Media Tech Business

Several years ago I started a list of alternative terms for online ad inventory that I used in presentations when we first introduced the Right Media Exchange. It was part of a larger effort to persuade publishers to think about the importance of having a real strategy for non-premium inventory.

It was simple when the world of website ad inventory was divided between premium and non-premium. The language has evolved tortuously to fulfill the industry’s impulse to redefine anything simple so that it appears to be much more complex and, therefore, presumably, more valuable.

The online advertising ecosystem now includes ad exchanges and marketplaces, yield optimizers and creative optimizers, buy-side platforms and data exchanges, and numerous intermediaries who serve other intermediaries. Not content to feed from the existing language pool, each new organism in the ecosystem spawns its own new language, better to describe why it deserves greater prominence.

A notable coinage used by William Morrison and Robert Coolbrith of ThinkEquity in their excellent report, “The Opportunity in Non-Premium DisplayAdvertising,” inserts a new layer of website ad inventory called “secondary premium.” This strikes me as a rate card distinction, not some previously undiscovered form of inventory found living in the cracks between premium and non-premium. Here’s the ThinkEquity view:

By any name, there’s no denying that publishers are creating more and more inventory that they can’t monetize easily without a lot of help from networks, ad exchanges, and yield optimizers. One of the latter group, PubMatic. has introduced “2nd Channel,” which I believe nicely encompasses and describes anything that isn’t in the premium sales team’s sweet spot. (Disclosure: I’ve consulted for PubMatic.) Here’s the rest of the lineup, organized roughly according to the context in which the terms are typically used:

A non-premium display ad by any other name? 2nd Channel

This is pretty subjective, of course. I’d love to see a neat, descriptive term such as “2nd Channel” replace the mish-mash of differences without distinction represented by the list in the right-hand column. Keep it simple, and focus on the goals of improving user experience, advertiser performance, and publisher yield.

Tags: Ad Inventory, Ad Networks, Ad Sales, Ad Serving, Digital Publishing, Language, Media Exchange, Monetization by Bennett Zucker
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… 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.

Tags: Ad Blockers, Behavioral Targeting, Data, Digital Economy, Digital Publishing by Bennett Zucker
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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?

Tags: Audience Targeting, Digital Publishing, Media Planning and Buying, Monetization by Bennett Zucker
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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.

Tags: Ad Inventory, Digital Publishing, User-Generated Content by Bennett Zucker
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It’s a hot and humid October 5 in New York, a typical lazy summer day, misplaced. A perfect time to let someone else do the heavy lifting.

MediaRiver knows what you’re searching for and brings the content to you before you request it. Starting life as a desktop app called Watson, the engine would infer from data and activity on your hard drive what you were working on and it would query databases for other content that would be highly relevant at that moment.

As ClickSurge, the product is now a widget that applies visual semantics to create a query from the entire page you’re viewing, not just keywords or word patterns, and it feeds back live content from other sites on the same topic you’re viewing. Given the right distribution and business model, this has potential to displace contextual search: after all, consumers are far more likely to click on relevant editorial content than an ad, no matter how relevant. For the publisher of that content, it’s an incremental page view on which they’ve already sold ads.

Steve Rubel wrote in AdAge recently about efforts under way at Microsoft, Google and elsewhere to bring content to the viewer. Commercial content vs editorial content: It will be interesting to see a head to head comparison.

Noting the as-yet untapped potential of social networks to use data on the interests of millions of participants, Rubel concludes, “Over time, as these technologies revolutionize how we interact with media and become increasingly seamless, sites will rely on a mix of people and technology to bring you content that is relevant to you. This will usher in a revolution in advertising that makes everything we do all the more relevant, timely and measurable.”

Tags: Digital Publishing, Search by Bennett Zucker
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