Category Archives: Consulting

November 3, 2014 · 1:52 pm

The 40% Chance Of Fraud

If there was a 40% chance that when you bought something you weren’t going to get what you thought you were buying, would you take that risk? I wouldn’t, but apparently many advertisers and/or their agencies do so every day. Ghostery, which is a browser extension I use and would heartily endorse, says its research shows 40% of all URLs in automated ad auctions are masked. What is URL masking? As a recent Ad Age article defined it:

URL masking is often used to trick advertisers into running ads on sites with illicit or stolen content, which tend to generate lots of traffic but little ad revenue. URL masking is also used to fool buyers into thinking they’re buying premium inventory when they are instead getting low quality placements.

Ouch.  Then again, this is just one of the issues that have arisen as programmatic ad buying becomes more prevalent.  As a former TV sales guy, I just don’t get it.  Oh sure – the costs of machines that are supervised by a couple of people is far less than the cost of the number of people required to do the equivalent work.  But look what happens when it’s just machines.

Ask anyone connected with the programmatic ad business what the top three issues are and they should answer:

  1. Fraud
  2. Fraud
  3. Fraud

Traffic generated by bots, ads that are run underneath pages to generate impressions when no one is seeing them, fake sites which spoof domain names that clear buyers’ whitelists because they look like they belong to reputable publishers.   That’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Another big issue is how little of what the buyers are paying actually reaches publishers – middleman upon middleman taking their cut drives revenues to the content creators down.

Putting aside the need for transparency, I’m not a Luddite.  I know programmatic ad buying is an advantageous, time and cost-effective process.  But the machines can’t do everything.  In fact, someone has to understand the business well enough (and all of those bad actors who would seek to steal from it) to program the algorithms.  Someone needs to bring the 40% chance down to 0%.  Someone else has to come up with the next brilliant, breakthrough idea.  It won’t be a machine.

You?

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October 27, 2014 · 9:54 am

Too Thin

No, this isn’t a screed about weight loss.  Nor is it a rant about underfed models and bad body images.  It’s about Facebook and how it raises a great business point for all of us.

Facebook logo Español: Logotipo de Facebook Fr...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You might have read about Facebook’s recent Rooms app.  It’s an app that attempts to transfer the utility of message boards to the mobile world.  Everything old is new again, I guess. As Mashable reported:

The app allows people to create a “room” on any topic. The room can then be customized with colors, icons and photos — even the Like button can be changed. Text, photos and videos can be posted to a room’s feed, creating an ongoing multimedia conversation.

Not exactly an original concept.  In fact, FriendFeed did something similar several years ago with the same name.  What’s different is that the app permits anonymity, something heretofore verboten on Facebook.  Frankly, it’s not all that difficult to create a fake identity but that’s a different discussion.

Rooms come on the heels of Paper, Poke, and Slingshot.  The former is/was a newsreader; the latter two are Snapchat clones.  None of the three are successful, at least not in the context of a user base of over a billion.  Messenger, another app, is more so but only because the messaging functionality was deleted from the Facebook app proper so it’s sort of a forced use case.  That said, I’ve not installed it since it’s way too intrusive in terms of the data it captures (mostly without the user knowing it’s doing so).  The app has one star in the App Store – not exactly a home run.

The business point is this. Facebook seems to be attempting to be all things to all people.  Everything that becomes popular – in this latest case anonymous sharing apps such as Yik Yak and Whisper – prompt Facebook to attempt to release something that keeps users in the Facebook ecosystem.  Obviously the need to serve ads to the user bases of those apps drives some of this.  When they can’t manage to build it, they buy, as in the case of WhatsApp.

I’m not a fan of being all things to all people.  I think doing a limited number of things well is a better path.  Facebook might be better served to negotiate ad serving deals (and maybe they’ve tried) and partnerships than to flail about creating crappy apps.  A business can spread the product mix too thinly, diluting what made it successful and alienating the user base when that dilution affects the core products (Messenger, for example).

Thoughts?

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October 17, 2014 · 8:37 am

Everything Is A Special

Foodie Friday Fun this week begins with a chalkboard.  I went out for dinner last night and the place I went was small.  After having been seated, one might expect the server to produce a menu.  He didn’t.  Instead he pointed to a chalkboard hanging on wall next to the open kitchen.  “Tonight’s menu is there” he said.  There were no specials – everything was a special.

The menu was small.  A few different types of crostini, two different types of pasta, a fish, a lamb dish, a beef dish, a duck dish and dessert.  Only three.  Everything was based on the ingredients available locally that day.  Having researched the place prior to going, I’d seen an assortment of previous menus.  One or two of the dishes popped up several times but the menus really varied from day-to-day.  They reflected the philosophy of the owners: fresh seasonal ingredients prepared simply.  Which of course got me thinking.

Many businesses try to be all things to all people.  They produce products in response to a competitor’s success.  Brand and line extensions are one way to leverage all of the brand equity we’ve built up.  The reality is that if the “larger menu” isn’t done as well as the array of choices that built that equity in the first place, we end up diluting what we’ve built up in the consumer’s mind.

The local ingredients had another advantage – much lower costs since they weren’t being shipped from around the world.  The prices at this place were reasonable.  They didn’t serve wine or liquor although you could bring your own (and they didn’t charge corkage!).  Again, maintaining a wine list was a distraction for them.  No inventory can go bad when you don’t have any.

I think this place’s philosophy is a good one for businesses to emulate.  Do a few things well.  Make everything special.  Make your products with the best “ingredients” you can find, where they be the people who provide your services or the materials from which your products are made.  Quality over quantity?  Maybe, although I think quantity comes from quality.  What do you think?

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