So many companies have developed sophisticated technology to automate campaign performance.  The problem is that no matter how good your technology, you still need statistical relevance to make decisions.  Statistical relevance requires volume, and volume costs money.  Asking an advertiser to spend a lot of money to “see” if something works is just not a proposition that goes over well.  On the other side, companies that take display deals on a CPA basis have to decide how much to spend to find that sweet spot.

That’s where the art comes in.  If technology can rapidly adjust your landscape and offer visibility, the human mind can determine how to jump to the next level without wasting a lot of money.  Sites, creative, frequency capping—all levers that can be played with to find that balance of volume and performance.

There are so many variables that it becomes a tangled web.  Take the “transition impression” concept.  When you first enter a site, you have yet to engage in the content, which means that an ad has a much better chance of making an impact on you.  Once you have engaged with the site, you are less likely to be distracted by extraneous content, such as advertising.

The analogy we use here at Underdog Media is one about driving a car. Consider these two scenarios: making a turn vs. driving straight ahead.  If you are making a turn, you are very engaged in your surroundings and more likely to notice things, like a pedestrian, that might effect your actions.  While driving straight, you are less likely to notice things going on around you.

Optimization is art and science.  Transition impressions—and their impact on performance—are just one example of the multitude of variables that must be considered to maximize ROI.

Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi discussed the economic outlook for the next couple of years in opening comments.

While he says full recovery is a few years away, he is optimistic and predicts that 2012 will be better than 2011, and 2013 will see additional improvement.

Mark indicated that the next big opportunity for US companies is in China, but that products and services must be re-imagined in order to succeed in that very unique and different culture. This holds true for content as well.

Our next speaker Peter Francese, Demographic Trends Analyst for the MetLife Mature Market Institute, noted that the state of the union for publishers is strong, considering how limitless the demand for content has become.

He broke down the various demographics that will be consuming the most content. He focused on both the young–noting that children are starting to access content online at around 5 and 6 years old–and grandparents, of which there are 65 million in the US alone.

For the latter, he said that when users encounter a new life stage, e.g. becoming grandparents or seniors, the need for content that explains the new worldview increases.

Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow and Director of Interactions and Experience Research, Intel Labs, INTEL, spoke next about how Intel uses anthropology to better understand how its products fit into this changing landscape.

She highlighted the fact that the world is not just more connected, but that the US is no longer the center of the web-driven world.

“17% of the world’s Internet users were based in the US in 2010 vs. 65% 10 years ago,” she said.

“You need to be clear about who you are targeting, not just creating a fantasy of who your user is,” Bell said. “It is essential that technology providers and content providers make things that cut through the clutter.”

She highlighted a number of trends that impact the publishing space. For example: the proliferation of devices. While consumers are struggling with what devices are relevant to their lives, they have decided that no one device will do it all.

But not everything is changing; Bell is quick to point out that Americans still watch five times more TV in a month than spend hours on the Internet.

Plenty more to come tomorrow and don’t forget to tune in at 9:15 am ET and 9:50 am ET for the next two live streamed sessions from the summit.

This post originally ran on the OPA Blog.

Most people within the marketing community are no strangers to seeing QR codes attached to advertisements and products these days. Even many tech-savvy consumers know how to create QR codes for promotion or information sharing, which is the beauty of their open platform design. Anyone can use them, read them, and get creative.

QR codes have created a new way for brands to engage their audience with products and services, and there are already quite a few examples of ways that “traditional” QR codes are getting pushed further, including the logo-friendly SnapTag. SnapTags are a gussied up version of the mobile interactive code options. Instead of the static-like appearance of QR codes, they’ve created a sleeker option that focuses more on branding with a cleaner code look based on gaps placed throughout a ring. Digimarc, another QR code boundary pusher, takes the cake by attempting to create mobile interaction with everything from an image to sounds.

Clearly, this mix of technology and advertising is steadily improving with new forms and functions constantly. That being said, functional improvement is meaningless if the platform is not applied with the right strategy and tactics in the real world.

I recently found myself standing in the Philadelphia subway and spotted a QR code on a candy advertisement across the rails. At the safest distance, without dangling myself out in front of a pending train, the closest I could get to the QR code was about 12 feet. The QR code took up a small portion of the lower left corner of the ad, and when zoomed in on became blurred. When I got back above ground, the decoder application was incapable of deciphering it. This brought another issue to my attention, if I hadn’t already known what a QR code was and installed a reader application, how would I even know that it failed or received additional information if it had been successful? Quite frankly, how much time are we anticipating the average commuter will put into interacting with that advertisement?

It’s quite easy to see how far down the rabbit hole you can go. Depending upon the platform, there are different applications for your mobile device. What if you can recognize the symbol itself as something you should be able to interact with but don’t know how? Are the creators anticipating that brands will use valuable ad space they could be using for brand recognition to explain to their potential customers what the symbol is and how to use it? Is multichannel marketing turning into something everyone feels they must do on every form of advertising, for every product, every time?

All of these questions boil down to an engagement and demographic stew. If your product’s target demographic isn’t within the range of those who are always at the ready to find out what’s on the other side of that symbol, you should be reaching out to them in creative ways that they respond to, not simply attaching every button and symbol you can to each campaign. It won’t be long before your once full of impact campaign is doing nothing but help further other companies and gadgets for free on half of your advertisement.

The end result of this subway advertisement experience should be people stopping on their way home to pick up a candy bar and indulge.  There is very little commitment beyond just that. If the product is great they’ll be back. If it’s not a hit with the consumer, there is very little that tweets, posts, and fun codes can do.

I’ll continue to wonder what’s on the other side of that QR code, which I’d prefer to come across on the actual candy bar. Maybe I’ll have to stop on the way home to pick one up…in which case the QR code inadvertently succeeded.

Everyone does it so why fight the trend. Reviewing the previous year as the “The Year of something or some other,” is almost mandatory nowadays – so as 2012 begins we take a look at the last 12 months.

The year started out with predictions for the “Year of the App” or “The Year of the Smartphone”. Both are true, but in reality, 2010 was the year that both began to dominate the mobile market.

What really changed in 2011 was that app developers started to make money – and some serious money. The model changed from premium apps to “Freemium” with the rise of interactive advertising and in-app purchases. This shift was so strong, that according to IHS Screen Digest Mobile Media Intelligence Service, 96% of the billions of apps downloaded in 2011 were free. Additionally, 45% of the top-grossing apps in the iPhone App Store and 31% of the top-grossing Android Market apps were free.

And remember, these figures do not include advertising which would push the revenue of free apps even higher.

However, it’s the future potential of mobile advertising that is most exciting. Time spent on our mobile surpassed time spent reading print media in 2011 and is rapidly approaching radio. However, advertising spend on mobile only makes up 1% of total media spend compared to 10% of time spent. This contrasts with 25% of ad spend for print and 10% for radio. The potential growth for Mobile ad spend is huge as mainstream advertisers begin to realize mobile will eventually be the most pervasive form of media – maybe even passing TV in the future.

Already the percentage of ad spend on mobile doubled from 2010 while the others remained static or declined. Take-up of mobile advertising is tracking the early days of the internet in terms of the differential between time spent and spend, although adoption of mobile media is much more rapid than the internet was.

So we say, 2011 was definitely the “Year of App Monetization” but maybe we are jumping the gun because we suspect 2012 will be more so.

Lego is actually my favorite activity with the kids. Sometimes we just build one of the elaborate Star Wars or Harry Potter sets, but more often than not, we create structures that come purely out of their imaginations. We always find that the success of these creations can be traced to two key elements. One: Assemble a vibrant collection of different and unique Lego parts. Two: Organize them so key elements are easy to find and use. When you have those two states, you can build creations that are unexpected, delightful, and completely different than you had originally planned.

This is such an apt analogy to the state of online targeting right now. There are currently no lack of platforms and providers of data and technology in the space. And many of them are focused on helping advertisers or publishers to collect, aggregate and use standardized sets of data. From this comes the ability to create broad and (hopefully) differentiated audience segments for online targeting. But this is like playing with an incomplete set of Lego blocks. Or if you have kids, one of those sets where a large percentage of those blocks have found their way under beds, into vacuum cleaners and other black holes of toys you can’t find. What happens when you need that special online behavior, or that special action which indicates high levels of interest? What about when basic site behaviors or conversion pages don’t tell the whole story about the shopping cycle or lifestage of a consumer?

This is where the value of large data volumes comes into play, and where a structured, organized process for collecting and using granular data is a huge asset and advantage as part of a targeting strategy. Notice that I used the word “asset.” Data should always be an opportunity for online marketers, not an obstacle. Just as the goal of my kids and me is to build out a durable, creative Lego asset collection, it should be the goal of any online marketer to follow industry best practices to build their valuable data asset with every relevant and actionable audience attribute possible. To this end, I see three critical changes that need to happen for online marketers:

1. Move beyond basic building blocks. The real fun with Lego comes when you get past the standard pieces that make up the majority of a structure and move into the trim, corner pieces and even decorative blocks – the details that really make it exceptional. Once you decide you want to move beyond basic data building blocks, and basic audience definitions, it’s important to consider what other data elements are valuable in online targeting. The truth is, there’s no lack of actionable online data.
2. Try new things. Often when building a Lego set, there are pieces which don’t seem to fit, or designs that don’t make sense until the final structure is in place. It’s the same with audience targeting – as marketers build their audiences, it’s not always the most straight-forward set of rules that make the most sense. Removing pre-conceived notions, testing and continually reiterating the audiences is the way to ensure you’re always moving forward.
3. Play nicely with everyone. There are no ethics or rules with Lego. At least not written ones. But there are the unspoken principles of sharing and cooperation. In the audience targeting business, rules are a bit more strict and sensitive, as well they should be. Using targeting technology to benefit and delight consumers is key. Cooperating and engaging with groups like the IAB and NAI will help communicate the positive elements of using audience targeting technology. Integrating with worthy technology partners is also key to creating the most successful structure for clients.

Embrace the excitement and opportunity of building your own data asset structure. And be sure to use every piece available, and your company will be on target for 2012.

One: Premium Advertising: By premium ads we mean the digital ad opportunities that are laser-targeted on in-market customers and customers that are most receptive to marketing messages. Precision audience targeting gives travel brands access to their best prospects, at scale in a safe environment. It’s not about remnant inventory purchased via a general network or exchange. Data has been secured to the point where brands should feel comfortable with the ability to cross-pollinate loyalty programs and share other non-personally identifiable information.

Two: Mobile: Mobile ad partners cannot own a space on the mobile interface. But they can enhance branded app experiences through uses of an embedded browser. Several companies, including Adara Media, are working with several leading local deal aggregators and national advertisers to optimize the mobile experience with user data and online campaign performances. It will support various mobile actions such as click to call, click to download, and click to purchase.

In 2011, brands, publishers and advertisers began embracing and leverage more mobile video as a way to maintain engagement with user. In 2012, this channel with continue to evolve as more consumers adopt and consume video on their smartphones and tablets.

With traditional video pre-rolls, marketers can tell who is watching the video. However, with mobile and social, it is easier to understand where users are accessing content. This year’s growth in the mobile video advertising channel is a sure sign that it will increasingly become a significant part of an overall digital strategy.

Three: Optimization: Data is useless unless it is refined and made actionable across channels. Travel brands have access to a cross-channel email and display ad channels to effectively deliver against marketers’ objectives. The cross-channel approach provides a complimentary, non-intrusive method to reach exact, desired customers on third party websites. It coordinates display ads with other channel communications. Finally, it can individualize and personalize messaging, because display ads are delivered to known customers, and messaging can be tailored.

Data is at the core of all three developments. Data will also be at the core of more efficient and targeted spending for the travel business.

As technology continues to change consumer shopping behavior, retailers responded in full force this year. Consumers visited circular sites from mobile devices 60% more than last year on Black Friday and a staggering 149% more on Cyber Monday. We saw the same trend with tablets as well with a 124% increase in iPad visits on Black Friday and a 233% increase in iPad visits on Cyber Monday. Additionally, IBM found that iPad users purchased nearly twice as much as people using mobile devices.

This holiday season marketers need to adjust their campaigns across individual devices and take “couch commerce” seriously. Tailoring advertising by device means more than just shrinking ads to fit a mobile screen or inserting 15-second television spots into pre-roll ads. Tailoring means managing messages, creative and delivery to better engage with consumers. Mobile and tablet advertising offer many interactive features that make so much sense around the holiday shopping season. Locally targeted ads can drive consumers into the nearest retail location or offer location-based deals customized for individual consumers. With eMarketer forecasting that one in three online consumers will use a tablet by 2014, it is essential for retailers to tailor their content and advertising to individual platforms to be successful in reaching consumers.

Overall, we saw record numbers with our ShopLocal product suite this year. Here’s an infographic of the results we saw specifically with pre-Black Friday shopping this year:

Baseline Criteria:

Let’s assume that for Year One you will only use third-party ad-serving networks, instead of direct selling. This is as simple as adding their code snippets to your pages, to automatically feed their ads to your site.

Because it’s rare to find one service that can fill all your inventory, I recommend a primary service and a backup service. I also like to use a combination of two ad types: CPM (revenue earned per 1,000 ad views) and CPC (revenue earned per click). For the sake of these sample projections, however, we’ll focus solely on CPMs, as it’s easier to calculate.

In terms of ad providers, I’ve used Contextweb for CPM and Google AdSense for CPC. There are plenty of others to consider, but you may have to qualify for their minimum page view requirements, and that may not come until later.

Year One Assumptions:

• 2 CPM ad slots per page
• 80% of your inventory filled (a common percentage with a 2-service approach)
• $1.20 earned per 1,000 pages viewed

You start by projecting monthly page views. Hopefully you have a beta site or some similar sites where you can review the average page views per visitor. If not, Compete.com will let you compare the number of monthly visitors for similar sites.

Depending on the type of site content, pages per visit can generally average as low as 2.5 to 3 pages per new visitor and between 8 to 10 pages for a repeat visitor. These numbers are based purely on my own experience managing sites.

Once you have a projection of monthly total page views, it’s time for simple math:

Total Page Views divided by 1,000 x $1.20 = Revenue Earned

You now have revenue projections for Year One.

Future Years:

When projecting revenue over Years Two through Four, increase your $1.20 per 1,000 page views first to an average of $3 CPM, then ultimately to a maximum average of $10 CPM. These are general guidelines and it’s best to be conservative.

To accomplish these increases in CPM rates, you may want to approach one of the larger or specialized ad networks to begin selling your inventory directly, or to even hire an outside sales team. You could approach a firm like 24/7 Real Media to employ their ad serving management tool and sales representation. You may want to contact them now and get their input as you start your projections.

As you build traffic and dramatically increase ad inventory, you will also want to analyze the benefits of adding an in-house salesperson or staff, with the goal of earning higher profit margins and providing better service, especially for advertisers coming to you directly. The base expense per sales person will range from $50,000 to $100,000 depending on the industry, location, compensation package offered, and the advertising and marketing support required. This does not need to completely replace your outside sales solution.

I hope this is helpful for those of you hard at work on a business plan for the next great dot com. I’d be curious to hear the input of others, those experienced in the ad selling game, to further this conversation.

Numerous brands advertise nationally in all media formats, but every single one of them is intensely focused on attracting the highest amount of foot traffic to stores in local markets. While they all spend in local media, they may or may not need to flood those sectors with more dollars. But they should get smarter about making sure that spend is deployed for maximum effectiveness.

National campaigns are good for raising awareness and brand building but the real activation happens on the local level, and national ads should contain those ancillary media plans and buys. This concept is not news—marketers and media buyers have always explored ways to make the media spend work as hard as possible.

If a retailer has 15 locations in Missouri, it makes sense to have a larger marketing budget there than in Nevada where they may be only have three.

Yet it’s surprising just how much inefficiency still exists in local media buys even in this day and age.

As any media planner knows, the whole local marketing process can be tedious, and the ROI imprecise enough so that marketers sometimes take the most perfunctory approach to local-market spending or turn it over to a third party. A lot of manual labor is associated with localized media plans because they require meticulous oversight and hands-on management.

In the recent past, planners would have had to conduct a lot of research to buy locally at scale. An advertiser in suburban Chicago who is putting together a media buy for a specific group of ZIP codes in New York is usually hard pressed about how to start.

Technology is making local media buys more acceptable to more advertisers because finding out the local media options in any market is becoming less cumbersome. New tools now enable a plan for 15 local markets comprised of 75 different local news outlets with the media company getting just one bill and point-of-contact for that service instead of having to deal with 75 different people at multiple vendor companies that handle different parts of the process.

With hyperlocal targeting tools, one person can handle 15 or 50 markets.

National advertisers need to understand physically where their target audience is located. Geography is the foundation on which to build out your media plan across platforms, then proceed to add layers of information about gender, age, likes, dislikes, household income, and purchasing behavior. There are still some media planners who think, “If I run on Yahoo! I’ve got it covered.”

The fact is, after this basic information is established, advertisers must tweak the creative to speak to the local market. If the creative piece falls short, it’s a waste of ad dollars. You must speak to each market in its local language.

For example, a national car company could take advantage of local advertising by featuring a photo of a specific dealership showroom or their salesperson of the year in a local market. They could combine this custom, local message with an offer for low financing or another special incentive. Keeping a standard creative message in other markets could help the national dealer measure ROI and show lift.

These geographically-targeted ads then become content for local news outlets. An ad touting a back-to-school sale at the local branch of a national chain store is going to be much more pertinent to the readers in that area than a less customized branding message that doesn’t speak to a specific location or address a community issue.

Newspapers and magazines have been doing this forever. The Macy’s ad in the local newspaper has always listed the store hours, coupons, and address of that Macy’s store alongside ads for the local lighting store, carpet store and pizza place.

For more than 40 years, MNI has taken national brand ads and customized and placed them at scale in local markets, first in print and increasingly in web display ads and through SEO/SEM.

Technology enables advertisers to target differently. All national advertisers should have a local branding initiative. It’s silly not to when it’s all at your fingertips.

When it comes to optimizing your Facebook ad campaigns it is not enough to set the campaign and just let it run. It is incredibly important to maximize your spend, test multiple options and continually optimize your campaign.

Facebook's ad platform is one that is fairly easy to use and the potential reach is one of the biggest draws for brands to engage. Initially, plans were all about driving Likes and ad units pointing internally to brand pages facilitated that need. Now with the platform focusing even more on engagement, having the ability to drive engagement on a post level becomes even more important and having a strategy that maps to both acquisition & engagement are key.

If you plan on managing your own campaigns here are a few tips to further maximize your ad spend.

1). Align ad unit type with Campaign Objectives & Budget - When you elect to run a self service Facebook campaign you will notice multiple options and ad types. And as I mentioned above, the units should be an extension of your strategy. You can select from Sponsored Stories and Facebook ad examples which I have referenced previously.

Sponsored Stories

Page Like Stories are good to capitalize on Social Reach

Facebook Ads for Pages

Fb Page Post Example (Great for driving engagement on a post level to maximize Edge Rank)

Fb external units are good to drive clicks off of Facebook, but Call to Action needs to be relevant & compelling.

If you have a smaller budget and your goal is awareness you may consider a CPM or Pay for Impressions campaign. If you are driving acquisition around a specific event or contest, ensure that you are fully optimizing your targets and go with a CPC or Pay for Clicks campaign but I would recommend the precise targeting option.

Also note from a daily spend perspective if you are just starting to run a campaign for the first time there are daily caps set on your account. Over time Facebook will review and potentially increase your daily spend amount.

Example message from Facebook

2). Captivating Creative is Key - Ensure that the creative of the campaign is compelling and be sure to test multiple options. Strong creative can be a difference maker in driving engagement with your ad unit.

3). Clear Call to Action - Driving Likes and social connections directly from the ad unit are key. Take an opportunity to drive a Like directly from the unit by simply adding text that asks the user to Like Us & Learn more.

Depending on the end destination, it is important to not only have your media driving awareness, but to also ensure that when the user lands on your selected destination there is a clear call to action for the next steps. Whether that is driving a Page level Like, a landing page for a contest, or an application, it is important to ensure continuity throughout.

4). Target, Target, Target - It is not enough to sit back and depend on the Broad Category Targeting, especially if you are executing a CPC centric campaign. Make use of the Precise Interests option and pay attention to how adding additional interests directly impacts the potential reach of the campaign.

Example of Precise Targeting

Targeting tied to Reach

5) Monitor & Optimize - As your campaign gets underway ensure to set specific checkpoints to review campaign performance, test units by both Impressions & Clicks to see what drives the ideal results. And continually monitor not only the performance of the units but also the impact of the campaign on other factors such as delta of Likes from the onset of the campaign to post level engagement. I highly recommend supporting most Facebook acquisition strategies with a Facebook media buy in order to fully take advantage of the platform.

Also, you cannot have the Paid, Owned & Earned benefits without the Paid element.

Advances in technology have helped create greater levels of interactivity, efficiency and control for today’s online shoppers. Still, that experience has to compete with the nostalgia of walking through a local mall, soaking up the overall experience of shopping in stores. The key toward progress in this area depends on identifying the specific emotional appeal to individual consumers and replicating that emotion in the online experience.

The inability to do this was one of the first criticisms online advertising faced when it emerged over 15 years ago. Critics said it lacked “emotion” compared to more traditional advertising models. In many ways they were right. Telling an engaging or compelling story using what amounted to a web link masquerading as a button (and perhaps minimally animated) was a pale pretender when it came to really attracting and engaging consumers.

However, a great deal of this criticism fueled the rise of dynamic rich media advertising models that, today, are able to create engaging and compelling online advertising formats (often using more traditional media, like video) that tell an emotional story and also inspire consumers toward taking specific actions.

Likewise, early websites often bore more of a resemblance to printed brochures than anything one might consider an “engaging experience.” In short, there was often very little emotional appeal for even the top sites of the day because of the lack of real interaction with visitors. This emotional divide was most apparent when it came to shopping online. While online shopping offered consumers a unique and perhaps convenient shopping experience, it often had the raw emotional appeal of filling in a tax form.

Technology has embraced emotion. And for the e-commerce space, it’s happening just in time. In his 1999 bestselling book “Why We Buy,” environmental psychologist Paco Underhill took a long, hard look at what makes people buy and what makes them not buy in retail environments. While the book provides a number of fantastic insights into the science of shopping, two of the major factors that drive sales are product relevancy and easy access. For example, retailers looking to optimize shelving displays often place a limited appeal product on a lower “out of the way” shelf in order to give a better-selling product greater display prominence. On the surface this makes sense. However, in his observations, Underhill discovered that senior citizens, often with physical limitations, were less likely to bend down to look at the content on lower shelves even when those products met their direct needs. On the other hand, a 20-something shopper with good eyesight and physical flexibility wouldn’t think twice about bending down to grab a product from a lower shelf. Likewise, a lower shelf is just about eye level for a small child and is a perfect place to display products for that particular consumer group.  What child can resist the sugar filled cereal aisle at the supermarket?

The real answer to optimizing shelf space in this way depends greatly on who your customers are and what they’re looking for.

Now technology has turned the tables. In the modern e-commerce space, the ability to instantly shift the contents of a “shelf,” or rich media ad, to meet the needs of an individual shopper is a trick that traditional retailers can’t match. Starting with a basic understanding of how an individual consumer best perceives the world can enable advertisers to change their dynamically targeted ads to best reflect those needs. For example, a visually dominant person may find an ad with more graphics to be emotionally appealing while a more tactile or kinesthetic shopper may appreciate a version of an ad with more hands-on widgets and interactive tools.  And who can resist a specific offer tailored directly to their needs?  By simply measuring the dominant forms of perceptive input of a shopper, even in real-time, ads can be perfectly matched to the consumer, therefore, enhancing their experience.

A relevant match between products and consumers is a core component of any successful ad or offline store. Treating all consumers to the same shopping experience makes as much sense as running a restaurant that only offers a single entree.  Because we are all different people we all want to have experiences that embrace our uniqueness. This includes being shown products that are personally appealing (and relevant) when we enter our store of choice.

It’s no longer a matter of figuring out if audience targeting technologies can be used to create a more personally emotional experience for online shoppers. We know they can. Now, we need to embrace them to create an even better shopping experience than the one in environmentally controlled, emotionless malls. Instead, this shopper is saying goodbye to early dawn risings and fighting off the crowds for the best deals—tired and frustrated is not my type of shopping. I most definitely prefer the tranquil experience and satisfaction of letting the deals find me while I sip hot cocoa, my dog nestles up in my lap and I browse lazily in front of my cozy fire.

Retargeting is a hugely valuable tool for retailers. Here’s a simple scenario: A consumer comes to the site, thereby expressing interest in products and services in a manner by which there can be no confusion.  It’s a data point that is inarguable.  They do some research, perhaps make some shopping basket entries, and then don’t finish their business.  For whatever reason a transaction didn’t take place.

That’s where retargeting kicks in. By cookie-ing the consumer, you now can target them offsite and encourage them to complete their purchase.  With the advent of dynamic creative, ads can be tailored specifically to the exact products the consumer was looking at. These ads work at conversion rates comparable to search advertising. This technique must be in the quiver of every online retailer on the Internet.  By the way, since it is so successful, there are dozens of online media companies that feature this as a core offering. Underdog Media is one, as are Criteo, Dotomi and Fetchback.

Great. It works. Or does it? What I found though is a glitch in the system. Many of the companies offering retargeting don’t frequency cap the follow up ads. What that means is that when a consumer leaves a retailer site they have the potential of being inundated with ads following them virtually anywhere they go. The conundrum, in my opinion, is how to drive results and support the significant investment a company has made in establishing their brand. Reminding a consumer about a product’s features, making a special follow up price offer, even cross selling and upselling are all important techniques to embrace. If it’s not done in a respectful way, though, the retailer will drive the consumer away from their brand for good.

We have to make this both about the immediate transaction and about a brand relationship. We must start talking about lifetime value of a consumer, supporting the costs of driving consumers to the site in the first place, treating consumers with respect. There is a lot of conversation about privacy, and this fits right in. Respect is the core of the privacy conversation.

Let’s start talking about “polite retargeting“ folks, where we take advantage of the benefits of retargeting and do so in a way that works for all parties. Trust me, if retailers start to attribute their loss of brand value to uncapped retargeting, the results will not be good for anyone. Let’s use engaging advertising to do the job, do so with appropriate frequency capping and make this a practice that will continue to be part of every online retailers marketing programs. I’ll be asking retailers how many times they think they should reach out to the customer when they leave their store. I know that the answer will not be “infinity.”

I grew up two blocks from the house that Art (as he was known) grew up in. The Nielsen Company started in Wilmette, Illinois where I resided, so I have fond memories of growing up and playing in parks named after him. Then as a professional in the advertising software business, I’ve made a living processing market ratings that he and his company originated and turned into a brand name and a symbol for television measurement. I’ve had the privilege to meet him and talk business with him. Nielsen was not the first ratings company in the industry, but Art changed the ratings industry from just research to a true currency.

STRATA has proudly processed Nielsen ratings for decades and today we along with the rest of the industry need to pause for a moment of reflection and thank a man that has meant so much to television and advertising. I know that I will also stop when I go by my childhood home or see kids playing in that park and think of what a profound impact Art has made.

As a long time reader (and failed contributor I might add) of Y Combinator's (YC) HackerNewz, I was very excited to attend their first annual Ad Innovation Conference in Mountain View, California yesterday.  I saw some familiar faces around the conference room, but mostly, it was a room full new media and technology geeks like myself who for some reason or another, are passionate about new ways to get consumers engaged with brands, aka the evolution of advertising platforms.

First a bit of background on the show you are hopefully going to continue to read about.

Y Combinator:

A group of Y Combinator-funded startups working on ad-related technologies have joined forces to create a new event focused on the future of advertising.

Topics to be discussed include: NFC advertising; the use of Twitter and Facebook content in display ads; ad/game hybrids; embedding ads in the 3D space of videos after they’ve been shot (i.e. retroactive product placement); geolocal ads and offers; audience polling; the evolution of SEO; marketing on Facebook; monitoring competing AdSense campaigns; landing page optimization; ad-based alternatives to paywalls; the future of QR codes; and advertising on the iPad.

In the next housand words or so, I attempt to capture and share my thoughts on each company and presentation from yesterday. It's really nothing more than a stream of consciousness brain dump written during the conference, as it was happening, presented back to you after nothing more than a cursory proof read while on a plane back from SF to Dallas.  I say this not as a humblebrag, but as a pre-emptive plea to the spell checkers, grammar fashionista's or word tense connoisseurs to take it easy on me in the comments.  Hopefully, some of you will find some of the information helpful or interesting and we can engage in witty banter instead and become internet BFF's.

Ready? Begin present tense writing...

From the Opening Remarks: What to expect to come down the innovation pipe for advertising

1. Tablets are very important. Not a gimmick, not a fad, and will affect how people interact with ads.  Think paradigm shift within the next 10 years in terms of how people engage with not just ads, but with brands.
2. “Apple is going to take over the world…they are even more powerful than they look. Ignore their market share of devices sold, and instead look at their share of profit..ridiculous..they have as much of the market as they want…they are in a position to take what they want, when they want…which is frightening as one company dominating is normally bad news for startups….they control the platform and set the rules, which are set to change at any time, for any reason, at their discretion “
3. All data will be stored in the cloud and live “in the web”.  This will free up computing resources and place less emphasis on specs like the size of the hard drive you are packing. What that means for advertising is that all of the information you could ever want and have dreamed of is sitting there, on some server, in the cloud.  But will you be able to access it? Who will grant you access it? How much will you have to pay? How will consumers react to this?
4. The peer to peer economy moves into the real world as micro economies (isnt this the same as local?) emerge.
5. There will be even more startups.  There used to be 2 things you could do as a young programmer right out of school: get a job, or go to grad school.  Now there is the option of creating your own company, aka a startup.  If 10% of the best brains are creating their own paths, big companies, like advertisers and brands, are going to have to start paying attention more to that guy who you make fun of for working out of his garage.
6. Facebook is even a bigger deal than you think. They havent even tried to start making money yet, they are still focused on user acquisition and have an entire team dedicated to this quest. Think about what happens when they create a Financial Growth group and begin to monetize the data they have collected on us all for nearly a decade.  Plus, Zuck is young and healthy (read: not Steve Jobs). He will be there for years to come.
7. More and more companies will become “software companies”.  People often talk about how Amazon is really a software company that sells things. Expect more and more disruption as tech based startups enter over more and more markets and out innovate incumbents.
8. Ad Targeting is still in its infancy. As more and more data is collected, and ad platforms evolve to take advantage of this information and act upon it, Minority Report is not too far away.
9. If you had to bet  on creative vs measurement having the most impact on ad performance in the next decade , bet on measurement.  We have so much data, and our ability to analyze, target and serve is only limited by our computing power…welp, remember Moore’s Law?
10. Creative will fuse with generated.  Something about stories becoming more important, but not in the generic way we usually talk to brands about the importance of a story based marketing campaign, but instead like how stories play out in video games: branched story lines/arcs with many ways to get to the same place.  An “Execute your user” line was used in this part of the preso and I like it in this context.

Ginzametrics:

Next generation SEO optimization platform.  They seem to be very focused on the quality of content to affect search rankings along with enabling your visitors to promote your content via the social graph. They do this through an automated platform that allows enterprise level, content driven companies manage their site, and by that they mean content, through a user friendly and simple web interface.

What they never talked about was the fact that in the end, producing good content should always be the first step.  ”Once you have that down, come talk to us” is something I would have liked to hear them say. I really think brands and publishers need to start putting quality back at the top of the list of “things that will help me grow my business”.

Tagstand:

An NFC (near field communication) platform that makes it easy for developers and businesses to incorporate near field communication into their apps. This becomes extremely relevant to advertisers as the next generation of smart phones will be NFC enabled. The opportunity, according to them, is in physical tags that when tapped with a phone, make something happen for lack of a better imagination on my part to come up with a metaphor: launch a web page to find out more, subscribe to a mailing list, set your dvr to watch a new show, purchase an mp3 or movie and have it loaded into your cloud drive for viewing across all sorts of connected devices, etc.  The possibilities are endless.

Tagstand wants to help you manage all of this.  It is a management platform for advertisers to manage their soon to be 1000’s of tags in the wild. This of course includes tracking them, always important to brand and media folk who like their excel spreadsheets to optimize their campaigns.

But what makes NFC so interesting, is that In Real Time is no longer the gold standard for managing media campaigns.  With NFC, you can manage them in real life. This is called micro-location analytics: not just that one mall display is better than the other mall, but that one display location within a mall is better.

Vidyard:

Simple: YouTube for business.  ”YouTube is the dead end of the internet” “You have to put ads on your own content just to get them back to your site”.

Vidyard handles the it all, serving, updating, tracking and syndicating of web based video.

Coca-Cola (their agencies) is an early adopter of their service.

This presentation cemented it: the new kids on the block are looking to fill in the gaps left by the big ocean liners in the technology/media world.  In this case: YouTube. It’s easy to call it an acquisition strategy, but since Vidyards clients are paying customers, they might actually be able to turn a profit, something that YouTube, in its quest to subsidize every one on the planets video storage and viewing habits in exchange advertising opportunities.

By the way, these guys get extra points for their “Rage Face” tshirts. “Y U NO USE VIDYARD?!”

Crowdbooster:

“The first intelligent social media dashboard”.  Claims to save social media managers drowning in data and reliant upon expensive analysis and reactionary strategies.

I think this is a great start to a pitch as they are addressing a real problem to grab the attention of potential new users in the room.

Like other social media management tools available for brands, Crowdbooster has all the data that you want. If you get off on graphs, be it pie or line, they’re there.  But what separates CrowdBooster is that they present analysis and recommended actions to take based on that data in a very easy to understand format.  And it does this in real time.

By removing you from the overwhelming and pretty much unusable firehose of information, CrowdBooster allows the Brand Social Media Manger to focus his or her  attention on what actually helps you achieve your social media objectives.

Optimizely:

Dan, a former product manager at the Google (Chrome) who left to join Barak Obama’s campaign in 2008, returns to the start up scene with Optimizely, which promises “website A/B testing and personalization for non technical users that you will actually use.”

Our live demo tests whether or not users like MIke Arrington’s right or left side. I think half of the crowd gets this joke. I like that he user interface looks a lot like what one would see on a blogging platform, be it wordpress or tumblr.  Not that the functionality is the same, but the familiar feeling is a very important feeling if you are trying to get non-technical, often impatient and hypercritical users to use your product.

Optimizely has quite the client list: Techcrunch, Starbucks and other things I use to not work during the day.

Loopt:

One step beyond engagement - motivating someone to move their feet. Their big idea: letting businesses bring in customers when they need them with dynamic pricing.

“It’s a rainy day, business is slow, I will give people half off if they come in to the store today.” But how to get that word out?

Loopt gives merchants the ability to self manage deals and push notifications to opted in users in their area. But taking it further, Loopt has a massive set of location data at their disposal that they can use to predict user behavior and in the future, they hope to be able to use this information to help connect merchants with receptive customers.

I keep having a recurring thought that a lot of these start ups are really in the data collection game and a lot of these marketers are in the data buying game. Nothing surprising there, but what is surprising is how no one so far has mentioned how a consumer might feel about all of this data being made available to marketers and what they do to mitigate this risk…

Mixpanel:

“The most sophisticated real-time analytics platform that companies can use to understand how users behave.”

Per Mixpanel, the most underserved and not paid attention to metric in data analysis is retention. Think about it, a video or app or feature goes viral and explodes across the web.  Thousands to millions of users flock to a destination on the web, but then the real problem sets in: keeping users interested.

The inspiration for Mixpanel’s solution to this problem began from looking closely at gaming, who has dealt with short attention spans for decades.  You level up to level 67 but then a new shiny object appears in the app store, you download and you forgot why you played World War in the first place.

And then the presentation ends….kind of left me hanging there.  Ummmm thanks?  They have a very nice client list but I’d like more info on what your solution actually is as I think you are trying to solve a very important problem for brands and publishers.

Ohhh I get it! Mystery! You are marketing to the marketers! Now I have to chase you down to find out more info.  Clever Girl.

Paperlinks:

Paperlinks wants to be “The QR code infrastructure for business.” and own the back end of “Proximity Commerce”.

While this company focuses on QR codes to bridge the gap from the real world to the digital world right now, they recognize that there are other flashier things in the near future that may replace them.  But they aren’t spending time trying to chase down shiny objects like NFC enabled tags.  They want to be the first to provide a mature and usable back bone, technical infrastructure, and management system for marketing campaigns that use QR codes, NFC tech, etc.

They end their presentation with a few QR code best practices:

1. Use designer codes, 4x more likely to be scanned
2. Offer a payoff for the consumer (give an incentive for engaging)

PageLever:

Analytics that help businesses be more effective on Facebook.

Insight: “People don’t really revisit fan pages after becoming a fan of them.”

When Paperlinks helped the Washington Redskins become the fastest growing Facebook page for a few weeks last year, they realized they had no idea why the growth was happening.

In their research to find out why, they learned that a brand’s fan page is simply not that important after the initial acquisition of a fan.  What really keeps the community alive, engaged and growing is the content you share with your fans via status updates. While knowing this important fact is half the battle, the other half is finding out that each status update you and your brand send out only reaches 25% of your fan base

So how do you get the other 75% engaged and to see your status update?

PageLever of course! PageLever finds the sweet spot between posting to much and not enough.  Too much and you get 2 status updates in the stream at one time and the user gets annoyed and unfan your brand.  Not good.

PageLever works to ensure you always have a status update in the feed without annoying your fans.

I like where this company is going.  It’s trying to solve a very important problem, but I cant help but think that making sure you are always present in someone’s news feed is a great second step.  The first step should be to actually have some great content to share that is worth me looking past the fact that you keep asking me to keep paying attention to you with multiple status updates per week/day/hour/what have you.

GazeHawk

“Webcam based eye tracking to accurately measure and increase display ad effectiveness.”

Interestingly enough, they see opportunities to help brands/advertisers find the most effective ads to serve, but conversely, they want to help publishers accurately place a value on their inventory.

The founders plan to have a big product announcement within the next few weeks.

MixRank:

OMG! THEY HELP ADVERTISERS SPY ON THEIR COMPETITION!

Definitely saw a lot of people perk up with that opening line. Per the founders, Mixrank brings the competitive intelligence for online advertising.

They want to answer questions like, “Where is the best audience?” “What ad format / creative works best?” “Does the whole “below the fold” really matter all that much anymore?”

I think that this is a company that will get a lot more interesting to marketers down the road as they will have the data on what works and what doesn’t to give agencies and brands, and their competitors the leg up they need to make a quick improvement in their online advertising. For direct marketers online, this could make or break a quarter in terms of monetary performance.

Hell, they might even have it now.  If they do, I think that is how I would be selling my product rather than focusing on how it works.

Polleverywhere:

Poll Everywhere: Live audience polling via mobile devices. Their platform promotes audience engagement in real time via the users own cell phone.  Think: immediate feedback.

They consider themselves a disruptive technology that costs 10X less than their competitors in the space (i.e. the clickers you used to see on America’s Funniest Home Videos). The instead leverage the users existing cell phones and interact with the user via text messages and offer their clients a robust analytics platform to help them manage and optimize their campaigns as it is happening.

Still considering themselves a startup, they have half of the fortune 500, not to mention thousands of educators already signed up and track over 17,000 responses a day.

DoubleRecall:

A new captcha like ad type that monetizes 12x better than banners aka atool to combat banner blindness as well as offer publishers an alternative to paywalling their content.

Instead of logging in or paying for content, users have to engage with an ad to read the content they want to see.  More valuable to sell for publishers, keeps content free on the web for users.

The user interface looks a lot like a Tweet, with familiar “buttons” or calls to action like Favorite and Retweet.

They are looking for 5 beta partners, preferably media buying agencies this month to prove their worth to the world of adverting and digital marketing.

This is a real problem for publishers and brands that sell and buy advertising space on the web, but I can’t help but think that new ad formats that interrupt and delay gratification are just not the sustainable permanent solution for funding content on the web.

Twitch.TV:

A last minute, unannounced addition to the lineup.

From the founders of Justin.TV comes a platform that allows gamers to upload their “gamecasts” (highlights of their gaming experience) to a platform that not only monetizes the content (brand sponsored content), but cuts the gamer in on that revenue!

But video of people playing video games you say? Really?

Dude, get over yourself.  Your bias is showing.  It’s the 2nd largest category of videos on YouTube with over 800million views a month.

I personally love this idea as there are incentives for every stakeholder. Uploaders get a piece of the revenue. Brands get to sponsor fan content, endearing gamers to their brand and spectators can be entertained!

I was wondering if TwitchTV was behind the North American Starcraft League, and it turns out they are.  Thank you Reddit for keeping me in the loop. FML.

End note: Thank you to my employer, UEG for the opportunity to attend this conference.

ABOUT UEG:

UEG has unparalleled access to influencers in the fields of movies and TV, music, sports, gaming, fashion and beauty, art, publishing, technology, digital content and engagement, with a track record of seeding influencers with product and, more imperatively, developing strategic partnerships that create validation and awareness among consumer targets. Created as a joint venture with Hollywood powerhouse United Talent Agency, UEG works with the best talent throughout Hollywood and the world. UEG’s executive team has developed some of the biggest and most successful branded entertainment platforms in the industry.

Here's a quick summary of why.  The full announcement is below.

1) Data is transmitted to the USA without proper notification to users. Lack of proper notification is illegal under European and German privacy laws.

2) Data is used to create online profiles and track people for 2 years. Creation of online profiles and cross-site tracking is illegal in Germany and under EU laws unless prior informed consent is given.   Browser settings do not constitute informed consent.

3) Facebook's privacy statement and T&C's are vague, confusing, uninformative, and therefore illegal under German requirements.  This means, even if you read and agreed, you still would not have given informed consent.

Their final comment: "Institutions must be aware that they cannot shift their responsibility for data privacy upon Facebook or the users."

Here is the entire text of the English-language announcement:

P R E S S   R E L E A S E

ULD to website owners:
„Deactivate Facebook web analytics“

The Data Protection Commissioner’s Office (Independent Centre for Privacy Protection - ULD) calls on all institutions in the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany to shut down their fan pages on Facebook and remove social plug-ins such as the “like”-button from their websites. After a thorough legal and technical analysis ULD comes to the conclusion that such features are in violation of the German Telemedia Act (TMG) and of the Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG), respectively the Data Protection Act of Schleswig-Holstein (LDSG SH). By using the Facebook service traffic and content data are transferred into the USA and a qualified feedback is sent back to the website owner concerning the web page usage, the so called web analytics (Ger.: Reichweitenanalyse). Whoever visits facebook.com or uses a plug-in must expect that he or she will be tracked by the company for two years. Facebook builds a broad individual and for members even a personalised profile. Such a profiling infringes German and European data protection law. There is no sufficient information of users and there is no choice; the wording in the conditions of use and privacy statements of Facebook does not nearly meet the legal requirements relevant for compliance of legal notice, privacy consent and general terms of use.

ULD expects from website owners in Schleswig-Holstein to immediately stop the passing on of user data to Facebook in the USA by deactivating the respective services. If this does not take place by the end of September 2011, ULD will take further steps. After performing the hearing and administrative procedure this can mean a formal complaint according to sect. 42 LDSG SH for public entities, a prohibition order pursuant to sect. 38 par. 5 BDSG as well as a penalty fine for private entities. The maximum fine for violations of the TMG is 50TS Euro.

Commissioner Thilo Weichert, head of ULD: “ULD has pointed out informally for some time that many Facebook offerings are in conflict with the law. This unfortunately has not prevented website owners from using the respective services and the more so as they are easy to install and free of charge. Web analytics is among those services and especially informative for advertising purposes. It is paid with the data of the users. With the help of these data Facebook has gained an estimated market value of more than 50 bn. dollars. Institutions must be aware that they cannot shift their responsibility for data privacy upon the enterprise Facebook which does not have an establishment in Germany and also not upon the users.

Our current call is only the beginning of a continuing privacy impact analysis of Facebook applications. ULD will continue in cooperation with other German data protection authorities. A comprehensive analysis is not to be performed at one go for a small privacy agency such as ULD; moreover is Facebook constantly changing its technical procedures and terms of use. Nobody should claim that there are no alternatives; there are European and other social media available that take the protection of privacy rights of Internet users far more serious. That they also may contain problematic applications must not be a reason to remain idle towards Facebook, but must prompt us as supervisory authorities to pursue these violations. Users can take their part in trying to avoid privacy adverse offerings.”

To Internet users ULD offers the advice to keep their fingers from clicking on social plug-ins such as the “like”-button and not to set up a Facebook account if they wish to avoid a comprehensive profiling by this company. Profiles are personal information; Facebook is requiring its members to register their actual name.

ULD has published its privacy evaluation of website analytics by Facebook in German language on the Internet at

https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/facebook/

This analysis will be continued, that is extended and specified. Suggestions to ULD are welcome by e-mail to

facebook@datenschutzzentrum.de

For inquiries or in case of general further questions please contact:
Unabhängiges Landeszentrum für Datenschutz Schleswig-Holstein
Holstenstr. 98, 24103 Kiel, Germany
Phone: ++49 (0)431 988-1200, Fax: -1223

Some people reading this may think the German's are being silly. However, I think we need to respect the culture of different countries.  The web brings the cultures of hundreds, if not thousands, of regions and groups into a shared environment.  We cannot assume that any one approach to online privacy is "correct" and that everyone else is "wrong."  In particular, we cannot assume the USA's business-centric attitude that consumers do not have a right to privacy will be respected anywhere else in the world.  Significant portions of the planet believe personal privacy is a fundamental human right.  We must respect the right of others to live in the manner they want, especially if they live in a democracy.  International brands, such as Facebook and Google, have a responsibility to ensure they understand the differing attitudes towards privacy in the countries in which they do business, and work within the boundaries each country demands.  Failure to comply will lead to situations like this, costing the company money and potentially bringing legal penalties to their staff (as happened with Google staff, who were jailed in Germany for privacy violations).  It's just bad business.

Consolidation in the industry is a sign that the rich media market has reached maturity and companies are trying to differentiate themselves. DG FastChannel acquired EyeWonder, adding it to earlier acquisitions of MediaMind and Unicast, apparently placing their bet on company size to win.

At PointRoll, we work with two-thirds of the Fortune 500 brands and know that the most important things we can deliver to them are (1) efficient ways to send a consolidated message to audiences across multiple touch points (mobile, social, video, circulars, out of home), along with (2) high-touch service to help them build and deliver powerful campaigns and realize their creative vision. That's why we're growing our business as a single point of entry for powerful multi-platform campaigns. The single point of entry is the crucial point here, and where we believe DG may struggle as they go through the growing pains of merging three distinct companies into one cohesive offering.

At the end of the day, this type of move is a good sign for the industry at large. It will certainly create some growing pains in the short term, but consolidation is a sign that the industry is out of infancy and heading into a new phase of growth.

That’s kind of the way it is with online advertising. Marketers want to go big, reach the biggest audience possible. But it has to be the right audience receiving the message otherwise those ad dollars will go to waste. Understanding and mastering that tension – macro/micro, buckshot/laser, Yao Ming/Spud Webb – is key to targeting success in RTB.

In my current role I often hear companies ask, “How many categories is the right amount in a taxonomy?” This is an interesting question and there are a ton of opinions out there. The IAB has put forth a recommendation as to the structure and makeup of a taxonomy that aims for standardization. It is recommended that companies in the contextual or semantic space follow at least the first two levels in a hierarchical structure, and further granularity is at the partners’ discretion. Google (of course) has their own approach, a taxonomy that’s derived from their keyword search products. What they both have in common is that their taxonomies go deep – too deep.

The nodes have it, or do they?

Companies often tout the size of their taxonomy, seemingly for bragging rights. To me it makes little sense. Say you could find some category in a logical tree structure (if it’s presented that way) out of some 3000 categories. The tiny volume of impressions that can be purchased by targeting the last node in the tree does not make it worth anyone’s time or money. Back in the day I worked for a network that offered a self-service interface for buying contextual categories. We had over 5000 categories in our taxonomy, but no scale in any one category other than the top levels. As a network this made it challenging to engage with clients effectively, and there was not significant repeat business for the product.

Now, things are a little different with RTB. Scale is less of an issue than it has ever been, however if you think about it, having excessive granularity just makes no sense to an advertiser. True, it seems appealing to target only the narrowest topics, but at end of the day all you really succeeded in doing is wasting time and energy setting up campaigns that will fail from the get go. Granularity becomes the enemy of scale. There needs to be a balance between the number of categories and appropriate granularity. When you need a magnifying glass, you don’t use an electron microscope. Talk about overkill.

The semantic advantage

You see, the problem is that those massive taxonomies are actually a legacy of the keyword-targeting approach to online advertising. Once you realize that it becomes clear why these (oftentimes competing and inconsistent) taxonomies have gone haywire. There is a limitless set of keywords that advertisers can choose to target, so it’s axiomatic that the taxonomies that support that approach have to be pumped on steroids.

In contrast, semantic based methods used to derive categories are more accurate and actionable than keyword based methods. Because this approach looks at the entire page, it is able understand the difference between phrases that challenge contextual targeting, like ‘Paris Hilton’ vs. ‘the Hilton in Paris’. This is because semantics looks at the words and how they are structured in a sentence and paragraph to identify patterns of how the words relate to one another

Once you understand the value of a semantic based system vs. a keyword based system, you will understand that keyword based systems are actually less useful to advertisers.

The bigger the nodes, the harder they fail…

Take the 80/20 rule (please!) Let's say 80% of your scale is coming from 20% of your categories. That means that you have 60 categories of scale (or value), to an advertiser.

There are roughly 10B impressions available through RTB. Even if you could classify 90% of that (I only know of one that can and does), your looking at 9B impressions per day. Doing the math, you’ll see that 80% of those impressions will be contained in the 60 or so categories of scale, 25 of those will be top level. That leaves you with 35 meaningful categories and 2940 fragments without meaningful scale or value.

So why the obsession with nodes? It comes from a few things. One is that people like to think that ‘bigger is better’ or ‘the more the merrier’ and so on, and this may be the case with many things, like scale of impressions, or the number of QPS that can be achieved. Another contributor may be from a legacy of keyword targeting. Once buyers become more comfortable with newer, more efficient data to base their decisions on, we’ll see that expansive taxonomies, with their largely irrelevant deep-level categories, will be considered what they actually are: useless.

Balance is the name of this game. Balance between relevancy and scale of impressions.

How often do you suppose the site owner knows this is why you abandoned?

The gap between these two instances can get canyonesque, and the wider that gap, the harder it is for the site owner to understand what is driving their critical site-abandonment data.

To put this in historical perspective, we must briefly travel back to an age where dial tones preceded the screech of modems as they attempted to connect with a host. We were pretty much bound by the skinny copper-based throughput we endured, and we would get used to waiting as bits and bytes crawled towards our browser testing what often felt like our near-infinite patience. Sites were skinnier, too. Developers were caught between a customer's desire for a rotating globe (animation!) and the same customer's requirement that the page not "take forever" to load.

Flash forward: we are watching movies streamed to our "cell phones", which really are computers that have a two-way radio inside to exchange digitized voice and data with a nearby antenna. No antenna, no service. One bar, lousy reception and no movies. This scenario gets played large every day all over the world, not just with cell phones but with all computers and with rare exception, bedevils access to every site at some point at some time. And yet its impact is often overlooked.

How could something this basic get so buried?

My theory is that the notion of load-time is just not sexy enough. You can't solve it with standard web analytics alone and you can't solve it with better creative. And after all, are we not well beyond the stage where bandwidth, now cheaper than dirt, can pose a challenge? Who wants to think about how fast the cool new module loads, when all we're trying to do is provide a more attractive and functional interface? Making sure bandwidth is adequate must be someone else's problem, right?

It is difficult to imagine a marketer happy to know the site didn't load. But it's almost as difficult to imagine a huge percentage of marketers knowing that load time would be directly correlated to site abandonment. Often they don't know because their analytics tools don't tell them about load time. And when IT tells them the pages are loading at a rate of eighteen-and-a-half-nanoseconds-per-content-unit, they tend to get a troubled angry look on their face and pretend not to have heard. This is often because the load time data is without context. So who cares?

Every marketer needs to care about load time today, just as much now if not more than the days when "you've got mail" was not yet an esoteric punch line. Much of the entire marketing heft is carried now by the site. Its worldwide availability cannot be left to guesswork. And once known, load time needs to be fixed.

There are tools that can measure load time globally, and some can even perform synthetic testing on your behalf so you know where you are slow before it's too late. Were you wondering why abandonment in Mexico City is unnaturally higher than in Northern Virginia? It may be because in Mexico D.F. they never saw the full page. But wait, did that fancy page with a hundred tags on it not load okay in beta? And even in production? Doesn't matter. You cannot control, nor can you know without measuring, what happens at the end of the bandwidth pipe. Right there in Mexico City or close by, there may be a reason why your pages load slow. Armed with that knowledge, you can adjust your global bandwidth presence or take other ameliorative steps to gain better load in that geography. In addition, some enterprise application management suites have load-balancing capability beyond just server substitution.

We have already established it's a content vs. bandwidth battle all the way to the desktop. But some of the bandwidth bandits may surprise you. It is not always the interactive module, or the ads themselves stealing your nanoseconds. Sometimes--more times than you'd think--it's actually the stuff you never see that clogs the pipe. Think about tags, for instance. Every ad is tagged, and often enough you don't control the tag itself. And your analytics tool adds tags to the ad tags. These can bog you down either because they are too big in aggregate or because they are being served up remotely from another server that may be much slower than the one hosting your site!

Welcome to tag management. There are a number of ways to do it and tools to help. One way to fight tag overload is to have them load "asynchronously" or perhaps better put, in a "managed" manner that interferes minimally with the user experience. There are also tools that can reduce the amount of tags loading the page without reducing tag functionality. Often they include additional tag-management capability that makes them more and more a part of the essential digital marketing toolkit.

Today there is no need to accept abandonment rates at face value. Marketers can be well-informed and can fight back. If you see high abandonment, assume nothing, and check load time. Often, equipped with the answer to "why" and the tools to give you the "how", you can rest easier that Mexico City is not going abandon you.

Facebook is the number one seller of display advertising in the US now according to eMarketer and has surpassed both Google & Yahoo. While Google+ has gained momentum quickly, analysis still shows there is a lot of duplication across networks with a majority of new Google+ users maintaining accounts and engaging across both Facebook & Google+.

From a brand perspective no other social platform is as well equipped to support brands both domestically and internationally than Facebook. With the breadth of reach available and the lack of brand support on Google+ (For the time being) it's important to note that Facebook is where the remainder of your 2011/2012 $$$ should be allocated.

To support this statement look at the recent rollout of Facebook's sponsored stories and how their usage of social context drives interaction. If you have yet to use this type of ad unit you should consider it as a part of your next Facebook media buy. This ad unit presents interactions with pages into dynamic ads that are shared throughout users newsfeeds and due to the personal & social nature of the unit they grab user's attention quickly.

The results have been impressive with 1.6x lift in brand recall, 2x lift in message awareness and 4x lift in purchase intent according to Facebook. This is a key differentiator between Facebook & Google+ at the present time. The social context that Facebook provides to brands and support with a variety of programs still makes it the primary choice to execute a Paid, Owned & Earned strategy.

I have found the following graphical representation of Facebook's Sponsored Story types to be extremely useful.

Time will tell who eventually wins the highly coveted ad dollars. But as it stands today it is still no contest when it comes to where to spend your brands social advertising dollars.

By 2016….

• Regulators will seal our legal fate
• Auction based buys will capture the real value of a marketing impression
• Television will cease to be the spoke of the consumer advertising wheel
• We will not be buying ad space, we will be buying audiences
• Facebook will become the infrastructure of branding
• Everything will be connected independent of devices
• Interactive channels will be the most important part of the brand/consumer relationship
• Data and the social graph will play an integral role in marketing
• App-based behavior will completely change consumer marketing
• Pre-campaign planning will be replaced by planning during the campaign

The evolution of the digital marketing landscape and the pace at which brands, services providers and technology enablers need to adapt to the rapid change in media consumption and the fragmentation of users and their demands across the industry is a complex issue. As marketers prepare for 2012 and beyond, they search for the most relevant trends that may impact their businesses and the way they operate online. In light of their 10^th anniversary, DQNA had industry leaders from 3 different continents share their thoughts with key predictions on what the future holds for the interactive advertising industry. Below are some thoughts, based on 10 predictions from “The Future of Online Marketing” book; “a must have book”.

By 2016, online advertising will no longer be about where consumers hang around and which media they use the most. It will all come down to the following: who are these users, and what do brands know about them that will enable them to efficiently interact with them using relevant ads that can be customized on-the-fly. As a result,

• The future is interactive and everything will be online or online connected.
• Good bye to push welcome pull strategy
• The internet will be mobile. Have you checked the stats on global mobile internet usage?

This revolutionary change will render the old pre-campaign planning strategy useless as intelligence will become the cornerstone to drive campaign performance.

1. Regulators will seal our legal fate

The issue of the Cookie law proposed by the EU in 2009 led to widespread criticism as many in the industry felt it was misguided, ill-informed and at the expense of the industry’s business interest.

Not only do cookies make ads become relevant, they do a great deal in minimizing waste for both the advertiser and user. Basically, without cookies users get more irritated as they may be forced to view ads that are entirely not in their line of interest.

The EU Directive requires prior consent for “storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored on a user’s PC. Since it was a directive, it left opened to be interpreted and adopted in member states. There has been a great concern about the issue of standardization for organizations that operates in the European Union. Companies are left to figure out how to serve all the EU markets if each sate’s interpretation will deviate from another. There will be no common ground as no single approach will satisfy all the laws in every member state. Even though the industry understands the online privacy concerns brought forward by legislators, without a more simplified privacy law that should address both the concern of users and the business interest of the industry, behavioral and personalized targeting will be a serious headache companies will have to deal with in order to stay in business.

2. Auction based buys will capture the real value of a marketing impression

As more marketers continue to seek greater control, transparency, and insight into how each ad dollar is spent, the role of Demand Side Platforms and technology enablers in facilitating auction based online ad buying is becoming increasingly important. Auction based online media buying in real time promises the greatest return for marketers and seeks to eliminate impressions waste that ROI-oriented marketers have been battling with for a long time. Real-Time-Bidding (RTB), based on audience data will become a “must” for marketers due to their potential to enhance campaign performance.

3. Television will cease to be the spoke of the consumer advertising wheel

The trends speak for themselves: Online ad spend is closing the gap with TV ad spend, the internet is now a major source for news even in real time, consumers are now in control so we continue to see more sophisticated targeting: ‘one stone for one bird, rather than one stone for a unlimited number of birds’. Furthermore, the push by TV stations and their networks to an online model in order to secure their share of the online revenue pie will continue. Additionally, online ad spend will overtake TV in other major ad markets as it did in the UK. Moreover, online ads are cheaper, have a greater reach on a large number of internet enabled devices; they are efficient and can be customized and served in real time. Marketers with more innovative Pull Strategy will win. So goodbye, Push, welcome Pull.

4. We will not be buying ad space, we will be buying audiences

Audience data will be the ultimate tool to decide the fate of every online advertising campaign. As we enter into the era of an increasingly data-driven market where consumers play a central role and data is the king, the traditional ad space buying model will slowly disappear, in exchange for an audience-centric model with greater efficiency to eliminate campaign waste and enhance performance for marketers. Make no mistake; this is the most outstanding trend that every marketer, publisher, agency, data mining company, and technology enabler will have to watch out for.

5. Face book will become the infrastructure of branding

Brands will be engaged in a more user oriented approach in order to enhance engagement on their pages. A reward system (games, free content, etc), even though still not widely used by many brands, will become a ‘most’ as it will form the basis for the creation of brand evangelists  that companies will need in order to have a strong fan base on SocNets in the future. With its new milestone of almost 700 million users and growing, face book will play the most significant role for every brand that aims to do it big on the internet.

6. Everything will be connected independent of devices

2016 will be about connection and what your device can do. As everything becomes connected, media communications will be simplified. The rate of compatibility will facilitate communication across multiple platforms. This will be in the advantage of not only the advertising industry but also users; as they browse contents across the web.

7. Interactive channels will be the most important part of the brand/consumer relationship

Healthy relationship with users will be propelled by a give-and-take approach. Brands will get hold of tools that enables direct interaction with users and manage their marketing loyalty programs. Value and relevance will define the nature of the interactions between online brands and their users.

8. Data and the social graph will play an integral role in marketing

Social information that enables brands to enrich customer data for more precise targeting and response prediction will continue to prove more relevant to brands in the years leading up to and after 2016. Many users engage in personal expressions (like, dislike, rating) during their sessions on SocNets. This will form an important part of users’ behavioral assessment with regard to their pattern, the relative trends, and influencers. With a view of the social graph, brands will be able to establish how users are connected and the strength of connection to each other through the social graph analysis.

9. App-based behavior will completely change consumer marketing

Apps designed to enable the registration of a user’s behavior are among the most outstanding trends in mobile marketing. With mobile internet usage and mobile search already ahead of desktop, behavioral and geotargeting apps will completely change the way ads are sold and consumed online.

10. Pre-campaign planning will be replaced by planning during the campaign

As the industry continues to move to a more audience-centric model, the traditional approach of selecting media choices to buy ad spaces from will be replaced by a new era of existing planning in real time auction market places where marketers place a high relevance on audience data.  Instead of inventory, marketers will choose for audience based on valuable intelligence that satisfies an advertiser’s requirement in real time.

These are just some thoughts on some of the predictions from the recently published “most have” Interactive book titled: The Future of Online Marketing, by DQNA. Get it straight from the horse’s mouth, as Industry leaders across 3 different continents share their thoughts on what the future will look like by 2016.

Grab your free digital copy from: www.futureofonlinemarketing.net.