A couple interesting articles by/about Adnetik earlier this week.
The first, written by Adnetik CEO Ed Montes (formerly Manager Director for Havas Digital, North America), argues against the over-reliance on last click / last view attribution – what Montes terms a “false positive”. Microsoft has published extensive research on this topic as well, but last click / last view is still all too standard in the world of online advertising.
As Montes lays out, the bulk of online ad infrastructure is designed and tuned around last click / last view, leading the industry to “throw smarter money away”. This itself is bad enough, but it’s even worse when you consider than in many cases the target of all this “optimization” is an online metric that has very little relationship to the ultimate objective of offline sales.
So for example, let’s say you’re a big CPG company and you invest the time and brainpower necessary to move beyond last click / last view attribution. Montes’ point is that this change in attribution may drive some fundamental shifts in your media mix, which will make you much more efficient in driving online “conversions”. That’s great if these conversions are meaningful, but if you’re selling toothpaste doesn’t the really meaningful “conversion” happen at an offline point of sale 95% of the time? Shouldn’t you be spending 95% of your time figuring out better ways to drive those offline conversions?
The second article, an AdWeek editorial piece, presents another interesting angle. Adnetik is taking the position that last click / last view is distorting publisher economics as well as advertiser economics – essentially undervaluing premium content (I agree). They hope to address this issue and ever-present privacy concerns using a targeting approach that focuses on quality and context rather than behavioral micro-segmentation.
Adnetik’s approach here is similar to Brand.net’s (although we add demographics and geographics) and in addition to reducing privacy concerns, it also enables dramatically increased scalability. So we applaud them for moving the dialog along.
It’s good to see Adnetik adding some more nets to the fleet!
Andy's Blog 