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Would you choose a digital or an integrated agency for 2012? 0

About five days ago, a dear friend of mine asked my opinion on whether
she should entrust digital to her brands’ existing agencies or hire digital
specialist agencies. Currently they do both, but are somewhat dissatisfied with
the results.

I asked which were her existing agencies, and surprisingly she asked me
to answer the question without knowing. She DID SAY none of her traditional
agencies had REALLY led the company toward digital, though now that she was
expressing serious interest they claimed to have all the requisite
capabilities. Similarly, NONE of her
digital partners have provided real programs based in brand strategy. She also
asked why there was a need for separate digital shops – that intuitively she
understood it was complicated, but shouldn’t big agencies be able to deliver
the goods?

Never one to shy away from giving a long winded opinion, I sent her the
following:

After the dot bomb, some major
traditional agencies saw digital as a strategic distraction. They felt it
lacked creative options that fostered brand development, added pronounced
audience and media complexity, required more staff per dollar to execute, and
demanded expertise that their traditional media teams lacked.

All that was true in its way,
except perhaps the strategic distraction part. But one could even make a case
for that when digital usage was relatively low. Digital was quite limited
creatively. And was and is far more complicated, especially as it is structured
and managed now:

1.
Tens of thousands of media options, versus
100 or so in TV and really only about a dozen given how many properties are
owned by the largest media companies

2.
Dozens of creative options

3.
A buying process that still relies on
RFPs/responses/phone calls/meetings

4.
A tracking and trafficking process that often
leads to remarkable amounts of manual labor

5.
High agency turnover and title inflation

6.
Clients and agency leaders expecting more
for less PLUS innovation

The advent of DSPs and trading
desks is slowly reducing the amount of labor per dollar, but most brands still
expect a significant portion of spend with specific major pubs and in “breakthrough”
programs. Those require lots of labor per dollar.

Until the past couple of years,
most of the traditional buying leaders were not terribly troubled to let
digital agencies take this high labor/low margin business. Naturally, sister
digital agencies were preferred, but losing 3 or 5 or 8% of total spend wasn’t
a “crisis.” It represented relatively small dollars and these digital agencies tended
to have subordinate, relatively unimportant relationships with clients.

Further, some major traditional
agencies discouraged digital spending, because:

1. They
didn’t believe in digital

2. They
didn’t understand digital

3. They
couldn’t execute digital well

4. Clients
didn’t care much

Those brand companies that cared
about digital generally employed separate digital agencies. Even many of those clients
that didn’t care all that much chose separate providers when it was clear that their
traditional agencies didn’t “get it.”

As digital grew more important to
brands, they began to ask those digital agencies to play a greater role in marketing
planning, and to involve them earlier in the process. The problem is that there
are many digital people that don’t have the same deep understanding of brands
and marketing as do brand or traditional agency people. I’m not suggesting
they/we are ignorant of strategy, but that because we have historically been
less involved in defining and delivering on major strategic issues, it’s not
our core competency. The digital world has historically been more about DR and
hype, and about providing “activation” in conjunction with a broader branding
initiative. “Activation” meaning moving cases out the door.

Of course, brand marketers have really
woken up to digital. As digital spend has increased, traditional agencies have again
asked themselves why they are sharing business with an indy digital shop when
they could acquire digital business and keep it all. The holding companies in
particular have scrambled to build or buy digital expertise. What they haven’t always
done is give their various agencies incentive to collaborate.

The key “battle” that will
determine the manner in which brands engage in digital is which “side” of this
agency conflict will address its weaknesses more thoroughly.

·
Traditional or “Integrated” agencies have profound understanding of brands,
marketing goals, and ideas. They are generally behind in understanding and
having experience with digital technology and vision. They need to find ways to
acquire digital expertise and drive competitive advantage by creating value in
cross media creative development, planning and buying. A portfolio approach to
media built on a digitally centered idea.

·
Digital agencies need to enhance their lead in digital knowledge, while really mastering
the fundamentals of strategy, branding, and real bona fide marketing. Shifting our
thinking from one driven by passion for forms of execution to passion for
strategic objectives. Only in this way will we be able to fully leverage our
seats at the brand table. Only in this way with digital shops marry passion and
expertise to delivering on business objectives. And the key is, our ideas and
programs need to work both within and beyond digital, even though we don’t
derive revenue from traditional efforts.

Which brings me to the answer to my friend’s question. I told her that
agencies are ultimately collections of individuals; applying generalized
conclusions to specific companies is misguided. But that it would be a good
idea for her to assess the extent to which her traditional alternatives really
“get” and are inspired by digital. And the extent to which her digital
alternatives “get” strategy and brand business issues.

Ultimately marketing will end up being led by companies that define and
deliver highly strategic, digitally centered integrated campaigns. Campaigns
that capitalize on the best opportunities in digital, but within a broad brand building
context and a larger media view.

The extent to which digital agencies have a future relates to their
ability to stay ahead of digital developments AND understand branding, the
difference between a digital idea and a digitally centered idea, and the best
ways to really partner with other service providers. Otherwise, there’ll be no
reason for brands to take on the complexity of having two agencies where one
might suffice.

Partnership is a critical
consideration because in many cases agencies don’t play well together. That is
sometimes even the case when both agencies are divisions within the same
company. Brands need to do more than say, “get along.” They need to reward
cooperation and punish its absence.

This response dissatisfied my friend. “It was a straightforward
question. Just give me a straightforward answer.”

So I giggled a little, and replied, “Yes”.

She was not amused.

It’s after moments like that that I am lucky to still have friends.

Posted on: 11-9-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Five Scary Client Stories To Tell In The Dark 0

Picture it: You’re sitting around a campfire and swapping stories of your worst client engagements — tales beyond moments of annoyance, and way past discomfiture. We’re talking the sorts of experiences that could be called disastrous were it not for the fact that ultimately it’s only advertising.

In general, I detest stories that place the blame on clients — or agencies for that matter — when an engagement is supposed to be a partnership. While it will be clear from these stories that partnership was not the client goal in each case, the agency bears responsibility for these snafus as well. But each of these incidents makes both a good story and a great opportunity to learn from the mistakes and missteps of others.But at the time people were going through these events, minds and stomach linings were consumed in prodigious quantities

Oh, enough of my caveats. I interviewed a few agency people to collect some good “horror stories” for your amusement and edification. Each teaches a lesson — to both agencies and clients — about how to make relationships and projects work better.

Scary story 1

Losing tens of thousands for lack of a $30 credit checkAn old friend tells of a time that an agency — a big ‘un — got so excited about the prospect of a massive web project that it jockeyed for the account without doing any due diligence on the company it was courting:

They were looking for a big e-commerce site, which would have given us the opportunity to show how well our team was aligned with a back-end web dev company that our holding company had just acquired. The prospect client threw out a budget that was astronomical — three or four times the cost of any previous web project we had done. We jumped at the chance and signed a contract within three days of the initial inquiry.

The instant the contract was signed, the client became an absolute nightmare, speeding the timeline by 60 percent and tearing out the hearts of four project managers who were assigned to the account in succession. The average tenure for PMs on this gem of an assignment was about four days. One person quit the industry as a result of the project:

Finally, the agency found someone in the account team who could deal with the evil and bile, and the project got on track. A week or so in, the A/P team first sounded the alarm that the initial payment had never been received. There followed several weeks of “it’s in the mail,” “we have record of it being signed for,” and “how dare you ask me about this again.”

About four weeks into the project, someone typed the names of the website founders into Google. The results page exploded with lawsuits, complaints, and invective-filled blog posts about the clients and how they had garnered web work in the past without ever paying a cent. The agency called the client to tell it work would stop until payment was received. And the agency never heard from the client again.

Lesson for agencies and clients: A credit report costs $30 or so. A Google search even less. Don’t be intimidated into foregoing basic due diligence. Separately, clients need to ensure that their agencies have the financial stability to do jobs as well. While this wasn’t an issue in this case, that is a problem that happens with some frequency these days.

Scary story 2

The client that wanted the agency to take the legal riskI heard from one person who was working on a vitamin supplement brand. That person was directed to put certain claims in banners that would be extremely compelling, if they were true:

We got started on the project before all of the terms of the contract were agreed to, but with a payment already made by the client to cover the costs of early development. Fortunately, the copywriter had worked on supplements before, and was aware that the FTC has strict rules on what can be said — and not said — about supplements.

When the client sent back the contract terms and conditions, it had crossed out provisions that stated that the client bore ultimate responsibility for the legal risk. In short, the company was unwilling to back the very claims it wanted made in the advertising.

Despite great pressure from the client, the agency refused to traffic the ads and lost the business. And likely averted tremendous legal consequences for false statements:

Soon after, the individual client was fired from the company. Turns out that the company as unaware of what this marketer was trying to do until the agency’s refusal to run the ads.

Lesson for agencies and clients: Think about the potential legal implications of projects before you take them live.

Scary story 3

The client who cried “innovation”Many agency folks spoke of clients who demanded innovative ideas but only ever bought the most offer-focused banners and other kerplunk direct-response programs. What drives this, I think, is a desire to be at the forefront of the industry but ultimately being beholden to very strict performance objectives.

Tens of thousands of brands have tried virtually every sort of digital tactic, but the reality is that a subset of digital is virtually always better at driving DR metrics.

What agency people told me was that this all becomes problematic when clients want the sort of creative campaigns that will serve to “make their career” and ”deliver their number.” DR tends not to be sexy like that.

Another respondent told me:

I once worked on an account that asked us to run DR-focused banners on ultra-elite pubs — sites with CPMs $30 or more. We explained that this was unlikely to deliver great DR metrics, but the client persisted. The idea was to enhance the brand image of the service while also delivering some sales. And besides, how do we know it wouldn’t work? When the first performance reports came in, it quickly became apparent that more efficient audience-based buys were far more effective and that brand goals — which weren’t even being measured — weren’t serious considerations for the client. They were wants not needs.

The resulting scramble to refocus dollars proved that old adage, “It’s not a DR campaign until the first reports come in.”

Lesson for clients: For best results, communicate bona fide objectives. Tell us what really matters.

Lesson for agencies: Be strident in alerting clients to bad direction. We are ultimately paid for our expertise, not our agreeable natures.

Scary story 4

Six months of Mars-Venus relationships for want of three Southwest ticketsAn old friend tells me that her agency has had a client for six months and has never met anyone from the day-to-day team face to face.

The client expects to do about $800,000 a year in creative business, and place more than $10 million on banners through Christmas. The account is very low margin for the agency owing to a tough round with procurement, but it keeps a bunch of designers and planners working and gives the shop a modicum of prestige.

My friend is convinced that the work could be much stronger if the agency team felt more ownership and had a better understanding of the business:

Our people would be more energized and do better work if they actually knew the people they present to on conference calls. Issues and problems arise because the people on both sides are disembodied voices to one another.

This client refuses to pay for three airline tickets to send the account person, the creative director, and the lead designer to the home office. They feel it is an unnecessary expense.

The agency and client towns are served by Southwest. I just checked, and the supersaver fare is $59.

I pointed this out to my friend and asked, “Why doesn’t the agency just pay?” The response:

Well, the contract indicates that the client pays for travel. So you may find it penny wise and pound foolish for the agency not to spring for the tickets. But there is a principle at stake. And when you start making exceptions to procurement-driven contracts, the slope gets awfully slick awfully fast.

Hmm. Would a site visit improve the work? It certainly seems worth three $59 tickets plus cab fare to find out.

Lesson for clients: Find a way to get face to face with the agency, especially at the outset of a relationship. It doesn’t cost very much relative to the amount you are probably spending through the agency, and I promise you it will mean better work.

Lesson for agencies: See lesson for clients. And if the terms of a contract are so onerous that you can’t afford a couple of Southwest tickets, don’t take the contract.

Scary story 5

The “huddle” and bad feedbackI once had a remarkably overstaffed client that involved a CMO, SVP of marketing, three VPs, five brand managers, and four assistant brand managers in every creative meeting. Yep, it was a CPG company.

Having lots of decision makers is not an unexpected part of the territory. What generally isn’t is “the huddle,” where agency people are ejected from the meeting to allow the client team to privately debate and discuss the campaign. Ostensibly the huddle is to enable the less-experienced assistant brand managers to speak more freely. I get the idea (though I would point out that in 25 years I have never worked with an assistant brand manager who was afraid to share an opinion). The huddle is also said to ensure that the agency gets one unified set of direction. That is appreciated — but the act of kicking the agency out puts distance between the teams.

While I personally find the huddle off-putting, I understand the desire to talk privately for a short period. What wasn’t reasonable was being made to stand in a hallway for an hour or more while the client team members debated the executions.

The most prolonged huddle was more than three hours. The executions under discussion were Flash banners — DR banners.

What could they possibly have been talking about for three hours?

Lesson for clients: If you want your agency to act in your interests as part of the team, involve its team in discussions. Oh, and contemplating every word in a banner for 17 minutes apiece is a tad excessive.

Lesson for agencies: If something in the client’s process is counterproductive, have the courage to tell them and explain why. We bitched about it amongst ourselves but didn’t explain why it was a problem.

Conclusion

Advertising is a service business, and agencies need to adapt to clients. And it would be wrong to look at the stories above and conclude that the clients always sucked. Certainly in the case of the company that had no intention of paying for services, that was the case.

But to look at all those stories and say it’s the clients fault is destructive behavior.

We all need to be masters of our own destinies, and the desire for short-term harmony shouldn’t outweigh the airing of genuine concerns. It isn’t always the client’s fault any more than it is always the agency’s.

Our role as individual participants in this process is to do what’s right, not what’s easy.

And of course, never, ever, ever forego running a credit check.

Thanks to iMediaConnection for running this first.

Posted on: 11-2-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: Magnetic delivers search retargeting to millions and millions 0

am a huge believer in the potential of search retargeting to drive strong ROI for brands. The model, for those who may be unfamiliar, is that a search retargeting firm serves banner ads to people based upon their recent search history.

Now why, you might ask, would you bother targeting with banners instead of just buying the search results? Well, it’s actually not an “instead,” it’s an “in addition to.” Everyone knows SEM delivers blockbuster results. The problem is that there are not enough instances of searches to satisfy the demand from brands. You can only buy the number of searches consumers organically make. And then only one company gets to be first on the results. And even if you are first, there is by no means a guarantee that people will buy as a direct result of seeing or even clicking on your link.

Search retargeting adds critical touch points to the bottom of the funnel ecosystem, giving brands an opportunity to follow up with consumers are clearly in consideration and buying mode. The banners appear in both contextually linked content and on quality sites where the searchers visit after their telltale searches.

was the first company in the space, and collects more than five billion data points monthly through its partnerships with most of the leading search providers. Ergo more data. These partners provide Magnetic with 100% of their search queries, so the company can develop more precise user profiles of consumers.

But there are other distinctions as well. The data they get are mostly from search and e-commerce environments – that’s an important element of their value proposition. According to Magnetic, many search retargeting options are based upon data that come largely from sharing widgets. That’s OK, but the thing is that these widgets tend to appear more in news, blogs, and general edit than in environments where shoppers are actively looking for buying options. Think of it this way –would you rather show banners to someone who searched in a commercial environment, or on CNN?

There are a variety of ways that brands can benefit from Magnetic’s data. First, they can buy inventory direct from the company. Second, Magnetic works with other sellers, providing data to pubs and networks as a means of identifying more likely prospects. Finally, users of exchanges can also leverage the company’s information.

Founded in 2008, the company has amassed a broad range of blue chip customers. It’s an impressive list particularly because many of their customers are highly sophisticated DR marketers.

Through the use of the exchanges, Magnetic can make available inventory on virtually any type of site. For brands with very high levels of concern over brand safety, they can white list a set of sites that fulfill the advertiser’s specs. For example, many of their advertisers insist on inventory ONLY on the Comscore 250.

On the data provider side, sites need not provide data solely to Magnetic – they can continue to sell their data to companies like Yahoo, Google, and Bing. They can simply add Magnetic to their set of paying contracts and make more money. Always a good thing.

As I say, I am a big believer in this space. As a means of driving scale for transactional advertising, search retargeting can and should be a powerful extension of an SEM program. Definitely worth a look!

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Posted on: 05-28-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

Start-Up Watch COD: Compass Labs uses real-time social comments to pinpoint user interests and deliver targeted ads 0

How do data companies and targeting engines determine your interests? Most of them use cookies to determine the sorts of content you’re consuming and the sites you’re visiting. It’s been proven effective, But if we get real for a minute, we need to admit to ourselves that Display response rates tend to be so microscopic that even small improvements in targeting make a difference. I’m not diminishing the power of BT to improve results but rather pointing out that the standard approaches and algorithms needn’t be perfect to have an impact.

But what if we could be CERTAIN about what a consumer was interested in. More specifically, interested in buying?

is an interesting new company that thinks it has a way to do just that. Rather than inferring user passions and needs, it analyzes what people actually tell the world they are interested in through their social media activity.

Put it this way: Would you rather put a Cadillac banner up in front of:

A consumer that has visited a lot of luxury auto content?
Someone who just typed “I am interested in buying a Cadillac” in their Twitter status?
Of course it’s not quite as simple as that; based on what I read from my friends and connections, comments are rarely THAT obvious. But the basic principle behind Compass Labs is that more effective targeting is possible when we interpret people’s comments than when we read the tea leaves of their Internet travels.

Theirs is a real-time ad targeting and serving platform that puts ads into social environments precisely when users identify their interests. These ads appear in Facebook, Twitter, social media apps, and thousands of community posting boards across the web. In total, the company says it can reach 200,000,000 web users in any given month with highly targeted messages that offer stronger response and conversion rates.

Publicly available social media information enables Compass Labs to offer a broad range of targeting options, including users’ current interests, lifestyles, purchase intent, demographics, location and other factors.

Here’s their pitch vid from last year’s Under the Radar:

As is often the case with advanced targeting, the benefits to DR marketers are obvious. But brand-side advertisers can also benefit by impacting brand perceptions among people who in earlier stages of the buying funnel.

Flipping the coin over for a sec, there are some significant benefits to the pub side as well. Obviously Facebook and Twitter benefit from more ads, and higher value impressions. But for pubs that offer forums, this stream of advertising revenue can be almost 100% incremental because it has traditionally been so hard to convince advertisers to place messages in UGC environments. Advertisers tend to fear the unknown, and forums may as well be renamed “Unknown Zone” as far as content goes.

With this new dimension of precision targeting, millions more page views can get monetized – and at strong rates.

I haven’t worked on any programs using them, but I think the concept is rather compelling, and warrants a serious look from DR and Brand advertisers.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.

Posted on: 05-28-2011
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

The ABCs of DMPs 0

Special thanks to for publishing this first!

ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:
• DMPs deliver marketing performance benefits by helping companies learn from the totality of marketing information they collect and purchase
• Brands deserve to collect and keep all of the information they pay to buy, collect, and base action upon. DMPs bring this all together
• A DMP can take a general target, like women aged 18-34, and subdivide it into groupings that help you plan and execute marketing efforts more effectively

From the beginning digital marketing data have been both a potential boon and a missed opportunity for the vast majority of marketers. The ability to track and analyze virtually every aspect of marketing communications brings with it a very real challenge to do more than react to bits and pieces of that information.

In our changed world we have the ability to learn about our customers and prospects constantly. But this relentless flow of information — from different channels and through different tools — needs to be gathered, combined, and analyzed in a timely manner in order to capitalize on its value.

A new category of marketing services companies is emerging to help answer all these questions: data management platforms (DMPs). Oh, I just detected audible groaning. Another category of middlemen? Call Kawaja to update the slide (no need, I’m sure he’s way ahead of you). I feel your pain, but I also believe that this set of marketing services and companies may really make a difference in our businesses.

In my view, two recent-ish news items reflect the growing importance. The first was the emergence of Red Aril, a start-up led by Jim Soss and Kira Makagon, two well known advertising/ technology veterans. Red Aril is a DMP with a platform created through over 150 man-years of development. The second key item is the recent purchase of DMP Demdex by Adobe. This will add dynamic online ad targeting capabilities to the Adobe Online Marketing Suite.

Both are signs of the likely growth potential in this arena.

The problem: Too many data buckets
The customer relationship management (CRM) team uses Prizm to analyze and segment your hand raisers. The media team buys a variety of third-party data sources to target ads through the exchanges. The market research group commissions important studies that parse and segment customers and provide valuable lifestyle and psychographic insight. And the web team uses Omniture and Quantcast to understand whose visiting and how their demographics and lifestyles impact pages visited, time spent, and purchases. And the social media folks gather learning from activity on Facebook pages and across other online venues.

Sound familiar?

Naturally, marketers have (or should have) some knowledge of all these efforts. But does the data come together? It really really should.

Mark Silva, founder and EVP, emerging platforms for Real Branding, put it this way:
“Think of it as a spectrum that runs from collecting data, to understanding behavior, to identifying and leveraging real insights that answer the question of why people do what they do. In my view, you need to triangulate at least three data sets in order to understand behavior: advertising performance, CRM metrics, and social analytics. Understanding behavior isn’t insight per se, but it’s a critical step in identifying genuine insights.”

Without connecting the dots, too many questions remain either unanswered. Peter Platt, president of PSquared Digital, provided this example:

“Too often, digital efforts are looked at in a silo unto themselves and we miss the real impact that our advertising efforts are having. A great example of this just happened the other day. I was reviewing a law firm client’s web analytics and we saw a huge spike in traffic from search last September. Turns out the hero in this effort wasn’t our search marketing program but rather a heavy TV flight during that time period. In this example we had visibility into the overall marketing effort, but if we hadn’t there might have been erroneous decisions made about how to allocate resources.”

Peter’s effort clearly helped his team find the underlying truth. But why isn’t all our learning leveraged fully? Because, in addition to it being in different places, it’s difficult to rationalize and standardize data sets, and then examine that massive data bank for real insights.

Enter the DMP.

The value of data aggregation
Duh. If you have a tool that can handle it, more relevant data is better. And quite frankly, if we are spending time and money aggregating irrelevant data, well then… I’ll let Tamara Bousquet, SVP-media director of MEA Digital, say it for me:

“My sole focus is to stay ahead of this ever-changing landscape and deliver actionable results for our clients; squeeze every cent of value out of our client’s budget. We find a key challenge for most clients is accurate attribution for different marketing tactics and sales analytics. My team’s analytic approach and deep knowledge of the rich first party information and resources help us understand exactly how all tactics, online and offline, impact our clients business and how to best deliver a positive result.”

Tamara is not alone in leading her team to do this. But the arrival of tools that can do this on a more granular and comprehensive basis can make the process easier, and potentially more effective.

How DMPs work
So what are these things, anyway? In their current incarnations, DMPs deliver marketing performance benefits by helping companies learn from the totality of marketing information they collect and purchase. They represent the antithesis of data silos.

At its core, a great DMP needs to do four things:

•Aggregate data sources: DMPs are designed to take disparate data sets and combine them into a single, actionable data set. We all know that different tools and platforms gather and collect info in different ways. A DSP partner will set up your instance to take into account the sources and differences of your data sets so that information comes together constantly and consistently, with few errors.

•It is essential to know if the platform you select is capable of parsing the information you already have and shows evidence it is planning (or already work with) many more data set flavors. Because one thing we all know is that what we use today may not be what we are using tomorrow. I’m not talking about all of your company’s data (that’s IBM’s job, or Oracle’s). Rather, DMPs focus on marketing relevant information.

•Give you information ownership: Brands deserve to collect and keep all of the information they pay to buy, collect, and base action upon. DMPs bring it all together so that more insights are possible from the combined totality of information.

•Analyze and model: Once the data come together, DMPs offer the means to derive critical information from the data, and work to segment your audience into groups that may warrant tailored marketing efforts. On a blockhead-simple level, a DMP can take a general target, like women aged 18-34, and subdivide it into groupings that help you plan and execute marketing efforts more effectively. This could be based on important demographic criteria, more esoteric psychographic/sociographic ways, or ways you haven’t even considered yet. It may also identify heretofore overlooked populations that may be prime opportunities.

•Drive action: The DMP helps to refine and sharpen ad targeting approaches and purchase media more precisely. For example, a DMP could empower better purchase decisions on the ad exchanges, and continue to collect and refine the learning for greater future precision. This is the “immediate value” DMPs can provide.
Jim Soss, CEO of Red Aril, describes the value proposition of his DMP thusly:

“Red Aril’s DMP was designed explicitly for real-time channels, the ability to leverage all data, and the integration with a broader marketing database strategy. Our clients see the proof every day — data drives relevancy, relevancy drives results.”

A key part of the aggregation service is a standardization of taxonomy. Indeed, it is a critical part of successfully merging data. Scalability is also a critical consideration. A large brand could be experiencing and recording billions of interactions a month across its marketing efforts. The DMP can only be successful if it is able to store, process, and act upon what could easily become an avalanche of data points.

DSP, DMP, LMNOP
Some of you are thinking that other types of marketing service providers offer some of these benefits.

You’re right. They do.

DSPs, for example, are collecting information in real time and using it to dynamically optimize campaigns and programs and enable users to integrate first-party data in real time. Some DSPs are encouraging users to run all their buys through their platforms to provide a more comprehensive audience view.

For example, MediaMath (disclosure, a CSF client) has put a major focus on providing many of the services that are traditionally the turf of DMPs. Their approach is to empower all buying with first and third party data, not just inventory bought on the exchanges. The principle of empowerment through data naturally has big benefits for pub direct. And most brands do not live by exchanges alone. I think it’s natural to expect that all the brands we associate with the DSP sector to move in this direction over time.

The most technologically sophisticated ad networks also work with first-party data, when you choose to provide it. For any business that uses data to define and refine what it is buying or working for you, the race is on to do more with more. As we all know, convergence is the middle name of our industry.

DMP is about driving action from the totality of your marketing-relevant consumer information. You know better than I do whether you are already doing that using a solution that describes itself by whatever name. If not, then the value of the DMP may be significant for you.

In my view, the ideal company for a DMP has data-intensive marketing practices and tactics, and is sophisticated enough that it is focused on incremental marketing improvement. What I mean by that last bit is that a DMP is great for a company that knows it’s doing a lot of things right, and is now looking to drive improvements on their good general direction.

But back to initials. My suggestion is, don’t get caught up in the monikers. Rather, consider whether you think bringing all the data together is likely to provide enough of a business benefit to justify the time and money required to do so. Do you have a strong CRM database? Are you really collecting great information on the site? Are you dealing with multiple media vendors collecting and purchasing data on your behalf separately? If the answer is yes, a DMP may well make sense for you.

Who will adopt these first? DR brands probably come to mind, because the initial focus for actionability will be in ad targeting. But it would be a big mistake for so called brand marketers to discount the value of more complete view of the consumer.

And consider this: data aggregation and modeling is not the same is genuine consumer insight. Says Mark Silva,

“In our business, first customers often have disproportionate influence on how the category plays out. DMPs need to be aware that while their first customers may be DR marketers looking for the magic data bullets that drive incremental sales improvement, behavioral information is not insight. Ultimately their success in the market will be significantly determined by the extent to which they offer the tools and opportunities for brand marketers and agencies to discover genuine behavioral insights. They’re good at getting to the ‘what’ — but they need to also empower us to get to the ‘why’.”

I like that as a concluding thought. It makes sense to get that data together and empower your marketing with it. But don’t leave it at that. It’s not their job to do our thinking for us. We need data to find the answer, and the most effective marketing is going to come from both actionable data and a heckuvalot of noggin’ scratchin’ to discover the seeds of overall brand relevance.

Posted on: 03-12-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

The Companies That Interest iMedia Agency Summit Attendees – Part Two of Four (D through M) 0

Thanks to for publishing this first.

In this second installment, I’ll continue to provide capsule descriptions of the companies that iMedia Agency attendees expressed excitement about in a recent survey. Before anyone contacts me wondering why their company wasn’t on the list: If your company is on the list, its’ because you were suggested in the survey. If you aren’t, it’s because no one listed you in their survey response.

enables DR marketers to connect online and offline data for more effective targeting. They do this by applying the offline data to their Affiniti™ tags. This enables a marketer to target based upon “real world” behaviors. In addition to offering their own ad network which touches 210MM consumers monthly, they also work with a variety of networks and exchanges to make access to this connected data easier.

is a leading digital media optimization engine that improves the performance of auction based online media buying and execution. Results are optimized based upon the key metric that is most desired by an advertiser, and are optimized across engines or platforms, not piecemeal. They are most known for their SEM optimization offerings, but also can optimize auction based Display. Here’s a vid on their Search service:

is the DSP platform acquired by Google for $81M earlier this year. Their Bid manager® service enables you to buy across multiple exchanges, as well as offer a proprietary exchange practice. The Google acquisition reflects the desire to make Display media buying more like search.

Eye Blaster has changed its name to Media Mind to reflect a sea change in its positioning and capabilities. Once content to bill itself as a turnkey solution to deliver richer rich media, it now messages as an everything platform that serves, delivers rich media, search, standard banners, video, dynamic ads, and mobile ads and lets brands manage and execute it all on a portfolio level. Data is also a big part of their new message, reflecting the ability to target with, collect, analyze, and optimize to relevant data.

Posted on: 01-3-2011
Posted in: Oldest Living Digital Marketer

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