Shift Market

Stupid RTB Tricks

vlad — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:03:49 +0000

At BLOOM we’ve been integrating real-time bidding functionality and have been running campaigns through AdGear since November 20o9. We’re plugged in to the DoubleClick AdX 2.0 and although our volume there is relatively small compared to the “traditional” third party delivery, it’s been a lot of fun.

To anyone dealing with the sheer scale enabled by RTB, it ends up being a boundless source of ideas for very questionable practices. This, in turn, raises the issues of privacy and data ownership. There has been a lot of coverage of RTB, and of course AdExchanger has done an amazing job in covering the new generation of ad companies (including us!). But let’s talk about the dark side of RTB. The Stupid RTB Tricks. Media hacking.

1) Browser history retargeting. Imagine that you have a two-sided display campaign. On one end, you run on sites or networks bought direct, with huge reach. Everytime you serve an impression, you check user’s browser history (see a demo of the CSS trick here). What you check for are your advertisers’ competitors’ sites. In the second part of the campaign, you retarget those who have visisted your competitors’ site with a sweet call to action.

2) Über-browser history retargeting. Adding on top of the first trick — create a segment for those who have visited more than one of your competitors’ sites. This might indicate that the person is in a serious shopping mode. Since browser history CSS trick works based on actual URLs and not just top-level domains, you could go really deep inspecting which products on your competitors’ sites were looked at. Targeting this segment through RTB is a no-brainer — bid like you’ve never bid before.

3) Using premium media as audience qualifiers. Buy a direct campaign with a premium publisher that reaches a very valuable audience. Say, WSJ. Run the campaign with frequency cap of 1. Reuse this data to serve to the same exact audience across the RTB universe. Do so for more than one advertiser, compensating the original advertiser whose budget went to WSJ.

Of course, there are many more opportunities of this sort. And although there is nothing really new here, having the possibility of doing it “on tap” without necessarily having a huge scale in the retargeting segments is definitely new. You don’t need to setup anything special with ad networks and run 10 witnessing tags from 10 of them, don’t need to commit ad budgets for retargeting without knowing what the final reach will be, etc.

I’d love to see other people post more examples of media hacking (both in the good and bad sense of it).

Annotated: Hulu and Targeted Marketing

Everything Is Media — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:12:42 +0000

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.

AdGear RTB on Doubleclick Exchange 2.0

Everything Is Media — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:23:52 +0000

AdGear RTB on Doubleclick Exchange 2.0 on Vimeo (via Vimeo)

A visualization of a real-time bidding campaign managed by AdGear on the Doubleclick Exchange 2.0

Sweeeeeet.

Annotated: Managing Commoditization and Exchanges

Everything Is Media — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:58:00 +0000

“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.

Recommended: A world of hits

Everything Is Media — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:44:00 +0000

“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.

Recommended: Planning Your Next Move in Ad Land

Everything Is Media — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:43:21 +0000

“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

Recommended: Who Gets the Highest Ad Rates Online?

Everything Is Media — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:21:57 +0000

Digital Advertising: Who Gets the Highest Ad Rates Online? - Advertising Age - Digital:

tdaloisio:

Shared by Tim
Interesting look at CPMs and roadblock prices from big publishers.

Recommended: TV’s Popularity on the Rise

Everything Is Media — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:58:55 +0000

“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

Recommended: Google Bets On Display Ads In 2010 - Forbes.com

Everything Is Media — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:52:19 +0000

“Online display advertising, viewed as inefficient and time-consuming for many marketers, has been a tough sell in recent years. Google aims to change that.”

Google Bets On Display Ads In 2010 - Forbes.com

Display is far from being dead. Another proof.

Recommended: Seven Predictions for 2010 from eMarketer’s CEO

Everything Is Media — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 16:58:54 +0000

“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.