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How To Solve The Viewable Ads Debacle (Mediapost 3.28.12) 0

If an ad shows up on a web page, and it’s below the fold where no one can see it, did it make an impression?

The buzz of this month is viewable ads, and the issue of whether or not your ads are being seen on the web.  It’s a big issue because, as we all know, click through is a horrid metric and actual click through rates are abysmal to say the least.  The only metrics that we’ve had left to champion have been exposure and engagement, and you can’t engage with something you never actually see.

The Comscore findings that 31% of all online ads are never seen are alarming, but also somewhat comforting.  If click through, engagement and interaction rates are so low, then at least we can discount those poor metrics by 31% and assume that if 100% of the ads were seen, then maybe the numbers would at least be a little bit better!  Really though, the fact that this high a percentage of ads are wasted is an issue because one of the strongest elements of online advertising has been the opportunity to reduce waste.  Online provides targeting, which means you can expose your message to only the most prime audience members, but now we find that a third of those prime audience members are not seeing the ads.  That is wasted value.

Back in the old days there was the concept of OTS, or opportunity to see. This concept was applied to the counting of online ad impressions, and was used by the ad-servers to come to a standard definition for an impression.  That definition is in place, and has been in place for years, however it’s clear the spirit of that definition has not been enforced by the long tail or the short tail of media.  Comscore also surfaced that the issue of viewable ads doesn’t get fixed by paying a higher CPM.  It’s an issue across the web.

What does this mean for the industry?

Well, one possible fix might mean that you tier the pricing for ads.  My suggestion would be that only ads above the fold are able to be priced on a CPM basis, and any ads below the fold of a standard website should be priced on a CPC or CPE (cost per engagement) basis.  Additionally, I would recommend that ads on mobile browsers be sniffed and priced in a similar fashion, realizing that the fold is much higher.  In the case of mobile, only ads at the top of the page would be CPM based and the rest would be performance priced or some other model. 

This is not a difficult issue to fix, in theory, but in practice it’s a doozy.  The bad news is the vast majority of “impressions” on the web are going to become devalued rather quickly and the overall opportunity for revenue from the long tail of websites is going to drop dramatically.  The good news is that the best inventory, the truly premium above-the-fold, quality inventory, is going to be priced higher.  It’s a simple supply and demand discussion.  There is more supply of below-the-fold, lower quality inventory and a finite supply of premium placements.  Think of it as a market correction for the ad industry.  These kinds of corrections are good in a maturing industry, and necessary if we are to take our rightful place as the number one advertising and marketing medium in the eyes of big brands.

Of course, we could just piddle around on this issue for a couple of years, and have “committees” and “initiatives” put in place to deal with it.  That would be helpful and productive (not so much).

How do you want to see this issues addressed?

Posted on: 04-1-2012
Posted in: treffiletti.com

Start-Up Watch COD: Outbrain drives strong results for brands and pubs with powerful recommendation widgets 0

Brands: If I told you there was a performance-based solution to drive HIGHLY qualified traffic to your rich brand content, would you be intrigued?
Pubs: If I told you that there was a way to take currently useless real estate, way way way below the fold, and drive big revenue from it, would you want to know more?
 is a start-up that says it has the solutions to deliver on those promises. They offer a unique platform that delivers recommended content links at the bottom of every story on a website, so that readers can indulge their passions with more rich content. And the pub where it appears gets both more PVs and more revenue.
Sounds too good to be true, huh? I see your point in that many of the existing content management platforms out there do offer a related articles feature, which is currently driving little or no revenue.
But these are essentially “dumb” tools that choose articles to list based upon matches to keywords in the story you’ve just read.
Outbrain is far more sophisticated. Essentially, they create a content consumption profile of a user, much as Amazon records all of one’s past browsing and purchasing in order to serve up recommendations. In a very real sense, you can think of the technology behind Outbrain as a collaborative filtering engine for content.
So that’s why the links are more relevant for users. But from here the story gets even more interesting. The latest Outbrain widgets offer a combination of on-site and sponsored links, so that a pub can drive more traffic to its own pages or get compensated for traffic it drives to brands or other pubs.
For example, this widget appeared below a CNN article on personal health:
As you can see, the recommendations are well tailored. The links on the right hand side are sold on a CPC basis, which provides performance based certainty for the advertisers and strong revenue for the pub. For its efforts, Outbrain gets a cut of the revenue.
As we all know, more and more brands are realizing the importance of offering rich content as part of their marketing mixes. Many of those brands have begin to use Outbrain links to promote their content, including American Express Open, Colgate-Palmolive, University of Phoenix and Procter and Gamble. Many of the other sponsors on Outbrain units are other pubs looking for a way to drive up their page views – particularly in sections where ad rates are strong. If for example you can drive a highly qualified viewer to your health content, that can potentially be quite lucrative – well worth the CPC fee.
According to the company, the clickthrough rates on these units average over 6%, meaning that about 6% of the viewers of a page of content click on at least one of the links in the unit. 6% not 0.06% or 0.6%.
6% would be cause for celebration for virtually any ad unit, but when you consider where these recommendations live – at the end of the story way way way below of the fold – it makes the figure even more noteworthy. When a user clicks on a link off the original site, it spawns a new browser tab or window, so the user is not lost to the originating pub.
I love this from both the buyer and seller angles. I want pubs to make more money to produce more and better content. I want new, more effective advertising tactics so brands can drive more value out of online. By turning heretofore low value real estate into a real traffic and business driver, Outbrain appears to be making a major contribution to digital growth. Certainly their client list, which includes many of the most important online sites, is evidence of that.
By making itself easy to implement, Outbrain offers a real, actionable way for pubs to do more – for their advertisers and their bottom lines.

Posted on: 09-25-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Searchandise Commerce Helps Manufacturers Make Their Products More Prominent in eStores 0

OMG is this clever. So, Ms. Manufacturer, you are buying KWs on Google to sell product. But if your product is sold on retail websites, how do you ensure that it is as prominent as possible?

When someone searches for a 40 inch TV, is yours in the top ten on leading sites? Because if it isn’t chances are, you’re not gonna get much Click. Or much Shopping Cart. Or much Buy.

is a start-up that is changing this dynamic by making it easy to raise your items in retailer site searches. And they sell it on a performance based CPC basis. Instead of appearing 17th in that ranking, now you can pay a little and raise your position into a much better search slot.

Did you know that a big revenue source for brick and mortar are SKU placement merchandising fees? Slotting, Displays, Features, End Caps, Four Ways and other merchandising tools are all highly lucrative for retailers, especially for stores that operate on low margins. Essentially, these tools help brands drive revenue from browsing behaviors. With Searchandise, ecommerce companies can start to reap the benefits of compensated merchandising as well.

Manufacturers participate in the program by:

•Identifying priority SKUs
•Setting their position bids
•Assigning a budget
Retailers begin to monetize the valuable real estate in their search results by:

•Provide an inventory feed to Searchandise
•Upload bid matches into your Search and Inventory system
•Assign a weighting for the PPC bids versus other search priorities
•Deliver a verified click count to Searchandise so they can charge the client and compensate you
Retailers can choose to include the promoted listings in the standard search stream, or create a special promoted searches stream analogous to what Google, Bing, and Yahoo provide.

Check out their video here.

The Searchandise solution has gotten a tremendous amount of press in the commerce and digital trades because it adds such an important new option for manufacturers and retailers alike. As e-commerce flirts with the 10% of total retail sales tipping point, it’s natural that both sides are looking for new ways to drive additional revenue. Relatively unsophisticated merchandising was all well and good when esales were more a hobby than a channel. But as well all know, money brings needed focus and attention.

Further, online retail drives considerably more than 10% of sales in a large number of categories. I just read that 93% of airline tickets are now sold online, and that the figures for PCs and similar technology are around 50%. Having a means by which to raise the retail profile of your products is truly a boon when digital is a critical channel for your business.

In brick and mortar there is a healthy interplay between push marketing like merchandising and pull marketing like driving consumer awareness and purchase interest. Searchandise adds an important tool to help drive a similar sort of interplay online. Check them out, and be sure and download their white paper here.

Posted on: 08-2-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: Inadco Delivers CPL at CPM Scale 0

Performance is the name of the game in interactive media – it’s one of the key reasons why digital’s growing faster than any other class of communications. But what we consider performance is evolving. While we used to live and die by the click, more and more companies are recognizing that we need to focus on business-relevant end results – performance that doesn’t always correlate with clicks.

is a start-up focused on delivering massive scale in business leads by converting standard banner units into lead collection “machines” that improve the number and rate at which real prospects are delivered to businesses. There’s a simple formula to this, but the most powerful ideas are almost always the simplest. Instead of driving people to websites and landing pages to collect contact information, Inadco delivers IAB-sized collection units across the web to environments with a high degree of likelihood to attract your prime customer types.

They assume the “risk” of this distributed lead collection system, by creating the units and paying the pubs that run the collector units. You pay on a cost per lead basis, so the performance risk falls on others.

They are betting – and winning – on the premise that their expertise in driving user response will make the process profitable.

Inadco says that the leads they generate are demonstrated to be high quality, and that this value is enhanced by three core business principles:

1.They are highly adept at identifying the best publishers on which to reach your audience
2.Leads are collected with forms that carry your branding, so respondents know who will be contacting them for follow-up. In other words, no surprises that might reduce closability
3.Their technology filters out respondes that are clearly of no value, so you aren’t purchasing information on people you have no ability to close
For publishers, Inadco promises that its form units drive significantly higher yield than standard ads. Pubs are paid on a bounty per qualified lead basis, and the revenue generated usually exceeds that made possible by CPM or CPC ad pricing.

Because the bounty per qualified lead can be relatively high, pubs are incented to deliver these units in locations and environments with a higher probability to deliver a qualified response. There’s a somewhat higher risk for a pub versus CPM, but as we all know most pubs simply cannot deliver the breadth and depth of content they want to under the existing CPM environment. With increased risk (usually) comes increased return.

As I said earlier, it’s simple, and that’s one of the things that makes it so powerful. The streamlining of the leads process is dramatic. No creative costs for you, no landing page development, no creative testing, no message testing. They manage all that, and can (they hope) do it better than you because they have so much experience in this field.

If leads are your business currency, you should definitely give them the onceover.

Posted on: 08-2-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: Perfect Market helps pubs monetize their content vaults 0

How long does a piece of content remain engaging to consumers? It depends, of course. How long is it valuable to a pub? Well, under ordinary circumstances, only as long as a news story is in the fiery eye of the storm of nearly universal consumer interest. By which I mean great content that would have evergreen relevance to passionate audiences often drifts off the SEO and content widget radar quite fast. The pubs that produce the good stuff often fail to get all of the value from it they can. And passionate consumers are by default less aware of information and ideas that might be very interesting to them.

But wait, there’s more. Given the billions spent each year on Search optimization, the best content doesn’t always make it to the top of results. Why? Because the core competency of media companies is in content development, not SEO.

Meanwhile, content farms pump out tons of drivel, but search optimize it to the hilt, so their stuff often appears at the top of results. While Google and Bing are always improving their methodologies, so too are the farms constantly innovating to maintain their edge. Quality pubs get the short end of the stick over and over.

So how can producers of quality content make more for their efforts? A company called believes it has the answer. Perfect Market helps media companies, including leading newspapers like the LA Times, Hearst newspapers, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and the OC Register, better monetize their content through its technology platform. Essentially the service breaks down into four key buckets:

• Content Analysis:The platform examines context for KWs and semantic meaning. This can be combined with monetization info to help pubs better understand what type of content is most profitable, so the pub can focus more resources on those areas.

• Audience Segmentation: It analyzes site traffic and separates the audience into distinct buckets like Search users and visitors from social media, and surfaces insights about what key groups are looking for.

• Optimized Content Pages:The service helps implement segmented content pages that better meet the needs of different types of visitors, and pairs CPA and CPC ads to them to improve monetization. The offering is particularly adept in serving up existing content in a way that makes it more attractive to search engines, so it appears higher up in more results. Further, the optimized content pages that drive the most revenue get continued attention to optimization.

• Cost Per Action Ads: The company identifies pay for performance ads likely to appeal to readers of the optimized content, and pairs them with pub content, driving dramatic increases in revenue. It’s a rev share play, so no risk to the pub.

While Perfect Market provides value for both new and archived stories, it really drives the greatest results for the archive – stories that often fade to obscurity quickly.

Here’s something interesting. Lots of pubs do search baiting in order to boost their traffic and (theoretically) their revenue. But an important study commissioned by Perfect Market shows that while celeb cellulite photos may drive eyeballs, they don’t necessarily bring in the dough. The reason is that context drives revenue, and often the most popular content isn’t desired by brands.

Here’s an excerpt from a NY Times post about their research:

Perfect Market measured revenue per page view and found that articles about Social Security were the most valuable, generating an average of $129 for 1,000 page views. Articles about mortgage rates made $93 for every 1,000 page views. On other topics, values for every 1,000 page views were $28 for items about unemployment, $33 for articles on jobs, $20 for articles on the egg recall and $26 for pieces on immigration reform. By contrast, articles on Lindsay Lohan generated $2.50 for every 1,000 page views. “There are not a lot of contextual ads on Lindsay Lohan stories,” said Robertson Barrett, the chief strategy officer at Perfect Market.

The key to this conceptually is the drive by visitor. Perhaps someone who doesn’t read the OC Register every day, but would be interested in their coverage of a key topic or issue. By attracting these enthusiastic eyeballs, the pub can better monetize the great content they write.

If there is any controversy here, it’s that the editorial team can see what sorts of topics and stories make the most money, so that they can respond with more such content. For some, this is a violation of the Chinese Wall between ad and edit. I guess I see it a little differently. While I understand the concern, I also see far too many good pubs closing because of a lack of revenue.

I would suspect that most editors take their responsibility very seriously, and that they can draw an appropriate balance. But in my view the dirty little secret of the content business is that it was always designed around advertisers, or at least at the intersection of consumer and advertiser wants. There is car edit because most papers have an abundance of car advertisers, and people are more likely to peruse all those ads if they are interspersed with content. This simply takes that concept online and makes the analysis more granular.

And the other thing is, it’s actually hard news that wins the monetization battle, not photos of pantyless actresses and addict actors who love chain smoking on webcams in the company of their goddesses.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Posted on: 04-23-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: Buysight delivers retargeting KPIs at real scale 0

We’ve all done it: gone to a site looking for info, or even ready to buy, and then gotten distracted by something. Maybe we wanted to check just one more online store for pricing, or visit Consumer Reports. Maybe the baby started crying and you had to leave the screen to tend to its needs. Or maybe you just didn’t make it ‘over the fence’ – weren’t quite convinced enough to click the ole buy button.

So you left the site, and went about your business.

Now we all can see that a person who engages in such behavior is still a great prospect, and that marketing resources spent against him or her are likely to yield a high return. So a whole retargeting industry has risen up to help you capitalize on it.

The challenge of retargeting is that the number of people who visit your site and don’t buy isn’t huge, at least in terms of the total category user base. There’s only so much money you can spend on retargeting.

The question is, ‘Is there a way to get those retargeting rates of return, on a significantly broader scale?

A company called believes it has the answer. This New York- and Silicon Valley-based start-up has figured out an ingenious way to target more genuine category and brand intenders, delivering results that rival those for retargeting, but with much larger universes. And you buy it CPC, just like Search! I first learned about them when Catalyst S+F did a small project for them last Fall, and was impressed at how much there there was there. (They are no longer a client.)

CMO Jeff Weitzman puts it like this: “Audiences don’t buy things, people do. Buyer Targeting is different from BT in that it looks at an individual’s real-time SHOPPING behaviors, not broad audience interest segments. And it’s different than retargeting in that it’s not based solely on a visit to a single site. Buyer Targeting focuses on predictive modeling off a large set of shopping-specific behaviors that allow us to know the purchase intent of a given individual in real time and with high accuracy.”

There are four components to the Buysight model:

•Real-Time Shopper Marketplace: Buysight has created a data coop in which retailers and brands share information. This helps the site create real-time buyer profiles for millions of consumers. Now, you get first crack at your site visitors. But if you present them with a number of messages after they visit and they don’t respond, then your dollars move on, and other retailers and brands are given a crack at them. So the retailer doesn’t suffer by sharing users, but can benefit from being able to target other retailers’ “nonresponders.” Nifty swifty, hunh? Yet again I could kick myself for not thinking of this first. Once again proving the adage, “Those who can’t…write blog posts about those who can.:
•Buyer Intent Map: Buysight analyzes the shopping interests of the majority of online consumers, and develops a “Buyer Intent Map” for each. This map enables the company to identify confirmed shoppers in the categories that interest them. These maps form the foundation of the service.
•Bid-Based CPC Ad Model: You pay for Buysight banners in the same way you would search words. You set the parameters of a campaign, identify a bid price, and you are off to the races. Analytics help you identify insights and optimize your program to drive greater performance and scale over time.
•Dynamic Creative: Because a more custom creative execution including the actual item the consumer desires is proven to be more effective at driving conversion, Buysight offers dynamic creative units that grab appropriate photos, descriptions, and pricing from site feeds. Thus they are optimized at the product level and can also show related products, special or limited time offers, and price comparisons.

The “gimme” prospects for Buysight are online retailers. Because retail’s the place where the financial benefits are the clearest and the fastest coming. But Buysight can also have relevance in brand campaigns where the client is seeking to increase its mindshare with category hand raisers.

Not possible handraisers.

Not people that may perhaps possibly be handraisers.

But actual people with their hands in the air.

And how cool is that?

It’s early days yet for these folks. They have their A round, and have signed a number of major online and brick and mortar retailer clients to use the service on an ongoing basis.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Posted on: 04-16-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: Chango: Is it time for you to start Search retargeting? 0

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first…

Ask virtually any marketer what the most effective marketing tactic they use is, and chances are they’re going to say Search. After all, if you can deliver a message when people are actively seeking info about your product – or even better, looking for a place to buy it – then the odds are pretty darned fine that you can make a sale.

It’s bottom of the funnel “I am ready to buy stuff” in many cases, which has great impact on DR response rates.

The issue with Search, though, has often been scale. Even with the tremendous reach of search leaders like Google and Bing/Yahoo, there is a limit to the number of people actively searching for your product today. Ergo, there a limited number of search results pages on which to appear. Add to that a CPC battle royal for top placement on those pages and the walls on search volumes close in.

The question is: How do you leverage the effectiveness of search related marketing across more prospects and customers?

A company called has one interesting answer. They are focused on “search retargeting,” or the ability to target ads to searchers AFTER they have left the results pages of Google or Bing.

You visit Bing and search for an item. You get your results and off you go. That’s where Chango kicks in, delivering ads to you related to the category you searched for. These may appear on contextually relevant pages or on general interest pages. Because the focus here is on qualified audience first.

To use Chango, a brand imports its set of keywords to the platform, and Chango serves dynamic display ads to people who have recently searched for one or more of those terms. Whether or not you were the number one ranked sponsored search result on the page, Chango gives you the opportunity to powerfully communicate your offering to those searchers across the web. Chango can also accommodate multiple landing pages and the like.

Here’s their CEO telling their story:

from on .

With Chango, you don’t need to create banner ads for each keyword. Rather, the platform combines your search text with images that you upload, creating graphical ads using clean and clear templates.

To deliver ads against these searchers, Chango purchases qualified inventory on the major ad exchanges.

Publishers partner with Chango to increase the value of their inventory. Chango pays them on a CPC basis, and because the search retargeting yields highly targeted audiences, the pubs can drive higher yield from these impressions. Because Chango ads appear in the graphical ad spaces on a page, they can be used in conjunction with contextually targeted Ad Sense programs.

We all know that Search data is very valuable for bottom of the funnel efforts. With Chango, those efforts can be scaled up to reap more of that value.

Cheers? Jeers? Tweet ‘em to @CatalystaJim

Posted on: 04-1-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer