The future of online advertising. I gave a talk on Thursday at the AppNexus Summit in front of a few hundred digital advertising types. The first part of the talk was a macro overview, but when the Q&A session started, all that anybody wanted to talk about was my take on online media. And given how granular the discussions over the course of the rest of the day were going to be, I wanted to push back a bit against some of the unexamined assumptions which I encounter most of the time when I meet online-media people.
The first is that there’s something necessary and inevitable about ad-driven models dominating the online media industry. That’s certainly how things have worked out to date, but there was nothing inevitable about it. From the very early days of the World Wide Web, many extremely smart people pushed very hard to develop a workable micropayments architecture online. Meanwhile, people were happily paying small sums for newspapers, for magazines, for coffee, for any number of fast-moving consumer goods.
ACHAT MEDIA. Online Advertising Goes Open Source. InShare0 A Q&A with Chris Davey, senior vice president and managing director of SapientNitro. Programmatic buying of digital media across exchanges is going through an accelerated growth phase. Recognizing the enormous benefits for the entire industry, companies on the buy and sell sides have dropped their competitive biases to create the OpenRTB Consortium. The group's mission is to improve ad technology adoption and integration through the creation of open, flexible, and safe industry standards. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Chris Davey, senior vice president and managing director of SapientNitro. Mike Baker: Sapient is a really unique company, since you offer agency services, IT consulting, and even financial trading systems. Chris Davey: Absolutely. To complete this evolution, I believe the marketplace needs to adopt a set of open standards that allow buyers and sellers of inventory to interact more efficiently.
CD: Yes I do. The Future of Advertising Will Be Integrated. Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster) a VC at GRP Partners. He blogs at BothSidesoftheTable. Banner Ads. They first started in 1994 and are therefore almost as old as the Web itself. They were very effective back then, with the original ad garnering a 78% click-through rate (CTR)!
Nowadays banner ads get on average 0.2% CTR meaning for every 1,000 ads that are served up only 2 people click on them. Holy Shiitake! Despite its creation more than 15 years ago, banner ads have been surprisingly resilient despite their lack of efficacy. The fundamental problem with banner ads is a condition called “banner blindness” meaning that our eyes are really quickly trained to look at what is most relevant on the page – the content we want to see. I’m sure it probably resonants with how most of you read the web. So I’ve spent the last few years checking out companies that are trying to solve for this problem. You’ll see a clear problem here. Integrated Advertising In Image Ads. Feeding the Funnel with Facebook (Social Studies Blog) _Full_year_2010_0413_Final.pdf (Objet application/pdf) Real-time Discovery Engine - YourVersion: Discover Your Version of the Web™
Attributing Brand Advertising Effectiveness. – July 15, 2011Posted in: Advertising, U.S. Traditional methods of attributing the effects of digital advertising, such as last-click (commonly used to measure the impact of direct response advertising) and last exposure (commonly used to measure the impact of branding advertising) rely on overly simplistic, flawed methods. This means that insights are often inaccurate and not actionable for marketers, agencies and publishers. comScore has developed a methodology, currently being applied to AdEffx Brand Survey Liftâ„¢ studies in the United States, called Smart Lift Attribution Model, which overcomes many of the shortcomings associated with ‘last exposure’ measurement approaches. Specifically, this model: Check out this infographic to get a better understanding of how it works and what this means for you and your business:
The Economics of Attention: Why There Are No Second Chances on the Internet : Tech News and Analysis « In my last Om Says, Why Some Apps Works and Some Don’t, I started to explore one of my core theses — the growing importance of the economics of attention and how it relates the success and failure of Internet (and mobile) applications. I believe that the economics of attention is much more ruthless and unforgiving than the real economic underpinning of a product. What I mean is that you can find money for your company from an investor, but it wouldn’t really matter if you don’t have users’ attention. This is a hard reality that has been obvious in highly competitive and somewhat subjective marketplaces. Hollywood movies, music and even fashion are markets where “attention” determines the outcome.
No Second Chances And just as it is hard for a movie to recover from a bad opening weekend, today’s “apps” are likely to lose their place in the marketplace if they don’t make a good first impression. MVP + Happiness + Utility = Early Traction Sareen makes a good point. What Doesn’t Work?