I chuckled at the recent article by research firm McPheters & Co. commissioned by Conde Nast, which found that relevant website content was a key factor in ad recall.
I didn't laugh just because someone found it necessary to do a study to confirm that readers of a food magazine might find food ads relevant. Rather, I laughed because they published the statistic that put the recall at "61% higher than ads in unrelated content".
Is Conde Nast trying to convince us all not to buy their content??
Look, it doesn't take a study to tell you that website content matters – it absolutely counts, both for audience targeting and for message relevance. But if you are a branded content publisher, this study does not make your case. In fact, it is pegging your "CPM premium" at only 61% higher than untargeted run of network (RON) inventory!
Hey you media planners out there…tell Conde Nast you are only willing to pay them 161% the price of what you pay for RON on a network or exchange, and cite their own research. That should get you premium inventory at less than $2.50 per thousand!
But all sarcasm aside, how important is this, really? Even if you are willing to pay a significant premium for contextually relevant content, in most categories you can't get any scale.
Let's say you're Coach. How many contextually relevant sites can you be on, once you've hit the major fashion sites? What's far more important than getting your ad on, say Vogue.com, is getting it in front of fashion-minded women who have the means to buy expensive leather goods and accessories.
Conde Nast tries to spin its survey by saying that a relevant editorial environment makes it all happen. This may be truer in print, but the online advertising world is a big leap from the landscape where Conde Nast has thrived. The only way to reach a print audience is to buy ads in publications. Online however, audience and content are uncoupled from one another, so you can buy audience without being tethered to editorial.
The hard truth is that the paradigm branded print publishers like Conde Nast built offline has broken online. Studies like this are a desperate attempt to convince online advertisers that online media is identical to offline so they buy more from premium publishers. I'd recommend they take a more holistic approach.
Give context its due. But also consider the quality of ad environment. Are the ad units presented well? Are the larger sizes available? Is the page cluttered? Is there more than one advertiser on a page? Is the ad above the fold? Is your company easy to deal with? Is the ops team responsive? All these issues matter a great deal; I would argue they matter far more than contextual relevance, because they can be advantageous to a wider range of advertisers.
Premium publishers like Conde Nast demand and usually get higher CPMs. And I am not for a second suggesting that they have not earned that right; quality sites deliver the goods. But when you're doing audience-based buys spanning perhaps hundreds of sites, reaching the same audience profile across all of them, some sites will invariably get better results than others. Yes, context sometimes defines the winner. But in today's world of ad exchanges and networks, there's no reason for me not to advertise on less productive sites; I'm just willing to pay less for them.
And here's another dirty little secret: You can buy premium publisher inventory at cut-rate prices. They won't tell you that they blind their inventory and sell to ad exchanges and networks, but they do. They have to keep up the illusion that they not "sell out" so they can avoid channel conflict with their direct sales force. So while you're not likely to get their home pages or other top-ranked pages on the exchanges, you might be surprised at the quality of inventory that you do get.
The bottom line is that editorial matters only if you're reaching your target audience at a price that makes sense for your ROI parameters. You need the right price/value relationship. It often pays to shell out a higher price and get a premium publisher, but most of the time, your best plan is to stitch together a campaign combining direct publisher buys of premium content with the scale of audience-based targeting on the ad exchanges and networks.
So don't be fooled by studies like this. Remember your priority is to get the right audience at the right price. Then you can put the cherry on top by layering on contextual relevance where you can find it.
