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If you are at all involved in display advertising AdExchanger.com is a daily must read. So I was really psyched when they wanted to interview me and that interview was published today. It covers what we are doing at RAMP Digital and my POV on the state and future of the digital ad industry.
The following post was originally published as a guest post for the AdMonsters blog in advance of my speaking at their Leadership Forum. For more reading on the ideas contained here I also recommend this post and this post on Chris Dixon's blog.
Fragmentation =
Problems & Opportunities
No one will argue that the Display marketplace is an incredibly fragmented and inefficient system. Try as they might this advertiser driven ecosystem has created a few problems long hidden by overinflated CPMs. First are the serious issues in the market’s ability to scale. Second, is the arbitrage and optimization often occurring in conflict and silos. Third and worst of all, the ads suck.
In contrast to Display, Search over a shorter period and having grown-up as a publisher side solution has 2 million active advertisers - all participating in a realtime auction based systems based on a single criterion, ad performance. The contrast is startling as are the results – Search spend will double that of display this year.
Enter the Network
Paradigm
Just like Wall Street, Madison Avenue also has that New York City reality – if you’re losing money then someone else is making money. Once spend hits the street it is a zero sum game. Into this fragmented world of media buyers, planners, ad serving and publishers came the ad networks - ostensibly filling a huge need for publishers. Yet it now seems ad networks are the collateralized mortgages of the online world. Just the other day Tim Armstrong declared the AOL want to be the digital equivalent of Goldman Sachs, so the analogy has some credence.
This has allowed two things to happen. On the sell side as inventory increases and prices drop, the media ROI for performance marketers continues to increase. So too does their spending. 57% of display advertising was performance last year (IAB/PWC). This year the number will increase for fifth consecutive year at the expense of branded CPM. First half 2009 online display ad spending continues shifting to pay for performance with greater velocity: (TNS +6.5% (CPM +CPC/CPA); Nielsen -1% (CPM only).
On the buy side what’s happening is that while Premium CPMs keep dropping those rising performance spends are being kept at huge margins by networks. For every remnant media dollar roughly a quarter of that is kept by the agencies, a quarter goes to the pubs and half or more of it goes to networks. It’s a damn fine business. No wonder VC’s have funded it up the wazoo to the tune of 2 billion over the past few years.The problem is all of this is cannibalizing the channel. Better tools have produced lower yield for publishers and higher ROI for performance advertisers.
Consequences of Alternate Realities
If there is too much weight on one side it sinks the ship. Publishers can’t survive with this inequity much longer. They own the audience and the content. The value is being created in their environment. They deserve more.
The media reality is that publishers are getting $7k in revenue from inventory being monetized at $48k (I know, I’ve run these RON performance campaigns). The content reality is that in digital power shifts away from the content and towards the distribution of it. The same way Search has done this with content so too have the ad networks done it on the ad side. It’s time for pubs to take the power back.
It’s beginning to happen. A number of publishers are turning into marketing agencies themselves. Meredith has just hired Martin Riedy CEO of Publicis Modem to lead its 400 employee integrated marketing unit. Publishers are now building microsites and custom ads for advertisers in order to get their spend. Are we that far away from NYTimes going to Ford and delivering 500,000 leads over a year for $25M? I don’t think so. Disintermediation anyone?
The Final Frontier
But this change doesn’t happen in display unless there is a fundamental shift in the mindset and technology. Like search, visitor and advertiser value can only be delivered and game-changing revenues can only be achieved for publishers if we start optimizing for people and performance, not pages and prices.
For example, we know from Search that content consumption and temporal trends provide amazing intelligence to deliver relevance. Most large publishers are privy to these interest trends but they do not have the data capture systems to quantify it or the targeting systems to leverage it or the advertising systems to monetize it.
Just like Search the forces that drive monetization are
everything from personal needs to macroeconomic or geographic issues. By
studying content consumption patterns publishers can understand even earlier than
Search the opportunities to match the information and services needs of their
audience. Intent is not generated in
Search. Intent is generated in publishers content and then moved to Search by
the user.
These huge changes require new platforms and tools. For publishers the revenue generation tools available to them have not kept pace with the investment and innovation on the ad side. The irony is that while agencies are not staffed to leverage most of the more analytic and technical tools publishers sit on a goldmine of optimization mindshare in with their ad ops teams. If it’s ever going to happen, now is the time. Nothing less than the future of the Display market is at stake.
Trends in search provide amazing intelligence. So much so that Google has provided a destination site with information even non-data junkies will find interesting. You can look at this data and understand two things about online marketing.
Different media channels serve different purposes for marketers and as Search has known for years demand generated by TV, Print, Radio, comes online and ends up as people searching for more information from publishers.
Most of the forces that drive intent occur offline. These vary from personal needs to macroeconomic and/or geographic issues. By studying content consumption patterns the way Google studies queries publishers can understand (even earlier than Google in many cases) what opportunities exist to match the information goals of their visitors with helpful and useful offers.
That’s all that Google is doing, helping people complete their goals. Being relevant to the needs of their visitors in a way that adds value to their experience, the marketer and their own bottom line. Their challenge is looking at the web in its entirety. For pubs the challenge becomes much easier looking within a single domain - especially a vertical one.
If we’ve learned anything 15 years in and with only 7% of brand spend it’s that Digital is not a medium you can use to get people to pay more for a product or service than a lower cost alternative - the essence of brand marketing. Digital actually facilitates the opposite. So where do all those publishers go that have been waiting with bated breath for brand demand to drive their CPMs higher and higher? There is only one option. Get in the demand capture game.
While publishers are privy to the same interest trends as Google they do not have the data systems to capture it, the targeting systems to leverage it or the advertising systems to monetize it (many pubs do have their own internal search applications capturing this data but they do jack shit with it). Also it’s not just the historical data that they can leverage -- as big an opportunity might be in real-time data.
It's time to move away from old media strategies like forecasting, allocation and planning. They never fit on a web where attention unpredictably ebbs & flows across it. The very idea of a campaign is antiquated when there is demand to be captured 365/24. How many more times will publishers fail to leverage events like Michael Jackson’s death or getting 9M impressions over 2 hours after a link is posted? How many more pubs will I speak with that have no idea how much traffic they get from Search each month, let alone daily by vertical.
If there is a wrinkle in the simplicity of the strategy (though I acknowledge the execution is fraught with challenges to norms) it is the number (25%) of search queries that are new everyday – never before seen. This "intention market" dynamic only serves to exemplify further of the nature and importance of the real-time web.
There’s no “death by Google” going on here as many publishers would like to claim. Furthermore, this is not all about “bottom of the funnel” as many marketers would have you believe. All through the funnel there is plenty of valuable intent. However, if publishers don’t invest in harvesters and reap what they are sowing with their content they will simply starve themselves to death.
It’s taken well over a decade for these ideas to get any traction at all and there are still plenty of holdouts, especially those who feel their business is publishing, not marketing. But the inevitable fact is online is not a branding/awareness/demand gen tool. It never was. Online is a demand capture tool – and serendipitously the greatest medium ever created for it. Let’s rejoice in that fact and get to work. Fall is the time to harvest.
