Just a quick note pointing to a short, but interesting post today that echoes my recent article in Ad Age. Clearly Pete Kim and whoever he was talking to understand that it’s not all about DR. Kudos to them.
Again, today’s re-energized battle for display is just warming up. The long-term winner will be the one that provides brand-focused capabilities on top of the evolving supply platforms to help brand budgets follow audiences online.
Interesting article by Joe Mandese on MediaPost this AM. “Unsavory adjacencies” (which would be a great band name by the way) are indeed a huge concern for the largest brand advertisers as they ramp up their online investments. That’s why Brand.net pioneered preventative page-level content filtering with the launch of SafeScreen almost a year ago. Abbey Klaassen at Ad Age and Laurie Sullivan at MediaPost both covered the launch back in February.
Since then, while others have been in development, we’ve been busy protecting our customers. In the past year, SafeScreen has provided 8 of the top 10 CPGs, dozens of other Ad Age 100 spenders and each of the top agency holding companies with the cleanest inventory available on the web, preventing millions of “unsavory adjacencies” each week.
While we’re on the topic, I will reiterate the point I made in my iMedia article a couple months back – that quality is a page-level issue, not a site-level issue. The reason I bring this up is that in order to do any sort of page-level quality filtering, it’s necessary to know exactly which pages are requesting ads – i.e., which pages need filtering. This is a very difficult challenge due to common usage of iframes by publishers. This recent blog post provides a great background on iframes for the uninitiated.
SafeScreen works because Brand.net does the buying and the filtering. So if we want to buy from a publisher that uses iframes we can take steps in advance to make sure we have accurate page-level visibility so SafeScreen can work. The recently announced quality assurance products seem to suggest in their marketing claims that they can be dropped in front of a random, arbitrary ad buy and ensure safety. This simply isn’t technically possible due to the prevalence of iframes.
Buyers considering these “stand-alone” solutions should ask hard questions. If they do they will find they aren’t going to be nearly as safe as the marketing suggests.
Interesting post from Cory Treffiletti on Mediapost this AM. He’s predicting that 2010 will be a big year for CPG spending online, driven by better measurement capabilities to prove the offline sales impact of online spend.
I agree.
Brand.net is a clear leader in this area, delivering strong, proven ROI results on web-wide campaigns for some of the biggest CPG brands on the planet. These were not niche studies. The average campaign size measured was >$250K, running across dozens of sites. So Brand.net offers the viable, scalable solution Cory envisions to tie online ad exposure to offline sales. We offer it today and have proven that it works.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go call Cory to collect that budget he promised. It’s shaping up to be a great 2010!
Another great article on the shortcomings of the click as a metric this morning, this one from Josh Chasin, Chief Research Officer of comScore. In addition to the points Josh makes in his article, I would also recall a recent post of my own where I show that CTR has been almost completely uncorrelated with ROI in our offline sales lift studies. Since that post I heard a talk by Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank where he presented a much broader dataset (graphic below) that showed similar lack of correlation between CTR and the metric that really matters: did your online campaign ultimately sell more product in stores.
RIP the click.
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