Let’s face it.  There are only 10 “top 10″ agencies in the country.  Not 11, not 432, and definitely not over 10,000.  But that is how many total agencies there are in the country.  Tens of thousands.  So if you’re not the huge shop with $1B budgets, how do you move up the agency social ladder by landing new business?  One surefire way is to know your digital media down pat.  It’s certainly the hot item right now and impressing a client in this area is a big advantage.

So, straight from our new book, 30 32 Days To Going Digital: Profitably bringing your advertising agency into the digital world, here is a sneak preview of Day 31, and a great leap toward winning your next big client!

1. More than anything, the best thing you can do to help yourself win a new piece of business is to convince the client to hand over the last six months’ worth of site-side analytics reports. Having online media reporting (search/display) would be helpful, too, but having the site-side data really is a must.  Remember, a website is a company’s storefront that most consumers see first.  You wouldn’t pitch the Taco Bell account without spending time in a few different locations and becoming very familiar with their product and operations, would you? It’s non-traditional but so, so important.
2. If you can gain access to these reports, determine which user actions are occurring most frequently and detect any exit patterns that might be unhealthy.
3. If you don’t get the data, you can still look at the prospect’s site and determine what user actions you think would create the most value to a client.
4. Don’t critique the website design unless you feel confident that your suggestions could likely improve site performance.  For example, “Research shows that using 12-point font rather than 10-point font decreases bounce rate by 12%, and so we recommend making this change.” (Just an example, I’m not sure whether there is any truth to this.) It’s easy to tell a client how goofy their current site looks or even suggest a site redesign; but, unless they’ve specifically asked for this feedback, it can be a dangerous situation to suggest they have a poor site since the person you’re pitching might have made that decision!
5. Once you inventory the desired user actions, whether from actual data or your best guess, determine whether they’re all equal in value or deserve different scoring.  Don’t go too crazy and assign everything values with decimals, but two to three different scoring values might show the client you’ve really done your homework.
6. Assign some basic dollar values to each action to show the client you’re thinking in terms of results for them.
7. Go to quantcast.com and use its media planner product to see an affinity report on visitors to your prospect’s site.  You’ll likely see dozens of sites that offer the very same users and types of users that visit your prospect’s site but others that also will surprise you by having this similar audience.  Sharing these insights in the pitch will show the client you know their audience and can offer knowledge based on real data.
8. If you have a compete.com subscription, log in and view all the search reporting available to tell you about ways users are discovering your clients’ sites.  Compete can also help by displaying where users come from or go to after visiting a prospect’s site.  If you don’t have a log in, give us a call and we’d be happy to discuss how we can work with you on your project.
9. Armed with search knowledge, display site affinity knowledge, and site-side conversion knowledge or guesses, you can create a plan that is highly data-driven and hard to dispute.
10. Determine if and how social, mobile, and video can augment your site, search, and display efforts to achieve your goals.

Any of us at Goodway would enjoy the chance to chat with you more on this topic.  You can ping me at jay @ goodwaygroup . com, or contact us through our web site any time.

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The days where ad networks glamorized themselves as a black box of information which held deep dark “proprietary” data knowledge and secrets is officially over.  We all remember how five and ten years ago we heard outrageous claims of “a billion points of data per month”, and “we harness data from over one million domain-level URLs” in boasting about the breadth and volume of intelligence a network had.  Of course, no one could prove anything, and the networks who made the most outrageous claims were the most opaque. But there is no longer a need for any opacity.  Full transparency is now coming around, so expect to see some previously-made claims debunked, and some technologies that were previously overlooked becoming more valued.  Here’s how you can employ new transparency tools, and avoid being swooned by grandiose claims.

1.      Blind site lists are a thing or the past, or at least they should be.  With ad exchanges now transparently offering 4,000+ sites there is no longer any reason at all to have an opaque site list.  No more “sample sites”, no more “representative” site lists, and there is definitely not a single network left with a “proprietary” site list.  Demand a full, real site list, with the possibility (depending only on inventory avails and CPM paid) that you will appear on every single site being offered.

2.      Fully transparent behavioral data segments and sources: BlueKai changed everything.  Not just with their own data, but the ability to plug into BlueKai and get Bizo, Polk, Axciom, and several other data providers through their system.  There is no network that has more data than the BK exchange, and certainly no network that shows their classification and taxonomy with as much transparency as they do.  Heck, they even offer real monthly forecasting of likely total users in each segment.  So, if you’re looking for a 50,000,000 impression campaign BT’d to farmers, and the BlueKai segment list says there are only 40,000 cookied farmers, do the math because something doesn’t add up.  Get a full taxonomy of the BT data available to you along with an understanding of where that data is sourced.

3.      Make sure you’re running across a significant enough percentage of a site list.  We’ve all seen the networks with 500, or even 5,000 sites, and then wondered if our campaigns ran on 10 sites or 1,000.  If you work with an ad verification company (like Adometry or DoubleVerify) you’ll no longer have to wonder.  These technologies offer domain-level transparency into what the network is running, and you deserve to ensure you are running across a significant enough portion of the sites on the site list you agreed to.

Any other tips? We’d love to hear them.

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If you read our blog you’ll know we are big supporters of ad verification and what it’s doing to keep the DSP and network industry honest.  But with all good things come some inherent trade-offs.  Who hasn’t received a verification report with malware, profanity, nudity, pornography and other categories in big bold letters as to say your client is only running on the worst inventory possible?  You’d think there is nothing good about online advertising, until you look more closely.

The reality is that some malware, at some point, may have been posted on some of these sites.  Or profanity may have been on a user-engaged site but was quickly removed. Or maybe they showed a stock image with someone in a bikini.  It seems that right now the categorization engine companies are making a whole lot of money by using scare tactics and not as much for doing an accurate job of portraying reality to their clients.  So, the next time you get your verification report, forget the scare tactics and big bold letters. Actually click on the sites and go there.  See if it’s truly objectionable content, or if somewhere in some corner of the site someone may have gotten away with something by mistake.

Lest we forget, there is carnage, murders, and terrorism reported in our newspapers and nightly local news every single day.

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It seems the industry has battled for years over 4th party ad calls.  Publishers don’t like them because it’s extra load time.  Agencies and advertisers love them because they are usually there to verify, provide additional data, or serve a very useful function.  The real problem is that with many publishers not wanting or allowing 4th party ad calls, ad tags could very easily integrate 5th, 6th, and 7th party ad calls at this point – there are that many great services that deliver value.  How will the industry tackle this?

First, let’s quickly identify where they’re coming from.  Having an audience measurement pixel, like one from Quantcast, in each ad would sure be nice.  Then we can see the general makeup of the audience who is viewing the ad and whether or not it fits the target we wanted to hit.  Having verification is a must, like a pixel from Adometry or DoubleVerify.  Certainly there are times where two ad servers are used, such as a rich media ad server but then also a standard ad server so all data can be in one place.  We’re up to six (user, publisher, and standard ad server are the first three.)  And more valuable metrics and verification services keep coming up.  How can we integrate this value without hanging up the user’s experience to such that no publisher will accept all this?

One solution is a universal tag container that cookie matches with each of these companies and outright transfers the pixel firing to its own servers.  TagMan is a container solution but it still requires pixels to be fired while the user is on the page.  It delays them do it doesn’t delay load, but if the user navigates away too quickly, the calls aren’t made.  The other solution would be for ad serving companies to buy these other companies and integrate them into their own ad call.  If you’re an ad serving company looking to make a real challenge to DoubleClick, installing all of this functionality within a 3rd party ad server would be enough reason for a whole lots of advertisers to make the switch.

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No one has dedicated more resources to grab online dollars from D.C. political advertising than Google.  They have built a team and offer full service search, display, and ad serving.  This past Saturday there was a great irony, however.

We also handle a significant number of digital political campaigns and for anyone who knows political advertising it is a seven-day-a-week job.  Messages change at any time on any day regardless of the standard advertising work week.  We received a client email at 11am CST Saturday that some text changes needed to be made to a current high-profile campaign.  Luckily we had all the files we needed and our production director had the changes done within an hour.  Our VP of Ad Ops was available to make the change out in our ad server 10 minutes later and the entire change would have taken two hours from start to finish – on a Saturday – with no one at Goodway knowing this change was coming. Except for one problem.

DoubleClick, our ad server and the $3.1 billion ad serving acquisition Google made last year, is down every Saturday for maintenance during the day.  So, despite everything being ready to go on our side we were at the mercy of Google’s engineers making regularly scheduled updates.  It took three more hours for Google to get DCLK back online.  In the meantime, a couple hundred thousand impressions were served.  So, Google… Your efforts to bring D.C. into the digital world are admirable and good for everyone.  But, to do so requires you keep their hours, not the other way around.  How about moving DCLK’s maintenance time to overnight to show your real dedication to D.C.’s digital efforts?

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When ad networks launched ten years ago one of the greatest things about them was the ability to run a campaign across hundreds or thousands of sites and, not only get great performance and value, but get learnings from the campaign.  Because you could see what was performing in which channels or sites from the many, it was like free market research.  At the time it was a great approach and despite the cost of non-performing media to get those learnings, it was innovative and a good value for the time.

Fast forward to now and there is no longer an excuse for “Let’s Run It On Our Network And See What Works” campaigns.  We have become too sophisticated with our data and knowledge of users, brands, and digital media use the LRIOONASWW strategy any more.  Through user-level cookie/data exchanges we now have data on almost every single internet user on the planet.  Some of it is true online-based behavior while some of offline and demographic or psychographic-oriented. Using almost any of this data is going to at least help you pre-target better than the LRIOONASWW strategy.  Second, composite indexing through Compete, Quantcast, or even Nielsen can help you include and remove many sites from a larger list to narrow the buy down before you start.  Sure, there is the chance that a site that indexes an 84 against your brand or category ends up to be a top performer, but it’s a small chance.  More likely is that you’d have to spend thousands of dollars of media on other similar sites that follow the logic of the model and end up not performing well at all.

While this may be self-promotional (it is the Goodway Blog after all), there really is no excuse for RON network buys any more.  Our automotive network, Beep!, now has a custom-build site list for every brand based on clickstream shopping behavior from our partner, Compete.com.  Beyond that, we’re applying cookie-level data to every campaign to enhance performance (to be fair, so do many other networks.)  The bottom line is that there is no more room for LRIOONASWW – demand more from your network partners!

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Today’s digital world is rapidly advancing and almost becoming too innovative for the major publishers/portals to handle.  Seems weird writing that since these are the companies that used to be the bulls of the industry when it came to development and innovation.  But somehow, these companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN  and the larger independent publishers are becoming less eager to work with new technologies until they can be fully vetted and approved by their overstretched tech teams.  I truly understand protecting one’s interests, one’s data and ensuring the end user is being protected from malicious companies.  However, agencies and networks are being asked for more efficiencies, transparency and performance from the media buy which would mandate outside platforms are used within buys. This requires a 4^th party ad call to be made when ads are served.

These creative optimization and verification tools like Doubleverify, Adometry, Adexpose, and Tumri are relatively new and each have their own methodology to how they render the ad call and report on the buy.  All different methodology, but they all require a call to be made to their servers to process the data.  If you’re like 90% of all online display agencies you are probably serving the creative through your 3^rd party server for many reasons.  If you add the optimization and verification code to your tags, you are now making a 4^th party call and in violation of all major publishers and won’t be able to serve across their content until the product is certified or you remove the code.  Seems reasonable if the certification process was a 2 day turn around.  But, that’s not the case and many startup’s and clients are being denied the right to optimize, verify and attribute conversations across these platforms on a site by site basis because the publishers will not certify the technology fast enough.  This certification process can take months and we all know that a month is like a year in the digital space!    The online industry is all about quick thinking, resolution driven start ups that fill a need fast.  The need today is for better transparency, optimization and reporting across the exchanges, networks and DSPs.

Yahoo, Google, AOL, MSN – act now, time is of the essence!

We as an industry need to push these publishers for approval of useful and beneficial startups so we can better manage clients’ media.  This isn’t a request from most advertisers and agencies, it’s a demand.  We’re growing the online display space and taking on larger budgets.  With these shifts in media allocations comes accountability.  We are now seeing more money in the space and we want to keep it here so we can continue to creatively evolve the medium.  Approving technology partners faster and with more accuracy will do the trick.  Declining them simply because you enjoy a wall around your garden is to no one’s benefit. It’s an open source world and every major publisher needs to be comfortable vetting and understanding new products developed outside their war rooms.  Publishers, put the onus on the start ups to provide everything you need to certify their product, but make sure the certification is quick and accurate so we can continue to advance.   Otherwise, we could see budgets start shifting back to mediums where clients are more comfortable, and that benefits absolutely no one.

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Can local out of home be the next medium to integrate personalized location based targeting from your handheld?

Those of us that need mounds of caffeine to get going in the morning love watching the flat screens broadcasting the day’s news at our local coffee shops.  Typically, the news from the NY times is being shown and every so often a perfectly placed local billboard is run.  What a great placement to capture a consumer who is engaged because they have nothing else to do but wait in line and look up.  But what if we could personalize the ads shown to those of us waiting in line?  Currently, the out of home placements are channel focused.  Buyers can purchase channelized inventory based on location –fitness clubs, in-flight entertainment, coffee shops etc.  But lets take it a step further and enhance the targeting based on your location and your mobile social profile.

Revive the place based BT concept by integrating data from your mobile social profile?  It’s not outlandish to think a Foursquare or Gowalla could team up with an RMG(who provides the flatscreens to the businesses) to tie in a personalized themes to the ads when you “check in”.  Imagine *The Mayor* of the local coffee shop walking in the door, your handheld synchs with a wireless feed from the flatscreen, which then pings the server and pulls an ad which is relevant to the users cookie/profile?  Of course strip out all PII  to keep the users identity secure.  RMG has developed the reach and infrastructure, now it needs the help of one of the leaders in location based mobile networks to make this real.

Marketers are always looking for new and exciting ways to build their brands and move product.  By creating a hyper local targeting environment on the “4^th screen”, advertisers can personalize incentives and deliver relevant ads which will drive ROI.  Unique targeting capabilities and advancements in technology is what will keep a platform relevant and cutting edge.

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You gotta love how easy it is to make headlines.  Put the words “Google” and “acquisition” in the same headline and wah-bam!  This time, the initial reaction to Google potentially acquiring Invite Media has many ad networks, publishers, and even agencies very nervous.  At this point, won’t Google simply own all search and more than 50% of the display, including the ad serving portion? The answers are, yes, no, and it won’t matter in the end.

Sure, if this acquisition actually happened then Google would have the potential to own the transactions within a disproportionate amount of the display market (through acquisition) in addition to already owning (through its own entrepreneurial development) the majority of search.  The former is only potential, not reality, though.  The “no” part of the answer comes from publisher reactions within Invite or the to-be-acquired DSP.  You think Yahoo is going to keep Right Media as part of a DSP that is owned by Google?  You think MSN will continue with its integration of AdECN into that DSP if Google has the potential to monetize and dominate its inventory?  Additionally, if you look through most DSPs site lists, Google’s own content network already makes up a huge portion of the inventory available within the interface.  Surely Google can’t be buying a company for its interface for accessing its own inventory… for which it already has an interface!

In the end, though, none of this will matter.  You see, sometimes I really enjoy the ‘I told you so’ dance (which I believe was made popular by Grace Adler of Will & Grace fame).  In September, 2008, I proposed that Google’s massive acquisition spree would end in anti-trust litigation.  With the AdMob deal clearing the pole vault bar by a t-shirt’s thickness, it doesn’t seem that any other major acquisitions that spread Google’s tentacles further into the industry for domination’s sake will pass muster.  Or, if they do, it’ll simply lead to a Google break-up.  Just as IBM pounded its chest in the 80s and Microsoft did in the 90s, Google has done so throughout the 2000s.  But it has yet to happen in history that a tech giant has dominated for more than a decade.  It’s my prediction, again, that this won’t change now.

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Lots and lots of years ago someone realized it wasn’t just a good idea to trade one guy’s wares for another’s.  Money was invented to make these transactions easier by trading a commonly agreed upon currency.  Great idea.  Fast forward to May, 2010, in Miami, FL.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Compete, Inc’s CMO Summit in Miami. The CEO of one of the major WPP companies suggested that the need to find a common currency for measuring online and its delivery is one of the biggest things holding us back.  Someone also mentioned this while asking a question from the audience.  While developing currency thousands of years ago was a good idea, we still see the value in having various currencies around the world rather than a one-world bank and currency. There is a reason for that, and to suggest we should adopt a single “currency” online, not to mention the fact that it’s the biggest thing holding us back, has got to be one of the scariest and regressive proposed behaviors I’ve ever heard come across in our industry.  There are two major reasons for this.

First, there is a need for currency in general but simplifying everything to one currency suggests that marketers aren’t capable of thinking for themselves.  You see, the people suggesting this point lovingly to the GRP/TRP.  I can’t think of a worse currency in media measurement today.  Sure, it’s universally accepted, but it’s accepting the notion of measuring very little because it’s hard and too costly to do any better.  400 people in a DMA of four million have “people meters” and provide a statistically invalid sample from which hundreds of millions of dollars are spent.  THIS is what we want online?  But let’s just say we look to Nielsen for a system.  They have one!  If you want to target Men 25-54 with HHI of $75k+, then pull a Nielsen report that gives you these sites, and then work with Nielsen to tag your creative and they’ll show you a report of (a much more statistically valid sample, mind you) how you delivered against that audience.  Plan, deliver, report, all by the same people who measure your TRPs.  How much easier does it get?  But wait, there’s more!  You can get this report from comScore, Compete, or even free for Quantcast. Why would we want a monopoly on this system the way the TV GRP measurement system works?  It’s certainly not better for it!

But the above assumes that all you want to measure is audience.  This doesn’t even put a scratch in the surface of the real reasons to use online media.  Right audience or not, DR advertisers have been using online effectively to deliver real ROI for years.  At this point, who cares about GRPs or audience – they’ve got money in the bank! And, how many businesses are identical in that they can use the exact same ROI calculation or eCPA metric?  None.  That is the beauty of online.  You can measure what is exclusively relevant to your business, down to the penny, user, and action.  Sounds just awful.

Remember back in 3^rd grade math class how everyone in the room understood something except “that one kid”? The teacher then had to take time to bring that one child up to speed while the rest couldn’t move along in learning anything new.  This is what we’ll get if we try to get everyone on one common currency: the lowest common denominator.  The metric that is so easy to understand it, even the least advanced CMO can understand it.  Is this really what we want?  If not, correct people when they suggest the need for this common currency.  We don’t need anything made simpler, but rather we need people to identify their business goals they can accomplish with online marketing and develop a plan to meet those goals.

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