A Chief Revenue Officer's View of the Ad Tech Landscape

The LumaScape slides are very effective for strategic analysis of invested capital by ad tech microsegment. But as revenue ops planning tools, they stink. So I took a whack at distilling this into a CRO style view: there are really four major groups of prospects for an ad tech BD maven, with sub groups as noted.

Unanswered Q&A from Viewable Impressions Webinar

I recently participated in a lively Webinar panel with Mike Leo and Manu Warikoo of Operative, and Julian Zilberbrand of SMG. Here are some great questions that came in, and my answers.

1.      Mike Renfro Sr Dir Ad Sales Seeking Alpha: have many publishers have actually moved to 100% "In-View"?

There are multiple comScore 100 publishers offering guaranteed InView. Ad servers and platforms are also getting into the mix, with Pubmatic offering publishers InView capability and Zedo providing buyers with its InView Slider controls.

2.      Jonathan Fibbon Owner Armslist: Is there a way to become an early adopter of this viewable standard and take advantage of my site's "premium inventory" ?

Absolutely. The best way to start is to conduct a comScore Digital Analytix (DAx) Monetization diagnostic on your inventory, and understand which placements are the best candidates for removal, and which are the most likely to sustain a move from “remnant” to “premium” status vis a vis viewability. Then, use DAx Monetization to optimize inventory on an ongoing basis.

3.      Jim Schrand Dir of Data Strategy: If it's pay for performance, then it would seem that viewability is somewhat irrelevant.  Viewability is not a performance metric.

On the contrary, one of the biggest challenges we see is the inappropriate attribution of conversions and other performance indicators to sites or placements that are unviewable. Get rid of unviewable impressions, and performance attribution becomes exponentially more accurate, ensuring proper allocation of performance dollars to publishers who invest in content and placement.

4.      Sara La, Sr Ad Coordinator HC Pro: Can you talk about auditing procedures? When advertisers start asking whether a publisher is compliant with Viewable Impressions, how will a publisher know they are compliant other than being honest?

Advertisers and publishers can use validation services such as comScore vCE and DAx Monetization (respectively) to create trusted third party data which can be used to optimize campaigns to InView as appropriate.

5.      Celia Wu Sr Dir Sales NBC: We launched "ServeView" on our site about two years ago, where an impression is only counted when it appears in the users' browsers window.  A great example of a publisher leveraging its tech team; and some industry PR wins.  However, it hasn't equated to actual lift in eCPM.  The only place where we have actually seen eCPM lift is in fact with performance advertisers.  Question:  how does a publisher use technology like ServeView to gain a higher premium on inventory, versus just satisfying "in view" standards?  Is the click still the best measurement?

The performance ad eCPM lift is not surprising – we would expect this given the impact of InView on efficiency and accuracy of attribution. Regarding using ServeView to increase premiums, have you tried selling guaranteed viewable impressions packages? The click correlates poorly to performance lift as opposed to InView and Engagement metrics…

6.      Kari Bretschger Presz and CEO IMW Communications: Why would there be a market for a non-viewable ad? It would be a tough sell...Why would publishers offer it?

Great question! It’s very hard to come up with a single good reason for anyone to buy or sell an unviewable ad. There are a lot of bad reasons, however, which is the challenge the industry needs to step up and solve.

A Thought on Marissa Mayer

This was a Wall Street hire not a Madison Avenue hire. All about optics and long shot gambling. Board decided that getting it right on media and monetization side (Levinsohn) was not gonna be enough to pump valuation long term – needed a product game changer even if means not nailing the media stuff.
 
But as I have said, the “look and feel” (Meyer’s specialty) of Yahoo’s products isn’t the problem. Nor is popularity. So I am short this move.

This feels very much like VC investing. Ross didn't tell BoD what they wanted to hear - he was being pragmatic. Marissa, with nothing to lose, glides in and promises the moon, makes BoD happy.

More on this from Mike Shields in AdWeek: http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/open-letter-marissa-mayer-141972

Twitter Etiquette Poll

We've all probably done this by now: you take or attend a meeting, and afterwards you or someone attending tweets, "Great meeting with @companyname and @personname today, they're doing exciting stuff!"

Is this a harmless networking shout-out or a violation of reasonably expected confidentiality?

RTB and Ad Server Facts and Figures 2012

Here are some interesting tidbits I put together while researching RTB recently. Since the data took a good while for me to pull together, I thought I would share it with others.

RTB and Ad Server Facts and Figures 2012

View more PowerPoint from Kirby Winfield

6 Reasons to Ignore Doubters of Digital

"The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty." - President of Michigan Savings Bank, 1903, advising Henry Ford's lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Company.

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" - Associates of David Sarnoff, manager of an early US radio network, 1920s.

"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossiblity, a development on which we need waste little time dreaming." - Lee de Forest, "father of radio", 1926.

"Television won't be able to hold onto any market it captures after the first six mmonths. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." - Darryl F Zanuck, 1946.

"I think there is a world market for as many as 5 computers." - Thomas Watson, head of IBM,1943.

"The telephone may be appropriate for our American cousins, but not here, because we have an adequate supply of messenger boys." - group of British experts, c.1900.

Seven Things Ad Tech People Have Been Saying For the Last Five Years That Are Total BS

1.  “Brand dollars will come online if we just do ____.”

Brand dollars will come online, but it won’t be because of ad tech. It will be because television itself comes online. It’s already happening, with blended TV/online buys from most big networks, and the emergence of the “newfront”. Will ad tech need to provide features and functionality, new metrics, and innovative formats to capitalize on this endemic trend? Of course. But the idea of online publishers somehow keelhauling the established TV ad market is the single largest and most consistent fallacy this industry has propagated since its inception.

2.  "We don’t need a GRP for digital.”

The Media Kitchen's Darren Herman and I agree on a lot of things, but this is not one of them. Reference point #1 above: TV is coming online, and not the other way around. The GRP needs updating, and validation, but it’s still the currency by which the vast majority of ad revenue today is planned and evaluated, and for an optimal merge of the online and TV ad markets it will necessarily need to remain.

3.  “Buying ads is like trading stocks.”

Jordan Mitchell said it best here:

"When you buy a share of stock on the NASDAQ or NYSE, you know exactly what you’re getting...In contrast, ad exchanges provide very little transparency or standardized information to what you’re actually buying – they simply offer ad inventory by the tonnage through an auction model and cookie retargeting...This basically means ad exchanges as they exist today are built on “insider trading” principles."

4.  “This is the year of mobile."

Last year was the year of mobile, actually. I guess if you say it every year you’ll be right once eventually.

“The year 2011 saw mobile advertising become a meaningful category,” said David Silverman, Partner, PwC U.S. “By combining some of the best features of the internet, along with portability and location-based technology, mobile advertising is enabling marketers to deliver timely, targeted, relevant, and local advertisements in a manner that was not previously possible. It is for these reasons that we expect strong growth to continue with mobile advertising.”

5.  “The digital advertising industry is too crowded.”

Competition breeds innovation and forces vendors to price solutions at rates that encourage widespread trial and adoption of new technology. Without venture capital, and the attendant “crowding”, online advertising would be stuck in 1995, with a ceiling imposed by direct publisher sales, blind inventory, and zero accountability. More than 35% of the vaunted Lumascape has been acquired, which ought to be a strong indicator of value creation of all parties in the ecosystem.

6.  “Online advertising is too complicated.”

Inefficient? Sure. Resource intensive? Can be. But is hiring vendors, placing buys, and measuring results really that complex?

7.  “Ad networks are dead.”

For the last time, no they’re not. More than 50% of the comScore Top 50 Properties either own or are owned by an ad network. The 26th largest ad network is bigger than the 5^th largest publisher. The Google Ad Network is the single largest provider of inventory on the Internet. Can we please stop talking about this now.