Are We Talking Past Each Other?

by Elizabeth Blair
October 13th, 2011

Two interesting pieces this week – Brian Morrissey’s first in a series of 12 (!!) rapid-fire Digiday articles on “Solving the Web’s Brand Challenge.” The usual suspects ( I mean that in a good way) – reeled off the usual list of reasons brand advertising online hasn’t exploded. Creative. Wrong or no Measurement. Focused on Technology rather than Creative.

Buried midway down:

“We reach 90 million people [ ], but we really need to connect to 1,000 CMOs.”

Bingo.

As time goes on, these “why not us?” pieces seem more wistful, more plaintive, less relevant. And a cardinal rule of successful marketing: you gotta be relevant.

We in the vendor community wanted the internet to be a “branding medium”. And we have a definition of “branding medium” that works for us. Now the problems: We got off to a very slow start. We got disastrously entangled in the ubiquity of DR metrics. We talked more about technology than solutions. We splintered like crazy because a bubble-era venture-backed environment invariably creates 100s and 1,000s of players whether needed or not (not). We lacked an agency workforce with the expertise and experience to produce creative that might pop the paradigm.

So we swap stories about an offline becomes online nirvana state that never existed. My thought: even if there ever was a window for traditional offline brand advertising to be the model of online brand advertising, we missed it. We blew it. While we were —-ing around…the world of the CMO kept moving. And keeps moving. This week’s second interesting piece: IBM’s survey of 1,700 CMOs on the marketing issues most relevant to them. Their list:

-data explosion (71%)

-dealing with social media (68%)

-the growth of channel and device choices (64.5%)

-shifting consumer demographics (64.5%)

If we can’t make “online brand advertising” relevant to CMOs’ concerns, we should drop these emotionally charged words as the nomenclature and pick new ones. Otherwise, stop talking about what we like to talk about and get to work addressing the issues the data-deluged, ROI-burdened, standardized-metrics-challenged, social-media-vexed, where-are-these-customers-I-need-to-find-most that CMOs say are overwhelming them. Start with their #1, the data Big Bang (which, conveniently, is the root of all the solves). The brand community needs to embrace the challenge of maximizing the value of data in online advertising as wholeheartedly as our counterparts in DR have done.

As an industry, rally around aggressively promoting the solutions (whether or not they are ones we individually “own”) that for starters enable CMOs to aggregate multiple sources of data, to precisely target audiences with massive reach and minimal waste, and to measure their online campaigns additively to TV.

Online brand advertising is very different from traditional brand advertising and getting more so every day. The real “Web’s brand challenge” is why we are in denial about that and how soon we sober up.

Filed under: Branding, Industry News
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(Finally) We’re Talking About the Metrics That Matter to Brands

by Elizabeth Blair
July 21st, 2011

As the CEO of the first and only company focused exclusively on online brand advertising (I chose the name Brand.net for a reason), I was delighted to see AdExchanger’s “What Are the Key Metrics for Brand Awareness Campaigns Today in an Automated Buying Environment” roundup.

It’s the right question. How do we prove to brand advertisers that online advertising delivers real, measureable value?

I thought the commentary was smart and on track, though with a few glaring omissions.

ON TRACK: Maximizing Reach against your Target Audience with managed Frequency is step one. Necessary, but not sufficient (more below). In 2011, doing it by vendor is table stakes, doing it campaign-wide is A-List.

The takeaway: Agencies and Brands: force all vendors to provide meticulous, detailed metrics for Reach, Frequency, and Audience Composition for every campaign. And consolidate those results across the whole campaign. Every Single Time. (P.S.: In my next bullet, on measurement, I’ll talk about a key, money in your pocket reason brand advertisers should only work with vendors who can manage reach and frequency campaign wide, across dozens or hundreds of publishers.)

RIGHT POINT, BUT LEFT A LOT OUT: All 9 commented on measurement being critical. A couple noted “just” measuring reach/frequency is necessary, but not sufficient.So what is sufficient? In 2011, sufficient is proof that the target audience actually saw your media and it had an impact on them. “Impact on them” can be measured in three key ways: (a) brand awareness/preference/intent lift – the most common option identified by all 9. (b) actual quality engagement with the advertising, measured by online activity (increased activity to website, microsite, time spent, algo searches, share of voice). 3 (arguably 4) of the 9 commentators didn’t mention this. Hm. A few of the 5 or 6 who did mention it fell into the Trap Du Jour that the best/only way to figure out the level of engagement is share of voice/social buzz. That’s one, but the classic brand manager strategy of driving and measuring each of paid, earned and owned is still the value maximizing choice. (c) did the ads actually sell anything? Amazingly not a single one of the 9 mentioned that. Huh? Brands don’t advertise for fun, they advertise to generate high volume, high ROI sales. So the ultimate KPI for branding: the target audience went out and bought a lot of the thing you advertised. If that is measurable, wouldn’t you at least have it in the set of measurement options? For CPGs – the biggest category in the AdAge 100 by # (19) and spend ($18B) – Nielsen and Yahoo! started doing this ten years ago. And for that second biggest AdAge 100 category, retailers (17 advertisers spending $15B), 2010/11 has seen solid solutions arrive for them, too.

The takeaway: Agencies and Clients: Measure whether or not the campaigns actually sold stuff. Step 1: demand that any potential vendor (publisher, network, any) show you detailed proof that their prior campaigns for similar brands actually generated high volume high ROI sales. If they can’t, or they won’t – don’t use them. (Interesting, true fact: both to maximize and to measure high volume, high ROI sales, vendors have to be able to manage reach and frequency campaign wide, across dozens or hundreds of publishers, in a single campaign. So – any vendor who failed to clear the “reach, frequency” hurdle in ”On Track” up above – is a guaranteed loser here. Run, don’t walk, away from them.) Step 2: think hard about measuring the offline sales ROI for your products – whether the study is managed directly by you, by your agency, or by a vendor. For online engagement – measure and weight each of paid, earned and owned appropriately. And yes, absolutely run awareness/intent lift studies, and take full advantage of the optimization opportunities, including real-time, they provide.

MISSED COMPLETELY: Nine experts, long quotes, not a single mention of “Quality Media Environment”. Huh. For 150+ years, megabrands have focused on both the message and the ENVIRONMENT in which it appears. For those of you muttering this quality obsession is just an old fashioned wives’ tale: WRONG. We’ve done dozens of campaigns where Nielsen measured actual offline sales ROI – did the campaign sell more razors, pet food, hair color in stores – and the results are clear: quality contextually aligned media is the #1 driver of maximum offline sales ROI. (#2, by the way, is frequency management. Seems like those brand managers are not so silly after all.) And as we’ve often discussed, this super valuable online quality is a page level, not a publisher level, issue. Good news brands: in 2011, cutting edge vendors proactively filter every display impression

The takeaway: The % of ads that run in high quality media is a critical brand KPI. Agencies and Brands must proactively page level filter every impression. And hello Agencies and Brands – stop overpaying for it. (a) Even with leading brand verification companies that say they can proactively page level filter – demand a report on what % of the media in your specific campaign was page level filtered. Dirty little secret: due to technical inadequacies, their proactive filtering products are being blocked by a lot of exchanges and publishers. The result: the percentage of your impressions being proactively filtered is a lot less than they lead you to believe. (b) Why are you paying at all? Today, the cutting edge media sellers proactively page-level filter for free. (Yes, including us.) And they have architected their solutions correctly such that exchanges and publishers don’t block their filters. And their filters really work. So starting today, demand that your proactive page level filtering solution be both really good and really free.

It’s exciting to see we’re finally talking about real Brand KPIs – the true Metrics That Matter. When advertisers start demanding real, meaningful brand KPIs and then vote with their feet (and dollars), pretenders fall out, the strong grow stronger, and the big guys move in for the big prizes.

Filed under: Branding, Measurement
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Addressing that “all-important brand/premium/guaranteed marketplace”

by Elizabeth Blair
July 7th, 2011

I was delighted to see that Tumri has been acquired. M&A is great for the online advertising industry. Consolidation creates fewer, stronger players with deeper, better solutions. And liquidity gives venture capitalists the dollars and incentive to fund the next generation of technology.

Terry Kawaja’s summary of what old school ad networks say they are doing, to either truly transform their businesses, or more crassly just to reposition themselves (either way primarily with an eye to an exit), is spot on:

(i) the amalgamation of a services solution set, (ii) the application of advanced technology to improve advertiser ROI, publisher yield and consumer relevancy, and (iii) more of a focus on “upper funnel” solutions that address the all-important brand/premium/guaranteed marketplace.

That said, a casual reader could infer that Tumri is part of the solution set for (iii) brand/premium/guaranteed. It’s not. Tumri’s description of itself on its Overview page makes that clear: “Tumri’s Dynamic Response solution optimizes landing page content (or any other type of post-click response) .” Online case studies also always tell you a lot about what a company “really does”. Proof is in the performance metric. What’s positioned as a “brand” or “branding” case study is unmasked by the KPIs – most of the time they are all about DR. Let’s glance at Tumri’s case study callouts:

• “37% Cost Per Lead reduction vs. static creatives (control)”
• “Cost per acquisition reduced by 67%”
• “312% improvement in Click Through Rate vs. default promotional creatives (control)”

So what really happened: a DR ad network acquired a DR optimization feature.

We fool ourselves thinking that any of this addresses the online spend pool that’s projected to triple in size in the next four years: true upper funnel brand advertising. Agencies spending the money get that. Publishers who want the money get that. PR spin isn’t doing a thing to make the $85 billion dollars in brand advertising that still hasn’t come online come online. To do that we need to prove to brand marketers that online advertising delivers results: a material increase in ROI on a material volume of sales. That’s what we do here at Brand.net every day.

Filed under: Ad Networks, Branding, Industry News
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Real Sales in Real Stores

by Elizabeth Blair
June 20th, 2011

Preparing our presentation for this week’s Morgan Keegan conference got me thinking about how the online advertising technology ecosystem really does work.

To date, we’ve let an ambitious sell-side investment banker frame our industry. I’m shocked! Shocked that he says there are several dozen key categories, with over 300 relevant players. Let’s run a different play. Instead of viewing our industry through the eyes of someone who profits from it (and from portraying it as fragmented and complex), let’s view it through the eyes of advertisers, whose billions of dollars always have paid for and always will pay for media model businesses.

Online advertising is a classic supply chain. Like any supply chain, you can count the number of truly critical “hops” on one hand. There are buyers. There are sellers. There is a marketplace where they meet. There are companies that smartly pull together what helps buyers buy better. There are companies that smartly pull together what helps sellers sell better. That’s really it. See my high-level sketch view here:

Brand.net Ecosystem

Reflecting perhaps our industry’s immaturity, (the collective) we have hyper focused on helping buyers buy better in the smaller piece of the spend pie (DR). Green field, we built closed loop optimization technology and process management perfectly suited for advertisers for whom “click=money”. Then, did we heed Willie Sutton and move quickly to bring perfectly suited technology and process management to brand advertising, which has, no joke, 50% more available spend? Hell No! Most recently, we’ve shifted our obsession to sell-side optimization. Very valuable yes, very lucrative yes. The most valuable most lucrative opportunity? Hell No! That we shamble along ceding to TV year after year. On a positive note, like all procrastinators eventually do, we’ve run out of places to hide. The challenge of securing brand advertising spending is all that’s left.

Since it’s a large opportunity, we always can (and oh we will) keep flinging bright shiny objects at brand advertisers. Ad units as big! 2X as big! 5X as big! as the pages they actually run on. Toilet paper purchase intender targeting. But if those are our Big Ideas, we’ll never make a solid dent in, never mind supplant, TV as brand advertising’s media of choice.

95% of what brand advertisers sell is sold offline. In a store. In a car dealership. In a movie theater. Brand managers’ careers rise or fall on proving they drive high volume high ROI increases of case movement in stores, cars off lots, people into cineplexes. Their multi-billion dollar employer corporations rise or fall in the stock market based on whether or not all those individual efforts, rolled up, add up to very high volume high ROI increases. And, remember, these needed “increases” are for businesses that already have multi-billion dollar top and bottom lines. So…

Real Sales in Real Stores.Real Sales in Real Stores. Real Sales in Real Stores. Silicon Valley’s Type A kids always psyche themselves up with a team chant just before the game begins. Let’s psyche ourselves up. Drive real sales in real stores. Prove we drive real sales in real stores. Prove we power brand advertisers’ real financial growth. When we do, that long-awaited second phase of online advertising hyper growth will finally begin.

See you Wednesday in Half Moon Bay.

Filed under: Branding, Display Advertising
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