Strategy is essential in media planning and media buying because it helps ensure that a company’s advertising efforts are targeted, effective, and efficient.
The Hourglass Funnel Changes Everything
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the hourglass funnel. Most funnels stop at the thin bottom, when a customer “drops” out, having made the journey through awareness, interest, desire and action. After the “action,” or purchase, the customer gets put into a CRM to be included in more traditional marketing outreach efforts, such as calls, e-mails, and catalogue mailings. In the past, marketers often thought about how to turn customers into advocates, but couldn’t figure out how to do it at scale. Companies that were really good at multi-level marketing, like Amway, didn’t have easy-to-replicate business models. Today, the situation has changed. Social-media platforms give marketers tools to engage customers in their CRMs and bring them back through the bottom of the funnel, turning them into brand advocates — and maybe even salespeople. This is why Salesforce has been snatching up social-media companies like Radian6 and Buddy Media, while Oracle bought Vitrue and Involver. These platforms can help get people talking about your [...]
Complexity is the Digital Ad Agency’s Best Friend
I once heard Terence Kawaja remark that “complexity is the agency’s best friend.” It’s hard to argue with that. Early digital agencies were necessary because doing things like running e-mail campaigns, building websites, and buying banner ads were really complicated. You needed nerdy guys who knew how to write HTML and understood what “Atlas” did. Companies like Operative grew admirable services businesses that took advantage of the fact that trafficking banner ads really sucked, and large publishers couldn’t be bothered to build those capabilities internally. The early days were great times for digital agencies. They were solving real problems. Fast forward 13 years. Digital agencies are still thriving, mostly by unpacking other types of complexity. “Social media experts” were created to consult marketers on the new social marketing channel, “trading desks” launched to leverage the explosion of incomprehensible RTB systems, and terms like “paid, owned, and earned” were coined to complexify digital options. It’s hard being a marketer. So much [...]
The Elephant in the Room: Agency Compensation
Earlier this month, during the Agency-Only Day at the iMedia Agency Summit, I gave a presentation on agency automation and streamlining the media planning process. It’s a complicated and expensive process still done manually at most agencies.
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% [...]
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 [...]
The 10 Biggest Problems with RFPs
It’s the fall media planning season. It’s the time of the year when leaves fall and make a mess of all the yards in the neighborhood. It’s also the time of the year when RFPs fall and make a mess of all the desks and inboxes in the media world. In The Fiesta Nobody Loves, Doug Weaver writes: “As we enter the fall season and another online advertising year begins to ebb, the human-powered agency RFP process continues — against all odds — to cling to life. For those looking in from the outside, the RFP (request for proposal) is a weekly ritual in which an agency sends out digital planning requirements to five times as many sites and networks as they’ll be able to buy from. The sales reps get all lathered up, put their entire organization into Def-Con 4 status, and turn a detailed proposal around in 36 or 48 hours with relatively little quality information and — unbeknownst [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]