iMedia Connection - ad:tech blog

Last week's Drift apparently struck a nerve with many of our readers. Our first annual "Do Not Say" list offered up several terms – transparency, optimization, partner — that have been so overused that they've become hollow, meaningless and ultimately self-destructive for the seller. The comments included other suggested terms (technology stack, robust, best-of-breed), some argument that the sellers were the problem and not the terms, and at least one piece of hate mail about the entire concept. But one common question I've heard a dozen times this week is, "So now that you've eliminated 90% of the key words we use in our presentations, what are we supposed to sell?"
Simply put, start selling the Three Cs: Clarity, Certainty and Control.
Clarity: While Transparency has come to represent the narrow themes of open reporting and site lists, Clarity is about how you the media seller are going to help the buyer see the whole picture, understand the landscape, find meaning through their relationship with you. With every customer, in every exchange: simplify, synthesize, explain, make sense of the world for your client. Hold this up as your standard, and you'll quickly stop bludgeoning them with three letter acronyms. Bringing excessive detail and technical... Read more

As I prepare for workshops with digital sales organizations I immerse myself in their sales materials, positioning statements, website, trade marketing and more.  I want to know all I can; not just about the company’s unique strengths, but also about how they talk about those strengths. And I’ve concluded that there are several phrases and terms in our industry that have now lost all meaning and, if used, actually do harm to the seller’s cause.  I hear dead words…..and they don’t even know they’re dead. So without further ado, I debut The Drift’s first annual “Do Not Say List.”
This week’s Drift is proudly underwritten by Shiny Ads,  the premiere white-label solution for self-serve advertising for digital publishers.  Our award-winning self-serve advertising platform generates net-new revenue from smaller ad buys while maintaining a high profit margin.  Our new Self-Serve for Direct Sales super-charges your direct sales and unburdens your ad-operations team by integrating directly into Salesforce.com and the top publisher ad servers directly via APIs. http://shinyads.com
Transparency. A... Read more

If you're insulted or confused by the title of this post, you're either not a political wonk or came of age after 1993. I'm of course paraphrasing Bill Clinton's political strategist James Carville as he famously kept staff members in line and on message during the 1992 presidential campaign. It was this maniacal focus on the day's most important issue that mattered most -- or mattered at all -- and any deviation from that message was an opportunity lost.
I think about this message a lot as I consider how digital sellers spend their time, energy and capital as they pursue business at agencies. We talk about marginal improvements to performance, brand "safe" environments, effective CPMs and a lot of other minutiae tied to successful stewardship of the latest plan. We prattle on about our latest reporting dashboard, the premium publishers or content we represent, how we're more "transparent" than the other guys. I wonder if at a certain point of this litany the agency folks just see our lips moving and only hear "blah...blah...blah...."
We stay locked onto the marginal, temporary issues of media planning (insuring that all we'll ever have is marginal, temporary success) while ignoring the big economic issues that... Read more

Scores of plane rides and dozens of nights in hotel rooms every year can sharpen one’s view of the customer experience.  Frankly, there are patterns of annoyance in weekly travel that are stunningly consistent.  And, yes, I’ve been thinking of how to legitimately whine about them in this space while also crafting a relevant message for Drift readers.  So I’ve decided to call out three of these FTAs (frequent traveler annoyances) while also looking at the deeper insight they illustrate for sales organizations.

The Blinking Light on the Phone: You check into a hotel at the end of a very long day, while e-mail and prep for the next day still stand between you and sleep.  But the message light on the phone blinks insistently.  After several minutes of setting up and accessing your voice mail box you finally retrieve the message:  “This is the front desk just making sure everything is OK with your room.”  Really?  Turns out everything was great except for that blinking light! Message for Sellers: Question the things you do automatically, by rote.  That mass email update or the check in call... Read more

Spring is upon us.  The swallows have returned to Capistrano, the snow tires have been replaced, baseball fans are experiencing either irrational exuberance or premature despair (depending on your team).
And it’s time for our annual discussion of the click-through.  Sure, you may have thought that we’d all moved on by now.  Certainly no rational marketer or agency buyer could still value a metric that’s been so thoroughly discredited?   But you ignore the staying power of a simple bad concept.  The idea that consumers will click on display ads (or videos) and navigate away from what they’re doing in order to visit advertiser websites is, of course, false.  Yet all these years later, it’s still with us.  Click-through attribution is the “birther” movement of online marketing.
The latest rational argument against the click comes from Pretarget and ComScore as reported by Jason Del Rey in Advertising Age (“Click-Through Rates May Matter Even Less than We Thought.”)  The big headline in this study is that even among the microscopically small share of customers who actually do click on ads, there is virtually no correlation between the click and a subsequent conversion. So... Read more