Reach Machines » planning

June 30, 2008

VivaKi’s Audience on Demand Network is a Step in the Right Direction

Filed under: media planning — Tags: buying, media, planning — bstraley @ 10:58 pm

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.

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Comments (1)

Additional Thoughts and Reaction to Google AdPlanner Announcement

Filed under: marketing strategy, media planning — Tags: advertising, buying, google, media buying, media planning, planning — bstraley @ 7:43 am

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.