BUSINESS WEEK -New metrics could change pricing, reach of online ads April 9, 2009
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentA Pricing Revolution Looms in Online Advertising
By Ben Kunz
Look just to the right of this article. There, on your computer screen, lies a little, two-dimensional secret that will soon threaten major online publishers and their precious advertising revenue.
It’s called the banner ad, and its cost may plummet.
For a decade, Web site publishers have relied on an old advertising model: Publishers provided advertisers access to readers, and the more desirable those readers, the more an online publisher could charge. WSJ.com, for example, charges advertisers as much as $64.60 to show a banner ad to 1,000 viewers. (In advertising language, this is called CPM, or cost per thousand impressions.) In the past these fees made sense becauseThe Wall Street Journal’s readers are highly affluent, a perfect target for many upscale brands. The better the audience, the more advertisers are willing to pay for ad space.
But what if marketers could find new ways to reach the same audience—with ads on sites that won’t charge nearly as much? What if those other ads cost as much as 95% less?
READ THE REST OF THIS BUSINESS WEEK ARTICLE
Social Media Metrics Vary Based on the Community February 5, 2009
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentFor many marketers, metrics are a stumbling block when it comes to social media. Like snowflakes, no two communities are the same. Whether you’re using social media to connect with employees—like McDonald’s—or consumers makes a big difference in how you judge their success. E-Centric recently talked with David Carter, CTO and co-founder of Awareness and Mike Lewis, vice president of marketing of the Waltham, MA-based company about the best ways to gauge the effectiveness of an online community. Awareness recently introduced a prefab, ready-to-deploy, online community building solution.
Read The Rest—>Social Media Metrics Vary Based on the Community
How poor metrics undermine digital marketing – The McKinsey Quarterly – How poor metrics undermine digital marketing – Marketing – Digital Marketing October 15, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a comment- The digital world has developed faster than the tools needed to measure it. This lag has made it difficult for marketers to fully exploit the Web’s promise as the most targetable and measurable medium in the history of marketing.
- Hobbled by nascent technologies, inconsistent metrics, and a reliance on outdated media models, marketers are failing to tap the Web’s full power. Unless this problem can be addressed, the inability to make accurate measurements of digital advertising’s effectiveness across channels and consumer touch points will continue to promote the misallocation of media budgets and to impede the industry’s growth.
The Economy of Attention: Captivate Your Online Audience or Be Stuck in the Past July 31, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentThe Economy of Attention: Captivate Your Online Audience or Be Stuck in the Past
By Cam Balzer
The proliferation of conferences in the online space is staggering. I’ve found several that are well-run and consistently provide valuable content, like Search Engine Strategies, Search Insider Summit:, SMX:, Searchonomics: and Webmasterworld PubCon.
I recently attended Future of Online Advertising, a nicely presented new media economy conference, and would say that it is worth attending for a forward thinking view on the industry. Top notch speakers and good sessions.
It was in a great venue too, New York’s Gotham Hall, a former bank built in the colossal Roman style, a temple to the old financial economy. The contrast between old and new was highlighted by a series of aphorisms carved into the granite walls circling the three-story-tall hall:
“Waste neither time nor money but use both for your own and your neighbor’s good.”
“There is no gain so sure as that which results from economizing what you have.”
“It is what we save rather than what we earn that ensures a competency for the future.”
These paeans to frugality sound quaint in an era where the average U.S. household carries $9300 in credit card debt. However, they also seemed strangely appropriate given that many of the speakers directly or indirectly addressed the key resource in the new economy: consumer attention.
The Economy of Attention
Marketers often behave as if they are in sole control of consumer attention, powering print and television via their ad spending, pushing messages to captive audiences. Unfortunately, this tendency has frequently been transferred to the online space unchallenged.
In that old economy, consumers didn’t have easy means to speak back or turn the shouting match into a conversation. Clearly they have always selectively doled out their proactive interactions with ideas, brands, products or media. The Internet and especially Web 2.0 tools enable nearly frictionless response. In fact, the ease with which consumers can express themselves online prompts other consumers to respond in kind. Suddenly, the voice of the consumer is amplified, sometimes reaching volumes unmatched by even the biggest advertising budgets.
Competition for consumer attention is at an all-time high, and it shows no signs of stopping. In an age where consumers can be more selective able what advertising they view, and where they use their extra time and energy to create unique conversations, they demand more careful attention from marketers. This reversal of value flow in the new economy has huge implications for marketers and publishers.
Here are a few recommendations for marketers distilled from the Future of Online Advertising conference speakers:
Stop shouting and listen: do you really understand what consumers want?
Serving existing ads in new places might work better than it does in the old places, but that’s only because of novelty. In the long run, marketers will better engage consumers by creating ads tuned to specific conversations, which necessitates analysis and understanding of those conversations.
Your brand, their terms
Consumer 2.0 wants to “license” your brand on their terms, not simply buy your products. There are exactly two reasons a consumer is going to blog about or review your product: it’s extremely cool or annoyingly bad. If it’s cool, the consumer will endorse it and by doing so “represent” it—or maybe actually let it represent him/her—in a blog or social site profile. Mediocre products get no visibility at all, only the remarkably good or bad get play. Marketers will expend energy trying to drown out negative reactions. If marketers are attentive, active participants in online conversations, they won’t make bad products in the first place.
Let go, let flow
Relax and be playful. You can’t control your brand the way you could 20 or even 10 years ago. Instead of being a drill sergeant when it comes to controlling the brand, perhaps there’s room to aspire to be a summer camp counselor, facilitating a good time for all and intervening only when the safety or the collective good time is jeopardized.
The old world messages emphasizing frugality were primarily directed at consumers, with temple-like banks meant to instill awe and respect for the institutions managing those funds on a saver’s behalf. But in this century, that same frugality exhortation should be heeded by marketers. Treat attention as the most valuable asset your consumers can give you. The old aphorists were on to something: when it comes to the attention economy, what you save still ensures “a competency for the future.”
Cam Balzer is vice president of emerging media at DoubleClick Performics, and a regular contributor to Chief Marketer. Contact him at cbalzer@doubleclick.com.
Targeting: To What End? July 17, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentTargeting: To What End?
Posted July 17th, 2007 by Joe Marchese
Statement: Digital media advertising technologies will allow for unprecedented targeting. Question: Targeting of what and to what end? It’s true that these technologies are improving daily in their ability to refine targeting based on context and consumer’s behavioral data, but targeting can only serve to improve advertising’s effectiveness when combined with an advertising plan that fully accounts for the abilities and limitations of targeting technologies. In the end, the key to unlocking targeting’s potential lies in the ability for advertisers to create targeting’s necessary counterpart, relevancy.
To form an advertising plan that fully leverages improving targeting technologies, advertisers must ask a number of questions. The first are: Why am I targeting? What is success? I am fairly certain the only metric that really matters is an advertiser’s ability to sell more products while maintaining margins reflecting that advertiser’s perceived brand premium. The difference in strategy lies in whether advertisers measure success in the short or long run, and/or whether they measure success as simply increasing sales volume or increasing brand equity to increase sales margins and product life cycles. Making these decisions has always affected the execution of offline marketing, yet we consistently fail to apply this type of thinking to digital advertising targeting strategies. By evaluating these goals, digital advertisers can determine if success is measured in views, clicks, online purchases, or some other measure more in line with traditional advertising goals.
Next, in order to evaluate digital media targeting strategies to achieve internally defined measures of success, advertisers must ask: What am I targeting? Targeting the people viewing an advertising opportunity (behavioral and demographic targeting) is very different from targeting the context of the message surrounding an advertising opportunity. Optimizing for targeting people requires creating a personally relevant independent advertising message, as context surrounding the advertisement will likely vary. Whereas, targeting context requires creating a more simple contextually relevant message that can “borrow” the message of the surrounding content to help convey the advertiser’s message.
Ideally advertisers can take a hybrid approach to targeting and utilize both contextual and personalized targeting. However, as advertisers begin to layer on levels of targeting, the two greatest weakness targeting are exposed; lack of scalability with regards to message creation, and lack of advertiser clairvoyance.
Addressing advertiser’s lack of clairvoyance first: How many times have you heard advertisers tell a story about how they thought they knew exactly who their target market was, only to be surprised? Or an advertiser that was convinced that its brand message was X, only to find out that the market perceived its brand message as Y? In short, over-targeting can cause advertisers to miss opportunities in a medium that should be providing marketers with unparalleled feedback on how people actually perceive their brand, and new ways to adjust messaging to capitalize on this dialogue.
The scalability issue of creating relevant messaging as advertisers utilize increasingly refined targeting technology is perhaps the most daunting. Targeting a “market of one” is certainly a great concept, but if you have a product with broad appeal, creating millions of marketing messages can be a bit prohibitive. Even creating 10 to 20 quality messages for a single campaign can be difficult, especially when the most effective campaigns will be reactive to dialogue with consumers echoing their perception of your brand back at you. There are some interesting experimental solutions to this issue such as modular ad creation and dynamic ad display. I personally feel that some form of distributed creative development will play an integral role in solving scalability issues.
Targeting’s real limitation in its current state is that digital media has yet to fully quantify/qualify what is available for targeting. Part of the onus for correcting this lies in the hands of publishers. Publishers must realize that they are not “selling their audience.” We have all had the discussions regarding the death of push advertising, yet publishers are forced to sell in a market that still behaves very much like a broadcast advertising market. Targeting and relevancy unlock the potential for QUALITY publishers (from individuals to professional media producers) to sell so much more than the attention of their audience and advertisers in order to build effective targeting strategies, offering so much more than just a demographic mix. But publishers must do a better job of defining what their true value is to advertisers and help advertisers to create greater relevance to the publisher’s content and audience alike.
Understanding the limitation of not being able to target on the true value of digital media (especially for brand advertisers) can create significant opportunity for those advertisers who can best glue together current targeting technologies to execute on a strategy of tapping undervalued digital advertising opportunities for their brands.
