Category: Industry News

Are you actually buying what you think you’re buying?

Great article by Mike Shields in MediaWeek yesterday. According to the article, Tremor Media was running ad for major brands that were a) in-banner video as opposed to pre-roll, b) below the fold and c) adjacent to questionable content.

I want to highlight two separate issues in the context of this article: quality control and credibility.

Quality control is something that has been top priority for Brand.net since inception, because it was the number one concern of our branding-focused clients. I have written extensively on this topic and Brand.net’s SafeScreen platform is the premier quality assurance platform on the web, providing page-level filtering to ensure quality for every impression that runs through the Brand.net network. The monitoring capabilities Adam Kasper mentions in the article can be useful, but it’s far better to prevent quality incidents in the first place. He’s dead on when he says that quality control is the ad network’s responsibility. Unfortunately, too often that responsibility is not fulfilled.

On my second point, ad networks at large have a reputation for not always being completely honest with clients. This is another issue I’ve written on in the past. In response to this particular incident, Shane Steele, Tremor’s VP marketing, was quoted saying, “It’s a very nuanced space, which makes it complicated”. Actual pre-roll video is indeed more complicated than display, but the ads at issue here were display ads. They just happened to be running video creative. So answers like this don’t help build credibility for networks and they certainly don’t help build the trust that’s so essential for major brands to fully leverage the medium.

Tod Sacerdoti summed it up well when he said, “There is a gap between what an advertiser thinks they are buying and what they are [actually] buying.” This gap occurs far too often today and it needs to be closed before the medium can fully mature.

A very smart publisher

I just read a great piece by Michael Zimbalist of the New York Times Company on paidcontent .org. He clearly has a deep and precise understanding of the substantive issues at play in the channel conflict debate.  The more other major publishers and the market at large understand the distinctions he’s helping to clarify here, the better off we’ll all be. We’ve certainly done our part to help clarify terminology and to help publishers prevent channel conflict, so it’s great to see smart publishers joining that effort.

An interesting time for Display

An insightful article by Emily Steel in the WSJ this AM, picking up on recent trends and energy in the display market.  Ms. Steel includes some broad coverage on Google’s recent announcement of AdX 2.0 and implications for the display ecosystem, along with more depth on industry concerns regarding channel conflict between publishers and networks.  A quote from Jeff Levick of AOL ends the article: “All advertising shouldn’t be managed equally and all ads shouldn’t be treated equally”.

I agree with Mr. Levick of course, but the hard part for publishers is to set specific policy and develop supporting infrastructure to make sure tradeoffs are being made appropriately such that that the combined output of direct and indirect sales channels is maximized.  This is a mouthful even to say and not at all easy to do.  Brand.net takes the issue of channel conflict very seriously and we have been focused on mitigating it since inception, to the point of offering a set of experience-based principles designed to help publishers get started.  The bottom line is that with well-designed policies and systems, publishers can enjoy mutually beneficial business relationships with networks in both the short-term and the long-term.

Readers finding this article interesting may also be interested in another recent post in which we attempted to clarify some terminology in hopes of helping readers more easily navigate discussion of some of these trends and issues.

All this energy in the space is fantastic!  It’s a very interesting time to be in Display.

Your brand depends on page-level media quality

For anyone who may not have checked imedia today,  I wanted to steer you towards my featured editorial piece on page-level quality.  Online media quality is obviously a critical issue for brands, and one that Brand.net has focused on since day one.

Brand.net doesn’t just buy from a carefully screened and curated set of top comScore sites.  That’s just where we start. Brand.net doesn’t just report on the pages where your ad was placed adjacent to brand-damaging objectionable content. We keep it from happening in the first place.  Our industry-leading SafeScreen™ platform is the gold standard for active, page-level quality management and is included free of charge with every Brand.net buy.

Starting with the best sites and applying active page-level filtering technology to each impression.  That’s a real quality solution.

“Offline Metrics” Work Online Too

Still digging out of my baby-induced blog backlog and came across an interesting MediaPost article by Adam Kasper of Media Contacts.  He basically poses a challenge to the online media industry to pull together and come up with an online GRP.  This theme is echoed in a recent (and fantastic) whitepaper from Microsoft’s Atlas Institute, which gives a more comprehensive treatment along with some practical suggestions.

Development and use of online metrics comparable to those routinely used in offline media is an extremely important topic.  As Kasper points out, comparable metrics make it easier for marketers to follow their audiences online.  That’s for sure (and we still have a lot of work to do there), but there are also some practical reasons why these tried and true top of the funnel metrics are as important online as they are offline.  First off, keep in mind that nearly 90% of retail commerce still occurs offline (even higher in some key ad categories like CPG).  Offline sales simply do not generate the same volume of online-actionable direct metrics that, for example, a company like NetFlix does.  So there’s a real practical limit to the in-flight optimization that can be done for marketers whose supply chains terminate offline.  Concepts like composition, reach and frequency are still tremendously useful tools in this environment.  Secondly, for many campaigns more precise targeting may not valuable and/or may not be available at scale.  Privacy issues aside, I’m not sure that “laundry detergent purchase intender” targeting gets you much further than “women, 25-54 with children at home” does.  But I am sure that it’s more expensive and offers smaller scale.  These points are just a brief treatment of an issue I have written on at length in the past.

The bottom line is that, even though less sexy, these “offline metrics” can be just as useful online and we shouldn’t be ashamed of using them.  Brand.net has shown that quality media, tight management of frequency, maximized composition and full budget delivery drive measurable results at the cash register.  That’s sexy enough for me.

The Bottom Line is Online Ads Work for Branding and Sales

Last week MediaPost picked up a press release on some comScore research showing that online ads can be effective in driving offline sales.  Just as effective as TV in fact.  This came as no surprise to us at Brand.net.  We have seen similar results in our work with clients measuring offline sales impact in response to online campaigns.

This recent release apparently builds on some earlier research discussed by comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni in his keynote to the OMMA metrics conference in San Francisco at the end of July (covered in another MediaPost article, from which I borrowed my headline).  In his remarks, Fulgoni gave some rough treatment to CTR (similar to a post last week from Cory Treffiletti).  I was on panel at the same OMMA conference.  The panel focused on Brand measurement and the moderator (Dan Beltramo from Vizu) asked each of the panelists to answer a few questions to get the conversation started. One of the questions was, “What is the most misused metric for Brand Campaigns?”. All 4 panelists including yours truly answered, “CTR.”, to which Dan readily agreed. The fact is CTR isn’t correlated with attitudinal measures that Vizu focuses on. Nor is it correlated with ROI as measured by offline sales impact vs. online campaign spend.

The moral of the story is that well-executed online advertising delivers results throughout the marketing funnel and those results come through in the metrics, when the metrics applied are meaningful.

The truth about ad nets?

I am putting the blogger hat back on after a hiatus for the birth of my first son on 7/29.  Baby and Mom are healthy – thanks for asking!

This article on MediaPost – erstwhile Internet Analyst Jordan Rohan sharing some observations about ad networks – was the first in my archive.  In the context of Mr. Rohan’s comments on network margins, I would assert that networks with truly differentiated capabilities earn whatever margins they capture.  However, I do agree that there is too little differentiation in the network space in general.  In particular, network reach tends to receive more focus than it should (as I have previously mentioned), while differences in specific capabilities tend to receive less focus than they should.  On the other hand, I strenuously disagree with Mr. Rohan’s  assertion that networks cannot be blind.  I have written in detail on how seriously we take the channel conflict issue and how we help our publishers partners manage it.  Blindness is fundamental to our approach.  Mr. Rohan suggests posing as media buyer to test network claims of blindness.  I can tell you some of our publisher partners have done just that with Brand.net and come away satisfied that we are as concerned about channel conflict as they are and that our SafeScreen page-level filtering technology gives content-sensitive Brand advertisers an assurance of page-level content quality that even transparency would not.

The truth, but not the whole truth and some things that aren’t the truth.

DVRs are coming

Some new data points last week on the inexorable march of DVRs into US households.

I am obviously quite focused on brand advertising (the majority of which is still done on TV), so I have been closely following DVR penetration and its impact on advertising ever since I got my own DVR in 2005.  At that point, my TV consumption increased significantly (taking share from DVDs), but at the same time I stopped watching commercials.  I would estimate I only watch 10% of the commercials embedded in the TV content that I consume.  So more TV, but largely free TV; the only one getting compensated for the content I consume is Comcast.  Great news for them, but not so great news for the (largely brand) advertisers who paid top dollar for my attention and whose advertising I saw at 20X its intended speed, on a different day/daypart, with no sound.   So much for “sight, sound and motion”.

I am not alone.  As I have written earlier, DVR penetration of all US households is now >30% and going to 80% by 2016.  Articles like this one in MediaWeek make it seem like the level of conversation / realization is increasing.  However, when we consider the current market projections and new, penetration-driving technologies like “Virtual” DVR, it’s hard not to feel like the brand advertising community as a whole should be a bit more concerned and thus a bit more active in its search for TV alternatives.

Stay tuned.

Not all ad networks lie

Another anti-ad network screed from Ari Rosenberg yesterday on mediapost.  I sincerely appreciate his passion on this issue, but I respectfully disagree.

He’s absolutely right that lots of ad networks lie.  Way too many for my taste frankly, but certainly not all of them.  For example, Brand.net takes our commitment to preventing channel conflict with our publisher partners very seriously.  We have to or we would not continue to be able access the best inventory on the web for our clients.  Every conversation we have, we conduct as if there were 3 parties in the room: Advertiser, Publisher and Us.  No wink, no nudge, no lying.  We sometimes lose sales to other networks because of our principled approach to this critical issue, but our SafeScreen page-level filtering technology provides a level of content safety not available from other networks – blind or otherwise – and most clients understand that.

I think we all need to recognize that agencies are looking for efficiency for some portion of their overall buying activity.  I am not just talking about pricing.  Buying 50 (or even 5) sites through a network is dramatically more efficient from an operational perspective than buying those sites individually.  There’s no way around it.  Think of TV buying without national networks.  The media market has changed since 2003 when Ari left IGN.  There’s a reason why networks exist and that reason isn’t going away; some portion of ad budgets will continue to seek efficiency.   Publishers can successfully mitigate channel conflict while still accessing these budgets by requiring networks to be blind and implementing a few other simple policies which I laid out in a byline earlier this year.

The typical publisher CEO is pushing her VP sales to use networks because she intuitively understands all of this.  Not every VP Sales is going to cheer about adding a sales channel that puts pressure on his team.  Just like not every print division GM for a newspaper is going to be excited that he can’t buy a new printing press because the company is investing in the web publishing effort.  Lack of excitement within one constituency doesn’t mean a particular decision is bad for the company.  It’s the CEO’s job to maximize long-term profitability for shareholders, not to maximize near-term revenue generated by one sales channel or business line.  That said, I think Ari might be surprised by the number of sales leaders I meet that think like CEOs.

ClickZ: CPG Companies Crank Up Display Ad Spend

Quick note on the ClickZ article last week about CPG companies ramping up online spend.  Branding is tremendously important in this category, which includes many of the largest advertising spenders on the planet (P&G, Unilever, etc.).  Companies like these are increasingly realizing that their customers are consuming a greater and greater share of their media online, so if they want to protect their brands they need have their ad budgets track that shift in behavior.  The alternative is to risk losing share to new brands or – particularly as wallets tighten through the recession – private label products.  Research indicates that such share losses can be permanent, so continued investment is critical even in “this economy”.  Glad to see them staying sharp.