Monthly Archives: March 2008

Right message, right person, right time. Wrong answer.

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I met with an entrepreneur late last week and he mentioned that he had read my blog (I didn’t believe him either) and that he was curious as to why I think online advertising will continue to be effective when all of the data shows that consumers are increasingly ignoring online ads. I realized that as much as I write about online advertising on this blog, I haven’t really defined what form I think it will take over the coming years to be effective. It turns out that The Cluetrain Manifesto had it at least partially right years ago. To paraphrase and to put in the simplest terms, marketing is about conversations.


The right message. The problem with online advertising to date has been that it has taken the form of delivering a one-way message and talking to a consumer, much like in traditional media. In today’s web world, consumers realize that they aren’t a captive audience. They are free to continue doing whatever it is that they came to a website to do, either by ignoring or skipping ads. That is why the “right message” doesn’t work any more. Online advertising in the coming years will be a dialogue between brands and consumers and amongst consumers themselves within the context of a brand. Widgets and dynamic rich media in various forms, such as games, review panels, and personal utilities, will take the place of banners and text ads (although probably not for search). Interactivity, community and engagement will be top of mind when developing campaign creatives.

The right person. The targetability and measurability of internet advertising will continue to improve. With so much anonymous and user-provided data available on the web to be used for targeting, finding the right person with whom to engage in a conversation will be easier than ever. Contextual targeting and the current approaches to behavioral targeting have not proven to work well in many contexts. Certainly, new targeting models will emerge and prove effective for discrete online environments.

The right time. The traditional purchase funnel (roughly defined as awareness, consideration, intent and purchase) isn’t such a straight and narrow path any longer. The idea of finding online consumers at exactly the “right time” in the funnel (again, with the exception of search) isn’t just difficult, it’s also outdated. The focus of agencies and brands will be in building relationships with consumers at all points in time, because on the Internet, information and influence is coming constantly and from all directions. The only way to rise above the noise will be to engage consumers in a sustained conversation using the new, rich tools available to marketers.

 

So what’s the right answer? Hopefully, the right conversation with the right person whenever possible.

Online media planners and buyers lost at sea

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It’s tough to be an online media planner or buyer right now. Nearly every planner or buyer that I talk to is swimming in an ever-deepening pool of data and demands. Over the past few years, the number of publishers and ad networks vying for their attention has increased dramatically. Engaging audiences through advertising has become more difficult as consumers increasingly ignore traditional display ads. Reaching those audiences at scale is more challenging because consumer attention is fragmenting across a growing number of online properties. Finally, advertisers have become more demanding about efficient allocation of their ad budgets given the assumed measurability of online media and all of the various forms that online advertising can take (display, search, contextual, behavioral, CPM, CPC, CPA and on and on). All of this is happening while agencies come to the realization that it’s impractical to separate planning and buying from creative development for online advertising.

Despite all of this rapid change, the tools that agencies use to determine how and where to spend money are still largely the same as the ones that they used early this decade. comScore, AdRelevance and @Plan (the latter two from Nielsen//NetRatings) remain the standard tools that most agencies rely on for online planning purposes. Buying is still largely a manual, time-consuming process, despite efforts to streamline the process with products such as MediaVisor. And forget about trying to optimize creative or spend on the basis of actual business results or ROI. Without the emergence of more useful tools and services to aid agencies in planning, buying, measuring and optimizing, the share of ad budgets allocated to online media (7.5% today according to Yankee Group) will continue to lag consumption of online media as a percentage of total media consumption (20% today). Innovative products and services are critical to the many businesses that are counting on ad revenue to survive. New ad-supported businesses will have a hard time seeing ad dollars flow their way without help for agencies that are dealing with a flood of opportunities and data. Today, agencies use the approach of clinging to the sites and formats that they already know. The entire industry needs to help agencies (and advertisers) navigate increasingly turbulent waters so that they in turn can find and justify throwing lifelines (in the form of ad dollars) to fledgling online properties.

Fortunately for agencies and advertisers, entrepreneurs who have lived and breathed online advertising during its early years are now recognizing the opportunity to help address these problems.  VisualIQ, Quantcast, Balihoo and Covario are examples of companies that are attempting to provide more data to agencies and to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their processes. I’m eager to see additional tools and services and the widespread adoption of them by agencies and brands. Only then will agencies, advertisers and ad-supported businesses be able to collectively withstand the waves of change that they are facing. Please let me know if you have come across any interesting products or services that help agencies or advertisers plan, purchase and optimize online media. All of us in the online media industry will sink or swim together!