Research back in 2006 by Microsoft Advertising (Atlas Solutions) called The Combined Impact of Search and Display Advertising: Why Advertisers Should Measure Across Channels by Esco Strong highlights an often forgotten performance rule in display advertising. That is, combining display advertising with your search campaigns provides a significant conversion rate lift over using search alone (http://www.atlassolutions.com/news_20060721.aspx). A 22% conversion lift in fact. Advertisers need to reach users across many different channels yet most metrics focus on each channel individually through their own optics and miss out on the proven “halo effect” of cross-channels synergies. This is because cross channel synergy was hard to measure until the advent of the unified buying platform.

The combined lift of using display advertising with search

There are a lot of reasons why these two mediums yield a synergistic effect. First, display has been proven as a strong way to drive brand awareness and recall and drive increased purchase intent. Display helps win users over who may still be sitting on the fence about converting after they search for after they are already interested in your brand. Display has also been shown to drive branded searches which is an early step in driving return as users pass through the sales funnel. Users usually visit your site by clicking on a display ad then they come back through search when they are ready to buy, sign up, download, register, or fill out your survey.

The same goes for video and mobile when it comes to cross-channel marketing online. Platforms that facilitate display combined with video and mobile drive an additional synergy as those very same users view a pre-roll ad on YouTube or catch an iPhone interstitial ad inside their favorite free app. This is one big reason that LucidMedia has worked so hard to unify display with mobile and video as well as leverage search data in our campaigns. Reach and frequency were always the original tenants of traditional marketing and they are translating perfectly to the digital realm.

If you’ve been online at all this afternoon, you may have noticed that the entire internet is buzzing over Google’s new “instant search” feature. When you start typing a search query from the Google home page (and, for now, if you’re signed into a Google account), you start getting suggestions, not just in the Google suggestions box, but on the actual search page.

So for now, here is the alphabet according to Google, based on typing the first letter of the alphabet into the search box to see what came up first (at least here in the DC metro area).

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It seems like “brand safety” is getting to be like “transparency” in our industry; everyone offers it in one form or another but like transparency, brand safety means different things to different people.  And just like transparency, everyone defines brand safety differently.  There is one thing that separates effective brand safety from all the other forms of impression analysis and delivery verification out there today.  Preemptive.  Is your flavor of brand safety truly preemptive?  Or is the brand safety you are getting from your demand-side platform (DSP) provider post impression analysis?  Is it reactive?  This is another of the industry myths perpetuated by other solutions rushed to market.  Real brand safety, meaning a demonstrably safe environment for a brand advertiser to promote their message online, comes from truly preemptive brand safe filtering.  But in practice pre-impression analysis for applicability and safety is very difficult to do.  Evaluating a billion impressions a day for applicability takes a robust platform and intelligent integration with real-time sources.  But it pays huge dividends in efficiency.  With truly preemptive brand safety the pass back is meaningless.  With truly preemptive brand safety you only buy what is safe and there is no waste.  No wasted targeting, optimization, time, or ad spend.  Make sure your brand safety is preemptive before you put your message out there.

U.S. relief organizations are urgently appealing for emergency assistance to aid the victims of the devastating earthquake that struck Caribbean nation of Haiti recently. The quake, which registered 7.0 on the Richter scale, triggered a tsunami warning for neighboring countries situated in the Caribbean Sea. The earthquake was centered about 14 miles west of the capital city, Port-au-Prince and the news has been reporting wide spread devastation. Funds are urgently needed to provide safe water, temporary shelter systems, essential medical supplies etc. Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere and has a population of 9.6 million inhabitants, of which more than half are under 21 years old. U.S. relief organizations like UNICEF have been working for years in Haiti developing long term solutions to current problems caused by poverty and lack of basic health care, education and sanitation services. The country has been suffering from long-term political strife and a severely depressed economy as well. In recent years the effects of the global food crisis and particularly strong hurricane seasons have left the country dangerously vulnerable and this catastrophe is only serving to exacerbate the already critical situation for the people of Haiti, especially women and children. LucidMedia is actively participating in raising relief funds for this emergency. To donate to the ongoing emergency relief efforts in Haiti and the Caribbean region, please visit www.unicefusa.org/haitiquake or call 1-800-4UNICEF.

The new TNS Media Intelligence Report is out and Adotas has jumped on it with their Display Advertising Shows Signs of Life e-newsletter today. The reports indicates that for the first quarter of 2009, the total measured advertising expenditures they track dropped 14.2% versus a year ago, down to $30.18B. This follows a 9.2 percent decline in Q4 2008 as the advertising recession accelerated in the new year. While that may not seem like good news, consider they indicate that internet display-specific advertising spend is actually up 8.2% over the same time period last year which I believe is better than expected considering all the frozen budgets, wait and see attitudes, and narrowed lines of sight. Although it is lower than the original double-digit growth predicted last year, it is still growth–and very healthy growth at that. Wipe away all the historical (and semi-hysterical) predictions of double digit growth ad infinitum and look at 8.2% growth on its own–among a sea of declining numbers–and you have a very clear sign. So why is display standing out like a shining star pointing the way ahead in our rocky sector of space? A lot of the growth they are reporting is being driven by the new free market exchange models that are moving onto the plateau of productivity and at the same time relegating the old ad network models to the trough of disillusionment. From this emergence, not only is publisher yield inching back upwards, advertisers are finally smelling the real meat of return on their spend. That alone has been happening for almost a year now and is not the whole story behind this successful metric. The promise of data has recently begun to materialize through all kinds of platforms with their new insights and relevant analytics. It is this confluence of forces, the emergence of the exchange model and the promise of data being realized through the platforms that is drawing advertisers to invest in display at a healthy clip. And when the exchange playing field congeals a bit further, and at the same time a few of the platform players begin to dominate inside the agencies, we will see a whole new display advertising sector. Gone will be banners and CPMs and premium and remnant. We will have a truly value priced free market exchange of media in real time that rewards the publisher and empowers the advertiser. We’ll have less layers and less middlemen and less latency. We’ll have more return, more clarity, more accountability, and real transparency. If one thing is certain, it will be nothing like the display business of last year.

The article How About a Little Revolution in Display Advertising by Martin Betoni is a good, hard look at how display dollars break out of the total ad spending in 2008 according to the latest IAB annual report. Of the $187 billion spent on advertising in 2008, $24 billion were online dollars of which only 17%, or roughly $5 billion, went to display ads. In other words just 3% of the total ad spend in 2008 went to display. His point is that the banner has not progressed much and I find it hard to disagree. All the best optimization in the world is still completely reliant on the creative to engage the user. This is why I think technology around the creative, things like our new AdMatch capability which provide a dynamic creative directly from the advertiser’s database of products or services and matches them in real-time to the highest performing content, have the greatest opportunity to increase the display share of ad spend and tip the scales away from search or even draw dollars away from the larger pool of traditional media. A campaign is only as good as it’s creatives and as Martin points out we are still basically working with the same 728 pixel by 90 pixel rectangle from 1994 to get the job done.

We will be covering this year’s ad:tech San Francisco April 21-23 on Twitter. So start following @LucidMediaVIP now for all the inside news from this big industry event.

Have you noticed lately that everyone in this ad network business says they offer great, transparent, handpicked inventory?  Everyone calls it Premium.  But in the end it winds up being self-certification and adding no real value beyond perceived value.  And now LucidMedia has launched a Verified Inventory program.  We are saying our inventory is safe for brands and that we can accurately target 14,000 specific content categories. You can find out more about brand protection in this Adotas article called A Display Advertising Safety Net. So how is this any different from all the other networks out there?  The difference is in the how, not the what or the why.  The what (verifying inventory) and the why (for brand safety) is the same across the board.  Every network says their media is checked for brand safety.  And everyone has the same reason.  Get more big advertiser spend.  That’s the common what and why in the industry.  It’s the how that is unique to this new program.  We launched this program not because we do it like everyone else, we have this program because we do it differently.  To be specific, we use the most robust and patented form of natural language processing at the pre-impression page level to better determine true meaning.  But how is that different?  Most networks spot check a top level domain list as their way of making their inventory brand safe.  You begin to see the degrees of brand protection available to advertisers and the intricate subtleties that make it confusing.  There’s a huge difference in the degree of safety provided between the two methods.  And every other network usually says they categorize for accurate relevance matching of ads to content because everyone knows that engagement and relevance are directly related.  But what most other networks really do is ask the publisher to self-certify their inventory and then they push it out in those same self-certified categories.  But we look at the words and phrases on the page in real-time and tag it with a far more accurate and granular category before we serve it.  Everyone has the same what and why but it’s the varying degrees of how that makes our program different.  But we go so much further too.  We even filter out pages with objectionable concepts as defined by our clients.  We also categorize our inventory into 14 different classes of media to filter against or target to a specific type of pages like a blogs, news sites, enthusiast site, or shopping sites.  So the story here is not that we are doing the same thing, the real story is in the lengths we go to verify our inventory versus what everyone else does.  They are two very different stories.  And that is why we created the Verified Program, because we do it differently and with a much higher degree of quality.

Targeting is rapidly overtaking inventory quality among ad networks as the one aspect that their value hinges on and the one that truly differentiates them. So much so that targeting has become the new “killer app” of ad networks. According to the E-consultancy 2007 Online Ad Network Buyers Guide, targeting was only 1 percentage point behind inventory quality as the single most important differentiator. That was 2007. Since then inventory quality has normalized with every network offering all the same top quality branded sites. Think comScore 200 and you’ll have the right picture. But the ground war around targeting has raged on. Now the single most important factor left that has not been commoditized and can still differentiate the countless ad networks is their targeting. Inventory quality is still an important factor when evaluating ad networks but it has become more like a commodity. Just a check box to be filled. Great inventory? Got it. Everyone has great sites now, or has potential access to great sites which is becoming the same thing, and can whip up a spectacular site list with all the right logos in all the right places. You’ll see that comScore now calls this “potential reach” and everyone’s got potential reach. But targeting? Good, precise, accurate, performance-driving targeting takes technology which is actually hard to come by among the ad networks. Most ad networks are made up of people and relationships and that’s how they scale. Add more great sites and add more great sales people and the revenue model scales accordingly. So what’s the best targeting solution out there? What kinds of targeting will provide the most performance boost for your campaigns? That of course hinges on what your key performance indicators are going to be. Is it clicks, acquisitions, brand awareness or a combination or something else entirely? In many ways contextual targeting has a leg up on the other forms and here’s why. The behavioral crowd almost always has a contextual component driving their segmentation so contextual tends to be one of the most mature technologies out there. Semantic relevance engines have been around since the early days of Knowledge Management and go back way before the first AT&T banner was sold by Doug Weaver on Wired.com in ’94. And contextual side steps the ugly privacy issues as it derives its relevance from the page content as the ad is being served and does not need to ask probing questions or save little bits of sensitive data behind the scenes. But most importantly, contextual targeting has frequently shown to offer both more click lift and more brand recall than any other targeting solution. A recent Marketing Sherpa study found that contextual targeting was preferred over behavioral by advertisers for the higher return on ad spend it provided. But the best approaches are the new hybrid solutions that combine the strength of both contextual for relevance and behavioral for audience segmentation. So when you are out there shopping for an ad network and everyone is pitching great sites and real transparency at the best price, stop and ask about targeting. Don’t be afraid to ask about technology either. Most likely you will find little behind that curtain besides some basic self declared channels, a little re-targeting after the fact, and a high level report for reconciliation at the end of the month. Take the time to ask for proof and see where that leads you. Can they offer proof as to why they targeted a certain impression with a specific ad? If not then there is probably little technology back there.  And if every answer seems to come back around to great sites, then I’d keep shopping.

A recent study released by the IAB from Bain & Company titled Digital Pricing Research has ignited a virtual flurry of newsworthy commentary from prominent publications like iMedia and MediaPost about the place–and need–of networks in the advertising value chain. Declining prices, channel conflict, and devalued brands are the mantra of the network bashing fervor. It wasn’t so long ago that the pundits were predicting the end of the ad network model as we know it. The latest headliner from Adotas called Can 314 Ad Networks Really Thrive is an especially insightful look at the ongoing ad network saga.  The reality is that we’re just getting started.   Look at the statistics from the eMarketer study that said more than 90% of advertisers surveyed plan to use ad networks on their media plans and 75% said they planned to increase their spend to networks.  And look at what factors differentiate the plethora of ad networks according to the agency study; you might be surprised to find that price is dead last.  The major differentiators they cited were quality of inventory (28%), targeting (27%), and transparency (11%) then service, optimization, reporting, reach and finally price.  It’s true, there are a lot of ad networks out there, and there’s a good reason too.  Niche audiences and strategic reach.  And it’s not always one or the other either; it’s frequently both at the same time.   Advertisers need massive reach to get their message across and hit their key performance indicators.  It’s just a numbers game at the end of the day.  And not only do they need the big numbers, they also need to diversify and specialize and focus depending on what they’re selling or who they’re branding to.  One day they may need laser like focus on a specific audience segment and the next they may need numbers on a Biblical scale.  Usually they need both at the same time: the “massive niche” if there is such a thing.  Actually, there is!  That’s where we come in.  Our “super-clustered” network brings both audience breadth and contextual depth for performance and branding campaigns delivering focused reach all in one campaign.   And until there are more of these hybrid networks out there that are big enough to satisfy the advertiser’s thirst for reach and at the same time give them the finely tuned depth they require for performance, we will have a plethora of specialized networks serving the market.   And it’s not just the advertisers driving the explosion of ad networks either; it’s also the publishers. On any given day the average publisher has less than a 50% fill rate. Sure they have their own sales force out there beating the bushes for ad dollars but content is exploding all around them at a logarithmic rate and there is no way they can sell it all. Frequently they don’t even know exactly what they have to sell. Sure the high quality impressions get sold first, and for a premium price, but that’s the tip of the iceberg and there’s always the massive remnant pool of impressions hanging around unsold. So they have to farm it out to the networks and the number of networks grows again. That’s where the channel conflict that everyone tattoos ad networks with comes from but it’s self inflicted and on purpose. Channel conflict only happens when things are selling. Call it too much selling if you want. Maximum yield trumps any sales force’s headache any day of the week. And maximize they do. Just look at PubMatic’s brilliantly elegant default optimization service. Their ad network optimization automates the reselling of unused inventory back to the network enabling publishers to instantly redirect to the highest paying impression every time allowing them to approach an almost theoretical 100% fill rate. What a wonderful world advertisers and publishers are living in today all care of the ad network explosion. In fact, without the hundreds of ad networks out there delivering the reach, segmenting the audiences, and backfilling the impressions, we wouldn’t have nearly as robust an advertising industry as we enjoy today. The networks might have started out as a necessary evil but they are far from that now. They have matured into the strategic reach partner of any successful advertiser or publisher out there, and they are working–hard.