Tag: advertising

Last Week in Digital Advertising #7

And so to New York where Google predicted “mobile is going be the number one screen through which users engage with advertisers’ digital brands” That’s just one of the seven predictions that Google’s Neal Mohan and Barry Salzman are widely reported to have said at IAB’s MIXX.

Take a deep breath and breathe.

How do you begin this issue of “Last Week In Digital Advertising”? It’s actually pretty hard as we’ve been on the wrong end of the fire-hose of industry announcements, news and comment through almost every channel imaginable thanks to New York’s Advertising Week. It’s an event where everybody seems to announce something.  It would have been perfectly possible to spend the entire week reading comment about the event and not doing much else.  This week I learnt that Twitter generates 12 terabytes of data. AdWeek, I imagine, produces many times that. Still, it was probably worse if you were actually there, right?

There was a follow-up on my mention last week of BIA/Kelsey’s research claiming that one in four local ad dollars would be spent with digital – across all digital channels – in the not too distant future. mocoNews.net reported that by 2014, U.S. mobile local ad revenues will have grown to $2.02 billion in 2014 from $213 million in 2009 (sourced from that same report). So is ‘local mobile’ where the money is?  The AOP reported 60% of publishers agree that more local and ‘niche’ digital content is crucial (AOP Content & Trends Census 2010) to their success, so I guess we should stand by for launches of such content soon.

Fortunately, makers of Blackberry apps, even the local ones, can now monetise their apps nice and easily through the newly announced BlackBerry Application Platform which aims to aggregate ads from mobile networks to maximise the revenue. Looks like a very nice yield management tool for mobile app makers, don’t you think? We all know mobile is going to be big. eMarketer put that into perspective last week, reporting a ComScore report (albeit from June)  suggesting smartphone ownership across the big western European countries had grown 41% between 2009 and 2010, to 60.8 million subscribers.

About 15 million of those users were in the UK, where smartphone ownership leaped 70% between 2009 and 2010, the Internet Advertising Bureau UK (IAB UK) reported. Further, the IAB calculated that mobile access accounted for about a quarter of time spent online by UK web users in mid-2010. (Full Steam Ahead for UK Mobile Marketing)

Publishers are reacting to this, with that AOP census also reporting, “Year on year, 65% of publishers expect to increase their mobile content, whilst content delivered via apps will increase for 91% of publishers”. All of which might be helping drive Apple’s share of the mobile ad market, which Bloomberg Businessweek reported, will end the year at 21%of the market,

If much of that mobile advertising market is to be location-based then it’s reassuring for us in the business to read that the “Ad industry acts now to safeguard location marketing” as New Media Age ran with this week. It’s really the same story I’ve been noting week-in week-out here: tell users what you are doing and given them ways to opt-out. That doesn’t have to stop you explaining the advantages of sharing data. I know, you know this.

And so to New York where Google predicted “mobile is going be the number one screen through which users engage with advertisers’ digital brands” That’s just one of the seven predictions that Google’s Neal Mohan and Barry Salzman are widely reported to have said at IAB’s MIXX. You can, of course, get it from the horse’s mouth on the Google Blog.  Publishers will be happy to hear their prediction that the digital advertising business will grow to be a $50 billion industry in five years. Are those US-only numbers? Context people! It’s everything in a global business like we’re in.

Another of G’s predictions included the suggestion that 50% of campaigns will eventually include video. Video will be bought on a cost-per-view basis that Google’s been suggesting means that “the user will choose whether to watch the ad or not, and the advertiser will only pay if the user watches”. I get the bit about the advertiser only paying if the user watches the ad but I wonder if the ‘choose to view an ad’ is sustainable. I wonder what the broadcasters think? To be fair, it could be “choose to view one of a selection of advertisements” so it makes a little more sense. If you saw their presentation at Advertising Week, drop me a note for clarity.

So much video advertising is going to have an impact on broadcast television, surely.  I was pointed to an article at Lucid Commerce last week that’s looking at this from the broadcast standpoint.  Does television loose when a consumer takes some kind of action online because that action gets attributed to an online campaign (of course, the assumption here is that there is online activity running). The piece starts of with the assertion, “In general, online advertising systems are unaware of the offline advertising that is going on around them” and I think this is, generally, true but is – hopefully – built into the resulting research analysis.  It is why I was quite interested to read a piece on MediaPost that began, “Electronic Arts (EA) plans to unveil Thursday a cross-platform reporting dashboard” but then disappointed to see it only covered online, console, mobile, email and social. I had thought they’d solved the true cross-platform conundrum. To be fair, many companies are trying to solve the cross-platform problem and I am sure somebody will get there, eventually.

Understanding how often somebody sees a message from a brand across all channels is important to enable us to really understand the impact of any marketing message, so any multi-platform reporting is to be welcomed. Direct Marketing News ran a piece titled, “Why finding the optimal ad frequency is difficult” that made it clear there was plenty of work to do on that front. I’ve been listening to Spoitfy while writing this piece and, really, there’s a high frequency to some ads there that – for some reason – seems much more annoying than high frequency rotations on broadcast radio. As an aside, I discovered last week that the IAB has a Digital Audio Committee that’s probably looking at this kind of thing as I type. I hope so.

Back Google’s crystal ball. I think many of the predictions were sensible and reflective of what we are all seeing in the industry. However, the concept that by 2015 75% of ads on the web will have some kind of social element is something that’s going to take some thinking about yet. I am not disagreeing but to achieve that will take a step-shift in the use of so-called social media within all advertising. That, in turn, is something quite difficult to envisage for 2015.

Talking social, I really think we’re too early to truly understand the role it plays in marketing & advertising. There are lots of possibilities but we need more data and not the kind of reporting that suggests the impact of social is small (“Twitter’s Impact On News Traffic Is Tiny”) without any true context. Yes, I commented on that story on the site, but it’s actually not unusual. Since I began writing “Last Week In Digital Advertising” I’m reading an increasing number of industry articles that don’t have any context in their reporting. Now, I understand sometimes this is the tease to get you to buy a research company’s report but I think the reportage needs a little more rigour.

At Ad:tech London there was some discussion from the publisher side about ‘data leakage’ (which is far too complex to explain in a trivial column like this so I could mis-characterise the whole things a data theft and let people moan back at me). Good to see, then, that in New York PubMatic announced a tool allowing websites “to determine not only how many tracking tools the site itself is installing, but also how many tracking tools are being installed by advertisers without the website’s knowledge”. I’ll be watching that one with interest.

With all this tracking, as we’ve been reading for weeks, there’s a constant stream of data being collected, analysed and stored somewhere. This caused Eric Porres at iMedia Connection to ask “Is audience data more valuable than advertising inventory?” Certainly, the data could be the most valuable asset for a lot of publishers, agencies and advertisers.

OK, to end, some digital advertising facts and figures we learnt this week.  Nice to hear that by 2014 nearly 42% of online ad dollars in the U.S. will be spent on branding, compared to just 35.7% today (“Branding Grows as Online Ad Objective” via Reuters) but it doesn’t seem like big growth to me. Also in the ‘good numbers category, I saw that, through Real Time Bidding systems you can see “click-through rates improving by up to 135%, conversion rates up 150% and cost per action up 145%” (“Real Time Bidding: The Sleeper Ad Technology Growth Story” via Marketing Vox) while retargeted display ads gave a 1,046% lift in searches on brand terms within four weeks after exposure (“Retargeting Used by Marketers for Cost-Effective Brand Lift” via eMarketer). In the UK, 38.4 million folks accessed the internet during August, according to the latest data from UKOM (“UKOM Data Report: August 2010” via MediaTel Newsline) which means there’s a lot of people out there so see this ad stuff!

And so we get to the end of another week. Lots of stories not covered here, lots of companies not mentioned. Still if you fancy trying to understand the business then there’s an updated version of the digital advertising technology landscape diagram. You can get it here. And then spend a week trying to work out how it really does all fit together before coming back to read next week’s review of  this week’s advertising news.

Last Week In Digital Advertising #6

It’s not surprising to have heard a number of suppliers at last week’s ad:tech conference bemoan the technical confusion arising from our industry: which technologies should be adopted and what can they do for their businesses? At least one mainstream publisher suggested there were simply too many technologies around and there wasn’t enough time to evaluate them all.

Ah, I know what you’re thinking. Somehow we missed each other last week. But I was on holiday in a place that was, blissfully, somewhat disconnected for me. Still, the last week was frantic. Back from a break and straight to Ad:tech at Olympia: it’s the trade show to connect the London digital advertising industry. It is, apparently, where ‘the online marketing and advertising community will gather together’ to reveal the latest trends and market figures, share best practices and address industry challenges. The main challenge I learnt: buy more comfortable shoes! And for those heading to this New York’s Advertising Week, remember your ‘phone charger.

As I didn’t do the paid-for conference I didn’t get to see the good folks from Twitter talk. There was much buzz about that but surprisingly light Twitter talk on the official #adtechuk hastag. I think it needed promoting a little better. But, of course, there was a social media buzz last week helped along nicely by Google telling us ‘Social recommendations can revolutionise online advertising‘. If you see my Twitter feed then you’ll know I am a big social media fan and I do think ‘social’ can change advertising but putting Twitter feeds into ads may not be the way (I know, it wasn’t the only thing they suggested).

eConsultancy is reporting some IAB research that tells us ‘Publishers get the short end of the stick with ad-supported content‘ and suggests publishers would do well to both look at their ad-revenues and cost structures. I don’t think any publisher needs telling this. It’s been true for many years that publishers are struggling with ways to properly monetise digital content. Nonetheless, I was surprised by the paragraph,

According to the IABUK’s study, “if those services that are currently provided for free were to be charged for (at a level that generates the same amount of revenue as ad-supported services), 40% of current users could stop using the internet.”

Really? Stop using the internet or just those services which have decided to charge? The devil, as always, is in the detail and that’s perhaps one to look at in more depth another week. Staying with the publisher business, in a tweet from the Ad Trading Summit, Improve Digital’s @janneke_improve reported “Large publishers will win unless niche publisher are able to monetise audience which makes a lot of sense to me.

Of course all publishers are looking at how their future digital advertising may play out. I would argue that putting a price on the right content may well work for some print publishers. There are lots of examples where it is working and scarcity will always be paid for. Didn’t Sky Sports show us the way?

As an aside, I wonder what Sky make of the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, TalkTalk, BT, Arqiva, Channel 5 joint venture for on-demand television services being branded YouView. Personally, I think it’s a really smart name but I can imagine some trademark lawyers had much fun (and decent bonuses) clearing it. The partners in the venture were, no doubt, intrigued to read research from Dynamic Logic telling us that ‘TV commercials repurposed as online ads perform less well on many metrics than videos especially developed for the online space’. I wonder how many created-for-television ads are run by those companies on their sites versus copy created especially for an online audience? I’d wager there’s more research on this to come as the survey also suggested television copy performed better under some circumstances. How are creative and planning-shops to use this do you think?

In other news, is the EU really cracking down on targeted advertising or are they making some sensible privacy suggestions? As we have noted before, privacy is key and I’m sure we, as an industry, can achieve the right balance. Perhaps noises-off (from Brussels) will get the industry there a little more quickly. The EU is also reported as having suggested that the use of Flash cookies for some purposes as illegal under European law. Clarity on this matter is, surely, a good thing and I’d be interested in seeing a proper ruling, if anybody has one.

This week, privacy was cited as a reason some people are choosing not to opt-in to SMS/MMS advertising. Research from the Internet Advertising Bureau and the Direct Marketing Association found, ‘64% of those surveyed did not want to opt-in to SMS or MMS because they thought they may have to share personal details’. The research also noted that 75% of respondents said, ‘they would be happy to opt-in to such services, given the right incentive, such as attractive offers, money off vouchers or priority service from a brand’. I wonder how good the offers would have to be to get that many people opting-in to more than a minimum of brand communications this way? Surely, just a few become intrusive very quickly.

Now, we’ve talked about Borrell Associates research numbers many times over previous weeks, noting in particular their research suggesting a bumper cash bonanza ($16 billion in 2011) for local (digital) advertising. Well research firm BIA/Kelsey thinks that is a little conservative. They suggest that local online already has 15% of a $133 billion local market (predicted 2010 numbers). eMarketer reports, ‘By 2014, BIA/Kelsey expects nearly one in four local ad dollars to be spent on digital’ which is pretty impressive, don’t you think?

As with other editions of ‘Last Week In Digital Advertising‘, this week’s scan of the digital advertising news shows that the industry has come a long way but also has a long way to go. It’s not surprising to have heard a number of suppliers at last week’s ad:tech conference bemoan the technical confusion arising from our industry: which technologies should be adopted and what can they do for their businesses? At least one mainstream publisher suggested there were simply too many technologies around and there wasn’t enough time to evaluate them all. We did hear that a data-driven display market is inevitable (so, you’re sunk if you don’t have your privacy in order) and brand safety is paramount (to both advertisers and publishers, who don’t want the wrong advertisers compromising their content).

As with any other modern business, it seems transparency is the key.

Curns’ Ad Links for 19 August 2010

Today: more numbers that mobile is growing; Facebook places launch and more on digital privacy – collected for your ease and enjoyment.

Last Week In Digital Advertising #2

So, where did we leave off? Well, it really does seem like a the conversation was broken mid-stream as we find ourselves more-or-less at the same point we finished on. There remains considerable discussion around the Wall Street Journal’s ‘investigations’ into advertising tracking. ClickZ asked, perhaps a little hysterically, if this was the end of behavioural targeting and challenged everybody – including consumers – to be aware and modify behaviours where necessary. Sage advice.

One week in, and I’m already moving things around – but you don’t want to know about that, do you? It’s just to confuse you a little. I’m taking my cue from Inception: create something that everybody thinks they understand and then throw in the curve ball.  Suffice to say the ‘product’ guy in me was thinking that my little review of the week is best located somewhere that allowed me to do more than just write this weekly missive which is why it’s moved here.  I have no idea what the ‘do more’ bit actually is – so you’ll have to hang around (or, I imagine, you could ask Mystic Meg).

So, where did we leave off?  Well, it really does seem like a the conversation was broken mid-stream as we find ourselves more-or-less at the same point we finished on. There remains considerable discussion around the Wall Street Journal’s ‘investigations’ into advertising tracking. As @exchangewire asked, “When is this hysteria going to cease”? Here they are, asking it. ClickZ asked, perhaps a little hysterically (but only in a journalistic sense, you understand) if this was the end of behavioural targeting and challenged everybody – including consumers – to be aware and modify behaviours where necessary. Sage advice.

USA Today claimed in what,  sadly, will not be the last of the cookie puns, “these ‘cookies’ aren’t tasty; you’re left hungry for privacy” but at least published an opinion piece, in which Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the US Interactive Advertising Bureau, asked people not to fall for the “wild debate” about websites using “tracking tools” to “spy” on people. And he has a point. A quick hop across to a site called Web Design Resources and you’ll find a piece suggesting digital advertisers “invented advertising technology that would scour through the cookies on your personal machine”.  Such language is neither an accurate portrayal of what’s happening nor helpful in explaining exactly what is going on, so the challenge is to move on from this kind of language to better education.

The Wall Street Journal, of course, printed other opinions too. Jim Harper published an interesting counter-argument, reminding those who need such reminders that cookie debates have been running for, more-or-less, as long as the web has been a major route to media consumption and it was considered an advertising channel. He tried to put some of the extremes of the ‘the cookie monster is coming’ argument into perspective:

“Surreptitious” use of cookies is one of the weaker complaints. Cookies have been integral to Web browsing since the beginning, and their privacy consequences have been a subject of public discussion for over a decade. Cookies are a surreptitious threat to privacy the way smoking is a surreptitious threat to health. If you don’t know about it, you haven’t been paying attention.

He even ventured as far as to suggest that we need to consider the trade off: think about what you get back from allowing cookies to be set but I am not seeing much mainstream media pick up on this. Now, where is all this going? New Media Age, quoted a TNS survey which is may be helpful (although I suspect not) in suggesting 65% of people see targeted ads as an abuse of their privacy, even though 64% welcome more relevant ads. Go figure how we’ll make that work. It’s all in the asking, huh? Obviously, much more discussion – and a lot of work – to come.  And as Tech firms come out to be clear that their data is anonymous, non-personal information, perhaps Bizo Blog, quoted on an AdMosters forum, said it best, “there are no monsters hiding under the bed”.

What else did we learn last week? How about the – not so shocking – information that “Canadians spend more time on the Internet than they do watching TV, listening to the radio or reading newspapers” yet advertisers are not allocating budgets to reflect that? Still, digital ad revenues in Canada got to $1.82B in 2009. Which, if reporting is to believed, is only marginally ahead of predictions for Facebook’s advertising revenues this year (at $1.3B). And yes, I am well aware those two stories are – probably – quoting different versions of the dollar, but it’s a much nicer segue to leave it like that. Facebook is, according to unnamed sources quoted by Net Imperative (in turn, quoting unnamed sources in the New York Times – gee, I can see how these rumours start), planning a strategic alliance with AOL, whose revenue, from subscriptions and advertising, in 2009 was four-times that of the predicted Facebook revenue (at $4.2B) but heading full pace off the end of that pier.

The enormous rise of Facebook was, amongst others, a reason ClickZ posed the question “Social: The Next Frontier of Behavioral Targeting?”. Really, as I noted on Twitter, you do not need the question mark there. Yes, it won’t come as a shock to anybody.

In other snippets, I thought it worth noting BrightRoll’s launch a self-service ad exchange for trading video inventory, as an indicator that online video will need the same sophisticated optimisation, trading and data tools as more ‘traditional’ formats have today. And need them quickly. eMarketer reported that almost 59% of US adults had watched full length TV shows online, “reflecting a shift in the content mix from short user-generated clips to full-length professional content”.

Not much mention of mobile this week, although ClickZ (who must get an award for being my favourite source of news this week), reported that, as mobile advertising becomes something agencies use more and more,  “companies in the space are continuing to attract investment” and cited Apple’s iAd as giving a boost to the market. My little 3 tweets we learnt about iAd (1, 2, 3) was sourced for an LA Times article on the topic but I think those tweets said it all and don’t need repeating.

So, did we reach the end of the week more informed or more confused? I’d love to extend Scott Portugal’s “confused sea condition” metaphor and ramble on about lifeboats and the like. But I can’t extend it any more than I did in a tweet on Friday – so I, sort of, blew that. His article was about ad technologies and how to survive changing market conditions and is worth a read (no Mae West needed). One thing I did want to follow-up on was a report suggesting that “One cannot be confident whether the findings of most IAE [internet ad effectiveness] studies are right or wrong” which is, perhaps, something to think about.

Now, why not comment and follow all this week’s industry news at @curns or even send me your ideas for digital advertising news? Go on, you know you want to.

Last Week In Digital Advertising

The Wall Street Journal’s piece entitled “The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets” influenced much comment around the web throughout the week. There’s a great deal of validity to the piece but, as with many articles about digital privacy, I think, by grouping many of the different tracking stories together without the space for full explanation simply serves to scare more than inform.

admits he was sceptical but this Magic Whiteboard is very clever stuff. My drawing? Not so much.

Apologies for the uninspiring title of this first entry. What can I say, inspiration has left me and run off into the night. Still, it’s probably going to be the only post with images so look at the pretty pictures and ignore the banality of the title. Unless the title becomes a regular feature, in which case I should note, somewhere, that last week began on 2nd August 2010 (Yes, my week starts on a Monday. Hey, I’m nothing but a traditionalist in that sense).

The aim behind this space is to allow a little more commentary on links that I posted via Twitter. 140 characters is great at making you think of ways not to use ‘text speak’ but not a great amount of space to say why you think something is important. And that’s the point of this place – to try to add some context around why I considered last week’s work-related tweets important. Fortunately, I decided not to attempt to justify the personal ones in my tweet feed and, as this week didn’t have a Grand Prix, of the Formula One variety, I don’t have to justify my opinions on that either.

I started the week by moving into a new office (hence the pictures) and being the subject of a press release. I’m only linking to the version without a picture (misplaced vanity?) but I’m incredibly excited to be at aiMatch, I think what’s coming will appeal to many of the biggest digital publishers. However, that’s not the purpose of writing here but, if you’re interested, check us out. And, for clarity, anything I comment herein is my view, I don’t pretend to be representing the views of any of my colleagues (who I know are capable of talking for themselves).

Oh, and the drawing of the rabbit in the hat: there’s a little more information on that on the original Flickr picture (although I am very impressed, I don’t own stock in the company so the review is true!).

But onto the main business of the day. What stories did I link to that need a little explanation about why I considered them important. Well, although I didn’t mention it directly, The Wall Street Journal’s piece entitled “The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets” influenced much comment around the web throughout the week. There’s a great deal of validity to the piece but, as with many articles about digital privacy, I think, by grouping many of the different tracking stories together without the space for full explanation simply serves to scare more than inform. On Friday, I did link to George Simpson’s amusing rebuttal on MediaPost which attempted to point out the WSJ’s apparent hypocrisy as they, according to George, happily say they’ll link the personal data they store to online data they collect along with their “64 third party partners”.  Privacy is something that this industry does take very seriously and I’m all for a more informed discussion because, as I have pointed out before, data is going to be increasingly important in the digital advertising ecosystem to get relevant advertising in front of people. Finally, on this topic, I linked to a video interview the very same WSJ did with Sir Martin Sorrell where he addressed this issue and it was good to hear that, he too, believes hidden tracking to be a problem and that transparency is a good thing.

If reports are to be believed then, according to netimperative, audience targeting – which is what most of the data is used for –  is now the “cornerstone of most online ad campaigns, helping to boost revenue for both branding and direct response” so I handily linked (thank me later) to their 4 steps to avoid behavioural targeting pitfalls. The quoted survey (as @exchangewire pointed out) was based on US figures but, to me, the useful nugget was the confirmation of the higher publisher returns for properly managed audience targeting.

At the start of the week I also linked to the Financial Times’ opinion of digital advertising tracking and note that their editorial acknowledges the advantages of targeted advertising,

There is nothing wrong in principle with advertisers using data about people based on their browsing habits. Such information enables them to place more relevant adverts – ones that are more likely to be of interest – on the sites that people visit. If executed correctly, that can benefit not only publishers but their customers (link)

Sadly, most of the FT’s piece is behind their paywall so I didn’t get to the meat. I hope the extract reflects the content. In the aforementioned WSJ interview, Sir Martin also discussed paywalls, something many digital publishers are paying close attention to, and stated a belief that the ability for advertising to finance media, as has been done in the past, is going away because of industry fragmentation. Nothing new there but timely as Rupert Murdoch was reported to have said that the paywall model was going well (“encouraging” was the word he used, as reported in New Media Age on Friday).

There has been much encouraging news of late about increased ad spend. This week it was the turn of the Irish to announce that in 2009 online advertising in Ireland approached the €100m threshold. To shamelessly steal the other headlines from the IAB’s piece, the online ad sector achieved 10% of Irish ad spend 2009 and 75% of study participants predict growth or strong growth for 2010. There’s much more than those headlines in the original article. I like good industry news, so enjoyed quoting Businessweek’s interview with Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, that, on Facebook, “some advertisers have increased spending by as much as 20-fold or more”. Pretty impressive numbers, huh?

It won’t come as a revelation to hear that much ad spend, for the sake of an easy link I’m guessing in Ireland and on Facebook  as everywhere else, is shifting to mobile. Commsdealer reported that ad agencies are increasingly going mobile with TV losing ground quickly and telecoms.com noted “that competition in the mobile advertising space is getting heated, with Amobee on Wednesday announcing a major European deal with publishing house Gruner and Jahr”. As an industry we have been saying for the last ten years that ‘this is the year of mobile advertising’ but we may be at a tipping point, partly thanks to the popularity of the iPhone. Friday saw the news that UK iPhone users would total 6.4m this year or, to see it another way, the number of iPhones in UK will grow 200% during 2010. One Friday tweet said that I thought Dave Morgan was bold to suggest that mobile’s personal nature, scale, ease of use and great person-to-person-to-place connectivity would lead to location based services devastating local media. I have a feeling his prediction that 25% of their revenue base will be lost by 2014 may not be far wrong. As another of my tweets said this week, “4Sq may (or may not) be a fad right now but localisation & geo-awareness isn’t”. Still, to add some balance The Wall Street Journal (very popular this week, I’ll admit), suggested that some advertisers were still a little skittish about using cellphones for advertising and so were turning more and more to “immersive—and possibly intrusive—mobile ads”.  More at Newest Cellphone Ads Crave Entire Screen.

Now, why not follow all this week’s industry news at @curns or even send me your ideas for digital advertising news.

Specials On The Streets Of San Francisco

It may be jetlag or hallucinations brought on by an overdose of blue cheese dressing but my visit to San Francisco during the last week has convinced me of two things: there are some very smart people in the online ad business and they’d better have a location-aware ad play by the time you’ve finished reading this. If they haven’t got one soon then my first point was wrong.

It may be jetlag or hallucinations brought on by an overdose of blue cheese dressing but my visit to San Francisco during the last week has convinced me of two things: there are some very smart people in the online ad business and they’d better have a location-aware ad play by the time you’ve finished reading this. If they haven’t got one soon then my first point was wrong.

My predications landed on your screen on 1st January, didn’t they? Well 109,440 minutes later (or 17th March as some know it), I’ve seen my three key thoughts in action. If they can get mass market penetration then there’ll be substantial new advertising revenues around. Having seen the pieces come together now I can really forsee huge opportunities for companies that can get scale and reach on mobile devices. And although I am in the spiritual home of internet start-ups, the tool that proved my point was created in New York and I’ve been using it in London for some time believing there was something in it. It;s the tool that made me unelected mayor of two coffee shops (who should read what I have to say and get me a fee coffee): Foursquare.

Foursquare is a location-aware social network mobile game (just count those buzz words and cash your VC cheque now). In a nutshell, tell your friends where you are, collect points and leave tips about great things to do. Check-in (identify your current location) on your mobile phone wherever you are (my check-in stats are here). The game element; points, value and status adds to the fun. Wikipedia says there are 450,000 members/players as I write this.

As I wandered San Francisco I’d check in occasionally. You get more points the first time you check-in so, as I hadn’t been in town for 10 years, every check-in was a stack of points in my own personal game. But here I saw something new. A little “Special Nearby” flag would appear. Check the special and you’ll discover offers on places nearby: $1 drinks, a frozen yogurt discount or something for the mayor. Visit the location; check-in and show your mobile phone to the retailer to claim your discount or freebie. Simple, elegant and it really works. There should be no reason why London is not offering as many specials right now but, if it is, I’m going to the wrong places. In Frisco I just kept coming across them in the central area.

This all ticks at least three of my prediction boxes just 10 weeks after I wrote them down (I’m not claiming to be Mystic Meg just that the collision of these ideas proved themselves to me a little sooner that I thought they would)! Tick one: it is location based and the specials are near where you are now. Tick two: most specials are, effectively, coupons which you show to redeem. Tick three: it’s real time (by which I mean the offers are available near you now: I haven’t determined if the venues offering the reward are always open when you see the “Special”). Tick, tick, tick.

I have no idea if it will be Foursquare that’ll go big with this (they need more people in more places to be playing) but it is showing what a world of location-aware advertising could be like and that’ll be a very appealing world to a lot of retailers. As the number of advertisers grows a little user targeting (to ensure, of all the offers here, it’s the right one for me) will be needed but generally the people who will see your advertisement will be in the right place at the right time. It’s an ad proposition with less wastage and great measurability and that’s the special most business would like.

Now, I’m checking-in at the airport to head home to try a check in at Paul A Young Fine Chocolates who are, apparently offering get free award winning chocolate truffles if you prove you’ve checked-in.

In Recovery Mode

For most of the weekend before last (and parts of the week either side) I was in Amsterdam at IBC. IBC is essential an enourmous broadcasting technology conference & exhibition; although its styling itself for the electronic media industry.

How long does it take to recover from a week in Amsterdam? Given it’s now Monday, I will say about five days. Of course, your mileage may vary etc. etc.

For most of the weekend before last (and parts of the week either side) I was in Amsterdam at IBC. IBC is essentially an enormous broadcasting technology conference & exhibition; although its styling itself for the electronic media industry. While the focus appears to me to be technology there is, apparently, a decent representation from the creative side of the industry. It’s been around for years and it’s quite important to many in the broadcast sector. While I’ve known about it for a long time, and have watched colleagues go before, I’ve never been myself. Upon arrival at the conference, prepare yourself: I found the size quite daunting. I suspect extensive, advance planning your visits/meetings etc. is the key to the experience.

Friends often ask me about this kind of event. Is it a trade show, conference, place for old friends to meet/excuse for a drink? Well, I know that this time I probably encountered the lot but I have never been so exhausted after a conference in all my life which is why it’s taken me five days to get the photos up onto Flickr. Although the hotel that they put us up in was very nice, central & restful; there is a lot (an awful lot) of walking. Tip: take a map showing the location of the RAI conference centre and your hotel. Walking between the two may be a trek but it saves waiting for the cabs or trams as the centre closes each day.

The thrilling thing (at least for me) was that it was the culmination of many months of work to have our advertising management tool deliver targeted, addressable advertising to video on demand systems. Microsoft, of course, had a fantastic stand in the Topaz lounge where all sorts of great technologies were being showcased. Check out some of the things Silverlight can do. But for me, the television screens in the corner connecting AdManager to Mediaroom were what it was all about. This meant that I stood, for many hours, watching the same video clips and advertisements (and I still want a pizza despite – or, perhaps because of – seeing a pizza ad several hundred times) but the response from customers, partners & prospects was great. You can read about the Mediaroom Advertising Platform on the official press rele

ase for the event.

I think targeted, addressable advertising is future for advertising; and I don’t think that’s a big announcement at all. Many people in advertising will say they’ve been doing it for years. What’s direct mail advertising, after all? However, in the digital world the key issue will be defining what is meant by targetable or addressable. Many years ago we used ‘targeting’ to describe how we were able place an advertisement on a particular page on a web site. Other areas of the advertising industry have used it describe demographics or audience segments. Isn’t Amazon’s “customers who bought” suggestions a great form of highly targeted promotion? The main problem is that we have no standard, industry definition of what we mean by targeted or addressable. Amazon knows my purchase history – it should be easy to target on that. But what about mobile or television advertising? How to we define what’s targetable. I agree that we still have some research to do in this area.

As an aside, it’s worth recognising that with little effort, many things are targetable, including personal data. But that’s not what I am referring to here. Privacy policies, user information, declared data etc. are all the scope of legislation and deserve a better piece of writing than this. No, I’m suggesting that the industry simply need to standardise what it means targetable advertising as a starting point for us all.

There were plenty of other people demonstrating similar things in this and related fields. It’s interesting to see that the television business is not, contrary to the predictions of You Tube doom, standing still. If IBC is anything to go by there’s a whole heap of innovation for those of us who watch television which could dramatically change our experiences. I’m looking forward to seeing which make it to the mainstream.

Apart from watching television advertising all day, Amsterdam was a fun place to be. It being my birthday in the middle of it all there was a desert with a sparkling candle in it, presented to me a great steak restaurant, whose name I have lost and, therefore, can’t recommend. Thanks to all my UK colleagues for that. After we had packed away, there was a canal tour to pass an hour or two before heading to the airport, arranged by some of my US colleagues (some of whom had not visited Amsterdam before).  There was even a bar showing American football and a late night team of my US friends trying to explain the rules to me. I’m not certain I mastered them, I’m afraid. Sadly, there wasn’t enough time to catch up with my old friends from my days in the radio distribution business. Hopefully, another year.

It was an exhausting week but a great glimpse of where we are taking the technology.

Disclaimer: the views here are my own and are not necessarily the opinions of my employer (who sent me) nor customers (who I spoke to while there). You have read the full disclosure, haven’t you?

 

Update: 29 September: Added some links to related commentary at Connected TV.

Moscow: War & Advertising In A Week

I went to Moscow to plan an ad-serving implementation but they went to war as I arrived. I missed the war but met smart, interesting people.

I suspect that I am in the middle of the one of the more (if not, most) interesting two weeks in my working career. Yesterday, I returned from Moscow some 1500 miles to the north east of where I type this and tomorrow I am flying 4800 miles, or so, in the opposite direction to Seattle. Russia to the USA. I could be running my own little cold war had Mikhail Gorbachev not done the world a service and taught us all a new word, perestroika, some 21 years ago. It’s possibly my only word of Russian, although I am reminded that we were all happy for glasnost freedoms; even if that meant 30,000 Muscovites had to queue for a beef patty in January 1990 in some kind declaration of the freedom to Supersize ones self. I suspect the Nobel Peace Prize committee didn’t cite Pepsico’s opening of a Pizza Hut when making the award to Gorbachev in 1990. Anyway, it appears the citizen’s of Moscow have, since dissolving the USSR on Christmas Day 1991, embraced consumerism and the market economy to such an extent as to make the upcoming Christmas Day 2008, Moscow-style, a very expensive affair indeed. Truly, the most expensive place I have ever visited. I imagine American Express do very well out of it all, much to the consternation – one imagines – of any members of the Politburo who may be looking down on this megacity.

As I left Heathrow on a, if I am honest, patched-up jet, some parts of the Russian army were taking a less tourist-like approach to Georgia’s South Ossetia, some 3700 or so miles from Moscow. Tbilisi and Moscow have disputed this territory for years. Depending who you ask, some may tell you that the Republic of South Ossetia is a country in itself but I think you’ll, generally, only get that answer from the people around about Tskhinvali (that’s South Ossetia’s capital should your geo-political globe not be to hand right now). In case you hadn’t worked it out, this isn’t an essay on political tensions in the South Caucasus but the dispute is relevant as my parents currently reside in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. In a nutshell, I fly into Russia one way while my parents evacuate ahead of an advancing Russian army. Less than a week ago they were on a bus heading to Yerevan watching Georgian tanks roll back towards me.

History and geography lessons aside, the thought that the country you are visiting is, regardless of a legal definition, at war with another country doesn’t fill your heart with joy or put a spring in your step. However, and this is the unsatisfactory climax to which I have been building these opening paragraphs, the people I met in Moscow were, unfailingly, concerned about my parents’ safety and went out of their way to help me get status updates. I image ringing the international operator and asking for trunk line to Tbilisi so I can ask about the weather would have got me on some kind of watch list. And that sums up my experience of Muscovites: warm, interested and friendly.

I was there to work on a digital advertising project with some people from a major publisher and, in the course of the last week, I’ve met with a large number of people generating digital content from news and sport to managing social media platforms and finding ways to generate advertising interest. The experience has, like many of these projects, shown me that the digital advertising business is truly global and facing more-or-less the same challenges and pressures. Interestingly, because one of the key drivers of this project was to increase display advertising relevancy without the need to serve-up more and more ad placements, we had some detailed conversations that expanded on my thoughts to the mobile conference earlier in the year: understand that each member of your audience is unique and, with the right infrastructure, digital advertising shouldn’t need to drown out the real content they are there to read so that you can make some return.

Hypothesising digital advertising’s future wasn’t the only reason for my visit. I needed to evaluate the the ways in which the technology that I represent fits into an existing workflow and how disruptive a new system implementation may be. The online advertising world has grown, in the fourteen or so years that I have been involved, organically. By that I mean we learnt lessons from our initial trials (hey, I logged on to hard-code ads on Christmas Day many years ago) and gradually adapted them. Software that solved problems ten years ago is still being actively developed today and being taken in many more directions than we could have imagined. As a result I often find customer processes that developed alongside the advancing technology are unique, (occasionally) misunderstood internally and inefficient: systems that too often rely on knowledgeable human gate-keepers or spreadsheets tucked on a machine in the corner. It’s an issue that I see the industry as a whole addressing in different ways but one that acknowledges what we refer to as ad-serving technology needs to integrate into wider business systems. One of the most delightful parts of my visit this week was that the customer I met had a complete understanding of their own processes before I even sat down and I was able to map them onto our products & plans with relative ease.

Although we had a lot of work to complete in the days I was there, and in spite of almost stranding myself in the Microsoft Moscow office for the night (tip: pre-book taxis), I managed to view Red Square and the Kremlin at night. I bought, what appeared to be, the world’s most expensive Beef Stroganoff (but I was sat looking at the Kremlin at the time); saw how the locals take a taxi without having to re-mortgage their house and got an all too brief guided tour (although we didn’t get to ride in the ‘special’ lane). I made it back to the airport – and to the sight of a almost new bmi plane – convinced that the digital entrepreneurs in Moscow will be creating some amazing products in the next few years and that they, perhaps better than some organisations I’ve worked with over the years, understand that developers need to eat. Such insight means that finding the way to make products efficient and advertiser-friendly is central to their thoughts. I’d love to go back but, perhaps, I’ll wait for hostilities to cease.

And now to pack for that flight in the opposite direction. I imagine my own internal war, the one where the jet-lag armies move in on the disputed territory of sleep, will be declared some time on Monday. In the meantime, my thoughts are with all sides impacted in South Ossetia and hope they find a speedy resolution.

Disclaimer: the views here are my own and are not necessarily the opinions of my employer (who sent me) nor customers (who hosted me). You have read the full disclosure, haven’t you?

Nice, Mobiles and TeleMedia

The session I was speaking at, ‘The New Monetisation Paradigm: Content, Advertising, and Markets of One’, was surprisingly well attended given the 4pm start time: conferences can be long hard days and 4 o’clock is certainly more ‘retire to the bar’ time than ‘explore new business model opportunities that can generate revenue through advertising’ time.

Last week I was in Nice, which is nice, especially in the sunshine. Truthfully, temperatures were hotter than I feel comfortable in and I had to be really careful as I’d failed miserably to plan for such heat and forgot hats and suncream. Luckily, the bars on the beach all have umbrellas for shade. And beer used for cooling purposes.

I don’t recall ever having been to Nice before, so I was unprepared for the rich and the beautiful people wandering around. Bernie Eccelstone’s doppelganger, in the nicest sense of that word, was drinking beers at a beach-front bar on Thursday afternoon which was unsurprising as the Formula One circus was in town, or rather, in the next town; the Monaco Grand Prix revving its engines in preparation for Sunday’s race. Sitting here a few days later I can tell you that Lewis Hamilton won which means the bruises are worse as I have been kicking myself for not extending my visit and catching, at the very least, some practice circuits. Possibly a golden opportunity missed.

Fortunately, I was prepared for the TM Forum Management World 2008 conference which I was speaking at. I don’t usually speak at this kind of event (large conference) but was looking forward to it, especially as I was in one of the break-out rooms speaking to audiences with an interest in ‘Advertising & Monetizing TeleMedia Services’. The conference is aimed at the telecoms business in general with sessions ranging from ‘End-User Device Management’ to ‘Using SDF/SDP for Rapid Service Deployment’ and not an advertising-specific event. In fact, Microsoft was speaking on a whole range of topics unrelated to the ad technology world I’m used to working in (See also MSFT Press Pass). The session I was speaking at, ‘The New Monetisation Paradigm: Content, Advertising, and Markets of One‘, was surprisingly well attended given the 4pm start time: conferences can be long hard days and 4 o’clock is certainly more ‘retire to the bar’ time than ‘explore new business model opportunities that can generate revenue through advertising’ time.

Given it’s not an advertising-driven conference I wasn’t sure exactly how to pitch the presentation of Microsoft Advertising’s view of monetisation opportunities so I opted for a general view of display-based advertising markets, value & opportunities in a multi-screen environment that a Telco could easily provide. My co-presenters, Grant Lenahan from Telcordia Technologies and Gary Galinsky from Call Genie had taken slightly different views of advertising options on mobile, incorporating non-display opportunities (which include SMS messaging and ad-funded calling). All together, I think the three stories gelled into a very intriguing story for the operators’ representatives in the audience.

Thankfully, all three if us had taken these different approaches to the idea of monetising services which meant that, while we were in overall agreement, our presentations were sufficiently different for the audience. I’ve found one of the downsides of some speaking engagements that are put together by third parties is a lack of, if you’ll pardon me, engagement with your fellow speakers. Last week, I don’t believe it really mattered as there were good stories to tell.

I focused on the Microsoft Advertising suite of tools to tell my story of ‘connected advertising’ which, in a nutshell, suggests that advertising should no longer be considered separate by medium. Advertising is a conversation, a long-term engagement or a multi-layered pitch to a consumer. It’s not a 30 second radio spot, a 728 banner or mobile coupon. It’s all those plus relationships from other communication tools or social sites and a compelling future, at least for me, is one where advertising messages know this and ensure you’re not burned by messages nor are you swamped by irrelevant promotions. Advertising becomes both connected and smart.

So, where does mobile fit in? Well, my co-presenters were able to give compelling success stories for monetisation today: and some things are a long way from traditional thoughts of advertising. My pitch, if you like, was more of a future think-piece. The dots are not connected yet but they could be. I wanted to ask the audience to forget traditional notions of advertising and think how advertising to customers may become part of a larger communication through connected technology. I believe that’s better for everybody and I wanted to hear what they had to say about it.

The discussion that followed the presentations was fascinating for me. I come from a background of working with content owners who need to generate revenue via advertising to provide the services they’re offering. Much of the audience didn’t come from that perspective; many were – understandably – unfamiliar with advertising processes and the roles each player in the ecosystem fulfils. Many represented the service provider in the mix who may, for example, be providing a gateway for others to advertise rather than sell media space themselves. It’s a very different viewpoint and I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of adapting my experiences to a different environment. Only the future will show which way it will play out and, unlike the Monaco Grand Prix, I can’t sit here and tell you who the winner will be.

Disclaimer: the views here are my own and are not necessarily the opinions of my employer nor of the conference management. You have read the full disclosure, haven’t you?

End Of Term Party

Thanks to all of our customers for making 2006 a great year. To celebrate we threw a little party.

Accipiter 2006 London Christmas Party
Accipiter 2006 London Christmas Party

When you walk into a bar and they have created an orange cocktail for your Christmas party, what on earth would you think? As you can see from the photograph our company logo contains a fair amount of orange so, perhaps, it’s not surprising but it was an interesting twist and an excellent introduction to a superb evening. We throw a customer party each year to say thanks them and also because it’s great to see them. I think they also appreciate the fact that they get to meet people in the industry – sometimes, competitors – that they wouldn’t otherwise talk to. I introduced two London based radio stations to each other. They’re less than ten minutes walk from each other’s offices yet these on-line guys had never met. As it’s that time of year, I’d like to say thanks to all our customers for making 2006 a memorable year for us. Thanks to those of you who travelled from overseas to be with us. Have a great Christmas and we look forward to working with you in 2007.

What Is An Ad Impression?

Lots of publishers I have spoken to get a little confused when their ad impressions counts are different to their page impressions. So my goal here is to try and identify the common reasons for the differences. The fact that advertising systems counts ads not pages is the first key difference.

The other day, I wrote, what I thought was, a handy guide to the basic web measurement concepts of page impression, visit and unique user metrics. Haven’t read it? Please do so before reading this one.

Back? This time I’m going to talk about a new impression metric that is often confused with the measurements I spoke about last time: the ad impression. To those of us in the digital advertising tech business the ad impression is our measure of scale and value for a website. However, our measurement counts advertisements and not most of those other things that I talked about last time.

How do they differ then?

Last time I noted that a page impression was counted every time somebody viewed a page of web content. That page, however, may have three or four (and often, many more) advertisements on it. Our industry, therefore, counts the number of times advertisements are shown. So, one page impression may be one ad impression but it may also be three ad impressions depending on the number of advertisement spaces a publisher has built into their pages. It’s important not to confuse them as these impressions are very different.

Lots of publishers I have spoken to get a little confused when their ad impressions counts are different to their page impressions. So my goal here is to try and identify the common reasons for the differences.  The fact that advertising systems count ads not pages is the first key difference.

Secondly, the advertising system will only count an advertisement impression when it is asked, by the browser, for the ad. It is not inconceivable that the advertisement system may not get the request for the ad and, therefore not count it (if the ad system is broken, or if it is slow, then the user may not wait around for the ad). Result: the page impression is counted but not the ad impression(s).

Thirdly, advertising systems try not to count robots, spiders and other automated web systems that make the web work for us but do not represent a human actually looking at an advertisement. After all, a computer is not really in a position to buy a new car.  I noted last time that when counting page impressions then those things should not be counted either. However, if the system measuring your pages is configured with a different list of what is – and what is not – a web robot then some pages may be counted when the advertising system might not count – or vice versa. Ideally, vendors of both systems would be using the same list but, sometimes and for many different reasons, they can’t. So the result is that a page counting system may not quite be counting the same people that an advertising system may be counting. The main thing here is that this is OK.  The systems have different counts because they look at different things. You know sometimes there are apples and sometimes oranges.

The next reason for the difference is simply to do with the way websites are set up. Many sites do not put advertisements on every page on their site. It may sound obvious but, if there is no advertisement placed in the page, it’s never going to count as an ad impression  I once spent a day trawling through the data for a very large, well-staffed, UK website to help explain differences in page and ad impression counts and I discovered hundreds of pages that contained no ads. The site had sprawled and their site management systems were simply not inserting all the right codes. The clever coders and designers who build websites sometimes miss this. There’s a whole other post about how, if your site is ad-funded, advertising should be part of the design process – but I digress.

Ask your web development team to look at all the places where there are advertisements on your site but they don’t call the ad-server to deliver them. This is often referred to as ‘hard coding’ because the advertisement code is hard-wired directly into the web page rather than designed to ask the ad-server to select an ad. This is a very common cause of differences between website page counts and ad impression counts. It’s often done because the ‘hard wired’ ad will be around for a long time the publisher does not want to pay the ad-serving company to continually select exactly the same advertising copy in exactly the same space. But, as with our examples above, if the ad-server is not asked to select the advertisement it can’t do its job and count it.

It’s worth pointing out that sometimes the ad-server appears to be asked for lots of advertisements and, even when accounting for multiple ads on a single page, the number looks too high. Here it’s worth checking that the ad-server code is correct on the page. Because ad-server code tries to do clever things to account for the many ways in which people view your site (with multiple browsers that support different standards) then incorrectly formatted code may ask for several advertisements when only one is displayed. The result is too high counts because the ad-server is unable to determine exactly which one will be displayed so assumes they are all valid. This is one for your coding team.

Also in the ‘too many ads counted’ category is the fact that you must be comparing the same site boundaries. Is your ad technology serving advertisements into other places? If it is, then we must ask if the code on those ‘other’ places is correct or is telling the ad-server that the request is coming from somewhere else. Most ad-servers rely on the code on the page, the ad-request, to know where the ad is being delivered to. If your request is telling the system it should be selecting an advertisement for Site A but it is, in reality, Site B then the ad system may assign the count to the wrong site (worse, it will also select an advertisement that may not really be valid for Site B).  Is the right code in the right place?

Finally, there are a couple of other reasons that add to the differences. Some people actively block advertisements using special software in their browser. If they do then the advertising system won’t count them. Some ad systems  also try to track suspicious behaviour (such as people clicking lots of times on advertisements trying to inflate the click-rate to make the site look better or generate additional revenue). If such browsers are detected then they are often blocked and removed from the advertising counts while they may not be removed from the page counts. Again, it’s valid because we’re looking at website traffic and audiences from different perspectives.

You also need to take into account the time is takes the advertisement to be served. Advertisers generally prefer that ads are counted when the entire piece of copy or creative is delivered. If it’s one of those rich, interactive, animations it could be taking longer than you imagine for all the file to be delivered. If the count happens once all content is delivered to the user’s browser then your ad-system may not be counting the ad for a short period after the ad looks like it’s been shown. This is one to check with your ad-server technology vendor. When do they initiate the count?

Thus, your web analytics and your ad-impression counts may differ for valid reasons. The key is to ensure that, if you rely on advertising to fund your endeavours, you’re giving your advertising system the best change of showing an advertisement in all the places you want them to appear.  Make sure your content control systems are inserting the right codes in all the right places.

In summary, if you’re doing all the checks and you’re content systems are inserting the right codes then your advertising system is doing the best job it can to count the advertisements for you. If it gives you a different number then you shouldn’t worry too much – there’s an acceptable difference that you can work with.

Update: it’s taken me over two years to write one of the pieces I suggest above: the one about if advertising is central to your offering then you need to think about it in the design process. Read Get Your Product Right Or Get In The Liferaft for some insights there.

Behavioural Targeting

I believe we have a lot of research to do to find the true value of inferring things from on-line behaviours. Inferences are either too simple or require a vast amount of data and analysis (which is expensive).

It’s Easter Monday (for my US friends, that’s a public holiday in here in the UK). What did you do this Easter?  I’ve been visiting family, and eating Easter eggs, in Shropshire and Wigan. I’ve been observing Roman ruins in Wroxeter (or ‘Viroconium’ as it was known when it was the fourth largest city in Roman Britain). I watched the film, Walk The Line, at Shrewsbury’s new(ish) Old Market Hall cinema. A lovely weekend.

So, if you were in the advertising business what adverts would you like to show to me now that I have shared this information with you? You know a little about my likes if not a lot about my dislikes.  Based on what I’ve just told you, would you promote a new film (Walk The Line was released in February so I am not sure it says I am big on new releases) or a new chocolate bar (I did extend my Cadbury’s love affair) or would you promote something historical? I am not sure there’s a movie based on Roman chocolatiers, but if there is then let me know!

Now, I know you’d actually profile me, determine that Walk The Line didn’t literally mean I loved country music but the fact that I bought Easter eggs and spent time with family firmly plants me into a demographic and the result of it all will be an ad for the new Volvo, or something similar. You get the idea. We can leap from A to C via M without much justification, can’t we?

This, however, is an issue I am struggling with at the moment at work. I know, I once promised not to write about work here but I’m not dwelling on specifics so go with me.

I’ve pretty much spent the last few weeks working with customers on how to implement behavioural targeting concepts for their web sites and if those concepts are right for their advertisers based on the customer’s behaviour patterns on the site.  Behavioural targeting isn’t actually as scary as I suspect some people think it is. It just suggests, anonymously, that if you have performed an on-line search looking for a new car then you might be looking for a new car. Now, if you do this on a car web site then it’s pretty much given you’re in the market. It’s not rocket science. Nobody knows who anybody is and I’m only working with technologies that do not share data between marketers. This way my behaviour on one site is not shared anywhere else. I’ve previously worked with technologies that tried to do this on a network level but it didn’t work then as the tech was too slow. DoubleClick moved away from network profiling in 2002 but, of course, technology has moved on and those working in that space should be able to be much more efficient.

The digital advertising industry is awash with people talking about behavioural targeting. I believe that reputable organisations will always exceed privacy legislation and protect their customers better than the law demands. After all, it’s in their interest. However, behavioural data requires so much analysis that I have to question if it is right for everybody. Certainly, publishers with a large user base who come back regularly might get some insight that would be useful to advertisers but we, as consumers, are complex beasts. Our likes and dislikes change based on many factors; advertising can help inform and change my mind and really don’t you want to advertise to all people interested in buying a car? Why just those who currently think it should be a new car? But what about my friends network or family? Aren’t they just as influential? We can’t look at their behaviours too but they are important in how I make decisions. Isn’t behavioural targeting too limiting then?

I believe it works in the right places. I believe that the technology I am working with is the best of breed for publishers. It’s anonymous and doesn’t enable any kind of network sharing so it’s good for consumers too. But finding the right use cases is the hard part.  How do I prove that this technology is working. I think we’ve some investigation to do yet.

I know that I am over simplifying arguments to make my point but I believe we have a lot of research to do in this space to find the true value of inferring things from my on-line behaviours. Inferences are either too simple or require a vast amount of data and analysis (which is expensive). I’ve got to spend the next few weeks reading a lot more data on this. If you’ve got anything that would be helpful then you know where I am.

Disclaimer: These are my view and not those of my employer. You have done the whole full disclosure thing, haven’t you?

Banners & Bazaars

Since the bubble burst in 2002 we’ve seen a move to outsourcing as more and more customers (and potential customers) want us to host the ad-serving infrastructure and they simply operate the system

Apparently, Cairo is the largest city in the Arab world. I’m sure that’s the kind of fact that can be checked on Wikipedia. It’s also packed with people, hot and wholly different from anywhere that I have been before. And it’s fascinating in a slightly “am I out of my depth” way. A colleague and I set off about 12 days ago to undertake a couple of days providing a range of professional services, including installation and training courses, on our primary ad-delivery technology. We set off a day or two early as we’re not presented with opportunities to visit this part of the world too often (actually, I’m never presented with opportunities like this). The lovely people at LINKdotNET helped us source a guide/driver for the Saturday so that we could get the most of our weekend before the worked started on the Monday morning. I have to admit that, sat in the over-priced Heathrow airport restaurant before we departed, I was wondering what on earth I was doing jetting off to somewhere warm just days before Christmas. Let’s face it, the I’m-sorry-I-didn’t-have-time-to-buy-a-gift excuse doesn’t work when the person expecting to tear off gift-wrapping has been looking at Flickr’s uncanny knack of suggesting you’ve been off having a ball in the sunshine while they’ve been struggling through the Oxford Street crowds.

What’s that? Don’t put the pictures on Flickr. Ooops, too late.

Before I forget, this was work. There was quite a lot to do in fact. I should never forget that training and implementation courses are always more complex when somebody else is in another room configuring software, changing settings and generally doing the ‘under the hood’ stuff that you wish they weren’t doing when you say ‘and clicking here works the magic that we’ve spent years developing’. Which of course, it won’t, if they haven’t installed the web-server component at that point. Still, I exaggerate for the story. Things came together pretty well. It’s always interesting working through the set-up in another country but, generally, customers have similar goals so I’m only adapting things to country-specific circumstances rather than trying to work out how we’ll re-develop some core component. I believe that’s one of the advantages of still providing our software for customer’s to run in their own data centres; we can make a set of installation-specific adjustments that are purely for a single customer.

Since the bubble burst in 2002 we’ve seen a move to outsourcing as more and more customers (and potential customers) want us to host the ad-serving infrastructure and they simply operate the system (and before any ad-ops teams come after me with burning torches, I know it’s not simple but, for now, you’ll understand that the word flows better) . Anyway, to my main point. We’re a service provider of sorts. Customers use our service rather than buy our software as a product and that tends to work well. We have the expertise delivering millions of advertisements per day; of tuning the database for the millions of ad interactions; of spotting and filtering the non-human traffic and ensuring that distribution networks deliver content quickly. But, as with every story, there’s an opposite opinion. If you have experience of managing large data projects; of maintaining response times and up-times then you have – most likely – the skills in abundance to manage an advertising infrastructure. My new friends at LinkDotNet are such an organisation; with data centres powering huge web sites popular across the world. Which is why, I found myself, in the corner, merrily suggesting configuration tweaks and obscure settings that might provide functionality in a different way; but one that is more suitable to this customer’s needs. Of course, the deeply technical guys in the room don’t like the changing the systems when all is up and running but I’m all for making operational workflow as easy as possible (see ops guys, I am really on your side).

In turn, we were provided with our own customisations for the visit in the form of our own guide, car and air-conditioning (of sorts). This way we could play tourists for a day with our own schedule and customised route through the city. And, I think, remarkably sensibly of us, it meant the driving was left to those locals who understood the rules of the road. I’d never pass a driving test there. Of course, I might not have to but you understand my point. We did see the Great Sphinx of Giza and visited – even venturing inside one of – the Great Pyramids. We took a boat to dine on the Nile and explored the palaces, mosques, and museums of the citadel, from where Egypt was ruled at one time. The Khan Al-Khalili bazaar is a melting pot of people, sounds, smells and narrow alleyways where it pays to keep your wits about you but pays you more to stop and take in the atmosphere.

There are few countries where you can claim to get out of the taxi and transfer to a camel but, I can say that, because we did. I’m sure our guide saved us a small fortune on that experience and it’s one, I imagine, our colleagues will find amusing when they see the pictures. We did get the company logo onto a pyramid (by subtlety placing a cap on one of the steps rather than spray painting it, you understand) so my covert mission in The City of a Thousand Minarets was completed.

Even after 12 days, I’m still pinching myself at the contrasts between the old world, of pyramids and citadels, and the new of modern offices, data centres and configuring banner ads. There’s so much to see that I’m hoping that we’ll do more business in that part of the world.

And, yes, with 5 days to go I still need to do my Christmas shopping but I think the brief trip to the sun was more than worth it.

My Digital Advertising Orchestra

We gathered customers in a room and asked them what they wanted from our products in the future. Strategy was discussed but not revealed here. Sorry. It was, however, an interesting insight into the dynamics of a group of industry competitors who really shared a common view on the way forward.

Yesterday, we tried something new (well, new to us, anyway). The kind of thing that could have gone horribly wrong had we not got it quite right. We gathered a small group of our customers and, more-or-less, locked them in a room with some of our product and development people to discuss what’s next in online advertising (we did feed them, it wasn’t cruel!). Truthfully, there was no key (although I sat blocking the door for some of the day, but that was to do with the shape of the room) and customers could leave if they wanted to, although if they tried I, in turn, tried to lure them back with coffee (the Dutch said I made it too bitter by plunging too quickly, but that’s another story). It was an interesting experiment and one, I hope, we’ll repeat again.

The first lesson is that managing a group of competing interests like this is akin to conducting an orchestra in that there are many sections who all need to play their part to get the best out of the day. There will be the large string, brass and woodwind sections who have clear ideas what they want from your product and each want to make sure they are heard. Then, of course, there’s the percussion section who seem to fill in the gaps with novel little additions or ideas that hold the other parts together. Fortunately, we had a great conductor in the shape of one of our key product managers from our US office. I guess the rest of us turned the pages on the musical score for the others. Here, my metaphor breaks down and I’ll move on.

I’m not breaking any confidences by suggesting that the key themes are universal to the digital ad-serving business: the industry is maturing and major organisations have moved from wondering what their web presence is all about to how they can make the most money from it and how it integrates into the rest of their business portfolio. I took away a consensus that suggests that the top three things important to the industry are:

  • video advertising is only going to get bigger but measurement metrics are still being figured out
  • ad units are going to get bigger to ensure they make a splash; but we may see fewer units per page
  • understanding inventory availability is a major concern for publishers of all sizes who can sell

and, as all great customers should do, they would like these issues resolved in the next release cycle. Of course, we were given a much deeper insight into what our business needs to do to meet these – and the other less obvious – requirements and industry challenges (do you think I’m going to tell you now?). It was fascinating to see how players in our orchestra interacted, many having never met before. It’s great to see competitors sharing information and, if any of them read this, I’d like to say thanks for your input. I’m sure we’ll do it again. We kept the group small(ish) – more chamber orchestra than philharmonic – so that we could get the best out of the day but if you’d like to be considered for the next one then you’d better be a customer in about 12 months from now!

Now, I’m starting the weekend by heading off to see a solo musician. Tori Amos is playing Hammersmith Apollo in a few hours. I believe she can play the piano rather well. I guess she’ll conduct herself.

Less Clutter On The Air

At last somebody in the commercial radio business has noted that one of biggest reasons to turn off isn’t poor music policy, crap jokes or bad station identity – it’s annoying and repetive radio commercials.

At last somebody in the commercial radio business has noted that one of biggest reasons to turn off isn’t poor music policy, crap jokes or bad station identity – it’s annoying and repetive radio commercials. Somebody in the UK should take on board the Clear Channel approach of trying to make better radio ads and brodcast fewer of them: “Radio is the most difficult medium because there are fewer senses to work with. For the most part, radio ads are a yawn” [source]. With online catching radio in terms of advertising spend (Britain’s Online advertising market will surpass the £500-million mark this year – Independent Online) radio’s revenues may be in for a rocky time. Inn the UK the Online industry may well surpass radio during the next 12 months so it’s important that the industry wakes up and does something to ensure that the recent history of growth and development can be sustained.