Had a great discussion with Jeff Glueck, current CEO of Skyfire Labs, and former CMO of Travelocity. And a White House Fellow.
Expect some great, useful advice from his CMO days at Travelocity on what worked for them. Also expect to be blown away by how Skyfire is fixing “Mobile Warming.” 
(no iTunes or don’t want to listen to it there? Here.)
Check out this month’s OMMA Magazine for a feature by Yours Truly on how co-optimization of DSPs and Dynamic Ads can counter-intuitively cause a big mess.
DSPs and dynamic ads can optimize your performance away
Demand side platforms (DSPs) are a giant leap forward for Adkind. They put the power back in the hands of the marketer to decide how much to pay for each audience segment, target them in real time, and hyper-optimize the campaign with the help of ingenious black boxes with Einstein-quality math equations inside.
Dynamic ads are the other superheros. They empower marketers to tailor their message or offers based on performance (among other factors). More math equations that put more dollars into marketers’ pockets!
Put them together and you get super-hyper-mega-optimized performance, right? Wrong! You get a mess. Here’s why: The DSP is optimizing against a specific creative. Let’s call it Big-Box Retailer Creative X. As the DSP sees a gradient of performance across different audiences shown Creative X, it optimizes your media buy to bid for more of those audiences. This scenario works great.
Dynamic ads complicate this scenario in that Creative X is undefined. Put simply, the execution of the creative is determined by optimization performed behind the scenes, and whether that means showing pictures of a DVD player or a washing machine is determined each time the ad loads.
So, when the DSP hits on a good audience that it thinks is responding well to Creative X, it doesn’t know whether that’s actually Creative X.DVD, Creative X.WASHER, or any of the literally millions of combinations possible with dynamic ads. Even if the DSP was able to foresee all the creative executions possible, it would unlikely be able to find enough volume for each micro-segment.
And there you have it: optimization overdose. Neither technology stops spinning plates long enough to get a good read on what the other is doing.
Luckily, there are ways you can avoid this problem and exploit the synergy between DSPs and dynamic ads:
1) Make sure your DSP and dynamic ad provider are talking to one another (programmatically). Essentially, the DSP has to pass audience information through, and the dynamic ad provider has to pass which creative execution it will show. Ask a lot of questions to make sure this is being done.
2) Stay away from non-product centric dynamic ads. It’s much easier for a DSP to scalably find audiences responding to DVD players vs. washing machines than “logo position=3X390F” vs. “logo position=3X939Q.” Why? Because with good product taxonomy, the DSP can always instruct the dynamic ad to tone down the granularity a step. Instead of “product=DVD player,” the ad can be requested to show “category=consumer electronics,” so that a broader audience can be targeted if necessary. What’s the broader audience for “logo position=3X939Q”? Yeah, I don’t know either.
3) Test your DSP with a static control to establish a baseline. Then you’ll have a frame of reference when you add the dynamic ad functionality to the mix.
For marketers, myself included, this is a lot to think about at a time when we have a lot to think about. But this is the future of display ads, and each day more marketers uncover the incredible performance (at scale!) that DSPs and dynamic ads (separately or together) enable. Let’s make sure the next one is you and not one of your competitors, okay?
We loved the debate sparked by our NYC panel, a.k.a. the “DSP Smackdown,” so much that we want to take it to you West Coasters in San Francisco. So we are! On March 24, 2010 at 7pm at the W Hotel San Francisco.
Our esteemed SF panel:
Peter Kim – Yahoo! SmartAds
Michael Rubenstein – President @ AppNexus
Bill Morrison – Managing Partner @ThinkEquity
Brad King, Managing Director @ BlueKai
Jon Aizen – COO, Dapper
And we’ll be adding a special advertiser-side guest shortly
Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital is our moderator.
Sign up here, and we hope to see you at the W Hotel San Francisco at 7pm on March 24, 2010!
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Oh…and here’s the audio from last week’s panel!
(no iTunes? Get the .mp3 itself here)
Re-purposing from today’s Mediapost, where I talk about the misconception that Brand and DR are separate things.
Direct Response to Your Brand
For some time, I’ve been guilty of speaking in terms of Direct Response (DR) and Brand as if they were black and white. Left and right. Obama and McCain. You get the idea. This dichotomy largely stems from what I do in my day-to-day, as I help marketers nail the direct response portions of their advertising strategy. See? I’m doing it again!But lately I’ve been hearing something interesting from my customers. While I tend to look at DR through the lens of performance metrics (ROAS, conversion rate, lift), they say interesting things to me like, “I like the way this ad functions like our website,” or “I don’t like how that ad has nothing to do with our brand.” Huh? Weren’t we talking about your ROI just a second ago?
Great marketers understand return on ad spend. They’re not ignoring that when they ask about the brand implications of the ad they’re running. Rather, they’re experiencing their advertising from the perspective of their customers, who actually have a better grasp for the Brand/DR mix than any of us do. Consider this example:
A chief household officer (CHO) performs a search for a family trip to Cancun. A savvy performance marketer for a big Online Travel Agency (OTA) sets up a dynamic retargeting campaign that hits this searcher with a well-placed ad that shows the best deals on packages in Cancun for the same dates searched. Our CHO is reminded of the relevant (and competitive) deals of big OTA and books.
I’ve given this example before (probably in a MediaPost publication, even) to illustrate how perfect DR display advertising is achieved in travel marketing. But let’s look at that last sentence: “Our CHO is reminded of the relevant (and competitive) deals of big OTA.” This ad just achieved (for the consumer) the best brand experience of any ad that this OTA could show. We often think of brand in terms of creating buzz, raising awareness, and all that fuzzy stuff, but really brand is about influencing the decision-making process that goes on in consumers’ heads when they decide between you and the other guys.
It’s easy to run an ad that says “Lowest Price on Flights from NYC-Cancun” (even a dynamic ad that substitutes the name of the origin and destination cities) but what does that really do to convince consumers that your brand is truly that which offers the lowest price on this route? Ads that offer this experience to consumers can achieve this, and “walking the walk” of showing the low prices you actually have for what the consumer is interested in is the best thing you can do to prove it. This, by the way, is why people hate the “fares from $99*” ads with that annoying asterisk. Because you know what that asterisk means to them? This deal is probably not going to happen if I click this ad.
The point is, if “we can get you there for less” is the brand message you’re trying to convey, the same tools you use to create the best DR-measured performance actually do double duty in creating the best brand experience for your customers. And the next time our CHO searches for a trip and is given a choice between you and a similar deal from a competitor, the brand equity you’ve built with that last experience with your ad will remind them why they booked with you before. So, DR and Brand become as complimentary as peanut butter and jelly. Yin and Yang. Gin and tonic …
As John Ebbert in AdExchanger mentioned today, the “Fixing Advertising” DSP/Data/Dynamic Ads roundup didn’t disappoint — if a data driven smackdown is what you’re after. We’ll see how we can follow up on that, but we will definitely be hosting the San Francisco version of this event next month and will be announcing details next week (save the date: March 24).
In the meantime, read the coverage here and here’s the audio from the panell!
(no iTunes? Get the .mp3 itself here)
Last but not least, I want to extend a sincere thanks again to all of our panelists and our moderator. Keep innovating and smacking down!
Thanks to everyone who registered, and I look forward to seeing you all tonight at the event (7pm, Nest Event Loft, 920 Broadway @ 21st St.). For those of you who really want to make it but didn’t get a chance to sign up yet, feel free to email me here.
And I’m excited to announce that we’ll be doing this again, in San Francisco next month with new panelists. Stay tuned for more details…
Due to overwhelming demand, we’ve moved the panel to a roomier location at Nest Event Loft, just down the street at 920 Broadway @ 21st Street (map). We also ordered a lot more beer.
Looking forward to seeing you all there on Wednesday, February 24 at 7pm!
–To Recap–
Panelists:
Emily Scott, Director of Digital Marketing at Kayak
Ari Buchalter, COO at MediaMath
Vikram Somaya, Director of Client Services at BlueKai
Jon Aizen, COO at Dapper
Brian O’Kelley, CEO at AppNexus
Our moderator is Sara Holoubek, President of SEMPO NY and CEO of Luminary Labs.
We’ll be pressing the panelists to teach us what all this real-time bidding, advanced user intent, and dynamic ad mumbo-jumbo really means for those of us concerned with getting direct response performance out of our ads. With the traditional ad network model losing a lot of ground to DSPs, it’s certainly an exciting time to be an advertiser or agency and this panel should give everyone a great overview of how to start benefiting from this shift in power.
Drinks still on us.
Welcome, James. Read about him on AdWeek, Mediapost and AdExchanger. Full release below:
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San Francisco (February 12, 2010) Dapper, a leading dynamic ad creation and optimization company, today announced that James Beriker has been named President & Chief Executive Officer and appointed to the Board of Directors. Eran Shir, co-founder and former President & CEO, has been appointed Chief Technical Officer and will continue to be responsible for Dapper’s product and engineering organization.
Mr. Beriker will work with founders Eran Shir and Jon Aizen and the Dapper team to continue to bring innovative technologies to the display advertising market that reshape the way that advertisers and agencies create, traffic and optimize dynamic, intent-driven display ad campaigns at scale. Mr. Beriker joins Dapper with a deep understanding of performance-based marketing and significant experience in leading online advertising technology platform companies through phases of rapid product evolution, market penetration, global expansion, and growth.
“We are excited to welcome James to the Dapper team,” says Bruce Golden, a member of the Board of Directors and General Partner with Accel Partners, an investor in Dapper. “His extensive experience and proven ability to lead advertising technology companies from early product development in emerging markets through accelerated adoption and growth is a huge asset to Dapper.”
Mr. Beriker most recently served as President & CEO of Efficient Frontier, a global technology leader in search engine marketing with over $750 million in spend under management. Prior to Efficient Frontier, he held Vice President, Senior Vice President and General Manager positions at ValueClick [NASDAQ: VLCK], a provider of online marketing technology and services. Previously, Mr. Beriker was the founder and CEO of Search123, one of the first pay-per-click search engine marketing platforms that launched in October 2000 and was acquired by ValueClick in May 2003. Prior to Search123, he practiced corporate and securities law in Los Angeles, representing early and mid-stage technology companies and entrepreneurs.
“I am thrilled to be joining Dapper in this formative period in the development of performance-based display marketing,” says Mr. Beriker. “Technology and algorithms brought efficiency, automation and increased performance to the search engine marketing channel. I look forward to working with the Dapper team to develop products that fundamentally change the way that advertisers and agencies exploit the display channel.”
“Our team has spent three years building a strong and highly scalable technology platform,” said Mr. Shir. “I look forward to working with James to leverage our platform to bring game changing products to the display advertising market.”
Re-purposing from today’s Mediapost, where I talk about how this in vogue buzzword actually has some dollars-to-doughnuts meaning for travel advertisers.
Real-Time Bidding Is The Real Deal
You gotta love the perennial ad industry buzzword cycle. It helps ad folks like me sound smarter than we really are, but for most it just creates annoying distractions that garner a lot of undeserved attention (social media advertising has a great knack for doing that).
I’m here to tell you that this buzzword’s the real deal, folks. And for travel industry advertisers, “real-time bidding” (RTB) presents the biggest potential to boost advertising efficiency since Google AdWords came along. Here’s how it works:
Today, most of us buy ad network impressions in bulk. We buy into a particular channel, but for the most part the information we have about the individual browsers is in aggregate. They’re in-market travelers. Great.
In reality, when you dig, there are in-market travelers that are traveling in six months, and there are in-market travelers that need to travel tomorrow. There are travelers who want to go to Bali for three weeks (in business class), and there are travelers that want to drive to a motel for one night. With most ad network buys, you’re getting all of these user intent profiles, and you’re paying the same amount to target each of them.
These profiles clearly aren’t worth the same. I bet that United Airlines would pay a lot more to convert the guy who needs a last-minute (and thus full-fare) ticket than the budget-conscious tire kicker who is comparison shopping six months out. The airline has these data from cookies that get dropped when users perform searches on its own site, but without RTB, it bids the same for each of these profiles when it re-targets them across the web. Because not every bid is high enough, sometimes the airline loses and somebody else’s ad shows up on a given impression when it could have been a United ad, if it had just bid higher for that impression.
RTB lets advertisers do just that: define a set of parameters under which they’re willing to pay more, or less, for a given profile. And it’s not that hard, thanks to a few really talented folks who have founded companies around this practice (see: AppNexus, Invite Media, MediaMath, et al.).
They manage your media buy and can adjust bidding — in real time — as a result of the factors that matter to you. All the work is done for you, transparently, and you get a neat report at the end of it all that shows you how many more conversions you generated as a result.
Just be careful when choosing a vendor (referred to as Demand-Side Platforms; “DSPs” — yes another buzzword!). They’re largely based on “black box” optimization engines that don’t really explain themselves well. Get references, and test against a baseline. And then enjoy that extra revenue gained by more efficient media buying!
Our free (and full bar) shindig just got one more (and final) panelist, Brian O’Kelley, CEO @ AppNexus. So, the final details:
Panelists:
Emily Scott, Director of Digital Marketing at Kayak
Ari Buchalter, COO at MediaMath
Vikram Somaya, Director of Client Servicesat BlueKai
Jon Aizen, COO at Dapper
Brian O’Kelley, CEO at AppNexus
Our moderator is Sara Holoubek, President of SEMPO NY and CEO of Luminary Labs.
We’ll be pressing the panelists to teach us what all this real-time bidding, advanced user intent, and dynamic ad mumbo-jumbo really means for those of us concerned with getting direct response performance out of our ads. With the traditional ad network model losing a lot of ground to DSPs, it’s certainly an exciting time to be an advertiser or agency and this panel should give everyone a great overview of how to start benefiting from this shift in power.
Drinks still on us.