Tag: WSJ

Don’t be cute

Wholeheartedly agree with Jonathan Mendez in yesterday’s Digiday.

Kirk McDonald’s WSJ op-ed reminded me of my abortive attempt to land a finance job in my early 20s. Someone told me I should read the Wall Street Journal and pick up the lingo. I read the C section dutifully for a couple months, but still had no idea what was going on. So in my interview to become a bond trader, when I was asked what most interested me about the bond market, I said “I’m really interested in LIBOR”.  Which I am sure to the interviewer sounded as cute as when I asked my 3-year-old son Alex what he dreamed about last night and he said “a cheese sandwich”.

Cute doesn’t get you the job.  Nor should it.

Weaver chimes in

Just a quick note to direct any reader who hasn’t seen it to a great post by Doug Weaver of Upstream Group.  Doug’s a sharp guy with a wealth of experience and  consistently insightful commentary on the industry, this post being no exception.

Worth a read.

Privacy Flaring. Next up: Data Ownership.

I’m sure by now most readers of this page have already read WSJ’s comprehensive coverage of the ever-increasing privacy concerns with behavioral tracking and targeting earlier this week.  Just in case, for those that haven’t, the series is interesting and worth the read.   Seems like I was right about those embers still being hot.

I predict it won’t be long before data ownership issues flare as well.  A central issue in the privacy discussion is of course a internet user’s ownership rights in data about her usage, so data ownership issues intersect with privacy issues.  However, data ownership issues also have much broader ecosystem implications.  I introduced this topic on an AdExchanger thread a couple months back and will certainly elaborate as this distinct set of issues moves to the foreground.  Watch for fireworks if not outright conflagration here as well over the next couple years.

With all these challenges for behavioral targeting, it’s a good thing there’s another approach that drives fantastic results where it matters:  offline sales.

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.

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