Joe Pych writes about technology that automates media planning and media buying. Below are his archives.
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Archives
Why the RFP fails in digital media buying
As a follow up to the 9 ways the RFP fails in digital media buying, this article shows how today’s digital media landscape has rendered the RFP obsolete. The RFP process has been used in the advertising business since the beginning. But the dynamics of the media landscape has changed significantly since then. 50 years ago, in the Mad Men era, there were few media options to choose from. Think ABC, NBC, and CBS. Budgets were big. Planning cycles were long. Everyone knew everyone. It was easy to create your consideration set. The RFP process worked well in this environment of limited and static supply. We did not have all these problems with the RFP back in those days. Fast forward 50 years to today. We are in the digital media era. There are tens of thousands of digital media options to choose from and the landscape is evolving every day. Budgets are relatively small. Planning cycles are short. Staffing [...]
9 ways the RFP fails in digital media buying
“The RFP is broken” is often heard among digital media planning/buying and digital ad sales teams (called “buyer” and “seller” in this article). However, the RFP – or Request for Proposal – has remained an ingrained part of the digital media buying process for guaranteed inventory. This article explores the problems with using the RFP process in digital media buying. The purpose of the RFP The proposals that come in response to the RFP provide the buyer with benefits that include: Information – Proposals (RFP responses) contain the information a buyer needs to decide whether or not to include a given program in their media plan Ideas – proposals sometime present fresh “out of the box” ideas that benefit the advertiser Pricing – Proposals often include special negotiated pricing and other special terms Inventory – Proposals typically reveal how much inventory is available during the flight of the campaign How do RFP’s fail? Buyers and sellers cite the following problems [...]
2,500+ Top Website Ad Programs Now Available In Bionic
The 1,000 site milestone seemed like a big deal when we hit it last month. But now it seems so yesterday… today we hit another milestone: more than 2,500 sites are now represented in our data card index. Congratulations to the Accounts and Market Intelligences teams for establishing the relationships and doing the research and data entry to hit this goal ahead of schedule. We’re running at a pace of more than 200 sites per day so it won’t be long before we hit our next milestone: 10,000 sites.
Yikes – it costs an agency $40,356 to create and execute a digital media plan
There’s been a lot of talk about how inefficient the process of placing digital advertisements is as compared to TV and other traditional media. For example, according to Google, “Managing display ad campaigns can take up 28% of the budget in overhead, compared to 2% for TV. Which means for every $100 you spend on display, $28 goes to process management such as negotiation with multiple sites, re-planning, faxing insertion orders, trafficking hundreds of ad tags and so on. Such inefficiencies have impeded the growth of the industry.” Being process and workflow geeks, we wanted to understand this inefficiency at a deeper level. So, we conducted our own study to drill into this from a media agency’s perspective. The goal of the study was to answer a basic question: “How much does it cost an agency to create and execute a digital media plan?“ We faced our first big challenge right out of the gate. This question is not as [...]
1,000+ Top Website Ad Programs Now Available In Bionic
Last month, we announced a milestone: 50 Top Web Publishers Tap NextMark’s New Ad Sales Tool. Today, we report two more milestones: 1) That “50″ number is already old news; more than 100 publishers are now on board. In the past month alone, another 50+ web publishers have signed on, bringing the count to 107. 2) More than 1,000 website advertising programs from these web publishers are now represented as “data cards” in our advertising program database. In fact, as of today 1,414 data cards have been published. At the current rate, more than 2,500 of the top website advertising programs will be indexed and available by the end of the year. Unlike in other media channels, digital media planners have never had a “go to” source of comprehensive information about digital advertising programs. They’ve used myriad tools and countless hours of drudgery to cobble together the information they need to present a professional media plan to their client, the [...]
50 Top Web Publishers Tap Bionic’s New Ad Sales Tool
Bionic’s new ad sales tool is gaining widespread adoption among leading website publishers. More than 900 of the hottest websites are already represented.
Excel Still Top Tool for Media Pros
Laredo Group's AdSavvy newsletter just featured a story by Kendall Allen that hit home with me because it highlights the fact that Microsoft Excel is still the tool of choice for media pros despite the proliferation of other tools: “Long live the Excel spreadsheet as the tool of choice. We speak anecdotally among industry circles and in class about our seemingly lifelong relationship with manual approaches and tools – and with Excel. We have a love-hate relationship with Excel. It turns out that the stats bear this out. But, we are still more manual and Excel-jockeying than we should be, if we want to scale our efforts.” She cites research by Efficient Frontier that reveals: “When asked which tools they used to manage both programs together, US marketers most commonly said spreadsheets (59%)—seemingly favoring a simple, and most likely inadequate campaign management solution over more advanced tools…. That’s not to say that marketers aren’t also relying on some form of [...]
Digital Media Agencies Spend 38 Hours and $3,018 per Campaign on RFPs
Here’s an interesting finding from a recent costing analysis: Digital media agencies typically spend 38 hours and $3,018 per campaign executing the Request for Proposal (RFP) process using modern tools. The “typical” campaign scenario here is a $500k media spend on 10 sites with an average of 10 placements each. Is the RFP process broken? Times have changed since it was built for the Mad Men Era: budgets are smaller and cycle times are quicker. It seems a new approach is required for the digital age.
Typical Online Display Media Order Process
As part of the process of building our next generation digital media planning application, we’ve been documenting the current digital media “culture” (I feel like an anthropologist). One of the more interesting documents to come out of this research is the “Typical Online Display Media Order Process” shown above. This is complicated! You’ll find a dozen roles executing 42 steps. It’s no wonder the cost of executing a digital campaign is so high.