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.

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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):

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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.

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Reprinted from Eran and my commentary on the 3 major innovations driving Display advertising in Mediapost today:

Let’s boil this display beast down to a 1-2-3. For most of us, it can’t compare to our search campaigns, so you should know how to take advantage of three emerging technology trends that are changing the Display vs. Search battle for a lot of marketers.

First Punch: Real-Time Bidding and Ad Exchanges
Used to be we looked at a spreadsheet to plan our media buys. As we got more data about our audience and the potential outlets to reach them, the spreadsheets grew. Ad networks added more variables for us to play with. Soon, we started looking like tired day traders, and we still weren’t making major improvements in Display ROI. Enter automated, real-time bidding and giant ad exchanges that optimize media buys across literally millions of Web sites, making sure you buy only the impressions that are achieving your marketing goals. Call this the Wall Street meets Madison Avenue with Google AdX, Right Media, Microsoft AdECN, OpenX, and AdBrite all adopting real-time bidding, and a new set of companies such as MediaMath and RocketFuel building hedge fund like trading platforms for high-fidelity media buying in real-time.

Second Punch: Advanced User Intent Determination
The FTC has us all abuzz about behavioral intent targeting. But let’s not forget that aside from behavioral, there are a bunch of downright game-changing user intent-gathering techniques: advanced geo-targeting, semantic targeting (understanding what keywords mean, rather than just extracting keywords), weather targeting, and even good ol’ context. Search is successful partly because it has this intent determination thing down pat, and it has taken some time for Display to catch up. Using some or all of these techniques in our ad campaigns makes the difference. But to make these data work for us, we won’t get very far without…

Third Punch: Intelligent Dynamic Ads
This is the secret ingredient that allows us to plug in the pipe of user intent data to do something scalable for us. There are just too many variables among peoples’ locations, behavior, and interests to expect to resonate with our audience with just one creative message. There has to be real-time switching of the offer, product, or message that we show to our potential customers. The guy in snowy Denver reading about ski poles probably won’t respond well to the snorkeling gear your sporting goods store offers, but you’ll get his attention with your blowout on ski poles.

Score a TKO
The trick is to take all three of these strategies together for a holistic knockout campaign. Buy only the right impressions one-by-one with real-time bidding on ad exchanges (tip: don’t spread out your bids across multiple vendors or you’ll bid against yourself!), figure out the intent of each potential customer, and then tailor a specific message to each of them. The real key is finding a vendor that can combine all three of these things –real-time bidding, for instance, becomes much more efficient if you already know the user intent behind the impressions you’re bidding on. Likewise, you’d be hard-pressed to bid on audiences reading about ski poles if you just ran out of that product and can’t show it in your ad. It’s the new feedback loop of online marketing, and in the right hands, it has the ability to finally make our Display campaigns perform as well as Search.

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Courtesy of phxpma

In an article posted today ClickZ writer and “Conversion Scientist” Brian Massey, we see a rare look of optimism toward display advertising as being able to “rock your marketing.”  Amen.

In the world I come from of performance-driven marketers, I’m used to Display being a bad word.  Like “Bush.”  But, as Brian so aptly points out, things are changing.  Better late than never, eh?

Companies like ours and others like Tumri and Teracent are leading this change.  Display ads will no longer be dumb, online billboards that show a one-size-fits-all message.  We’ve learned our lesson from search: have something for everybody.

Read Brian’s overview. I think we’re at an inflection point here…

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My take on how behavioral advertising should look in the very near future in Mediapost Today:

I must admit, I’m a sucker for being targeted. Just the other day I was making a mockup of a JetBlue ad (don’t ask, I’m a marketing guy!) and in the process of creating it I visited JetBlue.com to grab their logo and get some styling tips.Next thing I know, in my inbox is an email from JetBlue announcing a $20 off promotion. Wait…did they just…retargeting delivered via email campaigns? Cool!

Turns out plenty of other people got that same email that day who hadn’t visited JetBlue.com, so it was just a coincidence. Got me thinking though.

Everything should be delivered behaviorally, when it can. Given the choice between a) sending your mailer out all at once to a bunch of people who may or may not be interested in your offer right now or b) sending it asynchronously to people as they visit your website, which do you think would net more fish?

From a technological standpoint, this would be complex but not that difficult (and maybe someone’s doing it — let me know if you are!). I have booked with JetBlue before, they have a good idea of my likely IP address and have my email on file. It’s just a matter of connecting the two in real time.

But why stop there? With Google’s foray into managing TV ad campaigns, why shouldn’t those commercials I watch (read: fast forward through but certainly notice brand images) pique my attention by being directly related to my online brand intent? I know what you’re thinking: this is creepy. Any new intent-based technology always is, and the challenge for us as marketers is how to harness it for our own good while engaging the consumer in a not-too-intrusive way.

For example, if the fact that I’m being retargeted so early and often across channels means that I get an exclusive, 20% offer for a trip I was already going to book with my favorite airline, I say bring it on. Here’s a tip: if you’re retargeting people, there’s usually a reason they left your site, and you should do what you can to sweeten the deal for them. First time you retarget them, remind them of the product they were deliberating over on your site. Still no conversion, give them a coupon to buy that product. Still nothing? Free shipping. Eventually cut them off, but this stuff works — yet there are a scant few companies doing it right.

And I bet the privacy hawks would clamor a whole lot less if they were getting a better deal from JFK to Aruba because of our new scary technology…

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Together with our friends at ClickZ, we developed this easy peasy CPA Calculator to determine how much an ‘action’ costs you as a marketer.  We’ve been long pushing our agenda that marketers should pay for direct response advertising on a performance basis, and here’s a tool to help you keep your vendors honest

It’s a pretty simple calculator that takes the CPM or CPC you’re paying and divides it by the performance (% of Clicks and % of Conversions among those clicks).  This obviously leaves out the multitude of conversions that you’ll undoubtedly see as a result of post-impression conversions (user saw ad, didn’t click, but converted anyway), but for the sake of comparing campaigns across networks, media, and methods, this CPA measure is a good place to start.

We’ll follow up in the future with some more tools (perhaps one that reflects post-impression as well…).  Let us know what you think!

Click here for the ClickZ/Dapper CPA Calculator!

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My take on how dynamic ads and real-time web can save social media advertising in MediaPost today:

Hint: it’s not easy and involves a tremendous amount of technology, so the faint-of-nerd should stop reading here.

Here’s the thing: I look at Facebook all the time and, as a marketer, am in awe of the amount of rich, useful information about myself and my intentions that I broadcast to the world all the time.  And I’m not talking about unstructured, implied intentions in my status updates: I’m talking about the data that’s been embedded in all of our profiles since Friendster (or whatever came before that).

They know where I’m from, where I live, who I’m dating (or engaged to, as it were), how long I’ve been with this person, her birthday, my birthday, our anniversary, my friends’ birthdays, where they live, what bands I like, what bands they like, what bands we like together; well you see where this is going.

Yahoo has also boasted a bastion of user data for years and years as the number one destination on the web, whose network reaches 87% of Internet users (Comscore, April 2009).  Safe to say that, like Facebook, they know quite a lot about who you are and what your intentions are as you pour your heart out to them with every click.

Yahoo isn’t social media, but they’re the key to identifying the social media advertising problem in that they share the same shortcoming: tons of demand, lack of supply.  If Facebook and Yahoo know so damn much about me, why am I still mostly seeing ads for teeth whitening?

Data is only as good as what you do with it.  Knowing my favorite band is only useful when you have an ad that tells me when they’re going to be in my town, and that there’s an empty seat for me and my other friend that likes the same band if we only click here and pay $99.  And the reason that ad doesn’t exist is because there are literally over 100,000 artists that I could possibly be interested in, all with different touring schedules, and multiplied by the number of cities I could be located in and suddenly it becomes a lot easier to just show me some teeth whitening again.

Quite honestly, Facebook’s Beacon was the closest thing to that kind of example but was unfortunately executed terribly (the way to do it would have been to cut the users in: allow Beacon to tell your friends you just bought a DVD at BestBuy, and get 10% back).

Beacon aside, I think Dynamic Advertising, when able to search in real-time for offers, is beginning to chip away at this problem on a larger scale.  Real-time is really, really hard to do from a technical perspective; saying that we should be searching the web for offers to match every individual intent is different from actually building an engine to do that for ads.  Keep that in mind as “real-time” becomes the new buzzword.

As more and more platforms (like Facebook) open up their data to advertising platforms, the data we need will certainly be there, and will finally become key to making social media really deliver ROI.  If I were an advertiser with many different offers on my website, I’d be looking for ways to use Dynamic Advertising and real-time match these user data points.  In fact, if you are one of these advertisers, feel free to comment and I’ll answer with specific ideas.

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“CPA is the only meaningful metric to our clients” is the headline in Jon’s AdExchanger interview this morning.  Enjoy!

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Clever write up today by Tessa Wegert, interactive media strategist with Enlighten and writer at ClickZ.  In talking about what new advancements and trends are popping up in expandable banner ads, I contributed a quote:

We’re seeing real-time beginning to take a front seat, whether that be through Twitter or through dynamic data — real-time pricing, (product) availability, and search boxes for the consumer to interact with the ad.

Real-time is really becoming quite the buzzword.  I hope it doesn’t get overused (I’m partially at fault, see my editorial in Mediapost a couple months ago), because real-time takes real technology to execute, and it’s not just another marketing gimmick.  More on that later…

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