization and Exchanges
Interesting perspective, and definitely one of the challenges when it comes to network buys in general, not just on exchanges.
But one of the main ideas behind DSPs is the benchmarking of sites/URLs across clients and campaigns. Granted, we don’t always have the URL on Doubleclick’s Exchange and it depends on publisher preferences, but frankly right now inventory liquidity is the biggest problem.
Posted: January 6th, 2010 | Author: Everything Is Media | Filed under: Random | No Comments »
“A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.”
The Economist (via mudd up, peterwknox) (via marco)
This is really a huge insight that has repercussions in all sorts of other areas, from digital advertising to iphone apps to search engines. And it’s all based on the age old principle of people being afraid of missing things out. Hence the blockbusters.
Maybe one person’s attention span is composed on one hand of following others (blockbusters) and on the other, finding your own (niches).
My hunch has always been that advertising needs social proof — proof that there are other people that dig an offer or an ad. That ultimately creates curiosity stemming from not wanting to miss out on something that a lot of others are getting.
Posted: January 4th, 2010 | Author: Everything Is Media | Filed under: Random | No Comments »
“While consumer attention has moved to the web, consumer marketing has not. Instead, the web has, in the words of IAB chief Randall Rothenberg, been colonized “by the evil aliens of the direct-response planet.” Those below-the-line marketing budgets are about generating a sale, a clickthrough, a download or a page view. In short, marketing on the web has not been about creating demand so much as reacting to it by delivering the right ad to the right person when they indicate they want it. This has been a boon for Google (and has given birth to 400 ad networks), and represents the best thinking of largely West Coast technologists. But it is increasingly disastrous to content industries that are watching offline revenue erode and finding no equivalent revenue stream online.”
- Advertising: Planning Your Next Move in Ad Land - Advertising Age - News
Posted: December 15th, 2009 | Author: Everything Is Media | Filed under: Random | No Comments »
“According to Deloitte’s fourth annual “State of the Media Democracy” report, due out today, 34 percent of Americans cite TV as their favorite medium, up from 27 percent last year. Second through fourth, respectively, were Internet, music and books, all of which are perceived by the average consumer as being less expensive than a night out at the movies.”
- TV’s Popularity on the Rise
Posted: December 14th, 2009 | Author: Everything Is Media | Filed under: Random | No Comments »
“Rather than try to reach every conceivable person who fits a particular demographic, marketers will be looking for technologies and ad solutions that allow them to reach only the people who—by their past surfing behavior, search queries, online purchases, social connections, Twitter posts and other digital footprints—indicate that they are likely prospects.”
- Seven Predictions for 2010 from eMarketer’s CEO - eMarketer
There is a slew of challenges there, namely for publishers, but this is the trend we’re very fond of.