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…
We did this campaign last month for Haworth Media / Reelz Channel, taking content from their site (previews to over 10,000 movie trailers, interviews, etc.) and showing the right one in the ad based on a weighted average of performance, context, semantics, and behavior. We were able to catch the engine at work in a particularly cool semantic matching instance on Access Hollywood:
Note that the inventory was sourced through our ad exchange partners and each impression was scanned in real time for these types of semantic (and other) cues.
(not seeing the whole ad? click on the post itself or refresh — a Wordpress embedding issue)
Pretty cool, eh? We’re helping our friends over at ClickZ / SES promote their upcoming show in Chicago with a Dapper Dynamic Ad that updates when new speakers are added.
Interesting poll conducted by Clickable today showed that only 48% of marketers surveyed had an ‘attribution model.’ 33% either didn’t know what one was or aren’t interested in an attribution model. Interesting stuff; you’d think that marketers would want to have a system by which to assign credit (or blame!) to various advertising efforts.
But it’s not that simple, and the numbers aren’t surprising to me. Ad A and Ad B both run across some ad exchanges, and often consumers see both of them in a particular session, and so it goes. They make a purchase, and you don’t know whether it was because of A, B, or neither (or both).
This is in the world of static ads. Not much you can do to clarify the picture when your clues are shared among all your ad creatives. However, when you start to get granular, as with Dynamic Ads (surprise, surprise), the ‘clues’ become so unique that they’re easily attributed to conversions. What do I mean?
Say you run an ad that retargets specific products from your website. You’re a hardware megastore, and a random consumer looks at a nice dark stain hardwood 8mm number you have in your laminate flooring section. Later on, this same consumer buys something from your site. Attribution made, right? Wrong.
What if this person bought a vacuum cleaner? Or a potted plant? Can you attribute that conversion to the ad? Maybe there was something about seeing your brand and entering your store that brought it on, but if the consumer had bought some hardwood flooring, you’d feel a lot better about attributing that.
The moral is of course marketers are confused with attribution models, but Dynamic Advertising provides the added benefit of potentially solving yet another problem for marketers. Pretty cool!
…online advertising, especially display, most often shows us messages that are static, dated, and don’t at all reflect the real-time data that exists in our product inventories, Web sites, and showrooms. There’s a real-time Web of offers out that is — dare I say it — far more valuable than even Twitter.
Instead of just repeating the same ad about ‘Flights to Las Vegas from $99,’ we can tell the consumer who was looking for that flight 15 or 20 minutes ago that now there are only four seats left on the flight. Or that if they book NOW they’ll get a 20% discount.
Nice analysis by Enid Burns @ ClickZ of the onslaught of new Dynamic Retargeting solutions going on as of late — I’m personally shocked that so many other suitors stepped up in such a short period, and frankly it’s invigorating. Dynamic Ads have been such a “err, wtf?” product for so long that when the big boys start playing, suddently it’s the flavor of the week. This is good for Advertisers, Publishers, and Consumers: better ads are on the way!
Also good to hear from our pals at Teracent, who are also fighting for this cause. Indeed, as Vikas Jha (CEO, Teracent) comments, “Dapper’s [strength] is automatically creating a feed by scraping a company’s Web site or product catalog,” He continues to say that regarding the integration with feeds and APIs that the rest of the Dynamic Ad solutions require, “this method has fewer errors.” Agree with the first part Vikas, but have to say we haven’t experienced anything that resembles the second part
I’ll get into how our live feed creation (and management) technology works in a separate post — or better yet I’ll have its inventor do that. Creating a “scraping” technology that is actually robust is indeed something that hasn’t been done until we came along, quite frankly. In fact, after hearing the explanation of how it works, it becomes pretty clear that it isn’t really scraping by the traditional definition of it. But I’ll let Eran regale you all with that!
Nice writeup by Tanya Irwin @ Mediapost today on our Remessaging product, hot off the assembly line. Yes, we’re doing some pretty amazing stuff with retargeting, but instead of the usual take on it (showing your ad to previous visitors of your site), we’ve taken it a step further in showing consumers the exact product or offer they were looking at on your site.
Think of a an ad that can show you the product you’ve already expressed interest in, but maybe at a lower price? Or with diminishing availability — “Flight form LAX to LAS: only 5 seats left!” The possibilities are endless.
I’ll let Tanya’s article speak for itself. But in the meantime, we’ve put together a little cartoon that explains what Behavioral Messaging is:
Last week AdWeek ran a story about the OPA promising bigger ad sizes to counter “deepening recession and declining display ad rates.” So, with no good technological solution to make Display better, we’re trying BIGGER ugly ads? Yeah, that should do it.
There’s an old Hebrew saying “what you can’t do by force, do with more force.” Is that the credo we’re living by here?
I personally think we could be doing more with smaller ad sizes. Figure more, but relevant, ad units are more units for you to sell. Makes sense.
We recently ran a campaign across most of the major sizes and placements with the same Dapper Dynamic Creative. Obviously the bigger (and above fold) placements performed better. But not that much better. What’s interesting is that we were able to take an “anchor” placement (bottom of the page) and bring its performance up to the performance range of the above fold placements. Just by being relevant — by bringing (in this case) hotels based on the city the reader was browsing on a travel guide.
Guys, bigger ads isn’t the answer. It’s better ads.
UPDATE: I have to agree with Jonathan Mendez in his post about this — yes there’s opportunity here if we are able to take advantage of these larger sizes to make them mini-landing pages. Still, I’m pretty sure this isn’t what most people (save visionaries like Jonathan Mendez) are thinking regarding the new ad sizes…
