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Brands need to fire adtech

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Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#121
post #68
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at an advertiser. Most so called "viral" ads we've researched involve significant levels of paid impressions before they got to a "viralable" level. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Also it's significantly difficult to make a highly entertaining ad as well as convey your product benefits/superiority at the same time - strains creativity of the ad agencies though some are adapting faster to the online…

Who would have thought that actually adding value to peoples lives is hard. Much harder than paying someone to force others to see something.

Sarcasm aside, sadly, if you build it they will come doesn't particularly work.

Say you're made a new flavor of ketchup. Your product tests show people love it much better than anything else in the market. Arguably you are adding value to those people's lives with it.

Now it won't sell at all and recoup your investment and arguably actually add value to people's lives unless they know about it and try it - hence advertising.

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#122
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2) 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…

But how do you know if they were exposed to the advertising? You don't. Even if you did, how do you know they actually saw it/were paying attention? You don't. And even if you knew that, how do you know that it was because of that particular ad that they ventured to your location?

That's also true of 99.99% of digital ads. Plenty of businesses are using attribution models that aren't that deterministic.

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#123

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…

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

Two ideas:

1) Coupons or discount codes in print and tv/radio ads (or using a unique URL, phone number, etc.)

2) Simply watching to see if leads traffic (however you define it: foot traffic, hits to website, calls, etc.) surges in the period post ad campaign (assuming you stagger your campaigns for better individual campaign tracking)

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies want to know that their advertising dollars are actually producing results, and traditional advertising completely sucks at this. The argument can be reversed though: Despite the fact that traditional advertising is more or less blind to outcome and shows untargeted ads, it has survived for a very long time. This would indicate that businesses would be willing to pay to show untargeted dumb ads online too…

Big brands will always be able to afford dumb advertising, like sponsoring the Olympics. adtech exists mainly for small brands, of which there are many, many more.

I would argue that's a different type of advertising.

Some campaigns are designed to increase some tangible result: more leads, more sales, etc.

Other campaigns, such as your Olympics example, are more general brand awareness and brand reputation/prestige building.

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#125
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2) 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…

But how do you know if they were exposed to the advertising? You don't. Even if you did, how do you know they actually saw it/were paying attention? You don't. And even if you knew that, how do you know that it was because of that particular ad that they ventured to your location?

This was literally the nature of advertising for the first 99% of its life.

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#126

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…

And some people are willing to pay.

How much would it cost to offest the advertising income loss?

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#127
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. If Netflix was free but with ads (with ad-less subscriptions optional) their viewership and subscriptions would skyrocket, and end up supporting traditional advertising on…

Free but with ads is Hulu. Netflix crushes Hulu. Netflix is massive for three reasons. Original content, binge watch/no schedule, no adverts.

You forgot "very cheap". Compare the price of a monthly netflix binge watch session with what it would cost on Amazon, or God help you, iTunes or Google play.

It's like 90% cheaper.

The reason for this is obvious on the Netflix balance sheets. They spent 3-5 times what came in.

Of course, this is not what the content producers want. And that's where things have gone wrong in the past, and will go wrong again.

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#128

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,…

Why do you assume what you personally like is what your readers will like? But relevancy to your sites and readers is what adtech is all about. It doesn't help anyone to have irrelevant ads, they do care about making sure the fit is as good as possible. Stay away from the crappy "recommended links" widgets and popup videos and you'll find plenty of ad networks that can help.

It took you one sentence to refute your own claim about the quality of adtech ads -- you recommend them and then say don't use the most popular/successful/well-known ad systems.

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#129
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…

People say horrible things in the public streets but billboard and shopwindow advertising is still tolerated there.

Re: Brands need to fire adtech

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>We also have this fun problem where nobody's actually been verifying that TV ads actually run when they're supposed to

Have you considered hiring Kantar to check if the ads are running? They do this.

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