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Brands need to fire adtech

artplusmarketing.com

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Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#81

Post by acomjean »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #2

I also submitted this great article. I have been thinking of adtech because I have several web sites, and run ads on none of them because I don't want irrelevant material on my sites. But, since I mostly have content about AI, semantic web, and food + nutrition + machine learning, I would be happy to place ads for specific products and services that I personally like. But I don't know of any ad placing service that,…

I've noticed a few sites seem to have dedicated sponsors, which are in line with what they talk about.

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com seems you use "OWC" other world computing as its primary sponsor

http://strobist.blogspot.com/ (a flash lighting site) seems to have ads from a few flash companies and the 'midwest photo exchange' and a few flash copies.

I'm not sure how those relationships were built.

In college the newspaper had a dedicated team of people going out to sell ads for the paper. They had a "cut sheet" with information about how many papers where printed and how they were distributed..

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#82

Post by busterarm »

mdorazio wrote: post #50
busterarm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies want to know that their advertising dollars are actually producing results, and traditional advertising completely sucks at this. If you've never run a traditional ad campaign, I suggest giving it a try and then decide how much value you think you got out of it. You can spend thousands to millions of dollars and have absolutely no idea if your money impacted sales even the smallest amount. Compare that to…

Is your spend also roughly 1:1 on traditional and online? In my own experience qualified lead gen ROI has been significantly higher with online.

Traditional dwarfs our online budget. That said, online is still significant. We're bidding on 3 of the top 10 most expensive google keywords.

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#83

Post by busterarm »

wtvanhest wrote: post #71
gregw134 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of tool do you have to monitor traditional ad spend? According to op this should be impossible.

Most large companies use a quantitative model with various inputs and outputs. For example, if you know you spend X in market Y, but not market Z you can measure lift within some confidence level between the markets. Imagine a model with every market, and sku, plus the inputs also know where you spent ad dollars and on what product.

Definitely quantitative. And just like everything with advertising, you run experiments constantly.

We also have this fun problem where nobody's actually been verifying that TV ads actually run when they're supposed to. We have physical offices in all of the locations we advertise for the most part, so we're talking about setting up slingboxes and programmatically verifying that our ads actually run.

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#84

Post by clubm8 »

mdorazio wrote: post #17

I feel like the author of this article is missing the reasons behind the rise of adtech in the first place, and doesn't really address how traditional advertising can compensate. There are at least three forces at work here: 1) People straight up don't want to see ads. Ad blockers, Netflix, etc. are a natural response to this. If your medium relies on traditional ads, there's an increasingly large chance that your au…

>People straight up don't want to see ads. Ad blockers, Netflix, etc. are a natural response to this.

Is Netflix totally ad free? I've gotten the impression they were paid for product placement a few times. (Ex: Frank Underwood plugging Sony)

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#85

Post by oli5679 »

I worked as an intern at a couple of companies spending a lot of money on digital marketing, and I was amazed by the assumptions underpinning the marketing 'attribution models' that they used.

Both used 'Last Touch', and apparently this is industry standard for many firms. This assigns 100% of credit for a sale to the last marketing channel that the customer used. For example, if you clicked on a sponsored search/banner advert for the product and then buy, that channel will get 100% of the profit from the sale.

Implicit in this is the assumption that had the advert not been shown, the probability of purchase would have been 0%. This is wildly optimistic. Both were spending a lot of money on 'own brand keywords on Google, and it doesn't take a genius to realise that customers searching for Company X trainers may well have ended up reaching the page and buying, in the world where the ad didn't appear in the top 3 links for these searches.

However, none of this seemed to be clearly conveyed by the very marketing consultants/analysts in the presentations with countless charts and acronyms that they gave to their relatively untechnical managements. My assessment was that both companies were horribly overspending, and I was agnostic as to whether the marketeers where dishonest or misguided.

This has also been studied, and seems to confirm the intuitions I had. In one experiment, Ebay did A-B testing on all of its own-brand marketing paid search advertising and this had ZERO impact on short run sales [1]. Other A-B tests have found incremental sales advantages a small fraction of the values found by these horribly optimistic marketing models [2].

One interesting analogy is with political campaigns. A wise politician campaigns in battleground regions where they have the biggest chance of changing the result in their favour. A wise firm markets to similarly marginal customers. Digital marketing offers the benefit of being able to carefully avoid customers that are totally uninterested, but naive (or dishonest) attribution can cause companies to 'preach to the choir' and then over-credit their marketing activities. Lots of current industry practice would be analogous to a member of the Obama campaign telling him to avoid Texas and campaign in New York, and then congratulating himself after he won with a landslide!

[1] http://cn.cnstudiodev.com/uploads/document_attachment/attach...

[2] http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1399&c...

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#86

Post by guitarbill »

mdorazio wrote: post #17

I feel like the author of this article is missing the reasons behind the rise of adtech in the first place, and doesn't really address how traditional advertising can compensate. There are at least three forces at work here: 1) People straight up don't want to see ads. Ad blockers, Netflix, etc. are a natural response to this. If your medium relies on traditional ads, there's an increasingly large chance that your au…

> 1) People straight up don't want to see ads. Ad blockers, Netflix, etc. are a natural response to this. If your medium relies on traditional ads, there's an increasingly large chance that your audience won't ever see those ads in the first place.

I think this is spot on. And some people are willing to pay. Another example of this is Youtubers and Patreon. Now, you can finally block ads without guilt and support those creators far more reliably. If the number of supporters dominates the ad revenue, it also encourages more quality and less quantity.

For me, this is also where Youtube Red failed. It isn't transparent enough and I couldn't care less about all the "value-add" they tried to staple onto it. I'd rather pay ~$20/month distributed among roughly 6 channels via Patreon. Although it would be really nice to have a way to automatically give a few cents go to videos I watched and enjoyed (by some opt-out metric, e.g. watched more than 30%, or didn't hit dislike, or wasn't autoplayed "next up").

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#87

Post by thesagan »

busterarm wrote: post #27
mdorazio wrote: post #17

I feel like the author of this article is missing the reasons behind the rise of adtech in the first place, and doesn't really address how traditional advertising can compensate. There are at least three forces at work here: 1) People straight up don't want to see ads. Ad blockers, Netflix, etc. are a natural response to this. If your medium relies on traditional ads, there's an increasingly large chance that your au…

> Companies want to know that their advertising dollars are actually producing results, and traditional advertising completely sucks at this. If you've never run a traditional ad campaign, I suggest giving it a try and then decide how much value you think you got out of it. You can spend thousands to millions of dollars and have absolutely no idea if your money impacted sales even the smallest amount. Compare that to…

I spent a few years working closely at a regional ad/P.R. firm in a smaller metro, and the game was to convince companies to spend because their competitors are spending. Although there might be good tools out there to measure results, it would only create more work for an ad staff that already has received buy-in from traditional advertisers. (Although that's changing now.) Disrupting that non-measurement disrupts the steady stream of, what is IMO, clueless revenue that's been F.U.D'd into an ad spend. I mean, F.U.D. was the business model half the time.

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#88

Post by exclusiv »

aviraldg wrote: post #4

This had to happen, but I weep for all the great tech created at Google enabled by these ad dollars that may not have existed otherwise. Hope they can transition to an alternative business model relatively quickly.

Adtech will be fine but I do think we'll see a bigger shift of dollars into a bucket called content marketing versus traditional ad placement. So think about what Red Bull does with the content they develop and sponsor. YouTube should focus more on that market - helping match their own celebrities with brands and taking a cut of sponsored content versus a cut of ad revenue based on pageviews.

The issue here is really not adtech; it's a conscious decision by Google to disregard the free but horrible speech of users in chasing pageviews and video consumption. And it's now coming back to bite them. I'm surprised it took that long. YouTube comments are vitriolic and a breeding ground for trolls.

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#89

Post by pmoriarty »

guitarbill wrote: post #86
mdorazio wrote: post #17

I feel like the author of this article is missing the reasons behind the rise of adtech in the first place, and doesn't really address how traditional advertising can compensate. There are at least three forces at work here: 1) People straight up don't want to see ads. Ad blockers, Netflix, etc. are a natural response to this. If your medium relies on traditional ads, there's an increasingly large chance that your au…

> 1) People straight up don't want to see ads. Ad blockers, Netflix, etc. are a natural response to this. If your medium relies on traditional ads, there's an increasingly large chance that your audience won't ever see those ads in the first place. I think this is spot on. And some people are willing to pay. Another example of this is Youtubers and Patreon. Now, you can finally block ads without guilt and support tho…

"some people are willing to pay"

Isn't it a little perverse that the willingness of people to pay to block annoying ads provides an incentive to make ads ever more prevalent and annoying?

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#90

Post by cavisne »

"news about it is coming hard and fast"

The difference with this story is its being driven by the media organizations, not by "news" - any actual issue or event.

There is an obvious motivation here, the mainstream media organizations see this as a way to concentrate advertising dollars back to them, and they will paint any major brand that doesn't do so as supporting ISIS/Nazi's.

Google is in a dangerous position here, they probably have the data to prove this is a nonsense narrative, but the media organizations had enough influence to force big brands to stay away. Stuck between protecting their moat, and going to war with the mainstream media.

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