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: , , , ,

 

Brand.net Launches Digital Media’s First Social Media Measurement Suite for Brand Advertisers

by Cindy Cattey
November 8th, 2011

Brand.net today announced the launch of its Social Media Measurement Suite, the first turnkey media and measurement solution designed to give brand advertisers insight into the impact of their cross-format digital media campaigns on their social media presence and perceptions. Social Attitude™ and SocialLink™ provide integrated insights on the impact of display, video and social media on users’ brand perceptions on Facebook and other social activity.

“Our brand advertisers have told us that it is critical, but extremely difficult, to measure the impact of their digital media campaigns on their social media presence,” said Elizabeth Blair, CEO of Brand.net. “Previously, they challenged us to measure media’s impact on offline sales and we developed SalesLink®, the first and per Nielsen the most-used web-wide offline sales media and measurement solution. Our customers asked us to turn our innovation to their latest challenge, social media measurement, and today we are excited to launch for them the first two products in our Social Media Measurement Suite, Social Attitude and SocialLink.”

• Social Attitude taps into the expansive demos of the Facebook community to provide brand advertisers with understanding of the attitudinal impact of their web-wide digital campaigns. Powered by Nielsen Online Brand Effect, an ad effectiveness measurement service that provides performance metrics and qualitative insights into the impact of online ads running anywhere on the web, Social Attitude delivers rapid and detailed insight into brand KPIs through Nielsen’s polling of exposed audiences on their Facebook homepages.

“Nielsen understands how critical social measurement is to brand advertisers and, in our view, the most important thing is to have a multi-faceted understanding of audiences, including reach and frequency metrics, as well as how they interact with brands,” said Scott McKinley, EVP Ad Effectiveness at Nielsen. “That’s why we’re excited to work with Brand.net to give their clients insight into the impact of their digital campaigns – no matter how big or small – drawn from our measurement of Facebook’s expansive community of representative and highly engaged users.”

• SocialLink provides detailed insights into the impact of a brand’s digital campaign on its own Facebook presence, including Facebook fan page visitation and related search activity. SocialLink ties into comScore’s extensive brand tracking on Facebook, mapping broad-reach online campaigns to both Facebook and brand micro-site engagement. For the first time, brands can learn how their paid campaigns drive audience behavior and interactivity across owned and earned channels at the same time.

Rounding out its Social Media Measurement Suite, Brand.net also integrates comScore’s Social Essentials into its upfront partnerships. With Social Essentials, Brand.net provides detailed behavioral insights and data on the size, frequency and demographic composition of a brand’s Facebook following.

“Our advertisers asked for social media measurement that more closely ties impact to campaign and we have responded with a trifecta: proven Nielsen and comScore research capabilities, the power of the Facebook community, and the quality and scale of Brand.net media, powered by our pioneering MFP platform,” said Blair.

Filed under: Brand.net News, Measurement
Tags: , , , ,

 

CMOs and Fanning Social Measurement: What’s Not to Like?

by Cindy Cattey
October 24th, 2011

Last week, we highlighted the recently published IBM CMO survey focusing on their #1 pain point – Data. Now what about #2 on the list: dealing with social media? CMOs cited the challenges they face to track consumer comments, capture and evaluate all the data generated by social media, and then analyze and measure it. A few specifics:

- More than half of all CMOs think social media is a key channel for engaging with customers
- 8 in 10 plan to increase their company’s use of social media
- A majority believe ROI will become the most important measure of success but fewer than half feel prepared to measure and manage it

Ouch. The message is loud and clear. And we’ve seen this movie before. Once again…the Internet has created a great brand marketing tool for CMOs that goes “beyond the click”, but has failed to sweep in quickly to help them measure and manage it smartly. If we don’t straighten this out, if brand advertisers aren’t prepared to measure all the metrics that matter …they will keep 90%+ of their multi-billion brand spending in TV and other traditional media.

To be clear – this isn’t a by-vendor issue; it’s a universal problem, and thus a universal opportunity. We’ll all be better off the faster any of us can get CMOs the measurement tools that confidently allow them to measure and manage the impact of social media on their brands’ ROI. At Brand.net we’ve launched our first solution, SocialLink™, the newest in our growing suite of on and offline measurement tools. SocialLink™ measures a brand’s presence on Facebook and a campaign’s impact on Facebook activity, providing insight into how many users visited their Facebook page on click-through or through direct navigation. It also measures the impact of that campaign on usage of a brand’s corporate brand page and/or microsites. SocialLink™ was specifically designed to combine Brand.net’s ability to connect the world’s largest brands to their audiences with the measurement capabilities of comScore’s Social Essentials™ and Action Lift™ We are partnering with our key brand clients, and will share masked results once the campaigns have finished.

CMOs, in the well-known words of an IBMer (H. James Harrington): “Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement.”

Let’s get measuring.

Filed under: Brand.net News, Measurement
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: , , , ,

 

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
Tags: , , , ,