When talking about the advertising value-exchange, people often think about the commercial relationship between the advertisers, publishers, vendors, and the many players in the marketing and media space. But what often gets overlooked in this equation is the most critical player of all: the consumer.
The most significant exchange in the advertising world happens between the advertiser that promotes an ad and the user that consumes that content.The most significant exchange in the advertising world happens between the advertiser that promotes an ad and the user that consumes that content. I’ve already written about ways to get the right message, in front of the right consumers, at the right time, but in this post, I want to discuss the reason why the consumer should pay attention to the message in the first place.
With the constant proliferation of new media channels and technologies, content consumption patterns have radically changed. Each channel offers a different interaction model with the users, and as a result, we live in a (media) world where a given metric takes a different meaning depending on the publisher. Let’s take for example video views: Facebook counts a view when at least one pixel is visible for 3 seconds (without sound), YouTube after 30 seconds of play time, Snapchat 1 second, and many publishers still could count a view when a video is playing below the fold.Continue reading
There is this weird distinction in the advertising industry between “performance marketing” and “brand marketing”, where the former usually refers to the highly-trackable, data-driven spend, where the other is awareness-creation, emotions-driving, hard-to-measure-impact kind of spend: the most obvious example of the two are SEM and TV advertising. Continue reading
I just came back from the AdExchanger Industry Preview conference here in New York City, and while many of the presentations are still fresh in my mind, I’ve decided to write a few notes and personal considerations on the “hot topics” in the digital advertising industry as of January 2016.
Programmatic TV
Cross-device targeting, tracking, and measurement
Ad-blocking
Ad-fraud
New ad formats
Native Ads
Disclaimer 1: due to the ever-evolving, fast-paced nature of this industry, anything stated below may not be true in a few months, or even weeks.
Disclaimer 2: everything on this site is my personal opinion, and it does not represent the point of view of the company I work for etc. … you know the drill.
Over the past eight years, working in Digital Marketing, I saw the industry obsessing over many different metrics when talking about performance campaigns: CPM, CPC, CTR, and then finally focusing on more meaningful metrics such as CPA, ROAS, and profitability.
The reason why DR online marketing is a no-brainer nowadays is that, after years of debating on which metrics were meaningful, the right tools came along to take the guesswork and the heavy-lifting away from the people buying the media, and give it to machine-learning algorithms. Products like AdWords can automatically manage bids and placements to hit the desired cost per action, return on ad spend, or profitability.
Programmatic performance buying: the right bid for the right placement
This level of automation has come with incredible advantages to the industry as a whole. What used to be a very manual, slow, and tedious process, is now done by machines in a fraction of a second. Don’t get me wrong, true DR optimization is a very involved process, and that is why it is so hard to find real talent in this space: in my experience, I’ve seen only a handful of people doing it right and every expert you talk to has a slightly different way to go about it. Also, even when we reduce the complexity from the media buying process, there is still much to be done to optimize the creative and the conversion funnel. When deciding who owns the landing page or the creative development process, the debate often becomes political rather than tactical.
All this is possible in the Direct Response world because the relevant metrics are clear, the industry has reached consensus on what matters and machines can be leveraged to optimize the buying process.
Branding is not there. The industry talks about viewability, and there is not even agreement on what constitutes a viewable impression (e.g. for videos it could be a muted play for 3 seconds, or a full in view play with audio and video). But that’s just scratching the surface: if we were to draw a parallel for the DR world, it would be like asking that each ad should be clickable. It is not a measure of success, but the minimum requirement for even having a conversation.
I get it; it’s a vast and complex problem: publishers have been building their revenue models on different metrics, and asking them to switch suddenly is not sustainable for the industry. The work that many are doing in the space of “native advertising” is exciting, although there are still many technical and moral gray areas (e.g. advertorial).
