I’m going to have to agree with Andrew Goode’s article on “Hundreds of millions of online ads are “worthless,” posted on 17^th May 2013.

What surprises me most about marketers’ spending behavior is that they are almost unknowingly wasting their budgets away on meaningless clicks and impressions.

I’m not saying that paying for clicks (CPC) or impressions (CPM) are a waste of time, but I would say that marketers need to understand if these campaigns are actually going to help them achieve their key performance indicators (KPIs).

I’m going to only use two basic online advertising KPIs as points of discussion on suitability of CPC & CPM campaigns. (1) Creating brand awareness (2) Driving online sales.

Now if you owned a company that sells real estate properties or cars for example, your main purpose would be to create attention, interest, desire and demand from the internet audience. In this scenario, your performance indicators would be in the number of clicks and views of your ads, so CPC & CPM campaigns are the likely solution for you. The choice of agency or vendors is most crucial here as you would need to verify the quality of publishers and understand the measures these...

At the iMedia Agency Summit, I spoke on a panel called ‘Demystifying Programmatic Inventory.’  The entire session was geared toward helping marketers better understand the somewhat murky world of programmatic buying.

As someone who lives and breathes in this space everyday, I’m often surprised at the number of misconceptions that exist about this subset of marketing. It’s my belief that the lack of clarity on programmatic buying is a big part of our industry’s general ambivalence toward it: Whereas some advertisers are reticent to accept programmatic buying as a viable tactic, others have embraced it with open arms.

The goal of this column is to distill what programmatic inventory entails at its most basic level and debunk some of those most common myths that surround it.

Myth #1: “Programmatic buying and real-time bidding (RTB) are one and the same.”
Reality: Programmatic buying is a term widely used to define the automated nature in which media buying and selling takes place. It’s simply the process of executing media buys through digital technology platforms rather than through manual negotiations. Real-time bidding, or RTB, is a form of programmatic buying where ad inventory is bid on and sold within an auction environment...