Category Archives: digital media

September 3, 2015 · 10:37 am

Programming Surprises

I come from the world of advertising sales. Strike that: I come from a world that no longer exists even though there is one with the same name still out there. It’s called advertising or media sales except there isn’t a heck of a lot of selling going on – just a lot of buying.

I dislike programmatic buying for a number of reasons, but the one I’m going to discuss today has implications for your business, even if your business isn’t media. Your brand may be using programmatic to purchase ads. Certainly digital ads and, soon if not now, TV, print, and even outdoor. I completely understand the efficiencies of this system and from the buy side the system is great. From the publisher or content distributor side, it has had the effect generally of pushing pricing down. Zero-sum games do that. However, that’s not today’s beef.

In a word – transparency, or lack thereof, is my issue. Many brands have no clue where their ads are served nor do they know for certain which creative is being used vs. which targets. They don’t really know how fees are being taken along the way and they’re not really sure what their budget is getting them in terms of placement. In short, the last thing you want as a marketer – or any businessperson – is a surprise, and this system has the potential to deliver many of them, most of which are bad.

If you think you can mitigate the surprise issue with a Service Level Agreement, think again. Most of those contain a cure period. Even if there is an hour during which your ads run on an unapproved site, the damage is done. Surprise!

When the bills come in and you find out that your $250,000 budget bought you $175,000 of inventory due to fees, causing your effective CPM‘s to rise significantly, surprise!

Ad spending in the US for programmatic TV will rise to nearly $4 billion in 2016 according to some estimates.  That kind of honey attracts a lot of flies, and I suspect we’ll see an even more fractured technical landscape supporting this buying.  No matter what your business, you can’t work with partners who are hiding something, at least I can’t.  Can you?

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August 31, 2015 · 11:15 am

Gone In A Flash

If you are using Google Chrome as your browser, and over half of you are, your experience as you use the internet is about to change. Google has decided that as of tomorrow, September 1, they will begin pausing many Flash ads by default to improve performance for users. What that means is that if you are desperate to see an ad you will need to click on it to manually enable it. Otherwise, ads will remain plain images by default. Firefox is also doing this  and Amazon also said that it would no longer allow Flash-based ads to serve on its network or across its Amazon Advertising Platform.  In short, the bulk of web browsers is now Flash-unfriendly. This prompts several business thoughts.

First, yay Google and others!  Flash creates all kinds of issues, the biggest of which are that it drains batteries quickly, it doesn’t really perform that well on mobile devices (in a world that’s now mostly mobile) and, most importantly in my mind, it has abysmal security.  Just look at the recent malware attack launched via MSN‘s ad network as an example. This is a good thing for consumers and maybe makes our digital world a little safer.

Second, this is going to have a major effect of the digital ad world.  The supply of ad space is actually going to drop since much of what is out there is Flash-based.  That should kick prices up.  The question in my mind is will the price rise get publishers rethinking their ad load strategy?  I don’t know about you, but in my mind surfing much of the web has become a stroll through the proverbial Arabian bazaar – one hawker after another in an extremely cluttered environment.  Maybe this is how the tidal wave of ad blocking is pushed back?

Third, what will this do to the numerous ad-serving companies?  Who has technology that is so tied to Flash that their business model is disrupted and where are the opportunities in companies that aren’t Flash-based?

Finally, this points out how interdependent every digital business is.  The browser companies make a change and ad companies and publishers are affected.  A hardware company decides to change a business model, as Apple did with iTunes years ago, and nearly every subsequent business deal is held up to that standard.  Never a dull day in digital – how about in your business?

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August 26, 2015 · 10:01 am

Idiotic Injecting

No one that I know enjoys going to the doctor and getting an injection. Whether it’s as simple as a flu shot or something more complex such as a regimen of allergy shots, it’s not a particularly enjoyable experience. 

Today’s topic is an injection of another sort, but the experience isn’t enjoyable either. It turns out that AT&T has jumped on the “no free lunch” bandwagon with respect to offering wireless hotspots to its customers. A Stanford computer scientist and lawyer was travelling and discovered that the AT&T hotspot to which he had connected was serving ads over web pages he was accessing. When he went to Stanford’s home page, for instance (a page that has zero ads on it), he saw a pop-up ad for jewelry and AT&T itself, and the ads persisted for several seconds until he could close them.

He discovered that the ISP was tampering with HTTP traffic – that’s what serves web pages. It is using a service from a third party to inject the ads and to monetize the traffic. AT&T is far from the first “free” service to do this – Comcast and Marriott are just two others. But as the professor wrote:

AT&T has an (understandable) incentive to seek consumer-side income from its free wifi service, but this model of advertising injection is particularly unsavory. Among other drawbacks: It exposes much of the user’s browsing activity to an undisclosed and untrusted business. It clutters the user’s web browsing experience. It tarnishes carefully crafted online brands and content, especially because the ads are not clearly marked as part of the hotspot service. And it introduces security and breakage risks, since website developers generally don’t plan for extra scripts and layout elements.

In other words, while you might have accepted that as your ISP the folks at AT&T will see and record everything that you’re doing, you might be concerned about an outside company doing so.  Moreover, as a publisher, your beautiful content environment is now sullied by ads from which you derive zero revenue.

If you’re on an AT&T hotspot, you’re already an AT&T customer.  I don’t believe you can log on if you’re not and you’re probably paying them handsomely each month (I know I am).  This sort of nickel and diming might help revenues (I wonder how much in the scheme of things) but it doesn’t help with customer satisfaction. That’s a point from which any business can learn.  Idiotic injection from my perspective.  Yours?

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