Q & A on RTB

by Madhu Vudali
December 14th, 2011

When the 2011 digital advertising predictions rolled out a year ago, RTB’s transformative nature was often cited.  While many predictions didn’t come to pass – this one did.  In earlier posts, I explained how RTB will transform brand advertising, not just direct response.  With the right agency and vendor partners, optimizing for, measuring and proving brand KPIs, brand advertisers are beginning to access RTB’s advantages.  In 2012, as Video RTB explodes and Mobile RTB arrives, the opportunities seem limitless.  The pace of this change can leave brand marketers with a knowledge gap.  Heading into 2012, brand marketers need to know the RTB basics. There are no stupid questions – this is a brave new world.  Not surprisingly, right now the majority of questions center around environments – inventory quality and brand safety – with questions about formats a close second.

Here are my answers to some of the more common RTB questions:

Q. RTB increases price transparency, but it raises concerns due to blind buying. Placement and context need to be addressed.  How will RTB address placement concerns?

A. Contrary to popular perception, RTB is not all blind.  Most of the inventory is “branded,” with URL-level visibility to where the ad is going to be served.  Further, there are several semantic-categorization services that can provide page-level context at bid-time. And, of course, advertisers can vote with their feet (their bids).  If the inventory is anonymous, you need not bid.  If URL-level visibility matters, it is worth paying for. At Brand.net, we use SafeScreen™ for page-level quality filtering to bid only on brand-safe inventory. Similarly, we ensure that the context is relevant for the campaign, before we bid.

In general, the more and more economically attractive “demand” there is for branded inventory, the more and faster supply will come into the exchanges.  All in all, RTB provides the bidders with the levers that they need to manage the placement and context for every impression.

Q. Is there a rationale for quality inventory to be available on exchanges?  To what extent does RTB trade off quality for price? Seems that RTB may not solve for the concern of brand advertisers that they are being exposed to lower-quality inventory?

A. Greater transparency, the control that comes with “private marketplaces,”  increasing publisher yields, all are contributing to increasing quality.  It is a classic virtuous circle:  as more ad budgets move into programmatic environments, as more publishers add more inventory to RTB-enabled private marketplaces, programmatic buying will create more value for advertisers and this in turn will create more value for publishers.  Publishers are yield-driven, seeking the best overall economics.  If publishers can get the best price on an exchange – placing directly, through their SSP, whatever – we’ll see quality inventory flow into exchanges even more rapidly. 

Q. Speaking of trade-offs, when brand advertisers eliminate inventory that is considered to be brand unsafe, what enables them not to lose scale?

A. RTB scale is already massive. For example, AppNexus serves approximately 14B impressions/day via RTB. And, this number is growing as more and more publishers are adopting RTB. We are talking of a relatively small percent (<10%) of the inventory that is not brand safe.  That still leaves us with substantial scale to take advantage of — 90% of 14B impressions. 

Q. Will there be a day when brands can have it both ways: rich media and scale?  Will RTB be able to serve brand campaigns with large rich media placements?  How will standardization progress?

A. All signs point to a big leap forward in 2012.  Google AdX is in beta with a hover-to-expand rich media offering for RTB. Very interestingly, Mobile is ahead of standard display with respect to rich media standardization with efforts on ORMMA and MRAID.  This is one of several reasons (more below) why Mobile will come onto the exchanges much more rapidly than Video has come along – which is fantastic for the industry.

Q. RTB grew rapidly with display, and is now growing within Video. Does RTB Video have even greater benefit to brands than does display RTB?  Less?  What does the 2012 landscape look like for RTB Video inventory?

A. Yes – I think RTB Video has an even greater benefit for brand advertisers than Display.  Video volume has been lower (still is), so you need to assemble a lot of publishers to get scale – especially if seeking demos, geos, etc.  And technical standardization has been terrible.  2012 is the tipping point for RTB Video’s “virtuous circle.”   Consumer demand is surging, ad spend is jumping, both incenting publishers to make this their year to adopt VAST standardization.  And, RTB Video – coming from Adap.tv, BRX, AdX et. al – provides great monetization opportunities for those publishers.

Q. What about Mobile? How is Mobile evolving with RTB?

A. The rapid adoption and usage of smart-phones and tablets with ad-friendly form-factors is driving up Mobile impression volumes dramatically.   With more precise geo-location, better ad formats, and higher user engagement, Mobile presents a great opportunity for advertisers to reach their target consumers.  And, Mobile monetization is more readily taking advantage of exchanges and RTB – Nexage and MoPub are already transacting at a clip of multibillion impressions / month.  We now have the ability to apply the power of RTB to all the ad formats – Display, Video, and Mobile.   By the second half of 2012, best-in-breed vendors will be working seamlessly across all.

2011 has been a great year for RTB.  It has been a transformative development for digital advertising.  My prediction:  this time next year, we’ll look back at today as old history.  Once technology takes over, change accelerates at an incredible pace.  Our world will change more over the next 12 months than it has over the past several years.

Filed under: Branding, Display Advertising, Video
Tags: , , , ,

 

Scaling Over the Direct Response Wall; Q & A with PayPal

by Ryan Christensen
November 17th, 2011

What is a marketer to do when they’ve tested and grown direct response campaigns to the point where further scale at desired ROI appears to have hit the wall?  SEM/SEO are extremely effective but require demand generation to create intent at the top of the funnel. Retargeting similarly yields fantastic results, but maxes out at limited scale due to data availability and cookie churn. In a nutshell, hitting the DR ROI wall is a strong signal that a brand’s messaging is over-weighted to bottom-of-the funnel channels and tactics. 

So what’s required to get over that wall and jumpstart a brand’s digital media ROI?  How can a sophisticated DR-oriented marketer use top of the funnel channels and tactics to move results throughout the funnel?

At Brand.net, we’ve seen a number of sophisticated advertisers tackle this challenge using a similar blueprint for success. Here is a generalization of that blueprint in 5 steps:

1. Research

Do ongoing, regular customer research to understand what types of messages change *perception* about your brand and its benefits, with an eye towards those perceptions that link closest to driving intent and consumption. This type of research should be done before designing creative and planning campaigns.

2. Keep creative simple. Test and measure early.

Focus the creative on simple, clean messages that will drive awareness of the brand’s benefits based on your “out of band” customer research. Build creative testing into the early phases of your campaigns and measure for lift in preference – on a per user basis.

3. Select campaign planning metrics and targeting tactics with scale in mind.

Explore traditional planning metrics, like reach and frequency, demographic and geographic composition and targeting tactics, like contextual alignment, that can grow to address your total potential customer base. If you limit yourself to tactics that rely solely on cookies, you’ll never get your digital program to address more than 15-20% of your target audience.

4. Measure.  Capture ROI

Evaluate full funnel performance, from top-of-funnel metrics such as recall and consideration to bottom-of-funnel purchase impact.  Similarly, make sure you’ve selected measurement and attribution tools that align with your planning KPIs and targeting tactics. Ideally, you create room in the budget to execute measurement throughout the funnel, with simple attitudinal or survey-based measurement of awareness and intent at the top and direct or representative panel-based ROI measurement at the bottom. Each measurement tactic should have test and control populations and statistical significance to ensure repeatable results.

5. Grow top of the funnel budgets in stages

Leverage measurement results for top of the funnel programs to scale budgets over time, growing your total digital budget or rebalancing between top and bottom of the funnel programs over time.

To highlight how this framework drives the needle moving results, we asked Elina Vilk, Advertising Team Leader at PayPal, a series of questions.  Elina has implemented the scale-the-wall blueprint at PayPal with significantly successful results.

Q. What was the challenge you were facing?

A. We hit a ceiling with the impact we could drive at a reasonable ROI using tried and true direct response tactics. Increasing spending was not going to increase transaction volume and frequency among our consumers. All of the new developments in direct response technology promised incremental gains, but for only a small portion of our potential target audience – so overall not a great impact on the business.

Q. How did you identify an opportunity?

A. First, our internal research highlighted that driving awareness of select PayPal product benefits could increase purchase intent. This was a very different approach than an offer/deal message intended to directly drive an action online. Second, we developed a series of creative that communicated those key benefits with very simple, straightforward creative treatment. We wanted users to glean the key messages without requiring interaction with the creative. 

Q. How was planning for this program different from your “standard” approach to digital campaigns?

A. We wanted to run a program that could grow to the size of our total addressable audience, which is effectively the entire US adult population. So we thought carefully about what we needed to scale a program to that size without sacrificing the control we need to ensure valid measurement and minimize waste. It was key for us that Brand.net guaranteed target audience reach and frequency, within the contextual environment proven to be most effective by our initial measurements.

Q. What were the key learnings from the campaigns you ran with Brand.net?

A. Two important ones: a brand message could be incredibly effective at shifting audience perceptions and driving scalable, provable ROI, and designing and delivering a full funnel measurement program enabled us to rethink how we use digital advertising.

Q. Where do you go from here? What’s next?

A. At PayPal we have a learning mindset, we will continue to test and learn new approaches.  In terms of digital advertising our next big challenge is to take a more offline, traditional way of buying media (focusing on reach) while developing attribution models that can only be facilitated in digital advertising.

Filed under: Branding
Tags: , , ,

 

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
Tags: , , , , ,

 

Online Brand Advertising’s 654% ROI

by Cindy Cattey
October 7th, 2011

A picture is worth a thousand words. Here is the lead graphic in Nielsen’s latest whitepaper:

Nielsen’s conclusion: “The random scatter of the points indicates a lack of relationship between sales lift and click-through rate.” In plain English: click-throughs have no relationship to product sales. For many years, Nielsen has provided statistically significant confirmation of this fact. We know that brands don’t advertise for fun, they advertise to generate high volume, high ROI sales. We know clicks don’t work. What does?

In September, Nielsen released the SalesLink® study results from a 1H 2011 Brand.net campaign that used panel-based measurement to quantify the campaign’s direct impact on offline sales. What did the study cover?

The advertiser: one of the five biggest CPGs in the world
The product: a new hair-care solution targeted at women 25-54
The goal: driving awareness and trial
The campaign: over 3 months reached over 16 million households, totaling 33.6 GRPs
Nielsen’s conclusion: The campaign drove over $1.7 million in incremental retail sales and achieved a 654% ROI on media investment

What drove this result?

- Audience. The campaign had high composition and high reach against the target audience. 66% of total impressions reached women, and 58% of total impressions reached women ages 25-54. The campaign exceeded its guaranteed impression delivery (100MM) and, most importantly, unique reach to target (W25-54) (30MM) goals.
- Optimization. Across dozens of SalesLink® studies, we have confirmed that campaign-wide frequency management is one of the three key levers in maximizing ROI. Not per day, per month, per ad size or per creative – any of those methods generates significant waste and materially diminishes ROI – but frequency against the target unique user on every impression at any point in time. The campaign-wide frequency for this campaign was 3.3.
- Environment. The campaign was contextually aligned to maximize relevance to the target audience (e.g. fashion, shopping, entertainment, casual games), and every page was screened for quality prior to an advertisement being served.

The conclusion: driving offline sales requires optimization of multiple brand metrics. Analogizing to sports, it is not a one-event competition; it is a triatholon. And the best-known online metric of all – CTR – is not even one of the events. The advertiser who competes successfully on all three – Audience, Optimization and Environment – is the winner. As shown above, that victory produced a 654% ROI for this advertiser.

Filed under: Branding, Measurement
Tags: , , , , ,

 

On RTB and Brand Advertising (Part 2)

by Madhu Vudali
August 3rd, 2011

Last week, I discussed how Brand advertising benefits from RTB. Very quick refresher: a $200B online display ad market (i) of which 35% has Brand KPIs and (ii) with 50% of the inventory in RTB.  Big money opportunity.  We’re on it:  our ad platform MFP on Demand extends our full suite of guarantees (reach, frequency, audience composition, delivery, etc.) to RTB-enabled inventory.  Google is starting down the path with its GDN Reserve. But even as we early adopters go forth, lack of standards in three key elements of the ad stack inhibit the full realization of the opportunity.   Standards are boring – but the money they free up is fantastic.  So:

-          Rich Media must be standardized to keep up with, and take advantage of, the new world of RTB. Brand advertising is all about a high impact high quality user experience.  The proverbial creative pillars of TV brand advertising – sight, sound and motion – are powerful drivers of that experience.  Online, we’ve used rich media to achieve that. But, to quote Ari Paparo of AppNexus, “rich media is a poster child of dysfunction and lack of scale”.   And, Ari wasn’t even addressing RTB.  ClickZ reports that “the popularity of ad exchanges and adoption of real-time bidding through exchanges are creating challenges for rich media ad firms and advertisers.” When exchanges offer expandable inventory, the reported default-rate (i.e., showing non-expandable Flash creative) is 30% – yikes!  (Apparently, those dreaded iframes are to be blamed.)  It certainly puts to shame our claims we are the media powered by technology and innovation. Those of us who’ve dealt with rich media campaigns know what that means – we will ignore RTB for any rich media campaigns.   Net result? Brand dollars will stay in TV. Who’s positioned to address this:  Rich Media vendors (PointRoll, MediaMind, et al)?  Exchanges? Are they working together?

-          Video Advertising must get VAST Fast: Video is an even deeper sight, sound and motion experience than Rich Media, and Brand advertisers love it.  With display, we are 10+ years into standards that enable advertisers (through their creative) and media buying agencies to advertise at tremendous scale.  Video was a mess of a format before RTB emerged.  The IAB created VAST – and pushes adoption – but it is too slow going.  VAST is a promising standard – it doesn’t suffer the dysfunction of proprietary rich media.  However, unlike standards such as IEEE 802.11 for networking, VAST is SINO (not Chinese but Standard In Name Only).  Compliance to the standard is spotty and there is NO enforcement.  Again, Video has to be standardized to keep up with and take advantage of the RTB opportunity. Who’s positioned to address this:  Publishers. It has to be the publishers. While intermediaries (ad networks, exchanges, etc.) can facilitate scalable monetization, owners of the video inventory are critical to getting VAST compliance right. (Speaking of publishers in the RTB context, it is great to see Yahoo! and NBCU entering the RTB game with private marketplaces – a good first step.) What will catalyze the transition?  A few big publishers getting it going – and taking lion’s share of the spend – and by default forcing everyone else to get into the 21st century. I am really looking forward to Google with AdX and YouTube inventory to demonstrate how VAST should be done on RTB.

-          Standardized RTB: For all the talk of RTB and efficiencies, the one thing that gets glossed over is that every RTB source has created its own proprietary RTB protocol.  (Personally, the RTB protocol is the last place where I’d expect the providers to innovate and differentiate their offering.) For the agency trading desk or a media buyer that is using “manual RTB” via a DSP or Exchange UI, this may not matter.  However, if we want to scale, the lack of a standard RTB protocol creates unnecessary hassles.  Whether it is the on-the-wire protocol or the creative / brand approval or even something as basic as pricing metric, there’s no consistency.  Here’s a proposal – one RTB standard (to rule them all?)!  Who is going to step up? IAB? Open RTB Alliance?

As an ad-geek, I have not been as excited about any new technology as I am about RTB.   (I have to admit Real-time Data comes in a close second.)   Money is moving while standards are stalling.  Will we see a few more leaders lead and innovators innovate to speed that along?

.

Filed under: Branding, Display Advertising, Video
Tags: , , , , , ,

 

On RTB and Brand Advertising

by Madhu Vudali
July 29th, 2011

At Brand.net, we focus on maximizing ROI for Brand advertisers.  We demonstrate day in day out that tight management of the Metrics That Matter – Reach/Frequency against the target audience, and high-quality, contextually oriented media – yields outstanding offline sales ROI.  Obviously, Brands need both high ROI and high volume sales to move their P&L needles.  We address this by broad reach buying. How broad? In 1H ‘11, our average campaign ran across over 80 publishers.

What happens when we bring RTB into this focus on maximizing ROI for Brands?

Having moved past the buzzword stage, RTB is taking a rapidly growing slice of the spot market avails.  There’s been nonstop discussion of its benefits for DR advertisers.  But does it help further Brand advertisers’ goals? And, what about Publishers – how good is RTB for them?

The discussion of RTB’s impact has centered almost exclusively on the undeniable benefits of a more efficient marketplace.  Increased liquidity in the market creates a virtuous economic cycle.  Advertisers benefit from more and more diverse supply and publishers benefit from increased demand and competition for the inventory.  Since Brand advertising, like DR advertising, requires broad reach to maximize financial return, an efficient marketplace is a benefit.

But is the positive impact of RTB on brand advertising limited to just a more efficient market? No. RTB also facilitates greater focus on those Metrics That Matter to Brand advertisers:

-          Reach / Frequency: A key principle in branding is to maximize reach against the target audience while controlling frequency.  We can maximize reach more efficiently with RTB by bidding only when it results in incremental reach.  That is, bid smartly for reach – winning a new user for a campaign outweighs winning an additional exposure/increased frequency to an existing user.

-          Targeting: With audience data integration, RTB allows targeting at the user-level.  This allows Brands to win the trifecta: at the same time audience composition is optimized, reach is increased and frequency is managed.

-          Context: Exchanges or other data providers can score the various contexts that are applicable to the page – NOT the domain/site – from which the bid is originating.  We can bid only when the page-level context matches a campaign’s requirement.

-          Quality: For transparent inventory, Exchanges provide the URL of the page from which the bid originates.  We can screen for brand-safety and appropriateness of the content at the page-level before we bid, thus ensuring a quality environment for the brand. (We can do the same for anonymous inventory in a private marketplace – more on that in a separate blog.)

Again, dozens of offline sales studies prove that tight management of these levers drives highest actual offline sales ROI for brands.

How did we manage all of this before RTB, i.e., when inventory could only be bought directly from publishers?  At Brand.net, we built ad-serving technology – supplemented with operations – in anticipation of the Exchanges and are excited to plug in to the Exchange-oriented “tech stack”.  For example, with SafeScreen™, we apply quality at the page-level and discard impressions when they are not safe for brand advertisers.  (In 1H’11, we discarded 4.4% of the impressions for brand-safety reasons, even with buys across top comScore 50 “premium” publishers.)  However, with RTB, we will bid only if it is safe – no wasted impressions.  Similarly, for R/F management or targeting, our ad server is built to make user-level and impression-level decisions.  With RTB, we just move this upstream into bidding to minimize waste.  Our buying algorithms have always focused on the right inventory, the right amount, and at the right price – with feedback to refine & improve. With RTB, the feedback is more fine-grained (better) and in real-time (faster) resulting in smarter decisions.  Better, Faster, Smarter – that’s a good tagline for RTB!

So, RTB makes “achieving brand advertising goals” a better, faster, smarter possibility.  BUT (always a but)…the technical challenges to achieve those benefits using RTB are a lot greater than with publisher-direct buying, and even greater for Brand advertising than for DR advertising. For example, while there is more inventory with RTB, coordination across 10x more inventory and more publishers smartly requires significantly more technology, predictive modeling, and analytics.  Since there is a greater possibility of unsafe inventory, filtering and quality management become more challenging.  Since there is greater volatility in inventory availability and pricing, guaranteed delivery and smooth delivery – basic needs of Brands – also become more challenging to engineer.  If an ad technology company can’t manage against that volatility, the problems outweigh the benefits.  Want another challenge? At a purely infrastructural level, factoring all these considerations and returning a bid before the server times out is in itself a critical challenge and is, essentially, table-stakes for RTB.

Large numbers of DSPs have sprung up to help media buyers achieve the maximum benefit RTB can provide to direct response campaigns. Predictably, they are eager to access the huge brand budgets as well.  Media buyers beware:  success in DR does not ensure success in achieving Brand campaign KPIs. Make sure that your vendors understand and can prove that they achieve these Brand KPIs.  At that point, the benefits of RTB are realized for Brand advertisers.

So, what could market players – exchanges, IAB, publishers – do to move this brand opportunity even bigger?  A lot.  In my next blog, I’ll call out the key levers.

Filed under: Branding, Display Advertising
Tags: , , , , , ,

 

(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
Tags: , , ,

 

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
Tags: , , , ,

 

Premium traction

by Andy Atherton
June 29th, 2011

There has obviously been a ton of commentary already on WPP’s recent Xaxis announcements, but I wanted to highlight one specific element of Brian Lesser’s AdExchanger Q&A on Monday that caught my eye.

Brian twice mentioned “Xaxis Premium”, saying it will “use reserve media from GroupM’s top media partners” to “allow advertisers to target audiences in premium contextual environments”.

I think it’s interesting that we see this from a major demand player (WPP) less than a week after a similarly focused set of comments from a major supply player (AOL).  And they’re not the only ones.  We’ve been seeing rapidly increasing recognition within agency holding companies, major publishers and the tech community that advertisers with brand objectives are underserved and need a premium soloution.

Terry Kawaja – let us know if you need any help with that new branding ecosystem slide, because I think we’re right in the middle of it.

Filed under: Branding, Display Advertising, Industry News
Tags: , , , ,

 

Where’s the “LUMA slide” for branding?

by Andy Atherton
June 22nd, 2011

Very interesting article today from Brian Morrissey at Digiday, channeling Jeff Levick of AOL.

As Brian put it:

“The truth of the matter is much of the machinery of the programmatic buying landscape, captured in the Luma Partners slide, is dedicated to non-guaranteed inventory used for direct response advertising. Where’s the Luma slide for guaranteed ad space for brands?”

Now, that’s a great question and Jeff has obviously done some great thinking on the matter.

After you give the article a read, check out our results in connecting online ads to offline sales here.

Filed under: Branding, Display Advertising, Industry News, Measurement
Tags: , , , ,

 

Older Posts »