Tag Archives: digital media

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?

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, digital media, Huh?

Tagged as , , , ,

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?

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, digital media

Tagged as , ,

September 22, 2014 · 11:34 am

So 2004

I am meeting a former client for lunch today. As is the case so often, he suggested a local burger place to meet and I went to their website to check out the menu. It was a very pretty site – high quality photos, nicely written copy. Oh sure I have a few quibbles with it – why do I have to follow you on Twitter to see the specials? – but it’s a perfect example of what a site should have been about 10 years ago. Now? Not so much.

IS12SH 前面部分

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What’s my beef with the burger joint (I crack myself up!) site?  It’s written in Flash.  Why is this an issue?  As you probably know, the number of smartphone users now rivals desktop.  Most of the site I work with see a large and growing amount of traffic from mobile devices.  A recent study about this stated that “Mobile is often the only tool used to make a purchase decision—this is especially true for restaurants and entertainment purchases.”

Sounds like good news unless your site is written in Flash.  You see, no Apple device – iPhone or iPad – shows anything written in Flash.  Many Android devices won’t either unless Flash is loaded onto the phone.  In this case I tried to access the site via my phone’s browser and was prompted to load Flash.  No separate mobile site written in a programming language understood by all phones.

By leaving development – even state of the art development – as it was in 2004 before the massive growth of traffic from mobile, this place is hurting its business.  As the study found:

One data point is especially favorable for restaurants. Of the industries analyzed for this study, restaurants have the highest conversion rate from looker to buyer—80 percent. The factors that drive smartphone users to make a purchase at a restaurant after seeking information about it are:

• Right price: 15 percent
• Right brand: 18 percent
• Had a location in mind: 19 percent
• Reviews were good: 12 percent
• Close to my location: 20 percent

How is the potential customer to weigh those factors when they can’t see the site?  When mobile is 51% of your potential traffic, isn’t it worth at last SOME investment?

Have you gone to your site on a mobile device?  How did that work for you?  2014 or 2004?

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, digital media, Huh?

Tagged as , , , , ,