Tag Archives: Digital marketing

March 7, 2016 · 2:14 pm

The Canal Street Of Media

If you get off the New York City subway on Canal Street, it isn’t long before you’re approached by someone selling fake goods.  Preeminent among them are the watch salespeople, but it’s not hard to find fake bags, jewelry, luggage, or just about anything else that has a supposed high value at a very low cost (which can be negotiated lower if you press the seller).  I racked my brain to come up with some other example of consumers knowingly buying fraudulent goods but I am unable to do so.  Oh – except for one: programmatic advertising space in media.

In December 2014, AdWeek reported that, according to an Association of National Advertisers and WhiteOps study, digital advertising was projected to take in $43.8 billion in 2015, and $6.3 billion would be based on fraudulent activity. The average bot level for display ad campaigns throughout the study was 11%, but for programmatic ad buys that number rose to 17% (55% more). Bots account for 11% of display ad views and 23% of video ads and up to 50% of publisher traffic is bot activity, just fake clicks from automated computing programs.  They estimate that between 3% and 31% of programmatically bought ad impressions were found to be from bots, with an average of 17 percent.

Despite the fact that everyone buying digital ad campaigns knows that they might be buying fake goods, a study from the Association of National Advertisers and Forrester finds that 79% of marketers have made programmatic ad buys within the past year. (The growth is staggering: In 2014, the number was 35%.).

“While programmatic buying indeed offers benefits, it suffers from complexity and a lack of transparency,” said Bob Liodice, president and CEO of the ANA. “And that is wasteful. The industry — and marketers in particular — would greatly benefit from a rethink of the entire digital supply chain.”  Ya think?  What’s interesting isn’t that many advertisers are moving programmatic buying in-house where, in theory, they can have more control and better oversight or are taking other steps to deal with fraud: it’s that a significant number aren’t doing so.

Like the shoppers on Canal Street, any marketer who is buying programmatically without asking a LOT of questions and taking actions to increase transparency is knowingly buying fake goods.  Are you?

 

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February 23, 2016 · 9:36 am

Misplaced Marketing

Way back when in the dark ages before digital, I used to be involved in selling sports programming to sponsors.  One of the truisms with respect to selling golf was that a lot of CEO’s played and that they would have no problem instructing their marketing folks to sponsor a tournament so they might have a chance to rub elbows with the best golfers on the planet.  Heck, they’d even get to play in the pro-am with the golfer of their choice. The assumption was that they would see the world through their own prism and justify the marketing expense based on their own views of the world.

You might think that marketing in that manner is a piece of ancient history but you’d be kidding yourself.  One can see exactly that same mindset at work today.  For example, how many companies are spending way too much of their budgets on traditional media because the CMO never has streamed anything?  How about the companies whose social media efforts are totally devoted to Facebook – a place where the head of social media spends hours reading her 50-something friends’ posts – when most of their young audience is over on Snapchat?

We can’t be everywhere.  Even the biggest brands have limited human and financial resources and the smart ones allocate them to the places and platforms their customers use.  You might find Buzzfeed ridiculous but if your customers find it entertaining, that’s where they need to find you.

One of the biggest mistakes we can make is to assume that our customers share our media habits, both content and social.  It’s not a bad idea for you to share theirs, learning to use the platforms they use, even if those platforms aren’t where your friends and family hang out.  You can laugh at the CEO who assumed all of his customers shared his love for golf, but you might be making the same mistake.  Are you?

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February 15, 2016 · 11:00 am

Back To The Garden?

Over the weekend, I was thinking about how much the web has changed since I first started using it 20 or so years ago. Putting aside the tremendous improvement in speed (you haven’t lived until you’ve tried to load pages at 28.8kps), almost everything about the web is better. Graphics back then were minimal, video was non-existent. One thing that is the same, however, is that it is open. I think that it was that openness that let the web, accessed via a web browser, become the norm as opposed to the walled gardens such as AOL that were perhaps even more prevalent at the time.

Why am I mentioning this today? I think we are approaching a “back to the future” moment. You see it in what Google and Facebook and others are doing with their versions of a private internet, which I interpret to be a new walled garden. Ostensibly, this is to help users see the web much more quickly. After all, one of the main reasons people use ad blockers is because publishers overload their sites with beacons, graphics, autoplay videos, and the like.  The big guys are asking that pages be cached on their servers, in theory to provide greater speed and less incentive to block the ads.  Maybe it even allows them to substitute ads that they sell in case you can’t fully move your inventory.

The problem with this is the potential for a return to the walled garden.  If you don’t think that could happen, have a look at what happened to Facebook in India.  the company was forbidden to fully launch its internet.org initiative, which was meant to provide free internet access to million who don’t have it.  The problem is that it wasn’t access to the full, open internet at all; only to a series of sites which Facebook permitted.  That, my friends, is exactly what a walled garden looks like.As marketers and publishers, we desperately need a good solution to ad blocking.

As marketers and publishers, we desperately need a good solution to ad blocking.  From my perspective, a return to the era of walled gardens isn’t it.  How about in yours?

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