This I believe
So for several months now I have been closely watching the industry, reading articles, PR releases, product releases, financial releases and generally paying attention. I have been taking bits and pieces of what I care about and have been making comments and providing what I believe has been an insightful perspective on how technology can be better leveraged to improve how we advertise online.
I have looked at the ad servers, the networks, the lead generation tools. I have examined the search engines, the publisher tools and the creative formats and provided you with feedback on what other reliable people have had to say.
And I have discussed ad agencies, their workflow, the media buying process and the tools that people use to do their jobs, however inefficiently I may believe that to be.
Here is my position.
The agencies have engaged the interactive medium completely. Estimates for 2007 are that between 12 ½ and 20% of advertising budgets will go towards new media. This is no longer the edgy side-project. Engagement with technology is here. But it is about refinement.
Search is essential but everyone is coming to recognize that there is something wrong with the model. It is extremely time-intensive and expensive to manage. Furthermore the ROI metrics seem to slip the longer you run campaigns. As I have said in the past, a tipping point is coming.
Networks have been doing their thing the same way with some minor tweaks for a while now and people are demanding more disclosure. Tolerance for media showing up on inappropriate sites is very low, accountability is high and additional capabilities like behavioral targeting has become an expectation.
That brings me to behavioral targeting – a very common topic on this blog. I have ripped this topic up and down. My intent has been to redefine this concept as event-based targeting and to justify that there is little about behaviors actually associated with it at all. Just because someone took a navigation path, or saw a page means little about their behavior, the predictability of their behavior or their preferences. All we know is something that happened. Historical targeting is a better description but I have used event-based targeting over the last couple of months.
I have never tried to minimize the value of BT, only put it into it rightful place as a solid prospecting and direct response advertising mechanism. BT does not represent the best means to capturing known individuals, in fact, it does not have the capacity to associate with knowledge about people at all. Only with events. But I believe that BT should be part of a comprehensive campaign.
People have approached me both on and off this blog about my position towards BT and some of the networks, but I think its because they have been defensive and protective of their positions as representatives of these companies. Others have engaged me – usually advertisers, agency representatives or others who see that the evolution of practice is inevitable and being on the adaptive edge of the curve is better than the laggards edge.
I have also spent a lot of time plugging a concept called first party ad serving. Forgive me for the plugs. Obviously as a member of TruEffect I have a lot of passion for what we do here. But I also spend a lot of time looking for other technologies that can rival or at least coexist, companion or compliment what we are doing here.
The patent-pending DirectServe™ Technology that TruEffect has brought to the market represents the next generation of ad serving. It leverages the knowledge that an advertiser holds about its customers, registrants or users to re-target through ad campaigns. This is not a replacement for other technologies out there – I have said that before as well – but a great new way of doing it. An addition to a comprehensive advertising strategy.
First party ad serving is about customer re-targeting. BT is about event-based targeting, best applied when trying to capture unknown individuals. One is for bringing in new business; one is about farming and growing existing business. There is no point is re-prospecting existing customers while advertising online. DirectServe™ takes care of that. BT leverages previous events so that you can increase the likelihood of putting the right message in front of the right person at the right time based on historical events. DirectServe™ puts the right message in front of the right person based on known customer segmentation models, knowledge already held about customers. This a potential marriage.
Now BT is largely touted by networks, so there is a limitation as to how you can use it. I talk about TACODA a lot – which I think Dave Morgan has not be thrilled about – but its because they have been the leader in the space. I have also talked about Advertising.com and Blue Streak and Tribal and others as well. But ad servers offer BT too. DoubleClick’s Boomerang does it. TruEffect does it. And that extends beyond networks.
I also talk about integration. Agencies are not on this trail so much as advertisers. Well, some agencies are but they are the minority. I have strong opinions about this because I feel that they pieces of the puzzle are all here now for us to put together a great picture of our online marketing so that we can make better informed decisions about our web site compositions, product placements, online advertising and budget allocations. But nobody has fully engaged yet. There are leaders that are putting the pieces together, but I am advocating the full-monty and that is what you read about on this blog.
Tying it all together will enable an advertiser to make the best possible decisions regarding allocation of online media spend. It will promote the best utilization of technology, improve product placement on web sites, increase the value of existing customers, the initial value of new customers and enhance the likelihood of increasing the utilization of interactive media as a channel for marketing.
See my ten-step recipe for full-integration of all the technology pieces of an online advertising campaign.
First let me redefine that a third party cookie is a vendor’s cookie and a first party cookie is an advertiser’s cookie. Here is the recipe.
Categories: Online Advertising,Workflow,Third-Party Cookies,Behavioral Targeting,Technology,Advertising Networks,Ad Serving Technology,First Party Ad Serving,Cookies,Agencies,eCRM,First Party Cookies
Well done, Ari!
I think the idea of defining retargeting as first-party ad serving is compelling.
I'm less certain, however, about why you would completely exclude a network's ability to retarget from the definition.
You're spot-on when you say that behavioral targeting today is typically based on historical or event-related actions. But don't most major networks today offer different flavors of retargeting? Working with a willing client, many networks can use client data baked into a pixel or javascript to target different messages to browsers based on customer/prospect status, purchase history, etc.
My company, for example, enables several behavioral targeting companies to access an enormous amount of inventory in order to cherrypick their own customer cookies. The Right Media Exchange platform serves the ad when there's a match - but the person retargeted is not our customer and it's not even our technology that created the targetable segment. We're a platform that enables the transaction to happen between other first parties.
I think there are great opportunities for strategic thinkers to develop and, more important, test and scale these ideas. As you say, there are a handful of marketers and a smaller number of agency folks thinking this way. Maybe there's some partnering up we can all be doing to advance these concepts.
Keep the big thinking coming!
Excellent points Bennett.
I guess I don't a network's ability to re-target from the definition but thank you for pointing that out.
Networks do offer different flavors of targeting capabilities including what you have described with regard to integrating a clients customer data, but that requires some synchronization between the clients data and he third party network's cookie. The transfer of data opens up a host of issues:
(1) to client must first completely anonymous the data (SOX)
(2) the network must offer a synchronization process that is streamlined and not incrementally expensive or otherwise making the entire initiative not cost effective
(3) the synchronization of data makes the entire process historic, so the targeting can never be in real-time, meaning that the client can't change the cookie values and have that automatically change the targeting sequences like they can do with first party ad serving.
(4) all of the performance data that is generated through the ad serving is tied to the third party cookie, which means that the vendor has control over that the data and the advertiser does not have usable access to their own data without paying for or otherwise gaining access to the data from the vendor. The vendor gate-keeps access to the performance data.
(5) ad serving performance data written to the cookie is not usable to the advertiser in real-time, i.e., by a site-side analytics platform when a user lands on the advertiser's web page. It can only be taken in historically and again through a laborious synchronization process ($$$).
But you introduce some other lines of thinking here for me to be pondering, regarding RM. I addressed them in my next blog entry. But I do recognize that with RM, the ad serving is facilitated by you. I would definitely be interested in seeing how TruEffect's DirectServe capability could be integrated, or even just applied on your platform.
Thanks for reading and for contributing!