3 reasons that data will save online advertising

Posted on April 8, 2009 by satyapatel

It’s been nearly 15 years since Rick Boyce and HotWired famously popularized the use of banner advertising campaigns as a model for generating revenue online. Since then, there have been many, significant innovations in online advertising, including new ad formats, new pricing models, new targeting technologies and new metrics for effectiveness. Yet the value of online display advertising is being questioned now more than ever before, particularly in the current economic environment. Numerous organizations are projecting that online display advertising spend will be flat or slightly down in 2009. Growth is expected to recover in 2010, but at much lower rates than earlier in the decade and than search advertising. But the explosion of data and its increasingly effective use hold great promise for online display advertising. There are many types of data for online advertising, including keywords, contextual, behavioral, semantic, demographic, psychographic and social. The relative value of each of these forms of data is still an unknown, but I believe that the value (and cost) of data will soon exceed the value of inventory, which is already deteriorating. Here are three reasons that the use of data will save online ads and help restore their growth.

– Data makes media buying easier: Data from comScore, the IAB and others suggests that while the top 50 online publishers only account for 25%-35% of user attention, as measured by page views or time spent, they represent about 90% of online advertising spend. Why is that? As I’ve written before, the job of an online media buyer is seemingly impossible. Audience fragmentation, the proliferation of ad networks and the emergence of ad exchanges have created incredible amounts of complexity in the marketplace. Learning about all of these sources of inventory, let alone buying from them, is an unenviable task. On the other hand, buying from large, known publishers is simple. This is the default behavior for many online media buyers because it doesn’t entail extra effort or risk. Further, the buying of traditional media, rightly or wrongly, is done largely based on gross rating points, viewership, circulation, listenership, etc. Media buyers purchase audiences at scale. In the online world, media fragmentation has made it a necessity to buy from multiple places to achieve desired scale. Data allows traditional buying behavior (again, independent of whether it’s good or bad) to be replicated online. Data enables media buyers to purchase a specific, consistent audience at scale across many different publishers. Data makes the jobs of media buyers easier, allowing more dollars to be spent online.

– Data increases the value of remnant inventory: Somewhere between 30%-40% of online ad inventory at most major publishers goes unsold by their direct sales organizations. That number is closer to 80-90% for most social media sites, the fastest growing segment of inventory and the one with the most ad effectiveness challenges. Remnant inventory is the direct result of highly ineffective ads that are not relevant to the consumer. There was a time when NYTimes.com could sell its inventory because of the association with its brand. That time is long gone as metrics have told advertisers that they are not earning a return on their dollars. Getting value from advertising on social media, where consumers are largely not engaged in commercial activity, is even more difficult. And inventory, both premium and remnant is increasingly being commoditized by the ad exchanges. Effective use of data for targeting (with more engaging creatives) the right audience yields better ad performance and generates real value from remnant inventory. In the end, today’s gap between demand and supply diminishes as data-defined audiences, rather than impressions, are being purchased.

– Data is available to all: The traditional ad agency model is widely recognized as broken. The economics of the agency business dictate that they find more efficient and effective ways to engage consumers on behalf their advertising clients. Along these lines, agencies have come to realize that one of their greatest assets is their consumer and ad performance data. Data, in combination with more innovative creative, can target the right audience at the right time with the right conversation, interactivity and engagement. Publishers also see that it’s becoming more difficult to aggregate sizable audiences and to sell their ad real estate. Differentiation in the face of commoditization comes from their data. And ad networks know that they are in danger of being disintermediated unless they bring unique value to the both advertisers and publishers in the form of greater access to data or better targeting through data. Fortunately, all of these players have their own data assets and increasingly have access to data from traditional offline data vendors, such as Acxiom and TARGUSinfo, as well as from emerging online data exchanges, such as BlueKai (where I am an investor) and eXelate. The competitive dynamics in the online ad industry dictate that the various players leverage data to provide greater value to their constituents.

While data doesn’t solve all of the problems in the online advertising market, it’s clear that data is going to have a huge impact on the future of the industry. The companies that develop the platforms, tools and services to make it easier to aggregate, analyze and utilize data will be the next category of winners in the online ad market. More importantly, they will help grow the online advertising market for all of us. Even as the value of inventory decreases, the increasing use and value of data and the resulting greater sell-through of inventory will yield a larger online advertising market.

Tips for product management success

Posted on April 2, 2009 by satyapatel

I work with several early stage companies that are spending all of their time and energy focused on building great products that address real customerpain. To me, this is the most exciting time in a startup’s development. Starting from a blank page and creating something that will hopefully be in the hands of many satisfied users is both an imposing and thrilling challenge. My product management experience has given me several key insights (I think!) into what contributes to the success of a product manager. I’ll share a couple of those thoughts below and hopefully publish additional ideas over time.

I don’t think that you can be truly successful as a product manager if you haven’t experienced the customer or user’s pain firsthand. Being close to the customer can provide unique insight into product requirements, and even more importantly, can shed light on what is not required in the product at all. Often times, customers and users will say that they want X or Y feature, but that is only what they think they want. What they need is a specific problem to be solved. Having lived with that problem can provide a product manager with the insight required to identify a true solution. All customer and user feedback is not created equal and knowing which feedback to incorporate into product plans is a necessary skill for any product manager.

A successful product manager also knows that he or she is not an engineer. Trust the engineers to do what they do and involve them early and often in product thinking. If the product manager and the management team have hired strong developers, technical leads, etc., they will not only figure out how to build the product correctly but they will help make the end product markedly better. Many product managers don’t have the confidence in themselves or in engineering to avoid micro-managing and over-documenting. But I’ve found that allowing the engineering team members to own what they are expert in leads to greater confidence in the product manager, more collaborative teams and more efficient product development. It also just makes being a product manager a lot easier!

(Thanks to Hiten Shah from KISSmetrics for inspiring this post.)

Bigger (advertising) is not better

Posted on March 30, 2009 by satyapatel

Recently, two dozen members of the Online Publishers Association, a trade organization comprised of some of the most well-known and well-respected publishers on the web, announced their solution for attracting more brand advertising dollars….bigger ads. While I’m over simplifying the group’s initiative, it shocked me to see that the best that some of the leading online media brands could come up with was combining a few (already commonly used) interactive elements with a larger number of pixels. If this is the state of the art in online advertising, it’s no wonder that brand advertisers have been reluctant to invest more.

I previously wrote about how the model for so much of online advertising is broken. And I think it remains true that the industry’s approach to creative has not evolved to engage consumers on their own terms and in their own language. The fact is that the value of media (the real estate) in the online advertising equation is diminishing greatly. Volume growth in the online media exchanges is commoditizing media. Recognition by agencies that their long-term sustainability is tied to their data assets is increasing the importance and availability of high quality targeting data across the industry. While media and data are getting increasing attention, it seems that the third leg of the online advertising stool, ad creative, is still being ignored by most agencies and marketers. Without question, attempting something new with creative entails risk. But you rarely get skewered for attempting to engage your audience. In fact, in most cases, you only incite the wrath of consumers when you ignore, insult or bore them. Take the well-publicized Skittles example or the myriad other brands that have embraced the fact that online media allows them to engage and listen to consumers in an entirely new and valuable way. Consumers have spoken and they want to participate in or direct the conversation, not be broadcast to by brands.

Smart companies such as AppsSavvy, Context Optional and Dimestore Media are taking the lead in reinventing ad creative to deliver unique experiences to consumers and greater value to advertisers. I’m hopeful that we’ll see more of this innovation from the larger agencies as well as from startups. As an industry, we need widespread acknowledgement of the need for new creative models to avoid stunting the growth of brand advertising online.

Four essential characteristics of entrepreneurs

Posted on February 3, 2009 by satyapatel

Despite the fact that my New York Giants failed to make a repeat trip to the Super Bowl, being the diehard football fan that I am, I wasn’t going to miss the Big Game. Whether or not it was the greatest Super Bowl of all time (it wasn’t), one thing that stood out to me was the way in which both teams rallied when they were down and how it took the effort of every player on each team to deliver success. It was clear that no individual player wanted to let down his team by not doing his individual job well.

It strikes me that we’re seeing the same thing play out in the world of startups right now. The companies that are continuing to make progress notwithstanding the challenges in the funding environment and the broader market are the ones with teams that are committed both to the mission of the company and to each other. I would argue that a quality team is the most important factor in the success of a startup, but never is the quality of a team more important than in a down market. After all, there are no unique ideas, only unique execution and execution is the difference between success and failure given the current economic situation.

So what are the characteristics of a successful entrepreneur or team? I don’t know that I have the right answer to that question, but here are the things that I look for when making investments. First is passion. Is the team genuinely excited about the business and the problem that it is addressing? Is it committed to solving the problem and building a sustainable business? Passion is a requirement given that there are so many ups and downs in the life of a startup. Second is flexibility. Rarely is the initial approach to solving a problem or attacking a market the right approach. Entrepreneurs and teams that can’t react to messages from and changes in the market are likely to continue marching down a path that leads to a dead end. Third is expertise. It’s important to note that expertise isn’t defined as years of prior experience building a company or product. I deem expertise to be the possession of unique insight that sheds light on an acute pain and the salve for that pain. In other words, what is it that makes the team uniquely qualified to solve the problem that they have identified? Finally comes integrity. The relationship between an investor and a team of entrepreneurs is often compared to a marriage, and the comparison is only a slight exaggeration. Trust, honesty and candor are the foundations of the entrepreneur-investor relationship. Without those building blocks, the inevitable ups and downs of the corporate marriage are impossible to withstand.

While this isn’t a comprehensive list of what I believe makes an entrepreneur or team successful, these are some of the absolutely critical characteristics. And I would expect that any startup team should be looking for the same qualities in its investors. I’m blessed to work with a group of entrepreneurs whom I am proud to call both great partners and friends. I have absolute confidence that these teams will be able to execute well during the current economic downturn and emerge much stronger and better positioned than the competition. Watching the Super Bowl, it was clear that each player had the same faith in his teammates, even when it looked like the game was over. I hope that the same can be said about the Giants a year from now!

P.S. Many thanks to those of you who sent your thoughts and prayers my way upon hearing about the passing of my father-in-law. Supporting him and my family through his battle with cancer was a major reason that I’ve been remiss in blogging for so long.

If you build it, they might not come

Posted on October 5, 2008 by satyapatel

A while back I wrote a piece for The Battery Charger, my firm’s quarterly newsletter, about our investment focus within the Internet and Digital Media sectors. As I noted in that article, we invest in both consumer-facing media properties and enabling technologies. In my meetings of late, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend amongst companies that belong to the first category. While almost all of the presenting media companies have slick demos and whiz-bang product features, very few of them have gone to the trouble of outlining their strategy for possibly the most important and difficult piece of building any successful media business: acquiring consumers.

As a VC, one of the fundamental questions I ask when meeting entrepreneurs is about the unit economics of their business. How much does it cost to acquire a consumer and what is the lifetime value of that consumer once you acquire him or her? Most thoughtful entrepreneurs have considered this issue and can offer an answer. However, when I ask what strategies they are using to acquire users at the cited costs, I’m surprised by how often the response I get is a simple statement about some combination of SEO, SEM and viral marketing. Without fail, the entrepreneurs cite examples of other products that have been built on largely word-of-mouth alone.

I would argue that the next level of detail is critical to a well-thought out strategy for user acquisition. What are the specific tools and techniques that will be used to improve and optimize your SEO and SEM results (e.g., avoid dynamic URLs, use descriptive page titles, etc.)? What other steps will you take to create awareness for your product or service (e.g., blogging, content syndication, email marketing, etc.)? Which aspects of your product encourage sharing and linking or generate network effects? Good investors or advisors will not only ask these questions but offer some tips and tactics or relevant contacts of their own. They’ll also look to understand the overall quality of the traffic that is being generated, seeking that coveted shift in traffic from paid sources and organic search to direct navigation. My rule of thumb is that 30% direct navigation indicates the beginnings of brand loyalty and that 50% is evidence of strong traffic quality.

Admittedly, tackling the problem of user acquisition is extremely challenging and complex. But that doesn’t mean that it should be ignored or given short shrift. There are many resources that can help identify best practices for various consumer acquisition strategies and tactics. For example, Google itself publishes some good SEO guidelines and other helpful hints can be found on SEOmoz.org and SEObook.com. However you identify the strategies or whatever the approaches you choose, the crucial thing to remember is that a good product typically isn’t good enough, especially if you’re competing against incumbent players. Investors are certainly aware of that fact and entrepreneurs should demonstrate that they are as well.

Scaling startups is more than technology

Posted on July 14, 2008 by satyapatel

In the “Web 2.0” startups of today, innumerable technology choices are the topics of the day when talking about scaling the business. Countless hours and meetings are spent debating the virtues of Ruby on Rails, Amazon Web Services and server virtualization. A fortunate few companies find themselves in the enviable position of having to devote even more time and attention to even more critical, non-technical scaling challenges. When a startup delivers a product to market that fulfills a clear customer need, sometimes the biggest challenge can be addressing that demand with operational scale. In a market with so many startups and established companies competing for dollars, customers and talent, outstanding people and defined processes are vital to any business that is hoping to scale successfully. I encourage the teams that I work with that are lucky enough to be in this situation to answer two key questions to determine whether they are set up to scale effectively.

First, are there any single points of failure amongst your people and processes? A challenge with so many startups is that there a small handful of the oldest employees who have the majority of the business, technical and product knowledge contained within themselves. Pitching the product clearly, implementing customers or addressing bugs can all be bottlenecks to success if only a single expert can manage those tasks. Systematizing the dissemination of knowledge through various media, and importantly, through person-to-person guidance, is as important to scaling a business as documenting code is to scaling an engineering team. Further, even if several people have the ability to execute as needed, without clearly defined processes, those people may be ineffective, inefficient and demoralized. That is not to say that bureaucracy and rigid rules are needed to scale a business. On the contrary, a process that is both flexible and regularly modified based on business needs can aid in delivering consistently good performance.

Second, are you hiring and transferring knowledge to make yourself obsolete? The first step is being disciplined about hiring only the best people for your organization. That doesn’t mean that you are hiring the smartest, the most educated or the most accomplished people. Instead, the goal is to hire people who have the skills and the values needed to be successful within your organization. I hesitate to use a term as soft as “values”, but the importance of a shared culture, commitment and vision can’t be overemphasized during the development of a young company. If you are successful in making yourself obsolete, not only have you hired great people, you’ve supplied them with the tools, knowledge and processes needed to do their job (previously yours) consistently well.

So is your organization built to scale? If you’re lucky, you’ll get to find out, because the opposite of scaling isn’t nearly as fun or rewarding!

The short form vs. long form video holy war

Posted on June 2, 2008 by satyapatel

As a board member of a company in the online video advertising market (FreeWheel), I regularly get to chat with many video content producers, owners and distributors. Without fail, the fervent “holy war” between short form and long form video zealots arises as a top of conversation. Without getting into the nuances of the debate, the short formists argue that the web audience wants its video in bite-sized chunks, unlike a traditional television viewing experience. They inevitably point to the popularity of YouTube as evidence for their perspective. The long formists maintain that short form video only dominates online video viewing because long form content has been slow to come online. Of late, long formists have cited recent data from Nielsen that shows the growth in the online video streaming of Hulu. Neither side seems willing to open their minds to the possibility that there might be a little grey in their black and white worlds.

I’ve found religion and my faith lies with the availability of high quality online video of any length. The only thing that matters online, like across all media channels, is the value that someone gets from the content. There are vast audiences for both books and magazines, arguably the long form and short form, respectively, of the print world. On television, I can get my comedy fix from 23 minutes of Seinfeld or from short sketches on Saturday Night Live. Why can’t the same coexistence of content be true for online video? After all, I’m just as happy to watch two minutes of low production value Riegel & Blatt as I am 43 minutes of Lost in high definition because each video provides me with (very different!) entertainment value. Content producers should not be occupying themselves with discussions about the appropriate duration of online video. Instead, the path to salvation is will be found by focusing on creating quality content and on working to get that content distributed, discovered and monetized.

Dude, that’s so meta

Posted on May 4, 2008 by satyapatel

In recent weeks, everyone that I have spoken with claims to suffer from some form of information overload related to digital media. As content creation has become cheap and simple for the masses, and the cost of building online businesses has dropped, the volume of online content, activity and communication has grown enormously. According to a recent Deloitte & Touche study, nearly half of all U.S. media consumers are now creating content for others to see. People are not only explicitly creating content for consumption, but they are also increasingly broadcasting their online and offline activity via services like Facebook and Twitter. All of this information has led to the development of “meta layer” applications and services to help consumers filter and organize information so that they can find and consume what is most relevant and timely for them.

Examples of these meta layers can be found in many areas. Digg and Google News are meta layers for news. Friendfeed and Socialthing are meta layers for social networks. Bloglines and Google Reader are meta layers for blogs. Mint and Wesabe are meta layers for personal finance. (Even ad networks have meta layers, such as Rubicon Project and Pubmatic.) Unfortunately, the challenge for online consumers remains. Seemingly, the number of meta layers will soon present the same problem as individual sources of information do currently. Further, these meta layers take varying approaches to filtering and organizing information for the consumer. Fine-tuned algorithms, wisdom of the crowds, trusted networks, expert curation, explicit consumer actions and implicitly derived interests are all techniques utilized by meta layers.

Ultimately, consumers only care about the value that they get from using a meta layer and not the approach taken to providing that value. Consumers will want many different filters for content but will want to control when and how content is filtered and presented. Networks effects will be the true differentiator that separates the winners in the meta layer wars from the losers. If a person extracts greater value whenever another person uses the same meta layer, both the value proposition and the adoption of the layer will grow exponentially. Depending on the meta layer application, scale in the user base can provide consumers with higher quality benchmark data, greater market liquidity, more relevant results or unexpected personal connections. I haven’t come across a meta layer that really provides differentiated value via network effects. Until I do, and despite the need for them, I’m skeptical that any single meta layer application or service will reach the critical mass needed to provide outsized venture returns.

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

Posted on March 25, 2008 by satyapatel

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.

Venture Generated Content

A blog by Satya Patel