Posts Tagged ‘advertisers’

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Behavioral Targeting Nibbling Away At Publisher Value

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

128835635670901438In a lot of ways behavioral targeting is doing to large web publishers what large web publishers have done to newspapers. It’s offering an opportunity to get the same audience more cheaply. A recent BusinessWeek article highlighted how big this discount can be, citing reduction of $60 to $3 CPM, a 95% savings, as a plausible example.

Who provided the discount? Behavioral targeters. Who paid for the discount? The sales team who lost the $60 sale. Behavioral targeting let the advertiser reach a targeted audience, but on cheaper real estate through a process called re-targeting. Re-targeting is a process by which a behavioral targeting company can mark a web user when they visit participating websites, and then use that web history to target the user in the future. For example, if you want to reach BusinessWeek readers, the behavioral targeter would mark users who visit BusinessWeek.com. The targeter could then serve ads to those readers when they visited other web properties at a significantly reduced premium. Ergo, ‘premium’ audience, bargain prices.

Granted, there’s still some inherent value in an advertiser’s ads showing up on a premium publisher’s site, but behavioral advertising just nibbles away at that value by separating the publisher and the audience.

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Do We Need Google’s Behavioral Targetting Right Now?

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Google’s gotten into behavioral targeting with their new “interest ads”. Like Google’s existing AdSense product, “interest ads” target users based on context. In this case the context is based on what websites the user has been, not necessarily the content of the web page. But aside from the privacy concerns, which I think Google has handled well, is behavioral targeting really what advertisers and publishers need right now?

The product doesn’t answer any of the pain points brands and publishers are facing right now. Brands want better experiences and publishers want easier ways to add value for advertisers. If anything, behavioral targeting destroys value for publishers because it means you may not have to advertise on interest based sites since you can access the same user on a long-tail blog.

What advertising needs, and what I think SocialMedia.com is pursuing, is improving the advertising experience, not targeting. Make ads better, not more targeted.

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Publishers Teaming Up To Make Ads Bigger

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

It’s no secret that the declining economy has hit publishers where it hurts, ad rates. In the face of slowing growth in advertising budgets and ever increasing growth in page views, on the margin publishers have been able to command less for their ad impressions.

Today 27 publishers are joining up to try and change that by creating three new ad units. Combined, the 27 publishers reach 109 million visitors each month. The new ad units are:

# The Fixed Panel (recommended dimension is 336 wide x 860 tall), which looks naturally embedded into the page layout and scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user scrolls.

# The XXL Box (recommended dimension is 468 wide x 648 tall), which has page-turn functionality with video capability.

# The Pushdown (recommended dimension is 970 wide x 418 tall), which opens to display the advertisement and then rolls up to the top of the page.

An effort like this is long overdue. As I’ve stated before, publishers either need to create their own value adds or work with partners who can add value for them. Making ads more conspicuous is one way publishers can argue they serve advertiser’s interests better.

via 27 Huge Publishers Join To Replace The Banner.

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Recession Hits At Online Advertising Confab

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

AdAge has reported on the sentiment at the annual meeting of the IAB, which brings together the nation’s largest publishers. The mood was dour.

“It’s like nothing’s changed because no one has faced the fundamental issues to make this a viable marketing medium,” said Richy Glassberg, senior VP at TV Guide Network, who helped create the IAB nearly 12 years ago. “The last five years there’s been a growth curve and all of a sudden they’re realizing this is an across-the-board downturn in every sector.”

And at least one speaker suggested publishers face extinction if they think advertising is going to save them. Bob Carrigan, CEO of tech publisher IDG Communications, said he no longer sees traditional advertising as a growth business. Rather, his company is relying on lead generation and an ad agency-like “media services” division that creates custom websites and custom content to pay the bills.

“We love standard media and sell ads all the time,” Mr. Carrigan said. “But we’ve seen a lot of companies become extinct or on their way to extinction because they protected their legacy businesses too much.”

The reality for publishers is they’re facing a flat market at best in 2009. Including search marketing, online ad spending will grow 4.3% in 2009, but display advertising will essentially be flat, growing slightly to $8.27 billion from $8.1 billion in 2008, according to Citibank internet analyst Mark Mahaney.

The good news, if there is any, is that Mr. Mahaney is expecting a 20% rebound in 2010, largely due to share shifting from newspapers, yellow pages, direct mail and local TV and radio.

And online, like every other medium, is fighting for its share of a shrinking pie. Total ad spending — online and offline — is expected to fall 7% in 2009.

via Reality Sinks In at Online Advertising Confab - Advertising Age - Digital.

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Adding Value To Display Advertising

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

What does display advertising have in common with Zimbabwe? Apparently a great deal, acording to Martin Peers at the Wall Street Journal.

Peers cites expanding inventory as the culprit behind declining CPM rates.

But weak demand is simply highlighting the more fundamental oversupply problem — and pressuring prices. The cost per thousand views of display ads on big Web sites sold through ad networks — rather than sales forces of individual sites, which usually handle premium inventory — fell 54% in the fourth quarter compared with the year earlier, estimates PubMatic, which offers online services to publishers.

Conditions are getting worse. IAC/InterActiveCorp, which sells ads on sites like Evite and CollegeHumor.com, said earlier this month that display revenues were down nearly 50% in January.

I have two points to to add: tracking overall CPM rates as an indicator for the industry is misleading, and supply isn’t the problem with display advertising.

First, there are really two different CPM rates on the internet: ad network rates, and rate cards sold by in-house sales teams. Ad network rates are commodity prices whereas rate card prices are linked to publishing brand names. Yes, they’re related, but blending the two is like talking about the effect of leather prices on Louis Vuitton handbags.

Overall display spending is a more important metric, and it has dipped about 6% in Q3 2008. This was primarily driven by a decline in financial services marketing (big surprise, I know). Automotive and entertainment categories grew.

What does become concerning is the movement of ad budgets between ad network and rate card spending. Are marketers shifting their spending from higher priced name brand publishers to bulk buying on ad networks? I haven’t been able to find any data to let me know.

And this leads me into my second point. Supply isn’t the problem, it’s the value add. Publishers need to let go of the idea that they have limited inventory. There is simply limited page real estate, but inventory is effectively infinite. And on that real estate, publishers need to differentiate their advertising options by providing a compelling value add over ad display networks.

SocialMedia.com does this for our publishers by creating a social experience marketers can’t buy through Right Media Exchange. There will be other startups as well. I suggest publishers think of how their site can add value to marketers as well.

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Rules of Engagement for Blogging (Pic)

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

No sooner was I talking about the profound amount of tactical work that needs to happen with social media, then Joey deVilla posts this gem from the Airforce. The Air Force has outlined precisely what members are supposed to do when they encounter a post about the Air Force online in a workflow (XKCD has a good explaination). It’s a brilliant little cheatsheet for anyone looking to convey a consistent and reasonable response about their organization.

Of course the devil is in the details, but the main principles of apply to everyone:

  • - Be honest about the organization you belong to
  • - Be factual
  • - Let trolls lie
  • - Make good content
  • - Link often to sources
  • - Focus on influencers

Does your organization have a set of social media rules of engagement?

air-force-blog-assessment

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Blocking And Tackling In The Word Of Mouth Economy

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

blocking tackling“Social media experts” are the vanguard of the new way brands have to manage and leverage the web’s new social media ecosystem. We are making the switch from a broadcast one-to-many medium to a many-to-few word of mouth economy where conversational critical mass has an equal voice to traditional media. We see this trend manifested in restaurateurs rants about Yelp, Digg buttons, and the small band of mommy bloggers that brought Motrin to their knees.

These experts (Bublicious has a list) have eagerly dived into every new social media site, looking for ways to spread their message. Over time, they refine the services and methods that work. Over time, the process of conversation becomes proceduralized.

Like in Peter Kim’s great roundup of social media predictions, I imagine 2009 will be filled with even more productization of social media. A lot of this will come in the form of training a new cadre of social media professionals to pick up where the vanguard left off. While technology will play a large roll in this productization, people will play an equally important role. I totally agree with Todd Deferen’s assessment that “the “best” case studies of Social Media in action, to date, are marked by the introduction of “real” human beings into the customer conversation.”

However, the future will not be ruled by social media rockstars, but rather social media “linemen” who can do the day to day blocking and tackling to push to overall strategy forward. Jeremiah Owyang’s community manager is too passive a title for my taste.

Social media linemen are a mix of customer service and marketing. They’re both reactive and active participants in conversations about your brand. Customers can seek them out when problems arise and they will seek out customers to encourage positive word of mouth messaging.

Here’s a short job description:

Social Media Lineman:

A social media lineman manages relationships with customers through the use of social media. Responsibilities include:

    • Responding to customer support issues
    • Discovering and responding to customer conversations within social media properties
    • Developing and maintaining social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr)
    • Crafting Shareable messages that project the company’s core values

Skill should include:

    • Superior writing ability
    • Listening skills
    • Ability to entertain and inform
    • Familiarity with major social media platforms
    • Familiarity with searching and filtering social media

The process:

Social media linemen go through a daily process of:

  1. Managing and growing the social media footprint
  2. Responding to inbound messages
  3. Discovering relevant conversations
  4. Tapping influencers
  5. Creating conversation
  6. Repeat

Here are some of the tools:

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