Buyers & sellers, don’t miss this
Posted on May 31st, 2009 by Bennett Zucker
“So basically you want me to work for free?” Priceless.
Gossman pulls an Al Gore at OMMA Behavioral
Posted on February 12th, 2008 by Bennett Zucker
Revenue Science CEO Bill Gossman, speaking on a vendors panel at today’s OMMA Behavioral Conference in New York, told the crowd, “I believe that we coined the term ‘behavioral targeting.’” Well, Bill, if you believe that, then undoubtedly you give Al Gore credit for the internet, as well.
In fairness, I suspect he might have been referring to the fact that Revenue Science started talking about “BT” not long after digiMine became RSI in 2003. TACODA was selling behavioral targeting - with all syllables - for more than two years at that point, and of course Engage, Yahoo! and others were doing it in the pre-bubble 90’s. So, we’ll cut you some slack, Bill, but you must admit it was a pretty goofy claim!
Do you really want to know the future of behavioral targeting?
Posted on January 14th, 2008 by Bennett Zucker
If you want to know where behavioral targeting is going, look at aCerno. After consulting with Tom Sperry, Dave Hinton and team last fall, I signed on as VP of Sales & Marketing to help bring the company’s exciting story to market. You’ll be hearing a lot about us soon. For now, a snapshot:
- the only predictive targeting ad network
- the only online data co-op, with more than 350 member brand and multi-channel retailer sites
- anonymous shopping and purchase profiles of more than 125-million US consumers
- use predictive analytics & real-time ad decisioning at scale to accurately describe who is in an audience and what they’re likely to buy next.
I’ve written previously about the many opportunities available in the marketplace to help advance behavioral targeting, and I’ve been up close and personal with several of them. There’s also a summary today in Adweek. I chose aCerno because it represents the best combination of great data (responsibly managed, I might add), people, real-time targeting and results, results, results - for both brand-building and direct response.
Stay tuned …
Guppies Take Two from Whales at AOL; At Yahoo! Whales Still Dominate
Posted on November 10th, 2007 by Bennett Zucker
Very cool to see friend and former boss (at TACODA and earlier at Real Media) Dave Morgan take on global advertising strategy at AOL. Nice interview with Rafat Ali here shows why one of the web’s great storytellers is the right guy for the job.
Following the earlier appointment of TACODA CEO Curt Viebranz to President of AOL’s Platform A, the portfolio encompasses Advertising.com, Adtech, Lightningcast, TACODA, Third Screen Media and soon to be added Quigo.
AOL appears to be stitching together a smarter plan than Yahoo!, which is back-pedaling into becoming a technology company again, rather than zooming ahead into a networked future. As one of the true global media powerhouses, TimeWarner has more to lose by becoming less reliant on its own content than does Yahoo!, which has de-emphasized media and re-upped the ante on technology.
The best news for TW and AOL is that the content is always there for them to use to attract and retain great audiences. And it’s also there for them to make money from Google and MSN and former almost-media company Yahoo!, all of which depend on the TW’s of the world to feed content to their hundreds of millions of hungry users.
As perennial underdog to Google, Yahoo! and MSN, AOL also has more to gain by being bold. Ditching the ISP business, continuous reorganizing, massive layoffs and other wrenching changes are necessary for the company to compete again. They’re moving on all fronts, but the steady drumbeat of acquisitions and appointments is the clearest sign that AOL intends to win the fight to become solid number 2 behind Google.
Yahoo! is also banking on maintaining and growing its global audience leadership through platform and network acquisitions, but ultimately they’re hellbent on doing everything the Y! way.
This concerns me as a Yahoo! shareholder (from its acquisition of Right Media in July), but more so as a Yahoo! loyalist whose browser home page has been set to my.yahoo.com since 1996.
Yahoo! can’t grow its audience by building a better mousetrap: It’s the cheese that lures users. Please, Jerry, give us more and different and better varieties of cheese, not a stronger, faster spring or better distribution around the kitchen!
Hearty congratulations and good luck to Dave and Curt and the gang at TACODA. And an equally hearty HURRY UP! to the Yahoo! crew.
We have met the enemy…
Posted on November 4th, 2007 by Bennett Zucker
… and he is us. (Walt Kelly, Pogo)
For years I’ve enjoyed asking a couple of simple questions when speaking to online advertising, marketing and media groups:
- “How many of you delete your cookies?”
- “How many of you use ad blockers?”
Try it the next time you’re in front of a roomful of advertising and media professionals. I’ll bet you will find that at least a third, and often more than half, of the audience will raise their hands. They are the professionals, and they don’t get it.
They think that internet advertising is an invasion of privacy, an unwanted distraction, and a downright unAmerican practice. If people in the business don’t understand, how can we expect ordinary web users to welcome cookies, targeting and advertising generally?
Lots of people in the online business tend to be self-absorbed and smug about how they have changed the world. Well, they’ve done a poor job of educating themselves and the people around them who have made them successful.
How about a web-wide blackout? Every website would replace its contents with a blank screen for a few minutes at a peak time of day. And here’s the message they’d put on the screen instead:
This is your internet without advertising.
Please disable your ad blocker, enable your cookies and enjoy the great free content.
Ad Nets & Ad Nots
Posted on October 25th, 2007 by Bennett Zucker
Nice post by Andrew Chen about the proliferation of ad networks and the surprising success of several that have sold for very high multiples. He summarizes it this way:
My overall lesson from all of this is that a lot of times, people view things as “winner take all” and sometimes it is that way - but in this case:
mature industry + real revenue + adjacent space heating up
= huge outcomes for everyone
I think this is true, but it’s probably cyclical and there’s bound to be a lot of consolidation ahead. True, thanks largely to MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, et al, total ad inventory available has skyrocketed. True, no single network or handful of networks can meet 100% of this growing demand. And true, multiple pricing models and targeting technologies help to make this a market for the multitudes.
But consider some of the pressures working against “huge outcomes for everyone.” Various estimates put the total number of operating online ad networks in the hundreds. Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange and nascent others can accommodate all of them - but only for as long as they contribute real value to the marketplace. Better targeting, better optimization, better something is required for establishing a niche, staying in business and succeeding.
Without the exchanges, there is almost literally no hope for dozens of these networks. Media buyers are humans, and they are in short supply as it is. There is simply no way for them to add another thirty phone calls and meetings to every day to give serious attention to every network that wants their business.
Ultimately, there can and will be “a number of” winners. That number will probably be closer to 20 than 200, however, due to basic Darwinian principles. Some reasons why this is so:
1. The largest contributors of inventory to ad networks already work with 10, 20, 30 or more networks. It’s a big, ugly, inefficient process in which networks pass ad impressions back and forth, up and down a daisy chain or waterfall, depending on your metaphoric predilections. As in a beauty contest, there can only be one true winner, and that’s the number one network in line. Ad impressions get stepped on many times, the way poppies get reduced to heroin and then to a street mix that’s cut time and again before it hits the “user.” (At last, an excuse to relate web users and drug users 
2. Conversely, the hundreds of ad networks are all selling the same media placements. They are all offering every known and quite a few imagined forms of targeting, but they all base their targeting decisions off the same limited data set - primarily context. This is true of contextual ad networks and of behavioral networks that rely on context to define behaviors or interests.
In the end, individual networks won’t win simply because inventory is growing and they’re bigger and badder in getting to the best of it first. Media placement, context-based targeting or some new spin on optimization don’t matter that much. With apologies to my publishing colleagues, that’s the commodity end of the business.
Advertisers need a better, more predictive and accurate data source to drive much more value through the media value chain.
Actions or Audience?
Posted on October 14th, 2007 by Bennett Zucker
Compared with a year ago, which are you buying (or selling) MORE frequently, LESS frequently, or about the SAME?
- ACTIONS? - such as cost per action, acquisition, click, lead, order, etc.
- AUDIENCE? - behavioral segments, demographic targets, etc.
Ask any buyer or seller and you’ll hear variations on familiar themes.
For example, an analytics director for an ad agency in London who is buying actions less frequently says there are simply “too many conversion attribution challenges and distractions.” On the other hand, this buyer finds that “data and targeting are getting damned interesting, and the results are justifying greater investments.”
Meantime a counterpart at a US agency says, “Actions are prominent for us because everything is an action - a visit to a website, even if they don’t click, can be tracked and measured. Clicks, obviously, are actions. Sweepstakes, call center (pay per call), orders, conversions, leads, etc. are always a part of my goals. That is how I plan. Not to an audience, but to an action - and who is most likely to perform that action. Not take an audience and then try to fit the action to the person. THAT is the difference between marketing offline and marketing online.”
Will actions prevail, or will audience? Or are the lines between branding goals and metrics and direct response blurring into the long-sought new entity - branded response?
What’s a hammer without a nail?
Posted on October 6th, 2007 by Bennett Zucker
Not very useful, that’s what a hammer is without a nail. In a business environment where everyone has a great idea, but most ideas don’t address and solve real problems, it’s great to find a hammer that slams the ol’ nail on the head.
Last year, Pierre Grenier was an associate at SF-based Catamount Ventures when he was dispatched to help portfolio company Piczo with its fast growing social network for teens. He quickly saw that the site’s staff spent an inordinate amount of time reviewing submitted images and posts for porn, abusive speech and other bad content that could ruin a family-friendly site. In short order, Keibi Technologies was conceived to solve a very real problem shared by all sites with user-generated content that requires ongoing moderation.
Paul Remer came over from Piczo as CEO to lead a team that includes Johan Wikman, VP of Engineering, and Jon Wilks, VP of Sales & Business Development, both of whom had worked with him previously on successful startups. With Grenier on board as Founder and VP of Product Development, last month they announced the launch of the Keibi Moderation Suite for automated moderation and classification of user-generated content.
When I first talked to Remer about Keibi back in June, what got me excited was not simply the nuts and bolts problem Keibi squarely addresses, but its potential to help sites that have both edited and user content to provide advertisers with a new layer of content that has been moderated and classified as, for example, “brand safe.”
Say a large social network has a highly saleable home page, section fronts and additional edited pages below the section fronts. Perhaps ten percent of their ad inventory is on these pages and they monetize this effectively. The other 90 percent, however, is user-generated and therefore largely off-limits to brand advertisers. The site typically works with multiple ad networks to fill in with low-priced performance-based inventory. If the site can chip away at the 90 percent, adding a layer of safe content that has been moderated and classified using Keibi, it’s a big win for the site and for brand advertisers that want to reach prospects and customers where they spend their online time, but are fearful of doing so within unmoderated content.
While the sweet spot is among online communities, if you’re an ad network or an advertiser with this problem, or an edited site that has additional user content, Keibi is also worth a look.
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