Jonathan Mendez's Blog

WTF? IAB Says Performance is a Bad Thing for Online Ads

I was really interested this morning when I saw that the IAB is making an effort to combat "creative shabbiness" in display. Unfortunately it was not what I expected to read. As someone who has spent a decade building and optimizing creative for the web and has worked with six of the top eleven brands in the world I’m stunned.

Instead of being an effort to promote more holistic ad>landing page creative or institute new IAB approved ad sizes or push for new metrics that better define creative performance or issue some guidelines for creative testing and optimization (I could go on), this is a PR campaign to get brand (read TV) dollars. In fact, the idea here is to move away from the notion of performance in display and decry the very advertisers that have been successful on the web.

From today’s article in MediaPost (this crazy meme was first published in Ad Age yesterday):

Rothenberg said the push… was an effort to overcome perceptions of "creative shabbiness" in online media, and to help prevent the slide toward a "performance-based" Internet advertising economy.

Whoa… a performance based advertising economy is a slide! This from the man who heads up the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Step back for a second. According to this logic, ads that get the interest of people (clicks & conversions) are not creative. How does that make sense? Perhaps, the idea of what creative is needs to be redefined (or we need to re-read what David Ogilvy thought about creative).

No one has better captured or understood the web ad economy than the father of web based performance advertising, Bill Gross.

“The more I [thought about it], the more I realized that the true 
value of the Internet was in its accountability. Performance guarantees had to be the model for paying for media.”

Let me shout this into the halls of the IAB on East 26^th Street. The value of the media is in its accountability! This is the most accurate metrics/analytics driven medium that exists and it’s getting better at collecting data and more intelligent about what to do with that data everyday. Smart marketers and advertisers understand how to use that data and optimize their advertising. This is what the digital game is about.

Let me get something else off my chest while we’re on the subject of creative. Almost all the issues plaguing display advertising rest in the creative end. It starts with the ad sizes and locations. The problems continue with not understanding web user behavior and experience. They fester with the cost of serving rich media. Let’s touch on this for a bit because it is an important and unspoken aspect of the issues Mr. Rothenberg alludes to.

There is a huge cost consideration if you want to serve these really “creative” ads. Flash has opened up a world of possibility but at the moment the serving fees are outrageous, let alone the costs that most agencies charge for this type of work. Coming full circle most of the agencies that do this type of work haven’t a clue how to optimize Flash ads to get people interested in them. Testing these ads is non starter and fewer still understand how to optimize the media buy for performance. Oops, I said a bad advertising word, “performance.”

The problem will only be solved by continuing to move away from a banner economy and redefine what advertising is on the web. We need to stop putting up billboards and start paving roads. We need to stop taking ad strategies from other channels and throwing them on the web. That is the real "spray and pray."

I get that Mr. Rothenberg and the IAB have the backs of publishers here and they have every reason to be worried about the display economy (albeit a day late and a dollar short) but we are NEVER going back to the hey-days of high CPM so these ideas about creative and performance are ill thought-out and pure laziness. A much better tact would be to work on blurring the very notions of what is brand and what is direct for online.

Bottom line: if you are worried about the value of display then find better ways to create that value and better ways to measure it, based on performance.

Related Posts:

Brand Marketing in the Digital Age

The Power of Brand to Influence Outcomes or Why Brands Will Always Rule Digital

The Next Generation of Digital Marketing Agencies

Platforms, Applications and the Future of Digital Marketing

Ads as Content - Content as Ads

It is hard to believe but we are ONLY 5 years into search advertising reaching critical mass. In the blink of an eye it has emerged as one of the world’s most disruptive and successful technology initiatives. Google alone made over $20B in revenue from it last year. For me the key takeaway for the next generation of advertising technology is:

The marketing and advertising apparatus of the web has to be built into its underlying architecture and seamlessly integrate into the way people use it.

Sounds so simple. Yet so much time, energy and money has been spent trying to retrofit solutions -- attempts to anticipate or modify conventional (goal-based) web behavior with ads. While these ideas have short bursts of energy and sometimes glorious exits they eventually die without the scalable and sustainable foundation of the web itself and the way people use it.

To examine this deeper we should look at Google’s foundation, page rank. Page rank is based on links, the underlying architecture of the web. It works great at delivering relevance to people from one place (the page) to another (Google) based on a few major rules (query & authority).  The end result, the product, is a mashup of content into a search results page that the user maintains control over.

The ad platform that supports this is also built around the query and a different kind of authority, performance (quality score). The pricing and display are directly correlated to the same inputs and outputs that drive the underlying content. In fact there is the amazing ability to modify the relevance of the publisher content (the SERP) to adjust ad performance and revenue. I’m not suggesting this takes place but the important point is (to paraphrase Neil Young) ”it’s all one song!”

This blueprint is essential as we look to develop products that optimize advertising and marketing. Unless we are making the web better and more useful for people we will never achieve results or scale that breed success. This was the ultimate failing of display advertising – it did not add relevance or interest to the audience, it did not make the underlying content more valuable and it did not perform well for advertisers. That is all about to change.

We are moving forward with a web less about links and more about correlations. Less about talking at someone and more about bringing people, messages and content together. We would be smart to learn from search that if ads are integrated with content in a helpful, useful and ultimately relevant way they can not only support the underlying content but also provide great results for the advertiser and audience. After all, who hasn’t clicked an ad from a search?

New York Times Landing Pages: All the Irrelevance That Fits the Pixels

I’ve often used my hometown paper, The New York Times, to exemplify the disconnect between digital publisher content strategy, the goals of visitors and the resultant impact on advertising. The root of this disconnect is the way search, social media and the landing experience fracture content hierarchies. Behavior has changed and so too must the content experience.

Let’s face it, taking the 300 year old idea of a newspaper and essentially throwing it on the web while likely the only option 13 years ago is not optimal one for anyone today. So why has the optimization needle moved so little in the right direction?

Huge amounts of traffic to NYT.com bypass the homepage. With the growth of search, the opening of the Times content archive and the rise of Social Media, success for the Times, its advertisers and most importantly its visitors, relies on the quality of the landing experience. The current NYT landing experience is quite simply dreadful.

It was a link from Social Media that brought me to this page. Keep in mind I'm at 1440x900 so ideally I'm getting the most of this page above the fold.

 

After now having this awful NYT landing experience a number of times from Social Media and Search links I felt compelled to figure out exactly how irrelevant is the content above the fold on the typical New York Times landing page.

New York Times Landing Page Irrelevance

Space:

• 622,740 pixels above fold (970x642)
• 145,500 pixels given to relevant content (485x300)
• Only 23% of the page above the fold dedicated to relevant content   

 

Words:

• 235 words (approx) on the page
• 60 of those words are the relevant content
• Only 25% of the words on the page (above the fold) dedicated to relevant content 

Information

• 18 Distinct content areas (color coded below) above the fold (including the piece of content that is relevant to me). Many of these are navigation. Many have multiple links. Really, do we really need two search query fields?
• Only 5.5% of the content areas on the page (above the fold) dedicated to relevant content 

 

No "Next Click" in the Archive

I mentioned the Times’ has opened their historical archive. This is an amazing contribution to the web (and the correction of another NYT digital content strategy failure, TimesSelect). These archive landing pages while offering less clutter also represent another missed opportunity.

See this first New York Times mention of the Internet. It is a fascinating historical read but it is also a dead-end. Visitors landing on this page as with most of the archive have goals that are discovery. Yet, there are no links to the subsequent 15 years of Internet related content! This is analogous to Amazon’s product pages not having “add to cart” buttons. Even if this is exactly the content the visitor was looking for most of these visitors will likely hit the back button (to Google). This is simply inexcusable strategically and poor business financially.

The Times needs to do better. Its future depends on it. Spending less time selling ads on the front page and more time into creating better digital experiences offers their best hope for survival.

Related Posts:

Optimizing Content Pages

Social Media Landing Pages

Landing Page Utopia: 7 Lessons from Google

Optimize Randomness to Deliver Relevance

The web is never ending path of recovery and discovery.

This is what we’re optimizing!

Yet we are wired for randomness.

Radio, mix tapes, DJ’s, Pandora. Music proves our love of randomness. The sense of discovery fulfills a basic human need. We achieve further fulfillment from enlightening others to our discoveries.

The question then becomes…how random while still providing net-new relevance?

Think about it, if our messages are too random the base content can also become less relevant. We can be random to the point of context. 

We don’t like every one of the 300+ radio stations on XM/Sirius but we have affinity to some more than others. The beauty of affinity is that while it is insanely fragmented it is also incredibly consistent. Not everyone I know loves Springsteen. But nearly all Springsteen fans I know also love Van Morrison.

Randomness helps us discover. It can create interest. It can lead to intent.

This is a content equation not an advertising one.

All ads are content.

Most ads are random.

Few ads are relevant.

It is all changing. 

If we optimize the randomness we deliver relevance.