Inside Intel’s Effectiveness System for Web Marketing – Advertising Age – Digital.

Thanks to AdExchanger.com for this story. This isn’t a novel approach – my former colleagues in analytics at MRM created a similar methodology. We were able to get it sold into MasterCard as a means of measuring their digital activities – similar situation to Intel in that they were heavy consumer marketers, but didn’t hold one-to-one consumer relationships.

Nonetheless, credit OMD and Intel with using their Value Point System as a means of attribution, i.e making sure the right web marketing assets get the right credit for conversions, whether that means an online purchase (B2C), lead generation (B2B), or even greater brand awareness and engagement (B2B2C environments like Intel or MasterCard).

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A couple of Tim’s points stood out to me and inspired some additional thoughts:

• “Phase Two: Build a target profile of your audience …To do this effectively, you’ll develop a profile of the audience that responds to your marketing. Identifying your highest potential customers will allow you to target your ads as tightly as possible. Highly targeted ads are more relevant and more likely to succeed. (Just like search.)”

This is an area where pre-existing customer data adds tons of value. Database marketers in particular have an edge – perform RFM and segmentation analyses on your customer data to determine who’s been most profitable and likely to buy. Look at the demographics and geographies of these customers to develop a starting point for a target profile.

• “Phase Three: Find the most efficient way to reach your target audience …Should you target people or pages? You should use both! This is like asking whether you should use exact match or broad match in search. Targeting people, much like exact match keywords, provides access to a tightly defined audience but can be expensive and limited in scale. Targeting pages is more akin to broad match keywords: it’s usually only a loose proxy for the audience you’re trying to reach, but it’s easier to build scale and often more efficient.”

Targeting pages also allows you the opportunity to further refine your target audience profile. For example, say you’re a crafts retailer, and you initially set your target as “Women 34-45 who have at least one child and have been to a photo-sharing site.” But instead of just buying this audience, you also buy certain sites: Aol Living, NYTimes.com Home & Garden, etc. Let’s say performance via these sites show that “young single urban women 22-25” significantly outperform other audience segments of these sites – you can now refine your target audience and optimize the campaign to better reach this segment .

For anyone who’s ran a campaign: how hard is this in practice? Would taking the steps Tim prescribes help you better target your display advertising? Any success in leveraging your existing customer data?

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The theme was, as you might guess, TARGETING…specifically, the promise of providing more relevant ads online and the ecosystem of companies emerging to help fulfill that. The day’s panels and sessions covered a number of topics – data proliferation, social media targeting, what it really means to “buy audience”, etc.

In particular, I enjoyed a late-morning panel on ad networks – interestingly enough, the, ah, interactions of a couple of the panelists showed me just how much publishers distrust exchanges. I liked the social media targeting panel as well: the participants cast more of vision for where things are headed versus where they are. Rob Key of Converseon talked about eventually being able to draw correlations between changes in online sentiment and changes in real business metrics such as sales. Probably a bit early to do this now, but once more data points exist, the thought leaders will be able to use econometrics and other advanced analytics to build causal relationships and ultimately integrate social media marketing more fully into the broader marketing mix.

As always, I liked the networking most. Digiday attracts a good conference crowd: when I was at MRM, I always felt that vendors were more interested in conversation for the sake of conversation (as opposed to for the sake of selling) than at other events. This time around, more folks stuck around for the happy hour than usual…not sure if there’s anything to take away from that, but it made for good conversation.

In thinking of what could make this an even better experience, I had a couple of thoughts:

• I like the fact that they hand everyone an attendee list upon registration, but it would be nice to know who’s coming in advance of the event itself. In particular, I’m thinking that using an Eventbrite-like tool, where you can see attendees updated in real-time, would be useful. Eventbrite is especially nice because it allows attendees to enter their website and Twitter info – this could enable conversations in advance of the conference itself. Am I crazy, or would this be useful?
• Digiday would benefit from audience participation going beyond Q&A at the end of each session. What if they crowdsourced an entire panel and discussion (both topic and participants), either prior to the event or at the event itself? Or, give the audience polling devices or a site by which they can give a quick 1-5 rating on each panel. All easier said than done, with the point being that more interactivity is a good thing.

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In casual conversation at the meetup, Dennis had briefly touched on the proliferation of data, both online and offline, and how this proliferation is changing the way media is bought and sold. I wanted to get more of his thoughts here (and hear who he thinks is best-positioned to deal with these changes), hence the sit-down. Plus, he’s a super-nice guy.

As we chatted about the future of analytics, Dennis pointed out that the business of collecting, storing, and retrieving data has become a commodity. As a result, being able to tell what happened and why is so…yesterday. Rather, the REAL opportunity lies in using a combination of business intelligence and predictive analytics to make forward-looking decisions using data. He used the example of a retailer who studied how weather impacts consumer behavior on Black Friday – do consumers shop offline more in good weather and online more in bad weather? This retailer used the results to adjust the amount they chose to spend on their AdWords campaign.

We also talked a bit about the state of online advertising. Dennis pointed out that a publisher can now know a lot about who’s coming to their site, so much so that they may have to be paid for their data. It’s an interesting topic these days – there seems to be disagreement about the value of publisher data, what it’s best used for (leverage in direct sales vs. extracting higher bids in ad exchanges), and how exactly to extract the value of that data. For his part, Dennis suggested that some smart publishers may decide to forego the ad exchanges entirely (focusing on direct sales), while putting their data on exchanges like that from BlueKai.

It was a really informative conversation, and I certainly can’t thank Dennis enough for taking the time to speak. Check out his Visual Revenue blog to get regular dose of his insight mixed with good humor.

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The Rubicon Project published its Q3 outlook on the online advertising market last week (thanks to Ad Operations Online for summarizing and linking to it). It was certainly informative for a display neophyte like myself.  It’s awesome that companies put the effort into developing pieces like these (whether or not for marketing purposes) – I wish more companies in this space did it, and I wish I had more time to read them!

If I took one item away, it’s that I need to better understand how ad exchanges like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange or ADSDAQ work. I say this because, on the one hand, the report says “packaging audience effectively for display advertisers is a key means of differentiation for publishers.” But it then talks about the risks that publishers face in putting their inventory on an ad exchange, specifically with the emergence of real-time bidding enabled by demand-side platforms. Which, I thought, was meant to better enable advertisers to buy audiences rather than sites.

Maybe part of the answer lies in the report’s description of exchanges or demand-side platforms as being “designed for advertisers, and not designed to boost a publisher’s yield.” But I can’t see how exchanges will ever have enough inventory to reach scale if publishers don’t think they can get fair value through that channel. And it would seem to follow that the absence of exchanges weakens the value proposition of demand-side platforms.

Or, maybe publishers have work to do on capturing and leveraging data on their own audiences as they enter exchange transactions. But I’m certainly no expert on the inner workings of ad exchanges, so I’d love to hear someone get under the hood and explain what makes them inherently unattractive to publishers.

The other piece of the report that stood out to me was the Rubicon 20 Index, which combines metrics like CPM, traffic and revenue for 20 sites that having been Rubicon’s service for more than nine months. The growth in the index since January certainly suggests either a recovery in the display market, substantial lift in the publishers’ business metrics from their Rubicon relationship, or both. I’d love to see how revenue or CPMs for the Rubicon 20 compare with those metrics for a control group of publishers. A significant difference would certainly help validate the need for publisher advocacy in the form of optimizers like Rubicon.

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I’ll go so far as to say that the net impact of this innovation will be ever-increasing refinement and curation of web content (news, games, applications, widgets, social media, etc) – in a world where ad revenues aren’t artificially inflated because of deals penned by direct sales forces, only the best content will be able to survive. Hence the new name of the blog. And hey, maybe I’ll even click on one of these ads that’s supposedly more relevant.

I want to use this blog to reflect on conversations I’m having as I’m seeking to learn more about the sector and try to project forward a bit.

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http://www.digital-media.net.au/article/a-call-to-all-clients-it-s-time-to-say-goodbye-to-your-traditional-agency/494423.aspx

A couple of particularly provocative quotes:

• “The head of Razorfish worldwide (an old school ad guy) said traditional agencies will never get digital because digital requires collaboration and with traditional agencies the creative director is king; the structure of an agency kills collaboration.”

I haven’t seen enough agencies to agree that traditional agencies will NEVER get digital. That said, he’s right in that digital requires collaboration. I’ve have the most success when I sit down with our tech, creative and information architecture guys and agree on an approach – different disciplines act as idea catalysts for each other and interaction amongst them is critical to developing rich digital marketing plans.

• “This means the focus on the big idea is anathema for most marketing problems. Digital agencies have been working with this fact from the beginning. Testing and optimisation are the judge of a digital campaign’s success.”

Again, I’m not the best judge of the worthiness of the “big idea” going forward, but in pursuit of said big idea, I’ve seen brands unnecessarily lengthen the time it takes to get digital programs or utilities into the market. Agencies should encourage clients to move quickly from digital planning to digital activation because of the continuous improvement opportunities that testing and optimization provide.

I’d love to hear what more experienced folks think.

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A couple of weeks ago, I attended a session sponsored by TALK featuring Matthew Greitzer of Razorfish.  He spoke about the changes occurring in online advertising – it was a great presentation from someone who’s clearly quite seasoned in this space. A number of his points stood out:

• Mass reach (the online equivalent of buying a 30-second Super Bowl spot) is now a commodity online – an advertiser can get this on the cheap on ad exchanges such as Right Media or TRAFFIQ
• There are now alternatives to targeting audiences based on demographics; the ability to target individuals based on where they are or what they’re doing* online have been discussed extensively.  Now, companies such as Peer39 promise semantic targeting – the ability to place the right ads on sites based on the underlying sentiment of the site content and the proper context of certain keywords.
• One implication of the consumer’s increased willingness to express himself online (via various social media channels) is that all of the players in the marketing value chain – advertisers, agencies, publishers, social networks, etc – are collecting tons of data, placing us in the “data business”.  And sure enough, companies such as Blue Kai have emerged to offer a market for the exchange of said data

Does anyone disagree with any of these points?  I’d love to hear alternative viewpoints.

I’ve also had some great conversations with folks on the ground making these innovations happen, including Mark Mannino of MediaMath and Jeremy Welch of Invite Media.  Both firms are creating platforms that more easily enable advertisers and their agency partners to plug into the aforementioned ad exchanges.

I’d love to chat with anyone else in the space.  Feel free to DM me on Twitter.

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