When Facebook initially made its move to monetise onsite inventory with foreign datasets (foreign, meaning an advertiser’s first-party data), it divided opinion. We took a somewhat negative stance on the strategy.
With the launch of newsfeed ad formats being made available to RTB, does this require a new approach as to how the paid-for element of the Facebook platform will be leveraged, perhaps pointing to the future of RTB?
ASU Gold Rush
The initial FBX launch turned into a retargeting frenzy. Predominantly used to help drive greater cost efficiencies for businesses running existing RTB campaigns (FBX on numerous occasions was found to be unsurprisingly cheaper) and also to prop up the volume of click-based acquisitions that made the overall click-average-to-impression-conversions on RTB campaigns healthier.
Adap.tv held a half-day event in London this week to discuss the themes around programmatic video. The agenda was packed with eclectic speakers coming from different ends of the media buying jungle: from programmatic traders to traditional TV buyers. Here, ExchangeWire sketches out the afternoon’s key themes.
End-to-End Platforms
Adap.tv is clearly trying to position itself (and doing a solid job) as an agnostic platform player that connects buyers and sellers. Amir Ashkenazi, CEO of Adap.tv, spelled out the challenges that the video industry has encountered to date: too many middlemen, rogue behaviour and practices and too many layers diluting the flow of investment.
In doing so, Amir painted the picture of a consolidated end-to-end video buying stack, unsurprisingly what Adap.tv are able to offer.
It is interesting to see 1&1 in the UK really aggressively going after the local SME market with a blanket TV campaign. Owning the digital relationship with SME is a huge opportunity, and scale in this market is a massive untapped opportunity. Google makes much of its search revenue from the SME sector – but display thus far has failed to really open this market segment. 1&1 is now trying to offer social media management tools to its current clients so clearly owning the platform can allow you to upsell advertising and marketing management solutions.
So, we’re all pretty happy with how online measurement works. Right?
Ask a digital marketer why your marketing pounds should be spent online and, among the many (good) reasons they will come back with, will be its unrivalled accountability and targetability (not actually a word, but who cares).
They will tell you that you can find your likely customers (users who look like your existing customers), target them with your message and, best of all, see how many of them buy something from you as a result.
All of that’s true and, when put together well, it results in incredibly powerful marketing activity. The problem is that, with all of the data that’s available, it’s become a very easy system to manipulate. Online exchanges and DSPs have become very adept at ‘playing’ it so that everybody always appears to be doing an awesome job.
IPinYou, the market leading ad tech company in China, recently announced the launch of its bidding algorithm competition. Having invested heavily in the research & development of their bidding platform, it has now launched the global competition in an attempt to identify new methods, theories and formulas to refine the bidding algorithm. IPinYou hopes it will also stimulate further academic and research based interest in the space. This is likely to be the first time that ad technology components have been crowdsourced in such a way.
There are a lot of ad technology sleeping giants out there. Facebook. Amazon. Ebay. Twitter. Most of these usually pop up in breathless op-ed pieces about future dominating vendors. All have unique data sets, and all have their owned and operated inventory – but all are effectively media companies, now battling to capture agency/marketer budget. It’s interesting that the enterprise players, who are now encroaching onto ad technology’s traditional territory, are rarely ever spoken about. The Adobe’s and IBM’s are obvious examples. But Salesforce could well be the dark horse to emerge from the enterprise side.
In this week’s #TraderTalkTV, Adfonic CTO Wes Biggs explains the mechanics of the Adfonic ad platform, and the specifics on how they execute real-time bidding on mobile devices.
Jag Duggal, Senior Vice-President, Product Management and David Grant, Principal Product Manager at Quantcast discuss the attribution problem in display, and how the industry might address some of the underlying issues with the current methodologies.
You recently spoke how attribution needs to be addressed – and fixed – before we see significant shifts on spend into digital display. Can you expand on that point?
We’ve seen explosive growth in RTB over the last 3 years. However, for that growth to continue advertisers and agencies need to be convinced that their spend is driving real results. They have to trust that the attribution scheme is a reasonable proxy for the path to conversion. The current approaches of last click and last view attribution are so demonstrably flawed that advertisers are too often skeptical of the results. We recently had a client complain that our results were too good! He simply didn’t believe what his own ad server using his own preferred scheme (last view) was telling him. That scenario would not happen in Search. In Search, the path to conversion is trusted.
Last touch attribution has the advantage of being simple but in an RTB world that is dangerously simplistic. It incents an overuse of retargeting. We’ve all experienced a visit to an ecommerce site that yields more than 20 ads for that advertiser served over the course of the next 5 to 10 minutes! Many of those ads will be cheap placements, often unlikely to be viewed by the user. This is a gaming of the attribution system rather than a focus on driving actual (new) customers. This must be fixed for the good of the whole industry.
When Facebook initially made its move to monetise onsite inventory with foreign datasets (foreign, meaning an advertiser’s first-party data), it divided opinion. We took a somewhat negative stance on the strategy.
