The Dapper Blog

Great compilation (which will keep going) by AdExchanger today of the views toward RMX and the importance of ad exchanges for liquidity.  Our own Eran comments:

The impact of the Right Media exchange on the media industry has been tremendous, and we are just in its beginning. It had impact that ran across the entire food chain of the media business. Most of the benefits are enjoyed by various players on the buy side. First and foremost, it is a great equalizer, allowing start-ups and small companies to get as fair a chance in bidding for media as the biggest advertisers. As such, it provides the type of liquidity in display that keyword bidding provided in search marketing.

Second, it facilitated the introduction of new technologies and tools that utilize an automated media buying platform. It justifies investment in new targeting capabilities and data leveraging. It’s already spun a set of new companies that are implementing automated media buying and optimization a la Wall Street, forcing media agencies and ad networks to adapt to this new world. It wont be long before we’ll be seeing a lot of openings for ‘quants’ in agencies.

[Regarding the importance of having at least two, large ad exchanges] – it’s very important, especially in the current scenario where both the two largest ad exchanges are also big time buyers and sellers on their own and thus have skin in the game. We would like to see much more than just two exchanges in place. This is also important for ensuring rapid innovation. In particular, I think it will be very problematic for Google to monopolize this market.

pknegten Press

Hey folks,

I’ll get around to posting the official Phocuswright video in due time, but I’ve had a number of requests to post the presentation I used today so here it is:

pknegten Conferences, Events

Greetings from sunny Orlando!  Today I’ll be speaking at the Phocuswright Travel Innovation Summit, presenting Dapper’s set of dynamic advertising and media optimization tools for the travel industry.  Why Travel, you ask?  Because all the ever changing offers and inventory are just begging to be matched up with the right consumer at the right time.  Okay, end of pitch.

But seriously, it’s a vertical for which ads like ours add a tremendous amount of value (or, conversely, reduce a tremendous amount of cost-per-booking).  Showing me a generic “Book with us!” ad vs. “Here’s a room for $100 that makes sense for what your preferences are” is a no-brainer.  For those who want a preview of the talk I’m going to give, here’s some food for thought:

Dapper will be speaking at approximately 12:15pm EST.  If anyone is going to be there and wants to meet up, contact me here.

pknegten Conferences

Just posted Episode 6 of Advertising Sucks (and the People Who Fix It) with guest Sara Holubek, president of SEMPO and of her own marketing consultancy.  You can reach her at www.saraholoubek.com.

Before forging out on her own, she was the Chief Strategy Officer at iCrossing and held roles at Organic and Blue Dingo.  She is a master of search marketing, and we discussed a lot of how Search and Display are beginning to cross over.  Another great guest and another great episode!

Listen to it here

(no iTunes or don’t want to listen to it there? Here.)

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Great guest post in TechCrunch by Steve Poland today on how Amazon is opening up affiliate channels for us to tweet and Facebook-status-update product recommendations for a cut of the revenue. Brilliant!

Guess what though – this had a name, and it was Beacon. And I’ve claimed in the past that Beacon was a game changing idea, executed poorly, because it didn’t cut the users in. Now Amazon is making the opposite a reality, cutting the users in but as of now excluding the platform. This is problematic for a couple reasons.

First, as Steve rightly claims, the affiliate rev share will go down due to the onslaught of millions of would-be affiliate marketers saturating supply. This is counterproductive to everybody: think about the value of a genuine “dude, you should buy this too” of your product from one friend to another.  This is immensely valuable, and it’s something that no organized marketing channel can address as of now.  The problem is, if you put tiny revenue incentives behind it, one needs to either blast his friends like crazy with SPAM all day or just not play the game.  I suspect most individuals that marketers care about in any given campaign will just not play the game, and the SPAM industry will automate it as much as they can (as they’re already doing).

Second, and closely tied with my first point, without some mediation from the platform, this value is all but lost.  Beacon did something interesting: it used your actual behavior (Paul just ordered Season 2 Disc 1 of Mad Men from Netflix) to influence your friends to do the same.  Your friends see this once, and only once, from you, and its part of a one-time behavior that is actually an update relevant to what you’re doing at any given time (e.g. maybe one of your cute female friends wants to come over and watch it with you?)  Essentially Netflix sponsored a direct conversation between you and your friends, and it was an informational one.  This is not SPAM.

Compare this with “Hey I just ordered Mad Men you should get it to http:bit.ly/blahblahblah!” and suddenly you look like SPAM.  See the difference?  When the platform is able to be a part of the experience, it can mediate the relevancy of these messages to make the relationship actually valuable to marketers.  And I bet Netflix is willing to pay a lot more to that kind of recommendation than the irrelevant blasts of affiliate marketing Amazon is sponsoring by allowing individuals to be affiliates.

Solution: Facebook & Twitter – bring Beacon back.  But don’t be selfish and keep all the revenues for yourself.  Share with the users that are actually creating the value.  The alternative is here, and it’s going to ruin user experience, and you make no money from it.  You decide.

pknegten General

Good writeup today from our good friend Brian Massey (hear his podcast interview here).  Regarding Jonathan Mendez’s “Adplications” – a full retail application in a banner.

We partnered with RAMP to crank out the “Father’s Day Slacks” example he cites in the article, check it out (DISCLAIMER: this ad ran ages ago so the data doesn’t refresh):

pknegten Dapper Campaigns, Press

See today’s SearchEngineWatch / ClickZ write up about your marketing push for the holidays. It mentions the importance and efficiency of retargeting (or our flavor of it, remessaging) and how it can boost your holiday sales.

A few sites can be helpful for a relatively low investment. Retargeting works via cookies and is relatively painless to the user. Check out FetchBack.com, Dapper.net, or Retargeting.com to get started.

pknegten Press

This bone-crushing ad shows you how you can get the next big matchup of the home team from Dish Network. How do we know what the home team is? Like this, if you’re in Bloomington, IN:

Or like this, if you’re in Denver:

pknegten Dapper Campaigns

They say there’s a fine line between clever and stupid.  I’ll let you be the judge on this next exploration of what we could do to make United Airlines’ current winter promotion perform better.  We have some other brands up our sleeve for future episodes

There’s more to this than just a playful jab, however.  I’m actually a United frequent flyer (about to make 1K this year!) and get served these ads constantly.  I know they’re doing some heavy retargeting.  Just, the messages they’re choosing have absolutely nothing to do with me, or the user profile they clearly have of me.

Here’s the thing: half the time I see their ads its for something irrelevant that I already get for free as a frequent flyer: “Opt for Extra Legroom with Economy Plus” — yes, I get that for free and so does everybody else with the profile you’ve identified me with when I log in.  How about instead of that messaging, you remind me when prices drop, go up, or seats are running out on that flight I searched for today.  Or how much I could pay to get upgraded to First on my next flight I already booked…

I know what you’re thinking — you’re such a small subset of their audience, Paul, they are targeting a much broader set.  Really though? The set that I’m a part of likely makes up 80% of their profits, yet they’re mass marketing to the set that gives them 20%.  The moral here is that dynamic messaging, and proper intent derivation allows you to tailor messages (offers!) to the audiences that are most likely to respond to them.  And the ad in the video isn’t that hard to do…

pknegten Behavioral Advertising, Dynamic Ads

Episode 5 of Advertising Sucks (and the People Who Fix It) is now live, with special guest and dear Dapper friend Matthew Roche, who founded Offermatica, a leading campaign optimization and analytics platform, and sold it to Omniture in 2007.

He provides some really interesting insight toward using analytics in marketing campaigns and where the data stops and the real marketing begins.  He also provides his slant on the whole privacy debate.  Listen in!

Listen to it here

(no iTunes or don’t want to listen to it there? Here.)

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