At first this may not make sense. I can understand why you want to identify a user expressing intent at or very close to the time they are expressing it, but why would you want the opposite. It’s quite simple. Most of the time, a user is doing something specific online, something (perhaps a few things) is/are occupying his or her attention and if the advertising is not specific to that task (like search) it is ignored or deemed extraneous.

But, if the user has just completed a task (the closest thing to “emptying the mind” you will see) then that mind which  has now shifted into a “no-intent” state can be filled with other types of marketing messages. The marketer has a unique chance to encourage the user to take some form of action, to consider and act upon a compelling message.

Thus we as advertisers online must think not just of the audience’s intent, but also of the audience’s “no-intent” zones where they are amenable to suggestion. A place their task is not interrupted. A space online where a vacuum has been created waiting to be filled by the best and brightest thing. The former is harder because while intent is often present, you need to match the user’s intent with your product (hence the search keyword, behavioral targeting etc.). The latter is hard information to gather too – but arguably more valuable since it may then apply to lots of different products and services – when the user is in this “no-intent” zone, you could advertise all kinds of things with a much greater response rate than you would get elsewhere.

Advertising done successfully is thus a story of both intent and non-intent.

Please note that we changed our name to XA.net and our new blog is located at http://xa.net/weblog

http://www.adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/real-costs-real-time-bidding-rtb/

For people interested in just playing around with the figures in this simple example themselves, here is a  spreadsheet you can input your own values: Excel 2007 Spreadsheet

We would certainly welcome comments and thoughts: there is a lot of real value that is and will be created here, but there needs to be further thought given to how it will all hang together.

There are various pros and cons of Iframes (see here for a good overview some of which I summarize here), some pros include: Iframes don’t delay the serving of the page, typically loading in parallel with the other page content, there is no chance of name clashes with Javascript variable names if they are inside an iframe.

Some pretty big cons of iframes would include losing the referrer information of the page, which in turn means you can’t do contextual analysis of the page and more importantly you don’t really know where your ad has been running. Ads can’t communicate between each other if they are on the same page, so the coordination for wrap arounds or other things can be lost. You can’t run expandable ads (though some rich media creative companies like OggiFinoggi have come up with ways to “fake” expansion ads with iframes that is kind of interesting), which some users would say is a great benefit of these, but it complicates further the adserving ecosystem adding more heterogeneity to inventory which is now a mix of iframes and javascript tags and it is then unclear what can serve where.

As a demand-side platform helping advertisers buy optimized media, CPM Advisors (CPMa) runs billions of ad impressions per month across various advertising exchanges and we look at a LOT of impression logs. A lot of lower-cost inventory on some of these sources we have seen is hidden behind iframes, meaning most often the referring URL is that of the ad network serving the ads. As a whole, inventory that is served in iframes has a substantially lower price and underlying value than inventory that appears in javascript tags. The extent of the problem on any particular platform including Right Media is unclear, though I would guess that, excluding Yahoo! on the exchange, iframes might be 70 percent by volume if a fair bit less by number of publishers. There are obvious reasons for this, including that companies who would do nefarious things and generate large volumes of traffic often would hide their referring URLs behind iframes (and often, many nested layers of iframes running in parallel), but I do not believe the fairly young ad market yet correctly takes into account this trade-off.

Now there are exceptions. Some publishers like Amazon.com that work with ad networks grudgingly, purposefully put their ads in two layers of iframes to hide their origin AND to stop unscrupulous partners from “stealing” shopper-related data from their pages presumably – but as my other writings would attest I believe that the “sell the same stuff for different prices” world of online publishing will come to an end in the next several years and then this kind of good-quality-site-hiding-behind-frames behavior should be reduced – with the caveat that data use practices in a non-iframe world will also have to be more closely looked at, which I think will happen regardless. Are impressions a commodity? No, not yet but that wouldn’t be a bad thing if we had a real market to buy and sell impressions or “audience”. Let me put it this way – platinum and lead are both commodities but one sells for $1400 an ounce and the other for $1 a pound.

In tomorrow’s market-driven ad world, transparency will be more the norm and anonymous inventory will have its place, but on average will be discounted in price. Thus we may see what one might call the “iframe tax” – less measurability and accountability means more trust is needed which means more risk which means less money for networks and publishers that use them.

As someone selling media, CPM seems great but for the buyer it’s not the best experience. The seller need do nothing, really, for any particular deal. They collect money regardless of performance. Obviously in the overall sense, as word gets around that their CPMs are too high relative to performance, people will not buy from them, but in the micro case the onus is on the buyer to know the underlying characteristics of the media and make an assessment about whether to buy it or not. On the other hand, CPA gives the power to the buyer. They determine an activity or metric and the price they can pay for it, it’s performance-based, and absent any issues with fake leads or anything like that (not to be addressed here) they are happy. The incentive for the seller now is to collaborate and cooperate with the buyer and try to get the ads to work better to improve the likelihood of conversion. Some things are in their control – they can choose where to place the ad, when, what sub-segment of audience to target and so on, and if they are smart or have a very targeted audience they can sometimes make a lot more money than they could in the CPM case. But it takes work, and all-too often the incentives for the advertiser to care and make things work better are not there.

Run display ads with one of the big CPA networks. What do you see? Awesome Flash-based ads with great production values? No. More often it is crappy JPG and GIF-based ads with little interactivity or pizzazz to them. Part of this is a legacy issue related to making it simple for CPA pubs to pull these creatives down onto their site but REALLY in the age of pretty-much free adserving, sub-10c/Gig CDNs and the like you’re telling me you can’t get ad tags or flash onto a publisher’s page? It’s not that these ads don’t exist – the same advertisers are running the flash-based good stuff in their own often-CPM-based ad campaigns while their poor affiliates are sitting with the second rate JPG ads. The incentives are not properly aligned.

We need a new hybrid performance-model that gives incentives for the sellers and the buyers of media to come together to make campaigns work. We’ll be sharing some of our ideas on this with the industry soon, but we encourage idea sharing from others. This also means we need to empower publishers and media sellers with tools to better match their inventory with likely performing ad campaigns in a non-black-box way (some of their insights ARE useful, but with so many CPA options out there it’s a bit overwhelming for the average site owner). BUT the first thing I’d say is if you’re an advertiser using CPA or affiliate channels, bring your best creative game AND demand and actually use data and feedback they can give you about what’s working and what’ s not. Every impression is an opportunity to gather data, and make a sale. Put the crappy JPGs to bed and build a better marketing ecosystem for yourself.

CPM Advisors, the smart cross-platform media buying solution for advertisers and agencies, today announced that it has joined the BlueKai Certification Program.

The BlueKai Certification Program enables agencies and marketers to easily define a standard in-market audience profile using BlueKai data while reaching audiences via their media partners. Additionally, the program provides a seal of quality to assure marketers that their online campaigns are powered by the data they’ve defined. The BlueKai Certification Program offers an interface where agencies or marketers can create a standard audience definition via a BlueKai data plan that is customized based on their RFP. They can then share this data plan with CPM Advisors who will then submit a proposal that incorporates both data and media costs. Certified BlueKai data, according to the marketer’s plan, is then delivered real-time to target this standardized audience across all chosen media.

“We’ve enjoyed working with the BlueKai team over the past year as they’ve continued to expand their data offerings, and we believe that our cross-platform access and optimization methodologies can best utilize and enhance the value of their data,” says Matt Esslinger, Vice President of Operations at CPM Advisors. “We focus on streamlining the media buying process operationally for clients using via our CPMatic.com media-buying portal and back-end tools, and programs such as this make the data buying process easier, and enable us to incorporate BlueKai data efficiently across multiple client campaigns.”

CPM Advisors, Inc. (CPMa) was founded in early 2008 and is based in San Francisco, California. CPMa operates CPMatic.com and provides optimized cross-platform media buying for advertisers and agencies, integrating with major publishers, ad exchanges, aggregators and marketplaces. The company’s founders and board members have previously built and funded Internet advertising management, adserving and optimization systems for several of the largest online advertisers. More information is available at http://cpmadvisors.com.

We might call this “assumed targeting.” This combines cheap, untargeted or relatively untargeted media with an ad intended only for a select few viewers.

As you probably know by now if you’re reading this, we are a media buying technology (and service) company [follow us on Twitter too!].

Here’s why – link to a good post from MikeOnAds with our comment. ]]> http://www.cpmadvisors.com/2009/05/03/ad-technology-and-service-companies/feed/ 0