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.
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% [...]
On the Road to Programmatic Direct
Companies are turning their venture-funded ships in the direction of programmatic direct, thus making "Sutton Pivot" towards 80% of display media spending.
RFP and proposal management just got easier with Planner 2.0
Bionic today announced an upgrade to its digital media planning software, which adds key functionality for handling RFPs and media proposals. The Request for Proposal or RFP process in digital advertising is well-known to be a frustrating mess. Despite recently celebrating the eighteenth anniversary of the banner ad, sending RFP requests and handling proposal responses is still a highly manual effort involving emails, Excel spreadsheets, shared file folders, phone calls, sticky notes, and plenty of manual labor. Despite its many failings and costing agencies more than $3,000 per campaign in labor, nobody has yet developed a widely adopted alternative to this time consuming and expensive process. Bionic streamlines the RFP process with the latest upgrade to its Digital Media Planner system. Version 2.0 of Planner extends the platform’s functionality by enabling media planners to directly interact with publishers to request and manage media proposals. Now, instead of using spreadsheets and e-mail to negotiate pricing and placements, Planner’s Proposal Manager module [...]
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 [...]
When Cost-Plus is a Minus
It’s funny how people deride Microsoft for not being successful in advertising technology when 80% of digital media dollars are transacted using their media planning software. Despite the fact that we live in a world where computers can evaluate hundreds of individual bid requests on a single impression and render an ad serving decision in under 50 milliseconds, the overwhelming majority of display inventory is bought using e-mail and fax machines. Those media plans are manually created in Excel. Terence Kawaja of the famous LUMAscape maps, which depict the 300-plus companies who enable the 20% of display buying that happens programmatically, once said that “inertia is the agency’s best friend” when asked why holding companies were not doing more to bring innovation to advertising. I imagine that part of what he meant was that their common business model (billable hours plus a negotiated margin) does not create an incentive for efficiency. On the contrary, complexity in media planning means more billable hours—as [...]
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 [...]
A Publisher’s History of Programmatic Premium
It’s hard to argue that the banner ad era has been good to publishers. After a brief initial period in which banner inventory matched audience availability, publishers enjoyed double-digit CPMs and advertisers enjoyed unique access to a valuable audience of online “early adopters.” Prognosticators heralded a new golden era of publishing, and predicted the eventual death of print. Fifteen years later, print is barely breathing, but publishers are still awaiting a “golden era” where the promise of online media matches its potential. What happened on the long road of publisher monetization, and how did we arrive in this new “programmatic” era? It didn’t take long after HotWired sold the first banner ad to AT&T for other online properties to start making banner ads part of every page they put onto the Web. Not immune to Adam Smith’s economic theory, banner CPMs lowered as impression availability rose. Suddenly, publishers were in the single digits for their “ROS” inventory, and had plenty [...]
3 Reasons Why “Programmatic Premium” Doesn’t Work Today
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about “programmatic premium” – using machines to fully automate the purchase of premium advertising inventory.
John Henry vs. Programmatic Buying
Two articles published this week have caught my attention despite my recently self-imposed “information diet.” They rise above the din because of the keen observations they make on the changing workforce at advertising agencies. “There’s a lot of inexperienced people on the ground doing a lot of grunt work.” - Forrester analyst Joanna O’Connell in Agencies in the Age of Machines by Brian Morrissey “Accepting that there will be fewer and fewer staffers at the agency doing the grunt work of RFPs and spreadsheets: Do you really see more than a tiny handful of those people being retrained and redirected into right-brain Marketecture jobs?” – Upstream Group founder and CEO Doug Weaver in Brave New Agency The disruptive force here is the rise of automated, programmatic buying machines. These machines eliminate manual human toil and efficiently grind towards their narrow objectives. These articles remind me of the legend of John Henry vs. the steam-powered hammer. In this folk tale, the status quo [...]