Category: Branding

Great work from MarketShare Partners

A quick post this AM to point readers to a great piece of work from MarketShare Partners and the IAB that was released last week.

The case studies presented are interesting and present exactly the type of rigorous analysis that should go into optimizing the marketing mix.  We in online advertising spend most of our time thinking about the downstream decisions – i.e., how to get more of the budget that’s available to our channel.  It’s great to see some smart thinking from a smart company focused on the upstream decisions as well.

Some highlights:

  • A relatively small reallocation of media spend can have a significant impact on marketers’ revenue. For example, one media optimization scenario examined in this study demonstrated a 6% increase in revenue—even after a 13% decrease in total marketing spend—when dollars were shifted to interactive.
  • In all three of the scenarios presented, huge increases in online display spend were recommended (average of 107%).  These recommended increases were due to a combination of relative effectiveness, relative saturation effects and cross-media synergies.
  • The average recommended increase in online display spend was nearly twice the average recommended increase in Search spend (61%)
  • In 2 of the 3 scenarios presented, MSPs analysis explicitly recommended significant shifts in spend away from bottom of the funnel strategies (promotions/incentives) to upper funnel strategies (media)

I would recommend everyone take a few minutes to read this white paper, and stay on the lookout for more great stuff from MSP.

Simplifying the Narrative

Josh Chasin of comScore can definitely count me among his fans.  He wrote a great article late last year on the limitations of CTR as a metric.  A couple weeks back he wrote another great one that I have been looking for a moment to comment on.  Between the upcoming product launch and the 1 year old I finally found a little time, somewhat belatedly.

As I read it, the main theme of Josh’s most recent article was that as an industry we have inhibited the migration of brand-focused budgets online with complex and conflicting narratives, which cause advertisers essentially to throw up their hands and look for reasons not to spend.  I couldn’t agree more.  In fact, I don’t think Josh would object to framing this as a different angle on the same idea I discussed in a post last year (Josh – feel free to comment if I am taking your name in vain).  Regardless of the angle we each take on the story, we’re clearly in violent agreement that the narrative needs to be simpler.

Josh is also quite correct that the 30-spot is an extremely compelling creative format, next to which a hastily-assembled static banner can look, well, flat.  However, as I have previously noted, within 5 years about 80% of households will have the capability to fast forward through that compelling creative.  Online creative formats get more compelling every year – it’s not hard to imagine a well-made pre-roll, rich media or even animated flash creative execution comparing favorably to a TV ad that is watched at 10X normal speed with no sound.

Even before DVRs reach their inevitable tipping point, the research shows that online advertising drives sales at least as well as TV.

One area where I might diverge with Josh just a bit is on the “scale” element of the narrative.  As he correctly points out, a single highly-rated TV show generates gobs of inventory.  Let’s use his Two and a Half Men example.  The 6 rating means 18M unique viewers, which when multiplied by the 15 spots per episode yields the 270M impressions per episode he mentions.  Breaking that number down in the context of a particular campaign, however, makes it more manageable.  Even if a marketer was comfortable with a frequency of 3 during the half-hour sitcom, that would translate to about 50M impressions.  If it was truly necessary to deliver those impressions in a half-hour period, that’s a pretty big buy for online – possible, but big.  If, however, we allow those impressions to be delivered over a week (i.e. between the beginning of this episode of Two and a Half Men and the beginning of the next one), it starts to look a lot more manageable.  So I would argue that the scale is there, it’s just not as “instantaneous” because web content consumption is less “event-based” that TV consumption.

This all assumes, however, that we’re talking about the type of objective targeting that is possible to do buying a prime-time TV spot – i.e., context, demo, geo.  The myriad other online targeting techniques that continue to proliferate, creating “monstrous” complexity as they do, just can’t deliver anything like that type of scale; we’re not delivering 50M impressions in a week to 18M “competitive peanut butter bakers” any time soon.

For me, it all points back to Josh’s bottom line.  Online has the audience, the content, the creative and yes, the metrics.  A decade of burgeoning complexity has moved lots of DR money online, but brands are still waiting for the simple, efficient, repeatable scale of TV.

If we give them a simpler narrative, reflecting a simpler process, the money will move.

Again, I would suggest our goal needs to be, “Your audience moved. Your marketing needs to follow them. Let us show you how the internet can deliver the same quality, scalability and value as TV.”

What do you think?

Creative matters.

Very interesting article in Ad Age on Monday.

Not standard fare for this page – I usually focus on media as opposed to broader marketing or creative topics, but I found this article thought-provoking.  The author argues that establishing the right name for a new product category can be just as important in the long term as establishing a brand presence within it and uses several effective examples to illustrate the point.

While his goal is to highlight the importance of thinking carefully and independently about the product name and the category name, I don’t think he would argue that both are essentially branding exercises.  I.e. the same level of thought that goes into branding a product should also go into branding a new category, should you be lucky enough to have that opportunity.

Definitely a theme that we’d be wise to keep in mind in a space as dynamic as online advertising where it seems there’s a new acronym every quarter, whose definitions can often lack clarity even within the industry itself.

I was immediately reminded of the goosebump-inducing carousel scene from the finale of Mad Men Season 1 (worth watching again even if you have seen it several times, by the way).

With all the attention on media and media technology these days, let’s not forget the creative.

What Online Advertising Should Learn From TV’s Upfront Market

Just a short post today to steer folks to this year’s Ad Age Network & Exchange Issue.  In it I have a byline that outlines, in a more popularly accessible way, the main ideas of my previous technical piece on on the importance of the futures market for Brand marketers.

We think that the Futures market is a critical and under-served space in online advertising.  So we’re proud to offer the industry’s first and only web-wide Media Futures Platform, which has powered guaranteed delivery of high-quality campaigns with phenomenal offline sales results since 2008.

As always, we welcome your thoughts and comments!

It’s Time For The Futures Exchange

A quick post to direct readers to today’s guest article for AdExchanger.  It will be pushed to the broader AdExchanger audience tomorrow in John’s roundup, but I wanted our readers to have a “sneak peek” to get the dialog started.

As always, I am very interested in your thoughts and comments.

Microsoft gets it

More great stuff from Microsoft’s Young-Bean Song at the OMMA performance show Monday in San Francisco.  Microsoft has made no secret of the fact that they are focused on the brand advertising market and clearly the push continues.

I would encourage you to watch the embedded video of Young-Bean’s talk.  The content is fantastic and well-delivered, particularly the planning example at the end.  Building from earlier Atlas Institute research, Young makes the argument for the utility of offline metrics for online Brand campaigns.  I couldn’t agree more.  Reach, composition and pricing guarantees that back into guaranteed GRPs, TRPs and CPPs are exactly what online Brand advertisers need for cross channel planning.  As he points out, ROI tradeoffs happen throughout the funnel, but that shouldn’t always mean just “CPA”.

The discussion about the importance of complete attribution models vs. the too common last click / last view approach, while also not new, is very much worth hearing again (and again).  Working – and measuring – the full funnel is just as important online as offline.

Microsoft understands this market extremely well.  Don’t underestimate them.

Rethinking Retargeting

Just a quick post to make sure folks saw Richard Frankel’s article today on AdExchanger.

A couple solid, related tidbits in there.

The first point is about attribution.  Richard cautions that retargeting often “steals” attribution from other tactics unless careful steps are taken to prevent it from happening.  DR tactics stealing attribution from upper-funnel tactics is an important topic on which we have written before.  As we mention in that article, it’s also the subject of an entire body of work by Microsoft’s Atlas Institute.

The second point is about the importance of finding new prospects and customers, not just retargeting old ones.  This difference between “demand creation” and “demand fulfillment” (as Forbes.com’s Jim Spanfeller has somewhat famously put it) is something that needs to be understood and carefully considered when developing a comprehensive marketing and media strategy.

As online media marches past a 30% share of total media consumption, new technologies are eroding offline media like TV and print.  Both demand fulfillment and demand creation budgets alike must follow consumers online.

Online Video: Our Opportunity is VAST

In my guest article today in Ad Age, I state that the IAB’s new video ad serving standard (“VAST” for short) has serious implications for video-only ad networks (e.g., Tremor, Brightroll, etc.) for two reasons:

1. A significant portion of the engineering work in which the incumbents have invested enormous time and money will effectively be marked to zero by the market

2. Existing, technically sophisticated display ad networks will enter the video market quickly and effectively.

To be clear, when i say “video”, I’m not talking about in-banner video or overlays, “bugs” etc.  I am talking about :15 and :30 second pre-, mid- and post-roll video.  This is the video advertising format where the environment is most similar to TV and the creative is directly transferrable from TV.  As such, it represents >90% of advertiser demand for online video and will continue to be the lynchpin in moving TV budgets online.  VAST effectively hits the “reset” button on this market in 2010 and while many current players will face serious trouble, for some companies this is an enormous opportunity.

Brand.net is one of those companies.  Melissa, Elizabeth and I have been astonished how often and emphatically during the past year the top agencies, as well as Top 100 advertisers directly, have asked us to extend our market leading brand display platform capabilities (SafeScreen, SmartScale, etc.) to video.  So our sales force is out taking orders for a platform extension that does just that.

Top 100 advertisers want online video to explode as an advertising medium.  It’s the obvious, and (to stay in front of their target audiences) necessary, successor to the $60B they spend on sight, sound and motion brand-focused TV buys each year.   But today’s video ad networks simply don’t provide the brand-focused capabilities Top 100 advertisers require.   What have they told us for the past year they want from online video?  The ability to guarantee Quality, Scale and Value.

Music to our ears.  Stay tuned.

Why is DoubleVerify burying its big news with a December 23rd press release?

PR experts use a trick when they need to release news they really don’t want covered broadly, peer reviewed or scrutinized.  The trick: drop the announcement when everyone is focused on other things.  The Friday afternoon before a long weekend and the last business day before a major national holiday are prime dump days.  The Bush White House used this tactic to announce Koran abuse at Gitmo and the indictment of Scooter Libby.  Celebrities routinely use it to announce divorces or rehab stints.

And on December 23rd, just as the media world shut down for Christmas, Double Verify (DV) used it to announce its new “BrandShield” solution.  Of particular note in DV’s release is that it seems to imply (the wording is quite cagey) that DV can perform page-level quality filtering on “nearly 100% of impressions”, even when ads are served within iframes, by effectively “seeing through” the iframes to determine “which…page the ad is actually delivered on”.
Taken at face value, this sounds like a huge advance in page-level quality filtering technology, which obviously requires page-level visibility to work.  However, regular readers of this page will remember our recent post on the problems posed by iframes for 3rd party page-level filtering.  Specifically, that “seeing through” iframes is impossible for an ad buy – like the vast majority of ad network buys – the composition of which is not known in advance.

So why would a (to date) publicity-hungry startup like DV announce seemingly ground-breaking technology in a way that recalls the indictment of a senior White House staffer?  The only reason I can think of is that this announcement amounts to either a) an admission that DV is using the methods of hackers to exploit holes in browser security and enable collection of data that all commercial browsers prevent for important privacy reasons or b) a clumsy and misleading attempt to confuse the market about what is technically possible.

The former would raise extremely troubling privacy concerns, particularly against the backdrop of increased scrutiny on collection of user data for BT.  The latter is obviously not particularly comforting either, but at least it doesn’t open unsuspecting agencies and brands up to PR backlash, consumer lawsuits and/or government sanctions.  Either way, prospective DV clients considering this solution should ask tough, direct questions about how this apparent iframe miracle is performed before touching it with the proverbial ten foot pole.  Specifically, buyers’ technical staffs should seek to understand clearly and precisely how each page in an ad buy would be conclusively identified and filtered, including each page where the ad is displayed within an iframe.  As I mentioned above, be sure to consider the case where the composition of the buy is not known in advance, like most ad network buys.

Rest assured that we will be working with our agency partners to fully explore these claims and will share whatever facts we uncover on this page.  Please feel free also to share with me anything you know or find out.  As we set about that work (or at least until DV is good enough to clarify their release), I would renew my call for a New Year’s resolution:  let’s elevate the dialog from misleading marketing claims to honest discussion and execution of the cutting edge solutions that sophisticated clients demand and deserve.

Is BT Just a Sales Tool? (Redux)

This post is a continuation of my article in last Monday’s AdExchanger about some serious challenges with BT for Brand marketers.  Interested readers should start there and then continue reading below, as I make some of my points here in the context of the example presented in that original article.

As I mentioned, BT does not outperform other approaches in driving offline sales.  Specifically, Brand.net’s studies with Nielsen have proven that our campaigns deliver impressive offline sales impact.  These results were achieved without BT;  instead Brand.net uses high-quality media with contextual, demographic and geographic targeting managed to high composition, with controlled frequency and cost.

The average ROI of 141% on these Brand.net campaigns is roughly comparable to the average ROI generated by Nielsen’s largest offline measurement partners over hundreds of studies using the purchase-based / look-alike targeting approach I described in my original article, refined over nearly a decade.  The Nielsen-powered BT those others use is state of the art; BT doesn’t get any better for branding.  If it fails to deliver substantial ROI upside to other approaches in driving offline sales – we as brand marketers really need to question the utility of BT in general.

In addition to this fundamental problem, BT poses a variety of other important problems that brand marketers should consider carefully.

First, there are no standard definitions within the industry for behavioral categories so there’s a huge degree of subjectivity in defining which users are a close-enough match to the core users to qualify as “look-alikes.”  This is a big deal because, as I outlined, 99.9% of the users in a typical BT campaign are based on look-alike modeling.   In the context of the specific example I used, how similar does a user need to be to an actual CPB Baker to qualify for inclusion the behavioral category?  What’s to keep the network doing the modeling from stretching that definition to create more inventory, particularly if there’s no direct measurement on the campaign?

Another related issue is lack of portability.  Since there’s no consistent definition for any behavioral target, if an advertiser does find something that works with a particular vendor, the advertiser is stuck with that vendor.  They can’t say, “CPB Bakers work great.  Let’s figure out the best way to buy them.” because the CPB Bakers from one source could be completely different from the CPB Bakers from another source due to different look-alike definitions.  Furthermore, if the vendor whose CPB Bakers “worked” changes look-alike definitions, loses access to data or goes out of business, the advertiser must start from scratch.  BT can’t be used as a basis for a scalable, repeatable, progressively improved strategy driven by the advertiser/agency unless the advertiser is the one building the profiles from scratch – something that is far beyond what most advertisers today are willing to do.

Due to cookie churn and simple inventory volatility, impression delivery is extremely hard to predict for any reasonably focused BT target (and forget about reach or pricing).  This makes forward delivery guarantees almost impossible – another barrier for scalable use by large brands that typically plan a significant portion of their spend in advance.

BT can also be used by networks or publishers as a way to mask inventory quality issues.  Would an advertiser/agency want the media included in a BT buy if they actually knew what they were purchasing?  Would they be willing to pay the same rate?  I doubt it, but the glossy BT story effectively launders this sketchy inventory into a desirable commodity.

Finally, there are obviously high-profile privacy issues swirling around BT, and it’s anyone’s guess where those will settle out.  I would hate to have a platform or media strategy built around BT if (when?) our friends in Washington decide that “opt-in” will become the law of the land.

Marketers considering significant or sustained investments in BT would be advised to think carefully about all of these issues and ask tough questions of their partners before proceeding.