Dave Morgan, TACODA’s founder and Executive Vice President of Global Advertising Strategy for AOL, just hit the nail on the head with his blog commentary on the stigma surrounding ad networks. He points out that the ad network brought a pork bellies commodity attitude to online advertising in the lean, post-bubble days when any revenue was good revenue. He goes on to point out that this is changing and bravely outlines a few solid reasons why. What drove this home for me was his conclusion that networks are going to have to continue to deliver solid value, with high-quality ads and rates, to begin to offer something that publishers will never be able to deliver on their own because of their focus on the content. He highlights the need for networks to deliver effectiveness over efficiency. Bravo. This is really the crux of the situation and a very real opportunity for ad networks to step up to the plate. And this is exactly where LucidMedia is strongest, in bringing increased effectiveness—and the proof report down to the impression-level to prove it—instead of just new efficiencies through scale, technology and focus. We saw this void back in 2004 when we launched ClickSense, our robust contextual engine, and have recently applied it to lifting the effectiveness of our customer’s campaigns in the LucidMedia Network. This new effectiveness is inherent in our deep categorization which puts publisher’s content into our 13,000+ industry categories to allow for far more granular targeting than has ever been available in the past. When publishers can sell their inventory with 6 levels of categorization to pinpoint the meaning of their content there is a very real lift in conversions. This assumes all the underpinnings are in place like engaging creatives and streamlined landing pages but when it all comes together there is a tangible return. Hopefully other ad networks will do the same and bring real increases in effectiveness to the table in the future and begin to erase the negative connotations around the ad networks.

I am happy to announce that this week we will officially become LucidMedia. We are changing our name from Entrieva to LucidMedia to mark our revolutionary new approach to contextual advertising. If you take a look around our new website you will find a lot more than just a new look too. Don’t worry, we are the same great people with all the same great technology and the strong focus on customer satisfaction as before, we’re just taking ClickSense in some exciting new directions.

What you will see on our new site is that our new ad network uses the deep categorization of ClickSense to deliver more than 13,000 micro-segments for content targeting far deeper than anything available before. This new level of insight is delivered through our detailed Proof Report™ which is, for the first time in history, putting complete transparency and accountability under the advertiser’s control. With ClickSense cataloging every impression we can show advertisers exactly where every ad dollar is being spent. This is the kind of complete transparency that makes real brand safety and quality control possible.

Because of all this we decided to become LucidMedia, the small media company with a big answer to the challenge of lifting display ad revenues. If you look around our new website you will still see our famous 31 industry channels and deep micro-segmentation, but you will also see us talking about our new contextual ad network with transparency and brand safety at its core. So let me be the first to welcome you to the LucidMedia Network!

Sincerely,
Ajay Sravanapudi
Founder, President & CEO
LucidMedia Networks, Inc.

Google recently announced a new service that Web publishers can use to manage their online ad sales and serve up ads to consumers. This news is extra interesting now that Google has DoubleClick/DART legally in their stable. I am waiting to see how much transparency they will be turning over to the advertisers and how much overlapping functionality they will have with their other technology acquisitions. I bet they parade this out with much fanfare as a beginner solution with plenty of easy links to upgrade and the upgrade solution is DART. It really comes down to how “advertiser-centric” you can be when you are talking about ad serving. What this industry doesn’t need is just another ad network. What this industry does need is to lose the opacity that has plagued it since the earliest days. Advertisers need brand safety today and brand safety depends on transparency. You can only rest assured that your brand is being represented properly in the Wild-Wild-West that is online advertising when you know where every single impression is going. Not to mention detailed categorization. If anyone can provide the industry with useful contextualization it’s Google but I doubt they will. I want to see some proof reports showing how well they target and every impression URL from this new offering before I make the call whether or not this is a good thing for our industry.

Adotas recently posted an interesting, albeit oddly written article on the value of the ad exchange. The real story seems to be the value of the vertical ad networks—with which I cannot agree more—but their analogy between mutual fund managers and ad exchanges is a fascinating one. They equate the ad exchange to a specialized mutual fund manager who can add real value to your portfolio and that is very true for the new breed of ad exchanges out there today. The scenario buy that they walk through truly highlights the value that an ad exchange can bring to a media planner. They point out that when an advertiser wants to maximize ROAS they need their media buyer (their agency folk) to create a balanced “portfolio” mixing direct investment in large targeted sites with the specialized engagement of the vertical ad networks and the broad reach from the many low cost remnant networks. The share of voice and audience is highest on the expensive premium sites, highly relevant on the vertical ad networks (vertical search sites for instance) and yet there is massive reach to be had across the broad remnant networks. It is the mix that is critical to getting the job done. This is how you nail the ROAS for a big branding campaign where audience engagement is a critical factor—and this is just what the exchanges are good at delivering. They have the mix all ready to go, you just need your media planner, your mutual fund manager, to recommend and execute that perfectly balanced portfolio and your investment will pay off. What an exciting time for interactive media!

Turn Networks has been making a lot of noise in the press recently with some additional capital and the launch of their fully automated ad network. I perused their literature and demo and really like some of the ideas they are taking to market. I especially like the fully automated nature of their targeting based on multiple factors including a mix of contextual site analysis and past behavioral. I also have to give them credit for what looks like a good pricing model for everyone. I would be very interested to see some data on how well their targeting works through their automated approach. All too often I see ad networks talk about contextual targeting and providing relevant ads but in the end I usually find out they are using just caveman-like site or network level targeting to get the job done. That means most networks will sell you categories of automotive related content or health related content but the determination of what content is about which subject comes from looking at the publisher’s overall theme. Cars.com is automotive content and Health.com is content about health. That sort of thing. The reality is that much of the content on these sites is not about cars or health. It can be about almost anything especially when it includes socially-driven content from things like forums or community features. The only way to truly target for relevance is to look at each URL and analyze the content you find there and not lump it into a broad, site-level grouping. Only then do you find that your ads really start performing and your KPIs go through the roof. In a recent case study we found that eCPC rates went up 76% over the typical run-of-site campaign when thorough contextual targeting was employed. That’s how you really lift your ROAS.

YieldBuild is in the news raising another $6M capital with a solution to “maximize advertising revenue for web publishers”. It’s an AdSense layer of code that monitors and tunes your ad for you. Nice. I mention this because it’s just another validation of the very real risk from ad blindness eroding the impact of your ad spend in the industry and I applaud it. The online ad industry has grown so huge and so multi-faceted that many advertisers and publishers become complacent with their campaigns because they are so easy to traffic now and that is when your KPIs start to fall off. Just watch the conversion rate of a campaign after a week or so and you will see the creeping effects of ad blindness setting in. Frequency capping and day parting may help but a good campaign is one that is constantly being evaluated and tuned against your KPI. YieldBuild’s whole business model is based on that truism! A good online ad partner should always be talking to you about tuning and optimization. But more importantly, your ad network should be proactively showing you every single impression down to the URL level. If not, what is it they are trying to hide? It’s the reality that your promised impressions are either eluding them or not having the contracted impact and they are farming out your ad to anyone who can get them some numbers so they don’t have to put up the “mea-culpa” make-good at the end. So please, for me, ask your ad network for a report of every impression and every URL where you are running. Ask them what content you are running on and don’t settle for site level or network level themes. Then re-tune constantly for performance where your ads are getting traction. And if your ad network doesn’t have that kind of real transparency and accountability baked into their DNA, then shop your ad network around until you find a partner who is confident enough to open their kimono and show you everything. Only then can you truly keep ad blindness out of the picture and make the most of your ad spend.

Rohit Bhargava recently wrote an interesting blog piece about online advertising. He ponders what it would be like if there was a site like Priceline for online advertising (he calls it Adline for fun)? He asks what it would be like if you could enter your flight dates, the demographic details of who you are trying to reach, the type of placement, and the maximum CPM you are willing to pay. Placements would need to be rated on some sort of neutral system so you would not be overpaying for obscured inside page placements, as well as by relative visibility of the site, but the idea is that I could decide to do a five star ad unit on a five star site and set my own CPM. The site could choose to accept or decline my offer. I liked this free-market Ebay-esque approach to online ads. But one of the great Achilles Heel’s of online advertising has always been transparency; this notion that ad networks have historically been opaque to the advertiser basically requiring advertisers and agencies to take them on their word that their ads are out there working. A new bidding system like this would work if every impression was audit-able, if every dollar spent was on the table for scrutiny. Only then would people trust the system enough to put their ad spend on the line.