springload

(Originally published in ClickZ, September 2002) by Eric Picard

Interactive industry pundits are complaining a lot lately about the negative treatment we’re getting from The Wall Street Journal and other traditional media.

Can we blame the media? An appalling lack of understanding about industry issues exists even among the online advertising “experts.” If our experts can’t get a handle on the issues, how can anyone outside be expected to do so? We stink at explaining ourselves to the outside world. We stink at communicating internally.

We argue about a host of issues, all from Balkanized perspectives with little respect for other ways of doing things. Add to this cacophony agendas and approaches within various marketing departments, and confusion starts piling up.

Walk in the Other Person’s Shoes

We need empathy — the ability to see things from another’s perspective. How do you respond to the following statements?

• Online media should be bought using traditional offline metrics, such as reach and frequency.
• CPM media buys are absurd. Everyone should buy CPC or cost per acquisition (CPA).

The statements are one dimensional. Each points to valid issues but not to answers.

I see five major constituencies in our industry, although there are probably others. How the two statement above are heard and perceived depends on which group the listener is in:

• Traditional brand advertisers have advertised offline for years, buying media by gross rating points (GRP), reach and frequency, and other traditional brand media metrics. They understand clearly the science behind branding and prove their value to advertisers by showing them how many people they hit within the target market (sometimes through brand recognition studies).
• Traditional direct marketers scientifically approach consumers via direct mail and other direct methods. They focus only on successful acquisition and care little about brand effect. They have the research proving what results will be before they lift a finger. This group uses very specific methods and language to describe their work.
• “Traditional” online advertisers/marketers think of themselves as a hybrid of the first two. They love talking about the branding “side effect” (offensive to brand advertisers) and embrace direct measurement. Their dialect doesn’t quite make sense to brand or direct people outside the online space. Most are decidedly weak in their knowledge of traditional offline marketing concepts. They typically misunderstand the direct marketer’s proven science and have virtually no understanding of branding and associated relevant measures, such as reach and frequency.
• Online brand advertisers have decided the only way to save online advertising is to build measurement tools that will match those used by their offline counterparts. They have stared to eschew direct-response type information in favor of building consensus for the traditional brand path as applied to online.
• Online direct advertisers only buy CPA or CPC when they have any say in the matter. They buy CPM when they must, but they make darn sure their actual CPA is very low. Some understand traditional direct offline science pretty well, others think they invented the concept of measuring return on investment (ROI). Those who know the science of offline direct are successful by using the same indices to build models online.

What does this all mean? Just because you’re an online direct advertiser, doesn’t mean you should issue orders that the entire industry move to a response metric to value online advertising. And just because you’re an online brand advertiser, doesn’t mean you should suggest we ignore responses and only focus on methodologies such as GRP. There may be two paths to take — as there are offline.

Rather than snipe at each other because each group has its own agenda, we must unify the messaging from our industry. A divergent but strong positioning of each segment (without diminishing the others) would be an improvement. For example:

• Online advertising is proving to drive direct response better than any other medium.
• Online advertising offers the best ROI on branding efforts of any medium.

Issues to be aware of: Online direct has been boosted by lower online media costs. If the online brand crowd is successful, online media will be revitalized — and costs will rise. This will hurt online direct, because they rely on cheap CPC/CPA buys. Unlike offline, online direct and brand share a much higher percentage of the same media space.

Diversionary Tactics

As troubling as the lack of perspective between groups is the lack of clarity in technology companies’ marketing messages. Many use industry issues (real or imagined) as weapons in their own marketing arsenals in ways that further confuse an already confused marketplace.

My comments are not aimed at the companies used as examples (which is why I’m using fake names — although some of you know who’s who), rather at their messaging. I’m not saying marketers at these companies should ignore the value they offer customers. Rather, they shouldn’t inflate minor issues or make untenable claims spun as solutions to major industry problem.

TrueMethods’s marketing inflates minor issues. Its Site Side Ad Serving Solution is promoted as the only privacy-friendly server in the industry, making the case all its competitors share ad-serving data across customers. Virtually nobody in this industry does this. Even those who do cleanse and segregate data to protect customer information. They’d be out of business if they didn’t. This is a minor issue for a few publishers and marketers. It’s not a broad industry problem.

OneStream is a rich media technology company. Its message claims it is building standards for rich media advertising. OneStream doesn’t promote industry standards, just its own solutions. As a business, it should sell its products. What does it have to do with standards? Nothing.

A standard, by definition, applies to numerous offerings from different companies. Anyone can build to agreed-upon standards. OneStream suggests that the solution to a lack of industry standards is for the entire industry to unilaterally use its products. How inconvenient for competitors. If its mission is truly to help set industry standards, it should open its formats and offer standards that competing technology can be built to.

ZeroMedia offers an ad-serving and proprietary client-side creative format for ads. It claims to have solved all problems inherent to “first generation” locally installed ad-serving solutions (such as RealMedia and NetGravity) and “second generation” hosted ad-serving solutions (such as DoubleClick) that use their own server farms. ZeroMedia claims to have solved these problems by using CDNs to serve ads and a proprietary “patent-pending client-side intelligence.”

Many ad-serving solutions use CDNs (including Bluestreak, RealMedia, and others). Their “patent-pending client-side intelligence” requires individual users to choose ad preferences so ads can be targeted to them based on their defined criteria. Since the ad-serving solution seems to rely on this, it drags more issues into question.

Unless this industry starts communicating well, we’re not going to get past the misunderstandings in traditional media. If The Wall Street Journal doesn’t stop bashing online advertising, we’re in trouble. But we can’t complain about misrepresentation in the media if we can’t get our own story straight.

The stories above are on my mind, but I’m sure there are others. What are your suggestions for issues needing some housecleaning? We’ll try to air them here.