Google’s Display Dominance

Matt Harty – Previously published at ClickZ.Asia

With the recent announcement that Google confirms AdMeld buy, it’s an interesting time to look at the ‘search giant’ and see the advertising machine that it has amassed. What would a Google ownership of AdMeld mean? What is Google’s display media play?

Google has made no secret of its desire to dominate the display media market. With the modernisation of the display market in full swing, it is an excellent time for a company with Google’s credentials to take a leading role in the path forward. Display is getting more like search in accountability and the way it is offered. Interesting times…

So what ad products would Google have:

• Search (search engine marketing) – Google is the heavyweight champ
• Premium ads (guaranteed inventory) – AdMeld
• Mass media (reach inventory) – AdWords, DoubleClick Exchange, and Invite Media
• Audience targeting (demography, location, etc.) – Can work with search, premium, or mass media
• Behavioural targeting (recorded user actions) – Can also work with search, premium, or mass media
• Mobile ads (served to apps and web pages) – AdMob is a leading global player

The real key behind this revolution is data. Google has deployed a virtual armada of data collection points. Not only does Google know what you have been searching for, but now Chrome knows what pages you have been to, what you buy, and what media you consume. Combine that with DoubleClick and Google understands your paths to purchase. Latitude, Google Maps, Chrome, and Android know where you are. Gmail knows who you know. Google Analytics gives a deeper picture of conversion events.

I am not trying to be a scaremonger, but I think this is great for the marketing industry. It may make regulatory bodies tremble and well-informed consumers militant, but ultimately it’s only about selling things. Our whole lives revolve around either buying things or selling things. I am fascinated at how this new set of tools will be deployed and how they will be used.

Google is in the platform business now. The DSP (demand-side platform) is an amazing concept. A market place of display media market places. Where working through either existing exchanges or private custom exchanges, agencies can conduct their display business with greater economy and accuracy. It also allows uniform retargeting across enormous reach and diverse inventory.

Let’s say that through a combination of Chrome page visits and DoubleClick Spotlight tags, Google has identified you as a person in a particular point in a buying cycle for a ‘high-ticket’ purchase. Let’s say that they can define the radius of your potential travel to buy the item from analysis of your location data. Let’s say they also know your media preferences and advertising interaction history. How valuable is this information to the retailer of that expensive item?

Now AdMeld is not a DSP, it’s an SSP (supply-side platform). It has premium ad space and none of the bumps and warts that an ad exchange suffers from. This may be crucial in the media buyer ‘comfort factor’ stakes as the display ad market transitions from ‘placement’-based buying to an ‘audience’-based model.

Google has the display media market staked out. The two most exciting display venues emerging (being mobile and video) Google has a major seat at the game with AdMob, Android, and YouTube. It has DART (a major ad serving infrastructure) being used by sites and advertisers. It has the performance-end covered with Invite Media, search, and the Google Display Network. AdMeld would provide nicely for the premium end of the market.

AdMeld also comes along with an existing roster of high-end sites and a working real-time bidding technology (something rumoured to be eluding Google’s engineers).

My first thought when I mapped all this out (see below) was, “what will Google do in the DMP (data management platform) market?” I am not convinced it has to do anything. It’s emerging as one of the most formidable data sources in the world already. The display ad market allows Google to reach out to people who are not reaching out to them. It’s a new age!

Content Is Not King

By Matt Harty  - Previously published at www.clickz.asia

I am not looking to be provocative but I am sick to death of “Content is King” accepted as fact. I beg to differ; I believe that the Audience is King. So much so, that people will bring their content to your audience for a share of the money your audience is worth.

When we buy ads on a particular type of content, we do so to find an audience we have decided (through research or less scientific means) we wish to target. Content is a means to an end, helping us find audiences to market to.

Although social media has certainly made this relationship between content and audience clearer, on the Internet this has long been the case. We have had webmail and other “applications” on the web virtually forever. They are not content, but they have audiences and people have paid to advertise on them since the beginning of web marketing.

You have Facebook (and MySpace before it) that are just applications. People, the audience, are the content. The content quality argument, suitability of environment, and many other factors we think of when we select destinations for our advertising are out the window. If we can harness the audience, the site’s content becomes as irrelevant as content is on Facebook or webmail.

You can buy content. If you have the audience, you can get the content you need on a revenue share basis. There are content exchanges like Mochila that help content find audiences. Marketers now look to social media for distribution of their advertising content. Content may not attract an audience but the value of an audience transcends the content.

People will bring their content to the party. Blog sites, YouTube, Flickr, even Facebook and Twitter are places people bring their content. People who resonate with this content via social or interest groups gain exposure to the content and the content builds within itself an inherent suitability of propose. Even if the production quality is very low or the topic is questionable, it is right for the consuming audience.

Display advertising is in a state of monumental change. As we see the rise of the trading desk, the DSP (demand-side platform), and the DMP (data management platform). The relationship between audience and content is up for serious review. If we can buy the audience we want to on a real-time bidding basis then content takes a back seat.

I am not talking about what blind ad networks were doing for years. I am not talking about contextual targeting and behavioural derivatives thereof. The day is coming very soon (even in Asia) when we can buy our own customer databases or other third-party databases for display ads and not just email. We can find our targets via the uber-reach of the DMPs and hit them with an emotive video ad while we ruthlessly control the frequency.

The future of content is just a question…brand-safe? Or not brand-safe? Every other factor could become irrelevant for a lot of marketers. Like the content-neutral environments of webmail and social networks, we may just see a de-emphasis of the importance of a page’s contents.

The short-term future (at least) belongs to the audience. Most online display companies are betting heavily on that fact. Publishers are already feeling the effects in some markets and the storm clouds are gathering. Bring on the rain!

Marketing Landing Pages to Non-Humans

Matt Harty 

We are not alone; we share the Internet with spiders, crawlers, and bots. Marketers often downplay or downright ignore the potential of marketing to these non-human users of the Internet.

At this point, I’d like to draw a distinction between two types of marketing. The long-term brand fostering of the corporate website and the short-term and somewhat disposable ad campaign. The corporate site is often handed over to SEO experts who are looking to wring every conceivable advantage from search algorithms. The landing pages of ad campaigns are often overlooked, as advertising will be used as the key driver for traffic to the page.

This would all be fine if people clicked on banners or were willingly corralled into the marketing pathways we set, but unfortunately, that’s not the case. The campaign landing page is unloved from an SEO perspective, and all too often, unfindable.

In an earlier post, I talked about how clicking on banners is a fairly alien experience for people. Other mediums (like TV and outdoor) are not clicked on, but marketers fully expect people to find their own way from the ad to the information. For some reason, some marketers still believe that banners should break this rule entirely, even when they freely admit they never click banners themselves.

Too many times have I seen a campaign that has TV and online elements that if you do not type the exact branded name of the promotion, it is completely invisible on a search engine. I think we have to admit, that it is at least plausible that a percentage of the audience would search using a generic or inexact search term.

If the page is not accessible by generic search and we are relying on the audience remembering a specific URL from a TV ad or clicking on the banner unit, then we have not done our job of spreading our message very well.

That brings us back to the non-humans. If we take care to market our landing pages to non-humans we can solve (or at least go some ways to fix) the SEO disconnect. It is the bots that cruise the Internet looking for information humans might find useful and orderly package it up into accessible formats for humans to use… search engines.

For some strange reason we tend to make things hard for the bots on landing pages. Often in ways we never would in the corporate website. We make pages with the key text as images, loads of Flash, and many other things unfriendly to the non-human users of the site.

All parts of the media need to do their part in a holistic campaign. These days we will almost always have multiple media sources in the mix and the ultimate location for the audience to learn more about what the campaign offers is online. Spiders, crawlers, and bots are the gatekeepers for the search engines. Taking them into account when we plan a campaign will improve how campaigns perform and improve the user experience, as they will get to your offers with less hassle.

This was previously posted on ClickZ Asia

The Relationship Between Awareness and Banner Impressions

By Matt Harty

For anyone who has worked with online banner ads as a medium for a long time, there are things that we think we know about banners. We see the patterns emerge over and over but we can’t actually prove things categorically. I believe a recent campaign at the ad network I work for took a step closer to proving that banner ads have a significant and measurable effect on brand and product awareness.

To give you a bit of background, the client is Tourism Fiji (the beautiful tropical island), the agency is PMA Communications Group, and the execution was standard banner units. The sites for the campaign were selected using comScore behavioural analysis and the target market was the U.S., even though the campaign was booked in Sydney, Australia.

The campaign employed the standard banner measurements of impressions and clicks and these numbers were solid but not overly remarkable. What made the campaign break out was using social media monitoring to measure the level of discussion and interest around the brand. For this reporting, we used Statsit, a leading regional social media monitoring and insights company. For the purpose of the measurement, only forum and blog mentions were measured. We disregarded data from Twitter, as we did not consider it substantial in reflecting online awareness for the purposes of this campaign.

The campaign began in July 2010 and had a number of bursts before ending in October 2010. No TV ads or significant other mass marketing was run concurrently with the banner campaign.

Here are our key findings:

Banner ads create awareness evidenced in social media discussion. By the end of the campaign, the blog mentions and forum entries talking about Fiji were up 110 percent over the established baseline.

The awareness created was lasting. The level of discussion did not immediately fall back to its previous range once the impressions were reduced or stopped.

The awareness created was compounded. As the impression levels increased, so did the awareness. The awareness grew in a compound fashion building on the awareness levels of earlier impressions.

There is a time lag between impressions and online discussion. We can see a clear time lag between the spikes in the impressions and the corresponding increases in awareness. Interestingly, these lags seem to lessen as the compounding effect takes place.

I have included the graph showing the dates with the corresponding number of banner ad impressions run over those dates and the number of online blog and forum posts including the word ‘Fiji’.

Summary

We can see that this campaign strongly suggests there is a direct and measurable correlation between banner ads and an increase in substantial online discussion. We can see the relationship between volume increases in banners and the effect that has on awareness. We can also see that the awareness does not immediately fall away when the ad volume decreases and that awareness has a compounded effect.

However exciting this may be, I am not going to claim a complete victory yet. We intend to run further campaigns with measured exposure to the banner ad being an additional variable. Hopefully we can have a compelling update soon.

 

Social Media Trojan Horse

By Matt Harty

Word of mouth marketing may end up being the thing that launched a thousand start-ups. It seems from chatting with people that there is a strategy to create “viral” campaigns. This is kind of crazy. It is a bit like setting out to make a “cult” movie. A campaign, like a movie only gets cult status or goes viral rarely and a number of factors all have to come together to make that happen.

I was having a conversation with one of my new colleagues (I just started work at FOX) about social media marketing and the difficulty of getting users to support your stories & initiatives. The trick is not to have to create highly viral content of your own but to be able to find and hijack existing social media chatter. A social media Trojan Horse.

OK. That sounds good but how do you do this in practice?

Firstly you are going to have to find content that is suitable to serve as the host for your message. This content (perhaps more than one) should have people linking to it and should have a “comments box” for you to add in your story.

Obviously the content should be relevant exactly to what you are going to offer. Random comments on peoples postings will be construed (quite rightly) as spam. If you are contributing to the ongoing dialogue in a meaningful way you are present in the dialogue and you are doing what social media marketers should be doing.

Once you have found the suitable story and found the comment box you should remember to add in your URL of what you want to promote along with the copy that will inspire the users to go and read it.

This technique can be used with blogs, with news stories (with social feedback) and with social media sites like Digg or Facebook. This will also take Social Media Monitoring to apply broadly.

Enjoy