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Are you using Flintstones tools in the Jetsons age of advertising?
In today’s fast-paced world of programmatic advertising, you can’t afford to fall behind on technology because you may never catch up. This can be devastating to your organization. Here's why...
27 Tips to Build a Healthy Programmatic Direct Advertising API Ecosystem
To unlock the potential of Programmatic Direct, we need to fix the problems of the business arrangements and the design of the API protocols. Here are 27 tips to build a healthy Programmatic Direct advertising API ecosystem.
Marketing Budget Winners and Losers 2010-2020 in One Simple Chart
Last week, I got a report via email from Jack Myers called, “2000-2020 Advertising & Marketing Spending Statistics: Exclusive MyersBizNet Data.” It’s a fantastic report containing a goldmine data on how marketing budgets have shifted 2000-2010 and how they are predicted to shift 2010-2020. Here are the key summary data from Jack's report: Although I am comfortable with numbers, I was having a tough time digesting all this data and answering the question “Which marketing channels are going to be the biggest winners?” and conversely, “who are going to be the biggest losers?” So, I put together a simple chart by doing the following: Copied the raw data into Excel Created a new column called Share Gain/Loss which is calculated by subtracting 2010 % Share from 2020 % Share. A positive number indicates that the channel gained market share and a negative number indicates that the channel lost market share. Created another new column called Amount Gained/Lost which is calculated [...]
4 Essential Questions to Ask When Choosing Your Media Buying Platform
Choosing your media buying platform is a critical decision that will make or break your media planning and buying operation. It’s a decision on a tool that you’ll be using for your daily work for years to come. It will give you a distinct competitive advantage if you make the right choice. Or it can bankrupt you if you make the wrong choice. Using Microsoft Excel for media planning and media buying drains your energy and prevents you from reaching your full potential. Excel’s inefficiency is infamous in professional media circles. But finding a media buying platform to replace Excel can be an extremely confusing and frustrating experience. It seems that everyone is offering a media buying platform these days. When you Google “media buying platform” (with the quotes to limit the search results), you get more than 20,000 results. This creates a long, confusing list of options. In reality, only a small fraction of those options actually provide a [...]
True Story: Banner Advertising that Actually Works!
Like most of you in digital advertising, I read stories of dismal statistics in online display advertising, reports that you are more likely to survive a plane crash than click a banner ad, and the steady drumbeat of "banner advertising is dead." The reports of its death have been greatly overexaggerated. Here's a personal story that found me clicking a banner ad and becoming a new customer. On Saturday, was checking my Yahoo mail account. Usually, the right rail in Yahoo mail presents me with a cesspool of ads I try to ignore. But this time I saw an ad for shaving supplies from an outfit named Harry's. I had never heard of Harry's before, but I've been bothered lately by how much I am spending on shaving supplies between $16 shave cream from Clinique (which used to be $8 when I started using it) and Gillette Mach3 razor blades. Although I was not thinking about shaving supplies when I [...]
The Revolt Against the “Inefficiency Tax” in Digital Advertising
Advertisers are revolting against wasting huge portions of their digital advertising budgets on “non-working media.” The process of buying digital advertising is notoriously inefficient; Google estimates we are wasting $3.6 million per hour using our current methods. On Monday, I had the privilege of kicking off the "Breaking Down Data" segment of the IAB Ad Ops Summit in New York City with a presentation on "The Revolt against the Inefficiency Tax in Digital Advertising" where we dissected the problem, discussed implications, and presented a path towards reform. Here's a video snippet the IAB posted on their YouTube channel: And here's the slide deck that went along with it (I wish the slides were in the video because it would make more sense): Part 2 - The Value of Data Following my presentation, Angelina Eng of Merkle and Carine Roman of Linkedin presented "The Value of Data" - An agency and publisher articulate the value of data and what [...]
Our Quixotic Quest to Slay the Paper Insertion Order
Until recently, developing electronic standards for the digital media industry was like Don Quixote fighting “giants” – a noble but unrealistic pursuit.
Advertiser vs. Agency Debate – Part III – Follow the Money
Until advertisers stop punishing agencies for efficiency through broken compensation systems, agencies will continue to have a talent problem.
Fraud and the Programmatic Direct Pivot
There has been a lot of talk about the pervasive amount of click fraud and bot traffic happening in digital. Marketers are reportedly spending anywhere from 30% to 70% of their digital budgets on fake impressions and clicks, and an entire cottage industry is cropping up to help marketers combat fraud and try and protect their digital marketing investments. Some people claim that price of fraud is already built into the programmatic RTB ecosystem. Marketers are using programmatic RTB for direct marketing, and they are measuring sales using CPA metrics. If they are paying $100 per verified acquisition, should they care whether it takes 10 million or 20 million impressions to produce a conversion? Some say that they don’t, and take the view that they only pay for results, justified by their backend conversion metrics which take media cost into consideration. I hope this is not the case. Ignoring fraud with these justifications is what ultimately may kill the digital [...]
I See Dead People… Responding to my Marketing!
In today’s digital marketing, we seem increasingly dependent on algorithms and attribution models for targeting and measurement.