We work with enough folks in the media planning and buying space to recognize a good idea for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the research, planning, and buying process when we see one. Hot on the heels of Google’s AdPlanner announcement, Publicis Groupe’s new operating unit VivaKi announced the creation of their Audience on Demand Network. While I can’t speak for the effectiveness of their approach, it makes sense in theory.
Of particular interest to us was this quote from Jack Klues that we found in today’s AdAge coverage:
There are a lot of ad exchanges and ad networks out there, but say you are trying to buy any given target audience, like pet lovers, for instance. Right now if you were out looking for pet lovers or [to be more specific] golden retriever lovers, it isn’t like you can’t find those people. But to go find enough of them to generate any kind of aggregated reach would take you a lot of time and effort.
While aggregating eyeballs is certainly the first step in driving up the effective reach of a given campaign, that alone does not solve the “GRL” problem. That is to say you’ve still got to be able to identify where on the Web Golden Retriever Lovers are likely to spend their time regardless of how many networks and/or popular sites you’ve aggregated for the purposes of executing a buy. For that matter, many of the sites that are likely to be popular among the GRL crowd are also likely to be well down into the tail and out of scope for the major networks (AdSense being the notable exception here).
How to aggregate eyeballs without sacrificing the “quality” of the audience is one of the key challenges facing media planners and buyers today and it’s not clear from this announcement how VivaKi is actually going to do this.
Perhaps they should give us a call here at Reach Machines since we’ve spent the better part of a year developing a solution to this vexing and costly problem.
Now that the dust has settled a bit in the wake of Google’s announcement of AdPlanner (apologies for the mixed metaphor), I thought I’d circle back and provide the following additional thoughts.
- The measurement companies are whistling past the graveyard on this I believe. To wit, check out this MediaWeek article from this morning. While it’s clear Google made this announcement early given the maturity of the product, it’s also clear that the longterm play here is to vertically integrate every step along the online advertising value chain starting with research and planning. It’s less about the tail and more about the efficiencies to be gained by streamlining the process for advertisers. All other things being equal which given the notoriously variable results from the measurement companies is a stretch, if Google can get the perception of their measurement to pass over the “good enough” test, then the value-add of an integrated solution will enable the GOOG to move upmarket with greater purpose.
- Now that I’ve had a chance to see and play with AdPlanner a bit, I don’t understand why the company chose to announce the product now. Some of its shortcomings /wrt features and functions are commented on in the Mediaweek story I linked to above. The announcement seems a little premature (much like the product). Is there another shoe that’s about to drop?
- This announcement was/is welcome news for us. We’ve been saying for a couple of years now that the standard online media research-planning-buying methodology is fundamentally flawed and that the technologies used to practice each step in the process are limited as a result. This announcement is strong validation of point of view but as I said in my previous post, there is a lot more room for innovation in this space and Google, surprisingly, hasn’t really innovated anything yet other than shipped a basic media planning tool that will be useful and extremely price competitive within the SMB market segment. Integrated into AdWords, the tool could be quite useful.
The coverage of Google’s announcement of their AdPlanner application for media buyers has by and large buried the lede. The real story here is that Google is attempting to disintermediate “traditional” media planning from the management of online marketing campaigns. It is also integrating its own brand of audience measurement into the process thereby undermining the primary value proposition offered by the likes of comScore, NNR, Quantcast, and others. The online research and audience measurement companies have reason to be very, very concerned about this development. So too should the media teams of interactive agencies view this news with a reasonable degree of trepidation.
Another group of companies that should consider this move as a strategic threat are the ad networks. In making this move, it appears that Google has joined the team here at Reach Machines in the belief that the most efficient way to research and plan media is to take a platform and network agnostic view of the Web at the outset and utilize relevance, reach, and engagement data to identify the optimal online properties for specific ads and messages. Isn’t that precisely the ad network value proposition in a nut shell? They do the hard work of bundling the “best” sites into channels so the planners don’t have to? It is not a question of “if” but when Google announces the integration of ad buying with their AdPlanner tool. At that point, all bets are off as to what value all but the very largest ad networks can bring to the table.
For years, we’ve struggled on the client side to accept plans that on their face were too limited in scope and reflected the obvious. $1MM buys spread across four properties and maybe a network channel or two just don’t cut it anymore. In a world of ever more fragmented consumer attention and content, marketers not only want audience reach but also placements that are on message and offer an engaged userbase. Current planning tools, methodologies, and network buys (regardless of how “vertical ” they might be) simply don’t meet this fundamental requirement because they ignore these critical dimensions and instead steer marketers in the direction of targeting by demographics and psychographics. Those are poor proxies for consumer behavior and purchase intent. As a consequence, this methodology consistently underperforms compared to platforms and methodologies that target actual consumer behavior and purchase intent. Perhaps this is a big part of the reason why display campaigns rarely deliver the kinds of results savvy marketers expect and why marketers consistently flee to quality in the form of search campaigns and lead generation (where someone else owns the downside performance risk).
While Google’s approach to improving the efficiency of the media research and planning process makes a lot of strategic sense for the company (continuing to vertically integrate along the online advertising value chain), it does not go nearly far enough in moving the industry away from the antiquated approach of audience segmentation by poor proxies for consumer intent: demographics and psychographics. In this regard, the present incarnation of AdPlanner represents an evolution of the media research and planning process rather than the revolution that is required.
For more background and a review of AdPlanner, check out Danny Sullivan’s write-up over at Search Engine Land.
Jeff Jarvis and Scott Karp have both written extensively on the ascendancy of links as a primary form of currency on the Web. In the Buzzmachine post to which I linked above, Jarvis makes the point that the business of online media is to acquire and aggregate links. Links are what build awareness, drive traffic, and power the growth of one’s online presence. The more you have “out there” on high value sites and locations, the louder and more compelling your “voice”.
In the context of online marketing, the same rule of thumb applies. A simple but incredibly effective method of measuring the effectiveness of a brand’s online presence is to study the number, rate of change, and “quality” of backlinks (ie links pointing to the brand site). Powerful insights are to be gained by doing this. For example, benchmarking a brand’s backlinks against its competitors will provide a reliable proxy for market share more often than not. Interestingly, we’ve found several exception
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