Accountability is crucial in media planning and buying to ensure cost efficiency, ROI, campaign optimization, transparency, and continuous learning.
How to Make Advertising Flowcharts That Will Blow Your Mind
Flowcharts aren’t just for media planning anymore. Here's how to create beautiful flowcharts that reveal your advertising effectiveness across dozens of KPIs.
The Four Keys to Programmatic Direct Success
I was recently talking to the Chief Digital Officer of a large agency that does a lot of digital media buying. He has been working closely with a number of software providers to standardize his operations on a media management system. Getting all his vendor information, order management, and billing information has been a huge undertaking. Apparently, half the battle at an agency is getting paid (getting paid in less than 120 days is the other half)! We were talking about some of the upfront processes behind putting together a media plan, which were mostly manual: putting the actual plan together in Excel, trading e-mails back and forth with vendors in the RFP process, trafficking ad tags, collecting screenshots, etc. Wouldn’t it be valuable if computers could streamline much of that work, and connect buyers and sellers together more seamlessly? He agreed that it would truly transform his business, but accepted much of that manual work as part of the [...]
The Transactional RFP Business is Dying
“80 percent of the publishers getting an RFP don’t even stand a chance.” – Doug Weaver, Upstream Group Direct mail is an amazing thing. It costs something like $750 CPM to put a glossy catalogue in the mail, but somehow direct marketers make those numbers work. Mailing lists are constantly optimized to make sure they hit the right houses, fresh lists acquired to create new demand, and non-performing lists ruthlessly culled if they don’t meet certain KPIs. Direct marketers actually can tell just how much money a mailing will produce in sales. Contrast that with a banner campaign, in which “good” performance means a 0.05% click-through rate, 40% non-viewable inventory, and fairly dim transparency. Some of the greatest companies in the space, newly public and boasting hundreds of millions in run rates, are still challenged to justify spending to their marketing clients. Thankfully, last click attribution hasn’t gone anywhere. I recently overheard a marketer at a conference saying that 70% [...]
The Nuts and Bolts of Programmatic Direct
An interview with Econsultancy’s Monica Savut and Bionic's Chris O'Hara, on his recently published programmatic direct whitepaper. Econsultancy: Why now? In other words, why has this “programmatic direct” trend been on the radar lately? What’s driving all of the conversation the space? Chris O’Hara: It’s really something my boss Joe Pych calls the “Sutton Pivot,” inspired by the famous thief Willie Sutton who robbed banks “because that’s where the money was.” Over 70% of digital display dollars are transacted in a very manual way today. Despite all the LUMAscape hype over RTB, most of the digital money still gets transacted through the request-for-proposal (RFP) process. Everybody wants a piece of the action, hence the “Sutton pivot,” in which all the ad tech companies are running to try and provide automation technology for directly sold deals. It’s actually a good thing. Today’s process for buying guaranteed digital media can take over 40 steps and suck up over 10% of media budgets just in [...]
2013 Will be the Year of Programmatic Direct
Fairfax Cone, the founder of Foote, Cone, and Belding once famously remarked that the problem with the agency business was that “the inventory goes down the elevator at night.” He was talking about the people themselves. For digital media agencies, who rely on 23 year-old media planners to work long hours grinding on Excel spreadsheets and managing vendors, that might be a problem. For all of the hype and investment behind real-time bidding, the fact is that “programmatically bought” media (RTB) will only account for roughly $2B of the anticipated $15B in digital display spending this year, or a little over 13% depending on who you believe. Even if that number were to double, the lion’s share of digital display still happens the old fashioned way: Publishers hand-sell premium guaranteed inventory to agencies. Kawaja map companies, founded to apply data and technology to the problem of audience buying, have gotten the most ink, most venture funding, and most share of [...]
Programmatic Direct is not about Bidding
“A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is quickly saturated with a bad one” - Henry Ford When it comes to digital publishing sales, it seems like many publishers are questioning whether the product they have—the standard banner ad—is what they should be selling. Last month, I wrote that 2013 would be the year of programmatic direct, where LUMA map companies who make their living in real time bidding turn towards the guaranteed space, where 80% of digital marketing dollars are being spent. My recent experience at Digiday Exchange Summit convinced me that this meme continues—with an important distinction: programmatic direct (also described as “programmatic premium”) is not about bidding on quality inventory through exchanges. Rather, it is about using technology to enable premium guaranteed buys at scale. Here is what I heard: The Era of the Transactional RFP is Over Forbes’ Meredith Levien currently gets 10% of her display revenue from programmatic buying, up from 2% [...]
How you Pay Your Agency Matters
The typical $500,000 digital media plan takes an alarming 42 steps and nearly 500 man hours to complete, which can cost up to $50,000.
If it’s not Programmatic Premium, then what is it?
I recently returned from an exciting IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Phoenix, where a packed Arizona Biltmore resort was host to over 800 digital media luminaries. On the tip of many tongues over a two day session was “programmatic premium,” the term our industry is using to describe the buying of digital media in a more automated way. One particular “Town Hall” type meeting was particularly spirited, as leaders sparred over what “programmatic” meant, whether or not publishers should be using it, and how agencies were leveraging it. Here is what I heard: We are calling it the wrong thing. Like it or not, the term “programmatic” is tied to the concept of real time bidding. This is natural, given the fact that the last 5 years in ad tech have largely revolved around DSPs, SSPs, and cookie-level data. This creates a problem because, when you add the word “premium” into the mix, you have a really big disconnect. Most folks don’t [...]
New Tech Takes On Cost-Plus Pricing by Agencies
How the enterprise pays its ad agency actually matters. Here’s why. I have been working for a company that makes software solutions for buying digital media, and I have worked for a number of ad technology companies in the past. In a world where digital banner ads are still purchased through email and fax, and media plans are mostly created using Microsoft Excel — technology dating from 1985 — the ad technology industry sees an opportunity to create efficiencies in the way media is bought and sold. One of the odd industry dynamics we have encountered in bringing our product to market is how independent agencies are more apt to embrace new efficiencies than some of the “big four” owned agencies that lead the space in terms of media spend. Logically, you’d think that gigantic media agencies, managing hundreds of media planners and buying on thousands on digital media channels, would grasp at the chance to do more planning with [...]
In Digital Advertising, Time is Money
We found that 64% of the time spent on an online campaign is spent in implementation, execution, and reporting. Much of this time is spent copy pasting Excel.