Category: Advertising

FTC Clears Google-DoubleClick Deal – WSJ.com

FTC Clears Google-DoubleClick Deal – WSJ.com

“The Federal Trade Commission has cleared Google Inc.’s proposed $3.1 billion takeover of DoubleClick Inc., saying the deal is “unlikely to substantially lessen competition.”

“Regulators voted 4-1 vote to end the eight-month investigation.

This is good news for interactive marketers who need third-party ad serving into Google’s universe of advertising impressions. Doubleclick was in danger of looking like tired technology two years ago (when I actually figured out how to use their flagship product, Dart, while rebuilding ad ops at CXO Media) and still remains the default for most ad serving in the old page-view/banner world.

However, Dart can be taught new tricks and Google is the company to teach them. I don’t see the antitrust objections from Microsoft — the Aquantive acquisition and Atlas gives them a big of a leg up in terms of targeting capabilities.

The effects of a Google-Doubleclick combination should be profound and especially reverb strongest within the interactive ad agencies trafficking teams.

Cybermonday — more than a fad

A Gimmick Becomes a Real Trend – New York Times

A very big day for Lenovo.com. We kick off the holiday sales season today. Good piece in the Times this morning about the online version of Black Friday.

“Mr. Hart of BDO Seidman said this year’s Cyber Monday deals would culminate a series of November promotions intended to drive holiday sales sooner. Sales like Target.com’s discount on more than 60 gift items, he said, helped set the promotional tone of the month for retailers. Free shipping offers for toys sold on Walmart.com and Target.com show how jittery merchants have become since the recalls of toys made in China, he said.”

Death to junk mail

After lugging home ten pounds of catalogues (it must be the holidays, the catalogues are coming on stronger) from the post office on Monday, I declared enough is enough and went to the Direct Marketing Association’s website and paid a buck to get me and my wife’s name off of whatever mailing lists are sacrificing a few trees in our name every year.

Like the DoNotCall registry did to telemarketers, I hope this gives me some relief from the bins of crap that I pull out of the little box at the post office every week and which then go right into the recycling bin.

It felt good. Try it yourself. 

Do-not-target lists — The Federal Trade Commission and Behavioral Targeting

The New York Times has a piece today on the FTC hearings over online advertising and behavioral targeting practices. This sounds lot like 1995 all over again, when the revelation that cookies were getting slipped onto browser’s hard drives set the loony-tune elements loose with cries of invasion and privacy rights being trampled on.

“When you’re surfing the Internet, you never know who is peering over your shoulder or how many marketers are watching,” Mr. Leibowitz said.

Mwah-ha-ha.

Does any remember the stink over CallerID? When privacy nuts argued that transmitting a caller’s phone number was a violation of the caller’s privacy? I remember fighting with Bill Baldwin at Forbes over that issue, when in the throes of reporting a story in the late 80s on electronic privacy. My argument was simple: I have every right to ask a person knocking on my door to identify themselves before I open that door. Indeed, think of CallerID as the little fish-eye peephole for the telephone.

But I digress, to the matter at hand: Does Behavioral Targeting impinge on privacy?

The scary story cited by the Times has all the drama and handwringing one needs to make behavioral targeting seem appropriately Orwellian and sinister (if we called it Relevant Advertising it might have better PR) A young woman, discussing a recently deceased grandmother in email, sees Google AdSense ads for healthcare. Whoa. The Google-borg did some keyword analysis, the algorithm dipped into the AdSense pool, and lo and behold, the 26-year old was freaked out to see health care ads and who knows what else: maybe ads for coffins, adult diapers, nursing homes and Dr. Kevorkian.

People. Listen up. Machine matched tagging and ad serving is not the same as the National Security Agency listening to your phone calls and emails for mentions of “al qaeda” and “tax evasion tips.” Look, forget E Pluribus Unum, the new motto is One Nation, Under Surveillance ….With Strip Searches and Pat-Downs For All

As Scott “Scooter” McNealy put it nearly a decade ago, “You have zero privacy. Get over it.”
Well, tell that to an identity theft victim

Web browsing and targeted ads are not going to put your privacy at risk. Getting phished or signing over your 401K to that lawyer in Lagos will be a problem. But web ads? We’re done with Gator (right?), intrusion ads are dead, pop-ups are crushed by browsers … so what’s left?

Make My Logo Bigger Cream

Make My Logo Bigger Cream

Thanks to David Lamborn and Kelly Skaggs at the Lenovo Design and Usability team for this nice link. Anyone who has spent months on a beautiful ad or web page, only to see the accelerators, swooshes, starbursts, and calls for “a bigger logo” and “less white space” is going to feel the pain of this.

The answer is audits

Online advertising is 12 years old and the industry still can’t get its act together around standardized metrics and traffic measurement. This morning’s New York Times reopens the perennial wound with a lead story in the business section that features the requisite hand wringing by online publishers over the gulf between their server logs and the traffic reported by the rating agencies like Comscore and Nielsen/ NetRatings.

Begin by looking at the role of the rating agencies and why they persist. Rating agencies use panel-based reporting to sample internet traffic and extrapolate gross traffic scores for significant media. Why they exist is a mystery to me, a vestige of broadcast media when television and radio was essentially measured through statistical sampling as there was no machine connection between the device and the broadcaster. Is it laziness on the part of the media planners? The buyers who evaluate the traffic and demographic profiles of sites before building plans for their clients? A normalized, convenient view across all sites in one convenient, but ultimately inaccurate package?

“Other big media companies — including Time Warner, The Financial Times and The New York Times — are equally frustrated that their counts of Web visitors keep coming in vastly higher than those of the tracking companies. There are many reasons for the differences (such as how people who use the Web at home and at the office are counted), but the upshot is the same: the growth of online advertising is being stunted, industry executives say, because nobody can get the basic visitor counts straight.

“You’re hearing measurement as one of the reasons that buyers are not moving even more money online,” said Wenda Harris Millard, president for media at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and, until June, chief sales officer at Yahoo. “It’s hugely frustrating. It’s one of the barriers preventing us from really moving forward.”

Rating agencies may exist to provide some degree of third party verification to an industry marked by different server architectures with different traffic logging and measurement procedures. While Microsoft IIS and Apache based servers may log activity differently, the real measure comes from the traffic analysis packages deployed by the site owner. Log analysis – the old model of the mid-90s, has been replaced by beacon-based systems such as Hitbox and Omniture – however they are accurate only as far as those beacons/cookies are accepted by privacy paranoid users.

Publishers have made a sport of discrediting the rating agencies. They don’t accurately count at-work panelists, they don’t extend to international audiences, etc. The entire concept of panels – users recruited to install monitors on their browsers which report activity back to the rating agency – is very flawed and should be stopped. Take the best known public example of browser-based panels, Alexis, and look back to the last presidential campaign when site managers gamed the system by having their supporters download the Alexa client to overweight the statistical samples. While ComScore and Nielsen can control and pledge some normalization in their panel composition, the simple fact is this:

There is no place for a sample when the internet is precisely measured down to every call to a server.

The issue is how to get to an apples-to-apples basis for self-reported web traffic. Here is where the Internet Advertising Bureau could make an impact beyond its current role of establish technical standards. As I’ve blogged over and over – the magazine industry, the sloppiest reported medium there is, has two independent systems for verifying circulation – the Audit Bureau of Circulation and the Business Publishers Association. Publishers routinely get their circ lists scoured and scrubbed and the result is a standard reporting format. Why can’t the IAB bring the same to the web? I know I am hopelessly naïve on this – apologies to Randall Rothenberg in advance – but over a decade and this business is still being hobbled by a lack of transparent accountability. I only can assume the IAB has tried to get audits in place, but something – publisher resistance, technical hurdles, lack of expertise … something is holding the obvious from occurring.

So how can the IAB finally get audits established? 1) force participation 2) involve the Web Analytics Association and the metrics vendors and define the metric/analytics tool makers’ reporting standards and methodology 3) vigorously discipline anyone who is caught inflating reports 4) get the media buyers aboard 5) establish an advertiser sub-group to push for those standards, advertisers who will vote with their feet away from any site that refuses to participate or who is caught inflating 6) persuade ComScore and Nielsen to drop their panel process and morph into the role of auditors and demographic profilers, working to initiate third-party audience surveys with the publishers.

Here is the IAB congratulating ComScore for cooperating with an audit into ComScore’s measurement process. I have a proposal – get them to drop the measurement process and initiate an audit of the publisher’s web logs.

Update:

Randall Rothenberg at the IAB posts a great take on the Times article on his “clog” (column and blog) “I, A Bee” He, and Derek Slater at CSO point out the obvious which I overlooked — that it’s one thing to count, it’s another to profile the audience. On that, no server log will give an indication. However, to further diss the research model, every publisher is out there laying claim to the largest audience of “left-handed Latvians between the age of 18 to 23” based on their own survey research. I guess a media planner just wants to turn to the database and seek the right composition and go from there…..

The measured digital spend – investing internally

Interesting article in the business section of the Sunday New York Times (10.14.07) about the acceleration in advertising budgets away from traditional advertising — TV, radio, print — and even away from “traditional” interactive — banners, skyscrapers, search and viral to more experiential and immersible experiences which the writer, Louise Story, extends to social networking.

“Last year, Nike spent just 33 percent of its $678 million United States advertising budget on ads with television networks and other traditional media companies. That’s down from 55 percent 10 years ago, according to the trade publication Advertising Age.

“We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive,” Mr. Edwards says he tells many media executives. “We’re in the business of connecting with consumers.”

Mr. Edwards may be more blunt than most. But many large marketers are taking huge chunks of money out of their budgets for traditional media and using the funds to develop new, more direct interactions with consumers — not only on the Internet, but also through in-person events.”

Fine, this is not news. Money is moving from mass media to new media and accelerating. I get that. Digital should be at the heart of every marketing campaign, etc. etc. What is interesting and underscored in the Times piece is the shift not from traditional to digital, but from media to non-media.

“True, Nike increased its spending on traditional media in the United States by 3 percent from 2003 to 2006, to $220.5 million. But in the same period, it increased its nonmedia ad spending 33 percent, to $457.9 million, according to the Advertising Age data.

Behind the shift is a fundamental change in Nike’s view of the role of advertising. No longer are ads primarily meant to grab a person’s attention while they’re trying to do something else — like reading an article. Nike executives say that much of the company’s future advertising spending will take the form of services for consumers, like workout advice, online communities and local sports competitions.”

Here’s the payoff from the piece. The shift is not from traditional to digital, it’s from public media to “internal” media. In essence, marketers, particularly consumer packaged goods, are plowing their dollars into themselves. BudTV. Nike’s exercise tools. Their own communities, their own social networks. Their SecondLife islands.

“Digital media spending is doubling every year at many big companies, industry data indicate. But the research firm Outsell found this year that 58 percent of marketers’ online spending went to their own Web sites, rather than to paid ads. More than two million people visited Nike-owned Web sites in July, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.”

Repeat that number — 58% — that’s right, way more than half of the digital spend is being invested internally, not via agencies, not via media planners, not being behaviorally targetted, but on internal plays. As someone accustomed to regarding a corporate dot.com strategy as little more than an IT investment managed by some designers, that blows me away.

Social media marketing in Facebook

My Facebook activity — and I suspect yours — has stepped up over the past four months, seemingly due to a tipping point of sorts being reached in the late spring as more Forty- and Fifty-Somethings in the interactive/tech space flooded the former college network looking for insights and value.

As I told the audience at last week’s WPP Strategy meeting, you can’t accurately fathom the essence of Facebook unless you are a 19-year old freshman and are using the system at its naturally intended level: a replacement of the paper facebook that was de rigeur in the freshman welcome packs when I arrived at college in the fall of 1976.

My college roommate — a professor of archeology at the University of Kansas — actually uses Facebook the way a contemporary student would, posting pictures of our 25th Reunion (which I blew off), staying in touch, sharing videos of Burning Man, and adopting and rejecting new applications at a furious clip. But the rest of my network …. with the exception of some natural networkers like Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard, and interactive marketing pundit Joseph Jaffe, the typical Facebook friend in my network seems to be using the system as a semi-rolodex replacement, or a scalp-collector the way early Linked-In fanatics collected gross contact counts as a validation of their self-importance (until Linked-In wisely capped the reported contact count at 500+)

The usual cliches about Facebook being a time sink are true, and even though I compulsively check the thing, and even listened to a Jaffe podcast through it this morning (Across the Sound), I haven’t felt the utility of it click the way other addictive online apps (Google Reader, Google News, my own blog) have hit me.

I have spent a lot of time analyzing the economic value of marketing within Facebook, requesting rate cards and looking at the efforts of competitors and top brands such as Southwest Airlines in creating sponsored groups. While I have subscribed to, and monitor relevant grassroots groups that have cropped up around our brand terms, I haven’t seen a large amount of activity nor urgency in diving in with a seven-figure investment.

One thing is perfectly clear to me as I use it — display advertising has a very very hard time vying for my attention inside of a tool that is all about news and utility tailored to me and my interests. That same display advertising, in the context of a flat media page — say a news story on Marketwatch.com — is slightly more compelling or attention getting given the linear, one way experience of an HTML web page impression. If I can’t engage with the content then the ads pop out a bit more. Put that same ad in the middle of my profile page, and it suddenly is competing for attention with everything from my iTunes utility to my Facebook inbox.

I won’t delve into MySpace as a) that rivalry is overstated in my opinion, and b) I don’t use MySpace enough to feel informed about it.

I know I embarrass my daughter to no end by being on Facebook — I was her “friend” for about a month before she “unfriendeded” me — and I don’t blame her. I’m an invader, not a native, and nothing is uncooler than inviting a parent to a party. I guess if I want to understand how to market in Facebook I need to hire her or her ilk to insure it is done properly, otherwise the brand could come off looking like an old lady in a mini-skirt.

Now, to see if there are any Facebook gadgets so I can integrate WordPress ….

Online advertising not measurable enough?

Compared to what! Television? Print? Mark Cahill calls my attention to this insanity.
Scott Karp rips apart a recent McKinsey survey/report on online advertising (which I meant to do, but got sidetracked). Here’s the upshot as reported in Adweek:

“McKinsey polled 410 marketing executives in five sectors, and among those already advertising online, 52 percent said “insufficient metrics to measure impact” [emphasis mine, ed] was the biggest barrier, followed by insufficient in-house capabilities (41 percent), the difficulty of convincing management (33 percent), limited reach of digital tools (24 percent) and insufficient capabilities at agency (18 percent).”

Scott gets right to it:

“Does that mean advertisers really believe metrics like cost per lead, cost per sale, or even cost per visit are inferior to traditional “bottom line” metrics like reach and frequency, gross rating points, and rate base? Does that mean advertisers believe mass media have better “capabilities” than online advertising platforms like keyword-targeted search advertising, behavioral targeting”

Client-side as I am, let me agree with the survey panel that the primary barrier is indeed in-house capabilities. Budgets, staff and mindset are still geared towards television, print and out of home. Convincing management? Not an issue for me. Limited reach? Sure, online is growing more expensive and yet it is harder to put money in market as strong opportunities begin to vanish under high demand. Agency capabilities? Agencies are scrambling to staff up, I’d put the onus on the client to deal with the in-house capabilities, we’re moving to a multi-agency, specialist network model with the client providing the management and the glue, the metrics and the execution.

But insuffiicient metrics? That is doubtlessly the most ignorant thing I have heard all year. McKinsey needs to either change its survey methodology or find marketers who have a clue, because the one’s they surveyed are probably relying on their agency to give them click-through reports and therefore, deserve what they get.

Metrics in online advertising are the responsibility of the client, not the agency, not the publisher. If the client is incapable of attributing revenue to a dollar placed in the market, then the client is wasting its money. Only the client can detect the action on the client site. Period. If an advertiser is spending online (I suspect McKinsey’s survey panel is obsessed with CPM and CTR on banners) and not measuring the impact end-to-end then they need to fire their agency, hire an interactive marketing manager, and invest in a decent metrics package. If not, well, stick to your TV, radio and print and have fun with such wonderful measurements as “pass-along” and “drive-time impressions”

Note, McKinsey loves its registration wall, in the belief that its content is super precious (it is good, but sorry Stuart and Jeff, it needs to be easy to get to), so I shall not waste your time with a link to the survey which I can’t find anyway.