Author Archives: Eric Picard

May 10 2014
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3rd Party Data, Data Collection, Media Agencies, Online Privacy, Targeting

The 7 types of targeting you need to know

By Eric Picard (Originally Published in iMedia – May 10, 2014)

For as long as people have been buying ads, they have been targeting their desired audiences. The science behind this obviously has changed over the years. In the beginning — say, back in ancient Greece — it was as simple as putting the name of your pottery shop on a few of your clay pots. This evolved to more location-based models over the millennia, of course, and today we can geo-target your mobile device. End of story? Not quite.

As we think about the evolution of targeted advertising over the past 50 years, there are panel-based “currency” data providers such as Nielsen, Arbitron, and others. These services allow buyers to place ads on specific published content across numerous media, with an understanding of the overall audience breakdown that views this content. Buyers can place their ads on content where their desired audience makes up some percentage of the audience that consumes that content. By doing this across a certain number of publications or shows, they can be relatively confident that they are reaching a certain number of members of their target audience.

This is easy when you’re selling a product or service that has a very broad audience — say, toothpaste. But when you have a very targeted customer you’re trying to reach, it can be much more difficult. Other than niche publications clearly aligned with your target customer — say, knitting magazines or websites — it has been hard to find enough touchpoints to reach prospective customers easily.

That has changed significantly over the last few years. Let’s focus on digital media for our purposes. The core types of targeting available today include the following.

Panel-based data

Panel-based data is the most broadly used today, from providers such as Nielsen, comScore, and others. These panels are used as described above — to understand the overall audiences that consume content provided by a publisher. This “whole milk” approach works well for brand advertisers that have large audiences that are easy to find.

Geography

This category includes geo-targeting and geo-derived information such as Nielsen PRIZM clusters that merge information about households in specific geographies. This is much more important today than in the past, given that mobile devices offer information about where audiences are at the moment of the ad delivery, thereby taking location-based advertising to new heights. In mobile devices, this matters a lot, as some of the mechanisms available on the web are either not available on mobile, or much less available due to technical limitations related to cookies.

First-party audience data

First-party audience data is available from either the advertisers directly (data they have about their existing customers) or from publishers directly (data they have about their individual audience members). First-party data is derived either from explicitly provided information or from observed behavior.

On the advertiser side, this is typically CRM data; generally these are either customers or prospects with whom the advertiser has had direct contact. Perhaps the person in question has purchased from the advertiser before, or perhaps that person has signed up for a newsletter. In the case of e-commerce, perhaps the user has visited the site but hasn’t purchased, in which case a click-path analysis might derive some information about the person’s interests.

In the case of publishers, this information can be captured through registration (which actually tends to be much more accurate than professionals believe; as it turns out, many people don’t put in fake information) or from observed behavior (users who read financial news get put into a finance bucket to be targeted when consuming other kinds of content).

Third-party audience data

Third-party audience data is available from numerous providers. Typically these data points are derived from observing the behavior (anonymously) of the end users as they’re moving across numerous websites. Sometimes this data is derived from other sources, such as credit card activity matched anonymously to users via cookie matching.

Third-party retargeting data

Third-party retargeting data is available from numerous providers. These companies will typically place targeting tags on both the advertiser and publisher websites and then link those together in order to execute media buys. Because the provider needs to have matched cookies on both the advertiser and publisher websites, typically these services run as ad networks, since they need to close the loop directly. But there are providers that allow advertisers to create their own retargeting cookie pools and reach their customers and prospects over ad exchanges and through their own direct publisher relationships. This is frequently being referred to as second-party targeting.

Look-alike targeting

Look-alike targeting is available from numerous providers as well, which enables the buyer to provide the look-alike vendor or network with a pool of cookies or data definitions. The providers will then find matching audiences who “look like” the users you’ve provided to them. This allows the buyer to get value similar to retargeting campaigns, but for much larger audiences.

Custom micro-segmentation

Custom micro-segmentation is available from a few providers. This enables the buyer to specify extremely targeted audiences that are orders of magnitude more targeted than what is available over the open market and that match their ad campaign goals exactly or much more closely. This type of targeting can be used for brand campaigns or for performance.

The types of targeting above are broad bucket definitions, and there are now literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of available targeting segments on the market. Vendors should be more than happy to educate buyers (and sellers) on the opportunity and methodologies behind the data segmentation. I highly recommend that one or more buyers within every buying group become an expert in the types of available segmentation and the data models involved.

Apr 12 2014
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Ad Ecosystem, Ad Technology, Marketers, Media Agencies

The buyer’s role in shaping programmatic’s future

By Eric Picard (Originally Published on iMedia – April 12, 2014)

Media buying has been moving to more and more automated mechanisms over the last few years. When I talk to buyers about why this is the trend, they nearly always say something like, “Publishers package inventory that they want to sell, but I want control. I want access to inventory I want to buy.”

In 2006, I wrote an article called “Content Distribution: The Final Media Revolution.” The point I was making is one that would be hard for people in 2014 to ignore — that consumers are in control of their media consumption habits and that media companies should embrace this rather than battle it. Heck, back in 2003 I wrote another article on the same exact topic called “Control, the Killer App,” which was more focused on advertising conceptual design.

Now let’s talk about the concept of control from the perspective of the buyer. Today the vast majority of media dollars are spent on direct buys where the buyer has sent the seller an RFP and a media plan and asked the seller to put together a proposal. This process has developed over the years in digital as a way for buyers to push the grunt work (and frankly, sometimes the creative work) of media planning and buying off to the seller.

This evolved because, in digital media, the buyer has no idea what’s available to buy. In television, the buyers know in advance what shows are on television and how many ad slots are available in which pods. When they execute a buy, they’re just seeing if the slots they want have been sold yet. Magazines are a bit more complex, but buyers still have an immense amount of knowledge about what’s available. In digital media, the world is very opaque. Buyers don’t know what the seller has to offer, let alone what’s “left” to purchase. This has put publishers in a position to craft packages of inventory that they push to the buyer.

Some media directors see it as their jobs to take the packages offered by publishers and break them up. The problem is that buyers tell the publisher what they want, and publishers bundle together the desirable inventory with undesirable inventory that they force upon the buyer. This effectively would be like going to the grocery store for bananas and being told that in order to buy bananas, you also had to take some plantains and avocados. You can imagine that as the buyer you would tell the seller to jump in a lake — at which point the seller would say, “Well, maybe I can throw the avocados and plantains in for cheap.” After negotiating for a few minutes, the seller effectively lowers the price on the junk you don’t want to the point that it’s almost free — so you simply take it. This is how the sellers move the inventory they can’t sell; they bundle it together and effectively lower the price of all the inventory in the bundle until the buyer is willing to accept it.

This has “worked’ for the last 15 to 20 years mostly because buyers didn’t have much choice in the matter. There was too much work on the buying side to bother trying to wrest control back from the seller. And sellers were happy to pick up the slack; it gave them great opportunities to package inventory and increase sell-through.

But things have changed, and all media buying is heading down the path toward programmatic mechanisms. Today programmatic comes effectively in two flavors: RTB and direct. They’re supported by two separate software stacks and reflect the two different ways to buy media:

RTB: RTB is buyer-centric and enables buyers to take full control over what they’re getting. The buyers define the inventory they want to buy, and then the tools procure that inventory over the advertising exchanges. Companies playing in this space include AppNexus, MediaMath, Turn, DataXu, [x+1], Rubicon, PubMatic, and many others.

Direct: Direct is seller-centric and enables publishers to package inventory and expose it to buyers in programmatic means — but keep the publishers in control of defining the inventory and bundling it in ways that meet their sell-through goals. Companies playing in this space include Yieldex, iSocket, Bionic Ads, Adslot, Shiny Ads, and many others.

The problem with the programmatic direct stack and methodologies is that buyers want to be in control. The rapid (and massive) growth of the RTB stack has been driven as much by the control that buyers have gotten over their media buying as anything else. Buyers want to be in control.

Of course, publishers want to be in control too — which is why they’re adopting the programmatic direct technologies at a rapid pace. And the RTB buying tools vendors are lining up to plug into the APIs provided by the direct vendors.

At the end of the day, programmatic media buying and selling is the future. But I’m convinced that ultimately the buyer will demand control. And publishers simply don’t have the means to refuse this demand. We’ll see lots of mechanisms designed to plug the buyers into the sellers’ systems over the next few years, with significant effort placed on giving the buyer more insight and control over what they’re buying.

Apr 01 2014
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Ad Ecosystem, Ad Technology, Economics, Predictions

Programmatic: A Rising Tide

By Eric Picard (Originally published in AdExchanger October 1, 2014)

While we’ve been sitting in the progressively warmer water of the “programmatic kettle” without noticing the heat, the world has changed. The incremental changes have been small, but they have been happening constantly and quickly. Taken together, these changes are significant.

The term programmatic has gone mainstream in the last year – at least in the ad industry. Chances are, if you mention to anyone in our space that you work in programmatic, you won’t have to explain what that means anymore. This is true even if you’re talking to a typically “out of touch” executive, because every major company in our space is not only engaging in programmatic, it’s a significant portion of their spending or revenue. They’re likely either hiring or have just hired an executive to manage it, and may have already had turnover in their executive roles in programmatic.

Publishers are finally facing the reality that this isn’t a fad and they’re not treating it like a bad thing anymore. They’re not only selling “just some” of their inventory on programmatic and they don’t just see it as a source of revenue from remnant inventory.

Most major publishers have moved toward selling premium inventory over a programmatic channel. They’ve either sold inventory over a private exchange, adopted a programmatic direct vendor to offer premium inventory over an API, adopted a vendor to help with yield that incorporates programmatic (like Maxifier or YieldEx) or they’ve just rolled the dice and allowed Google’s Dynamic Allocation algorithms to let the exchange compete with sales on premium inventory – and from what I’m hearing, they probably had great success with it.

I’m hearing people talk about programmatic in ways that are very mature. There’s discussion of programmatic channels instead of channel, and there’s discussion of programmatic outside of the context of the concept of “channel.” There’s an understanding blooming among both buyers and sellers that taking a view of their media processes through a programmatic lens opens up bold new opportunities.

Publishers are investing in programmatic heavily – and it is getting deeply ingrained in their business processes. Previously publishers thought of their inventory in a pretty simple way: sponsorships, tonnage and remnant. Today they think about inventory and channel relationships very differently:

  • Direct relationship: old-fashioned sales
  • Programmatic direct: publisher-packaged inventory offered over API or through a self-service tool
  • Private exchange: DSP buyers can buy inventory with a “first look” ahead of it getting passed to the open exchange – and possibly ahead of other partner relationships
  • Vertical network: direct relationship with a vertical network that either buys direct or through a private exchange
  • SSP: Some publishers have a partnership with an SSP that divvies up inventory between ad networks and various ad exchanges
  • Open exchange: Some publishers skip the SSP and remnant wholesale deals to old-school ad networks, and drop it directly into the exchange

Agencies are moving programmatic into the mainstream. The trading desks started out as small dedicated businesses, and are either growing radically and becoming more than just centers of excellence, or they’re being primed for integration across the whole agency model. Expect to see very significant changes in every major media agency over the next few years – this is coming, and fast. Expect the changes to be about efficiency and driven as much by their client’s requests as finally accepting that the trading desk model, where the agency arbitrages their own clients, is nearing the end of its life span.

Agencies are investing in technology, not just to “bid on the exchanges” but to (finally) automate media buying. And the programmatic umbrella is being used as a catch-all for these conversations – whether it means investing in buying infrastructure that automates the RFP process or automates bidding. And the vendors servicing agencies are bridging from the guaranteed space into the programmatic space, and the programmatic vendors are bridging into the guaranteed space. This might be the most fun I’ve had in a decade when it comes to ad tech.

Marketers are eyeing the programmatic world as they put digital marketing through the same process we saw every other major business initiative go through: the “IT-ification” of marketing. CTOs and CMOs are actually deeply collaborating. They sense an opportunity to get investment in marketing infrastructure and bring their first-party data to bear on the marketing business at large.

Ad tech vendors clearly sense this opportunity. Every vendor I’ve talked with in the last six months is gearing up for a major initiative focused on the marketer directly. Not that they are trying to bypass the agency just to “go around them” – which was the old-school unhealthy dynamic many ad tech vendors have attempted since digital marketing started. Rather, they are hearing from the marketers directly – and often are being brought into the conversation by the media agencies, which are acting as agents of the marketer at their client’s request.

This trend deserves another paragraph. Marketers are looking to integrate ad technology into their enterprise IT technologies. They want to unlock the power of their first-party data, but can’t let it outside the firewall (more metaphorically than in reality). They won’t allow the raw data to sit in the hands of their agency partners, but this isn’t about “marketers taking digital marketing in-house.” They aren’t disintermediating the media agencies – they’re just pulling the technology relationships in-house and then providing their media agencies with access to the integrated tools from outside.

The significance of this is lost on many in the market – many analysts think it means bad things for the holding companies – but clearly that isn’t the case. This may be the best news in years for the holding companies. Their clients are making significant and permanent investments in digital marketing. And their need for assistance is going up – not down.

Here’s the biggest insight I’ve had in the last six months: Programmatic media is just as labor-intensive as direct media. The work is different and much more technical (and also more insightful, honestly, as there’s a lot more data generated), but there’s more of it – all the time. And it’s growing. Media agencies aren’t going anywhere; they’re busier than ever. Marketers need the help. Publishers have whole new ways to increase yield and revenue over these channels. And ad tech vendors are consolidating and investing significantly in their technology.

Programmatic is a rising tide lifting all boats in our space.

Apr 01 2014
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Ad Ecosystem, Ad Technology, Online Media

The Difference Between Programmatic RTB And Direct

By Eric Picard (Originally published on AdExchanger April 1, 2014)

I had the great fortune to moderate a panel called “Programmatic Guaranteed” at AdExchanger’s recent Programmatic.io conference in San Francisco. The prep conversations for this panel, the conversation on stage and the conversations with audience members afterward were very compelling.

Clearly the market wants to figure this out, and the promise of programmatic means different things to different people. This is a complex space that needs more information and definition, which we’ll do today.

As an industry we have two primary “stacks” of technology that drive advertising between the buyer, seller and consumer. One is what I’ll call the “direct” stack, and the other is the real-time bidding (RTB) stack.

Direct Advertising Stack

The “direct” software stack in play supports publishers. This is the first-party ad sever, the publisher’s inventory management system. Examples include DoubleClick for Publishers, Open Ad Stream and Freewheel.

This publisher system enables publishers to manage their advertising businesses – in particular, this is designed around the need to put ads on pages, monitor revenue and manage sales. But one of the primary uses of these systems is for publishers to package their inventory. One of the core uses of this entire technology stack is to find inventory that is available for sale, and package it in order to sell it to advertisers.

The direct stack is a set of tools and technologies for packaging inventory for sale to buyers. Packages are assembled either in advance, or in response to a buyer’s request for proposal and media plan.

The Programmatic Direct Stack

Over the last few years, a variety of companies have launched in the programmatic direct space, which aims to connect the publisher’s direct systems to buyers’ systems – either the traditional or the programmatic tools. Examples here include YieldEx, iSocket, Shiny Ads, Bionic Ads and AdSlot.

The problem with this stack, from the buyer’s perspective, is that the programmatic direct world is an extension of the direct platforms. They are designed to package inventory according to the ways in which publishers want to sell inventory. They aren’t designed to allow the buyer to manage against their own goals. The contract terms for inventory are defined by the publisher, and executed according to a publisher-centric view of the world.

The benefit that buyers get from the direct stacks are that the inventory can be reserved — in other words, the publishers and buyers can agree in advance on not only the price of the inventory, but the volume and budget that the buyer is signing up to spend. And the publisher is willing to guarantee the buy, meaning that if they under-deliver, they will give the buyer a “make-good” on the inventory that was not delivered.

Programmatic RTB Advertising Stack

The RTB software stack is focused primarily from the point of view of the buyer. There are supply side platforms (SSPs) like Rubicon and Pubmatic that are publisher facing, but like their demand-side partners (DSPs), their focus is on enabling the buyer to find inventory according to their definitions, rather than packaging inventory up on the publisher side.

The systems in the RTB world are very flexible and don’t require packaging in advance.  The only problem with this is the inability of these systems to easily offer a guarantee on the buy. There are some mechanisms that can be used, such as the Deal ID standard, which allows a buy-side system to be assigned to a specific ID in the sell-side system. But typically these are supported more by the SSP, and not within the direct stack of software.

There is an immense amount of investment in the ability to forecast and ultimately to sign reserved or even guaranteed deals in the programmatic RTB software stack, but we’re still a ways from this. We may find ourselves supported here in the next year or two – but matching these systems together has proven challenging – and recreating the ability to forecast and give make-goods in the RTB stack has been nearly impossible.

The ‘Holy Grail’

There is another path that some technology companies are exploring, which is the ability to push the advertiser’s demand goals directly into the publisher’s direct ad server. In this model, the buy-side system allows the buyer to specify their goals, and then through integration with the publisher’s direct ad server, can create line items matching the advertiser’s goals. But this is a new approach that has not been fully productized yet in the market. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

Mar 15 2014
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Ad Ecosystem, Ad Technology

The confusing language of ad exchanges

By Eric Picard (Originally Published on iMedia – March 15, 2014)

Our industry is filled with confusing concepts and equally confusing names. We have constantly done ourselves no favors by trying to simplify the concepts by reusing names from other industries or from parts of our industry that are not quite a match.

The most confusing area of our industry right now is anything touching or associated with advertising exchanges. I’ve heard all sorts of names for “things” in this space, and for whatever reason, we never seem to really get things “right.” The names that cause the most confusion and agitation in our space include ones like programmatic, spot, futures, guaranteed, reserved, etc.

Let me hit the term programmatic first, since this one should be easy enough to nail down. Programmatic media buying and selling really just refers to the fact that the buying and selling is automated. Programmatic buys might make use of the ad exchange (typically these are called programmatic real-time bidding campaigns, or programmatic RTB.) These are buys that use demand-side platforms (DSPs), such as MediaMath, Turn, or AppNexus, and are what most of us think of as ad exchange powered media buys. Programmatic buys might also make use of a toolset like Bionic Advertising Systems or connect to an API like iSocket. This type of buy is typically called a programmatic direct buy because the buyer is accessing inventory sold directly by the publisher, not over an exchange. But it is still an automated buy.

Television terminology

Another point of confusion that I hear about a lot is people trying to apply the concept of “spot” media buys to the exchange. The person using this term equates “guaranteed” media buys with the television upfronts and ad exchange buys with the television spot marketplace. Sometimes the term “scatter” gets used here, but not too often.

The television spot and scatter markets are essentially the same thing: spot applies to broadcast, and scatter applies to cable. These two markets basically cover all the non-upfront buys that happen in television. In broadcast and cable television media sales, the networks try to sell large blocks of ad inventory in bulk — several times a year. These sales extravaganzas are glitzy, involve a lot of money being spent in all directions, and lead to a large number of bulk sales of ad inventory in the television space.

There have been many attempts to replicate this upfront process in digital media, with varying degrees of success. The interesting thing is that the upfront process is really a discount mechanism for the media buyers. Media buyers agree in advance that they’ll pay a certain amount of money per gross-rating point (GRP) for television media inventory in order to get the sellers to give them a discount. The sellers are OK with that discount because it mitigates the risk that they won’t be able to sell that inventory later.

The rest of the television advertising inventory is sold on an ad-hoc basis in advance of the date of the show. Typically the price of inventory in the spot and scatter marketplaces is higher than the upfronts. Non-upfront buys (spot in broadcast, scatter in cable) are sold as far in advance as the buyer is willing to sign up, to as close to the date of the show airing as the seller can support technically (usually a day or two before the show is aired).

For some reason in digital, some people think of upfront as the equivalent of guaranteed and spot as the equivalent of ad exchange buys. The really interesting thing is that every “guaranteed” buy we do in digital is exactly the equivalent of a spot buy (or scatter buy) in TV. Spot buys are essentially guaranteed (reserved), and they’re bought anywhere from one day to months in advance. So we shouldn’t use the term “spot” to describe the ad exchange; this is technically incorrect. There is no traditional media equivalent to digital media ad exchanges — at least not yet.

Spot and scatter buys are reserved in advance, with make-goods and all the other nifty things expected in “guaranteed” digital buys once the contract is committed. The only minor difference here is that most buys are “preemptible.” That means that if another buyer comes along after the contract is signed, and the new buyer is willing to pay a high enough price to get the inventory, the seller can preempt the existing contract (usually this involves a penalty that the seller has to pay) and can substitute the new buy for the old one. Take note digital media folks: This is actually desirable to the buyers, and they’d love to be able to do this in digital. We just don’t support it because we didn’t design our systems that way. It would be great to really offer reserved buys instead of guaranteed buys.

Financial market terminology

The other thing we screw up in our space is trying to use stock exchange or commodity marketplace language to describe what happens in the digital media exchanges. But there isn’t an exact equivalent of most of these concepts. While the term “guaranteed” is used to describe “reserved” buys that are sold in advance in digital media, when people in our space want to discuss selling reserved buys over the ad exchange infrastructure, they try to talk about it in terms of “futures.” The problem is that a futures contract is not the same thing — not even remotely — as a guaranteed media buy.

In the financial markets, a futures contract is a very specific thing. It implies a whole lot of infrastructure and implementation that simply isn’t supported anywhere in the digital media infrastructure today. The biggest problem with trying to implement a “futures contract” mechanism in digital media is that the unit of inventory we sell — an ad impression — only exists for milliseconds. There isn’t an equivalent in the physical world that matches this scenario in which “futures” are sold for shares of a company or of a commodity that will exist and continue to exist after the contract expires.

Of course, I’m not an expert in the mechanisms used in the financial markets, and there might well be some more esoteric mechanisms I’m not aware of that more closely match what we do in digital media. But the danger here is that we push too far forward on something that isn’t a close match to what we actually need in order to have a healthy business. I don’t think it would be a healthy business decision for us to build marketplaces where “futures contracts” on ad inventory could be resold, for instance. There are plenty of reasons that this would be a bad idea.

Jan 18 2014
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Ad Ecosystem, Ad Technology, Online Media, Predictions, Startups

How (and why) emerging media should plan for scale

By Eric Picard (Originally Published on iMedia – January 18, 2014)

People in emerging media spaces frequently ask me how they can get advertising into their content experiences or how they can use their technology to create value for advertising technology companies. Recently someone asked me about using bitcoin in advertising. In the past, I’ve spent hours working with clients who have hired me to help them figure out advertising models for their new emerging media products, despite my telling them early on that it’s unlikely that there’s a “there, there” related to their situation due to scale.

This is apparently hard for people to wrap their heads around, so let’s talk about this specific issue — the issue of scale in advertising. At its heart, the issue of scale is possibly the biggest and most fundamental issue in advertising — and it is frequently misunderstood. Here are my three rules of scale in advertising:

  • Advertisers need to be able to spend relatively significant budgets efficiently at a low cost per impression.
  • Advertising campaigns need to be able to reach relatively large audiences without significant complexity in managing them.
  • Return on advertising spend (ROAS) needs to be able to be calculated in some form (including, in many cases, very simple key performance indicators).

Let’s talk first about the difference between marketing and advertising. I’ll give you my definitions, as the dictionaries don’t do justice to the concepts:

Marketing is about communication; it is a commercial message to a potential or existing customer, and increasingly it is a two-way conversation with potential or existing customers. Marketing includes one-on-one conversations between employees and prospects, mail and email communications, advertising, public relations, and more.

Advertising is about reaching the largest possible audience, with the best available message, as effectively, inexpensively, and efficiently as possible, generally through distribution over a large media channel. Advertising is a subset of marketing, but it has unique properties and rules that one needs to be aware of in order to apply it as a revenue source.

The most important concept that defines advertising as opposed to marketing is scale of reach at a reasonable cost. Advertising generally requires that a very large audience can be reached at a low cost per impression. Not only must the cost to reach the audience be relatively low, but the cost to manage the buying of the advertising media must also be relatively low. In addition, the ROAS must be somewhat measurable. That said, ROAS is a fairly squishy way of discussing a variable and varied set of metrics that are generally constructed on a per-advertiser — or even per-campaign — basis to gain an understanding of results.

At this point, a few of you are probably getting ready to argue with me about some of the things I just said. The likely argument revolves around some high-CPM inventory that is bought by some advertisers for some campaigns at a very high rate. And while this does happen, my points above still hold true. The cost of the inventory is relative based on the goals of the campaign and an analysis of its results.

For instance, some inventory that is highly targeted or highly effective can sell for a high CPM, but it can still meet the ROAS goals of the campaign. This can be due to high performance or a relatively rare target audience (perhaps extremely high income or very niche interests, such as pilots, airplane owners, or sky divers). It can also be due to a highly competitive media set (e.g., auto-intenders or people who manage investments).

ROAS is a superset of all the various means of calculating performance because ROAS can be based on brand metrics as well as performance metrics. It can be as laser-focused as a tightly bound formula including cost per acquisition (CPA) and the margin on the product that the “A” drove. Or it can be as broad as understanding that for every dollar of advertising spent (using some kind of analysis that could be sophisticated or simple) gross sales increased by some amount.

The ROAS calculations can also be derivative. For instance, there may be a very clearly understood metric that has very clearly understood value that can be used as the primary goal of a campaign. For instance, in the automotive space, the value of a test drive is very clearly understood; most car companies know exactly what the conversion rate is between test drives and purchases of their cars. It’s common to use test drives as a campaign goal, which is not really the goal of the advertiser, but it is fairly measurable and clearly understood in secondary value in sales.

For those trying to roll out a new (or emerging) advertising medium — one that is based on new content models, new distribution models, or new devices or technologies — this concept of scale is critical. Until a media type can provide enough reach to be of value, it’s hard to use advertising as a mechanism to fund it. That number varies based on the makeup of the audience using the media.

For instance, if a new hand-held device for hedge-fund managers were launching, the audience size needed to be ad supported would be much lower than a hand-held device for the homeless. For a mixed-audience scenario, one that’s by nature more affluent (since most emerging media scenarios tend to appeal to early adopters, who tend to be affluent), the magic number seems to be at least in the hundreds of thousands, but it can range into the millions.

The more information available about the audience that is adopting the emerging media, the more likely early ad funding is to occur. This audience data must be collected up front. The task cannot be left until later. If it is, there likely won’t be a “later.”

 

Nov 20 2013
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Ad Ecosystem, Marketers, Media Agencies, Online Media, Publishers

The fundamental disconnect between buyers and sellers

By Eric Picard (Originally Published on iMedia – November 20, 2013)

If we break down the way that buyers and sellers view the world from an advertising perspective, the buyer wants to reach a specific audience on quality publications. And the seller wants to sell as much inventory as possible at the highest price.

To these ends, each party has built their own set of processes, technologies, and methodologies. Historically, media buyers would come up with a plan for reaching ideal target audiences, identify publishers that match brand goals and have access to the target audiences, and then send RFPs over to those publishers. Once buyers passed along the RFP, control was largely out of their hands. Buyers could say yes or no to things, they could ask for clarification, and they could negotiate price. But the control over exactly which audience they reach or what pages their ads land on have not been in their control. That has reverted back to the publisher’s sales, account, and operations teams.

Publisher sales organizations, meanwhile, have spent an immense amount of time and effort coming up with methods of “packaging” inventory to ensure the most sales, at the highest price. They have created significantly complex packages — with combinations of highly desirable and aligned inventory to an RFP — with less aligned and less desirable inventory that they require the buyer to take in order to get the inventory they really want.

In conversations with media buyers, I’ve been told that they see their job as “forcing publishers to blow up packages and unbundle the bad stuff from the good stuff.” This tension between buyer and seller can be quite intense — because their goals are generally not seen as aligned. There is a problem of “information asymmetry” in this world, meaning that publishers have all the information about both the buyer’s goals and the publisher’s own inventory and audiences. Ultimately they package that inventory without much input from the buyer other than the original RFP and media plan. Buyers have very little information in this world and rely on the publisher to interpret the buyer’s goals properly and to deliver what they’ve agreed to.

Over in RTB land, media buyers have much more control. In this world, the “information asymmetry” goes in the other direction. Within a DSP or other buying tool, the media buyers specify the audiences they want to reach and the kinds of inventory that are acceptable — even down to creation of a white list of which publishers are acceptable. They use inventory quality vendors, verification vendors, data providers, and all sorts of techniques to gain control over the buying process.

In this world, publishers add very little value (basically none) to the buying process, and they exist with absolute data asymmetry. Not only do they not know why their inventory is being bought (they don’t get an RFP or media plan), but they also often don’t even know who is buying their inventory. They maintain very little control over the selling process in this circumstance, which rightly makes them nervous about RTB.

As the technologies and markets evolve, a new process needs to be developed where publishers and buyers can collaborate. This process must allow publishers to gain insight into the goals of the buyers such that they can make good decisions about where to invest in building content — content that attracts the kinds of audiences that buyers want to reach. And buyers need access to data that publishers have about their audiences (which they don’t normally make available to generic ad exchange buys) that can be bound together with inventory via private exchanges or even programmatic direct technologies. So between the buyer and the seller, we can come together with a strong handshake that drives the right kind of symmetry of information — one that drives the right business outcomes for everyone involved.

Nov 05 2013
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Ad Ecosystem, Ad Technology, Economics, Marketers, Online Media, Predictions, Publishers

Enterprise Adoption Of Ad Tech Will Supercharge The Market

By Eric Picard (Originally published on AdExchanger 11/5/2013)

The appetite for ad technology is just beginning to appeal to new markets in new ways. Expect to see significant growth in the sector over the next five years as marketers and large publishers invest significantly in technology at a scale we’ve never seen.

The context for this shift: Ad technology is moving from a marketing or sales and operations expense to an enterprise-level IT investment. We’re now seeing very significant interest in this space by CIOs and CTOs at major corporations – beyond what we’ve seen in the past, which mainly came from the “digital native” companies, such as Google, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft. Now this is becoming much more mainstream.

Historically, digital media was a very small percentage of advertising spending for large advertisers, and a small percentage of revenue for large, traditional media publishers.  But in the last two years, we have passed the tipping point. Let’s handle the two areas separately – starting with the marketer.

Marketers

First, let’s call the marketer by a slightly different name: the enterprise.

Large corporations, or enterprises, have invested massive amounts of money in IT over the last 30 years. Every major function within the enterprise has been through this treatment – from HR to supply chain, finance, procurement and sales to internally driven traditional direct marketing (the intersection of CRM and direct-marketing channels, such as mailing lists and even email marketing).

The great outlier here has been the lack of investment in advertising, which mainly has been driven by the fact that advertising is managed for the most part by agencies. Most marketing departments have allowed their media agency partners to take on the onus of sorting out how to effectively and efficiently spend their marketing budgets. And up until the past few years, digital marketing was a small percentage of spending for most major marketers.

Since there really hasn’t been much value in investing in advertising technology at the enterprise level for marketers on the traditional side, there was little driving change here. But as the percentage of the marketing budget on digital advertising has grown, and as the value of corporate data to digital advertising has grown, a significant shift in thinking has taken place.

Now we’ve got a way, through the RTB infrastructure – and, ultimately, through all infrastructure in the space – to apply the petabytes of corporate data that these companies own to drive digital advertising right down to the impression level. And we have mature infrastructures, bidders, delivery systems, third-party data and data pipelines,and mature technology vendors that can act on all this. None of this existed five years ago at scale.

Publishers

Just as the large marketers are enterprises, so are the large media companies that own the various online and offline publications that create advertising opportunities.

Until the last few years, the very largest of the traditional publishing conglomerates were still not paying much attention to digital media since it was a tiny fraction of overall revenue. But over the last few years there has been a significant shift as executives finally realized that despite the lack of revenue from digital as a channel, from a distribution standpoint, digital media is experiencing explosive growth. And ultimately all the traditional distribution channels – from print to television to radio – are all being subsumed into the digital channel.

You need to look no further than the people who have been hired into the major media companies in the last few years with titles like VP of revenue platforms, GM of programmatic and trading, director of programmatic advertising and VP of yield operations. These senior positions didn’t exist at these companies two years ago, and generally were areas reserved within the digital natives.

The fact that we’re seeing new focus on digital media, with both senior roles and significant investments in people and technology, means that we’re likely to see additional significant investment by these media enterprises over the next few years. I expect to see the shift happen here quickly since the consulting companies upon which they and most enterprises rely to lead these initiatives already have media and entertainment practices.

Suddenly major advertisers and publishers – who are all major enterprises – are looking at the opportunity to apply their significant IT expertise to marketing in a new way. So let’s talk about the way that IT evolved in other channels historically to try to understand what’s about to happen here.

The Evolution Of IT

A major corporation will typically hire large consulting firms with a vertical practice in the area they want to modernize. Note that the biggest consulting firms – we’ll use IBM and Accenture as examples here – have developed vertical practices around nearly every department, large initiative or focus area within an enterprise. Also note that wherever these consulting firms step in to build a practice, they assemble a recommended “stack” of technologies that can be integrated together and create a customized solution for the enterprise. One interesting thing: In nearly every case, there are significant open-source software components that are used within these “stacks” of technology.

When we look carefully at where they’ve developed practices that smell anything like marketing, they’re typically assembled around big data and analytics. There are obvious synergies between all the other vertical practices they’ve created and the intersection of using big data to inform marketing decisions with analytics, based on detailed analysis of other corporate data. So this isn’t a surprise. It also isn’t shocking that there are many major open-source software initiatives around big data, ranging from staples such as Hadoop to startups like MongoDB.

But nowhere in the digital advertising landscape do we see major open source initiatives. Instead we see the massively complex Lumascape ecosystem map, with hundreds of companies in it.

So when we look at the shift to enterprise IT for digital marketing, there are plenty of companies to plug into a “stack” of technologies and build a practice around. But there is very little in the way of open source, and no clear way to actually bind together all the vendors into a cohesive stack that can be used in a repeatable and scalable fashion.

We are seeing some significant consulting firms come into existence in this space, including Unbound Company and 614 Group. I’m certain we’ll see the big players enter the fray as they sniff out opportunity.

Oct 17 2013
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Ad Ecosystem, Ad Technology, Economics, Predictions

Who Will Win The Digital Media War?

By Eric Picard (originally published in AdExchanger October 17th, 2013)

Lately I’ve had many conversations about the digital advertising market and how it’s evolving.

The most-asked question: “Who will win the battle over digital advertising – Google, Facebook or Twitter?”

I’ve also recently been asked about other companies, such as LinkedIn and Adobe, and how well they’re positioned to beat “whomever.” And by “whomever,” everyone almost always means Google. But more often lately, I’m hearing about Facebook, too.

So, who’s going to win?

Well, it’s not so simple. I take a very different view of the market. I don’t believe there will ever be one winner in this space. Even from an ad-technology perspective, I don’t think all roads point to Google owning it all – although there’s little question that they dominate. And from a publisher perspective, Google is dominant in paid search but not in other areas.

I can hear your brain spinning right now. You’re thinking, “Wait – did you say Google is a publisher?”

Yes, I did. Google has leveraged a massive market share in paid search, and grown into other forms of advertising as well. But for some reason, people in our space don’t seem to think of Google as a publisher.

Google happens to be the biggest publisher of search – but, somehow, calling Google a search engine seems to mask for many people that Google is a publisher. They also are a publisher of maps with Google Maps. They publish video via YouTube. And they publish all sorts of other content related to the results of various vertical searches, including restaurant reviews and travel information.

Google’s also a technology company, and yet – amid all the excitement about various office applications, self-driving cars, balloon-based Wi-Fi and all the other efforts – they are primarily a publisher, one that makes almost all of its money from the sale of advertising. Even their massive DoubleClick business is in many ways really about building opportunities for more ad revenue flowing through their ad exchange and back to Google, tied to a percentage of media spending.

But even though they can almost legally be considered a monopoly, they are not the only publisher in search. Microsoft certainly hasn’t given up there. And beyond the two major publishers of search, there’s an entire ecosystem around paid search that Google can’t and won’t own. That opens up other opportunities.

A Range Of Opportunities – For Many Players

I see the market as a series of opportunities. Even if Google continues to be the dominant player across all forms of digital advertising, from a publisher or an ad-technology perspective, I don’t think that matters from a market perspective because the publisher space is far too fragmented for any one publisher to gain control. Any one publisher may dominate in one area, but won’t be a complete monopoly – not even in search. It’s even much less likely in other forms of media.

So when people talk about who’s going to “win” in advertising, I think it’s more complex than one winner and many losers. There are many opportunities to win here. And many of these markets are more than big enough for the “second-place” player to have a very big business indeed. In many cases, there will be a large number of big businesses in various verticals. Television is a great example of a market where there are many big players and no one player that has significantly dominated the market, at least not in the way we think of Google dominating search.

So what are the other areas we should be paying attention to? These areas could be very large – potentially as large as paid search – but at least as large as display ads or radio.

1. Consumer-Facing Social Media

Publishers: Obviously Facebook will dominate here. This means Twitter has the backup position in this market. Facebook is too far ahead for Twitter to come close any time soon. I think that Google+ is an outlier and could blow up at some point if Google keeps at it and really invests heavily, maybe in advertising Google+ rather than trying to gain share more organically.

Technology: There are tons of players, but nobody is dominant yet. And every major player wants to be the big gun here. I expect that, eventually, Google, Adobe and Salesforce will dominate, either through organic growth or acquisition. There are a lot of smaller players who could rise quickly depending on how innovative they prove and how good they are at executing.

Secondary Marketplaces: I think AppNexus will win. Others will play.

2. B2B Social Media

Publishers: Clearly, this belongs to LinkedIn. Google+, Facebook and Twitter will also play here, but it’s uncertain how much market penetration they’ll achieve. I’d guess that Twitter has a good opportunity to be bigger here than in the consumer space as a secondary player.

Technology: Again – too early to know. I like Rallyverse quite a lot, although they’re playing in several places here.

Secondary Marketplaces: Too early to be certain.

3.  Video / TV over IP

Publishers: Obviously Hulu is a standout. You can’t ignore YouTube, either. Netflix and Amazon are very focused, and Microsoft’s Xbox is super interesting. But video and television content over the Internet is very fragmented, and I don’t see one strong winner.

Technology: Freewheel seems to be getting tons of traction (quietly, too).

Secondary Marketplaces: Clearly Google’s got a good foothold because of its anchor-tenant relationship with YouTube. Tremor had a great IPO, and there are many players like TubeMogul, YuMe and Brightroll – but this space looks to be about as fragmented as the television ecosystem, or even display ads. Part of the reason is just that there’s a lot of demand and money floating out there looking to be spent on video advertising.

4. Mobile

Publishers: Mobile is not a media type. Well, sorta. But it’s not a media type that so far is significantly differentiated as one. I suppose you could point at Apple and Google (as leaders?) for their app and content marketplaces.

Technology: This part of the market is super fragmented.

Secondary Marketplaces: I’m looking forward to Google and AppNexus duking it out over this marketplace from the exchange point of view – but there are many ad networks in this space as well, including Millennial Media, which is clearly the powerhouse of the market.

5. Cross-Media Plays

Let me break out of my model for a moment and say that while the market has certainly fragmented into players focused on each of the various channels, I think we’re now starting to see a lot of investment in cross-media initiatives. These range from publishers to technology companies and marketplaces.

But the real interesting thing to me is that in the ad-technology space we’ve rarely seen the ability for companies to support multiple media types simultaneously and become a dominant player. That is changing.

Publishers: Google, Yahoo – yes, I said Yahoo – Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, AOL and a plethora of others are starting to gain real cross-media traction. I don’t see any one publisher dominating across media, but certainly there will be publishers who stand out because of their cross-media footprint.

Technology: Obviously Google stands out here. But watch out for AppNexus, which is really investing heavily in video, mobile and social to extend beyond its display roots.

Secondary Marketplaces: Again – I think it’s Google and AppNexus that are really poised to win here.

Oct 14 2013
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Why dynamic creative has bounced back from failure

By Eric Picard (Originally published on iMediaConnection October 14th, 2013)

Back in 1999 (when the moon did not have a moonbase Alpha, nor did an explosion send the moon rocketing across the cosmos — a reference for old-timers like me) while at my last startup, Bluestreak, we started experimenting with dynamic creative.

The idea was that there were e-commerce companies with thousands of products available online, and that based on location we should be able to test and optimize which products led to the most clicks and purchases. Over the next few years, we worked with several customers to experiment with this. We ultimately ran ads with several publishers that would rotate through a list of products, and we used our creative optimization technology to determine which combination of offers was getting the best results (based on clicks, interactions, or conversions).

It turned out that there were various combinations of location (publisher) and product that worked much better than others, and the tests were successful. But the question was really about matters of degrees. We saw significant improvements in results, and we developed great technology that supported all this. But after the bottom dropped out of the market in 2000 and 2001 and the price of inventory dropped significantly, the improvements in performance stopped mattering as much.

Essentially, the price of inventory was so low that it was cheaper to just run much higher volumes of unoptimized ads than to pay for optimization service.

But I knew that creative optimization and dynamic creative would have its time and place. Either the impact of the creative optimization would drive significantly better results, the price of inventory would come back up, or we’d be able to optimize the offers based on user targeting rather than just by publisher.

Creative optimization and dynamic creative dropped out of the industry for eight to 10 years, but it came screaming back. As I guessed, the major driver was targeting based on user data. And over the past few years, the growth of real-time bidding and audience targeting has led to significant improvements in dynamic creative and optimization.

There are now several significant companies that have built their business around the idea of optimizing the offer shown to users based on their profiles, including a lot of retargeting. They build advertising campaigns that are driven by databases — ones that pull together the creative in ways that include hundreds or thousands or even millions of possible combinations. The best offer is selected based on a variety of criteria, including audience targeting attributes such demographics, behavioral data, and retargeting data. This information is extensively available and can be used to drive significantly better optimization than just location.

We all know that with real-time bidding and ad exchanges, ads can be targeted based on this kind of data. And we all know that with basic tracking of impressions, clicks, and conversions, bid prices in ad exchanges can be adjusted to optimize results based on the number of clicks or conversions. But dynamic creative optimization can take things to the next level. Using all of these technologies and techniques in combination can significantly drive up ROI. The only question is how many different products, offers, or options are available for optimization purposes.

The more opportunities to adjust the creative — especially if those products or offers can be somehow predicted to match against different audiences’ preferences or interests — the more likely the user is to act.
Read more at http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/35170.asp#sxRJhl1kvggxUiAe.99

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