Media buying is crucial to the success of your advertising campaign. It helps you optimize your advertising spend and maximize reach to your target audience.
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.
Do Digital Media Agencies Have a Plan?
Digital agencies used to get paid for unpacking an incredibly complicated digital landscape for marketers. Faced with all kinds of new marketing opportunities, advertisers turned to savvy digital agencies to figure out where to spend their money, and how much of it to dedicate to display, mobile and social channels. The dingy little secret was that the agencies didn’t really plan much of anything. The way it worked was that agency planners would make an Excel template, create an RFP document, instruct the media owners to send back all kinds of creative ideas and fill out the media plan template. RFPs sent publisher teams spinning into action, churning out exciting-looking PowerPoints with screenshots and suggested spending levels. Not much of this was scientific. Publishers often promised more inventory than could be delivered, knowing they would never get the full budget allocation. Agencies asked for various “budget levels,” knowing they would allocate only $50,000 per publisher – but asking to see [...]
Ad Tech Investors Are Wasting Millions on Buyer Interfaces
Sell-side technology vendors building buyer interfaces are destined for failure because they ignore the needs of the media buyer.
Know These 5 AdTech Memes for 2014
Well, at least it’s not the “year of mobile” again. Or, maybe it is. After several days of media investment banking conferences (Gridley and JEGI), I can reliably report that 2014 will be “the year” of many uber-trends ,some of which will enrich the M&A bankers who have a focus on the increasingly frothy ad technology and marketing space. Here are five memes to consider: “Mobile First” If you were to believe every ad tech panelist, you might be inclined to throw your laptop in the East River. Apparently—despite desktop only slightly starting to lose overall time-spent share to mobile on a year-over-year basis—nobody is developing ad tech solutions for the desktop anymore. Everyone is “mobile first,” meaning that they are writing code for tablet and mobile phone browsers and apps before developing solutions for the poor laptop or desktop computer. Of course, mobile devices are showing explosive growth, and clearly where the majority of consumers’ time will be found [...]
Bionic Goes Old School with Traditional Media Planning
Bionic Advertising Systems today announced an upgrade to its Media Planner system that adds support for traditional media channels such as TV, radio, and print. The media planning tool now enables media planners to create media plans with placements across 24 different advertising channels, representing the full range of digital and traditional offline media. “Bionic Planner was originally designed to solve the problems specific to the complex and expensive process of planning and buying digital advertising,” said Chris O’Hara, co-founder and CRO of Bionic. “Since its launch a year ago, media planners have started by using it for their digital media planning. Along the way we noticed a pattern: inevitably after getting into it, they would ask us how to use it for ALL their media planning. Now that digital is becoming more mainstream and integrated in the advertising mix, nobody wants to use one planning tool for digital and another one for traditional advertising.” The latest version of Bionic [...]
The Battle for Workflow Automation
Even though programmatic RTB has seen the lion’s share of venture capital funding and an enormous amount of innovation, RTB buying only accounts for 20%-30% of all digital media dollars. The real money still flows through the direct buying process, with agencies spending up to 400 hours and $50,000 to create the typical campaign, and publishers burning through 1,600 hours a month and 18% of their revenue responding to RFPs. What a mess….and an opportunity. Everybody’s battling for a slice of that direct sales pie, and the game is all about helping buyers and sellers automate the manual processes that drive almost 80% of transactional value. The Holy Grail for both sides is a web based, connected platform that will enable planners and sellers to thrust aside Excel, and start to transact business in the cloud. Although a number of companies have tried and failed to deliver on the promise of workflow automation, the time seems ripe for true adoption, [...]
Bionic Makes It Easy to Create Beautiful Flowcharts
Instantly create advertising flowcharts. Eliminate hours of unpleasant grunt work. Eradicate tedious mistakes. Improves the look of your flowcharts.
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 [...]
Here’s Why 86% of Digital Media Planners Still Use Excel
Why do they media planners stick with Excel when other options exist despite its well-known shortcomings? Here are reasons from the iMedia Agency Summit.