I was directed to a post over at the Rubicon Project just now. Interesting read, as it happens. All about how advertisers (and publishers) can benefit from assurances about the standard and quality of inventory on which advertising is bought, sold and displayed. Similar in principle (though not execution) to the good work that IASH do here in the UK.
But while reading the article, I was amused by the piece top left on their blog page – the counter of ads optimised.
For some reason I decided to refresh… and saw the count revert back to the same start point I’d seen earlier.
Seems that Rubicon Project have discovered time travel 
A voice in the wilderness?
I met with the panellists I’m with at Local Social Summit next week, and we were discussing several issues that we want to cover next week.
High on the list was a subject I’ve talked about many times before: how you attribute value to social media marketing. Over the past year, as an industry, we’re getting better and better at figuring out some things to measure in the online world itself. This is good news… but it’s not always the most important thing.
How do we track what happens at the point of sale? How we measure that ‘last mile’ is going to be critical to understand the value of social marketing – where ’social meets local’ is a wonderful place to make that connection count.
Please come along and join us if you’d like to add to the debate – the panel details are below:
Social Media Marketing – The Rules are Changing
With the rise of social media and powerful self-publishing tools (Blogger, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia etc) the conversation between brands and consumers has changed forever. In this session we will explore the new rules and what this means for advertising, marketing and PR. All of which have been changed in a flash and forever. We will also dig into what engagement, the conversation and the attention economy really means for marketers.
Moderator: Mike Weston
Panel:
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- Sokratis Papafloratos, CEO TrustedPlaces
- Paul McCrudden, of the #6weeks project fame
- Carolyn Watt, Profero
- Nathan McDonald, Managing Partner – wearesocial
It’s a delight to see well-thought out and well-reasoned arguments being put forward about online marketing.
I should declare an interest here – I’m VP International for wunderloop, who offer behavioural and other forms of targeting, wrapped in the Connect ad exchange… so I’m not exactly impartial.
However, a dozen or so years in online marketing have shown that success of placing campaigns is rarely single-dimensional. In fact I’d tend to draw it as a compass, with the main axes pointing to geographic, timing (e.g. day and day part), socio-demographic and behaviour/interest based. In the centre of the compass I’d put context – because that is always a factor, regardless of the other targeting elements.
How much of a factor depends (at least in part) on the aims of the campaign – for example: is it the influence of brand associations or is it purely direct response?
Again, this is not a binary question – there are definite shades of grey.
Either way, what the industry is seeing – and accelerated by the current economic conditions – is a shift in buying patterns from premium to discretionary advertising inventory. This is a trend that was happening in any case, but which a softer buying market is accelerating.
Targeting (BT or otherwise) offers benefits on both sides of the media buying/selling equation: buyers can get better placed campaigns to drive whatever measurable benefits the campaign is aimed at; sellers can get a better price for the inventory they select by making sure that they put the right inventory into the mix for their customers.
And what do the audience get?
Content, in one shape or form or another – and mostly free of charge.
When I started in the online business a dozen or so years ago, my dad would always ask “yes, but who PAYS for it?” In the late ’90s, that was a rare question to ask.
Most forms of payment, other than ad-funding, have been gradually debunked: subscriptions models have not really taken off; micro-payments exist but don’t provide the currency to compensate for the development of web systems or creating content; fees from ISPs have been stripped away, packaged or reduced to commodity pricing. So ad-funding is (for most online content) an inevitability – as well as very competitive.
Which means that attempts to add value to discretionary inventory are here to stay too.
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Some interesting teaser campaign activity going on in London this morning – there’s a website (www.nudeinascarf.com) and a twitter account (@nudeinascarf) trying to build some excitement for something to be revealed (sic) at 3.08 pm today.
Now I don’t want to spoil all the fun, but there are pretty clear clues in the timing (and a simple DNS look up will reveal who is responsible for this).
But in an economic environment when there’s so much talk about the parlous state of car sales I’ll be very interested to hear how well this does in terms of shifting metal.
Is there a link to today’s budget announcements involved as well? £2000 to buy a new car anyone?
| 3.2 |
Forgive the radio silence from Sandlines. I’ve been head down doing things in the real world a bit – though still twittering @sandlines fairly often.
One of the things I’ve been discussing a lot has been the brou-ha-ha that’s kicked off over the past couple of weeks in the UK and the US around questions of privacy… something of a hot topic it seems.
A couple of separate but linked things that have contributed to this:
- the FTC talking (in the US) about its attitude to (and likely approach to) the sticky question of balancing the privacy of consumers against a desire not to constrict fair conduct of business in the online advertising community
- the IAB (UK) announcing their guidelines for ‘good’ practice in privacy against the backdrop of behavioural targeting
- Google’s announcements about the launch of it’s Google Interest programme.
And then there was the call from a journalist for a respected news source asking me if I thought the online industry was operating in an unregulated ‘wild west’ environment.
Now let’s just hold on a moment. There is a perfectly valid legal structure in place (European Convention of Human Rights (1950)/Data Processing Act (1998)/PECR/EC Directive…). All the principles are there.
What’s in question is how do we apply this to our current – and rapidly changing world, both online and otherwise.
What’s also in question is how much people understand this. If we are finding it so hard as an industry to get to grips with what we can/should/will do, how on earth do we expect to be able to convey this intelligently to consumers? Suggesting that it’s all ok because consumers will benefit from more relevant advertising is an argument that simply won’t wash: witness the furore in response to the IAB’s pronouncement a couple of weeks back.
If you want to find a model of how this can be done, I can’t think of a better one than Tesco Clubcard. There is so much information gathered about personal shopping habits – and then used to target marketing messages (amongst other things) that the current world of behavioural targeting online is still a long, long way from matching. And how do consumers react? With an almost visceral sense of attachment to the reward programme attached to the Clubcard.
That precise approach won’t work online; but it proves a point: people will exchange observed behavioural data if the benefits are right.
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A year after ESPN cancelled the use of Ad Networks (did anyone else follow suit?) there are rumours of UK publishers doing the same? Is this a myth or a mistake?
I understand why premium publishers are committed to maximising the value of their audience – and often the impact of using ad networks can diminish that value, especially if they are selling ‘inventory’ – or ad impression opportunities – on an undifferentiated basis – or selling ‘pork bellies’, as IAB (US) chair Wenda Harris put it last year .
But of course not all third party sales opportunities are about ’stack ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap’. There are some credible partners in the marketplace who seek to add value to their networked sales approach. This is not selling pork bellies, but making ready meals, to stretch a poor analogy too far.
All of this reminded me of something I read in the Times this morning about the changes being made over at Unilever by the new chief executive, Paul Polman.
It seems that when, last year, Unilever raised prices on it’s ‘power brands’ at well above the rate of inflation (9%), one of the consequences was a drop in market share. It seems consumers, rather than pay the premium for the power brand, swapped to ‘own brand’ alternatives – note my earlier post about the sacrificial consumer.
Sandlines is of the opinion that we’ll see similar things happening in the online market: if some publishers decide to pull from the networks, they will lose some of their revenue, but it is highly unlikely that enough will do this to reduce the ability of those networks to meet their commitments to provide advertising opportunities to their advertisers and agencies.
In other words, they’ll lose revenue and gain little if anything.
As I hinted at the start, it might be worthwhile for a power brand like ESPN to decline to play the network gain, but it is unlikely to have much impact on the way the online advertising marketplace shapes up during the ‘interesting times’ we find ourselves in.
And, interesting timing, all this coincides with a period when many ‘power brands’ in the online display advertising market here are in the process of building their own ad networks…
What’s wrong with this picture?
| 3.2 |
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