Monthly Archives: January 2013

January 23, 2013 · 10:10 am

RTB Means Really Tough Business

The always reliable Digiday did a piece yesterday on Real Time Bidding (some folks say Buying) and the effect it’s having on web publishers. Entitled “Publishers Face RTB Pressures,” it’s an excellent though depressing overview of what’s happening in the digital publishing business due to the steady growth of programmatic ad buying. I can’t sum it up any better than this:

The drive for more efficient buys in RTB is putting pricing pressure on the entire display ad market. According to Magna Global, display advertising globally rose just 1.5 percent in 2013. That’s not very good in a market that expanded 14.4 percent overall for the year. In fact, the reason Magna identified: price drops.

That’s the situation today, when 17 percent of buying is through exchanges. In five years, Magna director of global forecasting Vincent Letang expects 43 percent of display advertising to be bought and sold via exchanges.

In other words, there’s too much inventory and these formulae don’t give the quality of your content enough consideration.  Heaven forbid that humans actually enter the equation!  Before all of my friends who sell non-digital media get too smug, one can rest assured that when the efficiencies of this buying protocol become evident that someone will push it on TV and print just as sure as the sun shines.  So is this a bad thing?

If you’re buying audiences for your marketing messages, no, it’s not.  It is, however, if you’re a content creator who tries to make money off your content by selling the audiences it attracts.  I suppose that means that if I were in the content business I’d get the hell out by selling off my audience monetization to someone else – a publisher or distributor.  I’d give up some of the upside in return for protecting the downside push to the bottom RTB is forcing.  As the article says “Efficiency is a great thing unless what you do is what is being made more efficient.”  It’s not going to be long (and it may be here already) before the quality of the content is impacted as the resources to produce consistently great stuff just aren’t there.

If I were back being a publisher, I’d be spending a lot of time having someone think about our syndication strategy and fast.  Let  someone else ride the ad wave down to the bottom.  My content – and yours – is worth more than that.

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January 22, 2013 · 12:11 pm

Borderless Consumers

Not to sound like Jeff Foxworthy, but if you own a computer, a tablet, a smartphone, and a TV, you just might be a “borderless consumer.”  That’s what the folks at Harris Interactive called people who have those devices when they did a survey for Verizon a couple of months ago.  You can see the results at BorderlessConsumer.com and, as the site says “Borderless consumers are an important and rapidly growing segment, almost 40 percent of U.S. adults. These consumers use several devices and require connectivity, flexibility and choice whenever and wherever possible. They are defined as consumers who own a laptop or desktop, own a smart phone or tablet, have an Internet-enabled device at all times, are motivated to make technology and connectivity upgrades and are interested in the benefits of a connected home.”

It appears as if there is an ongoing update of information, which is probably an excellent idea given how rapidly media consumption changes among this group.

Among the other findings:

  • 40% of borderless consumers are interested in interacting with TV commercials via their phones or tablets.
  • 74% of all consumers believe all the electronics in the house should be connected both to the internet and with each other (90% of borderless consumers want this).
  • 60% of all consumers want to access their files and content on any device, at any time, and anywhere (82% of borderless consumers want this).
  • While only 32% of all consumers want the ability to control or influence TV shows via second screens, 48% of borderless consumers want this.

It’s easy enough to dismiss this as a bunch of early adopters except that we’re at critical mass and many of the big players in the media and content distribution world are reacting.  While watching a lot of content on a phone or tablet still usually requires that you subscribe to the cable or satellite TV distributor, we’re starting to see “cord nevers” in addition to “cord cutters”.  It’s not just about media either as the shopping data shows borderless consumers shop in person quite a bit less than do non-borderless types.  Think about that as you read today’s announcement of Blockbuster closing 300 more stores.

No massive revelations here today – I thought you might find this interesting – I certainly did.  It’s data that reminds us that we need to be focused on changing models and methods since the world is already doing so.

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January 21, 2013 · 12:35 pm

Social and Shopping

How do you think social media influences what people buy?  If you believe a recent report on the influence of social media on shopping this past holiday season, the answer is not much.  As the article said:

online shoppers mostly ignored social channels as purchase influencers,according to survey results from Baynote. Pinterest and Twitter influenced online and in-store purchases for just 1 in 10 shoppers surveyed, with Facebook garnering only slightly more interest. Instead, online ratings and reviews were most likely to influence both online and in-store purchases (33% and 24%, respectively), with Google search results including a pictured product available by the retailer coming in next for online purchases (26%) and paper catalogs (21%) second for in-store purchases. Not surprisingly, social channels were most influential among younger consumers (aged 25-34), while paper catalogs got the attention of the 45+ crowd.

This was accompanied by another piece which announced that “only 2% of traffic to retailers during the holiday season came from social networks, per figures released by Adobe Systems.”   The article then goes on to say “Adobe isn’t the first to detail social media’s rather small influence over the holiday season.”

I could be wrong about this but given that Adobe is the parent company of one of the large analytics firms, I’m assuming they looked for traffic into shopping carts from social media.  Their question – is social media converting into sales – isn’t the right one.  How about “does social media influence sales?”  I’m willing to bet that a large percentage of what’s on Pinterest is aspirational – something the user wants or acknowledges as desirable.  Maybe it’s a place people use to research gifts for friends?   You will have a hard time convincing me, just based on what crosses my Twitter stream and Facebook news feeds, that people aren’t researching purchases via social media.

The Baynote data is a survey – let’s always remember that what people say and what they do sometimes don’t align.  That said, I think taking “catalogs” as a whole while segmenting digital into pieces (search vs. social vs online stores) is a bit misleading.  It also doesn’t reflect how users may begin with a search, move over to social to check out their connections’ thinking on what they’ve found, and then their use of the online store to buy, perhaps several days (and sessions) later.

Given the continuing and impressive growth of online shopping during the last holiday season I’m a believer in social as a influence.  People spend more of their lives online and that includes shopping.  Maybe these folks are asking the wrong questions.  I’m sure they’d have just as hard  time proving that TV or print resulted in the conversions they’re discussing yet very few people deny those media have an impact.  What do you think?

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