Fantastic! When David Smith steps up and writes an article, people should listen. If you have the opportunity to attend a venue where he is speaking, you should make it your business to sit in on his session.
Earlier I posted an entry about when to blog and when to publish. David should always, always publish. He is not about self-promotion but rather call-to-action. Although he never admits it, MediaSmith strives to meet or exceed all the demands that he places on us as agencies, advertisers and vendors servicing the industry.
In today’s iMediaConnection, David wrote “The Medium is the Metric for Online Ads” and he pulled out all the stops.
He gave us illustrations for why digital research is taking a quantum leap with Quantcast. Dwarfing what ComScore and NetRatings have to offer, Quantcast provides insight into millions of websites. Forget @Plan which is a front to DoubleClick’s publisher database. Quantcast is considered to be the next, new and potentially most accurate source of secondary publishers in the industry. Ad servers should be integrating with them, and agencies should be taking a long hard look at providing access to it for their media planners. Currently, they measure 20 million web sites and growing exponentially. Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting that you abandon Comscore, not yet. Soon they will not just be about the secondary web sites, but the primaries too. Their model is primary about getting publishers to post tags on their sites so they get tracked, but if they continue to get traction that won’t be an issue. Watch these guys. I am.
David also brings up Blackfoot several times. David has been working with Martin Wesley and the team at Blackfoot for a couple of years. I have known Blackfoot and have watched them grow-up from a one-room office to the organization that they are today. Blackfoot offers cutting-edge analytics software and people like David Smith have been experimenting with it from the days when it was based entirely on processes. While still involving teams of analysts, Blackfoot’s Analytix is a composite compilation of disparate sources of data. Accomplished through a team of manual processes, this service model produces analysis capabilities that rival the comprehension capacity of the top-5% intellect in the industry. Dumb-it-down and you still have huge insight into the holistic marketing initiatives for an advertiser. A lot of data for making decisions.
The call for dashboard views has been David’s MO since I first met him last year. As I mentioned in my January 10th, 2007 post, Improve Your Stats, Don’t Over Analyze, Make Decisions and Execute I have not been in contact with David in quite some time. But when we last spoke, it was about his search for a holistic digital dashboard that provided a top-down view over every aspect of an advertiser’s campaign. David has a vision for how an agency should be managed, and if you are a client I sincerely believe that you will benefit from his desire to control every aspect of the campaign – if not personally then as an agency. A need to see how each medium correlates together into a series of results helps David determine the interaction between them. And he is confident that those relationships can be seen and subsequently decisions can be made that will be affected by that insight.
In this article, David glosses over the utilization of site-side analytics, Coremetrics, WebSideStory, WebTrends and Omniture. I think this is where the insight falls short. Perhaps David is unaware of what we’re doing with first party integrations of first party ad serving and first party site-side analytics. Other ad servers are conducting cookie synchronizations. DoubleClick and Omniture for example is the best example that I can think of. It’s historical and laborious. A DoubleClick ad serving cookie and the data associated with the acquisition marketing campaign can be synchronized with the site side analytics third party cookie in the rears. Real-time decision-making is not achieved but insight into navigation patterns, entry points that extend to the advertising campaign and placement to eCommerce patterns are measurable.
TruEffect’s patent-pending DirectServe™ offers first party cookie synchronization with the WebSideStory first party cookie. So in fact it is real-time and is a direct pass through, and not a synchronization at all. Poor choice of words on my part. It is an integration of commonly-threaded technologies. The ad serving knowledge flows through to the site side analytics engine. Both use the clients first party cookie and so decisions are made in real-time. Reactionary.
So listen up David, this aspect of your challenge to the industry has already met. And we’re working with the other companies mentioned to complete the offering across the industry.
Funny, a year ago David wrote an article entitled “Where’s My Dashboard?” and I contacted him to introduce him to TruAdvertiser.xls™ the holistic ad server built within Microsoft Excel. It integratable with accounting platforms and pulls in disparate sources of data. We didn’t move forward together but it was a great series of conversations. Maybe it is time for us to chat again and introduce the topic of DirectServe™. I think that we’re doing things that he is unaware of. Hey David, give me a call.
Reactionary with Insight.
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