feb 26
Five Tips to Get the Most Out of Retargeting : Adform lnkd.in/6vZGkS
feb 25
Ezra Pierce is co-founder at PubSquared.
Advertising is about one thing: persuasion. You put an ad in front of a person, they see it, a desire is created and an action engendered. What’s odd is that this isn’t what our corner of the advertising industry is focused on these days. The industry is currently obsessed, not with great content and persuasive creatives, but instead with the latest and greatest software. That’s perfectly sensible, but I can’t see that lasting. Here’s the thesis: trading technology is having it a moment, but we’re going to reach a new equilibrium and top-notch tech will be table stakes, not something to brag about.
Advertising technology is at a rolling boil at the moment. Venture capital firms have shown a willingness to invest huge quantities of funding to anyone with half a bright idea and a marginal ability to execute. Simultaneously, the barriers to entry have been progressively lowered by the arrival of RTB ad serving, cloud computing and big data infrastructure as commodities. These factors have converged and accelerated the pace of progress in display advertising. The question is, does the innovation continue forever, or is there a natural end point to this progression?
The answer is a bit of both. The problems that are being addressed currently – let’s take three of the big ones – performance optimisation, scale for rich media implementations and creating an integrated and safe demand environment for publishers, are fundamentally solvable. Problems that can be solved, and solved profitably, get solved. The bit of both comes from the factor which profitability plays. There will always be more to do, but at some point it ceases to be profitable to do so.
Let’s just take one of these problems and pull it apart – performance optimisation. The state of the art today is the Demand Side Platform – Invite, MediaMath, Turn, AppNexus, etc. Fundamentally, their approaches to optimisation come down to surprisingly simple factors: how has this tag performed for this creative in the past, how many times has the user seen the advertiser’s creative, perhaps the time of day and day of week, etc. Clearly, there’s more work to be done here in at least two areas: 1) going to more granular levels of analysis of performance and 2) bringing some sanity to the ways in which performance itself is measured. Going granular means finding additional ways of dividing up users – male, female, age, purchasing behaviour (there are people who buy things on the internet and people who never do) and myriad other factors. Dividing allows the buyer to move closer to the correct price for every ad impression. It also has it’s own inherent limits, eventually, when cutting up users more doesn’t yield enough data to generate a statistical significance.
A further catch is that there are diminishing returns to those divisions – knowing the difference between a user in London E1 and W1, great; the difference between age:31 and age:32… not as interesting. There is a threshold at which the increasing granularity stops being profitable. By extension, when marginal improvements decrease in added value, so does the attractiveness of funding new DSPs.
To put it simply – performance optimisation will become a commodity and there’s a reason Venture Capitalists don’t go looking for really innovative potato farmers.
Moving on to measurement, it’s incredible that we’re (almost) all still looking to clicks, post-click conversion and post-view conversions. Take clicks – when did you last click on an ad? Do you think people that click on display ad units are your ideal customers? Take post-view – how are we still measuring conversions on ads that the user probably didn’t see? (Let’s talk about the fantastic PV performance of social networks while we’re on the subject) – and one event get’s all the credit?
There are problems, but again, there are technological solutions. AB testing as standard practice would be a start (and a disaster for ecommerce retargeters) and time in-view would be most of the way to a robust solution to some of the measurement issues. Advertisers will start demanding these things, and they’ll get them. Back to my main point – there are problems in ad tech, but they will be solved and commoditised.
What we’re left with when that happens is the work that media companies and advertising agencies have been at for decades. Creating good content and coming up with gorgeous, persuasive ads. Today’s innovation will be assumed and the focus will return to the irreducible core of advertising… ads and somewhere to put them.
mar 26
What is Adform?
Watch this video and find out how Adform makes online advertisement simple for the planner, relevant for the consumer and rewarding for the advertisers:
Why is display advertising such a drag?
Read more about Adform here: http://www.adform.com
nov 18
Adform Launches Its DSP Solution In Europe; Tight Integration With Existing Ad Server Seen As Key Differentiator: http://t.co/f0xau71p
sep 21
Adform launches their new corporate identity: “Making display advertising simple, relevant, rewarding”: http://t.co/j95cwsqv @AdformInsider
maj 03
mar 23
apr 07
We are finally back after a loooooooooong break! And to kick off, we have a new very useful for all companies running banner display campaigns – The Banner Heat Map:
Today Adform (Ad serving & tracking firm) introduced a new reporting feature – the Banner Heat Map. It allows for deeper analysis of where people interact with your ads, and helps identify what drives consumer engagement.
Example of a Banner Heat Map report that shows clicks concentrate on text and logo
Visualization of clicks on an actual banner can help clients identify banner areas that are most clicked and provide valuable insights on creative execution of the campaign. The Banner Heat Map is a standard reporting feature for all campaigns and heat maps are automatically produced for each ad format.
The Banner Heat Map is also very useful in combination with banners supporting Adform Content Manager – while the Heat Map allows clients to identify the best performing areas; Adform Content Manager enables them to easily edit banner content, thus optimizing campaign performance.
To learn more click here: Adform.com
jun 25
We have already seen Google introduce their Display Ad Builder and ad serving companies like Adform and Eyeblaster also including similar offerings (create-a-banner-easily) in their systems. Today I found a new service reaching out to all those clients that can’t afford to pay unreasonable sums for banners and versioning of them. Pointbanner offers you custom banner ads within 48 hours…
Companies in need of banner ads typically face the choice between creating their own or hiring a professional to create it for them. Many do-it-yourself sites use templates while using professionals can be expensive and time-consuming. Aiming to offer a third alternative, PointBanner promises custom-created banners in just 48 hours for USD 49.
Customers submit a banner request with New York-based PointBanner in three simple steps: they upload their logo, enter their desired text and URL, and then pick a size. Eschewing templates, the company’s design team works on each banner individually, guaranteeing a result for USD 49 within 48 hours. Three free revisions are included for each banner, and an assortment of multi-banner packages are also available with per-banner pricing as low as USD 11.
Much like Inkd, which offers a third alternative in the realm of graphic (print) design, PointBanner seems like a natural next step in the evolution of web advertising, making professional quality more accessible to all. One to adapt locally—or, more broadly, find another area where the niche between cookie-cutter and professional approaches is currently unfilled, and offer a middle ground of your own.
Check it out here: www.pointbanner.com and also have a look at their blog: pointbanner.com/blog
Source: Springwise
mar 12
Yesterday Google introduced their new “interest-based” advertising system. Basically these ads will associate categories of interest — could be sports, gardening, cars, pets — with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view. Then Google ad system uses these interest categories to show you more relevant text and display ads.
Of course questions about user choice and privacy arise, when a system like this is presented. Google try to answer these questions by launching their interest-based advertising with three important features:
- Transparency – We already clearly label most of the ads provided by Google on the AdSense partner network and on YouTube. You can click on the labels to get more information about how we serve ads, and the information we use to show you ads. This year we will expand the range of ad formats and publishers that display labels that provide a way to learn more and make choices about Google’s ad serving.
- Choice – We have built a tool called Ads Preferences Manager, which lets you view, delete, or add interest categories associated with your browser so that you can receive ads that are more interesting to you.
- Control – You can always opt out of the advertising cookie for the AdSense partner network here. To make sure that your opt-out decision is respected (and isn’t deleted if you clear the cookies from your browser), we have designed a plug-in for your browser that maintains your opt-out choice.
Don’t know if this is just another way of saying behavioural targeting but you can read more about the new system over at Google
